The Interpretation of Dreams / Толкование сновидений

The dream composition, therefore, has no place in the company of psychic successions which fill the mind. It lacks all the aids of memory. “In this manner the dream structure rises, as it were, from the soil of our psychic life, and floats in psychic space like a cloud in the sky, which the next breath of air soon dispels” (p. 87). This is also aided by the fact that, upon awakening, the attention is immediately seized by the inrushing sensory world, and only very few dream pictures can withstand this power.

They fade away before the impressions of the new day like the glow of the stars before the sunlight.

As a last factor favouring the forgetting of dreams, we may mention the fact that most people generally take little interest in their dreams. One who investigates dreams for a time, and takes a special interest in them, usually dreams more during that time than at any other; that is, he remembers his dreams more easily and more frequently.

Two other reasons for the forgetting of dreams added by Bonatelli (given by Benini

) to those of StrГјmpell have already been included in the latter; namely, (1) that the change of the general feeling between the sleeping and waking states is unfavourable to the mutual reproductions, and (2) that the different arrangement of the presentation material in the dream makes the dream untranslatable, so to speak, for the waking consciousness.

It is the more remarkable, as StrГјmpell observes, that, in spite of all these reasons for forgetting the dream, so many dreams are retained in memory. The continued efforts of the authors to formulate laws for the remembering of dreams amounts to an admission that here too there is something puzzling and unsolved. Certain peculiarities relating to the memory of dreams have been particularly noticed of late, e. g., that a dream which is considered forgotten in the morning may be recalled in the course of the day through a perception which accidentally touches the forgotten content of the dream (Radestock,

TissiГ©

).

The entire memory of the dream is open to an objection calculated to depreciate its value very markedly in critical eyes. One may doubt whether our memory, which omits so much from the dream, does not falsify what it retained.