III   The Nature of Dreams

梦的本质

The views held about the nature of dreams differed vastly throughout the centuries and through various cultures. But whether one believes that dreams are real experiences of our disembodied souls, which have left the body during sleep, or whether one holds that dreams are inspired by God, or by evil spirits, whether one sees in them the expression of our irrational passions or, in contrast, of our highest and most moral powers, one idea is not controversial: the view that all dreams are meaningful and significant. Meaningful, because they contain a message which can be understood if one has the key for its translation. Significant, because we do not dream of anything that is trifling, even though it may be expressed in a language which hides the significance of the dream message behind a trifling façade.

Only in recent centuries was there a radical departure from this view. Dream interpretation was relegated to the realm of superstitions, and the enlightened, educated person, layman or scientist, had no doubt that dreams were senseless and insignificant manifestations of our minds, at best mental reflexes of bodily sensations experienced during sleep.

It was Freud who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, reaffirmed the old concept: dreams are both meaningful and significant; we do not dream anything that is not an important expression of our inner lives and all dreams can be understood provided we have the key; the interpretation of dreams is the “via regia,” the main avenue leading to the understanding of the unconscious and thereby to the most powerful motivating force in pathological as well as in normal behavior. Beyond this general statement about the nature of dreams Freud emphatically and somewhat rigidly reaffirmed one of the oldest theories: the dream is the fulfillment of irrational passions, repressed during our waking life.

Instead of presenting Freud’s and the older theories of the dream at this point, I shall return to them in a later chapter and proceed now to discuss the nature of the dream as I have come to understand it, with the help of Freud’s work and as the result of my own experience as a dreamer and as a dream interpreter.

In view of the fact that there is no expression of mental activity which does not appear in the dream, I believe that the only description of the nature of dreams that does not distort or narrow down the phenomenon is the broad one that dreaming is a meaningful and significant expression of any kind of mental activity under the condition of sleep.

Obviously this definition is too broad to be of much help for the understanding of the nature of dreams unless we can say something more definite about the “condition of sleep” and the particular effect of this condition on our mental activity. If we can find out what the specific effect of sleeping is on our mental activity, we may discover a good deal more about the nature of dreaming.

Physiologically, sleep is a condition of chemical regeneration of the organism; energy is restored while no action takes place and even sensory perception is almost entirely shut off. Psychologically, sleep suspends the main function characteristic of waking life: man’s reacting toward reality by perception and action. This difference between the biological functions of waking and of sleeping is, in fact, a difference between two states of existence.

In order to appreciate the effect of sleep existence on our mental process, we must first consider a more general problem, that of the interdependence of the kind of activity we are engaged in and our process. The way we think is largely determined by what we do and what we are interested in achieving. This does not mean that our thinking is distorted by our interest but simply that it differs according to it.

What is, for example, the attitude of different people toward a forest? A painter who has gone there to paint, the owner of the forest who wishes to evaluate his business prospects, an officer who is interested in the tactical problem of defending the area, a hiker who wants to enjoy himself—each of them will have an entirely different concept of the forest because a different aspect is significant to each one. The painter’s experience will be one of form and color; the businessman’s of size, number, and age of the trees, the officer’s of visibility and protection; the hiker’s of trails and motion. While they can all agree to the abstract statement that they stand at the edge of a forest, the different kinds of activity they are set to accomplish will determine their experience of “seeing a forest.”

The difference between the biological and psychological functions of sleeping and waking is more fundamental than any difference between various kinds of activity, and accordingly the difference between the conceptual systems accompanying the two states is incomparably greater. In the waking state thoughts and feelings respond primarily to challenge—the task of mastering our environment, changing it, defending ourselves against it. Survival is the task of waking man; he is subject to the laws that govern reality. This means that he has to think in terms of time and space and that his thoughts are subject to the laws of time and space logic.

While we sleep we are not concerned with bending the outside world to our purposes. We are helpless, and sleep, therefore, has rightly been called the “brother of death.” But we are also free, freer than when awake. We are free from the burden of work, from the task of attack or defense, from watching and mastering reality. We need not look at the outside world; we look at our inner world, are concerned exclusively with ourselves. When asleep we may be likened to a fetus or a corpse; we may also be likened to angels, who are not subject to the laws of “reality.” In sleep the realm of necessity has given way to the realm of freedom in which “I am” is the only system to which thoughts and feelings refer. Mental activity during sleep has a logic different from that of waking existence. Sleep experience need not pay any attention to qualities that matter only when one copes with reality. If I feel, for instance, that a person is a coward, I may dream that he changed from a man into a chicken. This change is logical in terms of what I feel about the person, illogical only in terms of my orientation to outside reality (in terms of what I could do, realistically, to or with the person). Sleep experience is not lacking in logic but is subject to different logical rules, which are entirely valid in that particular experiential state.