Psychoanalysis, Sleep and Dreams

Dream interpretation is not an idle pastime or a mysterious performance. Carried out in accordance with certain scientific rules based on common sense and not on mere theory, it...

I have given in the previous chapters many reasons why human beings are compelled to seek at regular intervals an escape from reality which is made possible by the unconsciousne...

Monotony symbolizing safety _enables_ us to withdraw our attention from our environment, from a reality which we no longer fear, but it does not _compel_ us to do so. There is i...

Whenever one and the same motive, with perhaps slight variations, recurs frequently in dreams we may assume that it is the leading motive of the dreamer's waking life. Whenever...

Dreams reveal to us what our unconscious cravings are and this is of course valuable information. But cravings are only symptoms of something more important and less easily deal...

Thousands of explanations have been offered for typical dreams which almost every one has had at least once, such as dreams of falling or flying, but none of them should be acce...

From time immemorial, the unthinking and thinking alike, have accepted the idea of a kinship between sleep and death. Expressions like "eternal sleep" show by the frequency with...

We obliterate distance and transport ourselves wherever our fancy chooses; our strength is herculean; we defy the law of gravitation and rise or soar with or without wings; we b...

What causes sleep? What causes us to withdraw partly our attention from our environment? The answer: brain anaemia, is unsatisfactory for we may ask in turn: what causes brain a...

This should not be understood to mean that the dream either "causes" the neurosis or "cures" it. That mistake has often been made by psychologists of the old school. Taine, amon...

An evening paper published recently a cartoon showing a kiddie in bed who asks his mother: "What makes me dream?"--"You eat too much meat," the mother answers. The next scene is...

To which I will answer: Make experiments on yourself or some one else. Have some one wake you up fifty times or a hundred times in one night. Repeat the experiment as many night...

The Freudian theory of wish-fulfilment easily accepted by the layman as solving the problem of pleasant or indifferent dreams, meets with a most sceptical reception when it is a...

Every one has heard relations of prophetic dreams which seem to imply a sense of unconscious sight going far beyond the limits of our conscious visual perceptions. It may be tha...

Day dreams are not essentially different from night dreams and would not be mentioned separately but for the fact that they at times verge on a neurosis and that in certain case...

The curve of sleep depth shows that our withdrawal from reality is not sudden but gradual. The transition from wakefulness to sleep is characterized at first by blurred visions,...

The hypnagogic vision I have so often, that I wade into a body of water and finally start swimming, only adds one more pleasant feature to my escape from reality. Swimming is re...