Chapter Commentary of The Interpretation of Dreams - Study Guide by Sigmund Freud

further question as to why these dreams reveal their meaning in such a disguised manner – i.e. What is the origin of this distortion in dreams?

Freud then describes dreams of his own, and of acquaintances, all of which appear indifferent, or painful, yet can be seen to be wish-fulfillments also. However Freud acknowledges that anxiety dreams – as a sub-order of dreams with painful content, need to be considered separately.

V. THE MATERIAL AND SOURCES OF DREAMS

Freud introduces the idea of the 'latent' and 'manifest' content of dreams. Relating to manifest content, he identifies the following properties:

1) Dreams show a clear preference for the impressions of the immediately preceding days (Robert 1886, Strumpell 1877 Hildebrandt 1875 and Hallam and Weed 1896). 2) They make their selection upon different principles than our waking memory, since they do not recall what is essential and important, but what is subsidiary and unnoticed. 3) They have at their disposal the earliest impressions of our childhood and even bring up details from that period of our life which. Once again, strike us as trivial and which in our waking state we believe to have been long since forgotten.

A. Recent and indifferent material in dreams

Freud proposes that in every dream it is possible to find a point of contact with the experiences of the previous day not days. Freud then analyses a dream in great detail

"I had written a monograph on a certain plant. The book lay before me and I was at the moment turning over a folded coloured plate. Bound up in each copy there was a dried specimen of the plant, as though it had been taken from a herbarium."

He found that he could continue at great lengths finding an event however subsidiary to relate to almost every feature of the dream. However Two impression of the 'dream day' were outstanding. An indifferent one concerning a sighting of a book in a shop window that day and a more important one – an hours conversation with a Dr.

Freud suggests various possible sources of the dream material: (a) A recent and psychically significant experience which is represented in the dream directly (b) Several recent and significant experiences which are combined into a single unity by the dream (c) One or more recent and significant experiences which are represented in the content of the dream by a mention of a contemporary but indifferent experience (d) An internal significant experience (e.g. a memory or a train of thought), which is in that case invariably represented in the dream by a mention of a recent but indifferent impression.

Freud accounts for the fundamental objection, namely that indifferent impressions from earlier period of life also appear in dreams. He proposes that these particular elements which were originally indifferent aren't anymore, since taking over (displacing) psychically important material at an early stage (see neurotics who attach irrational importance to indifferent impressions).

B. Infantile Material as a source of dreams

The motives which led a dreamer to reproduce one particular impression from their childhood and not another, cannot be discovered without analysis. – either confirmatory information from another person that what you have dreamt did indeed originate from a childhood event, or if the dream is 'recurrent' the recurrent item can normally be connected relatively easily with some childhood item. For example, Freud's dreams of going to Rome – until fulfilled, partially represented his high childhood esteem of and identification with the semitic leader Hannibal, who was fated to only see the city from afar. He also cites examples from women patients.

However Freud is cautious and admits that some of his examples where dreams could be traced to obscure childhood events from the first 3 years of life, are from neurotics, and as such may not be representative of the general population. However he overcomes this by relating to similar dreams that he can recollect, traceable to long-forgotten obscure early childhood events.

Since Freud found that even in dreams which seem to have been completely interpreted, trains of thought reaching back to earliest childhood can be found – therefore Freud suggests that this could be a further precondition – that every dream was linked in its manifest content with recent experiences and in its latent content with associated (source) the most ancient experiences. Whilst this point is harder to prove, it is more prominent in analysis of hysteria, as these ancient experiences have remained recent, in the true sense of the word. (see chapter 7 (C)).

Thus Freud concludes that the preference for non-essential material in the content of dreams can be accounted for in terms of dream-distortion, and the other two properties cited – namely emphasis on recent and infantile material, can be confirmed. One more important inference is that dreams often have more than one meaning. Either several wish-fulfillments alongside one another, or even the succession of meanings or wish- fulfillments may be superimposed on one another, the bottom one being the fulfillment of a wish dating from earliest childhood – does this 'invariably' or frequently' occur?

C. The somatic sources of dreams

Freud cites three types of somatic sources of stimulation (Chapter 1 (c)). (a) objective sensory stimuli arising from external objects (b) internal states of excitation of the sense organs having only a subjective basis and (c) somatic stimuli derived from