Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/488

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482 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

highly, and find that I left them at the honse of a friend where I last had dinner and a game of bridge. The wish shortly to visit so pleasant a place again is very clearly implied. To take a single final example in this connection: Only a moment ago it was necessary for me to call a man on the telephone. I said : " This is Dr. John B. Watson, of the Johns Hopkins Hospital,'* instead of Johns Hopkins University. One skilled in analysis could easily read in this slight slip the wish that I had gone into medicine instead of into psychology (even this analysis, though, would be far from complete) .

Slips of the pen are just as numerous and just as interesting re- vealers of hidden character as are slips in speech. It is in dreams, however, that we get our most interesting and valuable material for analysis.

The Dreah as a Vehicle op Wish Fulfilment

According to the now generally accepted viewpoint we dream almost constantly. If we were to put the question: "Do you often dream?*' to a group of men, women and children, the answers would be various. Most of the men would say : " I seldom dream, and when I do my dreams are meaningless and uninteresting." Some of the women would say that they often have wonderful and thrilling dreams while others would maintain that their dreams were few and had no interest. The children would tell us that they dreamed frequently and that their dreams were always interesting and exciting. It is difficult to convince most adults that if they do not dream constantly they do dream much more fre- quently than they are at present aware of. Even my own students are at first sceptical about the universality of the dream processes. I ask them to try hard to recall their dreams on waking in the morning, and if they awake in the night to jot down a sentence or two of their dreams so that they can recall the whole dream on awaking in the morning. In a short time most of them are convinced that they do dream almost constantly.

If it is difficult to convince one that he dreams constantly, it is a Herculean task to convince him of the second step in understanding dreams — to wit, that his dreams are noi at bottom bizarre and meaning- less, but, on the contrary, that they are orderly, logical, and, if we know the history of the individual, almost predictable. We must admit im- mediately that if we take the dream at its face value, that is, read the words that the dreamer puts down as a true report of his dream, it is a creature of fancy in the wildest sense of that word. We get the reports in bits with no apparent connecting links. Fanciful words are put in. Names are mentioned which are the names of no individuals known to the dreamer. Places are visited which have never been visited by the dreamer. (Yet in almost every dream the starting point is some

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