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Freud and Dreams

Sigmund Freud believed dreams are the mind's way of fulfilling wishes. In an excerpt from his Interpretation of Dreams, he offers several examples of dreams with obvious ties to wish fulfillment. One of these is from a young medical student who had difficulty waking up in the morning. To help, he asked his landlady to wake him each morning. On one of these mornings, she yelled through his door, "Wake up, Herr Pepi! It's time to go to the hospital!" He dreamed in response that he lay in a sick bed in the same hospital as a patient. In his dream, he said, "As I'm already in the hospital, there's no need for me to go there," and continued sleeping. This dream was a way to reconcile his need to get to the hospital and his desire to continue sleeping.

The examples Freud uses in this excerpt are exclusively positive. They are all dreams that represent some desire being fulfilled, whether it is a dream of Freud himself drinking water to quench his real thirst, a child's dream of a boat trip to satisfy her after a disappointing real-life boat trip the day before, or something else. In the excerpt, at least, he never mentions nightmares, which are far removed from the more pleasant world of wish fulfillment. Freud, however, saw nightmares as unsuccessful attempts by the ego to cover up one's repressed desires. They still relate to wish fulfillment, then, but are an expression of the conflict between the id's wishes and the ego's efforts to keep those wishes in check.*

Freud goes on to say that we would have discovered this truth about dreams had we only noticed the language we use when talking about them. When we say "I should never have imagined such a thing even in my wildest dreams," in his example, we reveal our understanding that dreams are expressions of wish fulfillment.

*Freud used the analogy of a horse and rider to explain the relationship between the id and ego: "in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength, while the ego uses borrowed forces."

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