Quotes About Dreams

Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a diet. Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in the pellucid atmosphere of dream investigation.

Sigmund Freud

there is no such thing as an unconscious no.

The hypermnesia of dreams and their command of childhood material have become the two pillars on which our theory rests; our theory of dreams has ascribed to wishes deriving from childhood the part of indispensable moving-force in the formation of dreams.

We are alone in confronting a different state of affairs; as we see it, there is a new kind of psychical material intervening between the content of the dream and the results of our reflections: the latent dream-content reached by our procedure, or the dream-thoughts. It is from this latent content, not the manifest, that we worked out the solution to the dream.

This is why a new task faces us which did not exist before, the task of investigating the relationship of the manifest dream-content to the latent dream-thoughts, and of tracing the processes by which the latter turned into the former.

The dream-thoughts and the dream-content lie before us like two versions of the same content in two different languages, or rather, the dream-content looks to us like a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, and we are supposed to get to know its signs and laws of grammatical construction by comparing the original and the translation.

I always find the same principles confirmed: the elements formed into the dream are drawn from the entire mass of the dream-thoughts, and in its relation to the dream-thoughts each one of the elements seems to be determined many times over.

Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two foremen in charge of the dream-work, and we may put the shaping of our dreams down mainly to their activity.

The dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish.

The waking life never repeats itself with its trials and joys, its pleasures and pains, but, on the contrary, the dream aims to relieve us of these. Even when our whole mind is filled with one subject, when profound sorrow has torn our hearts or when a task has claimed the whole power of our mentality, the dream either gives us something entirely strange, or it takes for its combinations only a few elements from reality, or it only enters into the strain of our mood and symbolises reality.

Of course it would not occur to us to doubt the importance, experimentally demonstrated, of external sensory stimuli during sleep, but we have given this material the same place relative to the dream-wish as we have the remnants of thought left over from the work of the day. We do not need to dispute that the dream interprets the objective sensory stimulus as if it were an illusion; but where the authorities left the motive for this interpretation uncertain, we have put it in.

Dream disfigurement, then, turns out in reality to be an act of the censor.

The same diversity in their ways of formation and the same rules for its solution hold good also for the innumerable medley of dream contents, examples of which I need scarcely adduce. Their strangeness quite disappears when we resolve not to place them on a level with the objects of perception as known to us when awake, but to remember that they represent the art of dream condensation by an exclusion of unnecessary detail.

If we subject the content of the dream to analysis, we become aware that the dream fear is no more justified by the dream content than the fear in a phobia is justified by the idea upon which the phobia depends.

The first thing the investigator comes to understand in comparing the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that work of condensation has been carried out here on a grand scale.

The way in which these factors—displacement, condensation, and over-determination—interact in the process of dream-formation, and the question of which becomes dominant and which secondary, are things we shall set aside for later inquiries.

As a scientific rationalist, Freud distrusts the manifest content of dreams.

Then, when the entire mass of these dream-thoughts is subject to the pressure of the dream-work, and the pieces are whirled about, broken up, and pushed up against one another, rather like ice-floes surging down a river, the question arises: what has become of the bonds of logic which had previously given the structure its form?

dreams may be thus stated: They are concealed realizations of repressed desires.

Lucretius and Cicero testify to the view that people dream about the things that concern them in waking life.

The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream 'No' does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one.

Uma técnica bem comum de distorção onírica consiste em representar o resultado de um acontecimento ou a conclusão de uma cadeia de pensamento no início de um sonho e em colocar em seu final as premissas nas quais se basearam a conclusão ou as causas que levaram ao acontecimento.

Visul este realizarea mascata a unei dorinte refulate. Este construit ca un simptom nevrotic, este o formatie de compromis intre necesitatea unei aspiratii instinctive refulate si rezistenta unei puteri cenzurate in eu. In virtutea unei origini asemanatoare el este la fel de incomprehensibil ca si simptomul si necesita, ca si acesta, o interpretare.