Chapter III: Sleep And Death

We need only call to mind a few characteristic dreams to find all this confirmed. A man will dream, for example, that he is chasing away a dog which has been rushing at him. He awakens and finds himself in the unconscious act of pushing away a portion of the bed-clothes which had been weighing on an unaccustomed part of his body and had become oppressive. In such an instance, what does the dream make of the real, sense-perceptible event? To begin with, the life of sleep leaves entirely in the unconscious what the senses would have perceived in waking life. But it holds fast to one essential—the fact that we are wanting to ward something off—and around this it weaves an imaginary sequence of events. In substance these imaginary pictures are like echoes from the waking life of the day-time, echoes selected at random. The dreamer will generally feel that with the same external cause his dream might just as well have conjured up quite other pictures. Only in one way or another they would relate, in this instance, to the sensation of having to ward something off. The dream, therefore, creates symbolic pictures; it is in fact a symbolist. Inner bodily conditions too can be translated into dream-symbols of this kind. A man will dream that a fire is crackling beside him; he sees the very flames. On awakening, he finds that he put on too many bed-clothes and has grown too hot. The feeling of excessive heat comes out symbolically in the picture of the fire.