Psychoanalysis, Sleep and Dreams

by André Tridon

One finds in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research many remarkable examples of dreams which, to the uninitiated, appear truly miraculous. Remembering, however, the wonders accomplished by Lucie under the influence of a hypnotic command, we may realize that the book-keepers who suddenly find in a dream the mistakes which have prevented them from balancing their books, or the various people who locate missing objects, are simply continuing in their sleep the day’s work, drawing no longer upon their limited store of conscious memories and impressions, but upon all the wealth of information which is contained in their unconscious.

Even the famous dream of Professor Hilprecht loses much of its glamour when viewed from this angle. Hilprecht had spent quite some time trying to decipher two small fragments of agate which were supposed to belong to the finger rings of some Babylonian god. He had given up the task and classified the fragments as undecipherable in a book on the subject. One night he had put his “o. k.” on the final proofs of that book, feeling, however, rather dissatisfied at his inability to account for the inscriptions found on those ancient stones. He went to bed, weary and exhausted and had a remarkable dream: A tall, thin priest of Nippur appeared to him, led him to the treasure chamber of the temple of Bel and told him that the two fragments in question should be put together, as they were, not finger rings, but earrings made for a god by cutting a votive cylinder into three parts. The next morning he did as the dream priest had told him to do, and was able to read the inscription without any difficulty.

I have received many letters from persons relating that they had dreamt of the San Francisco earthquake, of the sinking of the Lusitania, of the death of some friend or relative the very night preceding the event.

I show in another chapter how treacherous and unreliable our memory of dreams can be at times.

Happenings following quickly the awakening are likely to become “parasites” on the night’s dreams and to appear as a component part of them.

Time and over again, the newspaper one reads at breakfast adds details to the night’s remembered dreams. Reading about some accident in the early morning may cause us to believe that we dreamt of the accident in the course of the night.

When the German submarines began to sink passenger ships, thousands of dreamers who either wished unconsciously for such sinkings or feared them (which is generally the same thing) and many also who craved the excitement such catastrophes would bring them, must have had dreams in which large ships were sunk. And those thousands must have impressed themselves and their family circle by announcing, when the morning newspaper came out, that they had seen the tragedy enacted in a dream.

Here again we are groping our way over uncharted fields and not until thousands of scientific observations made with the care characteristic of the chemical laboratory have been made, all explanations will only be tentative and all positive statements misleading.

Those mentioning such dreams to me have at times been rather annoyed when I made them confess the wish lurking in them.

One man told me that he had three brothers at the front during the war and that in a dream he saw one of them killed by the Germans. Soon afterward, news of his death reached the family.