Vague dreams, full of moods rather than of action, indicate stagnation, aimlessness.
Dreams of adulthood, dealing with the present or the future, indicate progression. Dreams of childhood or dealing mainly with the past, indicate attempts at a regression.
In his latest book, “Introduction to Psychoanalysis,” Freud states that “the unconscious in our psychic life is the infantile.”
This is one of the great Freudian exaggerations. Such a statement is true of the neurotic and explains why he is a neurotic. In fact the more infantile the unconscious appears to be, the more severe the neurosis generally is, until in certain forms of malignant regression, the patient acts like a helpless newly born infant. The predominance of infantile material in dreams indicates a fixation on infantile gratifications which makes the subject especially ill adapted to adult life. But in the normal individual the amount of infantile material is very small indeed.
We start gathering unconscious material at the very minutes of our birth, if not before birth, but we keep on accumulating experiences, most of them unconscious and only rising to consciousness when needed, and conscious experiences which become unconscious when not needed.
It is the proportion of material from the various periods of our life which enables us to gauge the level a human being has reached through his intelligent, positive acceptance of present day reality. I say acceptance of reality rather than adaptation to reality, for adaptation implies a certain suppression, and suppression may mean neurosis.
It is the human being who satisfies all his infantile cravings within a sphere of activity beneficial to himself and the world, who remains healthy. He who tries to satisfy them through infantile or childish ways merges into a neurosis.
We have seen that the dreams of children and of simple, normal people are obvious and devoid of any symbolic disfigurement. Children dream of the food or the pleasures they had to forego in the previous waking state. Nordenskjold and his sailors, icebound in the Antarctic, dreamt of fine meals, of tobacco, of ships sailing the open sea, of mail from home, in other words of the things of which they had been deprived for months.
The use of symbols in dreams, on the other hand, indicates a lack of freedom of expression due to some fear or repression. A repressed vision appears on the screen of our mind in symbolized form.
A highly symbolical dream is almost always a pathological dream. It means that we do not dare, even in our dreams, to visualize directly the thing we are thinking of.