For childish people, which are easily caught in the meshes of their fancies and let their imagination run away with them, that indulgence is deadly and it has led millions of Orientals into a nirvana-like idleness and weakness, destructive of energy and life, a negative escape from reality.
This is one of the reasons why, in many forms of neurosis, a rest cure is the most dangerous form of treatment. The neurotic’s attention is generally directed away from reality. His energy is too often deflected toward fictitious goals located outside of the real world. The neurotic has to be brought back into contact with life and human beings; he has to be trained to accept them as they are and to enjoy them for what they are, instead of imagining what they might be. The idleness and seclusion of the rest cure may negative all efforts in that direction.
The rest cure from which day dreams cannot be excluded, is simply an abnormal flight from reality sanctioned and abetted by a physician ignorant of psychology.
The day dreams which produce happiness, which promote creation, scientific or artistic, and which lead the individual into the stream of life, are sound and healthy dreams. Those which only lead to more dreaming and away from life, are neurotic phenomena, devoid of any redeeming grace.
CHAPTER XV: NEUROSIS AND DREAMS
Not infrequently neuroses and psychoses are ushered in by a dream and their termination is announced by a dream.
This should not be understood to mean that the dream either “causes” the neurosis or “cures” it. That mistake has often been made by psychologists of the old school. Taine, among others, cites the case of a policeman who once attended a capital execution.
This spectacle made such an impression on him that he often dreamt of his own execution and finally committed suicide.