Psychoanalysis, Sleep and Dreams

by André Tridon

Obsessive fear which is at the bottom of every worry is due to certain complexes, at times apparently unrelated to the actual disturbance, and which cannot be unearthed and uprooted except by a thoroughgoing psychological analysis.

This is especially true of certain cases of insomnia which the patient reports as follows. “I fall asleep with difficulty and with a certain apprehension. I sleep an hour or two during which I have awful dreams which I cannot remember. After which I hardly dare to close my eyes again.”

This is what I would call the fear of the unknown nightmare, and the anxiety dreams responsible for it must be patiently reconstituted from the scraps which invariably linger in the subject’s memory, even when he imagines that he cannot remember any dreams. The procedure will be explained in the next chapter.

While the psychoanalytic treatment is being applied, however, the patient must be made aware of a fact which will comfort him to a certain extent.

Patients often fear that if their sleeplessness is not relieved “at once” they will “loose their minds.” Thereupon they beg to be given some narcotic.

We must remember that the results of sleeplessness depend mostly upon the attitude which we assume toward that condition. It may seem paradoxical to state that its bad results are mainly due to our fear of them but it is true nevertheless.

We assume that we shall be exhausted by a sleepless night. We go to bed in fear and trembling, wondering whether we will or will not sleep. That anxiety is sufficient to liberate secretions which produce an unpleasant muscular tension and a desire for activity. This keeps us awake until the chemical contained in those secretions have been eliminated. In the meantime, we develop a fit of anger which releases some more of the identical chemicals. After which we are doomed to many hours of unrest and agitation.

During those restless hours we toss about angrily and exhaust ourselves physically. About dawn, when sleepiness generally overtakes even the most restless, we finally doze off and are awakened by our alarm clock or some other familiar disturbance and once more relapse into anger at the waste of our sleeping hours and the disability which we feel is sure to result from it.

We naturally feel worn out. If, on the other hand, we would resign ourselves to our sleeplessness, realize that rest, even in the waking state, will relieve our organism of all its “fatigue” and that, by complete relaxation in the waking state, we can liberate almost as many of our unconscious cravings as in the unconsciousness of sleep; if we were as careful not to waste uselessly our inner secretions as we are not to touch live wires, we would lie down as motionlessly as possible, and would consign to the scrap heap all the absurd notions as to the dire results of a sleepless night; we would then awaken in the morning as refreshed by the two or three hours of sleep that would finally be vouchsafed us as by the usual eight or ten.

The amount of sleep one needs varies with every individual and increases or decreases according to unconscious requirements. Hence, statements to the effect that one needs eight or ten hours’ sleep are absurd and dangerous.