Pleasant and unpleasant dreams. Healthy and morbid. Masochistic and sadistic. Childish or adult. Regressive, static or progressive. Positive or negative. Varied or recurrent. Personal or typical. Hypnogogic and hypnapagogic visions, etc.
Care must be taken then to note all the words and thoughts which appear most frequently in many dreams and which are likely to refer to important complexes.
Whenever possible two versions of each dream should be studied.
The subject should write down his dreams as soon as he wakes up, either in the morning or right after an anxiety dream which may have disturbed him in the course of the night.
The version of almost any important dream which the subject tells the analyst will be found quite at variance with the version written immediately after awakening.
Here is a dream reported orally to me by a patient.
“I saw you through a restaurant window, having lunch with your wife.”
Here is the same dream as I found it in the patient notes:
“You were to deliver a lecture in a park. There was a number of good looking girls there. One especially attracted my attention. As there was quite a little mud in the park she wore rubber boots. You were late in appearing and I went to look for you. I saw you sitting at a table in a restaurant with your wife, waving to some acquaintance on the side walk.”
The discrepancy between the two versions is quite amusing.