The Interpretation of Dreams

by Sigmund Freud

It is requested to shut the eyes

or

It is requested to shut an eye

which I am in the habit of representing in the following form:

	the
It is requested to shut		eye(s).
	an

Each of the two variations has its own particular meaning, and leads us along particular paths in the interpretation of the dream. I had made the simplest kind of funeral arrangements, for I knew how the deceased thought about such matters. Other members of the family, however, did not approve of such puritanic simplicity; they thought we would have to be ashamed before the mourners. Hence one of the wordings of the dream requests the “shutting of one eye,” that is to say, that people should show consideration. The significance of the blurring, which we describe with an either—or, may here be seen with particular ease. The dream activity has not succeeded in constructing a unified but at the same time ambiguous wording for the dream thoughts. Thus the two main trains of thought are already distinguished even in the dream content.

In a few cases the division of the dream into two equal parts expresses the alternative which the dream finds it so difficult to represent.

The attitude of the dream towards the category of antithesis and contradiction is most striking. This category is unceremoniously neglected; the word “No” does not seem to exist for the dream. Antitheses are with peculiar preference reduced to unity or represented as one. The dream also takes the liberty of representing any element whatever by its desired opposite, so that it is at first impossible to tell about any element capable of having an opposite, whether it is to be taken negatively or positively, in the dream thoughts.[^[DU]] In one of the last-mentioned dreams, whose introductory portion we have already interpreted (“because my parentage is such”), the dreamer descends over a balustrade and holds a blossoming twig in her hands. Since this picture suggests to her the angel in paintings of the Annunciation (her own name is Mary) carrying a lily stem in his hand, and the white-robed girls marching in the procession on Corpus Christi Day when the streets are decorated with green bows, the blossoming twig in the dream is very certainly an allusion to sexual innocence. But the twig is thickly studded with red blossoms, each one of which resembles a camelia. At the end of her walk, so the dream continues, the blossoms have already fallen considerably apart; then unmistakable allusions to menstruation follow. But this very twig which is carried like a lily and as though by an innocent girl, is also an allusion to Camille, who, as is known, always wore a white camelia, but a red one at the time of her menstruation. The same blossoming twig (“the flower of maidenhood” in the songs about the miller’s daughter by Goethe) represents at once sexual innocence and its opposite. The same dream, also, which expresses the dreamer’s joy at having succeeded in passing through life unsullied, hints in several places (as at the falling-off of the blossom), at the opposite train of thought—namely, that she had been guilty of various sins against sexual purity (that is in her childhood). In the analysis of the dream we may clearly distinguish the two trains of thought, of which the comforting one seems to be superficial, the reproachful one more profound. The two are diametrically opposed to each other, and their like but contrasting elements have been represented by the identical dream elements.

The mechanism of dream formation is favourable in the highest degree to only one of the logical relations. This relation is that of similarity, correspondence, contiguity, “as though,” which is capable of being represented in the dream as no other can be, by the most varied expedients. The correspondences occurring in the dream, or cases of “as though,” are the chief points of support for the formation of dreams, and no inconsiderable part of the dream activity consists in creating new correspondences of this sort in cases where those which are already at hand are prevented by the censor of resistance from getting into the dream. The effort towards condensation shown by the dream activity assists in the representation of the relation of similarity.

Similarity, agreement, community, are quite generally expressed in the dream by concentration into a unity, which is either already found in the dream material or is newly created. The first case may be referred to as identification, the second as composition. Identification is used where the dream is concerned with persons, composition where things are the objects of unification; but compositions are also made from persons. Localities are often treated as persons.