The Psychology of Sleep

A few months ago I stood before the bust of Freud that was mounted in the yard of the University of Vienna in 1956, the centenary of Freud's birth. A few hours later I lectured at the Psychiatric Clinic, where I first heard him lecture more than 50 years ago. So many memories of my student years emerged. How often did I sit in that yard cramming for exams!

The occasion when I first heard the name of Sigmund Freud came to mind. It was in 1908 and I was 20 years old. Our lecturer in psychology had explained to us what dreams are: how stimuli from the body and stimuli from the external world determine the form and content of our dreams. There were experiments to prove this genesis of dreams. Small stones were thrown at the window of a bedroom and the sleeper dreamed that a battle, with much gunfire, was going on. A music box under a pillow resulted in a dream about an approaching military band, playing a march. A few drops of water thrown at a sleeper's face made him dream that he was walking in the middle of a tempest. In those days, psychiatry categorized dreams as the activity of degraded and weakend thought. With a fine, ironical smile our lecturer added that there lived in our city a neurologist who asserted not only that dreams were meaningful phenomena but that he knew a method of deciphering them. From what our teacher said and left unsaid, we students, trained in the theories of Wilhelm Wundt and Theodor Ziehen, concluded that the teachings of that certain Dr. Sigmund Freud were not much better than an old wives' tale.

A few weeks later I confronted Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. I read a few chapters and put it back into the files. I was indignant. What I had read definitely contradicted all that I had learned as a student of clinical psychology.

A short time later I had a vivid dream that followed me, as some dreams do, into my waking thoughts. This was the dream: I received an unsigned telegram: Jacob Died. come immediately. The content and source of the dream puzzled me. Where were the physical stimuli or the sensory sensations responsible for its emergence? I was, then, far from searching for meaning in my dreams, but I wondered why it was that the emotion with which I awoke did not correspond to the sad message contained in the dream. I had slept well and had experienced a joyous feeling when, awakening, I remembered the dream. Having perused Freud's book, I was sufficiently curious to search for some clues to understanding why I had dreamed such abstruse stuff. Who was Jacob? I did not know anyone by that name. I searched my memory in vain: none of my friends or relatives was called Jacob. And no one I knew had died recently.

The telegram was not signed. What did that mean? I suddenly remembered that I had received an unsigned telegram that week. The message it contained had nothing to do with a Jacob or with death. I knew the sender very well. The telegram consisted of only a few words, canceling an appointment for the following day.

At the time I was in love with Ella, the girl I was to marry several years later. Her father strongly objected to our association. He said about me – and how right he was – "He is nothing and he has nothing!" Ella and I met secretly. The actual telegram I had received was from Ella, telling me that I should not come to a meeting we had planned, because she had to go to a party with her parents on that day. Two elements of my dream were thus explained: the telegram and the fact that the message was not signed, as in reality it had not been.

But my dream still remained enigmatic. The real telegram had asked me not to come. The dream-message told me to do the opposite "immediately." Who was Jacob, whose death was announced in the telegram? I was almost ready to dismiss my dream as nonsense when I remembered that I had to attend a lecture that afternoon. The lecture was given by Professor Jacob Minor. It then occurred to me that Ella and I had originally planned to meet that afternoon, but had to drop that plan, to my regret, since I had to attend Professor Minor's lecture.

Now a third element of the dream had found its explanation; the name Jacob, which was that of the lecturer whom I then admired, yet whose discipline I feared. But Professor Minor enjoyed the best of health. I would listen to him lecture on the same day I had dreamed of his deadth.

Now at last I understood the meaning of my dream. Before I had fallen asleep, (continued on page 68) Psychology of Sleep (continued from page 64) I had thought what a pity it was that I could not see Ella the next day because of the lecture. I had then dreamed that Jacob Minor had died, that I need not go to the university, and could meet the beloved girl. The dream had transformed a secret wish into reality, presenting a fantasied possibility as actual. It seemed that I wished my professor dead in order to see Ella. No guilty conscience accompanied this thought (the dream was ruthless, reckless and remorseless). As I wondered about this aspect of my dream, I remembered having read in Freud's book that the dream treats the idea of death as children do, simply as absence, treats the idea of deadth as of children do, simply as absence, without the finality adults associate with it. Freud, in fact, mentioned that a little boy once said, "I know that grandfather died. But why does he not come to dinner?"

The unsigned telegram of the dream was taken from the memory of the fact that Ella had telegraphed me the week before. The dream had, as is often the case, condensed elements of reality and fantasy into one entity: the news came from Ella, but in contrast with the real message it was good news. The dream-telegram undid, so to speak, the previous telegram: now she was telling me I should come. The dream telegram not only showed that haste was necessary, but the tone of it, the request that I come, "immediately," signified also the impatience with which she awaited me.

A few days later, I realized that Jacob Minor and Ella's father had some personal characteristics and mannerisms in common. The dream finally emerged in depth-dimension: I also wished this father-representative figure, who stood in my way, dead. In the dream Ella conveyed to me that her father had died. All obstacles were removed. We would now be able to see each other regularly, as we wished.

It would lead us too far astray here to follow the path of the dream interpretation back into my childhood. However, the immediate insight I had gained in understanding this dream opened, for me, the door that had been kept closed through the narrow-minded prejudices of psychiatry and psychology of that day. I read The Interpretation of Dream again, and then everything that Freud had published. One year later I stood, for the first time, in his consultation room.

I later attended his lectures, and still remember how he approached a much discussed problem: that the dream, at its core, presents a wish fulfillment. He also spoke of the physiological and psychological conditions of sleep and familiarized his audience with his theory that dreams have the important function of guarding sleep, postponing awakening. He showed us how internal and external stimuli are interwoven and used by the emotional factors responsible for the formation of the picture which we see on that private stage of the night. A sleeping baby who experiences hunger does not immediately awaken; it moves its mouth as if sucking, though still asleep. It hallucinates that it is drinking and only begins to cry when the physical fact of non-satisfaction finally forces it awake.

It is similar with our other needs. A Hungarian magazine once published a series of cartoons about a governess who had to take care of a little boy. The child, who wanted to empty his bladder, tried in vain to awaken the woman, who usually helped him. The first picture showed that she dreamed that she was already helping the little boy: she was holding the child as he urinated. The next picture depicted his urine grown to the size of a brook; then it swelled into a river on which canoes were floating, then into a sea, and so on. Finally the shouts of the child became so urgent that the governess awakened. Her dream had prolonged her sleep as long as possible.

This function of guarding sleep is accomplished by dreams despite physical discomfort. Freud told us a dream of his own, dreamed when he had a sore spot on his buttocks. In the dream he saw himself horseback riding.

Dreams generally have their origin in impressions, impulses and thoughts occurring on the day before they are dreamed. In dream interpretation, the knowledge of those day-remnants is frequently helpful. Here is an example from my psychoanalytic practice: a patient reported that in his dream he entered a barber shop. The barber, a funny-looking, small man, greeted him cordially and shook his hand. The patient felt happy about the friendliness of the fellow. The day remnant: the patient had seen a movie, The Great Dictator, the evening before the dream. In that picture Charlie Chaplin played the part of a comical barber. Before falling asleep that night the patient had thought how rewarding it would be to meet Chaplin.

Dreams are always concerned with the person of the sleeper, with what he does or what happens to him. His person is sometimes disguised, but he is always in the center of the plot. The late Ernest Jones, Freud's biographer, told us in the early days of the psychoanalytic movement that a lady, present at a lecture of his in London, strongly objected to the statement that our dreams are self-centered, an insight common to all psychoanalysts. The lady asserted that her dreams were always "altruistic." Jones pointed out that the "personal" character of dreams had been recognized by all psychiatrists who interpreted them. He told her that when one makes an experiment– holding a person underwater in the Thames River for 20 minutes and seeing that the person has drowned – one is not obliged to repeat the experiment in all the rivers of the world.

In keeping with this personal quality of our dreams, people to whom we are indifferent rarely appear in them. I heard a charming story during my recent stay in Vienna: two sisters, Gertrude, six years old, and Monica, four years old, usually tell each other their dreams. In Gertrude's dreams little Monica always plays a role, while the sister never appears in Monica's dreams. On hearing of this from her sister, Gertrude indignantly declared, "What? You do not dream of me at all? Then I will not dream of you either."

The dynamics of the dream, the demonstration of the mechanisms of distortion, condensation, displacement and others which operate to form the dream and make its meaning unrecognizable to us after we awake, are complex. Psychoanalysis differentiates between the manifest dream content and its latent thoughts, and provides the psychologist with a method for deciphering the remembered dream, thereby penetrating its surface.

A few peculiarities of dream-thinking have to be mentioned in order to make the psychoanalytic interpretation understandable. The dream returns in its manifestations to the phase of infantile thoughts and does not hesitate to form puns and to use metaphorical expressions literally. This was already known to the dream-interpreters of antiquity. When Alexander the Great beleaguered the city of Tyre in 332 B.C. he had a dream in which he saw a satyr who teased him and tried to escape from him, but who finally let himself be caught. The dream interpreters whom the Macedonian king consulted explained the meaning of the dream: Tyre is yours (in Greek, Tyre= Tyros and satyr= satyros).

Let me compare this example with a dream I had to interpret not long ago. A woman patient dreamed: There was a bird. It was quite wet. I kissed it. The dream was particularly puzzling, since no helpful thought-associations of the dreamer opened an avenue to its interpretation. Nothing connected with the dream's content occurred to the patient. We decided to halt the discussion of the dream and to attempt its interpretation another time. The patient then told me other things; she gave me, for instance, an amusing description of a party she and her lover had attended the evening before. The man had become involved in a discussion during which some silly opinions had been expressed. Her lover had said some things which, in the lady's opinion, were quite mistaken. (continued on page 106) Psychology (continued from page 68) She controlled an impulse to tell him so when she kissed him good-night. Speaking of the discussion at the party my patient twice used the derogatory colloquialism, "That bird said so and so." The interpretation of the dream was no longer difficult. The bird who was "quite wet" (colloquially, "all wet") was of course her lover, who, in the patient's opinion, was quite mistaken on several points.

Certain actions and organs of the human body appear frequently in dreams in symbolic form. Such symbols are part of a universal heritage of prehistoric mankind and belong, so to speak, to a "forgotten language." Thus, the female genitals often appear as receptacles or empty enclosed areas and the male genitals are sometimes presented as independent persons.

Yet the assertion, heard so often, that psychoanalysis gives all dreams a sexual interpretation, is entirely erroneous. Freud and his acknowledged students never denied that there are many dreams in which other organic needs are satisfied and wishes of non-sexual natures gratified. It cannot, of course, be denied that sexual impulses, so often repressed in our civilization, also find their concealed expression in dreams.

Can all dreams be interpreted in psychoanalysis? Certainly not. Sometimes only fragments or parts of a dream can be explained. Only a little of the cover can be lifted, but that is often enough to recognize what the dream conceals. It is possible to guess much of a dream's meaning when one knows a great deal of the personal situation of the dreamer and is familiar with his emotional conflicts. In some cases the psychoanalytic method of dream interpretation fails because the resistances of the dreamer prove too strong to penetrate the manifest dream content. There are, furthermore, dreams that are clearly not wish fulfillments in the usual sense and whose interpretation leads to the insight that other emotional tendencies determined their emergence and shaped their form. Dreams of this kind often fulfill unconscious needs for self-punishment and serve masochistic trends in which the dreamer reacts to forbidden wishes and impulses that have come in conflict with his moral demands. An example of such a self-punitive dream was told to me by a 36-year-old hospital nurse.

She had never had intercourse with a man and suffered from serious neurotic complaints and great difficulties in social relationships. Here is the dream: There is a race going on among the girls, a horse-race. I cannot find my pants. I am afraid that I will lose the race.

The dreamer could not contribute anything to the interpretation of the dream except the fact that a nurse in the hospital in which she served mentioned at dinner the evening before that she would like to play the horses. Some girls she knew did so and won. No other thought-association occurred to her.

In such a case, a dream interpretation can sometimes be accomplished when the psychoanalyst knows the personal circumstances of the patient well. He replaces the thought-associations of the dreamer with his own inner experience.

The patient was silent after she had reported the dream and the remark of the other nurse about playing the horses. I recalled a sentence from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.

It was from the scene in which the Egyptian queen imagines what her absent lover is doing. She thinks of him riding with the Roman army on an expedition against the enemy and says: "O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony." Immediately after that another memory came to me: a few months after the first World War, I took a walk in the suburbs of London and happened to come to an open field where cavalrymen were drilling. The sergeant who was training them was not very tolerant toward their shortcomings and I heard him shout: "God have mercy on your wife if you cannot ride her better than that mare." Thus, the way to the interpretation of the patient's dream was paved.

Since Freud's death more than 20 years ago, quite a few modifications and additions have been made to his theory of the dream and to his technique of dream-interpretation. Factors of a social nature were considered, the transition from the waking-state to sleep was studied, the significance of colors and sounds in dreams was explored, to note a few advances. Swiss psychiatrists, including Carl Jung and A. Maeder, tried to find a prospective function in the dream, a function that points to the future. There are, of course, tendencies of this kind operating in dream formation: there are plans and hopes in the thoughts of the person during the day, often unconsciously perceived, in addition to the wishes that the dream fulfills. Who would deny that the wishes that live subter-raneously in us are among the powers that shape our future? But the core of Freud's epochal discovery of the meaning of dreams remains intact and will forever be among the most important contributions to our understanding of man.

Much remains unknown about the psychology of sleep. Here is, in reality, the last dark continent on earth. Psychoanalysis has taught us much about this little-explored area. "How much?" one will ask. That is a question to which optimists and pessimists will give different answers. You can say that a cup of tea is half empty or that it is half full.