Thus my solution of the problem of the absurdity of dreams is that the
dream thoughts are never absurd—at least not those belonging to the
dreams of sane persons—and that the dream activity produces absurd
dreams and dreams with individual absurd elements if criticism,
ridicule, and derision in the dream thoughts are to be represented by it
in its manner of expression. My next concern is to show that the dream
activity is primarily brought about by the co-operation of the three
factors which have been mentioned—and of a fourth one which remains to
be cited—that it accomplishes nothing short of a transposition of the
dream thoughts, observing the three conditions which are prescribed for
it, and that the question whether the mind operates in the dream with
all its faculties, or only with a portion of them, is deprived of its
cogency and is inapplicable to the actual circumstances. But since there
are plenty of dreams in which judgments are passed, criticisms made, and
facts recognised, in which astonishment at some single element of the
dream appears, and arguments and explanations are attempted, I must meet
the objections which may be inferred from these occurrences by the
citation of selected examples.
My answer is as follows: _Everything in the dream which occurs as an
apparent exercise of the critical faculty is to be regarded, not as an
intellectual accomplishment of the dream activity, but as belonging to
the material of the dream thoughts, and it has found its way from them
as a finished structure to the manifest dream content_. I may go even
further than this. Even the judgments which are passed upon the dream as
it is remembered after awakening and the feelings which are aroused by
the reproduction of the dream, belong in good part to the latent dream
content, and must be fitted into their place in the interpretation of
the dream.
I. A striking example of this I have already given. A female patient
does not wish to relate her dream because it is too vague. She has seen
a person in the dream, and does not know whether it is her husband or
her father. Then follows a second dream fragment in which there occurs a
“manure-can,” which gives rise to the following reminiscence. As a young
housewife, she once jokingly declared in the presence of a young
relative who frequented the house that her next care would be to procure
a new manure-can. The next morning one was sent to her, but it was
filled with lilies of the valley. This part of the dream served to
represent the saying, “Not grown on your own manure.”[EW] When we
complete the analysis we find that in the dream thoughts it is a matter
of the after-effects of a story heard in youth, to the effect that a
girl had given birth to a child _concerning whom it was not clear who
was the real father_. The dream representation here goes over into the
waking thought, and allows one element of the dream thoughts to be
represented by a judgment expressed in the waking state upon the whole
dream.
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