If we are willing to disregard these objections, which are not to be
taken lightly, we still must admit that the qualities of the dream life
thus far considered, which originate by withdrawing from the outer
world, cannot fully explain the strangeness of the dream. For otherwise
it would be possible to change back the hallucinations of the dream into
presentations and the situations of the dream into thoughts, and thus to
perform the task of dream interpretation. Now this is what we do when we
reproduce the dream from memory after awakening, and whether we are
fully or only partially successful in this back translation the dream
still retains its mysteriousness undiminished.
Furthermore all the authors assume unhesitatingly that still other more
far-reaching alterations take place in the presentation material of
waking life. One of them, Strümpell,[66] expresses himself as follows
(p. 17): “With the cessation of the objectively active outlook and of
the normal consciousness, the psyche loses the foundation in which were
rooted the feelings, desires, interests, and actions. Those psychic
states, feelings, interests, estimates which cling in the waking state
to the memory pictures also succumb to ... an obscure pressure, in
consequence of which their connection with the pictures becomes severed;
the perception pictures of things, persons, localities, events, and
actions of the waking state are singly very abundantly reproduced, but
none of these brings along its psychic value. The latter is removed from
them, and hence they float about in the mind dependent upon their own
resources....”
This deprivation the picture suffers of its psychic value, which again
goes back to the derivation from the outer world, is according to
Strümpell mainly responsible for the impression of strangeness with
which the dream is confronted in our memory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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