The Interpretation of Dreams

Miss Calkins mentions two dreams the contents of which exactly reproduced an experience of the previous day

Delboeuf relates of one of his university colleagues that a dream of his repeated, in all its details, a perilous drive in which he escaped accident as if by miracle.

Strumpell rightly calls our attention to the fact that repetitions of experiences do not occur in dreams. It is true that a dream will make a beginning in that direction, but the next link is wanting; it appears in a different form, or is replaced by something entirely novel. The dream gives us only fragmentary reproductions; this is so far the rule that it permits of a theoretical generalization. Still, there are exceptions in which an episode is repeated in a dream as completely as it can be reproduced by our waking memory.

Pilcz, according to which definite relations between the time of dreaming and the contents of a dream may be demonstrated, inasmuch as the impressions reproduced by the dream in deep sleep belong to the remote past, while those reproduced towards morning are of recent origin. But such a conception is rendered improbable from the outset by the manner in which the dream deals with the material to be remembered.

It might even occur to one to reduce the phenomenon of dreaming to that of remembering, and to regard the dream as the manifestation of a reproductive activity, unresting even at night, which is an end in itself.

nothing which we have once psychically possessed is ever entirely lost" (Scholz, p. 34)

I must, however, express my regret that this discerning author refrained from following the path which at first sight seemed so unpromising, for it would have led him directly to the central point of the explanation of dreams.

Hildebrandt was certainly correct in his assertion that all our dream-images could be genetically explained if we devoted enough time and material to the tracing of their origin.

Miss Whiton Calkins found that 11 per cent of the entire number showed no relation to the waking state.

here it is not, as in the waking state, only the most significant things that are held to be worth remembering, but also the most indifferent and insignificant details.