III
THE DREAM AS WISH-FULFILMENT

WHEN, after passing through a narrow defile, one suddenly
reaches a height beyond which the ways part and a rich
prospect lies outspread in different directions, it is well to stop
for a moment and consider whither one shall turn next. We are
in somewhat the same position after we have mastered this
first interpretation of a dream. We find ourselves standing in
the light of a sudden discovery. The dream is not comparable
to the irregular sounds of a musical instrument, which, instead
of being played by the hand of a musician, is struck by some
external force; the dream is not meaningless, not absurd, does
not presuppose that one part of our store of ideas is dormant
while another part begins to awake. It is a perfectly valid
psychic phenomenon, actually a wish-fulfilment; it may be
enrolled in the continuity of the intelligible psychic activities
of the waking state; it is built up by a highly complicated
intellectual activity. But at the very moment when we are
about to rejoice in this discovery a host of problems besets
us. If the dream, as this theory defines it, represents a fulfilled
wish, what is the cause of the striking and unfamiliar manner
in which this fulfilment is expressed? What transformation
has occurred in our dream-thoughts before the manifest dream,
as we remember it on waking, shapes itself out of them? How
has this transformation taken place? Whence comes the material
that is worked up into the dream? What causes many of the
peculiarities which are to be observed in our dream-thoughts ;
for example, how is it that they are able to contradict one
another? (see the analogy of the kettle, p. 127). Is the dream
capable of teaching us something new concerning our internal
psychic processes, and can its content correct opinions which
we have held during the day? I suggest that for the present all
these problems be laid aside, and that a single path be pursued.
We have found that the dream represents a wish as fulfilled.
Our next purpose should be to ascertain whether this is a
general characteristic of dreams, or whether it is only the
accidental content of the particular dream (“the dream about
I

130 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

Irma’s injection”) with which we have begun our analysis;
for even if we conclude that every dream has a meaning and
psychic value, we must nevertheless allow for the possibility
that this meaning may not be the same in every dream. The
first dream which we have considered was the fulfilment of a
wish ; another may turn out to be the realization of an appre-
hension ; a third may have a reflection as its content; a fourth
may simply reproduce a reminiscence. Are there, then, dreams
other than wish-dreams; or are there none but wish-dreams?

It is easy to show that the wish-fulfilment in dreams is often
undisguised and easy to recognize, so that one may wonder
why the language of dreams has not long since been understood.
There is, for example, a dream which I can evoke as often as
I please, experimentally, as it were. If, in the evening, I eat
anchovies, olives, or other strongly salted foods, I am thirsty
at night, and therefore I wake. The waking, however, is
preceded by a dream, which has always the same content,
namely, that I am drinking. I am drinking long draughts of
water; it tastes as delicious as only a cool drink can taste when
one’s throat is parched ; and then I wake, and find that I have
an actual desire to drink. The cause of this dream is thirst,
which I perceive when I wake. From this sensation arises the
wish to drink, and the dream shows me this wish as fulfilled.
It thereby serves a function, the nature of which I soon surmise.
I sleep well, and am not accustomed to be waked by a bodily
need. If I succeed in appeasing my thirst by means of the dream
that I am drinking, I need not wake up in order to satisfy
that thirst. It is thus a dream of convenience. The dream takes the
place of action, as elsewhere in life. Unfortunately, the need
of water to quench the thirst cannot be satisfied by a dream,
as can my thirst for revenge upon Otto and Dr. M., but the
intention is the same. Not long ago I had the same dream in
a somewhat modified form. On this occasion I felt thirsty
before going to bed, and emptied the glass of water which stood
on the little chest beside my bed. Some hours later, during the
night, my thirst returned, with the consequent discomfort.
In order to obtain water, I should have had to get up and fetch
the glass which stood on my wife's bed-table. I thus quite
appropriately dreamt that my wife was giving me a drink

THE DREAM AS WISH-FULFILMENT 131

from a vase; this vase was an Etruscan cinerary urn, which
I had brought home from Italy, and had since given away.
But the water in it tasted so salt (apparently on account of
the ashes) that I was forced to wake. It may be observed how
conveniently the dream is capable of arranging matters. Since
the fulfilment of a wish is its only purpose, it may be perfectly
egoistic. Love of comfort is really not compatible with con-
sideration for others. The introduction of the cinerary urn is
probably once again the fulfilment of a wish; I regret that I
no longer possess this vase ; it, like the glass of water at my wife’s
side, is inaccessible to me. The cinerary urn is appropriate
also in connection with the sensation of an increasingly salty
taste, which I know will compel me to wake."

Such convenience-dreams came very frequently to me in
my youth. Accustomed as I had always been to work until
late at night, early waking was always a matter of difficulty.
I used then to dream that I was out of bed and standing
at the wash-stand. After a while I could no longer shut out the
knowledge that I was not yet up; but in the meantime I had
continued to sleep. The same sort of lethargy-dream was
dreamed by a young colleague of mine, who appears to share
my propensity for sleep. With him it assumed a particularly
amusing form. The landlady with whom he was lodging in
the neighbourhood of the hospital had strict orders to wake
him every morning at a given hour, but she found it by no
means easy to carry out his orders. One morning sleep was
especially sweet to him. The woman called into his room:
“Herr Pepi, get up; you've got to go to the hospital.” Where-

* The facts relating to dreams of thirst were known also to Weygandt, who on
P. 41 speaks of them as follows: “It is just this sensation of thirst which is regis-
tered most accurately of all; it always causes a representation of quenching the
thirst. The manner in which the dream represents the act of quenching the thirst
is manifold, and is specified in accordance with some recent recollection. A
universal phenomenon noticeable here is the fact that the representation of
quenching the thirst is immediately followed by disappointment in the inefficacy
of the imagined refreshment.” But he overlooks the universal character of the
reaction of the dream to the stimulus. If other persons who are troubled by thirst
at night awake without dreaming beforehand, this does not constitute an objection
to my experiment, but characterises them as persons who sleep less soundly.
Cf. here Isaiah xxix. 8: “It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and,
behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty
man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is
faint..."

132 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

upon the sleeper dreamt of a room in the hospital, of a bed
in which he was lying, and of a chart pinned over his head,
which read as follows: “Pepi H., medical student, 22 years
of age.” He told himself in the dream: “If I am already at
the hospital, I don’t have to go there,” turned over, and slept
on. He had thus frankly admitted to himself his motive for
dreaming.

Here is yet another dream of which the stimulus was active
during sleep: One of my women patients, who had been
obliged to undergo an unsuccessful operation on the jaw, was
instructed by her physicians to wear by day and night a
cooling apparatus on the affected cheek; but she was in the
habit of throwing it off as soon as she had fallen asleep. One
day I was asked to reprove her for doing so; she had again
thrown the apparatus on the floor. The patient defended herself
as follows : “This time I really couldn't help it; it was the result
of a dream which I had during the night. In the dream I was
in a box at the opera, and was taking a lively interest in the
performance. But Herr Karl Meyer was lying in the sanatorium
and complaining pitifully on account of pains in his jaw.
I said to myself, 'Since I haven't the pains, I dont need the
apparatus either’; that's why I threw it away.” The dream
of this poor sufferer reminds me of an expression which comes
to our lips when we are in a disagreeable situation: "Well,
I can imagine more amusing things!” The dream presents
these “more amusing things!” Herr Karl Meyer, to whom the
dreamer attributed her pains, was the most casual acquain-
tance she could think of.

It is quite as simple a matter to discover the wish-fulfilment
in several other dreams which I have collected from healthy
persons. A friend who was acquainted with my theory of
dreams, and had explained it to his wife, said to me one day:
“My wife asked me to tell you that she dreamt yesterday that
she was having her menses. You will know what that means.”
Of course I know: if the young wife dreams that she is having
her menses, the menses have stopped. I can well imagine that
she would have liked to enjoy her freedom a little longer,
before the discomforts of maternity began. It was a clever
way of giving notice of her first pregnancy. Another friend
writes that his wife had dreamt not long ago that she noticed

133

milk-stains on the front of her blouse. This also is an indication
of pregnancy, but not of the first one; the young mother hoped
she would have more nourishment for the second child than
she had for the first.

A young woman who had for weeks been cut off from all
society because she was nursing a child who was suffering from
an infectious disease dreamt, after the child had recovered,
of a company of people in which Alphonse Daudet, Paul
Bourget, Marcel Prévost and others were present; they were
all very pleasant to her and amused her enormously. In her
dream these different authors had the features which their
portraits give them. M. Prévost, with whose portrait she is
not familiar, looked like the man who had disinfected the
sickroom the day before, the first outsider to enter it for a long
time. Obviously the dream is to be translated thus: “It is
about time now for something more entertaining than this
eternal nursing.”

Perhaps this collection will suffice to prove that frequently,
and under the most complex conditions, dreams may be
noted which can be understood only as wish-fulfilments, and
which present their content without concealment. In most
cases these are short and simple dreams, and they stand in
pleasant contrast to the confused and overloaded dream-
compositions which have almost exclusively attracted the
attention of the writers on the subject. But it will repay us if
we give some time to the examination of these simple dreams.
The simplest dreams of all are, I suppose, to be expected in
the case of children whose psychic activities are certainly less
complicated than those of adults. Child psychology, in my
opinion, is destined to render the same services to the psy-
chology of adults as a study of the structure or develop-
ment of the lower animals renders to the investigation of the struc-
ture of the higher orders of animals. Hitherto but few deliberate
efforts have been made to make use of the psychology of the
child for such a purpose.

The dreams of little children are often simple fulfilments of
wishes, and for this reason are, as compared with the dreams
of adults, by no means interesting. They present no problem to
be solved, but they are invaluable as affording proof that the
dream, in its inmost essence, is the fulfilment of a wish. I have

134

been able to collect several examples of such dreams from the
material furnished by my own children.

For two dreams, one that of a daughter of mine, at that time
eight and a half years of age, and the other that of a boy of
five and a quarter, I am indebted to an excursion to Hallstatt,
in the summer of 1896. I must first explain that we were living
that summer on a hill near Aussee, from which, when the weather
was fine, we enjoyed a splendid view of the Dachstein. With a
telescope we could easily distinguish the Simony hut. The
children often tried to see it through the telescope–I do not
know with what success. Before the excursion I had told the
children that Hallstatt lay at the foot of the Dachstein. They
looked forward to the outing with the greatest delight. From
Hallstatt we entered the valley of Eschern, which enchanted
the children with its constantly changing scenery. One of
them, however, the boy of five, gradually became discontented.
As often as a mountain came into view, he would ask: “Is
that the Dachstein?” whereupon I had to reply: “No, only
a foot-
hill.” After this question had been repeated several
times he fell quite silent, and did not wish to accompany us
up the steps leading to the waterfall. I thought he was tired.
But the next morning he came to me, perfectly happy, and
said: “Last night I dreamt that we went to the Simony hut.”
I understood him now; he had expected, when I spoke of
the Dachstein, that on our excursion to Hallstatt he would
climb the mountain, and would see at close quarters the hut
which had been so often mentioned when the telescope was
used. When he learned that he was expected to content
himself with foot-
hills and a waterfall he was disappointed,
and became discontented. But the dream compensated him
for all this. I tried to learn some details of the dream; they
were scanty. “You go up steps for six hours,” as he had
been told.

On this excursion the girl of eight and a half had likewise
cherished wishes which had to be satisfied by a dream. We
had taken with us to Hallstatt our neighbour’s twelve-
year-
old boy; quite a polished little gentleman, who, it seemed to me,
had already won the little woman’s sympathies. Next morning
she related the following dream: “Just think, I dreamt that
Emil was one of the family, that he said ‘papa’ and ‘mamma’

135

to you, and slept at our house, in the big room, like one of the
boys. Then mamma came into the room and threw a handful
of big bars of chocolate, wrapped in blue and green paper,
under our beds.” The girl’s brothers, who had evidently
had not inherited an understanding of dream-interpretation,
declared, just as the writers we have quoted would have done:
“That dream is nonsense.” The girl defended at least one part
of the dream, and from the standpoint of the theory of the
neuroses it is interesting to learn which part it was that she
defended: “That Emil was one of the family was nonsense,
but that about the bars of chocolate wasn’t.” It was just this
latter part that was obscure to me, until my wife furnished
the explanation. On the way home from the railway-
station the children had stopped in front of a slot-machine, and had
wanted exactly such bars of chocolate, wrapped in paper with
a metallic lustre, such as the machine, in their experience,
provided. But the mother thought, and rightly so, that the day
had brought them enough wish-fulfilments, and therefore left
this wish to be satisfied in the dream. This little scene had
escaped me. That portion of the dream which had been
condemned by my daughter I understood without any difficulty.
I myself had heard the well-behaved little guest enjoining the
children, as they were walking ahead of us, to wait until
‘papa’ or ‘mamma’ had come up. For the little girl the
dream turned this temporary relationship into a permanent
adoption. Her affection could not as yet conceive of any
other way of enjoying her friend’s company permanently
than the adoption pictured in her dream, which was sug-
gested by her brothers. Why the bars of chocolate were
thrown under the bed could not, of course, be explained
without questioning the child.
From a friend I have learned of a dream very much like
that of my little boy. It was dreamed by a little girl of eight.
Her father, accompanied by several children, had started on
a walk to Dornbach, with the intention of visiting the Rohrer
hut, but had turned back, as it was growing late, promising
the children to take them some other time. On the way back
they passed a signpost which pointed to the Hameau. The
children now asked him to take them to the Hameau, but once
more, and for the same reason, they had to be content with the

136

promise that they should go there some other day. Next morning
the little girl went to her father and told him, with a satisfied
air: “Papa, I dreamt last night that you were with us at the
Rohrer hut, and on the Hameau.” Thus in the dream her
impatience had anticipated the fulfilment of the promise made
by her father.

Another dream, with which the picturesque beauty of the
Aussee inspired my daughter, at that time three and a quarter
years of age, is equally straightforward. The little girl had
crossed the lake for the first time, and the trip had passed
too quickly for her. She did not want to leave the boat at
the landing, and cried bitterly. The next morning she told
us: “Last night I was sailing on the lake.” Let us hope
that the duration of this dream-voyage was more satisfactory
to her.

My eldest boy, at that time eight years of age, was already
dreaming of the realization of his fancies. He had ridden
in a chariot with Achilles, with Diomedes as charioteer. On
the previous day he had shown a lively interest in a book
on the myths of Greece which had been given to his elder
sister.

If it can be admitted that the talking of children in their
sleep belongs to the sphere of dreams, I can relate the following
as one of the earliest dreams in my collection: My youngest
daughter, at that time nineteen months old, vomited one
morning, and was therefore kept without food all day. During
the night she was heard to call excitedly in her sleep: “Anna
F(r)eud, st’awbewy, wild st’awbewy, om’lette, pap!” She used
her name in this way in order to express the act of appropriation;
the menu presumably included everything that would seem to
her a desirable meal; the fact that two varieties of strawberry
appeared in it was a demonstration against the sanitary regu-
lations of the household, and was based on the circumstance,
which she had by no means overlooked, that the nurse had
ascribed her indisposition to an over-plentiful consumption
of strawberries; so in her dream she avenged herself for this
opinion which met with her disapproval.¹⁾

¹⁾The dream afterwards accomplished the same purpose in the case of the child’s
grandmother, who is older than the child by about seventy years. After she had
been forced to go hungry for a day on account of the restlessness of her floating

137

When we call childhood happy because it does not yet know
sexual desire, we must not forget what a fruitful source of
disappointment and renunciation, and therefore of dream-
stimulation, the other great vital impulse may be for the
child.¹ Here is a second example. My nephew, twenty-two
months of age, had been instructed to congratulate me on
my birthday, and to give me a present of a small basket of
cherries, which at that time of the year were scarce, being hardly
in season. He seemed to find the task a difficult one, for he
repeated again and again: “Cherries in it,” and could not be
induced to let the little basket go out of his hands. But he
knew how to indemnify himself. He had, until then, been in
the habit of telling his mother every morning that he had
dreamt of the “white soldier,” an officer of the guard in a
white cloak, whom he had once admired in the street. On the
day after the sacrifice on my birthday he woke up joyfully
with the announcement, which could have referred only to a
dream: “Herman eaten all the cherries!”²

kidney, she dreamed, being apparently translated into the happy years of her
girlhood, that she had been “asked out,” invited to lunch and dinner, and had
at each meal been served with the most delicious titbits.

¹A more searching investigation into the psychic life of the child teaches us,
of course, that sexual motives, in infantile forms, play a very considerable part,
which permits us to doubt to some extent the happiness of the child, as imagined later
by adults. Cf. the author’s Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, 1905 (TRANS.
by A. A. Brill, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Publishing Co., 1930).

²It should be mentioned that young children often have more complex and
obscure dreams, while, on the other hand, adults, in certain circumstances, often
have dreams of a simple and infantile character. How rich in unsuspected content
the dreams of children no more than four or five years of age may be is shown
by the examples in my Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben (Jahrbuch von
Bleuler-Freud, vol. i, 1909), and Jung’s Über Konflikte der kindlichen Seele (vol. ii,
1910). For analytically interpreted dreams of children, see also Hug-Hellmuth,
Putnam, Raalte, Spielrein, and Tausk; others by Banchieri, Busemann, Doglia,
and especially Wigam, who emphasizes the wish-fulfilling tendency of such dreams.
On the other hand, it seems that dreams of an infantile type reappear with
especial frequency in adults who are transferred into the midst of unfamiliar
conditions. Thus Otto Nordenskjöld, in his book, Antarctic (1904, vol. i, p. 336),
writes as follows of the crew who spent the winter with him: “Very characteristic
of the trend of our inmost thoughts were our dreams, which were never more
vivid and more numerous. Even those of our comrades with whom dreaming
was formerly exceptional had long stories to tell in the morning, when we ex-
changed our experiences in the world of phantasy. They all had reference to that
outside world which was now so far removed from us, but they often fitted into
our immediate circumstances. An especially characteristic dream was that in

138

What animals dream of I do not know. A proverb for which
I am indebted to one of my pupils pro-
fesses to tell us, for it
asks the question: “What does the goose dream of?” and
answers: “Of maize.”¹⁾ The whole theory that the dream is
the fulfilment of a wish is con-
tained in these two sentences.²
We now perceive that we should have reached our theory
of the hid-
den meaning of dreams by the shortest route had

which one of our comrades believed himself back at school, where the task was
assigned to him of skinning miniature seals, which were manu-
factured especially
for purposes of instruction. Eating and drinking constituted the pivot around
which most of our dreams revolved. One of us, who was especially fond of going
to big dinner-parties, was delighted if he could report in the morning ‘that he
had had a three-course dinner.’ Another dreamed of tobacco, whole mountains
of tobacco; yet another dreamed of a ship approaching on the open sea under
full sail. Still another dream deserves to be mentioned: The postman brought the
post and gave a long explanation of why it was so long delayed; he had delivered
it at the wrong address, and only with great trouble was he able to get it back.
To be sure, we were often occupied in our sleep with still more impossible things,
but the lack of phantasy in almost all the dreams which I myself dreamed, or
heard others relate, was quite striking. It would certainly have been of great
psychological interest if all these dreams could have been recorded. But one can
really understand how we longed for sleep. That alone could afford us every
thing that we all most ardently desired.” I will continue by a quotation from
Du Prel (p. 231): “Mungo Park, nearly dying of thirst on one of his African ex-
peditions, dreamed constantly of the well-watered valleys and meadows of his
home. Similarly Trenck, tortured by hunger in the fortress of Magdeburg, saw
himself surrounded by copious meals. And George Back, a member of Franklin’s
first expedition, when he was on the point of death by starvation, dreamed con-
tinually and invari-
ably of plente-
ous meals.”

¹A Hungarian proverb cited by Ferenczi states more explicitly that “the pig
dreams of acorns, the goose of maize.” A Jewish proverb asks: “Of what does the
hen dream?”—“Of millet” (Sammlung jüd. Sprichw. u. Redensarten., edit. by
Bern-
stein, 2nd ed., p. 116).

²I am far from wishing to assert that no pre-
vious writer has ever thought of
tracing a dream to a wish. (Cf. the first passages of the next chapter.) Those
interested in the subject will find that even in antiquity the physician Herophi-
los,
who lived under the First Ptolemy, distin-
guished between three kinds of dreams:
dreams sent by the gods; natural dreams—those which come about whenever the
soul creates for itself an image of that which is benefi-
cial to it, and will come to
pass; and mixed dreams—those which originate spontaneously from the juxta-
position of images, when we see that which we desire (Buchsenschütz, p. 33).
From the examples collected by Scherner, J. Stärcke cites a dream which was
described by the author himself as a wish-fulfilment (p. 239). Scherner says:
“The phantasy immediately fulfills the dreamer’s-
wish, simply because this
existed-
vividly in the mind.” This dream belongs to the “emotional dreams.”
Akin to it are dreams due to “masculine and feminine-
erotic longing,” and to
“irritable-
moods.” As will readily be seen, Scherner does not ascribe-
to the wish
any further significance for the dream than to any other psy-
chic condi-
tion of the
waking state; least of all does he insist on the connec-
tion between the wish and the
essential nature of the dream.

139

we merely consulted the vernacular. Proverbial wisdom, it
is true, often speaks contemptuously enough of dreams—it
apparently seeks to justify the scientists when it says that
“dreams are bubbles”; but in colloquial language the dream
is predominantly the gracious fulfiller of wishes. “I should never
have imagined that in my wildest dreams,” we exclaim in
delight if we find that the reality surpasses our expectations.