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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 per-
fectly valid psychic phenomenon, actually a wish-fulfilment; it may be
enrolled in the continuity of the intelligible psychic activities of the wak-
ing 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. 667 ). 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 Irma’s injection”)
with which we have begun our analysis; for even if we conclude that every

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FULFILMENT

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 apprehension; 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 drink-
ing. 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 ac-
customed to being 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 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 capa-
ble 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
consideration 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

210

cinerary urn is appropriate also in connection with the sensation of an
increasingly salty taste, which I know will compel me to wake.¹

Such convenience-
dreams came very frequently to me in my youth.
Accustomed as I had always been to working 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.” Whereupon 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 M., 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 don’t need the apparatus

¹The facts relating to dreams of thirst were known also to Weygandt, who speaks
of them as follows: “It is just this sensation of thirst which is registered most ac-
curately of all; it always causes a representation of quenching the thirst. The man-
ner 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 im-
mediately 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 before-
hand, this does not constitute an objection to my experiment, but characterizes 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.”

21

THE DREAM AS A WISH-
FULFILMENT

either’; that’s why I threw it away.” The dream of this poor sufferer re-
minds 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 acquaintance of
whom she could think.

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 preg-
nancy. Another friend writes that his wife had dreamt not long ago that
she noticed milk-stains on the front of her blouse. This also is an indica-
tion 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 for weeks had 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 under-
stood 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-compo-
sitions which have almost exclusively attracted the attention of the writ-
ers on the subject. But it will repay us if we give some time to the exam-
ination of these simple dreams. The simplest dreams of all are, I suppose,
to be expected in the case of children whose psychic activities are cer-
tainly less complicated than those of adults. Child psychology, in my
opinion, is destined to render the same services to the psychology of adults
as a study of the structure or development of the lower animals renders to

212

the investigation of the structure 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 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 suc-
cess. 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 en-
chanted 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?” where-
upon 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 Hall-
statt 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’
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,

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THE DREAM AS A WISH–FULFILMENT

who evidently had not inherited an understanding of dream-
tation, 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 inter-
esting 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 affec-
tion 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 suggested 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 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 dreamed last night that you were with
us at the Rohrer hut, and on the Hameau.” Thus, in the dream her im-
patience had anticipated the fulfilment of the promise made by her
father.

Another dream, with which the picturesque beauty of the Aussee in-
spired 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.

214

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 regulations 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

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.² 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

¹The 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 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.

²A 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 has been
too long overlooked, in the psychic activity of the child. This permits us to doubt to
some extent the happiness of the child, as imagined later by adults. Cf. Three
Contributions to the Theory of Sex.

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FULFILMENT

he woke up joyfully with the announcement, which could have referred
only to a dream: “He[r] man eaten all the cherries!”¹

What animals dream of I do not know. A proverb for which I am in-
debted to one of my pupils professes to tell us, for it asks the question:
“What does the goose dream of?” and answers: “Of maize.”² The whole
theory that the dream is the fulfilment of a wish is contained in these
two sentences.³

¹It 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 “Experiences Concerning the Psychic Life of the Child,”
translated by Brill, American Journal of Psychology, April, 1910. For analytically in-
terpreted dreams of children, see also von 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. 330), 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 com-
rades with whom dreaming was formerly exceptional had long stories to tell in the
morning, when we exchanged 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 which one of our comrades believed himself back at school, where the
task was assigned to him of skinning miniature seals, which were manufactured espe-
cially 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 readily understand how we longed
for sleep. That alone could afford us everything that we all most ardently desired.”
I will continue by a quotation from Du Prel (p. 231): “Mummo Park, nearly dying of
thirst on one of his African expeditions, 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 starva-
tion, dreamed continually and invariably of plenteous meals.”

²A 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 Bernstein,
2nd ed., p. 116).

³I am far from wishing to assert that no previous 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 Herophilos, who lived under
the First Ptolemy, distinguished between three kinds of dreams: dreams sent by the

216

We now perceive that we should have reached our theory of the hidden
meaning of dreams by the shortest route had 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.

gods; natural dreams—those which come about whenever the soul creates for itself
an image of that which is beneficial to it, and will come to pass; and mixed dreams—
those which originate spontaneously from the juxtaposition of images, when we see
that which we desire. 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 an other psychic condition
of the waking state; least of all does he insist on the connection between the wish
and the essential nature of the dream.