111
THE DREAM IS THE FULFILMENT OF A WISH

WHEN after passing a defile one has reached an eminence
where the ways part and where the view opens out broadly
in different directions, it is permissible to stop for a moment
and to consider where one is to turn next. Something like
this happens to us after we have mastered this first dream
interpretation. We find ourselves in the open light of a sudden
cognition. The dream is not comparable to the irregular
sounds of a musical instrument, which, instead of being touched
by the hand of the musician, is struck by some outside force ;
the dream is not senseless, not absurd, does not presuppose
that a part of our store of ideas is dormant while another part
begins to awaken. It is a psychic phenomenon of full value,
and indeed the fulfilment of a wish; it takes its place in the
concatenation of the waking psychic actions which are intelli-
gible to us, and it has been built up by a highly complicated
intellectual activity. But at the very moment when we are
inclined to rejoice in this discovery, a crowd of questions over-
whelms us. If the dream, according to the interpretation,
represents a wish fulfilled, what is the cause of the peculiar
and unfamiliar manner in which this fulfilment is expressed ?
What changes have occurred in the dream thoughts before they
are transformed into the manifest dream which we remember
upon awaking ? In what manner has this transformation
taken place ? Whence comes the material which has been
worked over into the dream ? What causes the peculiarities
which we observe in the dream thoughts, for example, that
they may contradict one another ? (The analogy of the kettle,
p. 87). Is the dream capable of teaching us something new
about our inner psychic processes, and can its content correct
opinions which we have held during the day? I suggest
that for the present all these questions be laid aside, and that
a single path be pursued. We have found that the dream

108

104 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

represents a wish as fulfilled. It will be our next interest to
ascertain whether this is a universal characteristic of the
dream, or only the accidental content of the dream (“ of Irma’s
injection ”) with which we have begun our analysis, for even
if we make up our minds that every dream has a meaning and
psychic value, we must nevertheless allow for the possibility
that this meaning is not the same in every dream. The first
dream we have considered was the fulfilment of a wish ; another
may turn out to be a realised apprehension ; a third may have
a reflection as to its content; a fourth may simply reproduce
a reminiscence. Are there then other wish dreams; or are
there possibly nothing but wish dreams ?

It is easy to show that the character of wish-fulfilment in
dreams is often undisguised and recognisable, 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 cause as often as I like, as it were experimentally. If in
the evening I eat anchovies, olives, or other strongly salted
foods, I become thirsty at night, whereupon I waken. The
awakening, however, is preceded by a dream, which each time
has the same content, namely, that I am drinking. I quaff
water in long draughts, it tastes as sweet as only a cool drink
can taste when one’s throat is parched, and then I awake
and have an actual desire to drink. The occasion for this
dream is thirst, which I perceive when I awake. The wish
to drink originates from this sensation, and the dream shows
me this wish as fulfilled. It thereby serves a function the
nature of which I soon guess. I sleep well, and am not accus-
tomed to be awakened by a bodily need. If I succeed in
assuaging my thirst by means of the dream that I am drinking,
I need not wake up in order to satisfy it. It is thus a dream
of convenience. The dream substitutes itself for action, as
elsewhere in life. Unfortunately the need of water for quench-
ing thirst cannot be satisfied with a dream, like my thirst for
revenge upon Otto and Dr. M., but the intention is the same.
This same dream recently appeared in modified form. On
this occasion I became thirsty before going to bed, and emptied
the glass of water which stood on the little chest next to my
bed. Several hours later in the night came a new attack of
thirst, accompanied by discomfort. In order to obtain water,

THE FULFILMENT OF A WISH 105

I should have had to get up and fetch the glass which stood on
the night-chest of my wife. 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 an Italian journey and had since given away. But the
water in it tasted so salty (apparently from the ashes) that
I had to wake. It may be seen how conveniently the dream
is capable of arranging matters; since the fulfilment of a wish
is its only purpose, it may be perfectly egotistic. Love of
comfort is really not compatible with consideration for others.
The introduction of the cinerary urn is probably again the
fulfilment of a wish; I am sorry 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 also appropriate to the sensation
of a salty taste which has now grown stronger, and which I
know will force me to wake up.*

Such convenience dreams were very frequent with me in
the years of my youth. Accustomed as I had always been to
work until late at night, early awakening was always a matter
of difficulty for me. I used then to dream that I was out of
bed and was standing at the wash-stand. After a while I
could not make myself admit that I have not yet got up, but
meanwhile I had slept for a time. I am acquainted with the
same dream of laziness as dreamt by a young colleague of
mine, who seems to share my propensity for sleep. The
lodging-house keeper with whom he was living in the neigh-
bourhood of the hospital had strict orders to wake him on
time every morning, but she certainly had a lot of trouble when
she tried to carry out his orders. One morning sleep was
particularly sweet. The woman called into the room : “ Mr.
Joe, get up; you must go to the hospital.” Whereupon the

* The facts about dreams of thirst were known also to Weygandt, who
expresses himself about them (p. 11) as follows: * It is just the sensation of
thirst which is most accurately registered of all; it always causes a repre-
sentation of thirst quenching. The manner in which the dream pictures the
act of thirst quenching is manifold, and is especially apt to be formed accord-
ing to a recent reminiscence. Here also a universal phenomenon is that
disappointment in the slight efficacy of the supposed refreshments sets in
immediately after the idea that thirst has been quenched.” But he over-
looks the fact that the reaction of the dream to the stimulus is universal.
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 those others as persons who sleep poorly.

106 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

sleeper dreamt of a room in the hospital, a bed in which he
was lying, and a chart pinned over his head reading: “ Joe
H....cand. med. 22 years old.” He said to himself in the
dream : “If 1 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 another dream, the stimulus for which acts during
sleep itself : One of my women patients, who had had to
undergo an unsuccessful operation on the jaw, was to wear a
cooling apparatus on the affected cheek, according to the
orders of the physicians. But she was in the habit of throwing
it off as soon as she had got to sleep. One day I was asked
to reprove her for doing so; for 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 in the night. In the dream, I
was in a box at the opera and was taking a lively interest in
the performance. But Mr. Karl Meyer was lying in the sana-
torium 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 either, thats why I threw it away.”
This dream of the poor sufferer is similar to the idea in the
expression which comes to our lips when we are in a disagree-
able situation : “1 know something that's a great deal more
fun.” The dream presents this great deal more fun. Mr. Karl
Meyer, to whom the dreamer attributed her pains, was the
most indifferent young man of her acquaintance whom she
could recall.

It is no more difficult to discover the fulfilment of wishes
in several dreams which I have collected from healthy persons.
A friend who knew my theory of dreams and had imparted 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 understand that she would have liked
to enjoy her freedom for a time longer before the discomforts
of motherhood began. It was a clever way of giving notice
of her first pregnancy. Another friend writes that his wife
had recently dreamt that she noticed milk stains on the bosom of

THE FULFILMENT OF A WISH 107

her waist. This is also an indication of pregnancy, but this time
not of the first one; the young mother wishes to have more
nourishment for the second child than she had for the first.

A young woman, who for weeks had been cut off from
company because she was nursing a child that was suffering
from an infectious disease, dreams, after its safe termination,
of a company of people in which A. Daudet, Bourget, M.
Prevost, and others are present, all of whom are very pleasant
to her and entertain her admirably. The different authors
in the dream also have the features which their pictures give
them. M. Prevost, with whose picture she is not familiar,
looks like—the disinfecting man who on the previous day
had cleaned the sick rooms and had entered them as the first
visitor after a long period. Apparently the dream might be
perfectly translated thus : “ It is about time now for something
more entertaining than this eternal nursing.”

Perhaps this selection will suffice to prove that often and
under the most complex conditions dreams are found which
can be understood only as fulfilments of wishes, and which
present their contents without concealment. In most cases
these are short and simple dreams, which stand in pleasant
contrast to the confused and teeming dream compositions
which have mainly attracted the attention of the authors.
But it will pay to spend some time upon these simple dreams.
The most simple dreams of all, I suppose, are to be expected
in the case of children, whose psychic activities are certainly
less complicated than those of adults. The psychology of
children, in my opinion, is to be called upon for services similar
to those which a study of the anatomy and development of the
lower animals renders to the investigation of the structure of
the highest classes of animals. Until now only a few conscious
efforts have been made to take advantage of the psychology
of children for such a purpose.

The dreams of little children are simple fulfilments of wishes,
and as compared, therefore, with the dreams of adults, are
not at all interesting. They present no problem to be solved,
but are naturally invaluable as affording proof that the dream
in its essence signifies the fulfilment of a wish. I have been
able to collect several examples of such dreams from the
material furnished by my own children.

108 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

For two dreams, one of my daughters, at that time eight
and a half years old, the other of a boy five and a quarter years
of age, I am indebted to an excursion to the beautiful Hallstatt
in the summer of 1896. I must make the preliminary statement
that during this summer we were living on a hill near Aussee,
from which, when the weather was good, we enjoyed a splendid
view of the Dachstein from the roof of our house. The Simony
Hut could easily be recognised with a telescope. The little
ones 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 day with great joy. From Hall-
statt we entered the valley of Eschern, which highly pleased
the children with its varying aspects. One of them, however,
the boy of five, gradually became discontented. As often as a
mountain came in view, he would ask: “Is that the Dach-
stein ? “ whereupon I would have to answer: “No, only a
foot-hill.” After this question had been repeated several
times, he became altogether silent ; and he was quite unwilling
to come along on the flight of steps to the waterfall. I thought
he was tired out. But the next morning, he approached me
radiant with joy, and said : " Last night I dreamt that we were
at Simony Hut.” I understood him now; he had expected,
as I was speaking of the Dachstein, that on the excursion to
Hallstatt, he would ascend the mountain and would come face
to face with the hut, about which there had been so much
discussion at the telescope. When he learned that he was
expected to be regaled with foot-hills and a waterfall, he was
disappointed and became discontented. The dream com-
pensated him for this. I tried to learn some details of the
dream ; they were scanty. * Steps must be climbed for six
hours,” as he had heard.

On this excursion wishes, destined to be satisfied only in
dreams, had arisen also in the mind of the girl of eight and a
half years. We had taken with us to Halstatt the twelve-
year-old boy of our neighbour—an accomplished cavalier,
who, it seems to me, already enjoyed the full sympathy of the
little woman. The next morning, then, she related the follow-
ing dream : “Just think, I dreamt that Emil was one of us,
that he said papa and mamma to you, and slept at our house

THE FULFILMENT OF A WISH 109

in the big room like our boys. Then mamma came into the
room and threw a large handful of chocolate bars under our
beds.” The brothers of the girl, who evidently had not in-
herited a familiarity with dream interpretation, declared just
like the authors: That dream is nonsense.” The girl
defended at least a part of the dream, and it is worth while,
from the point of view of the theory of neuroses, to know which
part : “ That about Emil belonging to us is nonsense, but that
about the bars of chocolate is not.” It was just this latter
part that was obscure to me. For this mamma furnished me
the explanation. On the way home from the railway station
the children had stopped in front of a slot machine, and had
desired exactly such chocolate bars wrapped in paper with a
metallic lustre, as the machine, according to their experience,
had for sale. But the mother had rightly thought that the day
had brought enough wish-fulfilment, and had left this wish to be
satisfied in dreams. This little scene had escaped me. I at
once understood that portion of the dream which had been con-
demned by my daughter. I had myself heard the well-behaved
guest enjoining the children to wait until papa or mamma had
come up. For the little one the dream made a lasting adoption
based on this temporary relation of the boy to us. Her tender
nature was as yet unacquainted with any form of being together
except those mentioned in the dream, which are taken from her
brothers. Why the chocolate bars were thrown under the bed
could not, of course, be explained without questioning the child.

From a friend I have learnt of a dream very similar to
that of my boy. It concerned an eight-year-old girl. The
father had undertaken a walk to Dornbach with the children,
intending to visit the Rohrerhiitte, but turned back because
it had grown too late, and promised the children to make up
for their disappointment some other time. On the way back,
they passed a sign which showed the way to the Hameau.
The children now asked to be taken to that place also, but had
to be content, for the same reason, with a postponement to
another day. The next morning, the eight-year-old girl came
to the father, satisfied, saying: “ Papa, I dreamt last night
that you were with us at the Rohrerhiitte and on the Hameau.”
Her impatience had thus in the dream anticipated the fulfil-
ment of the promise made by her father.

110 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

Another dream, which the picturesque beauty of the Aussee
inspired in my daughter, at that time three and a quarter years
old, is equally straightforward. The little one 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 dura-
tion of this dream ride was more satisfactory to her.

My eldest boy, at that time eight years of age, was already
dreaming of the realisation of his fancies. He had been riding
in a chariot with Achilles, with Diomed as charioteer. He
had, of course, on the previous day shown a lively interest
in the Myths of Greece, which had been given to his elder
sister.

If it be granted that the talking of children in sleep likewise
belongs to the category of dreaming, I may report the following
as one of the most recent dreams in my collection. My youngest
girl, at that time nineteen months old, had vomited one morn-
ing, and had therefore been kept without food throughout
the day. During the night which followed upon this day of
hunger, she was heard to call excitedly in her sleep: “ Anna
Feud, strawberry, huckleberry, omelette, pap ! ” She used her
name in this way in order to express her idea of property ;
the menu must have included about everything which would
seem to her a desirable meal; the fact that berries appeared
in it twice was a demonstration against the domestic sanitary
regulations, and was based on the circumstance, by no means
overlooked by her, that the nurse ascribed her indisposition
to an over-plentiful consumption of strawberries; she thus
in the dream took revenge for this opinion which was distaste-
ful to her.*

If we call childhood happy because it does not yet know
sexual desire, we must not forget how abundant a source of
disappointment and self-denial, and thus of dream stimulation,

* The dream afterwards accomplished the same purpose in the case of
the grandmother, who is older than the child by about seventy years, as it
did in the case of the granddaughter. After she had been forced to go
hungry for several days on account of the restlessness of her floating kidney,
she dreamed, apparently with a transference into the happy time of her
flowering maidenhood, that she had been “asked out,” invited as a guest for
both the important meals, and each time had been served with the most
delicious morsels.

THE FULFILMENT OF A WISH 111

the other of the great life-impulses may become for it.* Here
is a second example showing this. My nephew of twenty-two
months had been given the task of congratulating me upon
my birthday, and of handing me, as a present, a little basket of
cherries, which at that time of the year were not yet in season.
It seemed difficult for him, 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 secure his
compensation. He had, until now, 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 on the street. On the day after the birthday,
he awakened joyfully with the information which could have
had its origin only in a dream: “ He(r)man eat up all the
cherries ! ” +

* A more searching investigation into the psychic life of the child
teaches us, to be sure, that sexual motive powers in infantile forms, which
have been too long overlooked, play a sufficiently great part in the psychic
activity of the child. This raises some doubt as to the happiness of the
child, as imagined later by the adults. Cf. the author's “Three Contribu-
tions to the Sexual Theory,” translated by A. A. Brill, Journal of Nervous
and Mental Diseases Publishing Company.

+ It should not be left unmentioned that children sometimes show com-
plex and more obscure dreams, while, on the other hand, adults will often
under certain conditions show dreams of an infantile character. How rich
in unsuspected material the dreams of children of from four to five years
might be is shown by examples in my “ Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjahr-
igen Knaben” (Jahrbuch, ed. by Bleuler & Freud, 1909) and in Jung's
“ Ueber Konflikte der kindlichen Seele” (ebda. ii. vol, 1910). On the other
hand, it seems that dreams of an infantile type reappear especially often in
adults if they are transferred to unusual conditions of life. Thus Otto
Nordenskjold, in his book Antarctic (1904), writes as follows about the crew
who passed the winter with him. "Very characteristic for the trend of our
inmost thoughts were our dreams, which were never more vivid and
numerous than at present. Even those of our comrades with whom dream-
ing had formerly been an exception had long stories to tell in the morning
when we exchanged our experiences in the world of phantasies, They all
referred to that outer world which was now so far from us, but they often
fitted into our present relations. An especially characteristic dream was the
one in which one of our comrades believed himself back on the bench at
school, where the task was assigned him of skinning miniature seals which
were especially made for the purposes of instruction. Eating and drinking
formed the central point around which most of our dreams were grouped.
One of us, who was fond of going to big dinner parties at night, was exceed-
ingly glad if he could report in the morning ‘that he had had a dinner con-
sisting of three courses” Another dreamed of tobacco—of whole mountains
of tobacco; still another dreamed of a ship approaching on the open sea
under full sail. Still another dream deserves to be mentioned. The letter
carrier brought the mail, and gave a long explanation of why he had had to
wait so long for it; he had delivered it at the wrong place, and only after

112 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

What animals dream of I do not know. A proverb for
which I am indebted to one of my readers claims to know,
for it raises the question : “ What does the goose dream of ? ”
the answer being : “ Of maize!” The whole theory that the
dream is the fulfilment of a wish is contained in these sentences."

We now perceive that we should have reached our theory
of the hidden meaning of the dream by the shortest road if
we had merely consulted colloquial usage. The wisdom of
proverbs, it is true, sometimes speaks contemptuously enough
of the dream—it apparently tries to justify science in expressing
the opinion that “ Dreams are mere bubbles : but still for
colloquial usage the dream is the gracious fulfiller of wishes.
“I should never have fancied that in the wildest dream,”
exclaims one who finds his expectations surpassed in reality.
great effort had been able to get it back. To be sure, we occupied ourselves
in 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 surely have been of great psychological interest if
all the dreams could have been noted. But one can readily understand how
we longed for sleep. It alone could afford us everything that we all most
ardently desired.”

+ A Hungarian proverb referred to by Ferenczi” states more explicitly
that “the pig dreams of acorns, the goose of maize.”