that the dreamer awakens with feelings of pain (pavor nocturnus). Anxiety which has a physiological basis, gives in such cases an opportunity for the deeply repressed childishperverse excitations to involve themselves in the dream, in the form of frightful, cruel, horrible scenes, which seem frightful to us, but in a certain depth of the unconscious satisfy wishes which in the "prehistoric" ages of our own mental development were actually recognized as desires.
The great part played in such dreams by cruelties inflicted or suffered must find its explanation in the sadistic idea which children have of the sex-relationship, as Freud has so beautifully shown in his "infantile sexual theories."[1] All the cruel acts of such dreams appear in analysis as sexual events transformed into deeds of violence. Sexually unsatisfied women, for example, very commonly dream of thieves breaking in, of attacks by robbers or wild beasts; but not one of the concealed, well-hidden incidents of the dream betrays that the outrages to which the dreamer is subjected really symbolize sexual acts. An hysterical of my observation once dreamed that she was run down by a bull before which she held a red garment. There was involved in this dream not only the present wish to possess such a dress, but also an unavowed sexual wish, the same which also caused the sickness. The thought of the frightfully enraged bull, which is a widespread symbol of manly strength, came to her especially through the circumstance that a man with a so-called "bull neck" had played a certain rôle in the development of her sexual life.
Childish memories make continual and always significant contributions to the creation of the dream. Freud has also established the fact that the earliest age of childhood is not only not free from sexual excitations, but that rather infantile sexuality, not yet restrained by education, is expressly of a perverse character. In infantile sexuality the oral and analurethral erogeneous zones, the partial impulses (Partialtriebe) of sexual curiosity and of exhibitionism, as well as sadistic and mashochistic impulses rule. When we consider these facts we come to the conclusion that Freud is in the right when he says that dreams express such impulses as wish-fulfillments, as the fulfillment of wishes from that part of our childhood which seems long since outgrown.
There are, however, dreams of very unpleasant content, which peculiarly enough disturb our rest hardly at all, so that when we awaken we reproach ourselves for experiencing such terrible events with so little sympathy or feeling. This sort of
- ↑ S. Freud: Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, II Folge. Deuticke, Vienna, 1909.
