Sigmund Freud Dream Quotes & Sayings

A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood. — Sigmund Freud

What means, then, is the dream-work able to use to indicate these relations, which are so difficult to represent, in the dream-thoughts? I shall attempt to list them one by one. — Sigmund Freud

Our first answer must be that the dream has no means at its disposal among the dream-thoughts of representing these logical relations. Mostly it disregards all these terms and takes over only the factual substance of the dream-thoughts to work upon. It is left to the interpretation of the dream to re-establish the connections which the dream-work has destroyed. This inability to express such relations must be due to the nature of the psychical material which goes to make the dream. After all, the fine arts, painting and sculpture, are subject to a similar limitation in comparison with literature, which can make use of speech. Here too the cause of the incapacity lies in the material which both arts use as their medium of expression. — Sigmund Freud

Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two foremen in charge of the dream-work, and we may put the shaping of our dreams down mainly to their activity. — Sigmund Freud

All elongated objects, such as sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas(the opening of these last being comparable to an erection) may stand for the male organ ... Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards, and ovens represent the uterus ... Rooms in dreams are usually women ... Many landscapes in dreams, especially any containing breidges or wooded hills, may clearly be recognized as descriptions of the genitals. — Sigmund Freud

I always find the same principles confirmed: the elements formed into the dream are drawn from the entire mass of the dream-thoughts, and in its relation to the dream-thoughts each one of the elements seems to be determined many times over. — Sigmund Freud

The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever ... because they already live in a dream world. — Sigmund Freud

Three tendencies can be observed in the estimation of dreams. Many philosophers have given currency to one of these tendencies, one which at the same time preserves something of the dream's former over-valuation. The foundation of dream life is for them a peculiar state of psychical activity, which they even celebrate as elevation to some higher state. Schubert, for instance, claims: "The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter." Not all go so far as this, but many maintain that dreams have their origin in real spiritual excitations, and are the outward manifestations of spiritual powers whose free movements have been hampered during the day ("Dream Phantasies," Scherner, Volkelt). A large number of observers acknowledge that dream life is capable of extraordinary achievements - at any rate, in certain fields ("Memory"). — Sigmund Freud

The dream is to be regarded, says Binz, "as a physical process always useless, frequently morbid. — Sigmund Freud

At first this gives the impression that the psychical intensity7 of the particular ideas was not taken into consideration at all in their selection for the dream, but only the varying nature and degree of their determination. — Sigmund Freud

WE think we have advanced too rapidly. Let us go back a little. Before our last attempt to overcome the difficulties of dream distortion through our technique, we had decided that it would be best to avoid them by limiting ourselves only to those dreams in which distortion is either entirely absent or of trifling importance, if there are such. But here again we digress from the history of the evolution of our knowledge, for as a matter of fact we become aware of dreams entirely free of distortion only after the consistent application of our method of interpretation and after complete analysis of the distorted dream. — Sigmund Freud

There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life. — Sigmund Freud

Creativity is an attempt to resolve a conflict generated by unexpressed biological impulses, such that unfulfilled desires are the driving force of the imagination, and they fuel our dreams and daydreams. — Sigmund Freud

To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish. — Sigmund Freud

The thought suggests itself that a psychical power is operative in the dream-work which on the one hand strips the psychically valuable elements of their intensity, and on the other creates new values by way of over-determination out of elements of low value; it is the new values that then reach the dream-content. — Sigmund Freud

The dream shows how recollections of one's everyday life can be worked into a structure where one person can be substituted for another, where unacknowledged feelings like envy and guilt can find expression, where ideas can be linked by verbal similarities, and where the laws of logic can be suspended. — Sigmund Freud

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being. — Sigmund Freud

His understanding of transference in the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He is commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis" and his work has been highly influential- - popularizing such notions as the unconscious, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips and dream symbolism - while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as literature (Kafka), film, Marxist and feminist theories, literary criticism, philosophy, and psychology. However, his theories remain controversial and widely disputed. Source: Wikipedia — Sigmund Freud

The dream-thoughts and the dream-content lie before us like two versions of the same content in two different languages, or rather, the dream-content looks to us like a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, and we are supposed to get to know its signs and laws of grammatical construction by comparing the original and the translation. — Sigmund Freud

The same diversity in their ways of formation and the same rules for its solution hold good also for the innumerable medley of dream contents, examples of which I need scarcely adduce. Their strangeness quite disappears when we resolve not to place them on a level with the objects of perception as known to us when awake, but to remember that they represent the art of dream condensation by an exclusion of unnecessary detail. — Sigmund Freud

I think that it is a good plan to bear in mind that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis. — Sigmund Freud

Everybody dreams, but memory for dreams is famously elusive. Even Sigmund Freud, without the benefit of modern technology's electroencephalogram, or EEG, did not know that adult humans dream 90 minutes per night, and that newborns spend eight hours per day dreaming (out of their 16 hours of sleep). REM sleep helps grow the brain! — Charles McPhee

Plaque was placed on 6 May 1977 at Bellevue (a house on the slopes of the Wienerwald) where the Freud family spent their summers. — Sigmund Freud

I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream. — Sigmund Freud

Dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it - all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory. — Sigmund Freud

Dreams are constructed from the residue of yesterday. — Sigmund Freud

If we avail ourselves for a moment longer of the right to elaborate from the dream interpretation such far-reaching psychological speculations, we are in duty bound to demonstrate that we are thereby bringing the dream into a relationship which may also comprise other psychic structures. — Sigmund Freud

The study of dreams may be considered the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental processes. Now dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright. — Sigmund Freud

But the dream-work knows how to select a condition that will turn even this dreaded event into a wish-fulfilment: the dreamer sees himself in an ancient Etruscan grave, into which he has descended, happy in the satisfaction it has given to his archaeological interests. Similarly man makes the forces of nature not simply in the image of men with whom he can associate as his equals - that would not do justice to the overpowering impression they make on him - but he gives them the characteristics of the father, makes them into gods, thereby following not only an infantile, but also, as I have tried to show, a phylogenetic prototype. In — Sigmund Freud

So far we have mainly been concerned with probing after the hidden meaning of dreams, the route we should take to discover it, and the means the dream-work has employed to hide it. — Sigmund Freud

By exposing the hidden dream-thoughts, we have confirmed in general that the dream does continue the motivation and interests of waking life, for dream-thoughts are engaged only with what seems to be important and of great interest to us. — Sigmund Freud

One can make a compound formation of events and of places in the same way as of people, provided always that the single events and localities have something in common which the latent dream emphasizes. It is a sort of new and fleeting concept of formation, with the common element as its kernel. This jumble of details that has been fused together regularly results in a vague indistinct picture, as though you had taken several pictures on the same film. — Sigmund Freud

We are alone in confronting a different state of affairs; as we see it, there is a new kind of psychical material intervening between the content of the dream and the results of our reflections: the latent dream-content reached by our procedure, or the dream-thoughts. It is from this latent content, not the manifest, that we worked out the solution to the dream. — Sigmund Freud

As everyone knows, the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction. — Sigmund Freud

This is why a new task faces us which did not exist before, the task of investigating the relationship of the manifest dream-content to the latent dream-thoughts, and of tracing the processes by which the latter turned into the former. — Sigmund Freud

Then, when the entire mass of these dream-thoughts is subject to the pressure of the dream-work, and the pieces are whirled about, broken up, and pushed up against one another, rather like ice-floes surging down a river, the question arises: what has become of the bonds of logic which had previously given the structure its form? — Sigmund Freud

dream is the dreamer's own psychical act. — Sigmund Freud

Accordingly, identification, or the formation of composite figures, serves different purposes: first, to represent a feature both persons have in common; secondly, to represent a displaced common feature; but thirdly, to find expression for a common feature that is merely wished for. Since wishing it to be the case that two people have something in common is often the same as exchanging them, this relation too is expressed in the dream by identification. In the dream of Irma's injection, I wish to exchange this patient for another, that is, I wish that the other were my patient, as Irma is; the dream takes account of the wish in showing me a figure who is called Irma, but who is examined in a posture in which I have only had occasion to see the other. — Sigmund Freud

Most people report dreaming principally in visual images. Freud, however, assumes that dreams start from a dream-thought that is best expressed in words and translate it into a picture-language which is intellectually inferior because it cannot convey logical connections; the analyst restores to the dream its verbal character. — Sigmund Freud

Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers. — Sigmund Freud

Nothing that is mentally our own can ever be lost. — Sigmund Freud

The way in which these factors - displacement, condensation, and over-determination - interact in the process of dream-formation, and the question of which becomes dominant and which secondary, are things we shall set aside for later inquiries. — Sigmund Freud

Contradiction with this the majority of medical writers hardly admit that the dream is a psychical phenomenon at all. According to them dreams are provoked and initiated exclusively by stimuli proceeding from the senses or the body, which either reach the sleeper from without or are accidental disturbances of his internal organs. — Sigmund Freud

Dream disfigurement, then, turns out in reality to be an act of the censor. — Sigmund Freud

The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream 'No' does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one. Indeed, it also takes the liberty of representing some random element by its wished-for opposite, so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts. — Sigmund Freud

If this is what happens, then a transference and displacement of the psychical intensity of the individual elements has taken place; as a consequence, the difference between the texts of the dream-content and the dream-thoughts makes its appearance. — Sigmund Freud

An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols. — Sigmund Freud

The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse. — Sigmund Freud

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter. — Sigmund Freud

The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain. — Sigmund Freud

The dream is a sort of substitution for those emotional and intellectual trains of thought — Sigmund Freud

Lucretius and Cicero testify to the view that people dream about the things that concern them in waking life. — Sigmund Freud

If we subject the content of the dream to analysis, we become aware that the dream fear is no more justified by the dream content than the fear in a phobia is justified by the idea upon which the phobia depends. — Sigmund Freud

Of course it would not occur to us to doubt the importance, experimentally demonstrated, of external sensory stimuli during sleep, but we have given this material the same place relative to the dream-wish as we have the remnants of thought left over from the work of the day. We do not need to dispute that the dream interprets the objective sensory stimulus as if it were an illusion; but where the authorities left the motive for this interpretation uncertain, we have put it in. — Sigmund Freud

The dream is not a somatic but a psychic phenomenon. You appreciate the significance — Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud said we act out our own dreams, but if you are only an actor you are not acting out your own dream. You are simply participating in someone else's dream. — John Malkovich

The dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish. — Sigmund Freud

The first thing the investigator comes to understand in comparing the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that work of condensation has been carried out here on a grand scale. — Sigmund Freud