A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Dreams as Wishes

Freud believed that dreams were the ‘royal road’ to the hidden mind, but adult dreams are strange and confusing, so he began with the simplest ones: the dreams of small children.

“A boy of twenty-two months had to give a basket of cherries as a birthday present; he did it very unwillingly, although he was promised some of them himself.The next morning he told his dream: ‘Hermann eat all cherries.’A little girl of three made her first trip across a lake, and when the boat landed, she did not want to get off and cried bitterly; the trip had seemed far too short.The next morning she said, ‘Last night I rode on the lake.’A boy of five, taken on a walk in the mountains, kept hoping to see a famous mountain hut, grew silent and sad when he did not, and the next morning said happily, ‘Last night I dreamed we were at the hut.’

These dreams are not meaningless; they are clear, understandable acts of the mind.Each is a reaction to something that happened the day before and left behind a regret, a longing or a wish that was not fulfilled.The dream fulfils this wish directly and openly: the wish says, ‘I should like to ride on the lake,’ and the dream says, ‘I ride on the lake.’Adults have dreams like these too, when their bodies are in need: hungry explorers trapped in the Antarctic ice dreamed night after night of great dinners.

This also shows us what dreams are for.An unfulfilled wish would wake the sleeper, so the dream fulfils it, and the sleeper sleeps on.The dream is not the disturber of sleep, as people say, but the guardian of sleep, like a night watchman who makes a little noise himself while he drives away the troublemakers who would wake us.”