Convenience Dreams

Some of the hypnogogic visions and experimental dreams I have mentioned contradict the wide-spread belief that sound sleep is untroubled by dreams.

The hypnagogic vision I have so often, that I wake into a body of water and finally start swimming, only adds more pleasant feature to my escape from reality. Swimming is really my favorite sport.

When my nose was tickled and I interpreted the stimulus as foliage brushing my face on entering a forest, that vision was not meant to awaken me, but on the contrary to keep me asleep by explaining away the tickling sensation and removing any sense of fear which would have compelled me to take notice once more of reality and protect myself.

Such dreams have been designated as convenience dreams.

Dreams of urination can be considered as typical convenience dreams. In the morning, when the pressure of urine on the walls of the bladder becomes stronger, dreams build up a convenient explanation around that unpleasant stimulus. Our wish to urinate is either represented as gratified or we are shown the impossibility of gratifying it (no toilet, doors locked, people looking, etc.). Unless the pressure is absolutely unbearable, we generally sleep on, satisfied or discouraged by such convenience dreams.

Freud tells in his “Interpretation of Dreams” of a striking convenience dream of his and of a variation it underwent on one occasion: “If in the evening I eat anchovies, olives or any other strongly salted food, I become thirsty at night, whereupon I awaken. The awakening, however, is preceded by a dream, which, each time has the same content, namely that I am drinking. The dream serves a function, the nature of which I soon guess. If I succeed in assuaging my thirst by means of a dream that I am drinking, I need not wake up in order to satisfy that need. The dream substitutes itself for action, as elsewhere in life. 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 a chest near my bed. Several hours later in the night, came a new attack of thirst, accompanied by discomfort. In order to obtain water I would have had to get up and fetch the glass which stood on a chest near my wife’s bed. I appropriately dreamt that my wife was giving me to drink from a vase, an Etruscan cinerary urn. But the water in it tasted so salty, apparently from the ashes, that I had to wake up.”

On a chilly summer night a woman patient had the following the dream:

“A man took me in a canoe to the middle of a lake and upset the canoe, saying: ‘Now you belong to me.’”

She woke up shivering.

The lake, the canoe upset and the man in the dream were associated with many conscious thoughts and memories of hers. But this was mainly a convenience dream, which endeavored to explain away the chilliness of the night through an appropriate scene. When the unavoidable awakening took place it was dramatized, as it is in so many cases of awakening, through a fall accompanied by a certain fear of death.

The few examples I have given and which could be multiplied, tend to show that the dream, far from being a disturber of sleep, is sleep’s best protector.

It seeks to explain away physical stimuli which might cause the sleeper to awake and it visualizes many reasons for not experiencing the fear usually connected with a certain stimulus.

In every convenience dream which I have analyzed, I have found a close connection between the image conjured up by the dream work and the ideas generally occupying the dreamer’s mind in his waking states.

In almost every case it could also be noticed that the convenience dream made use of some experience or observation of the previous waking state, which increases the plausibility of the dream’s visualization.