Wish Fulfilment

An evening paper published recently a cartoon showing a kiddie in bed who asks his mother: “What makes me dream”—“You eat too much meat,” the mother answers. The next scene is laid in the kitchen where the mother finds her child ransacking the ice box for meat.

Parents could testify to the illustrator’s knowledge of the childish soul. Children like to dream and Freud’s statement that every dream contains fulfillment of some wish is confirmed by the dreams of healthy children.

Children attain in their sleep visions simple pleasures which are denied them in their waking states.

Freud’s little daughter, three and a half years old, being kept one day on a rather strict diet, owing to some gastric disturbance, was heard to call excitedly in her sleep: “Anna Freud, strawberry, huckleberry, omelette, pap.”

On one occasion she was taken across a lake and enjoyed the trip so much that she cried bitterly at the landing when compelled to leave the boat. The next morning she told the family a dream in which she had been sailing on the lake.

Freud’s little nephew, Hermann, aged twenty-one months, was once given the task of offering his uncle, as a birthday present, a little basket full of cherries. He performed that duty rather reluctantly. The following day he awakened joyously with the information which could only have been derived from a dream: “Hermann ate all the cherries.”

The London Times of Nov. 8, 1919, had a report of a lecture by Dr. C. W. Kimmins, chief inspector of the London Education Committee, on the significance of children’s dreams. He based his statements on the written records of the dreams of 500 children between the ages of eight and sixteen years.

Up to the age of ten, dreams of eating predominated, but their number fell off after ten, when dreams of visits to the county began to increase. Dreams of presents and eating at all ages from eight to fourteen, were much more frequent with children of the poorer classes that with those from well-to-do districts and there was an appreciable increase of their number about Christmas time. Retrospective dreams were very uncommon among all children.

Obvious wish fulfillment dreams were less common among boys than among girls, the proportion being respectively twenty-eight and forty-two percent.

Boys below ten had more fear dreams than girls of the same age. In both sexes it was some “old man” who terrified the dreamers. Both sexes suffered equally from the fear of animals, lions, tigers and bulls in the case of the boys, dogs, rats, snakes and mice in the case of the girls.

From ten to fifteen a falling off in the number of fear dreams was very noticeable among boys, whereas among girls it rather increased.

That increase was especially striking among girls of 16 and over, who were generally frightened by animals and strange men and women.

When school life played a part in children’s dreams it was more frequently the playgrounds than the classrooms that were visualized.

The war affected boys’ more than girls’ dreams. The dreaming boy was a valorous fighter, mentioned in dispatches, rewarded with the Victoria Cross, thanked personally by the King; or he returned home wildly cheered by crowds.

Girls, thirteen or over, saw themselves as Red Cross nurses, but no such dreams were observed in girls below ten.

Normal, healthy children delighted in dreaming and telling dreams with a wealth of detail.

Dr. Kimmins mentioned that, while the dreams of school children were generally easy to interpret, the dreams of students from 18 to 22 “were so heavily camouflaged that it would be impossible for anyone who was not a trained expert in psychoanalysis to deal with them satisfactorily.”

We can see how the repression made necessary by life conditions in modern communities slowly but surely transforms the obvious wish-fulfillment dreams of children into the symbolical and often distressing visions of the adult. The development of sexuality in boys and girls and the repression to which it is submitted explains easily the proportion of fear dreams in girls and boys.

Sexual talk and sexual curiosity are more common among boys than girls and therefore occupy the boys’ minds more constantly than the girls’ minds. On the other hand, many of the boys above sixteen find forms of sexual satisfaction of which the girls of the same age are deprived. Fear dreams are therefore more frequent among growing girls, being simply a symbolical form of sexual gratification.

The dreams of adults are far from being as uniformly pleasurable as those of young and healthy children.

A few of them are frankly pleasant; most of them are apparently indifferent and a few of them frankly unpleasant.

The pleasant dreams of the adults require as little interpretation as those of children and are obviously fulfillment of conscious or unconscious wishes.

A patient of mind, camping in the woods alone, dreamt during a rainy night that some of his friends were camping with him, that one of them had gone to a neighboring inn to secure better accommodations and finally that he was in his own bed at home.

Nordenskjold in his book “The Antarctic,” published in 1904, mentions that during the winter which he spent in the polar wilderness, his dreams and those of his men “were more frequent and more vivid than they had ever been before. They all referred to the outer world which was so far from us. . . . 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, was exceedingly glad when he could report in the morning that he had had a three course dinner. Another dreamed of tobacco, mountains of it; still another dreamed of a ship approaching on the open sea under full sail. Still another dream deserves mention: the postman brought the mail and gave a long explanation of why he had to wait so long. . . . One can readily understand why we longer for sleep. IT ALONE COULD GIVE US ALL THE THINGS WHICH WE MOST ARDENTLY DESIRED.” [Capitals mine.]

Other dreams of wish-fulfillment appear at first glance either indifferent or absurd. Interpreted according to the technique outlined in Chapter XVII, however, they soon yield a meaning which is rather convincing.

The following dream, recorded by a patient, would not lead the inexperienced interpreter to suspect the sinister death wish which it is meant to express in an indirect way.

“I was visiting a factory and saw Charles working as a glassblower.”

Charles was the first name of a wealthy man who seduced a girl with whom the dreamer was in love. The wealthy man is reduced to the condition of a working man. The patient’s unconscious association to glass blower to be consumption. The patient had once read statistics showing that a large number of glassblowers died from that disease. A very neatly concealed death wish.

In other cases the death wish, while obvious in the manifest dream content, appears absurd and may cause the patient some anxiety. One of the Ferenczi’s patients, who was extremely fond of dogs, dreamt that she was choking a little white dog to death.

Word associations brought out the memory of a relative with an unusually pallid face whom she had recently ordered out of her house, saying later that she would not have such a snarling dog about her. It was that white-faced woman, not a white dog, whose neck she wished to wring.

Here is another example in which the wish fulfillment is cleverly concealed.

“I am standing on a hill with Albert and somebody else. Bombs are falling about us. One of them strikes his car which is destroyed.”

The patient, a woman, is in love with Albert and enjoys greatly riding with him in his car. Why should she wish to see it wrecked?

The key to the enigma was given by the associations to the “somebody else.” The somebody else was another woman whom Albert had taken to ride on several occasions and of whom my patient was very jealous. By destroying the car, the jealous woman was putting an end to the rides which had especially aroused her jealousy.

The following dream seems rather unpleasant without being however an actual nightmare.

DREAM: I heard a noise downstairs and went to investigate. Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs, I found a man lying on the floor with his coat off and drunk. Later he was hiding from me and running about the house. The man was captured and brought back by another man who cross-examined him. The other man made excuses for the thief and said he probably intended to steal but as he had a toothache he had sought the cellar and drunk to deaden the pain. To prove his explanations he opened the thief’s mouth and pointed to a large cavity in one tooth.

INTERPRETATION: The patient who brought me the dream was a young woman who, at the time, was worrying least her husband should discover an indiscretion she had committed in her own house. The thief in the dream turned out to be her lover and the man who captures him, her husband. Everything is made simple and pleasant by the fact that the husband takes it upon himself to make excuses for the man he has captured. The excuse of the cavity was an allusion to alleged visits to a dentist’s office which supplied her with alibis on various occasions.

We spend a part of the night, if not the entire night, seeking solutions for the problems of the day. Patients who have been trained to remember and record their dreams accurately, sometimes bring a series of visions, apparently unrelated, but which after interpretation, prove to be successive presentations of one and the same problem from different angles.