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Our concept of the nature of the dreaming process has changed markedly in recent decades. We now know that the dream is not a brief flickering of consciousness produced by a sudden shift in psychological forces. Rather, it is a regular and repetitive experience containing events the time and space dimensions of which are very similar to those of waking life. This new insight into the nighttime character of the mind has provided a fresh impetus to studies of the relationships between the mental operations that occur in the manifest content of dreams and in daytime symptom formation.
Scrutiny of the march of events in the manifest content of dreams often reveals quantitative and qualitative aspects of the interaction between the structures of the mind which are not obvious in scrutinizihg the events of waking life. In dreams we observe the structures of the mind as they function autonomously, uninfluenced by stimuli from an ongoing reality. Also, because of the general regression which occurs during dreams, we encounter those structures in various stages of immaturity.
It is convenient to compare the phenomena in the manifest dreams to the phenomena of the waking mind in those persons in whom the latter are quite stereotyped. For this reason, in a group of previous papers, I have reported on dream series occurring in patients with clearcut syndromes of depersonaIization, mania, phobia, compulsive neurosis, and traumatic neurosis.9-16 In the course of these studies, I reached the conclusion that each syndrome possesses a type of dream that is as characteristic for it as are the stereotyped phenomena of waking life.
In this paper, I will review the previously reported dreams of a phobic patient14 and a compulsive patient.15 By juxtaposing data from the dreams of two patients with different psychoneuroses, I will further elucidate the nature of the factors responsible for the choice of neurosis in each instance. The dreams of both patients reveal early phases in the process