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We are pleased that Hobson now agrees that many dreams are wish-fulfilling. We, unlike Hobson, however, see this fact as highly significant because it raises important scientific questions. Why do many dreams gratify desires? Why is the diurnal origin of wishes that appear in children's dreams invariably represented by an intense emotional daytime experience of the child? Can the dream really gratify a wish by reducing the intensity of the wish when one awakens? What is the precise relationship between wishes and dreams? And, more generally, what is the relationship between motivational states and dreaming? These are questions that any science of dreaming is naturally interested in.
We’re trying to give a more solid empirical footing to some concepts—which in a Freudian psychoanalytic therapeutic setting are well-known facts—by using research programs that are repeatable by any researcher, whether psychoanalytically or nonpsychoanalytically oriented. Through studies such as those cited in our article, we hope to move the study of several concepts (such as those of wish-fulfillment and others of general psychoanalytic theory) from the analytic setting into the realm of empirical research on dreaming, so as to make direct comparisons with data from other theoretical approaches to dreaming.
We believe that studies such as those on children's dreams and drug dreams provide a greater understanding of the role of wish in the dream.
In providing this understanding, we, as researchers, operate with conscious wishes: We know that Freud attributed the ability of such conscious wishes to trigger dreams in children, thereby constituting the driving force of dreams in the same way as unconscious wishes trigger dreams in adulthood. Thus, this type of model is “small scale” but faithful, and allows us to draw inferences on a general model of dreaming. The studies on children's dreams (including infantile dreams in adulthood) therefore provide evidence to assess the general thesis