A Typical Dream-Sensation and its Meaning1

The feeling we experience in dreams of being astonished is doubtless familiar to you all from your own dreams and from those of your patients. Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams recounts five such dreams. In the chapter about Dream-Work (section: Absurd Dreams—Intellectual performances in dreams) he mentions that 'there is an abundance of dreams in which judgements are passed, criticisms made, and facts recognized, and in which astonishment at some separate element of the dream appears, attempts at an explanation are made and arguments adduced'. In addition to this Freud makes the following important observation: 'Everything in dreams which occurs as the apparent functioning of the critical faculty is to be regarded not as the intellectual performance of the dream-work, but as belonging to the material of the dream-thoughts, and it has found its way from there, as a completed structure, into the manifest dream-content.' In a later passage of the same chapter (in the section: The Secondary Elaboration) Freud returns to this statement with the following words: 'I have in mind cases where one manifests astonishment, anger, or resistance in a dream and that in respect of part of the dream-content itself. Most of these impulses towards criticism in dreams are not directed against the dream-content, but prove to be part of the dream-material, taken over and fittingly applied, as I have already shown by suitable examples.' We meet with a wholly similar observation also in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (eleventh lecture), which reads: 'Such manifestations of judgement, criticism, surprise, or deductive reasoning as are met with in dreams are not brought about by the dream-work and are only very rarely the expression of subsequent reflexion about the dream; but are for the most part fragments of the latent thoughts introduced into the manifest dream with more or less modification and in a form suited to the context.'

In analysing my patients' drea