Towards a Formalist Approach to Dreams

In 1923 Freud strove to make a distinction between two kinds of dreams, those 'from above' and those 'from below':

Dreams from below are those which are provoked by the strength of an unconscious (repressed) wish which has found a means of being represented in some of the day's residues. They may be regarded as inroads of the repressed into waking life. Dreams from above correspond to thoughts or intentions of the day before which have contrived during the night to obtain reinforcement from repressed material that is debarred from the ego (Freud, 1923a, p. 111).

Six years later Freud (1929) specified the nature of 'dreams from above' more elaborately: 'they are formulations of ideas which could have been created just as well in a waking state as during the state of sleep, and which have derived their content only in certain parts from mental states at a comparatively deep level.' And finally, in 1940 Freud concluded, 'In short, dreams may arise either from the id or from the ego' (p. 166).

I should like to caution against a hasty classification of any dream as an ego dream, as one 'from above'—and perhaps even this genetic category itself might be reconsidered at least for some instances. In this light any thorough dream analysis must take account also of a formalist, stylistic approach (dealing with the grammar, figurative language, semantic patterns and the like)—an approach quite in harmony with psychoanalysis. That is to say, whereas the cornerstone of modern Saussurean linguistics is that the connexion between the signifier and signified is arbitrary, the cornerstone of modern stylistics is that the connexion is motivated, non-arbitrary; and in that sense, formalism is close to psychoanalys