Schopenhauer, Heine, Freud: Dreams and Dream-Theories in Nineteenth-Century Germany

From Homer onwards, trivial dreams have been distinguished from dreams which are, in whatever way, significant. In Book 19 of the Odyssey, Penelope tells the disguised Odysseus:

Dreams are awkward and confusing things: not all that people see in them comes true. For there are two gates through which these insubstantial visions reach us; one is of horn and the other of ivory. Those that come through the ivory gate cheat us with empty promises that never see fulfilment; while those that issue from the gate of burnished horn inform the dreamer what will really happen. (Homer 1946, p. 302)

The vast majority of dreams may well be trifling, incoherent and uninformative, but in many cultures it has been believed that a minority of dreams (‘big dreams’) prophesy the future, announce significant turning-points in the dreamer's life (Lincoln 1935), or constitute messages in which a buried part of the self communicates with the part closer to consciousness (Rycroft 1991).

Freud himself repeats this distinction at the beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams:

[t]he ancients prior to Aristotle […] distinguished valuable, truth-telling dreams, sent to the sleeper to warn him or to announce the future to him, from vain, deceptive or idle dreams intended to lead him astray or plunge him into ruin. (Freud 1999, p. 8)

For Freud, however, the supernatural is a territory to be ‘conquered by scientific explanation’ (Freud 1999). Any truth-telling function ascribed to dreams is a prescientific illusion. He considers it his task to combat such illusions, for they do not belong only to the distant past but have been taken up by the German Romantics: ‘The high value accorded to the dream-life by many schools of philosophy, for example, by Schelling's followers, is a distinct echo of the undisputed divinity accorded to dreams in antiquity’ (p. 8). So The Interpretation of Dreams may be seen as part of Freud's lifelong campaign against religion. But he does not attack directly the claim that drea