You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Since earliest times, dreams have been credited with a prophetic significance. Freud has pointed out that this belief in the prophetic value of dreams is, in part, both justified and explained by the fact that the function of dreams is to represent wishes as fulfilled. Wishes often succeed in attaining fulfilment also in real life. Hence it is not strange that dreams should often prove to be prophetic.
Freud (1923) has also called attention to the fact that a person, immediately after awakening from sleep, may be able to solve a difficult intellectual problem with which he had been struggling in vain before going to sleep. It has been abundantly demonstrated that both the id and the superego continue to function in dreams. Observations of the sort just cited, indicate further that the ego's function to find solutions for problems in real life may also be continued in sleep.
A less dramatic, but more frequent observation, points to the same conclusion. I suspect that most analysts could recall dreams that are already, as it were, premonitory of a real conflict solution that the patient will achieve perhaps very soon, perhaps only after a period of weeks or months. Such dreams have been frequently reported in the literature. The following dream from the first case report in Alexander's and Healy's book, Roots of Crime, is a dream of this sort.
The patient had been complaining that he would never achieve anything. He could be an elevator boy and slowly advance to a small job in a hotel or a department store, but such a man has no pleasure in life, nothing but duties and children, no hope of advancement. The patient prefers to be a crook.