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Freud suggested that in psychosis there exists a reciprocal relationship between waking thoughts and the manifest content of the dream. Patients with delusions will have normal manifest dreams, and those who reject or repress their delusions will find them appearing in manifest dreams. The author had the manifest dreams of schizophrenics compared with those of a control group. A low but significant rate of difference was found. The expectation that schizophrenics would have more unrepressed sexual and aggressive content in their manifest dreams was not borne out. The prediction that they tended to be more bizarre and unrealistic was fulfilled.
The authors hypothesize that in schizophrenics neutralized energy is increased during sleep. This energy then becomes available for defense because of the withdrawal of cathexes from autonomous ego functions. This bolsters repression and furthers the opportunity for dreamwork. The neutralized energy available for secondary revision is less because of its relation to secondary process. This leads to the impression of greater bizarreness and strangeness in the manifest content of the dreams of schizophrenics.