The Dream as a Simple Wish-Fulfilment in the Negro

The investigator of dream states in this country has at hand a race whose psychological activities are certainly less complex than those of the Caucasian and whose dreams therefore must be simpler in type. I refer, of course, to the American negro, and especially to the so called pure blooded negro.

It is not my intention in this paper to discuss pro or con the existence of an individual or number of individuals of unmixed African descent. While it is quite conceivable to my mind that four or five generations of a race can exist in an alien country without necessarily receiving an admixture from their environment and while I fail to see how such a generalization as that made by Witmer1 and others can be satisfactorily proved in a race so widely distributed and so great quantitatively as the American negro, I will admit that a large proportion of this race is diluted to a greater or less extent with the polyglot nationalities with which it has come into contact since 1620. Perhaps only a small percentage, or it may be none, of the negroes whose dreams are recorded below, were of pure African blood. The admission of this assumption would affect in no way the fact that the student of psychology working in the United States has access to a people the average level of whose development is lower than the white race and which furnishes numerous individuals showing psychological aspects quite similar to those of the savage.

This being the case, it is to be expected that their dream life would enjoy a relative freedom from the endopsychic censor, exactly as that of the child does. Freud says:

“… under the most complex conditions, dreams are formed