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Unless it commences on a firm ground of Freud's pioneer work, no undertaking to examine dreams and dream-life from the psycho-analytical point of view can go any considerable distance into the problem without creating more confusion than clarity. But a truly critical, rather than merely appreciative, view of his accomplishment runs almost immediately into the problem, writ large in the early days of his psychological career, of a baffling division between his tendency to form and prove rigid theories, and his extraordinary capacity for observation and imaginative speculation.
Before we can proceed with an examination of the rich and fascinating array of observations and conjectures, it is necessary to state and examine the less interesting theory, mainly in order to set it aside in our future exposition. The brevity may seem dismissive, but this would be unjust. There cannot be the slightest doubt of the historical importance of the theory and the groundwork it laid for the evolution of clinical practice. And much can be salvaged that is enduringly interesting, such as the concepts of censorship and dream-work. But the basis of the theory is so deeply rooted in a neurophysiological model of the mind, with its mind-brain equation, that it will not bear the weight of investigations into the meaning of the meaning of dreams.
A. The Guardian of Sleep - none of the evidence that Freud brought to bear in this respect argues any more strongly for the thesis that dreams are the guardians of sleep than that they are its destroyers. The hypothesis was bound so completely to the assumption that sleep is a purely physiological process, that waking and sleeping stand in relation to the brain as catabolism and anabolism do to the body as a whole. No other purpose could possibly be assigned that would see dreams as valuable to the organism in the Darwinian sense.
Consequently Freud had only two choices: to view dreams as the protector or as the disturber of the physiological event