12. Where Do Dreams Come from?

Everyone dreams. But do you know where dreams come from? Reading the article may help you understand dreams a little better.

Do you often dream at night? Most people do. When they wake in the morning they say to themselves, "What a strange dream I had! I wonder what made me dream that.

Sometimes dreams are frightening. Terrible creatures threaten and pursue us. Sometimes, in dreams, wishes come true. We can fly through the air or float from mountain-tops. At other times we are troubled by dreams in which everything is confused. We are lost and can't find our way home. The world seems to have been turned upside-down and nothing makes sense.

In dreams we act very strangely. We do things which we would never do when we're awake. We think and say things we would never think and say. Why are dreams so strange? Where do dreams come from?

People have been trying to answer this since the beginning of time. But no one has produced a more satisfying answer than a man called Sigmund Freud. One's dream-world seems strange and unfamiliar, he said, because dreams come from a part of one's mind which one can neither recognise nor control. He named this the "unconscious mind".

Sigmund Freud was born about a hundred years ago. He lived most of his life in Vienna, Austria, but ended his days in London, soon after the beginning of the Second World War.

Freud was one of the great explorers of our time. But the new worlds he explored were inside man himself. For the unconscious mind is like a deep well, full of memories and feelings. These memories and feelings have been stored there from the moment of our birth—perhaps even before birth. Our conscious mind has forgotten them. We do not suspect that they are there until some unhappy or unusual experience causes us to remember, or to dream dreams. Then suddenly we see a face we had forgotten long ago. We feel the same jealous fear and bitter disappointments we felt when we were little children.

This discovery of Freud's is very important if we wish to understand why people act as they do. For the unconscious forces inside us are at least as powerful as the conscious forces we know about. Why do we choose one friend rather than another? Why does one story make us cry or laugh while another story doesn't affect us at all? Perhaps we know why. If we don't, the reasons may lie deep in our unconscious minds.

When Freud was a child he wanted to become a great soldier and win honour for his country. At that time Austria and Germany were at war with each other. His father used to take Sigmund down to the railway station to watch the trains come in from the battlefields. The trains were full of wounded soldiers. There were men who had lost an eye, an arm or a leg fighting in the war. Many of the soldiers were suffering great pain.

Young Sigmund watched the wounded men as they were moved from the trains into the hay-carts that carried them to the hospital. He was very sorry for them. He pitied them so much that he said to the teacher at his school, "Let us boys make bandages for the poor soldiers as our sisters in the girls' school do."

Even then, Freud cared about the sufferings of others, so it isn't surprising that he became a doctor when he grew up. Like other doctors he learned all about the way in which the human body works. But he became more and more curious about the human mind. He went to Paris to study with a famous French doctor, Charcot. Charcot's special study was diseases of the mind and nerves.

At that time it seemed that no one knew very much about the mind. If a person went mad, or 'out of his mind', there was not much that could be done about it. There was little help or comfort for the madman or his family. People didn't understand at all what was happening to him. Had he been possessed by a devil or evil spirit? Was God punishing him for wrongdoing? Often such people were shut away from the company of ordinary civilized people as if they had done some terrible crime.

This is still true today in many places. Doctors prefer to experiment on those parts of a man which they can see and examine. If you cut a man's head open you can see his brain. But you can't see his thoughts or ideas or dreams. In Freud's day few doctors were interested in these subjects. Freud wanted to know what makes us think and feel as we do. He wanted to know how our minds work, and he learned a lot from Charcot.

He returned to Vienna in 1886 and began work as a doctor in nerve diseases. He got married and, in order to support his wife, he began to receive more and more patients at their home. Most of the patients who came to see him were women. They were over-excited and anxious, sick in mind rather than in body. Medicine did not help them. Freud was full of sympathy but could do little to make them better.

Then one day a friend, Dr Josef Breuer, came to see him. He told Freud about a girl he was looking after. The girl seemed to get better when she was allowed to talk about herself. Dr Breuer allowed her to talk at great length. She told him everything that came into her mind, whether it seemed important or not. And each time she talked to him she remembered more about her life as a little child.

Freud was excited when he heard this. Perhaps this was the way to help his patients. He began to try to cure his patients in the same way. He asked about the events of their early childhood. He urged them to talk about their own experiences and relationships. He himself said very little.

Often, as he listened, his patients relived occasions from their past life. They trembled with anger and fear, hate and love. They acted as though Freud was their father or mother or lover.

The doctor did not make any attempt to stop them. He let them speak as they wished. He himself remained calm and quietly accepted whatever they told him, the good things and the bad. Sometimes, talking to him in this way seemed to relieve them of their pain.

One young woman who came to him couldn't drink anything, although she was very thirsty. She would hold a glass of water to her lips and then push it away. Something prevented her from drinking.

Freud discovered the reason for this. One day, as they were talking, the girl remembered having seen a dog drink from her nurse's glass. She hadn't told the nurse, whom she disliked. She had forgotten the whole experience. But suddenly this childhood memory returned to mind. When she had described it all to Dr Freud—the nurse, the dog, the glass of water—the girl was able to drink again.

Freud called this treatment the "talking cure". Later it was called psychoanalysis. When patients talked freely about the things that were troubling them they often felt better. They learned to control their fears. Perhaps this isn't so surprising. We all know how much it helps us if we tell our troubles to a friend.

The things that patients told him sometimes gave Freud a shock. He discovered that the feelings of very young children are not so different from those of their parents. A small boy may love his mother so much that he wants to kill his father. At the same time he loves his father and is deeply ashamed of this wish. It is difficult to live with such mixed feelings, so they are forgotten. They fade away into the unconscious mind and only return in troubled dreams.

Whatever Freud learned he reported to other doctors. Many of them were greatly upset by his discoveries. Even Dr Breuer's courage failed him and he stopped his experiments. It was hard to believe that people could become blind, or lose the power of speech, because of what had happened to them when they were children. The human mind was turning out to be a dark and fearful place.

Freud was attacked from all sides for the things he said and wrote. He made many enemies. But he also found firm friends. Many people believed that he had at last found a way to unlock the secrets of the human mind, and to help people who were very miserable. He had found the answer to many of life's great questions.

He became famous all over the world and taught others to use the talking cure. His influence on modern art, literature and science cannot be measured. People who wrote books and plays, people who painted pictures, people who worked in schools, hospitals and prisons, all these learned something from the great man who discovered a way into the unconscious mind.

Not all of Freud's ideas are accepted today. But others have followed where he led and have helped us understand ourselves better. Because of him, and them, there is more hope today than there has ever been before for people who were once just called "crazy".

From Great People of Our Time, Carol Christian,

Macmillan Education, 1977.