Was it a Dream?

Have you ever woken up and gone through your day, wondering if you really dreamt something up that night? Freud finally touches upon the topic of the loss of dreams. To start off, he tells us how unreliable our memories are: "...everything goes to prove that our memory reproduces the dream not only incompletely but also untruthfully, in a falsifying manner. As, on the one hand, we may doubt whether what we dreamed was really as disconnected as it is in our recollections, so on the other hand we may doubt whether a dream was really as coherent as our account of it." Basically, Freud is trying to say that our memories are really unreliable. In that particular quotation, Freud says that our memories tend to remember our dreams incorrectly. We might recall dreams that are broken up into little pieces that don't fit together, just because our memory forgot certain parts of the dream. Conversely, we might find that our dreams fit together too well because our memory has pulled other thoughts in, tying the separate pieces together when they really weren't supposed to be connected. Freud concludes, "thus we are in danger of being deprived of the very object whose value we have undertaken to determine." To sum up: we could possibly never find the true meaning of our dreams through dream interpretation, because our memories just aren't perfect.

But Freud tells us not to worry: he says that our memories may alter our dreams in this way to hide details (censorship). Freud prescribes a test to figure out the details being hidden: "If the first report of a dream seems not very comprehensible, I request the dreamer to repeat it. This he rarely does in the same words. But the passages in which the expression is modified are thereby made known to me as the weak points of the dream's disguise...These are the points from which the analysis may start." So, if you're interpreting any dream (yours or someone else's) and it doesn't sound too coherent, repeat it (or have them repeat it). Whatever changed in the second recall are "the weak points of the dream's disguise" (censoring of details).

As a final note, Freud tells us that forgetting parts of dreams, as we naturally do, is not important. After all, what we're really after is the meaning behind it, not the dream itself. He says that this "is possible to discover from a single remaining fragment."