Delusion and Dream: An Interpretation in the Light of Psychoanalysis of Gradiva

In a circle of men who take it for granted that the basic riddle of the dream has been solved by the efforts of the present writer's curiosity was aroused one day concerning those dreams which have never been dreamed, those created by authors, and attributed to fictitious characters in their productions. The proposal to submit this kind of dream to investigation might appear idle and strange; but from one view-point it could be considered justifiable. It is, to be sure, not at all generally believed that the dreamer dreams something senseful and significant. Science and the majority of educated people smile when one offers them the task of interpreting dreams. Only people still clinging to superstition, who give continuity, thereby, to the convictions of the ancients, will not refrain from interpreting dreams, and the writer of Traumdeutung has dared, against the protests of orthodox science, to take sides with the ancients and superstitious. He is, of course, far from accepting in dreams a prevision of the future, for the disclosure of which man has, from time immemorial, striven vainly. He could not, however, completely reject the connections of dreams with the future, for, after completing some arduous analysis, the dreams seemed to him to represent the fulfilment of a wish of the dreamer; and who could dispute that wishes are preponderantly concerned with the future?

I have just said that the dream is a fulfilled wish. Whoever is not afraid to toil through a difficult book, whoever does not demand that a complicated problem be insincerely and untruthfully presented to him as easy and simple, to save his own effort, may seek in the above-mentioned Traumdeutung ample proof of this statement, and may, until then, cast aside the objection that will surely be expressed against the equivalence of dreams and wish-fulfilment.