The Interpretation of Dreams

of a player ignorant of music perform a musical composition?
The theory of partial wakefulness did not escape criticism even by
the earlier writers. Thus Burdach wrote in 1830: "If we say that
dreaming is a partial waking, then, in the first place, neither the
waking nor the sleeping state is explained thereby; secondly, this
amounts only to saying that certain powers of the mind are active in
dreams while others are at rest. But such irregularities occur
throughout life..." (p. 482).
The prevailing dream-theory which conceives the dream as a
"physical" process finds a certain support in a very interesting
conception of the dream which was first propounded by Robert in
1866, and which is seductive because it assigns to the dream a
function or a useful result. As the basis of his theory Robert takes
two objectively observable facts which we have already discussed in
our consideration of dream-material (chapter I., B). These facts
are: (1) that one very often dreams about the most insignificant
impressions of the day; and (2) that one rarely carries over into
the dream the absorbing interests of the day. Robert asserts as an
indisputable fact that those matters which have been fully settled and
solved never evoke dreams, but only such as lie incompleted in the
mind, or touch it merely in passing (p. 10). "For this reason we
cannot usually explain our dreams, since their causes are to be
found in sensory impressions of the preceding day which have not
attained sufficient recognition on the part of the dreamer." The
condition permitting an impression to reach the dream is, therefore,
that this impression has been disturbed in its elaboration, or that it
was too insignificant to lay claim to such elaboration.
Robert therefore conceives the dream "as a physical process of
elimination which in its psychic reaction reaches the
consciousness." Dreams are eliminations of thoughts nipped in the bud.
"A man deprived of the capacity for dreaming would in time become
mentally unbalanced, because an immense number of unfinished and
unsolved thoughts and superficial impressions would accumulate in
his brain, under the pressure of which all that should be incorporated
in the memory as a completed whole would be stifled." The dream acts
as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain. Dreams possess a
healing and unburdening power (p. 32).
{I|G ^paragraph 15}
We should misunderstand Robert if we were to ask him how
representation in the dream could bring about an unburdening of the
mind. The writer apparently concluded from these two peculiarities
of the dream-material that during sleep such an elimination of
worthless impressions is effected somehow as a somatic process; and
that dreaming is not a special psychic process, but only the
information which we receive of such elimination. Moreover,
elimination is not the only thing that takes place in the mind
during sleep. Robert himself adds that the stimuli of the day are
likewise elaborated, and "what cannot be eliminated from the
undigested thought-material lying in the mind