The Interpretation of Dreams

to repel
us unless it can carry us away with it. It places so many difficulties
in the way of an analysis that we gladly resort to the clearer and
conciser presentation of Scherner's theories made by the philosopher
Volkelt: "From these mystical conglomerations, from all these
outbursts of splendour and radiance, there indeed flashes and shines
an ominous semblance of meaning; but the path of the philosopher is
not illumined thereby." Such is the criticism of Scherner's exposition
by one of his own followers.
{I|G ^paragraph 35}
Scherner is not one of those writers for whom the mind carries its
undiminished faculties into the dream-life. He even explains how, in
our dreams, the centrality and spontaneous energy of the ego become
enervated; how cognition, feeling, will, and imagination are
transformed by this decentralization; how the remnant of these psychic
forces has not a truly intellectual character, but is rather of the
nature of a mechanism. But, on the other hand, that activity of the
psyche which may be described as phantasy, freed from all rational
governance, and hence no longer strictly controlled, rises to absolute
supremacy in our dreams. To be sure, it borrows all its
building-material from the memory of the waking state, but with this
material it builds up structures which differ from those of the waking
state as day differs from night. In our dreams it reveals itself as
not only reproductive but also productive. Its peculiarities give
the dream-life its singular character. It shows a preference for the
unlimited, the exaggerated, the prodigious; but by its liberation from
the inhibiting categories of thought, it gains a greater flexibility
and agility, and indulges in pleasurable turns. It is excessively
sensitive to the delicate emotional stimuli of the mind, to its
stirring and disturbing affects, and it rapidly recasts the inner life
into an external, plastic visibility. The dream-phantasy lacks the
language of concepts. What it wishes to say it must express in visible
form; and since in this case the concept does not exert an
inhibitory control, it depicts it in all the fulness, power, and
breadth of visible form. But hereby its language, plain though it
is, becomes cumbersome, awkward, and prolix. Plain speaking is
rendered especially difficult by the fact that it dislikes
expressing an object by its actual image, but prefers to select an
alien image, if only the latter is able to express that particular
aspect of the object which it is anxious to represent. Such is the
symbolizing activity of the phantasy.... It is, moreover, very
significant that the dream-phantasy reproduces objects not in
detail, but only in outline, and in the freest possible manner. Its
paintings, therefore, are like light and brilliant sketches. The
dream-phantasy, however, does not stop at the mere representation of
the object, but feels an internal urge to implicate the dream-ego to
some extent with the object, and thus to give rise to action. The
visual dream, for example, depicts gold coins lying in the street;