The life we lead in our dreams, especially in healthy, pleasant dreams, is simpler and easier than our waking life.

We obliterate distance and transport ourselves wherever our fancy chooses; our strength is herculean; we defy the law of gravitation and rise or soar with or without wings; we brave law and custom; we abandon all modesty and make ourselves the centre of the world, which is OUR world, not any one else’s world.

The simplification of life is attained in dreams through three processes, visualization, condensation and symbolization.

The dream is always a vision. Other sensations than visual ones may be experienced in dreams but they are only secondary elements.

In other words, we may now and then hear sounds, perceive odours, etc., but the dream is based primarily on a scene which is perceived visually, not on sounds, odours, etc., now and then accompanied by a visual perception.

In fact we seldom hear sounds in our dreams, unless they are actual sounds produced in our immediate environment; the people who address us in dreams do not actually emit sounds but seem to communicate their thought to us directly without any auditory medium. Seldom do we taste or smell things in dreams.

On the other hand, we translate every stimulus reaching our senses in sleep, be it sound, taste, smell, touch, into a visual presentation. This process is to be compared to the gesticulation of primitive individuals who attempt to visualize everything they describe, indicating the length, height, bulk of objects through more or less appropriate mimic and who convey the idea of a bad odour by holding their nose, of pleasing food, by rubbing their stomach, etc.

The dramatization of every thought and every problem follows the line of least effort. And this explains the popularity of the movies, the enjoyment of which does not presuppose on the part of the audience any capacity to conceive abstract ideas.

Movie audiences are undoubtedly the least intelligent aggregations of people. They are not told that a crime has been committed, they are shown the crime while it is being committed. Captions warn them of what they are going to see, that they may not misunderstand the meaning of any scene. The movie, like our unconscious, translates every thought into a visual sensation, and when a psychological change cannot very well be visualized, for instance when the villain decides not to kill the ingenue, the fact is flashed on the screen in large type.

Pleasures of the eye are probably stronger and simpler than those vouchsafed by other sensory organs.[3] The most uninteresting parade will attract thousands of people, many more for instance, than free concerts in the open. Illustrated lectures appeal to more people than lectures without illustrations. Displays in shop windows, picturesque signs, possess a greater selling power than the best advertising copy.

In our waking life, we express our thoughts to ourselves and others through the algebra of abstract concepts. We speak of length, height, volume, weight, hardness, coldness, etc. It is doubtful, however, whether we can imagine length without thinking specifically of something long. In our dreams, the concept length disappears and is always replaced by something long.We notice that abstract thinking is more tiresome than descriptive thinking, that abstract facts demand more exertion in order to be grasped, than concrete facts. A philosopher expounding his theories to an audience tires himself and the audience quicker than an explorer would, describing his travels and possibly illustrating his talk by means of lantern slides.

Dream life is further simplified through condensation. This process is the one through which, in waking life, we reach generalizations. When we think of a house we select the essential characteristics of the various houses we have seen, the properties wherein a house essentially differs from, let us say, a bird or a river. In our dreams, condensation is less subtle and more directly based upon our experience.

We combine several persons into one, selecting as a rule the most striking features of every one of them. We may see a dream character with the eyes of one person, the nose of another and the beard of a third one.

Freud having made one proposal to two different men, Dr. M. and his brother, the former having a beard and the latter being clean shaven and suffering from hip trouble, combined them in a dream in a figure which looked like Dr. M., but was beardless and limped.

One of Ferenczi’s patients dreamt of a monster with the head of a physician, the body of a horse and draped in a nightgown.

Silberer dreamt of an animal which had the head of a tiger and the body of a horse.

This is a process similar to the one which in the infancy of the race gave birth to strange composite gods and mythological creatures like the Assyrian bull a combination of man’s intelligence, the bull’s strength and the bird’s power of flight, the various Egyptian deities in whom the process was reversed, for so many had the heads of animals and the bodies of men, the satyrs and syrens, combining respectively man and goat, woman and fish, Pegasus, the winged horse, etc.

Finally, dream life is simplified through the symbolic representation of human beings or inanimate things.

In symbolization, one striking characteristic of some complicated object is isolated from the others and some other object with only one characteristic substituted for it. Slang is made up of such symbolizations. Think of the expression “bats in the belfry,” in which the complicated human head is replaced by an architectural detail much simpler in character and occupying in an edifice the same position which the head occupies in human anatomy. Then, instead of describing absurd ideas, of a sinister colouring, without definite direction, we simply visualize queer creatures, half bird and half mouse, flitting about blindly.

Instead of explaining that the central figure of the christian religion is a godlike creature who died crucified, we select the most striking detail of the Passion, the cross, which to the initiated and uninitiated alike signifies christianity. In many cases we do not even represent the cross as that instrument of torture really looked but we simplify it, we symbolize it, by using a conventional design in which the proportion between the cross pieces has been entirely disregarded.

Symbolization is a reduction of an object to one essential detail which has struck us as more important than the others.

A child will designate a watch as a “tick-tick,” a dog as a “bow-wow,” because to his simple mind, ticking and barking are the essential characteristics of a watch and a dog.

In dreams, we simplify the concept of the body and often represent it by a house. The authority vested in the father and mother causes them often to be symbolized by important personages, etc.Without any more explanation, I shall sum up the various dream symbols whose selection is easily understood.

Birth is often symbolized by a plunge into water or some one climbing out of it or rescuing some one from the water.

Death is represented by taking a journey, being dead, by darksome suggestions.

A great many symbols in dreams are sexual symbols. The figure 3, all elongated or sharp objects, such as sticks, umbrellas, knifes, daggers, revolvers, plowshares, pencils, files, objects from which water flows, faucets, fountains, animals such as reptiles and fishes, in certain cases hats and cloaks are used to represent the male sex.

The female sex is symbolized on the contrary by hollow objects, pits, caves, boxes, trunks, pockets, ships.

The breasts are represented by apples, peaches and fruits in general, balconies, etc.

Fertility is symbolized by ploughed fields, gardens, etc.

I have shown in another book, “Psychoanalysis, Its History, Theory and Practice,” that symbols are absolutely universal and that the folklore of the various races and of the various centuries draws upon the same material for the purpose of simplified representation. Differences in climate, fauna and flora are purely superficial. Dwellers of the Polar regions are not likely to compare anything to a palm tree which they have never seen, nor will tropical races symbolize coldness through snowfields.

Experiments made by Dr. Karl SchrÖtter have confirmed Freud’s and Jung’s theories of symbolization in dreams. To the uninitiated and sceptical, dream symbols generally appear rather ludicrous fancies and not a few opponents of psychoanalysis hold that symbols were resorted to by analysts unable to read an obvious wish fulfilment in every dream.

SchrÖtter hypnotized his patients, then suggested to them a dream outline, ordering them also to indicate through an appropriate gesture when the dream would begin and end. This enabled him, by the way, to record the duration of every dream.[4]

He then awakened the subject and made him tell his dream.

One of his patients, a woman drawing toward middle age, who had been greatly upset when she learnt that the man she loved was suffering from syphilis, was asked to have a dream symbolizing her state of mind. Here is the vision she had:

“I am walking through a forest on an autumn day. The path is steep and I feel chilly. Some one whom I cannot distinguish is near me. I only feel the touch of a hand. I am very thirsty. I would like to slake my thirst at a spring but there is a sign on the spring that means poison: a skull and cross bones.”

The fancy is rather poetical and this example is quite typical of the symbolization of our life’s incidents by the dream work.

A patient with a strong resistance to the analytic method saw me in a dream “carrying a fake refrigerator full of make-believe meats, vegetables and fruits.”

The interpretation is obvious. I am carrying in a deceptive way an assortment of ideas which can be of no use to any one.

The refrigerator implies that the ideas are not even new but old and stale.

The patient’s repressions were such that, although the dream struck him as strange and he remembered it several months, he was unable to puzzle out its meaning. It expressed his mental state at the time and yet having made up his mind not to doubt me or the analytic treatment, he become unable to accept any disparaging thought consciously.

Unconsciously, however, he expressed his doubts in most striking symbolism which he did not himself understand.

This should be borne in mind if we wish to understand the psychology of nightmares. For in nightmares we may express a wish through a symbol which expresses it fittingly, but which we do not understand and which, on that account, may frighten us.

Let those who sneer at the study of symbols watch some of the attitudes assumed by insane people[5] who have reached the lowest level of deterioration. Let them see a picture published in the issue of the Journal of Mental and Nervous Disease for January, 1920, and which represents a hospital patient who has reached the lowest degree of infantilism. The patient hung herself in a blanket attached to a nail in front of a window. There she spent her days in the characteristic attitude of the unborn child in the womb.

Everything in that attitude was symbolical of her regression to, not only infancy, but the prenatal condition.