Ester González Martín

3rd Essay
December, 2017
The idea of dreams in Nietzsche and Freud

In 1900 publishes Freud his popular book “The interpretation of dreams”.

Decades earlier, though, Nietzsche had already employed himself theorizing about

these, although his ideas regarding dreams didn’t catch as much attention as those from

Freud. This paper will examine both conceptions of dream, and will bring together their

similarities, and differences. We will focus in Nietzsche’s work Human, all too human

(1878), and Freud’s lecture Revision of dream-theory, published in 1916-17, as a chapter

of the New introductory lectures.

Freud developed an elaborated theory of dreams, in which he tried to explain

how does the world of dreams work and what are the consequences and relations

between our dreams and our “awake” life. Many scholars have accused Freud’s theory

of explaining everything from a sexual perspective, as if the cause of all our problems

and traumas was of a sexual nature, and therefore, also our dreams. Freud declares,

though, that this is a misinterpretation, and that not all dreams are of a sexual nature (8).

One of the things that interests Freud at most is the process, in which dreams

appear and the implications of dreams in our daily lives: “we want to learn something

from our dreams” (9). For that purpose, we need more than just the fragmentary pieces

of dream that we can remember, but also, we need to access those that we can’t

remember at first, and pay attention to the associations we create and the connections

we find when we try to explain the part we remember.

 Freud states that the most important thing when we look at dreams are not

dreams themselves, but the associations that we make afterwards. Freud denominates

what we would typically call dream, the “manifest dream” or “text of the dream” (9),

which refer to the parts of the dream that we can remember once we are awake. This

part of the dream can happen in many different ways, for instance, “it may be coherent,

smoothly constructed like a literary composition, or it may be confused to the point of

unintelligibility, almost like a delirium” (10).

Analyzing the manifest dream is not an easy task, especially if we consider, that

the interest of this process is not the manifest dream itself, but the information we can

extract from it. Freud calls the fragments of the dream that we don’t remember and the

meanings and associations derived from it, the latent dream. In order to understand the

true meaning of dreams “we have to transform the manifest dream into the latent one”

(10).

Freud believed that our dreams were the door to our unconscious and that we

could learn much about ourselves if we could understand what our dreams stand for,

since, in his own words, “there can be no doubt that by our technique we have got hold

of something for which the dream is a substitute, and in which lies the dream’s

psychical value”. (12). Therefore, he elaborated a scientific method that allows us to

access some of the information that the manifest dream is hiding.

In order to access the latent dream, we have to forget about the dream as a

whole, as we remember it, and break it into many small pieces. Then, we will ask the

dreamer to concentrate in each and every one of these pieces and to try to tell us

anything that comes to his mind when he thinks about a specific portion of the manifest

dream. These portions can be described and analyzed in chronological order (the order

in which they appear in the dream) or we can also ask the dreamer to search for “day’s
residues” in the dream, since “experience has taught us that almost every dream

includes the remains of memory or an allusion to some event (or often several events) of

the day before the dream” (13). Often, if we do the process right, we will find out that a

lot of the elements of the dream, that seemed strange and incoherent in the first place,

are actually references to the dreamer’s real life.

Unfortunately, not every dream can be successfully interpreted with Freud’s

method, as he himself asserts when he, himself, asks: “Can we interpret all dreams by

its help” (his method’s help), and he answers the same question: “No, not at all, but so

many that we can feel confident in the serviceability and correctness of the procedure”

(13) The answer to the question of “why can’t we interpret every dream?” requires a

longer explanation, as we will next see.

One of the reasons why we can’t interpret all dreams is the resistance that we

show against remembering them. Freud thinks that this resistance is actually stronger

the more important the censored portion of the dream is. Usually, after working on the

associations and different portions of a dream the dreamer is able to reconstruct most of

it, except a specific part. Respect to this portion, states Freud that “experience shows

that it is that particular piece which is the most important” (14) and that is why our

unconscious fights harder to keep it secret. Even if we tried to write down our dream as

soon as we get up, we wouldn’t be able to reconstruct the whole thing, but only selected

pieces. Freud calls this concept the censor of dreams.

The censor of dreams complicates the process of interpreting dreams. But, what

are the reasons why we forget or repress part of our dreams? In our dreams, we allow

ourselves to do, think and feel things that we don’t allow us in our normal lives. For

Freud, the piece that we can’t remember is usually the most disturbing one. Most of our

manifest dreams are created basing on fragments or thoughts that were already in our
mind, and that we could have experienced consciously days before the dream: “It now

becomes evident to us that the portions of a conscious, or, more accurately, a

preconscious train of thinking” (18) On the contrary, the repudiated part that we reject

to remember is part of our unconscious, and even if can’t figure out what it is, “it is the

true creator of the dream” (18).

Sometimes, our unconscious would use dreams to punish us. These are the so

called “punishment dreams”: “Punishment dreams, too, are fulfillment of wishes,

though not of wishes of the instinctual impulses but of those of the critical, censoring

and punishing agency in the mind” (27). These dreams are of a complete different

nature than those that happen after a traumatic experience and that take the dreamer

back to it. To Freud, this event doesn’t belong to the real nature of dreams and it is

showing “ a failure in the functioning of his dream-work” (29), that is, “the process by

which the latent dream-thoughts were transformed into the manifest dream” (17).

Since dreams constitute a connection with our unconscious, they can also help us

understand some events that we would not understand otherwise, as it is the case with

telepathy. For Freud, dreams are a proof that some people can connect with another’s

mind. In his opinion, there are many cases that prove that in certain situations ( usually,

remarkable or relevant situations, like an accident) a person who has a very close

relationship with the victim of this situation might learn about it instantly “through a

visual or auditory perception” (36).

It is surprising to find out how Nietzsche, decades earlier, already wrote about

dreams in a similar way (even though, way less developed) than Freud. For him,

dreams are also a representation of a repressed part of ourselves, although his approach

is different that Freuds. In his book “Human, all too human, Nietzsche develops a short

but meaningful theory on dreams.

 Nietzsche starts by stating that dreams have traditionally been misinterpreted by

mankind. Even if he doesn’t believe that the dead could come visit the living in dreams,

he recognizes the value of superstition concerning dreams, since thanks to them, we

have been encouraged to explore and analyze the world: “Without the dream, men

would never have been incited to an analysis of the world” (13). For him, dreams are the

source of metaphysic: “In epochs of crude primitive civilization, thought they were

introduced to a second, substantial world: here we have the source of all metaphysic”

(íbid.) and the origin of the distinction between soul and body.

Nietzsche explains how, when we are asleep, dreaming, our memory “is reduced

to a state of imperfection as, in primitive ages of mankind” (17) . Since, from his

perspective, at that point in history, everybody’s memory was probably reduced to the

same state of imperfection, we can learn from those people and civilizations thanks to

dreams. To Nietzsche, “individual. Dreams carry us back to the earlier stages of human

culture and afford us a means of understanding it more clearly.” (18). In dreams, we go

back to a savage state of mind, that “recalls the conditions in which earlier mankind

were place, for whom hallucinations had extraordinary vividness, entire communities

and even entire nations laboring simultaneously under them” (ibid.).

Nietzsche also explains that when we dream, we are experiencing all kinds of

feelings that our brain needs to justify. In that primitive state of mind that rules over our

thoughts when we are sleeping, we will try to find any kind of reason that explains why

we are feeling the way we are feeling. When we sleep, our intestines are in motion and

our body adopts a different posture that “compresses some portions of the body” (ibid).

Under these circumstances our body needs to create and present reasons for the new

feelings we experience, for example, he says, “whoever has his feet bound with two

threads will probably dream that a pair of serpents are coiled about his feet.” (19). For
some reason, argues Nietzsche, the causes for these feelings, that o our brain creates

don’t seem very convincing in real life, when our whole rationality is working. “why

does the first plausible hypothesis of the cause of a sensation gain credit in the dreaming

state?” (19) When we hear a noise while we are dreaming, we might imagine that the

house is being bombed rather than considering a more plausible option.

At the same time, Nietzsche noticed that coming back to that primitive and

simplified state of mind could also be used as a restoration for our brain, after fulfilling

all thr requirements of our demanding world: “To a certain extent the dream is a

restorative for the brain, which, during the day, is called upon to meet the many

demands for trained thought made upon it by the conditions of a higher civilization.”

(ibid). Nietzsche sees a parallel between the state of mind we access when we are

dreaming and the one that can be seen in artists: “Even the poet, the artist, ascribes to

his sentimental and emotional states causes which are not the true ones. To that extent

he is a reminder of early mankind and can aid us in its comprehension.” (20

As we have seen, even when Nietzsche’s theory is just a very short and compact

one, we can still extract some interesting ideas from it. Being aware of the great

differences between Freud’s and Nietzsche’s concept of dreams, we can still see some

common ground between both theories: they both share the idea that what we dream is a

symbol of something and that by analyzing our dreams, we can learn much about

ourselves. For Freud, this learning is based in the exploration of the unconscious,

whereas Nietzsche refers to this chaotic, impulsive and less developed part of ourselves,

a primitive or savage state of mind.