THE ‘dream in the dreams’ as recognized by Stekel is the satisfaction of the desire that everything activated by the dream-thoughts may be untrue, unreal, that is, a dream. There are, however, dreams in which the dreamer is in a way aware that his thoughts are dreamlike. These dreams appear to need a different explanation of the way in which the dreamer becomes aware that he is dreaming. Many people who use sleep and dreaming as a flight from reality wish to prolong the sleeping state far beyond the physiological necessity for it; it is for this reason that, among other methods, they are inclined to cope with the arousal stimuli by working them into their dreams. Moreover, even when the arousal stimulus has been too strong and its reality can no longer be denied, that is, during the process of waking up, they still struggle with their ‘inability’ to get up and use every possible pretext to prolong their stay in bed.
One such patient reports to me quite frequently about his peculiar way of becoming aware that he is still dreaming in his sleep. In some of his dreams, which consist of several scenes, the change of scene does not happen as usual suddenly, in a surprising way, and without any obvious reason, but with a peculiar motivation: ‘at this moment I thought to myself’—is the usual way he reports the transition between the two scenes—‘this is a bad dream; the dream must be solved in a different way’, and in the same moment the scene changed. The scene that followed brought in fact an acceptable solution.
This patient sometimes dreams three or four scenes one after the other which try to work through the same material, but with varying outcomes. All of them, however, are in turn inhibited in the decisive moment by the patient’s becoming aware that he is dreaming and by his wish for a still better solution, until the last dream can be dreamt to its end uninhibited. This last dream scene ends not infrequently with an emission. (Cf. Rank’s opinion that all dreams are in reality wet dreams.) Occasionally, after the inhibition, the whole scene does not have to be newly created, the dreamer simply thinks to himself in the midst of his dream: ‘this dream will end unpleasantly, and yet the beginning was so beautiful; I must dream it to its end in a different way.’ And indeed the dream goes back to a certain point in the preceding dream scene and then corrects from that point the solution which has been recognized as unsatisfactory, without, however, changing in any way the scenery or the personalities in the corresponding first part of the dream.
In contradistinction to daydreams, which are also able to choose from various outcomes and possibilities, it must be stressed that these ‘dirigible dreams’, as I would like to call them, do not show the rational features of the fantasies produced in the waking state; they betray their close connexion with the unconscious by their ample use of displacement, condensation, and indirect representation. It must be admitted, however, that in these dreams closely knit ‘dream fantasies’ frequently occur.
We may add that these dreams are usually dreamt in the morning hours, and mainly by people who are bent on prolonging as far as possible their state of sleeping and dreaming. All this suggests that the occurrence of this peculiar mixture of conscious and unconscious thought processes may be explained by a compromise between the consciousness that has had sufficient sleep and wants to wake up and a desperate holding fast to sleep by the unconscious. Theoretically this kind of dream is important because it offers us the possibility of studying introspectively the wish-fulfilment tendencies of dreams.
Moreover, the insight into the motives of the scene-changes in these dreams may be used in general for explaining the connexion between several dreams dreamt in the same night. The dream elaborates from all sides the particular dream thought which occupies the mind, drops one dream-scene when there is a danger that the wish-fulfilment will fail, tries a new kind of solution, and so on, until finally it succeeds in bringing about a wish-fulfilment which satisfies, with a compromise, both instances of the mind.
It is unlikely that a similar mechanism is at work in cases in which the dreamer awakes because of the unpleasure character of his dream, only to drop off to sleep again and to go on dreaming ‘as after brushing off a fly’ (Freud). The following dream is a point in favour of this idea. It was dreamt by a man, now baptized and in a high position, coming from a very simple Jewish family. He dreamt that his dead father appeared at an elegant party and made the dreamer feel embarrassed because of his shabby clothes. This highly unpleasant situation woke up the dreamer for a moment; soon after he dropped off to sleep again and dreamt that his father was at the same party, but this time smartly and elegantly dressed.
1 German original: Zb. f. Psa. (1912), 2, 31. First English translation.