Now this persistent wish to sleep on the part of the preconscious has a quite general facilitating effect on the formation of dreams. Let us recall the dream of the father who, by the gleam of light from the death-chamber, was led to conclude that his child’s body might have caught fire. We have shown that one of the psychic forces decisive in causing the father to draw this conclusion in the dream instead of allowing himself to be awakened by the gleam of light was the wish to prolong the life of the child seen in the dream by one moment. Other wishes originating in the repressed have probably escaped us, for we are unable to analyse this dream. But as a second source of motive- power in this dream we may add the father’s desire to sleep, for, like the life of the child, the father’s sleep is prolonged for a moment by the dream. The underlying motive is: “Let the dream go on, or I must wake up.” As in this dream, so in all others, the wish to sleep lends its support to the unconscious wish. In chapter III. we cited dreams which were manifestly dreams of convenience. But in truth all dreams may claim this designation. The efficacy of the wish to go on sleeping is most easily recognized in the awakening dreams, which so elaborate the external sensory stimulus that it becomes compatible with the continuance of sleep; they weave it into a dream in order to rob it of any claims it might make as a reminder of the outer world. But this wish to go on sleeping must also play its part in permitting all other dreams, which can only act as disturbers of the state of sleep from within. “Don’t worry; sleep on; it’s only a dream,” is in many cases the suggestion of the Pcs to consciousness when the dream gets too bad; and this describes in a quite general way the attitude of our dominant psychic activity towards dreaming, even though the thought remains unuttered. I must draw the conclusion that throughout the whole of our sleep we are just as certain that we are dreaming as we are certain that we are sleeping. It is imperative to disregard the objection that our consciousness is never directed to the latter knowledge, and that it is directed to the former knowledge only on special occasions, when the censorship feels, as it were, taken by surprise. On the contrary, there are persons in whom the retention at night of the knowledge that they are sleeping and dreaming becomes quite manifest, and who are thus apparently endowed with the conscious faculty of guiding their dream-life. Such a dreamer, for example, is dissatisfied with the turn taken by a dream; he breaks it off without waking, and begins it afresh, in order to continue it along different lines, just like a popular author who, upon request, gives a happier ending to his play. Or on another occasion, when the dream places him in a sexually exciting situation, he thinks in his sleep: “I don’t want to continue this dream and exhaust myself by an emission; I would rather save it for a real situation.”
The Marquis Hervey (Vaschide) declared that he had gained such power over his dreams that he could accelerate their course at will, and turn them in any direction he wished. It seems that in him the wish to sleep had accorded a place to another, a preconscious wish, the wish to observe his dreams and to derive pleasure from them. Sleep is just as compatible with such a wish- resolve as it is with some proviso as a condition of waking up (wet-nurse’s sleep), We know, too, that in all persons an interest in dreams greatly increases the number of dreams remembered after waking.
Concerning other observations as to the guidance of dreams, Ferenczi states: “The dream takes the thought that happens to occupy our psychic life at the moment, and elaborates it from all sides. It lets any given dream-picture drop when there is a danger that the wish-fulfilment will miscarry, and attempts a new kind of solution, until it finally succeeds in creating a wish- fulfilment that satisfies in one compromise both instances of the psychic life.”
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