by Eric Wargo
The necessary obliquity of prophecy in a post-selected (i.e., possible) universe is one of the reasons why, despite Sigmund Freud’s strong resistances to the subject, we must enlist his aid, recruit him over his own dead body as it were, in our study of it. Specifically, any theory of the oblique language spoken by prophecy and the time-looping way it shapes our lives must bring Freud’s theory of dreams as symbolically disguised wish-fulfillments into dialogue with J. W. Dunne’s observations about precognitive dreams and the pragmatic impediments to observing them, along with recent developments in the neuroscience of sleep and memory. The tropes and detours Freud identified as the symbolic language of the unconscious turn out to be none other than the associative laws that govern how the brain stores and retrieves information, the rules by which new experiences in our lives are linked with older ones. We are now learning that it is precisely in dreaming that these associations are forged, making dreams the “royal road” not only to memory but, I argue, to “premory” as well. Yet ironically, because Freud, the great dream pioneer, rejected the possibility of prophecy, it ruled his fate in a tragically wyrd way—not unlike Macbeth, or indeed Oedipus.
The Invisible Key to Dreams
The dream that started it all, the one that revealed to Freud the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, centered on a close friend named Anna Hammerschlag, whom Freud had treated for hysteria briefly in spring of 1895. He had the dream one night the following July, while on vacation, and gave Hammerschlag the name “Irma” in his description:
A large hall—numerous guests, whom we were receiving. —Among them was Irma. I at once took her to one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my ‘solution’ yet. I said to her: ‘If you still get pains, it’s really only your fault.’ She replies: ‘If you only knew what pains I’ve got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen—it’s choking me.’ —I was alarmed and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after all I must be missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and looked down her throat, and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her to do that. She then opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose. 2
At this point, Freud summons a trio of medical friends in the dream to get their opinion. “Dr. M,” his friend “Otto,” and another friend “Leopold” examine Irma. Dr. M confirms what the dreamer has seen in Irma’s mouth, and the men poke and prod Irma’s shoulder and abdomen. They agree she has some sort of infection, which her dysentery should eliminate from her body.
We were directly aware, too, of the origin of the infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls ... propionic acid ... trimethylamin (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type). ... Injections of this sort ought not to be given so thoughtlessly ... And probably the syringe had not been clean. 3
The method Freud hit on was to free associate on each separate element of the dream—that is, reflect honestly and spontaneously on what each figure, each object, each noticed element reminded him of, and follow the trains of association where they led. The force of this method was like splitting the atom: A dream that may fill a paragraph or less of description (the “manifest content”) mushrooms into pages and pages of associations that, in many cases—Freud argued all cases—present in multiple ways a single coherent latent (or unconscious) thought or a nexus of closely related thoughts.
Freud’s free association on each of the elements of the Irma dream runs to some 14 pages in his 1899 masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams , and he admits that even then he has not exhausted the dream’s many possible layers of meaning. He begins by identifying the “day residues,” obvious points of contact with the previous day’s activities and preoccupations. Most dreams have one or two, and here there were several. Freud had this dream while summering at an open spacious house called Bellevue, near a resort outside of Vienna. While not as vast as the drawing room in the dream, the house did have a similar expansive quality. The day before the dream, Freud had received a visit from the family pediatrician, Dr. Oskar Rie, who appears in the dream as Otto. Although Rie was a friend, Freud felt ambivalently toward Rie and disliked his habit of bringing gifts whenever he visited. On this occasion, Rie specifically annoyed Freud by bringing two things: a bottle of spoiled Ananas or pineapple brandy that, when opened, smelled like fusel oil (similar to the smell of the chemicals in the dream injection); Rie also brought news that their mutual friend Anna (dream Irma) was “better, but not fully recovered.” It happened that she was going to be invited to a party at the Freuds’ a few days hence, for which preparations were already being made. And on the evening prior to the dream, to clear his conscience about her treatment, Freud had spent time writing up a report on her case. It is worth emphasizing that Anna Hammerschlag’s “condition” was hysteria that had emerged in the aftermath of the loss of her husband, nothing like the organic disease that was displayed in the dream.
It is impossible to adequately summarize in a few sentences, but most of the associations in the dream, including the figures present, pointed to professional worries Freud was then having. He was feeling vulnerable firstly because of his support for his best friend, Wilhelm Fliess, a quack ear, nose, and throat doctor who had recently seriously botched a nose operation on a mutual friend and who had recommended a questionable course of treatment for one of Freud’s patients that had caused serious complications. Major and minor medical malpractice was going around in Freud’s medical circle, and Freud himself bore his share of guilt. In addition to the patient he had seriously injured following Fliess’s advice, his treatment of another, psychotic patient a few years earlier with an injection of the dangerous drugs chloral hydrate and sulfonal had led to the patient’s death. Another friend and patient of Freud had died after injecting himself with cocaine that Freud had prescribed to be used only orally. As he was venturing into brand-new territory in his psychiatric work with hysterics, he could not have been without a measure of doubt about his new “talking cure” and would have been eager for any news of his treatment successes. 4 Instead, hearing from Dr. Rie, dream Otto, that their friend Anna was “better, but not fully recovered” was not what he wanted to hear.
Despite the air of anxiety and guilt that seemed to oppress his waking professional life at this period, the conclusions he was able to draw from this one dream analysis, as far as it went, excited him greatly:
If we adopt the method of interpreting dreams which I have indicated here, we shall find that dreams really have a meaning and are far from being the expression of a fragmentary activity of the brain, as the authorities have claimed. When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish . 5
What was the wish in this case? There are many layers to it, but briefly, it boiled down to Freud not being responsible for Anna/Irma’s condition but that Dr. Rie/Otto instead should be responsible. (Remember that dream Otto had “thoughtlessly” given Irma the injection that caused her infection, and the syringe he had used had not been clean.) It was a wish that Freud be beyond any kind of professional or personal reproach in Anna’s case. 6
Five years later, Freud revisited the house in Bellevue, and wrote to Fliess:
Do you suppose that some day a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these words?—
In This House, on July 24, 1895 the Secret of Dreams was Revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud. 7
We see here again Freud’s obsession with commemorating his real or imagined accomplishments—first marble busts, now marble tablets. But his achievement here was indeed groundbreaking. Nobody in history had given so much detailed attention to a single dream and
in the process divulged so many personal vulnerabilities, private sources of guilt, and deep desires in a public forum. Freud’s book goes on to subject several other dreams of his own and those of his patients to similarly close scrutiny, in some cases to more convincing effect. More than any other single exploit in Freud’s work, though, this one dream interpretation catapulted him to ultimate immortality and fame. It was a milestone in psychology that some have compared to Darwin’s contributions to biology a few decades earlier or Einstein’s contributions to physics a few years later.
The dream itself seemed to “know” how scientifically significant it was. Its culminating image, the formula for the organic compound trimethylamine in bold type, would naturally have called to mind August Kekulé’s famous discovery of the hexagonal structure of the benzene molecule after a dream of a snake biting its own tail. Although the Czech-Austrian chemist alleged he had had his dream in 1861, it was only in 1890, five years before Freud’s dream, that Kekulé told the story for the first time at a Berlin conference to honor the discovery. “I was sitting writing at my textbook,” Kekulé said, “but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere”—
I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eyes, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformations; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twisting and turning in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis. 8
It quickly became a famous, proud moment in Austrian science, and to this day no discussion of dreams in the context of genius, creativity, or scientific discovery fails to cite it. It would have provided Freud with a template for his own making of a milestone scientific discovery in a dream—in his case, a discovery about dreams. 9 You can’t get more snake-biting-its-tail-ish (or fractal) than that.
Freud’s interpretation of his dream was a cultural watershed, leading to the post-Victorian epoch of self-inquiry and self-scrutiny, a kind of novelistic approach to the soul. Freud’s writings made psychological causation complex and mysterious, and through them he got Westerners to see themselves and their lives as having infinite, perhaps unplumbable depths. After Freud, it was no longer easy to see humans as simple creatures with clear-cut, straightforward motives and needs—even if certain root principles, such as a drive for satisfaction or pleasure, could be discerned at the root of it all. The twists and turns through which our desires flow, in Freud’s picture, have the sublime complexity of a weather system or a butterfly, not a simple steam engine. As we will see later, there are also more than a few similarities between the invisible, warring motives in the unconscious as Freud depicted it and the obscure “superposition” of unmeasured particles in the emerging science of quantum physics; the latter lent an almost “psychodynamic” mystery and inscrutability to the world of material interactions.
Many Freudian constructs are easily parodied for sure. The single-minded obsession with sex and childhood incestuous desires, as well as constructs like “penis envy,” can be bracketed or set aside (or, some argue, thrown out like bathwater). But the Freudian big picture has retained its power. Humans are complex, conflicted, inconsistent creatures with warring impulses, contradictory emotions, and divided aims. Our conscious self or ego is a construct and a compromise, a treaty appeasing these various sides of ourselves, weaving them into a somewhat coherent and productive whole that at best accommodates cultural expectations while giving us sufficient leeway to satisfy most of our needs and desires. Calling our attention to the dimension of ambivalence in our mental life has probably been the most important, basic, and enduring contribution of Freudian psychoanalysis, even if the precise nature and “location” of the unconscious, where these divided aims lurk, is debatable.
Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory of dreams has fared less well than some of his other ideas. Although it was long popular with the wider public, it was highly controversial in psychology even at the time he proposed it, and it was later rejected out of hand by most scientists. Popperian science rests on the ability to falsify hypotheses with evidence and repeat an experiment to gain better confidence in one’s conclusions, but there is no way to falsify an interpretation of a dream. Indeed, there is really no objective basis from which to assess any claim related to meaning. For example, how can we ever know that Freud’s many, sometimes brilliant, sometimes strained interpretations of his and his patients’ dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams do not reflect his own “wish” to prove his theory correct? We will see later, in fact, that Freud’s own wishes about his dream theory may have been precisely—and fractally—part of his (mis)interpretation of the Irma dream, causing him to miss a stunning precognitive dimension.
As I argued earlier, the “schizophrenia” of dreams—being amenable either to biological or hermeneutic study—reflects their unstable position on the fault line between C. P. Snow’s “two worlds” of the sciences and the humanities. The humanities all in one way or another address meaning as it comes to be encoded in language or other cultural forms, but meaning always boils down the value of a thing to or for an individual. There is no way really to get at meaning without losing our grip on objectivity, and vice versa. It is directly analogous in fact to basic tradeoffs of knowledge that define quantum physics. Niels Bohr showed that an experimenter is prohibited from gaining knowledge of both the position and momentum of a particle because the tools necessary to gain one type of information are actually antithetical to the tools necessary to gain the other, complementary type. 10 The philosopher Slavoj Žižek uses the term “parallax” to describe dual-aspect phenomena that cannot be apprehended other than in a kind of alternating gestalt, like the famous duck-rabbit of psychological research on perception. 11 Dreams are perfect examples of objects that need to be approached obliquely, flickeringly, from multiple, non-integral perspectives, in a kind of “parallax view.”
To acknowledge the inability to scientifically adjudicate the “correct” meaning of a dream, precognitive or not, is not equivalent to saying that there can be no meaning in the dream. It is only to concede that such meaning (or its absence) is not something that can be readily evaluated solely through the usual scientific tools of quantification and replication, since the dreamer is an n of 1. Yet Freud-bashers in scientific psychology and neuroscience have historically committed the oddly superstitious mistake of thinking that if the scientific tools do not exist to verify a dream’s meaning, then dreams are therefore not meaningful. It is not just like searching under the proverbial streetlight for one’s lost keys just because the light is better there, even though you know you probably dropped them in the dark alley nearby. It is more like saying the keys must be somewhere in this pool of light because that is where light exists to detect them, denying the existence of the alley altogether. When you cannot find the keys you remember you once had, you will end up either with a theory of invisible keys or a theory that your memory of ever having had keys in the first place is false.
Until recently, much of the neuroscience of dreaming has read like a theory of invisible or nonexistent keys. J. Allan Hobson, the most outspoken contemporary dream neuroscientist and the most vocal and persistent critic of the Freudian wish-fulfillment theory, argued in 1977 that dreaming represents chaotic hyper-activation of the brainstem during sleep. 12 Dreams contain no symbolic meaning, he insisted; the conscious mind simply imposes meaningful order on that chaos, sort of the way a patient will see suggestive pictures in a Rorschach inkblot. Nobel Prize-winning biologist Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of DNA, lent fuel and the weight of authority to the anti-Freudians in a 1983 paper arguing that dreams are the discharging of mental static, random and meaningle
ss associations, a way the brain gets rid of unwanted or unneeded information. 13 Other functional theories have also found some support in the peculiarities of nocturnal brain activation, such as the theory that dreams prepare us to face threats or emotional challenges in waking life. 14 The common theme in these accounts is: Dreams may be interesting neurological phenomena, but they do not contain any hidden or obscure meaning or represent any covert, “off-stage” portion of our meaning-making mind.
In recent years, however, cognitive science and neuroscience have made greater peace with Freud, having been “obliged” by mounting evidence to acknowledge that his core theory of the unconscious accurately characterizes many dimensions of cognition. Again, Freud’s terminology is often replaced by the less baggage-laden term implicit processing. Research has also started to vindicate some of Freud’s ideas about dreams, albeit with some key modifications.
Evidence from sleep science over the past few decades has pointed to a role for dreaming in the solidification or consolidation of memories and the forming of new associations to events that occurred in recent waking life. Newly learned material is better remembered after being “slept on,” and complex material is simplified during sleep, or reduced to its gist. 15 If you are exposed to material in a morning lesson, you will do better on a quiz the following morning, after a night of sleep, than you will on a quiz the preceding afternoon. There is an evolutionary correlation between REM sleep, when the brain is most active at night, and learning. Altricial animals (those most dependent at birth, like humans and birds and some mammals, such as dogs and cats) show much more REM sleep than precocial animals (those born able to function). In other words, the more an animal needs to learn in order to survive and function, the more its brain is active at night, and the more it seems to dream. 16 Rodent studies have shown that brain areas activated during daytime exploration and learning are reactivated during sleep (compared to control animals that haven’t engaged in learning). And the hippocampus, which can be likened to the brain’s librarian or archivist, is extremely active during sleep. 17