Dream work

“ Work which proceeds in the opposite direction, from the manifest dream to the latent, is our work of interpretation. The work of interpretation attempts to undo the dream-work. Infantile dreams that are recognized as evident wish fulfillments nevertheless have undergone some dream-work, namely, the transformation of the wish into reality, and generally, too, of thoughts into visual pictures. ”

“ Not only do we invent the dream, but we act it in thought. Not merely do we act in it [56] ourselves, but we paint the scenery, construct the dresses and decorations, invent the characters, and put into their mouths the language that would properly be theirs had they been beings of flesh and blood instead of shadows summoned by the fancy. Almost every faculty of the mind must be exercised upon such a work. Even the waking mental condition will not enable us to do this. ”

“ Your vitality must in some measure work itself off. You must suffer, labour, and wait, before you will be able to grasp the true and the beautiful. You dream of it now; the intensity of life that is in you, the spirit of poetry which makes itself heard by you in indistinct language, needs work to relieve itself and be made clear. ”

“ From both sources we have seen that the dream-work consists essentially in the transposition of thoughts into an hallucinatory experience. How that can take place is puzzling enough, but it is a problem of general psychology with which we shall not busy ourselves here. We have learned from the dreams of children that the purpose of the dream-work is the satisfaction of one of the sleep-disturbing psychic stimuli by means of a wish fulfillment. ”

“ We are so made, you and I, that your function in life is to dream, mine to work. That you failed to make a dreamer of me is no cause for heartache and chagrin. What of my practical nature and analytical mind, I have generalised in my own way upon the data of life and achieved a different code from yours. ”

“ In the same way, the dream-work resolves the content of the dream thought into its raw material of objects and activities. You may be satisfied if the possibility is vouchsafed you to suggest certain relations, not representable in themselves, in a more detailed elaboration of the image. In quite the same way the dream-work succeeds in expressing much of the content of the latent dream thought in the formal peculiarities of the manifest dream, in its clearness or vagueness, in its division into several parts, etc. ”

“ We say in conclusion, that what the dream-work has made out of the material of the dream thoughts has been subjected to a new influence, the so-called secondary elaboration, the object of which evidently is to do away with the incoherence and incomprehensibility caused by the dream-work, in favour of a new ‘meaning’. ”

“ If, however, it remains a distant end, it becomes a mere end, that is a dream. As soon as we have projected it, we must begin to work backward in thought. We must change what is to be done into a how, the means whereby. ”

“ If he pursues a customary occupation, whether it be cleaning harness or writing music, he finishes his work before he leaves it. He is acting a dream, which is connected and sustained. The attention is keenly awake in this dream, and favours its accomplishment to the utmost. ”

“ Dream life is fuller of meaning and teaching of the inner, or God life, than is the exterior life of man. The mind receives education from communing with the dream composition in the great circle. Consult with your whole nature or circle before beginning a serious work; partial consultations, or material advice only, often brings defeat of objects sought, when a true home counsel would have brought success and consequent happiness. ”

“ Yet such a purely artificial movement as reading the raised type with the finger almost never occurs in dreams. The boys dream of playing, running, jumping, and so on; the men of broom-making, piano-tuning, teaching, and similar work; the girls of sewing, fancy work, household work, and the like. ”

“ He said it made him feel that life was not an idle dream to be gaped and yawned through, but a noble task, full of duty and stern work. ”

“ Oh the miracle of the whole, the widespread, labouring concentration Swelling mankind like one bud to bring forth the fruit of a dream, Oh the terror of lifting the innermost I out of the sweep of the impulse of life, And watching the great Thing labouring through the whole round flesh of the world; And striving to catch a glimpse of the shape of the coming dream, As it quickens within the labouring, white-hot metal, Catch the scent and the colour of the coming dream, Then to fall back exhausted into the unconscious, molten life! ”

“ In love, it shows quarrels and bad tempers. 33, 9.
LABOR. To dream you are hard at work, shows you will go a painful journey, unless you be very circumspect; but to see others at work, betokens good fortune. ”

“ The people's dreams are wandering afield; they pass the seas and mountains of faery, threading the intricate passes led by their souls; they come to golden temples a-ring with a thousand bells; they pass up steep streets lit by paper lanterns, where the doors are green and small; they know their way to witches' chambers and castles of enchantment; they know the spell that brings them to the causeway along the ivory mountains--on one side looking downward they behold the fields of their youth and on the other lie the radiant plains of the future. Arise and write down what the people dream. ”

“ Dreaming will never catch them. Nothing makes the "scent lie well" in the hunt after distinction, but labor.
And it is a glorious thing, when once you are weary of the dissipation, and the ennui of your own aimless thought, to take up some glowing page of an earnest thinker, and read—deep and long, until you feel the metal of his thought tinkling on your brain, and striking out from your flinty lethargy flashes of ideas that give the mind light and heat. ”

“ They (the thoughts and passions) may bring forth a flower called 'love in idleness'—a flower which changes before you are aware of it. The dream gives us reality reversed, but reversed in such a way that there is always the possibility that it may, in an unguarded moment, take veritable shape. ”

“ Here have I gathered all my treasures of art and letters; here may those I love find rest and refreshment when worn out with hopeless lighting. Suffer me to live here and forget, or live in a living dream of dreamless life. Against my hilly ramparts life may beat in vain,—it cannot enter. ”

“ But at least our dreams are true—to us.'... 'We make the heaven we hope indeed our home! All to the good if we wake up in it after all! If not, the dream will have had its own use here. Why should we fight so with our ignorance? The point is, as to the quality of our dreams! ”

“ The people my mind's eye has seen have too much of the extravagance of dreams, like all the inventions of art before our crowded life had brought moderation and compromise, to seem more than a dream, and yet all else has grown dim before them. ”

“ But there must be intensity. Are you thrilled? Do you stretch out your arms and dream the beauty? It is only when you gaze into a reality empty of the voices of life that I would wake you to bid you dream better. ”

“ Without them, the scenes of the world would affect us no more than the shadowy pictures of a morning dream.
"Who can view the works of nature, and the productions of art, without the most sublime and rapturous emotions? Who can view the miseries of others, without being dissolved into compassion? ”

“ The operation of the imagination unconscious of labor is better known by another name—inspiration; its expression is revelation; its mouth-piece the seer. But rare clay, and only the finest, incases such spirits; men must work in the storm, in sorrow and suffering, each to his measure of creative ability. Let us never forget, in the terrible struggle for expression, that it is given to lips which press the sword of pain to speak to fellow-men the words "Go thou up higher!" ”

“ Do these things, which I think I see about me, exist, or do they not? Is not every thing a dream—a deceitful dream? Is not this apartment a dream—the furniture a dream? The publisher a dream—his philosophy a dream? Am I not myself a dream—dreaming about translating a dream? I can’t see why all should not be a dream; what’s the use of the reality?” And then I would pinch myself, and snuff the burdened smoky light. ”

“ Of labour glorify majestic hours.
The singing angel from the starry sphere
Of dazzling Science shows his wonders here;
And Art, the dream-clad spirit, starts, and brings
From Fairyland her strange, sweet, glittering things. ”

“ The angels of the morning broke into song, the sons of the Elohim, high in the ethereal dwellings among the fountains of light and life, shouted for joy. In poetic vision the writer beholds that work of God and those rejoicing companies; but to himself, as to Job, the question comes—What knows man of the marvellous creative effort which he sees in imagination? It is beyond human range. ”

“ When men of labour shall be men of dream,
With hand seer-guided, knowing Deity
That breathes in sonant wood and fluting stream,
Shapes too the wheel, the shaft, the shouldering beam,
Nor ceased to build when Magian toil began
To lift its towered world. What chime supreme
Shall turn our tuneless march to music when
Sings the achieving God in conscious hearts of men! ”

“ Like something fashioned in a dream;
Such Forms as from their covert peep
When earthly cares are laid asleep!
Yet, dream and vision as thou art,
I bless thee with a human heart:
God shield thee to thy latest years! ”

“ I worked hard all day, but in a kind of dream, as if the dead weight I carried with weariness were only the phantom of something, and I were a fantasy carrying it;—the actual had become visionary, and my imaginings nudged me and jostled me almost off the path of reason. ”

“ I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before. 'A dream of form in days of thought:'—who is it who says that? ”

“ From his heart, its native soil, springs up the lovely flower of wisdom; and if others, while waking, dream, and are pained with fantastic delusions from their every sense, he passes the dream of life like one awake ”

“ And even in my most carnal desires, magnetised always in a certain direction, concentrated about a single dream, I might have recognised as their primary motive an idea, an idea for which I would have laid down my life, at the innermost core of which, as in my day dreams while I sat reading all afternoon in the garden at Combray, lay the thought of perfection. ”

“ Without it all work is hard, detached, mechanical; with it all work is vital, co-ordinated, original. It must shape, illumine, and adorn; it must build the house, light the lamp within its walls, and impart to it that touch of beauty which invests wood and stone with the lightness, the grace, and the loveliness of spirit itself. We begin with the imagination; it holds its light over the play of childhood; it is the master of the revels, the enchantments, and the dreams of youth; it must be also the inspiration of all toil and the shaping genius of all work. ”

“ What are many men who will be hurrying on to the Manchester Exchange on Tuesday? What are they but men who are dreaming that they are at work, but are only at work on dreams which will vanish when the eyes are opened? Practical men, who are busy and absorbed with affairs and with the things of this present, curl their lips about 'idealists' of all sorts, be they idealists of thought, or of art, or of benevolence, or of religion, and call them dreamers. ”

“ Each one dreams the dream of life in his own way. I have dreamed it in my library; and when the hour shall come in which I must leave this world, may it please God to take me from my ladder—from before my shelves of books!... ”

“ But dream-life is only a paraphrase, so to speak, of waking life—a phase largely corresponding to the waking life of children [103] and animals; and in waking life the same thing happens. A wish or desire appears in the background of the mind; it moves forward and becomes a definite thought and a plan; then it moves forward again and becomes an action; the action creates a result; and the desire finally establishes itself or its image in the actual world. These emotions and desires and the images which sprung from them have a certain vitality and growth-power of their own. ”

“ When the brain is heavy and the body worn, when to talk is labor and to think is pain, then we can seize the novel, loll on the sofa, or recline under the leafy shade by the brink of the musical river, and float away, half asleep, half awake, into dreamland. In a moment a new world, as real and living to the mind's eye as that in which we move, is conjured up before us. ”

“ Would to God it were possible for me to see the work and art of the mighty masters to come, who are yet unborn, for I know that I might be improved upon. Ah! how often in my sleep do I behold great works of art and beautiful things, the like whereof never appear to me awake, but so soon as I awake, even the remembrance of them leaveth me. ”

“ The play of color values, the planes of light and shade, are handled with mastery. These four panels indicate that the thought, the dream, the aspiration, the dutiful devotion underlying all the labors of the common day are the source of their progress. One panel shows the higher toils of the mind, as in the arts and statesmanship. In the center of this stands the inventor or leader of thought with the eagle of aspiration above him. Another shows the motives of love and pain and prayer and the central power of labor as movers of the world. ”