Dreams Are a Wish Your Heart Makes
Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud used dreams as points to explain humanistic behavior. Nietzsche was a philosopher who wrote:
There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this -- what would that mean but to castrate the intellect? (The perspective)
Freud was a physiologist, medical doctor, and psychologist. Freud is considered the “Father of Psychoanalysis.” Freud pointed out that a constant connection between dreams and some details of the dreamer ‘s wakeful state establishes a relationship between the sleeping and waking states which disposes of the former view that dreams are purely nonsensical phenomena coming from nowhere and leading nowhere. Freud proved that many of our dream visions are symbolic, which may cause many to consider them as absurd and unintelligible. However, today, the trained observer is able to translate these visions and get an idea of what the dream is trying to say to the dreamer. Freud’s own interpretation leads to the idea that all dreams are basically a form of wish fulfillment and even if the dream is unpleasant, there is some inner desire (usually of a sexual nature) that causes the dreamer to have these symbolic or sometimes outwardly explainable dreams as a form of being denied in the wake state.
Both men are generally recognized as the most influential and authoritative thinkers of their time and continue to have an effect in today’s society long after their life ended in the early 1900’s. Although Nietzsche and Freud were contemporaries and embraced the importance of dreams and how they influenced the general meaning of life, they were not part of each other’s societal circles.
Friedrich Nietzsche explains his theory of life for the artistic individual in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. Greatly influenced by German philosophers, Georg Wilhelm Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche was twenty-eight years old when he wrote this work that argues for individuation based on the Greek Platonic theory. In order for the artist to find expression and essence in the artistic form, Nietzsche uses a Plato’s Greek tragedy as an example; he explains that despite the enormous amount of brutality and torment that human beings suffer, life can be worth living. According to Nietzsche, it is the suffering that enacts the end of individuation and is represented in every tragedy. Nietzsche insists that “the primal contradiction hidden within the things of this world is that while humans can experience energy, will, and sensation only as individuals, the process of individuation separates them from the universe” [which makes] suffering inevitable” (872).
Nietzsche states Schopenhauer’s philosophical take on reality, “the mark of a person’s capacity for philosophy is the gift for feeling occasionally as if people and all things were mere phantoms or dream images.” Taking the idea of dream images, Nietzsche explains:
A person with artistic sensibility relates to the reality of dream in the same way as a philosopher relates to the reality of existence: he attends to it closely and with pleasure, using these images to interpret life, and practising [sic] for life with the help of these events. He[the artist] is careful to elaborate that it is not only the pleasant and friendly images which give him this feeling of complete intelligibility; he also sees passing before him things which are grave, gloomy sad, dark, sudden blocks, teasings of chance, anxious expectation, in short the entire ‘Divine Comedy’ of life, including the Inferno. (885)
Nietzsche opposed Schopenhauer's negation of the will in which Schopenhauer says that the will resists its own negation, but if it is completely negated, then the world of representation is also completely negated. Thus, nothing is left of the world after the will has been negated and so Nietzsche argues that life can be worth living despite the enormous amount of cruelty and suffering that exists. In reading both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, I found that you have to transcend your normal impulse to scream, “Get to the point” to understand their underlying ideas. Nietzsche suggests that the artist “lives in these scenes and shares in the suffering, --and yet never without that fleeting sense of its character as semblance” (885). Nietzsche remarks how some people can conjure the same dream night after night and even those that are dreaming of peril will continue the dream which leads him to believe that the evidence proves that individuals “experiences the state of dreaming with profound pleasure (lust) and joyous necessity” (885). He compares the dreaming concepts to the Greek tragedy and explains Apollo role as the god of prophecy (the god of light) as he also governs the inner world of fantasy. To further clarify the role of dreams, Nietzsche explains:
The higher truth the perfection of these dream-states in contrast to the only partially intelligible reality of the daylight world, together with the profound consciousness of the helping and healing power of nature in sleep and realm is simultaneously the symbolic analogue of the ability to prophesy and indeed of all the arts through which life is made possible and worth living. (886)
On the other hand, Freud’s work, The Interpretation of Dreams, is a more scientific theory of the interpretation of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious" which led him to believe that dreams illustrate the logic of the unconscious mind. Freud developed his first study of the relationship of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it.
Freud explains “investigating the relations between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts and of tracing out he processes by which the latter have been changed into the former” (924). If it were anyone but Freud writing this, I would have thought this was just a run-around; however, Freud expresses his thoughts in a complex manner. Freud explains “investigating the relations between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts and of tracing out he processes by which the latter have been changed into the former” (924). Dreams “show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing [the differences in dreams] as one and the same thing” (928-9). Freud suggests that “there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream thoughts as a positive or as a negative” (929). So Freud is looking at dreams for a way to determine a direction for a person to take or to look at dreams as a way of understanding what is happening in life. However, Nietzsche is saying that dreams, for both good or bad, is a way of life and we should embrace both sides to be more fulfilled and aware of our full potential. Whatever viewpoint one wants to take, it is apparent that dreams can or will affect the waking state. Dreams do have a life of their own and make the dreamer more fulfilled whether in the waking life or asleep. Dreams are a wish your heart makes as Jiminy Cricket once said many years ago!
Freud, Sigmund. “The Interpretation of Dreams.” The Norton Anthology Theory and Criticism.Ed Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 919-929.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Brith of Tragedy.” The Norton Anthology Theory and Criticism.Ed Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 884-895.
“The Perspective of Nietzsche.” Quote from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, s III.12. Trans. by Walter Kaufmann. 2 Oct. 2008. < http://www.pitt.edu/~wbcurry/nietzsche.html>.
“The Interpretation of Dreams.” Freud Museum, London. 3 Oct. 2008. <http://www.freud.org.uk/Theory1.html>.
