ABSTRACT
Anxiety, elation, and anger are three emotions that are so prominent in dreams as to further justify their status as instincts. Thus instincts such as sexuality and aggressiveness dominated post-Darwinian thought and were prominent in the theoretical work of Sigmund Freud, who reasoned that dreams, the ego, and the emotions all derived from primitive instincts. Emotions are essential to survival as Charles Darwin himself was at pains to point out: many of them are shared by subhuman mammals. For Freud, an emotion like anxiety was a symptom that arose when repressed instinctual wishes were stirred up in response to waking conflict or in sleep when the ego relaxed its guard on the id. Anxiety arises without obvious environmental stimulation. The brain is anxious, elated, and angry, by turns, as it dreams away, night after night, throughout our lives.
