ABSTRACT
In the second chapter I pointed out that the dreams which I had chosen to introduce the subject differed greatly in their affective character, my own manifest dream being apparently devoid of any affect, while the dreams of my patient were of so unpleasant a kind that he described one as the most terrible he had ever known and vomited on waking from the other. I propose now to consider the relation of affect to the dream more fully, and will begin with Freud's view concerning this relation. According to Freud one character of the dream is that its manifest content is as a rule poorer in affect than the dream-thoughts. Where there is an affect in the manifest dream it will also be found in the latent content, but the converse is not true. There may be no appreciable affective disturbance in the manifest dream when the presence of affect in the deeper content is evident. In other words, one of the results of the transformation of the latent into the manifest content of the dream is not only to disguise the nature of the dream-thoughts from the sleeper, but also to lessen or inhibit its affective character; and just as Freud ascribes the fact of disguise to the censorship, so does he ascribe to this agency the lessening or inhibition of affect. I will begin by saying that my own experience definitely confirms Freud's statement that affect may be absent or at least inappreciable in the manifest dream when it is evidently present in the deeper dream-thoughts of which the manifest dream is the transformed expression. This is a definite fact which has to be explained by any theory which endeavours to account for the relation of the dream to the affective aspect of experience. I propose, however, to begin the consideration of this subject by dealing with a variety of the dream in which affect is not merely present in the manifest content, but is present in an extreme degree. In the nightmare there is painful affect of the most intense kind, and any theory of the dream must take account of this character. This variety of dream, in the form of so-called night-terror, is especially liable to occur in childhood, but examples of one kind or another often occur in adult life, especially under abnormal circumstances. Everyone who had to do with war-neurosis became very familiar with this form of dream as a characteristic example of the nightmare.
