On Dreams by Sigmund Freud

I'm finding it quite difficult to recall my first impressions of this book, even with my notes and highlights right in front of me. It is so factual and textbook-like that there is really not much room for interpretation, but I can attempt to insert my own experience into the position of some of the ideas Freud posits here.

"We must in any case suppose that even during deep sleep a certain amount of free attention is on duty as a guard against sensory stimuli, and that this guard may sometimes consider waking more advisable than a continuation of sleep. Otherwise there would be no explanation of how it is that we can be waked up at any moment by sensory stimuli of some particular quality" (67).

Some part of the brain, some faculty, must still be conscious in this respect. And if this is possible, it reinforces my belief that we can, at times, force ourselves awake during times of great dream distress or fright.

There have been rare occasions in which I am dreaming and something scary or unfavorable to me is happening in my dream and I consciously make the decision to wake up at that particular point in time. That means that some part of our brain must also be aware that we are dreaming and know that none of what is happening is real. I can also remember instances in which I have chosen to keep dreaming to see what happens, and feeling excited about it.

But, if this is true, then it seems as if we should be able to go back to sleep and decide what to dream about or to go back into a dream that was previously interrupted. This seems, in my experience and any other accounts of experience I have encountered in the past, to be impossible. Therefore, my conclusion is that the subconscious and the conscious mind are both at work here, in some kind of strange limbo or maybe even a battle for the brain.

There have also been times of dreaming so vivid that I have found myself waking up in either extreme relief or sadness to find out that it wasn't, in fact, real. My theory is that it depends on the degree of sleep depth. The deeper you are in sleep, the less likelihood of your conscious mind playing a part in your nighttime musings. There are so many different parts of the brain in play here as well as outside effects on dreaming that it all seems endlessly mysterious to me... Freud's thoughts on the matter definitely gave me some ideas and theories that I can base further thought regarding dreams on--he gave me a starting point that I'm not sure I would've been able to find otherwise.