According to Freud, nightmares were the result of masochistic wish-fulfillment. The basis of this curious notion was Freud’s unshakable conviction that every dream represented the fulfillment of a wish. “I do not know why the dream should not be as varied as thought during the waking state…” wrote Freud, tongue-in-cheek. For his own part, he continued, “I should have nothing against it…There is only a trifling obstacle in the way of this more convenient conception of the dream; it does not happen to reflect reality.” If for Freud, every dream was nothing but the fulfillment of a wish, the same thing must be true for nightmares: the victims of nightmares must secretly wish to be humiliated, tortured or persecuted.
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According to me, nightmares scare the shi*t out of me leaving me in a cold sweat and going ‘what the heck was that?’. Freud was a psychologist and had a psychoanalytical mind like no other but I do have to disagree that nightmares are a wish fulfilment – no matter how basic or complex this fulfilment is. Last night I had a bad dream, which I won’t go into detail about but it was scary, and I don’t ever want to see any part of that being fulfilled. Who wants to see their nightmares realized, no matter how scary, odd or crazy the are, whether you are being chased by monsters, eaten alive by a giant zebra or swallowed whole into a lake of red Thai curry.
Freud, you might be wrong on this one.
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