Where Do Dreams Come from? Do you often dream at night? Most people do. When they wake in the morning they say to themselves, 'What a strange dream I had! I wonder what made me dream that.' Sometimes dreams are frightening. Terrible creatures threaten and pursue us. Sometimes, in dreams, wishes come true. We can fly through the air or float from mountain-tops. At other times we are troubled by dreams in which everything is confused. We are lost and can't find our way home. The world seems to have been turned upside-down and nothing makes sense. In dreams we act very strangely. We do things which we would never do when we're awake. We think and say things we would never think and say. Why are dreams so strange? Where do dreams come from? People have been trying to answer this since the beginning of time. But no one has produced a more satisfying answer than a man called Sigmund Freud. One's dream-world seems strange and unfamiliar, he said, because dreams come from a part of one's mind which one can neither recognize nor control. He named this the 'unconscious mind.' Sigmund Freud was born about a hundred years ago. He lived most of his life in Vienna, Austria, but ended his days in London, soon after the beginning of the Second World War. Freud was one of the great explorers of our time. But the new worlds he explored were inside man himself. For the unconscious mind is like a deep well, full of memories and feelings. These memories and feelings have been stored there from the moment of our birth—perhaps even before birth. Our conscious mind has forgotten them. We do not suspect that they are there until some unhappy or unusual experience causes us to remember, or to dream dreams. Then suddenly we see a face we had forgotten long ago. We feel the same jealous fear and bitter disappointments we felt when we were little children. This discovery of Freud's is very important if we wish to understand why people act as they do. For the unconscious forces inside us are at least as powerful as the conscious forces we know about. Why do we choose one friend rather than another? Why does one story make us cry or laugh while another story doesn't affect us at all? Perhaps we know why. If we don't, the reasons may lie deep in our unconscious minds. When Freud was a child he wanted to become a great soldier and win honor for his country. At that time Austria and Germany were at war with each other. His father used to take Sigmund down to the railway station to watch the trains come in from the battle-fields. The trains were full of wounded soldiers. There were men who had lost an eye, an arm or a leg fighting in the war. Many of the soldiers were suffering great pain. Young Sigmund watched the wounded men as they were moved from the trains into the hay-carts that carried them to the hospital. He was very sorry for them. He pitied them so much that he said to the teacher at his school, 'Let us boys make bandages for the poor soldiers as our sisters in the girls' school do.' Even then, Freud cared about the sufferings of others, so it isn't surprising that he became a doctor when he grew up. Like other doctors he learned all about the way in which the human body works. But he became more and more curious about the human mind. He went to Paris to study with a famous French doctor, Chareot. Chareot's special study was diseases of the mind and nerves. At that time it seemed that no one knew very much about the mind. If a person went mad, or 'out of his mind', there was not much that could be done about it. There was little help or comfort for the madman or his family. People didn't understand at all what was happening to him. Had he been possessed by a devil or evil spirit? Was God punishing him for wrongdoing? Often such people were shut away from the company of ordinary civilized