The rest cure from which day dreams cannot be excluded, is simply an abnormal flight from reality sanctioned and abetted by a physician ignorant of psychology.
The day dreams which produce happiness, which promote creation, scientific or artistic, and which lead the individual into the stream of life, are sound and healthy dreams. Those which only lead to more dreaming and away from life, are neurotic phenomena, devoid of any redeeming grace.
Not infrequently neuroses and psychoses are ushered in by a dream and their termination is announced by a dream.
This should not be understood to mean that the dream either "causes" the neurosis or "cures" it. That mistake has often been made by psychologists of the old school. Taine, among others, cites the case of a policeman who once attended a capital execution.
This spectacle made such an impression on him that he often dreamt of his own execution and finally committed suicide.
It would be absurd to believe that the sight of the execution "put the idea of suicide into his head." He undoubtedly had been consciously or unconsciously revolving death thoughts in his mind.
The sight of the execution made those ideas more concrete and more obsessive. The recurrence of a death dream simply showed that the obsession was gradually overpowering his personality and seeking realization. The dream work, endeavouring to solve the problem of how to end his life, offered an easy solution: he did not have to commit suicide; he was being put to death. Finally the death wishes overthrew his personality and he killed himself.
An epileptic was tortured every night by a dream in which a group of boys playing Wild West (he personifying the Indian) were pursuing him, throwing sticks and stones at him and finally cornering him. At the very minute where they were laying hands on him, he would experience a "dying" feeling and wake up in great discomfort. One night he turned round to face the gang which dwindled down to one small urchin whom he spanked. That night he slept soundly and the next day his fears of having a new fit disappeared. Neither that dream nor his fits have returned. It was not the dream that gave him fits, nor was it the last dream which cured him. The obsessive dreams were wish-fulfilment dreams, showing him how to dodge life's duties through his sickness which was a convenient, though painful, unconscious excuse and how to solve his life problems by getting out of reality.