The neurosis is merely a wrong attitude to life and its problems. A fear of darkness, an incestuous desire, an abnormal craving for a certain food are no more important in themselves than a small sore appearing on one's lip. But as the sore may mean that the organism is infected with the spirochaeta of syphilis, the "psychic" phenomena I mentioned may mean that the organism has adopted toward reality a negative attitude leading to death instead of life.
Owing to its visualizing powers, the dream makes attitudes extremely obvious at the very first glance.
We are as we see ourselves in our dreams.
Positive, energetic dreams, full of action, indicate strength either in resolve or in resistance.
Vague dreams, full of moods rather than of action, indicate stagnation, aimlessness.
Dreams of adulthood, dealing with the present or the future, indicate progression. Dreams of childhood or dealing mainly with the past, indicate attempts at a regression.
In his latest book, "Introduction to Psychoanalysis," Freud states that "the unconscious in our psychic life is the infantile."
This is one of the great Freudian exaggerations. Such a statement is true of the neurotic and explains why he is a neurotic. In fact the more infantile the unconscious appears to be, the more severe the neurosis generally is, until in certain forms of malignant regression, the patient acts like a helpless newly born infant. The predominance of infantile material in dreams indicates a fixation on infantile gratifications which makes the subject especially ill adapted to adult life. But in the normal individual the amount of infantile material is very small indeed.
We start gathering unconscious material at the very minutes of our birth, if not before birth, but we keep on accumulating experiences, most of them unconscious and only rising to consciousness when needed, and conscious experiences which become unconscious when not needed.
It is the proportion of material from the various periods of our life which enables us to gauge the level a human being has reached through his intelligent, positive acceptance of present day reality. I say acceptance of reality rather than adaptation to reality, for adaptation implies a certain suppression, and suppression may mean neurosis.