o firm hold on "may be" and
"might be", but slides directly into the present indicative. The
thought of being struck is _being_ struck, in a dream. So we do not
need to suppose that the dreamer pictured himself as struck by
lightning in order to have the satisfaction of coming off {504} whole
and bragging of the exploit. In large measure the course of a dream is
determined by free association; but the mastery motive and other
easily awakened desires act as a sort of bias, facilitating certain
outcomes and inhibiting others.

But there are unpleasant dreams, as well as pleasant. There are fear
dreams, as well as wish dreams. A child who is afraid of snakes and
constantly on the alert against them when out in the fields during the
day, dreams repeatedly of encountering a mass of snakes and is very
much frightened in his sleep. Another child dreams of wolves or
tigers. A person who has been guilty of an act from which bad
consequences are possible dreams that those consequences are realized.
The officer suffering from nervous war strain, or "shell shock", often
had nightmares in which he was attacked and worsted by the enemy.
Since Freud has never admitted that dreams could be fear-motived,
holding that here, as in worry, the fear is but a cloak for a positive
desire, some of his followers have endeavored to interpret these
shell-shock nightmares as meaning a desire to be killed and so escape
from the strain. To be consistent, they would have also to hold that
the child, who of all people is the most subject to terrifying dreams,
secretly desires death, though not avowing this wish even to himself.
This would be pushing consistency rather far, and it is better to
admit that there are real fear dreams, favored by indigestion or
nervous strain, but sometimes occurring simply by the recall of a
fear-stimulus in the same way that anything is recalled, i.e., through
association.

A large share of dreams does not fit easily into any of the classes
already described. They seem too fantastic to have any personal
meaning. Yet they are interesting to the dreamer, and they would be
worth going to see if they could be reproduced and put on the stage.
Isn't that sufficient {505} excuse for them? May they not be simply a
free play of imagination that gives interesting results because of its
very freedom from any control or tendency, and because of the
vividness of dream imagery?

Freud's Theory of Dreams

Just at this point we p