Dreams occur for several different reasons. And two parts of one and the same dream occur for two different reasons. It is unscientific to say--as the materialistic medicos, many psychoanalysts, and the fortune-tellers stubbornly say--that dreams are determined by a single particular cause. And it is just as unscientific to say that dreams have only one function to perform. Therefore the student must move warily when trying to understand dream processes or to interpret individual dream happenings. It is quite true to assert, for example, that some dreams or some parts of a dream represent unconscious desires or repressed emotions, but it is equally true to assert that most dreams don't represent them at all. It is fallacious to make the dream a metaphor pointing to future events. More often, it is a stew cooked up out of past ones. For most dreams merely reveal what happens when the image-making faculty breaks loose from the general mental equipment and works out a series of self-deceptive illusions based on real material picked up during the previous day's experiences.
-- Notebooks Category 19: The Reign of Relativity > Chapter 3 : The States of Consciousness > # 60
-- Perspectives > Chapter 19: The Reign of Relativity > # 17
