Interpretation of Dreams. Freud, (3)

Looking at dream phenomena we should always take it into consideration that dreams are ungoverned by reason or common sense and that it is impossible to make generalisations concerning dream interpretation. Nevertheless, there are certain laboriously proved assumptions such as source of a dream, material of a dream and the content of a dream. Once we are worried about the reason, cause and origin of dreams, or the stimuli that trigger a dream, we are indeed dealing with source(s) of a dream.
As a matter of fact there are two major factors recognised: internal and external causes. If a dream is seen as reaction to sleep disturbance, then there can be reactions to disturbances coming from the exterity during sleep eg temperature fluctuations during night time, or disturbances resulting from internal organism eg heartache, or still other excitations prompted by psychic life (memory).
In general any kind of disturbance which targets our senses_auditory, visual, gustatory, olfactory, and tactile_bring about objective sensory excitations to which our body makes specific reactions (dreams) if we are not awaken by the powerful stimuli. While asleep the body tries to close important sensory channels, eyes; however, some senses are not fully retired such as ears or sense of tactile which reacts to cold and hot ambiance. When a sensory stimulus reaches us and a particular sense is addressed, the stimulus instigates a dream. The crowing of a cock makes dream images like a man’s cry of terror or the creaking of a door is turned into a dream of burglary. What seems interestingly amazing is the extent our mental activity compresses events in dreams thought to have lasted hours into some seconds.
“A dream dreamt by Maury (1878) has become famous. He was ill and lying in his room in bed, with his mother beside him and dreamt that it was during the Reign of Terror. After witnessing a number of frightful scenes of murder, he was finally himself brought before the revolutionary tribunal. There he saw Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier-Tinville and the rest of the grim heroes of those terrible days. He was questioned by them, and, after a number of incidents which were not retained in his memory, was condemned, and led to the place of execution surrounded by an immense mob. He climbed onto the scaffold and was bound to the plank by the executioner. It was tipped up. The blade of the guillotine fell. He felt his head being separated from his body, woke up in extreme anxiety_and found that the top of the bed had fallen down and had struck his cervical vertebrae just in the way in which the blade of the guillotine would actually have struck them.”
This dream becomes the point of discussion between Le Lorrain (1894) and Egger (1895) in the Revue Philosophique: that “how it was possible for a dreamer to compress such an apparently superabundant quantity of material into the short period elapsing between his perceiving the rousing stimulus and his waking. Thus we come to know that the stimulus doesn’t appear in the dream in the real shape but is replaced by another image in some way related to it_in Mauray’s words: “une affinité quelconque, mais qui n’est pas unique et exclusive.”
The reason for this transition is that when the mind receives the stimulus, it is not in conscious state and therefore the conditions are favourable to the formation of illusions and images. When the mind is not in its conscious state, it can’t analyse the stimulus in its proper way thus the mind forms an illusion about it.