ion of dreams in psycho-analysis right beside hypnosis and free association. In the end of 19th century he eventually researched the mechanism of dreaming. The analysis of dreams is indispensable tool in therapy for each psychoanalyst since then, and for Freud, dreams are even the key to theoretical understanding of subconscious. He explained also dreams of people, who did not suffer from mental illness, in psychoanalitic way and so he was changing his psychotherapy in theory in the very beginning. 2.1.1 A desire to sleepWhen we become tired of receiving of and responding to stimuli from environment we try to fall asleep. The main characteristic of psychical state of a sleeper is therefore a withdrawal from reality and cessation of taking all interests in it. We try to fall asleep by disconnecting from all sources of external stimuli. We lay down in a silent, dark room and cover our body to keep it comfortably warm and so minimize input from environment. Of course, an absolute withdrawal in which we would stop to perceive environment is not possible. In other words, the sleeper does not have a 'switch' to switch off at the time of sleeping and switch on back, when the time for awakening comes. After all, if such absolute withdrawal was possible to achieve, the sleeper would risk not to wake up again, since more and more strong stimuli in the morning are exactly what wakes up the sleeper. These stimuli disturb us also during the sleep, and our mentality is forced to respond to them - with dreams. Disturbing stimuli can be either external or internal. External stimuli come from environment and from inside of our physical body. Their task is to warn of imbalance in the body (e.g. full bladder, thirst) or else they contain information about disturbances in environment (e.g. low room temperature, noise). There are lot of evidences how dreams maintain sleep in such cases. For Freud though, the external stimuli are important only to the extent...
