Sometimes dreams are frightening. Sometimes, in dreams, wishes come true. At other times we are troubled by strange dreams in which the world seems to have been turned upside-down1and nothing makes sense.

　　In dreams we do things which we would never do when we're awake. We think and say things we would never think and say. Why are dreams so strange and unfamiliar? Where do dreams come from?

　　No one has produced a more satisfying answer than a man called Sigmund Freud. He said that dreams come from a part of one's mind which one can neither recognize nor control. He named this the "unconscious mind."

　　Sigmund Freud was born about a hundred years ago. He lived most of his life in Vienna, Austria, but ended his days in London, soon after the beginning of the Second World War.

　　The new worlds Freud explored were inside man himself. For the unconscious mind is like a deep well, full of memories and feelings. These memories and feelings have been stored there from the moment of our birth. Our conscious mind has forgotten them. We do not suspect that they are there until some unhappy or unusual experience causes us to remember, or to dream dreams. Then suddenly we see the same thing and feel the same way we felt when we were little children.

　　This discovery of Freud's is very important if we wish to understand why people act as they do. For the unconscious forces inside us are at least as powerful as the conscious forces we know about. Sometimes we do things without knowing why. If we don't, the reasons may lie deep in our unconscious minds.

　　When Freud was a child he cared about the sufferings of others, so it isn't surprising that he became a doctor when he grew up. He learned all about the way in which the human body works. But he became more and more curious about the human mind. He went to Paris to study with a famous French doctor, Charcot.

　　At that time it seemed that no one knew very much about the mind. If a person went mad, or 'out of his mind', there was not much that could be done about it. People didn't understand at all what was happening to the madman. Had he been possessed by a devil or evil spirit? Was God punishing him for wrong-doing? Often such people were shut away from the ordinary people as if they had done some terrible crime.

　　This is still true today in many places. Doctors prefer to experiment on those parts of a man which they can see and examine. If you cut a man's head open you can see his brain. But you can't see his thoughts or ideas or dreams. In Freud's day few doctors were interested in these subjects. Freud wanted to know how our minds work. He learned a lot from Charcot.

　　He returned to Vienna in 1886 and began work as a doctor in nerve diseases. He got married and began to receive more and more patients at home. Most of the patients who came to see him were women. They were over-excited and anxious, sick in mind rather than in body. Medicine did not help them. Freud was full of sympathy but he could do little to make them better.