The original purpose for my examination of this little section of psychology - of how dream content relates to what we experience in waking consciousness - is to attempt to understand why different people exhibit such different ability to recall.

Fromm's words in blue:

The discovery of the understanding of unconscious processes led Freud to a discovery which shed light on normal behaviour. It permitted him to explain an error like forgetting or a slip-of-the-tongue which had puzzled many observers and for which no explanation had yet been found.

We are all familiar with the phenomenon of suddenly not being able to remember a name which we know quite well. While it is true that such forgetting may have any number of causes, Freud discovered that often the explanation was to be found in the fact that something in us did not want to think of the name because it was associated with fear, anger, or other similar emotion. And that our wish to disassociate ourselves from the painful aspect led us to forget the name associated with it. As Nietzsche once said, "My memory says I have done this, my pride says I could not have done it. My memory yields."

The motive for such slips is not necessarily a feeling of fear or guilt…

Dreams are another part of behaviour which Freud understands as an expression of unconscious strivings. He assumes that, as in the neurotic symptom or the error, the dream gives expression to unconscious strivings which we do not permit ourselves to be aware of and thus keep away from awareness when we are in full control of our thought. These repressed ideas and feelings become alive and find expression during sleep, and we call them dreams.

The motivating forces of our dream life are our irrational desires [and rational - since differentiating between them can often be cultural] . In our sleep there come to life impulses whose existence we do not want to or dare not recognize when we are awake...

[But] this explanation is understood more easily in those instances, where the desire is not irrational and where, therefore, the dream is not distorted, as is the case with the average dream, according to Freud.

…awakened by the alarm clock and at that very moment produce a dream in which... church bells ring…

A second assumption Freud makes about the nature of dreams is that these irrational desires which are expressed as fulfilled in the dream are rooted in our childhood, that they once were alive when we were children, that they have continued an underground existence, and have come to life in our dreams.

It is especially this area that I'm interested in here because very early childhood is probably when the most crucial external influences occur that fix our level of 'memory repression' for life (unless one later undergoes extensive therapy, maybe). So I include the next two paragraphs only for completeness:

According to Freud, all those sexual strivings which, when they appear in the adult, are called perversions are part of the normal sexual development of the child. In the infant the sexual energy (libido) centres around the mouth, later it is connected with defecation, and eventually it centres around the genitals. The young child has intense sadistic and masochistic strivings. It is an exhibitionist and also a little "peeping Tom." It is not capable of loving anyone but is narcissistic, loving only itself to the exclusion of anyone else. It is intensely jealous and filled with destructive impulses against its rivals.

Freud does not emphasize those qualities in the child which would at least balance this picture: the child's spontaneity, its ability to respond, its delicate judgment of people, its ability to recognize the attitudes of others regardless of what they say, its unceasing effort to grasp the world; in short, all those qualities which make us admire and love children and which have given rise to the idea that the childlike qualities in the adult belong among his most precious possessions.

One of Fromm’s explanations for Freud’s negative slant here is the influence of the Victorian era which emphasised child ‘innocence’ and ‘non-sexuality’. 

So the key point about this whole issue is what I return to now: the way that memory is involuntarily repressed, not necessarily specific memories, but much more crucially: ALL MEMORIES - or at least, the effective general impairment of ALL memory (or almost all).

The answer, I wager, is precisely the same as to the question of why some kids need glasses to see a blackboard (or whiteboard).

Here, I'm addressing the general situation.There will doubtless be exceptions.

The obvious question from this is: what is the root cause of such massive discrepancy between people?

Why - all other things being equal - does one kid have an immaculate memory, and therefore learns with great ease and speed, while another has an appalling memory and learns agonisingly slowly and only with difficulty?

This relates too, of course, to Andrew Curran's BRILLIANT OBSERVATIONS>>>

But that doesn't explain the vast differences between individuals in their receptivity. And although the majority of us are similar, there are wide variations which I'd imagine show a gaussian distribution - as for physical height, for instance.

The cause of children needing glasses is well known: because they do not want to see the board. They subconsciously unfocus.

As I say, there are exceptions, but this is nearly always the cause: their subconscious has deliberately attempted to distance them from the proceedings of the hostile external world which only presents punishments and other difficulties - whereas ailments such as poor sight, in contrast, evoke only positive responses like sympathy and compassion.

And this is precisely what I believe is the source of that huge discrepancy in recall ability (though beginning at a much earlier age than the 5-year-olds' failure to focus).

Sometimes a kid can get rid of glasses after a while - because hostility ceases. But if it prevails then they can be stuck with glasses for life. As I've said, there are (many) exceptions where simple focussing errors are not the cause of needing glasses. And likewise, there will be kids whose recall is impared or enhanced for reasons other than what I'm proposing here. I have neither the facility nor the patience to search around for the facts. I did try to unearth a document cited in Fromm's book, ie:

Sleep and waking life are the two poles of human existence. Waking life is taken up with the function of action, sleep is freed from it. Sleep is taken up with the function of self-experience. When we wake from our sleep, we move into the realm of action. We are then oriented in terms of this system, and our memory operates within it: we remember what can be recalled in space-time concepts. The sleep world has disappeared. Experience we had in it - our dreams - are remembered with the greatest difficulty.

[footnote:] Cf, to the problem of memory function in its relation to dream activity the very stimulating article by Dr. Ernest G. Schnachtel, "On Memory and Childhood Amnesia," Psychiatry, February, 1947.

So, as with the recent work by CURRAN >>>, one would have hoped there might too be some recent work - or at least something fairly definitive - on this issue of 'Memory Repression' or more expressly: 'how external infuences fix recall ability'. Because, as I see it, this is perhaps even more fundamental and significant than Curran's important work.

BUT the tired old system with its dinosaur inertia (and ever continual reassertion) - scarcely to mention the great mass of unwitting support from the naive slaves it controls - drags stubbornly on towards oblivion.

Well, I don't suppose 'oblivion' will result - for the few who manage to squeeze through the worst of what's to come, at any rate.... what with massive global overpopulation on the cards, and massive starvation, then massive disruption from global warming (some guy the other day on the radio says he aims to paddle a kayak to the North Pole!), and all the other side issues that the current mad system is driving us towards.....

Maybe Spielberg's 'AI' was a remarkably accurate prediction of how things will unfold. Who knows? Anyhow, I for one shall dream on.... and on.... and on....

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