John Volkert

Johann Volkelt appears in The Interpretation of Dreams as an authority on two related subjects: the surprising persistence of remote childhood memories and the influence of bodily sensations on dream images. His work supplies both examples and theoretical claims in Freud’s survey of earlier dream research, showing how dream material could reach beyond conscious recollection and take shape from physical conditions during sleep.

Childhood Memory

Volkelt observes that dreams readily revive recollections from childhood and youth, including things people have long ceased to think about and that have lost their former importance. Freud uses this point to introduce dreams in which forgotten or faintly registered early experiences return to awareness. The emphasis is not merely on cherished memories: dream memory may preserve material that had little conscious significance when first encountered, or whose significance had since faded.

This account supports Freud’s broader argument that the dream can draw on a range of memory traces unavailable to ordinary waking recollection. Volkelt’s observation makes childhood a continuing source of dream material, rather than a closed period accessible only through deliberate remembering.

Bodily Stimuli and Dream Images

Volkelt also belongs to the discussion of theories that connect physical stimuli with dream imagery. In the account of Schopenhauer’s view, internal bodily sensations that are muted by the distractions of daytime can become more noticeable at night; the intellect then transforms them into figures and events arranged in space, time, and causal sequence. Freud places Scherner’s and Volkelt’s investigations after this explanation, while reserving fuller consideration of their theories for a later section.

The issue is how a sensation becomes a dream scene rather than remaining a sensation. In a related account, M. Simon proposes that an organ placed in a state of arousal associated with an emotion may lead to dream ideas appropriate to that emotion; when an organ is active or disturbed, the dream may introduce ideas connected with its function. Volkelt’s work forms part of this wider inquiry into how bodily conditions may be translated into dream content.

Examples and Theoretical Context

A dream reported by Volkelt illustrates how an external sound can be incorporated into a developing dream. A composer dreams that he is teaching a class. A boy’s loud answer gives way to a chorus of increasingly altered cries, until the waking cries of Fire! in the street emerge as the actual stimulus that awakens the dreamer. The sound does not simply interrupt the dream from outside: it is fitted into the scene and becomes its culmination.

The example complements Volkelt’s interest in the transformations through which dream material is formed. At the same time, Freud’s survey distinguishes the earlier investigators’ proposals from his own systematic account of dream-work. Volkelt therefore serves both as a source of observations and as part of the intellectual background against which Freud presents his developing theory.