““Is, then, the man-made reality outside ourselves not the most significant factor for the development of the very best in us, and must we not expect that, when deprived of contact with the outside world, we regress temporarily to a primitive, animal-like, unreasonable state of mind? Much can be said in favor of such an assumption, and the view that such a regression is the essential feature of the state of sleep, and thus of dream activity, has been held by many students of dreaming from Plato to Freud. From this viewpoint dreams are expected to be expressions of the irrational, primitive strivings in us, and the fact that we forget our dreams so easily is amply explained by our being ashamed of those irrational and criminal impulses which we express when we were not under the control of society.””
![“Many students of dreams, from Plato to [Sigmund] Freud, hold…” quote by Erich Fromm](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/5e6/erich-fromm-367_contact_many-students-of-dreams-from-plato-to-si_2487746.jpg)
