Pandemic dreams

 letter to Sci-Am

Dear Editors
Thouroghly enjoyed Tore Nielsen’s discussion of pandemic dreams.
One thing, though, had me scratching my head. Though the work of Freud on dreams is largely scoffed at these days, shouldn't he—for old times' sake if for nothing else—be given at least a passing mention? The article does, after all, admit that “creative dreaming produces safety imagery that supersedes and inhibits the original fear memory, helping to assuage distress over time”; and this sort of creative dreaming comes pretty close, it seems to me, to being the sort of wish fulfilment that was at the heart of Freud's theory of dreams.
Even so, a nice read.
Ermes Culos,
Ashcroft, BC Canada