For bilinguals, the use and knowledge of one language affects how they process the other. Various cross-linguistic influences (CLI) can be observed in both language production and comprehension across all domains of linguistics. We start by broadly exploring the concept of transfer, both negative and positive, and forward and reverse. In doing so, we identify various classifications of CLI. Following this, we review key studies on phonological, lexical, morphological, and syntactic transfer along with other types such as discursive, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic. We find that there are a number of factors that can determine the degree to which transfer emerges or whether it happens at all. We then review studies investigating the ability to switch between the two language systems. In doing so, we look at theoretical models that explain what facilitates language switching and what empirical studies tell us about the neural and electrophysiological activity that arises in language switching. Finally, we discuss dreaming and bilingualism and argue that dreaming in an L2, contrary to popular belief, does not necessarily imply fluency in that language.

Freud next elaborates consequences of the structure he has postulated, as he examines the material dreams use (his Chapter V) and the mechanisms by which they reach their manifest form (his Chapter VI). The former investigation allows us to see whether his conception illuminates characteristics of dreaming he has not yet considered, like its favoring of recent and indifferent impressions. The latter effort – his delineation of the means by which the underlying “latent,” wish-fulfilling content of dreams changes into its manifest form – assumes the theory without providing any additional grounds for its evaluation. His fifth chapter turns out, on inspection, also assumes the theory.

A novel contribution of the fifth chapter is the assertion that dreams serve to guard sleep. The sixth chapter introduces the idea that dreaming is a primitive mental process. Freud overstates the case for the former and has yet to elaborate the import of the latter.

Freud wrote some admittedly far-fetched speculative works addressing what he considered to be fundaments of the human psyche. Chapter 7 considers two of his most speculative pieces, “The return of totemism in childhood,” the fourth essay of his Totem and Taboo (1913), and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

Both writings, despite their fantastical nature, contain a coherence and completeness The Interpretation of Dreams lacks. Throughout the Totem and Taboo excerpt, Freud examines his suppositions and, in the end, offers an enlightening, if hypothetical, account of totemism, the evolution of religion, and a prehistoric piece of modern mentality. The steps, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, through which he reaches his improbable anchoring of mental life in dueling life and death instincts are clear, if avowedly extreme at the time.

Freud’s investigation of mental life took him beyond psychoneuroses and dreams to other phenomena of waking life. Though well aware of behavior requiring no special explanation, he identified some occurrences on which he thought he might productively bring his explanatory apparatus to bear. Those occurrences consist of short-term behaviors and experiences that, although common, elude straightforward explanation, thus licensing Freud to explore the applicability of the mechanisms he had ascribed to other instances of non-ordinary functioning.

The chapter examines his treatment of the mental glitches he called parapraxes – small involuntary errors, like slips of the tongue – and jokes, as well as more passive experiences like getting lost in a book and the feeling of the uncanny. In each instance, Freud builds a more compelling case than he does with respect to dreams that processes along the lines he proposes are needed to produce the result in question.

This chapter watches Freud develop and deploy his approach to dreaming. The chapter reviews the first three of five chapters that develop his vision of dreaming from observation.

Those chapters provide the core of Freud’s book’s argument, to wit: Dreams can be inserted into dreamers’ waking thought through a process of interpretation based in dreamers’ retrieval of memories and conjuring of impressions related to the elements of the dream. The process permits the identification of a wish the dream has fulfilled: A state of affairs dreamers would be happy to see come to pass. At least adult dreams rarely express directly wishes of the sort to which interpretation leads, wishes we would hesitate to express openly. Accordingly, Freud posits a process of distortion that converts the wish-fulfillment into unobjectionable, if bewildering, form.

Freud’s investigation of dreams drew heavily from his first psychological effort, his treatment of patients with psychoneuroses. This chapter examines how Freud extrapolates from analysis to genesis in the case of neuroses and whether the extrapolation stands on firmer ground than does the one he makes for dreams. It reviews his first complete analysis, of Fräulein Elisabeth von R, conducted in 1892, and then a portion of his “Wolf Man” case history, completed in 1914.

The convergence of the ebb and flow of symptoms in both cases with the uncovering of significant emotional material lends strong support to the idea that the symptoms and themes were related. No comparable external support exists for Freud’s vision of the genesis of dreams, including in the Wolf Man’s case, in which the analysis of a dream proved instrumental in his recovery.

In his final chapter, Freud tries to show that his dreams theory follows from larger principles about the way our minds work.

Wish-fulfillment, he argues, is a very old function, embodied, even, by the nervous system, which operates to discharge excitation. Dreaming, as psychically primitive, realizes that function, and only that function. It is set in motion by a wish that, if unattended, would wake us. A dream, fulfilling such a wish, allows us to sleep on. It hallucinates the fulfillment, hallucination of the mental equivalent of a reflex, serving the purpose of discharging an irritant.

Neither Freud’s extrapolation from the endpoint of the analysis of dreams to their origin nor his attempt to derive the account from general theory appears to support the conclusions he reaches about dreaming. The gap in his argument appears not to have an equal in his other lines of writing. Consequently:

1. 1. The Interpretation of Dreams cannot form the bedrock of his other treatises.

2. 2. His larger project, consequently, is little affected by the weakness of the tract.

3. 3. We need not, on those accounts, abandon the practice of interpreting dreams.

4. 4. We may still be driven by a pleasure principle, even if dreams do not carry out wish-fulfillment.

Freud might have been blindsided, in formulating his dreams theory, by his insistence that all mental processes are purposive. Purposiveness may be incompatible with sleeping, and by extension dreaming. The apparatus Freud maps out in The Interpretation of Dreams and elsewhere may pertain only, though still illuminatingly, to waking life.

Freud shows that dreams, via the process of element-by-element analysis, can be inserted into the occupations of dreamers’ waking mental life, of which dreams, as analyzed, represent an improvement for the dreamer. It is less clear that dreams themselves accomplish that outcome, that they fulfill a wish. Freud does not offer any grounds independent of the analysis itself that dreams arise for that purpose. Counterarguments he proposes, like that dream analyses could not arrive at the conclusions they do without the tracks’ having been laid down beforehand, do not salvage the argument.

To try to situate the apparent gap within Freud’s thought and to investigate its implications for his larger program, the next three chapters examine to what degree similar weaknesses appear in his treatment of other subjects.

How and when did Australia begin? One version of the country’s origins – a version taught to generations of school children and set down in literature and art, memorials and anniversaries – would have it that Australian history commenced at the end of the eighteenth century. By the end of the twentieth century it was no longer possible to maintain the fiction of Australia as terra nullius, a land that until its settlement in 1788 lacked human habitation, law, government or history. The growing recognition of this vastly extended Australian history spoke to late-twentieth-century sensibility. It revealed social organisation, ecological practices, languages, art forms and spiritual beliefs of great antiquity and richness. The second version of Australian history, the one that begins not at 1788 in the Western calendar but 50,000 years or more before the present, is at once more controversial, more rapidly changing and more compelling.

Dreaming is a form of imagination, based on embodied simulation. Dreams frequently involve enactments of a dreamer’s personal conceptions and concerns, both positive and negative, in relation to known persons and favorite avocations. More generally, most dreams include social interactions and activities. Dreaming is supported by an unconstrained portion of the default network, including its dorsal medial and temporal lobe functional subsystems, along with a region in the secondary visual cortex and by the caudate nucleus. The fact that this portion of the default network is unconstrained by the frontoparietal and the dorsal attentional control networks gives dreaming its unique character as imagination roaming freely. This neural substrate has cognitive insufficiencies that are consistent with what is known about dreaming and dream content from six decades of systematic research in laboratory and non-laboratory settings, such as a dearth of episodic memories and only rare indications of “symbolic” content. Nevertheless, there are lawful aspects of dreaming, such as the “small-world” nature of its character networks and consistency in dream content over many years.