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Dreams revive the earliest situation of the nursing infant who seeks to re-experience satisfaction through primary process thinking -that is, to use hallucination to short-circuit reality. Sigmund Freud treated the concept of omnipotent thinking at length through investigations of primitive peoples and their beliefs in telepathic and animistic thought, and also through pathologies such as obsessional neurosis and psychotic megalomania.Īlthough Freud did not discuss it in these terms, narcissistic regression in sleep may be viewed as putting the dreamer in a situation typical of infantile omnipotence, able to realize frustrated desires of the previous day and, on a deeper level, to fulfill repressed wishes. Infantile omnipotence is also a feature of obsessional pathology, in which it appears as superstitious or magical thinking in psychosis, as delusions of grandeur and, finally and to a lesser extent, in creative people who are able to momentarily escape reality and manipulate a world of fantasy. The sense of omnipotence that arises in the fundamental misapprehension of reality which is central to the period of primary narcissism, during which the infant hallucinates its original love-object, persists into childhood and is found among prehistoric and prelite-rate peoples who overestimate the power of wishful thinking and the real-world effect of psychic acts.