VI THE DREAM-WORK (continued 2)

Moreover, inversion or transformation into an opposite is one of the favourite methods of representation, and one of the methods most capable of varied application which the dream activity possesses. Its first function is to create the fulfilment of a wish with reference to a definite element of the dream-thoughts. “If it were only just the other way!” is often the best expression of the relation of the ego to a disagreeable recollection. But inversion becomes extraordinarily useful for the purposes of the censor, for it brings about in the material represented a degree of disfiguration which all but paralyses our understanding of the dream. For this reason it is always permissible, in cases where the dream stubbornly refuses to yield its meaning, to try the inversion of definite portions of its manifest content, whereupon not infrequently everything becomes clear.

Besides this inversion, the subject-matter inversion in temporal relation is not to be overlooked. A frequent device of dream disfigurement consists in presenting the final issue of an occurrence or the conclusion of an argument at the beginning of the dream, or in supplying the premises of a conclusion or the causes of an effect at the end of it. Any one who has not considered this technical method of dream disfigurement stands helpless before the problem of dream interpretation.^[DW]

Indeed in some cases we can obtain the sense of the dream only by subjecting the dream content to manifold inversion in different directions. For example, in the dream of a young patient suffering from a compulsion neurosis, the memory of an infantile death-wish against a dreaded father was hidden behind 305the following words: His father upbraids him because he arrives so late. But the context in the psychoanalytic treatment and the thoughts of the dreamer alike go to show that the sentence must read as follows: He is angry at his father, and, further, that his father is always coming home too early (i.e. too soon). He would have preferred that his father should not come home at all, which is identical with the wish (see page 219) that his father should die. As a little boy the dreamer was guilty of sexual aggression against another person while his father was away, and he was threatened with punishment in the words: “Just wait until father comes home.”

If we attempt to trace the relations between dream content and dream thoughts further, we shall do this best by making the dream itself our starting-point and by asking ourselves the question: What do certain formal characteristics of dream representation signify with reference to the dream thoughts? The formal characteristics which must attract our attention in the dream primarily include variations in the distinctness of individual parts of the dream or of whole dreams in relation to one another. The variations in the intensity of individual dream images include a whole scale of degrees ranging from a distinctness of depiction which one is inclined to rate as higher—without warrant, to be sure—than that of reality, to a provoking indistinctness which is declared to be characteristic of the dream, because it cannot altogether be compared to any degree of indistinctness which we ever see in real objects. Moreover, we usually designate the impression which we get from an indistinct object in the dream as “fleeting,” while we think of the more distinct dream images as remaining intact for a longer period of perception. We must now ask ourselves by what conditions in the dream material these differences in the vividness of the different parts of the dream content are brought about.

There are certain expectations which will inevitably arise at this point and which must be met. Owing to the fact that real sensations during sleep may form part of the material of the dream, it will probably be assumed that these sensations or the dream elements resulting from them are emphasized by peculiar intensity, or conversely, that what turns out to be 306particularly vivid in the dream is probably traceable to such real sensations during sleep. My experience has never confirmed this. It is incorrect to say that those elements of the dream which are the derivatives of impressions occurring in sleep (nervous excitements) are distinguished by their vividness from others which are based on recollections. The factor of reality is of no account in determining the intensity of dream images.

Furthermore, the expectation will be cherished that the sensory intensity (vividness) of individual dream images has a relation to the psychic intensity of the elements corresponding to them in the dream-thoughts. In the latter intensity is identical with psychic value; the most intense elements are in fact the most significant, and these are the central point of the dream. We know, however, that it is just these elements which are usually not accepted in the dream content owing to the censor. But still it might be possible that the elements immediately following these and representing them might show a higher degree of intensity, without, however, for that reason constituting the centre of the dream representation. This expectation is also destroyed by a comparison of the dream and the dream material. The intensity of the elements in the one has nothing to do with the intensity of the elements in the other; a complete “transvaluation of all psychic values” takes place between the dream-material and the dream. The very element which is transient and hazy and which is pushed into the background by more vigorous images is often the single and only element in which may be traced any direct derivative from the subject which entirely dominated the dream-thoughts.

The intensity of the elements of the dream shows itself to be determined in a different manner—that is, by two factors which are independent of each other. It is easy to see at the outset that those elements by means of which the wish-fulfilment is expressed are most distinctly represented. But then analysis also teaches us that from the most vivid elements of the dream, the greatest number of trains of thought start, and that the most vivid are at the same time those which are best determined. No change of sense is involved if we express the latter empirical thesis in the following form: the greatest 307intensity is shown by those elements of the dream for which the most abundant condensation activity was required. We may therefore expect that this condition and the others imposed by the wish-fulfilment can be expressed in a single formula.

The problem which I have just been considering—the causes of greater or less intensity or distinctness of individual elements of the dream—is one which I should like to guard against being confused with another problem, which has to do with the varying distinctness of whole dreams or sections of dreams. In the first case, the opposite of distinctness is blurredness; in the second, confusion. It is of course unmistakable that the intensities rise and fall in the two scales in unison. A portion of the dream which seems clear to us usually contains vivid elements; an obscure dream is composed of less intense elements. But the problem with which we are confronted by the scale, ranging from the apparently clear to the indistinct or confused, is far more complicated than that formed by variations in the vividness of the dream elements; indeed the former will be dropped from the discussion for reasons which will be given later. In isolated cases we are astonished to find that the impression of clearness or indistinctness produced by the dream is altogether without significance for its structure, and that it originates in the dream material as one of its constituents. Thus I remember a dream which seemed particularly well constructed, flawless, and clear, so that I made up my mind, while I was still in the somnolent state, to recognise a new class of dreams—those which had not been subject to the mechanism of condensation and displacement, and which might thus be designated “Fancies while asleep.” A closer examination proved that this rare dream had the same breaches and flaws in its construction as every other; for this reason I abandoned the category of dream fancies. The content of the dream, reduced to its lowest terms, was that I was reciting to a friend a difficult and long-sought theory of bisexuality, and the wish-fulfilling power of the dream was responsible for the fact that this theory (which, by the way, was not stated in the dream) appeared so clear and flawless. What I considered a judgment upon the finished dream was thus a part of the 308dream content, and the essential one at that. The dream activity had extended its operations, as it were, into waking thought, and had presented to me in the form of a judgment that part of the dream material which it had not succeeded in reproducing with exactness. The exact opposite of this once came to my attention in the case of a female patient who was at first altogether unwilling to tell a dream which was necessary for the analysis, “because it was so obscure and confused,” and who declared, after repeatedly denying the accuracy of her description, that several persons, herself, her husband, and her father, had occurred in the dream, and that it seemed as though she did not know whether her husband was her father, or who her father was anyway, or something of that sort. Upon considering this dream in connection with the ideas that occurred to the dreamer in the course of the sitting, it was found unquestionably to be concerned with the story of a servant girl who had to confess that she was expecting a child, and who was now confronted with doubts as to “who was really the father.”^[DX] The obscurity manifested by the dream, therefore, is again in this case a portion of the material which excited it. A part of this material was represented in the form of the dream. The form of the dream or of dreaming is used with astonishing frequency to represent the concealed content.

Comments on the dream and seemingly harmless observations about it often serve in the most subtle manner to conceal—although they usually betray—a part of what is dreamed. Thus, for example, when the dreamer says: Here the dream is vague, and the analysis gives an infantile reminiscence of listening to a person cleaning himself after defecation. Another example deserves to be recorded in detail. A young man has a very distinct dream which recalls to him phantasies from his infancy which have remained conscious to him: he was in a summer hotel one evening, he mistook the number of his room, and entered a room in which an elderly lady and her two daughters were undressing to go to bed. He continues: “Then there are some gaps in the dream; then something is missing; and at the end there was a man in the 309room who wished to throw me out with whom I had to wrestle.” He endeavoured in vain to recall the content and purpose of the boyish fancy to which the dream apparently alludes. But we finally become aware that the required content had already been given in his utterances concerning the indistinct part of the dream. The “gaps” were the openings in the genitals of the women who were retiring: “Here something is missing” described the chief character of the female genitals. In those early years he burned with curiosity to see a female genital, and was still inclined to adhere to the infantile sexual theory which attributes a male genital to the woman.

All the dreams which have been dreamed in the same night belong to the same whole when considered with respect to their content; their separation into several portions, their grouping and number, all these details are full of meaning, and may be considered as information coming from the latent dream content. In the interpretation of dreams consisting of many principal sections, or of dreams belonging to the same night, one must not fail to think of the possibility that these different and succeeding dreams bring to expression the same feelings in different material. The one that comes first in time of these homologous dreams is usually the most disfigured and most bashful, while the succeeding is bolder and more distinct.

Even Pharaoh’s dream in the Bible of the ears and the kine, which Joseph interpreted, was of this kind. It is reported by Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews, bk. ii. chap, iii.) in greater detail than in the Bible. After relating the first dream, the King said: “When I had seen this vision I awaked out of my sleep, and being in disorder, and considering with myself what this appearance should be, I fell asleep again, and saw another dream much more wonderful than the first, which did still more affright and disturb me.” After listening to the report of the dream, Joseph said, “This dream, O King, although seen under two forms, signifies one and the same issue of things.”

Jung,^[99] who, in his Beitrag zur Psychologie des Gerüchtes relates how the veiled erotic dream of a school-girl was understood by her friends without interpretation and continued by them with variations, remarks in connection with reports 310of this dream, “that the last of a long series of dream pictures contained precisely the same thought whose representation had been attempted in the first picture of the series. The censor pushed the complex out of the way as long as possible, through constantly renewed symbolic concealments, displacements, deviations into the harmless, &c.” (l.c. p. 87). Scherner^[58] was well acquainted with the peculiarities of dream disfigurement and describes them at the end of his theory of organic stimulation as a special law, p. 166: “But, finally, the phantasy observes the general law in all nerve stimuli emanating from symbolic dream formations, by representing at the beginning of the dream only the remotest and freest allusions to the stimulating object; but towards the end, when the power of representation becomes exhausted, it presents the stimulus or its concerned organ or its function in unconcealed form, and in the way this dream designates its organic motive and reaches its end.”

A new confirmation of Scherner’s law has been furnished by Otto Rank^[106] in his work, A Self Interpretation Dream. This dream of a girl reported by him consisted of two dreams, separated in time of the same night, the second of which ended with pollution. This pollution dream could be interpreted in all its details by disregarding a great many of the ideas contributed by the dreamer, and the profuse relations between the two dream contents indicated that the first dream expressed in bashful language the same thing as the second, so that the latter—the pollution dream—helped to a full explanation of the former. From this example, Rank, with perfect justice, draws conclusions concerning the significance of pollution dreams in general.

But in my experience it is only in rare cases that one is in a position to interpret clearness or confusion in the dream as certainty or doubt in the dream material. Later I shall try to discover the factor in the formation of dreams upon whose influence this scale of qualities essentially depends.

In some dreams, which adhere for a time to a certain situation and scenery, there occur interruptions described in the following words: “But then it seemed as though it were at the same time another place, and there such and such a thing happened.” What thus interrupts the main trend 311of the dream, which after a while may be continued again, turns out to be a subordinate idea, an interpolated thought in the dream material. A conditional relation in the dream-thoughts is represented by simultaneousness in the dream (wenn—wann; if—when).

What is signified by the sensation of impeded movement, which so often occurs in the dream, and which is so closely allied to anxiety? One wants to move, and is unable to stir from the spot; or one wants to accomplish something, and meets one obstacle after another. The train is about to start, and one cannot reach it; one’s hand is raised to avenge an insult, and its strength fails, &c. We have already encountered this sensation in exhibition dreams, but have as yet made no serious attempt to interpret it. It is convenient, but inadequate, to answer that there is motor paralysis in sleep, which manifests itself by means of the sensation alluded to. We may ask: “Why is it, then, that we do not dream continually of these impeded motions?” And we are justified in supposing that this sensation, constantly appearing in sleep, serves some purpose or other in representation, and is brought about by a need occurring in the dream material for this sort of representation.

Failure to accomplish does not always appear in the dream as a sensation, but also simply as a part of the dream content. I believe that a case of this sort is particularly well suited to enlighten us about the significance of this characteristic of the dream. I shall give an abridged report of a dream in which I seem to be accused of dishonesty. The scene is a mixture, consisting of a private sanatorium and several other buildings. A lackey appears to call me to an examination. I know in the dream that something has been missed, and that the examination is taking place because I am suspected of having appropriated the lost article. Analysis shows that examination is to be taken in two senses, and also means medical examination. Being conscious of my innocence, and of the fact that I have been called in for consultation, I calmly follow the lackey. We are received at the door by another lackey, who says, pointing to me, “Is that the person whom you have brought? Why, he is a respectable man.” Thereupon, without any lackey, I enter a great hall in which machines are standing, and which reminds me 312of an Inferno with its hellish modes of punishment. I see a colleague strapped on to one apparatus who has every reason to be concerned about me; but he takes no notice of me. Then I am given to understand that I may now go. Then I cannot find my hat, and cannot go after all.

The wish which the dream fulfils is obviously that I may be acknowledged to be an honest man, and may go; all kinds of subject-matter containing a contradiction of this idea must therefore be present in the dream-thoughts. The fact that I may go is the sign of my absolution; if, then, the dream furnishes at its close an event which prevents me from going, we may readily conclude that the suppressed subject-matter of the contradiction asserts itself in this feature. The circumstance that I cannot find my hat therefore means: “You are not an honest man after all.” Failure to accomplish in the dream is the expression of a contradiction, a “No”; and therefore the earlier assertion, to the effect that the dream is not capable of expressing a negation, must be revised accordingly.^[DY]

In other dreams which involve failure to accomplish a thing not only as a situation but also as a sensation, the same contradiction is more emphatically expressed in the form of a volition, to which a counter volition opposes itself. Thus the sensation of impeded motion represents a conflict of will. We shall hear later that this very motor paralysis belongs to the fundamental conditions of the psychic process in dreaming. Now the impulse which is transferred to motor channels is nothing else than the will, and the fact that we are sure to find this impulse impeded in the dream makes the whole process extraordinarily well suited to represent volition and the “No” which opposes itself thereto. From my explanation of anxiety, 313it is easy to understand why the sensation of thwarted will is so closely allied to anxiety, and why it is so often connected with it in the dream. Anxiety is a libidinous impulse which emanates from the unconscious, and is inhibited by the foreconscious. Therefore, when a sensation of inhibition in the dream is accompanied by anxiety, there must also be present a volition which has at one time been capable of arousing a libido; there must be a sexual impulse.

What significance and what psychic force is to be ascribed to such manifestations of judgment as “For that is only a dream,” which frequently comes to the surface in dreams, I shall discuss in another place (vide infra, p. 390). For the present I shall merely say that they serve to depreciate the value of the thing dreamed. An interesting problem allied to this, namely, the meaning of the fact that sometimes a certain content is designated in the dream itself as “dreamed”—the riddle of the “dream within the dream”—has been solved in a similar sense by W. Stekel^[114] through the analysis of some convincing examples. The part of the dream “dreamed” is again to be depreciated in value and robbed of its reality; that which the dreamer continues to dream after awakening from the dream within the dream, is what the dream-wish desires to put in place of the extinguished reality. It may therefore be assumed that the part “dreamed” contains the representation of the reality and the real reminiscence, while, on the other hand, the continued dream contains the representation of what the dreamer wished. The inclusion of a certain content in a “dream within the dream” is therefore equivalent to the wish that what has just been designated as a dream should not have occurred. The dream-work utilises the dream itself as a form of deflection.

(d) Regard for Presentability

So far we have been attempting to ascertain how the dream represents the relations among the dream-thoughts, but we have several times extended our consideration to the further question of what alterations the dream material undergoes for the purposes of dream formation. We now know that the dream material, after being stripped of the greater parts 314of its relations, is subjected to compression, while at the same time displacements of intensity among its elements force a psychic revaluation of this material. The displacements which we have considered were shown to be substitutions of one idea for another, the substitute being in some way connected with the original by associations, and the displacements were put to the service of condensation by virtue of the fact that in this manner a common mean between two elements took the place of these two elements in the formation of the dream. We have not yet mentioned any other kind of displacement. But we learn from the analyses that another exists, and that it manifests itself in a change of the verbal expression employed for the thought in question. In both cases we have displacement following a chain of associations, but the same process takes place in different psychic spheres, and the result of this displacement in the one case is that one element is substituted for another, while in the other case an element exchanges its verbal expression for another.

This second kind of displacement occurring in dream formation not only possesses great theoretical interest, but is also peculiarly well fitted to explain the semblance of phantastic absurdity in which the dream disguises itself. Displacement usually occurs in such a way that a colourless and abstract expression in the dream-thought is exchanged for one that is visual and concrete. The advantage, and consequently the purpose, of this substitution is obvious. Whatever is visual is capable of representation in the dream, and can be wrought into situations where the abstract expression would confront dream representation with difficulties similar to those which would arise if a political editorial were to be represented in an illustrated journal. But not only the possibility of representation, but also the interests of condensation and of the censor, can be furthered by this change. If the abstractly expressed and unwieldy dream-thought is recast into figurative language, this new expression and the rest of the dream material are more easily furnished with those identities and cross references, which are essential to the dream activity and which it creates whenever they are not at hand, for the reason that in every language concrete terms, owing to their evolution, are more abundant in associations 315than conceptual ones. It may be imagined that in dream formation a good part of the intermediary activity, which tries to reduce the separate dream-thoughts to the tersest and simplest possible expression in the dream, takes place in the manner above described—that is to say, in providing suitable paraphrase for the individual thoughts. One thought whose expression has already been determined on other grounds will thus exert a separating and selective influence upon the means available for expressing the other, and perhaps it will do this constantly throughout, somewhat after the manner of the poet. If a poem in rhyme is to be composed, the second rhyming line is bound by two conditions; it must express the proper meaning, and it must express it in such a way as to secure the rhyme. The best poems are probably those in which the poet’s effort to find a rhyme is unconscious, and in which both thoughts have from the beginning exercised a mutual influence in the selection of their verbal expressions, which can then be made to rhyme by a means of slight remodification.

In some cases change of expression serves the purposes of dream condensation more directly, in making possible the invention of a verbal construction which is ambiguous and therefore suited to the expression of more than one dream-thought. The whole range of word-play is thus put at the service of the dream activity. The part played by words in the formation of dreams ought not to surprise us. A word being a point of junction for a number of conceptions, it possesses, so to speak, a predestined ambiguity, and neuroses (obsessions, phobias) take advantage of the conveniences which words offer for the purposes of condensation and disguise quite as readily as the dream.^[DZ] That dream conception also profits by this displacement of expression is easily demonstrated. It is naturally confusing if an ambiguous word is put in the place of two ambiguous ones; and the employment of a figurative expression instead of the sober everyday one thwarts our understanding, especially since the dream never tells us whether the elements which it shows are to be interpreted literally or figuratively, or whether they refer to the 316dream material directly or only through the agency of interpolated forms of speech.^[EA] Several examples of representations in the dream which are held together only by ambiguity have already been cited (“her mouth opens without difficulty,” in the dream of Irma’s injection; “I cannot go yet,” in the last dream reported, p. 312), &c. I shall now cite a dream in the analysis of which the figurative expression of abstract thought plays a greater part. The difference between such dream interpretation and interpretation by symbolism may again be sharply distinguished; in the symbolic interpretation of dreams the key to the symbolism is arbitrarily chosen by the interpreter, while in our own cases of verbal disguise all these keys are universally known and are taken from established customs of speech. If the correct notion occurs at the right opportunity, it is possible to solve dreams of this sort completely or in part, independently of any statements made by the dreamer.

A lady, a friend of mine, dreams: She is in the opera-house. It is a Wagnerian performance which has lasted till 7.45 in the morning. In the parquette and parterre there are tables, around which people dine and drink. Her cousin and his young wife, who have just returned from their honeymoon, sit next to her at one of these tables, and next to them sits one of the aristocracy. Concerning the latter the idea is that the young wife has brought him back with her from the wedding journey. It is quite above board, just as if she were bringing back a hat from her trip. In the midst of the parquette there is a high tower, on the top of which is a platform surrounded by an iron grating. There, high up, stands the conductor with the features of Hans Richter; he is continually running around behind the grating, perspiring awfully, and from this position conducting the orchestra, 317which is arranged around the base of the tower. She herself sits in a box with a lady friend (known to me). Her youngest sister tries to hand her from the parquette a big piece of coal with the idea that she did not know that it would last so long and that she must by this time be terribly cold. (It was a little as if the boxes had to be heated during the long performance.)

The dream is senseless enough, though the situation is well developed too—the tower in the midst of the parquette from which the conductor leads the orchestra; but, above all, the coal which her sister hands her! I purposely asked for no analysis of this dream. With the knowledge I have of the personal relations of the dreamer, I was able to interpret parts of it independently. I knew that she had entertained warm feelings for a musician whose career had been prematurely blasted by insanity. I therefore decided to take the tower in the parquette verbally. It was apparent, then, that the man whom she wished to see in the place of Hans Richter towered above all the other members of the orchestra. This tower must, therefore, be designated as a composite picture formed by an apposition; with its pedestal it represents the greatness of the man, but with its gratings on top, behind which he runs around like a prisoner or an animal in a cage (an allusion to the name of the unfortunate man), it represents his later fate. “Lunatic-tower” is perhaps the word in which both thoughts might have met.

Now that we have discovered the dream’s method of representation, we may try with the same key to open the second apparent absurdity,—that of the coal which her sister hands her. “Coal” must mean “secret love.”

“No coal, no fire so hotly glows

As the secret love which no one knows.”

She and her friend remain seated while her younger sister, who still has opportunities to marry, hands her up the coal “because she did not know it would last so long.” What would last so long is not told in the dream. In relating it we would supply “the performance”; but in the dream we must take the sentence as it is, declare it ambiguous, and add “until she marries.” The interpretation “secret love” is then confirmed by the mention of the cousin who sits with 318his wife in the parquette, and by the open love-affair attributed to the latter. The contrasts between secret and open love, between her fire and the coldness of the young wife, dominate the dream. Moreover, here again there is a person “in high position” as a middle term between the aristocrat and the musician entitled to high hopes.

By means of the above discussion we have at last brought to light a third factor, whose part in the transformation of the dream thoughts into the dream content is not to be considered trivial; it is the regard for presentability (German: Darstellbarkeit) in the peculiar psychic material which the dream makes use of,—that is fitness for representation, for the most part by means of visual images. Among the various subordinate ideas associated with the essential dream thoughts, that one will be preferred which permits of a visual representation, and the dream-activity does not hesitate promptly to recast the inflexible thought into another verbal form, even if it is the more unusual one, as long as this form makes dramatisation possible, and thus puts an end to the psychological distress caused by cramped thinking. This pouring of the thought content into another mould may at the same time be put at the service of the condensation work, and may establish relations with another thought which would otherwise not be present. This other thought itself may perhaps have previously changed its original expression for the purpose of meeting these relations half-way.

In view of the part played by puns, quotations, songs, and proverbs in the intellectual life of educated persons, it would be entirely in accordance with our expectation to find disguises of this sort used with extraordinary frequency. For a few kinds of material a universally applicable dream symbolism has been established on a basis of generally known allusions and equivalents. A good part of this symbolism, moreover, is possessed by the dream in common with the psychoneuroses, and with legends and popular customs.

Indeed, if we look more closely, we must recognise that in employing this method of substitution the dream is generally doing nothing original. For the attainment of its purpose, which in this case is the possibility of dramatisation without interference from the censor, it simply follows the paths 319which it finds already marked out in unconscious thought, and gives preference to those transformations of the suppressed material which may become conscious also in the form of wit and allusion, and with which all the fancies of neurotics are filled. Here all at once we come to understand Scherner’s method of dream interpretation, the essential truth of which I have defended elsewhere. The occupation of one’s fancy with one’s own body is by no means peculiar to, or characteristic of the dream alone. My analyses have shown me that this is a regular occurrence in the unconscious thought of neurotics, and goes back to sexual curiosity, the object of which for the adolescent youth or maiden is found in the genitals of the opposite sex, or even of the same sex. But, as Scherner and Volkelt very appropriately declare, the house is not the only group of ideas which is used for the symbolisation of the body—either in the dream or in the unconscious fancies of the neurosis. I know some patients, to be sure, who have steadily adhered to an architectural symbolism for the body and the genitals (sexual interest certainly extends far beyond the region of the external genital organs), to whom posts and pillars signify legs (as in the “Song of Songs”), to whom every gate suggests a bodily opening (“hole”), and every water-main a urinary apparatus, and the like. But the group of associations belonging to plant life and to the kitchen is just as eagerly chosen to conceal sexual images; in the first case the usage of speech, the result of phantastic comparisons dating from the most ancient times, has made abundant preparation (the “vineyard” of the Lord, the “seeds,” the “garden” of the girl in the “Song of Songs”). The ugliest as well as the most intimate details of sexual life may be dreamed about in apparently harmless allusions to culinary operations, and the symptoms of hysteria become practically unintelligible if we forget that sexual symbolism can conceal itself behind the most commonplace and most inconspicuous matters, as its best hiding-place. The fact that some neurotic children cannot look at blood and raw meat, that they vomit at the sight of eggs and noodles, and that the dread of snakes, which is natural to mankind, is monstrously exaggerated in neurotics, all of this has a definite sexual meaning. Wherever the neurosis employs a disguise of this sort, it treads the 320paths once trodden by the whole of humanity in the early ages of civilisation—paths of whose existence customs of speech, superstitions, and morals still give testimony to this day.

I here insert the promised flower dream of a lady patient, in which I have italicised everything which is to be sexually interpreted. This beautiful dream seemed to lose its entire charm for the dreamer after it had been interpreted.

(a) Preliminary dream: She goes to the two maids in the kitchen and scolds them for taking so long to prepare “a little bite of food.” She also sees a great many coarse dishes standing in the kitchen inverted so that the water may drip off them, and heaped up in a pile. Later addition: The two maids go to fetch water, and must, as it were, step into a river which reaches up into the house or into the yard.^[EB]

(b) Main dream^[EC]: She is descending from a high place^[ED] over balustrades that are curiously fashioned or fences which are united into big squares and consist of a conglomeration of little squares.^[EE] It is really not intended for climbing upon; she is worried about finding a place for her foot, and she is glad her dress doesn’t get caught anywhere, and that she remains so respectable while she is going.^[EF] She is also carrying a large bough in her hand,^[EG] really a bough of a tree, which is thickly studded with red blossoms; it has many branches, and spreads out.^[EH] With this is connected the idea of cherry blossoms, but they look like full-bloom camelias, which of course do not grow on trees. While she is descending, she first has one, then suddenly two, and later again only one.^[EI] When she arrives at the bottom of 321the lower blossoms they have already fallen off to a considerable extent. Now that she is at the bottom, she sees a porter who is combing—as she would like to express it—just such a tree—that is, who is plucking thick bunches of hair from it, which hang from it like moss. Other workmen have chopped off such boughs in a garden, and have thrown them upon the street, where they lie about, so that many people take some of them. But she asks whether that is right, whether anybody may take one.^[EJ] In the garden there stands a young man (having a personality with which she is acquainted, not a member of her family) up to whom she goes in order to ask him how it is possible to transplant such boughs into her own garden.^[EK] He embraces her, whereat she resists and asks him what he means, whether it is permissible to embrace her in such a manner. He says that there is no wrong in it, that it is permitted.^[EL] He then declares himself willing to go with her into the other garden, in order to show her the transplanting, and he says something to her which she does not correctly understand: “Besides this three metres—(later on she says: square metres) or three fathoms of ground are lacking.” It seems as though the man were trying to ask her something in return for his affability, as though he had the intention of indemnifying himself in her garden, as though he wanted to evade some law or other, to derive some advantage from it without causing her an injury. She does not know whether or not he really shows her anything.^[EM]

I must mention still another series of associations which often serves the purpose of concealing sexual meaning both in dreams and in the neurosis,—I refer to the change of residence series. To change one’s residence is readily replaced by “to remove,” an ambiguous expression which may have reference to clothing. If the dream also contains a “lift” (elevator), one may think of the verb “to lift,” hence of lifting up the clothing.

322I have naturally an abundance of such material, but a report of it would carry us too far into the discussion of neurotic conditions. Everything leads to the same conclusion, that no special symbolising activity of the mind in the formation of dreams need be assumed; that, on the contrary, the dream makes use of such symbolisations as are to be found ready-made in unconscious thought, because these better satisfy the requirements of dream formation, on account of their dramatic fitness, and particularly on account of their exemption from the censor.

(e) Examples—Arithmetic Speeches in the Dream

Before I proceed to assign to its proper place the fourth of the factors which control the formation of the dream, I shall cite several examples from my collection of dreams for the purpose partly of illustrating the co-operation of the three factors with which we are acquainted, and partly of supplying proof for assertions which have been made without demonstration or of drawing irrefutable inferences from them. For it has been very difficult for me in the foregoing account of the dream activity to demonstrate my conclusions by means of examples. Examples for the individual thesis are convincing only when considered in connection with a dream interpretation; when they are torn from their context they lose their significance, and, furthermore, a dream interpretation, though not at all profound, soon becomes so extensive that it obscures the thread of the discussion which it is intended to illustrate. This technical motive may excuse me for now mixing together all sorts of things which have nothing in common but their relation to the text of the foregoing chapter.

We shall first consider a few examples of very peculiar or unusual methods of representation in the dream. The dream of a lady is as follows: A servant girl is standing on a ladder as though to clean the windows, and has with her a chimpanzee and a gorilla cat (later corrected—angora cat). She throws the animals at the dreamer; the chimpanzee cuddles up to her, and this is disgusting to her. This dream has accomplished its purpose by the simplest possible means, namely by taking 323a mere mode of speech literally and representing it according to the meaning of its words. “Ape,” like the names of animals in general, is an epithet of opprobrium, and the situation of the dream means nothing but “to hurl invectives.” This same collection will soon furnish us with further examples of the use of this simple artifice.

Another dream proceeds in a very similar manner: A woman with a child that has a conspicuously deformed cranium; the dreamer has heard that the child got into this condition owing to its position in its mother’s womb. The doctor says that the cranium might be given a better shape by means of compression, but that would harm the brain. She thinks that because it is a boy it won’t suffer so much from deformity. This dream contains a plastic representation of the concept: “Childish impressions,” which the dreamer has heard of in the course of explanations concerning the treatment.

In the following example, the dream activity enters upon a different path. The dream contains a recollection of an excursion to the Hilmteich, near Graz: There is a terrible storm outside; a miserable hotel—the water is dripping from the walls, and the beds are damp. (The latter part of the content is less directly expressed than I give it.) The dream signifies “superfluous.” The abstract idea occurring in the dream thoughts is first made equivocal by a certain straining of language; it has, perhaps, been replaced by “overflowing” or by “fluid” and “super-fluid (-fluous)” and has then been given representation by an accumulation of like impressions. Water within, water without, water in the beds in the form of dampness—everything fluid and “super” fluid. That, for the purposes of the dream representation, the spelling is much less regarded than the sound of words ought not surprise us when we remember that rhyme exercises similar privileges.

The fact that language has at its disposal a great number of words which were originally intended in a picturesque and concrete sense but are at present used in a faded abstract sense has in other cases made it very easy for the dream to represent its thoughts. The dream need only restore to these words their full significance, or follow the evolution of their meaning a little way back. For example, a man dreams that 324his friend, who is struggling to get out of a very tight place, calls upon him to help him. The analysis shows that the tight place is a hole, and that the dream uses symbolically his very words to his friend, “Be careful, or you’ll get yourself into a hole.”^[EN] Another dreamer climbs upon a mountain from which he sees a very extraordinary broad view. He identifies himself with his brother who is editing a “review” which deals with relations to the Farthest East.

It would be a separate undertaking to collect such methods of representation and to arrange them according to the principles upon which they are based. Some of the representations are quite witty. They give the impression that they would have never been divined if the dreamer himself had not reported them.

1. A man dreams that he is asked for a name, which, however, he cannot recall. He himself explains that this means: It does not occur to me in the dream.

2. A female patient relates a dream in which all the persons concerned were especially big. “That means,” she adds, “that it must deal with an episode of my early childhood, for at that time all grown up people naturally seemed to me immensely big.”

The transference into childhood is also expressed differently in other dreams by translating time into space. One sees the persons and scenes in question as if at a great distance, at the end of a long road, or as if looked at through the wrong end of the opera-glass.

3. A man, who in waking life shows an inclination to abstract and indefinite expressions, but who is otherwise endowed with wit enough, dreams in a certain connection that he is at a railroad station while a train is coming in. But then the station platform approaches the train, which stands still; hence an absurd inversion of the real state of affairs. This detail is again nothing but an index to remind one that something else in the dream should be turned about. The analysis of the same dream brings back the recollection of a picture-book in which men are represented standing on their heads and walking on their hands.

4. The same dreamer on another occasion relates a short 325dream which almost recalls the technique of a rebus. His uncle gives him a kiss in an automobile. He immediately adds the interpretation, which I should never have found: it means Autoerotism. This might have been made as a joke in the waking state.

The dream work often succeeds in representing very awkward material, such as proper names, by means of the forced utilisation of very far-fetched references. In one of my dreams the elder Bruecke has given me a task. I compound a preparation, and skim something from it which looks like crumpled tinfoil. (More of this later on.) The notion corresponding to this, which was not easy to find, is “stanniol,” and now I know that I have in mind the name of the author Stannius, which was borne by a treatise on the nervous system of fishes, which I regarded with awe in my youthful years. The first scientific task which my teacher gave me was actually concerned with the nervous system of a fish—the Ammocœtes. Obviously the latter name could never have been used in a picture puzzle.

I shall not omit here to insert a dream having a curious content, which is also remarkable as a child’s dream, and which is very easily explained by the analysis. A lady relates: “I can remember that when I was a child I repeatedly dreamed, that the dear Lord had a pointed paper hat on his head. They used to make me wear such a hat at table very often, so that I might not be able to look at the plates of the other children and see how much they had received of a particular dish. Since I have learned that God is omniscient, the dream signifies that I know everything in spite of the hat which I am made to wear.”

Wherein the dream work consists, and how it manages its material, the dream thoughts, can be shown in a very instructive manner from the numbers and calculations which occur in dreams. Moreover, numbers in dreams are regarded as of especial significance by superstition. I shall therefore give a few more examples of this kind from my own collection.

1. The following is taken from the dream of a lady shortly before the close of her treatment:

She wants to pay for something or other; her daughter takes 3 florins and 65 kreuzer from her pocket-book; but 326the mother says: “What are you doing? It only costs 21 kreuzer.” This bit of dream was immediately intelligible to me without further explanation from my knowledge of the dreamer’s circumstances. The lady was a foreigner who had provided for her daughter in an educational institution in Vienna, and who could continue my treatment as long as her daughter stayed in the city. In three weeks the daughter’s school year was to end, and with that the treatment also stopped. On the day before the dream the principal of the institute had urged her to make up her mind to allow her child to remain with her for another year. She had then obviously worked out this suggestion to the conclusion that in this case she would be able to continue the treatment for one year more. Now, this is what the dream refers to, for a year is equal to 365 days; the three weeks that remain before the close of the school year and of the treatment are equivalent to 21 days (though the hours of treatment are not as many as that). The numerals, which in the dream thoughts referred to time, are given money values in the dream, not without also giving expression to a deeper meaning for “time is money.” 365 kreuzer, to be sure, are 3 florins and 65 kreuzer. The smallness of the sums which appear in the dream is a self-evident wish-fulfilment; the wish has reduced the cost of both the treatment and the year’s instruction at the institution.

II. The numerals in another dream involve more complicated relations. A young lady, who, however, has already been married a number of years, learns that an acquaintance of hers of about her own age, Elsie L., has just become engaged. Thereupon she dreams: She is sitting in the theatre with her husband, and one side of the orchestra is quite unoccupied. Her husband tells her that Elsie L. and her husband had also wanted to go, but that they had been able to get nothing but poor seats, three for 1 florin and 50 kreuzer, and of course they could not take those. She thinks that they didn’t lose much either.

Where do the 1 florin and 50 kreuzer come from? From an occurrence of the previous day which is really indifferent. The dreamer’s sister-in-law had received 150 florins as a present from her husband, and had quickly got rid of them by buying some jewelry. Let us note that 150 florins is 100 times more than 1 florin and 50 kreuzer. Whence the 3 which 327stands before the theatre seats? There is only one association for this, namely, that the bride is that many months—three—younger than herself. Information concerning the significance of the feature that one side of the orchestra remains empty leads to the solution of the dream. This feature is an undisguised allusion to a little occurrence which has given her husband good cause for teasing her. She had decided to go to the theatre during the week, and had been careful to get tickets a few days before, for which she had to pay the pre-emption charge. When they got to the theatre they found that one side of the house was almost empty; she certainly did not need to be in such a hurry.

I shall now substitute the dream thoughts for the dream: “It surely was nonsense to marry so early; there was no need for my being in such a hurry. From the case of Elsie L., I see that I should have got a husband just the same—and one who is a hundred times better (husband, sweetheart, treasure)—if I had only waited (antithesis to the haste of her sister-in-law). I could have bought three such men for the money (the dowry!). Our attention is drawn to the fact that the numerals in this dream have changed their meanings and relations to a much greater extent than in the one previously considered. The transforming and disfiguring activity of the dream has in this case been greater, a fact which we interpret as meaning that these dream thoughts had to overcome a particularly great amount of inner psychic resistance up to the point of their representation. We must also not overlook the circumstance that the dream contains an absurd element, namely, that two persons take three seats. We digress to the interpretation of the absurdity of dreams when we remark that this absurd detail of the dream content is intended to represent the most strongly emphasized detail of the dream thoughts: “It was nonsense to marry so early.” The figure 3 belonging to a quite subordinate relation of the two compared persons (three months’ difference in age) has thus been skilfully used to produce the nonsense demanded by the dream. The reduction of the actual 150 florins to 1 florin and 50 kreuzer corresponds to her disdain of her husband in the suppressed thoughts of the dreamer.”

III. Another example displays the arithmetical powers of 328the dream, which have brought it into such disrepute. A man dreams: He is sitting at B——’s (a family of his earlier acquaintance) and says, “It was nonsense for you not to give me Amy in marriage.” Thereupon he asks the girl, “How old are you?” Answer: “I was born in 1882.” “Ah, then you are 28 years old.”

Since the dream occurs in the year 1898, this is obviously poor arithmetic, and the inability of the dreamer to calculate may be compared to that of the paralytic, if there is no other way of explaining it. My patient was one of those persons who are always thinking about every woman they see. The person who followed him in my office, regularly for several months, was a young lady, whom he used to meet, about whom he used to ask frequently, and to whom he was very anxious to be polite. This was the lady whose age he estimated at 28 years. So much for explaining the result of the apparent calculation. But 1882 was the year in which he had married. He had been unable to refrain from engaging in conversation with the two females whom he met at my house—two girls, by no means youthful, who alternately opened the door for him, and as he did not find them very responsive, he had given himself the explanation that they probably considered him an elderly “settled” gentleman.

IV. For another number dream with its interpretation,—a dream distinguished by its obvious determination, or rather over-determination, I am indebted to B. Dattner:

My host, a policeman in the municipal service, dreamed that he was standing at his post in the street, which was a wish-realisation. The inspector then came over to him, having on his gorget the numbers 22 and 62 or 26—at all events there were many two’s on it. Division of the number 2262 in the reproduction of the dream at once points to the fact that the components have separate meanings. It occurs to him that the day before, while on duty, they were discussing the duration of their time of service. The occasion for this was furnished by an inspector who had been pensioned at 62 years. The dreamer had only completed 22 years of service, and still needed 2 years and 2 months to make him eligible for a 90 per cent. pension. The dream first shows him the fulfilment of a long wished for wish, the rank of 329inspector. The superior with 2262 on his collar is himself; he takes care to do his duty on the street, which is another preferred wish; he has served his 2 years and 2 months, and can now be retired from the service with full pension, like the 62–year-old inspector.

If we keep in mind these examples and similar ones (to follow), we may say: Dream activity does not calculate at all, whether correctly or incorrectly; it joins together in the form of a calculation numerals which occur in the dream thoughts, and which may serve as allusions to material which is incapable of being represented. It thus utilises numerals as material for the expression of its purposes in the same manner as it does names and speeches known as word presentations.

For the dream activity cannot compose a new speech. No matter how many speeches and answers may occur in dreams, which may be sensible or absurd in themselves, analysis always shows in such cases that the dream has only taken from the dream thoughts fragments of speeches which have been delivered or heard, and dealt with them in a most arbitrary manner. It has not only torn them from their context and mutilated them, taken up one piece and rejected another, but it has also joined them together in a new way, so that the speech which seems coherent in the dream falls into three or four sections in the course of analysis. In this new utilisation of the words, the dream has often put aside the meaning which they had in the dream thoughts, and has derived an entirely new meaning from them.^[EO] Upon closer inspection the more distinct and compact constituents of the dream speech may be distinguished from others which serve as connectives and have probably been supplied, just as we supply omitted letters and syllables in reading. The dream speech thus has the structure of breccia stones, in which 330larger pieces of different material are held together by a solidified cohesive mass.

In a very strict sense this description is correct, to be sure, only for those speeches in the dream which have something of the sensational character of a speech, and which are described as “speeches.” The others which have not, as it were, been felt as though heard or spoken (which have no accompanying acoustic or motor emphasis in the dream) are simply thoughts such as occur in our waking thought activity, and are transferred without change into many dreams. Our reading, also, seems to furnish an abundant and not easily traceable source of material for speeches, this material being of an indifferent nature. Everything, however, which appears conspicuously in the dream as a speech can be referred to real speeches which have been made or heard by the dreamer himself.

We have already found examples for the explanation of such dream speeches in the analysis of dreams cited for other purposes. Here is one example in place of many, all of which lead to the same conclusion.

A large courtyard in which corpses are cremated. The dreamer says: “I’m going away from here, I can’t look at this.” (Not a distinct speech.) Then he meets two butcher boys and asks: “Well, did it taste good?” One of them answers: “No, it wasn’t good.” As though it had been human flesh.

The harmless occasion for this dream is as follows: After taking supper with his wife, the dreamer pays a visit to his worthy but by no means appetising neighbour. The hospitable old lady is just at her evening meal, and urges him (instead of this word a composite sexually-significant word is jocosely used among men) to taste of it. He declines, saying that he has no appetite. “Go on, you can stand some more,” or something of the kind. The dreamer is thus forced to taste and praise what is offered. “But that’s good!” After he is alone again with his wife, he scolds about the neighbour’s importunity and about the quality of the food he has tasted. “I can’t stand the sight of it,” a phrase not appearing even in the dream as an actual speech, is a thought which has reference to the physical charms of the lady who invites him, and which would be translated as meaning that he does not want to look at her.

331The analysis of another dream which I cite at this point for the sake of the very distinct speech that forms its nucleus, but which I shall explain only when we come to consider emotions in the dream—will be more instructive. I dream very distinctly: I have gone to Bruecke’s laboratory at night, and upon hearing a soft knocking at the door, I open it to (the deceased) Professor Fleischl, who enters in the company of several strangers, and after saying a few words sits down at his table. Then follows a second dream: My friend Fl. has come to Vienna in July without attracting much attention; I meet him on the street while he is in conversation with my (deceased) friend P., and I go somewhere or other with these two, and they sit down opposite each other as though at a little table, while I sit at the narrow end of the table facing them. Fl. tells about his sister and says: “In three-quarters of an hour she was dead,” and then something like: “That is the threshold.” As P. does not understand him, Fl. turns to me, and asks me how much I have told of his affairs. Whereupon, seized by strange emotions, I want to tell Fl. that P. (can’t possibly know anything because he) is not alive. But, noticing the mistake myself, I say: “Non vixit.” Then I look at P. searchingly, and under my gaze he becomes pale and blurred, his eyes a morbid blue—and at last he dissolves. I rejoice greatly at this; I now understand that Ernest Fleischl, too, was only an apparition, a revenant, and I find that it is quite possible for such a person to exist only as long as one wants him to, and that he can be made to disappear by the wish of another person.

This beautiful dream unites so many of the characteristics of the dream content which are problematic—the criticism made in the dream itself in that I myself notice my mistake in having said “Non vixit” instead of “Non vivit”; the unconstrained intercourse with dead persons, whom the dream itself declares to be dead; the absurdity of the inference and the intense satisfaction which the inference gives me—that “by my life” I should like to give a complete solution of these problems. But in reality I am incapable of doing this—namely, the thing I do in the dream—of sacrificing such dear persons to my ambition. With every revelation of the true meaning of the dream, with which I am well acquainted, I should have been put to shame. Hence 332I am content with selecting a few of the elements of the dream, for interpretation, some here, and others later on another page.

The scene in which I annihilate P. by a glance forms the centre of the dream. His eyes become strange and weirdly blue, and then he dissolves. This scene is an unmistakable copy of one really experienced. I was a demonstrator at the physiological institute, and began my service in the early hours, and Bruecke learned that I had been late several times in getting to the school laboratory. So one morning he came promptly for the opening of the class and waited for me. What he said to me was brief and to the point; but the words did not matter at all. What overwhelmed me was the terrible blue eyes through which he looked at me and before which I melted away—as P. does in the dream, for P. has changed rôles with him much to my relief. Anyone who remembers the eyes of the great master, which were wonderfully beautiful until old age, and who has ever seen him in anger, can easily imagine the emotions of the young transgressor on that occasion.

But for a long time I was unable to account for the “Non Vixit,” with which I execute sentence in the dream, until I remembered that these two words possessed such great distinctness in the dream, not because they were heard or spoken, but because they were seen. Then I knew at once where they came from. On the pedestal of the statue of Emperor Joseph in the Hofburg at Vienna, may be read the following beautiful words:

Saluti patriae vixit

non diu sed totus.

I had culled from this inscription something which suited the one inimical train of thought in the dream thoughts and which now intended to mean: “That fellow has nothing to say, he is not living at all.” And I now recalled that the dream was dreamed a few days after the unveiling of the memorial to Fleischl in the arcades of the university, upon which occasion I had again seen Bruecke’s statue and must have thought with regret (in the unconscious) how my highly gifted friend P. with his great devotion to science had forfeited his just claim to a statue in these halls by his premature 333death. So I set up this memorial to him in the dream; the first name of my friend P. is Joseph.^[EP]

According to the rules of dream interpretation, I should still not be justified in replacing non vivit, which I need, by non vixit, which is placed at my disposal by the recollection of the Joseph monument. Something now calls my attention to the fact that in the dream scene, two trains of thought concerning my friend P. meet, one hostile, the other friendly—of which the former is superficial, the latter veiled, and both are given representation in the same words: non vixit. Because my friend P. has deserved well of science, I erect a statue to him; but because he has been guilty of an evil wish (which is expressed at the end of the dream) I destroy him. I have here constructed a sentence of peculiar resonance, and I must have been influenced by some model. But where can I find similar antithesis, such a parallel between two opposite attitudes towards the same person, both claiming to be entirely valid, and yet both trying not to encroach upon each other? Such a parallel is to be found in a single place, where, however, a deep impression is made upon the reader—in Brutus’ speech of justification in Shakespeare’s Julius Cæsar: “As Cæsar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.” Is not this which I have discovered, the same sentence structure and thought contrast as in the dream thought? I thus play Brutus in the dream. If I could only find in the dream thoughts, one further trace of confirmation for this astonishing collateral connection! I think the following might be such: My friend comes to Vienna in July. This detail finds no support whatever in reality. To my knowledge my friend has never been in Vienna during the month of July. But the month of July is named after Julius Cæsar, and might therefore very well furnish the required allusion to the intermediary thought that I am playing the part of Brutus.^[EQ]

Strangely enough I once actually played the part of Brutus. 334I presented the scene between Brutus and Cæsar from Schiller’s poems to an audience of children when I was a boy of fourteen years. I did this with my nephew, who was a year older than I, and who had come to us from England—also a revenant—for in him I recognised the playmate of my first childish years. Until the end of my third year we had been inseparable, had loved each other and scuffled with each other, and, as I have already intimated, this childish relation has constantly determined my later feelings in my intercourse with persons of my own age. My nephew John has since found many incarnations, which have revivified first one aspect, then another, of this character which is so ineradicably fixed in my unconscious memory. Occasionally he must have treated me very badly and I must have shown courage before my tyrant, for in later years I have often been told of the short speech with which I vindicated myself when my father—his grandfather—called me to account: “I hit him because he hit me.” This childish scene must be the one which causes non vivit to branch off into non vixit, for in the language of later childhood striking is called wichsen (German, wichsen—to smear with shoe-polish, to tan, i.e., to flog); the dream activity does not hesitate to take advantage of such connections. My hostility towards my friend P., which has so little foundation in reality—he was far superior to me, and might therefore have been a new edition of the playmate of my childhood—can certainly be traced to my complicated relations with John during our infancy. I shall, however, return to this dream later.

(f) Absurd Dreams—Intellectual Performances in the Dream

In our interpretation of dreams thus far we have come upon the element of absurdity in the dream-content so often that we must no longer postpone an investigation of its cause and significance. We remember, of course, that the absurdity of dreams has furnished the opponents of dream investigation with their chief argument for considering the dream nothing but the meaningless product of a reduced and fragmentary activity of the mind.

I begin with specimens in which the absurdity of the dream-content is only apparent and immediately disappears 335when the dream is more thoroughly examined. There are a few dreams which—accidentally one is at first inclined to think—are concerned with the dead father of the dreamer.

I. Here is the dream of a patient who had lost his father six years before:

A terrible accident has occurred to his father. He was riding in the night train when a derailment took place, the seats came together, and his head was crushed from side to side. The dreamer sees him lying on the bed with a wound over his left eyebrow, which runs off vertically. The dreamer is surprised that his father has had a misfortune (since he is dead already, as the dreamer adds in telling his dream). His father’s eyes are so clear.

According to the standards prevailing in dream criticism, this dream-content would have to be explained in the following manner: At first, when the dreamer is picturing his father’s misfortune, he has forgotten that his father has already been in his grave for years; in the further course of the dream this memory comes to life, and causes him to be surprised at his own dream even while he is still dreaming. Analysis, however, teaches us that it is entirely useless to attempt such explanations. The dreamer had given an artist an order for a bust of his father, which he had inspected two days before the dream. This is the thing which seems to him to have met with an accident. The sculptor has never seen the father, and is working from photographs which have been given him. On the very day before the dream the pious son had sent an old servant of the family to the studio in order to see whether he would pass the same judgment upon the marble head, namely, that it had turned out too narrow from side to side, from temple to temple. Now follows the mass of recollections which has contributed to the formation of this dream. The dreamer’s father had a habit, whenever he was harassed by business cares or family difficulties, of pressing his temples with both hands, as though he were trying to compress his head, which seemed to grow too large for him. When our dreamer was four years old he was present when the accidental discharge of a pistol blackened his father’s eyes (his eyes are so clear). While alive his father 336had had a deep wrinkle at the place where the dream shows the injury, whenever he was thoughtful or sad. The fact that in the dream this wrinkle is replaced by a wound points to the second occasion of the dream. The dreamer had taken a photograph of his little daughter; the plate had fallen from his hand, and when picked up showed a crack that ran like a vertical furrow across the forehead and reached as far as the orbital curve. He could not then get the better of his superstitious forebodings, for, on the day before his mother’s death, a photographic plate with her likeness had cracked as he was handling it.

Thus the absurdity of the dream is only the result of an inaccuracy of verbal expression, which does not take the trouble to distinguish the bust and the photograph from the original. We are all accustomed to say of a picture, “Don’t you think father is good?” Of course the appearance of absurdity in this dream might easily have been avoided. If it were permissible to pass judgment after a single experience, one might be tempted to say that this semblance of absurdity is admitted or desired.

II. Here is another very similar example from my own dreams (I lost my father in the year 1896):

After his death my father has been politically active among the Magyars, and has united them into a political body; to accompany which I see a little indistinct picture: a crowd of people as in the Reichstag; a person who is standing on one or two benches, others round about him. I remember that he looked very like Garibaldi on his death-bed, and I am glad that this promise has really come true.

This is certainly absurd enough. It was dreamed at the time that the Hungarians got into a lawless condition, through Parliamentary obstruction, and passed through the crisis from which Koloman Szell delivered them. The trivial circumstance that the scene beheld in the dream consists of such little pictures is not without significance for the explanation of this element. The usual visual representation of our thoughts results in pictures which impress us as being life-size; my dream picture, however, is the reproduction of a wood-cut inserted in the text of an illustrated history of Austria, representing Maria Theresa in the Reichstag of 337Pressburg—the famous scene of “Moriamur pro rege nostro.”^[ER] Like Maria Theresa, my father, in the dream, stands surrounded by the multitude; but he is standing on one or two benches, and thus like a judge on the bench. (He has united them—here the intermediary is the phrase, “We shall need no judge.”) Those of us who stood around the death-bed of my father actually noticed that he looked much like Garibaldi. He had a post-mortem rise of temperature, his cheeks shone redder and redder ... involuntarily we continue: “And behind him lay in phantom radiance that which subdues us all—the common thing.”

This elevation of our thoughts prepares us for having to deal with this very “common thing.” The post-mortem feature of the rise in temperature corresponds to the words, “after his death” in the dream content. The most agonising of his sufferings had been a complete paralysis of the intestines (obstruction), which set in during the last weeks. All sorts of disrespectful thoughts are connected with this. A man of my own age who had lost his father while he was still at the Gymnasium, upon which occasion I was profoundly moved and tendered him my friendship, once told me, with derision, about the distress of a lady relative whose father had died on the street and had been brought home, where it turned out upon undressing the corpse, that at the moment of death, or post-mortem, an evacuation of the bowels had taken place. The daughter of the dead man was profoundly unhappy at having this ugly detail stain her memory of her father. We have now penetrated to the wish that is embodied in this dream. To stand before one’s children pure and great after one’s death, who would not wish that? What has become of the absurdity of the dream? The appearance of it has been caused only by the fact that a perfectly permissible mode of speech—in the case of which we are accustomed to ignore the absurdity that happens to exist between its parts—has been faithfully represented in the dream. Here, too, we are unable 338to deny that the semblance of absurdity is one which is desired and has been purposely brought about.^[ES]

III. In the example which I now cite I can detect the dream activity in the act of purposely manufacturing an absurdity for which there is no occasion at all in the subject-matter. It is taken from the dream that I had as a result of meeting Count Thun before my vacation trip. “I am riding in a one-horse carriage, and give orders to drive to a railway station. ‘Of course I cannot ride with you on the railway line itself,’ I say, after the driver made an objection as though I had tired him out; at the same time it seems as though I had already driven with him for a distance which one usually rides on the train.” For this confused and senseless story the analysis gives the following explanation: During the day I had hired 339a one-horse carriage which was to take me to a remote street in Dornbach. The driver, however, did not know the way, and kept on driving in the manner of those good people until I noticed the fact and showed him the way, not sparing him a few mocking remarks withal. From this driver a train of thought led to the aristocratic personage whom I was destined to meet later. For the present I shall only remark that what strikes us middle-class plebeians about the aristocracy is that they like to put themselves in the driver’s seat. Does not Count Thun guide the Austrian car of state? The next sentence in the dream, however, refers to my brother, whom I identify with the driver of the one-horse carriage. I had this year refused to take the trip through Italy with him (“of course I cannot ride with you on the railway line itself”), and this refusal was a sort of punishment for his wonted complaint that I usually tired him out on this trip (which gets into the dream unchanged) by making him take hurried trips and see too many nice things in one day. That evening my brother had accompanied me to the railroad station, but shortly before getting there had jumped out, at the state railway division of the Western Station, in order to take a train to Purkersdorf. I remarked to him that he could stay with me a little longer, inasmuch as he did not go to Purkersdorf by the state railway but by the Western Railway. This is how it happens that in the dream I rode in the wagon a distance which one usually rides on the train. In reality, however, it was just the opposite; I told my brother: The distance which you ride on the state railway you could ride in my company on the Western Railway. The whole confusion of the dream is therefore produced by my inserting in the dream the word “wagon” instead of “state railway,” which, to be sure, does good service in bringing together the driver and my brother. I then find in the dream some nonsense which seems hardly straightened out by my explanation, and which almost forms a contradiction to my earlier speech (“Of course I cannot ride with you on the railway line itself”). But as I have no occasion whatever for confounding the state railway with the one-horse carriage, I must have intentionally formed the whole puzzling story in the dream in this way.

340But with what intention? We shall now learn what the absurdity in the dream signifies, and the motives which admitted it or created it. The solution of the mystery in the case in question is as follows: In the dream I needed something absurd and incomprehensible in connection with “riding” (Fahren) because in the dream thoughts I had a certain judgment which required representation. On an evening at the house of the hospitable and clever lady who appears in another scene of the same dream as the “hostess,” I heard two riddles which I could not solve. As they were known to the other members of the party, I presented a somewhat ludicrous figure in my unsuccessful attempts to find a solution. They were two equivoques turning on the words “Nachkommen” (to come after—offspring) and “vorfahren” (to ride in advance—forefathers, ancestry). They read as follows:

The coachman does it

At the master’s behest;

Everyone has it,

In the grave does it rest.

(Ancestry.)

It was confusing to find half of the second riddle identical with the first.

The coachman does it

At the master’s behest;

Not everyone has it,

In the cradle does it rest.

(Offspring.)

As I had seen Count Thun ride in advance (vorfahren), so high and mighty, and had merged into the Figaro-mood which finds the merit of aristocratic gentlemen in the fact that they have taken the trouble to be born (Nachkommen—to become offspring), the two riddles became intermediary thoughts for the dream-work. As aristocrats can be readily confounded with coachmen, and as coachmen were in our country formerly called brothers-in-law, the work of condensation could employ my brother in the same representation. But the dream thought at work in the background was as follows: It is nonsense to be proud of one’s ancestry. (Vorfahren.) I would rather be myself an ancestor. (Vorfahr.) For the sake of this judgment, “it is nonsense,” we have the nonsense in the 341dream. We can now also solve the last riddle in this obscure passage of the dream, namely, that I have already driven before (vorher gefahren, vorgefahren) with the coachman.

Thus the dream is made absurd if there occurs as one of the elements in the dream thoughts the judgment “That is nonsense,” and in general if disdain and criticism are the motives for one of the trains of unconscious thought. Hence absurdity becomes one of the means by which the dream activity expresses contradiction, as it does by reversing a relation in the material between the dream thoughts and dream content, and by utilising sensations of motor impediment. But absurdity in the dream is not simply to be translated by “no”; it is rather intended to reproduce the disposition of the dream thoughts, this being to show mockery and ridicule along with the contradiction. It is only for this purpose that the dream activity produces anything ridiculous. Here again it transforms a part of the latent content into a manifest form.^[ET]

As a matter of fact we have already met with a convincing example of the significance of an absurd dream. The dream, interpreted without analysis, of the Wagnerian performance lasting until 7.45 in the morning, in which the orchestra is conducted from a tower, &c. (see p. 316) is apparently trying to say: It is a crazy world and an insane society. He who deserves a thing doesn’t get it, and he who doesn’t care for anything has it—and in this she means to compare her fate with that of her cousin. The fact that dreams concerning a dead father were the first to furnish us with examples of absurdity in dreams is by no means an accident. The conditions necessary for the creations of absurd dreams are here grouped together in a typical manner. The authority belonging to the father has at an early age aroused the criticism of the child, and the strict demands he has made have 342caused the child to pay particularly close attention to every weakness of the father for its own extenuation; but the piety with which the father’s personality is surrounded in our thoughts, especially after his death, increases the censorship which prevents the expressions of this criticism from becoming conscious.

IV. The following is another absurd dream about a dead father:

I receive a notice from the common council of my native city concerning the costs of a confinement in the hospital in the year 1851, which was necessitated by an attack from which I suffered. I make sport of the matter, for, in the first place, I was not yet alive in the year 1851, and, in the second place, my father, to whom the notice might refer, is already dead. I go to him in the adjoining room, where he is lying on a bed, and tell him about it. To my astonishment he recalls that in that year—1851—he was once drunk and had to be locked up or confined. It was when he was working for the house of T——. “Then you drank, too?” I ask. “You married soon after?” I figure that I was born in 1856, which appears to me as though immediately following.

In view of the preceding discussion, we shall translate the insistence with which this dream exhibits its absurdities as the sure sign of a particularly embittered and passionate controversy in the dream thoughts. With all the more astonishment, however, we note that in this dream the controversy is waged openly, and the father designated as the person against whom the satire is directed. This openness seems to contradict our assumption of a censor as operative in the dream activity. We may say in explanation, however, that here the father is only an interposed person, while the conflict is carried on with another one, who makes his appearance in the dream by means of a single allusion. While the dream usually treats of revolt against other persons, behind which the father is concealed, the reverse is true here; the father serves as the man of straw to represent others, and hence the dream dares thus openly to concern itself with a person who is usually hallowed, because there is present the certain knowledge that he is not in reality intended. We learn of this condition of affairs by considering the occasion of the dream. Now, it occurred after I had heard that an older 343colleague, whose judgment is considered infallible, had expressed disapproval and astonishment at the fact that one of my patients was then continuing psychoanalytical work with me for the fifth year. The introductory sentences of the dream point with transparent disguise to the fact that this colleague had for a time taken over the duties which my father could no longer perform (expenses, fees at the hospital); and when our friendly relations came to be broken I was thrown into the same conflict of feelings which arises in the case of misunderstanding between father and son in view of the part played by the father and his earlier functions. The dream thoughts now bitterly resent the reproach that I am not making better progress, which extends itself from the treatment of this patient to other things. Does this colleague know anyone who can get on faster? Does he not know that conditions of this sort are usually incurable and last for life? What are four or five years in comparison to a whole life, especially when life has been made so much easier for the patient during the treatment?

The impression of absurdity in this dream is brought about largely by the fact that sentences from different divisions of the dream thoughts are strung together without any reconciling transition. Thus the sentence, I go to him in the adjoining room, &c., leaves the subject dealt with in the preceding sentences, and faithfully reproduces the circumstances under which I told my father about my marriage engagement. Thus the dream is trying to remind me of the noble disinterestedness which the old man showed at that time, and to put it in contrast with the conduct of another, a new person. I now perceive that the dream is allowed to make sport of my father for the reason that in the dream thought he is held up as an example to another man, in full recognition of his merit. It is in the nature of every censorship that it permits the telling of untruth about forbidden things rather than truth. The next sentence, in which my father remembers having once been drunk, and having been locked up for it, also contains nothing which is actually true of my father. The person whom he covers is here a no less important one than the great Meynert, in whose footsteps I followed with such great veneration, and whose attitude 344towards me was changed into undisguised hostility after a short period of indulgence. The dream recalls to me his own statement that in his youth he was addicted to the chloroform habit, and that for this he had to enter a sanatorium. It recalls also a second experience with him shortly before his death. I carried on an embittered literary controversy with him concerning hysteria in the male, the existence of which he denied, and when I visited him in his last illness and asked him how he felt, he dwelt upon the details of his condition and concluded with the words: “You know, I have always been one of the prettiest cases of masculine hysteria.” Thus, to my satisfaction, and to my astonishment, he admitted what he had so long and so stubbornly opposed. But the fact that in this scene I can use my father to cover Meynert is based not upon the analogy which has been found to exist between the two persons, but upon the slight, but quite adequate, representation of a conditional sentence occurring in the dream thoughts, which in full would read as follows: “Of course if I were of the second generation, the son of a professor or of a court-councillor, I should have progressed more rapidly.” In the dream I now make a court-councillor and a professor of my father. The most obvious and most annoying absurdity of the dream lies in the treatment of the date 1851, which seems to me to be hardly distinguishable from 1856, as though a difference of five years would signify nothing whatever. But it is just this idea of the dream thoughts which requires expression. Four or five years—that is the length of time which I enjoyed the support of the colleague mentioned at the outset; but it is also the time during which I kept my bride waiting before I married her; and, through a coincidence that is eagerly taken advantage of by the dream thoughts, it is also the time during which I am now keeping one of my best patients waiting for the completion of his cure. “What are five years?” ask the dream thoughts. “That is no time at all for me—that doesn’t come into consideration. I have time enough ahead of me, and just as what you didn’t want to believe came true at last, so I shall accomplish this also.” Besides the number 51, when separated from the number of the century, is determined in still another manner and in an opposite sense; for which reason it occurs in the dream 345again. Fifty-one is an age at which a man seems particularly exposed to danger, at which I have seen many of my colleagues suddenly die, and among them one who had been appointed to a professorship a few days before, after he had been waiting a long time.

V. Another absurd dream which plays with figures, runs as follows:

One of my acquaintances, Mr. M., has been attacked in an essay by no less a person than Goethe, with justifiable vehemence, we all think. Mr. M. has, of course, been crushed by this attack. He complains of it bitterly at a dinner party; but he says that his veneration for Goethe has not suffered from this personal experience. I try to find some explanation of the chronological relations, which seem improbable to me. Goethe died in 1832; since his attack upon M. must of course have taken place earlier, Mr. M. was at the time a very young man. It seems plausible to me that he was 18 years old. But I do not know exactly what year it is at present, and so the whole calculation lapses into obscurity. The attack, moreover, is contained in Goethe’s well-known essay entitled “Nature.”

We shall soon find means to justify the nonsense of this dream. Mr. M., with whom I became acquainted at a dinner-party, had recently requested me to examine his brother, who showed signs of paralytic insanity. The conjecture was right; the painful thing about this visit was that the patient exposed his brother by alluding to his youthful pranks when there was no occasion in the conversation for his doing so. I had asked the patient to tell me the year of his birth, and had got him to make several small calculations in order to bring out the weakness of his memory—all of which tests he passed fairly well. I see now that I am acting like a paralytic in the dream (I do not know exactly what year it is at present). Other subject-matter in the dream is drawn from another recent source. The editor of a medical journal, a friend of mine, had accepted for his paper a very unfavourable, a “crushing,” criticism of the last book of my friend Fl. of Berlin, the author of which was a very youthful reviewer, who was not very competent to pass judgment. I thought I had a right to interfere, and called the editor to account; he keenly regretted the acceptance of the criticism, but would not promise redress. Thereupon 346I broke off relations with the journal, and in my letter of resignation expressed the hope that our personal relations would not suffer from the incident. The third source of this dream is an account given by a female patient—it was fresh in my memory at the time—of the mental disease of her brother who had fallen into a frenzy, crying “Nature, Nature.” The physicians in attendance thought that the cry was derived from a reading of Goethe’s beautiful essay, and that it pointed to overwork in the patient in the study of natural philosophy. I thought rather of the sexual sense in which even less cultured people with us use the word “Nature,” and the fact that the unfortunate man later mutilated his genitals seemed to show that I was not far wrong. Eighteen years was the age of this patient at the time when the attack of frenzy occurred.

If I add further that the book of my friend so severely criticised (“It is a question whether the author is crazy or we are” had been the opinion of another critic) treats of the temporal relations of life and refers the duration of Goethe’s life to the multiple of a number significant from the point of view of biology, it will readily be admitted that I am putting myself in the place of my friend in the dream. (I try to find some explanation of the chronological relations.) But I behave like a paralytic, and the dream revels in absurdity. This means, then, as the dream thoughts say ironically. “Of course he is the fool, the lunatic, and you are the man of genius who knows better. Perhaps, however, it is the other way around?” Now, this other way around is explicitly represented in the dream, in that Goethe has attacked the young man, which is absurd, while it is perfectly possible even to-day for a young fellow to attack the immortal Goethe, and in that I figure from the year of Goethe’s death, while I caused the paralytic to calculate from the year of his birth.