The Interpretation of Dreams

The question might be raised, whether the dream is invariably connected with the events of the previous day, or whether the reference may be extended to impressions from a longer space of time in the immediate past. Probably this matter cannot claim primary importance, but I should like to decide in favour of the exclusive priority of the day before the dream (the dream-day). As often as I thought I had found a case where an impression of two or three days before had been the source of the dream, I could convince myself, after careful investigation, that this impression had been remembered the day before, that a demonstrable reproduction had been interpolated between the day of the event and the time of the dream, and, furthermore, I was able to point out the recent occasion upon which the recollection of the old impression might have occurred. On the other hand, I was unable to convince myself that a regular interval (H. Swoboda calls the first one of this kind eighteen hours) of biological significance occurs between the stimulating impression of the day and its repetition in the dream.[AQ] I am, therefore, of the opinion that the stimulus for every dream is to be found among those experiences “upon which one has not yet slept” for a night.

Thus the impressions of the immediate past (with the exception of the day before the night of the dream) stand in no different relation to the dream content from those of times which are as far removed in the past as you please. The dream may select its material from all times of life, provided only, that a chain of thought starting from one of the experiences of the day of the dream (one of the “recent” impressions) reaches back to these earlier ones. But why this preference for recent impressions? We shall reach some conjectures on this point if we subject one of the dreams already mentioned to a more exact analysis. I select the dream about the monograph. _Content of the dream.—I have written a monograph upon a certain plant. The book lies before me, I am just turning over a folded coloured plate. A dried specimen of the plant is bound with every copy, as though from a herbarium._ Analysis.—In the forenoon I saw in the show-window of a book store a book entitled, The Genus Cyclamen, apparently a monograph on this plant.

The cyclamen is the favourite flower of my wife. I reproach myself for so seldom thinking to bring her flowers, as she wishes. In connection with the theme “bringing flowers,” I am reminded of a story which I recently told in a circle of friends to prove my assertion that forgetting is very often the purpose of the unconscious, and that in any case it warrants a conclusion as to the secret disposition of the person who forgets. A young woman who is accustomed to receive a bunch of flowers from her husband on her birthday, misses this token of affection on a festive occasion of this sort, and thereupon bursts into tears. The husband comes up, and is unable to account for her tears until she tells him, “To-day is my birthday.” He strikes his forehead and cries, “Why, I had completely forgotten it,” and wants to go out to get her some flowers. But she is not to be consoled, for she sees in the forgetfulness of her husband a proof that she does not play the same part in his thoughts as formerly. This Mrs. L. met my wife two days before, and told her that she was feeling well, and asked about me. She was under my treatment years ago.

Supplementary facts: I once actually wrote something like a monograph on a plant, namely, an essay on the coca plant, which drew the attention of K. Koller to the anæsthetic properties of cocaine. I had hinted at this use of the alkaloid in my publication, but I was not sufficiently thorough to pursue the matter further. This suggests that on the forenoon of the day after the dream (for the interpretation of which I did not find time until the evening) I had thought of cocaine in a kind of day phantasy. In case I should ever be afflicted with glaucoma, I was going to go to Berlin, and there have myself operated upon, incognito, at the house of my Berlin friend, by a physician whom he would recommend to me. The surgeon, who would not know upon whom he was operating, would boast as usual how easy these operations had become since the introduction of cocaine; I would not betray by a single sign that I had had a share in making this discovery. With this phantasy were connected thoughts of how difficult it really is for a doctor to claim the medical services of a colleague for his own person. I should be able to pay the Berlin eye specialist, who did not know me, like anyone else. Only after recalling this day-dream do I realise that the recollection of a definite experience is concealed behind it. Shortly after Koller’s discovery my father had, in fact, become ill with glaucoma; he was operated upon by my friend, the eye specialist, Dr. Koenigstein. Dr. Koller attended to the cocaine anæsthetisation, and thereupon made the remark that all three of the persons who had shared in the introduction of cocaine had been brought together on one case.

I now proceed to think of the time when I was last reminded of this affair about the cocaine. This was a few days before, when I received a Festschrift, with whose publication grateful scholars had commemorated the anniversary of their teacher and laboratory director. Among the honours ascribed to persons connected with the laboratory, I found a notice to the effect that the discovery of the anæsthetic properties of cocaine had been made there by K. Koller. Now I suddenly become aware that the dream is connected with an experience of the previous evening. I had just accompanied Dr. Koenigstein to his home, and had spoken to him about a matter which strongly arouses my interest whenever it is mentioned. While I was talking with him in the vestibule, Professor Gärtner and his young wife came up. I could not refrain from congratulating them both upon their healthy appearance. Now Professor Gärtner is one of the authors of the Festschrift of which I have just spoken, and may well have recalled it to me. Likewise Mrs. L., whose birthday disappointment I have referred to, had been mentioned, in another connection, to be sure, in the conversation with Dr. Koenigstein.

I shall now try to explain the other determinations of the dream content. A dried specimen of the plant accompanies the monograph as though it were a herbarium. A recollection of the gymnasium (school) is connected with the herbarium. The director of our gymnasium once called the scholars of the higher classes together in order to have them inspect and clean the herbarium. Small worms had been found—bookworms. The director did not seem to have much confidence in my help, for he left only a few leaves for me. I know to this day that there were crucifers on them. My interest in botany was never very great. At my preliminary examination in botany, I was required to identify a crucifer, and did not recognise it. I would have fared badly if my theoretical knowledge had not helped me out. Crucifers suggest composites. The artichoke is really a composite, and the one which I might call my favourite flower. My wife, who is more thoughtful than I, often brings this favourite flower of mine home from the market.

I see the monograph which I have written lying before me. This, too, is not without its reference. The friend whom I pictured wrote to me yesterday from Berlin: “I think a great deal about your dream book. I see it lying before me finished, and am turning over its leaves.” How I envied him this prophetic power! If I could only see it lying already finished before me!

The folded Coloured Plate.—While I was a student of medicine, I suffered much from a fondness for studying in monographs exclusively. In spite of my limited means, I subscribed to a number of the medical archives, in which the coloured plates gave me much delight. I was proud of this inclination for thoroughness. So, when I began to publish on my own account, I had to draw the plates for my own treatises, and I remember one of them turned out so badly that a kindly-disposed colleague ridiculed me for it. This suggests, I don’t know exactly how, a very early memory from my youth. My father once thought it would be a joke to hand over a book with coloured plates (Description of a Journey in Persia) to me and my eldest sister for destruction. This was hardly to be justified from an educational point of view. I was at the time five years old, and my sister three, and the picture of our blissfully tearing this book to pieces (like an artichoke, I must add, leaf by leaf) is almost the only one from this time of life which has remained fresh in my memory. When I afterwards became a student, I developed a distinct fondness for collecting and possessing books (an analogy to the inclination for studying from monographs, a hobby which occurs in the dream thoughts with reference to cyclamen and artichoke). I became a book-worm (cf. herbarium).

I have always referred this first passion of my life—since I am engaging in retrospect—to this childhood impression, or rather I have recognised in this childish scene a “concealing recollection” for my subsequent love of books.[AR] Of course I also learned at an early age that our passions are often our sorrows. When I was seventeen years old I had a very respectable bill at the book store, and no means with which to pay it, and my father would hardly accept the excuse that my inclination had not been fixed on something worse. But the mention of this later youthful experience immediately brings me back to my conversation that evening with my friend Dr. Koenigstein. For the talk on the evening of the dream-day brought up the same old reproach that I am too fond of my hobbies.

For reasons which do not belong here, I shall not continue the interpretation of this dream, but shall simply indicate the path which leads to it. In the course of the interpretation, I was reminded of my conversation with Dr. Koenigstein, and indeed of more than one portion of it. If I consider the subjects touched upon in this conversation, the meaning of the dream becomes clear to me. All the thought associations which have been started, about the hobbies of my wife and of myself, about the cocaine, about the difficulty of securing medical treatment from one’s colleagues, my preference for monographic studies, and my neglect of certain subjects such as botany—all this continues and connects with some branch of this widely ramified conversation. The dream again takes on the character of a justification, of a pleading for my rights, like the first analysed dream of Irma’s injection; it even continues the theme which that dream started, and discusses it with the new subject matter which has accrued in the interval between the two dreams. Even the apparently indifferent manner of expression of the dream receives new importance. The meaning is now: “I am indeed the man who has written that valuable and successful treatise (on cocaine),” just as at that time I asserted for my justification: “I am a thorough and industrious student;” in both cases, then: “I can afford to do that.” But I may dispense with the further interpretation of the dream, because my only purpose in reporting it was to examine the relation of the dream content to the experience of the previous day which arouses it.

As long as I know only the manifest content of this dream, but one relation to a day impression becomes obvious; after I have made the interpretation, a second source of the dream becomes evident in another experience of the same day. The first of these impressions to which the dream refers is an indifferent one, a subordinate circumstance. I see a book in a shop window whose title holds me for a moment, and whose contents could hardly interest me. The second experience has great psychic value; I have talked earnestly with my friend, the eye specialist, for about an hour, I have made allusions in this conversation which must have touched both of us closely, and which awakened memories revealing the most diverse feelings of my inner self. Furthermore, this conversation was broken off unfinished because some friends joined us. What, now, is the relation of these two impressions of the day to each other and to the dream which followed during the next night?

I find in the manifest content merely an allusion to the indifferent impression, and may thus reaffirm that the dream preferably takes up into its content non-essential experiences. In the dream interpretation, on the contrary, everything converges upon an important event which is justified in demanding attention. If I judge the dream in the only correct way, according to the latent content which is brought to light in the analysis, I have unawares come upon a new and important fact. I see the notion that the dream deals only with the worthless fragments of daily experience shattered; I am compelled also to contradict the assertion that our waking psychic life is not continued in the dream, and that the dream instead wastes psychic activity upon a trifling subject matter. The opposite is true; what has occupied our minds during the day also dominates our dream thoughts, and we take pains to dream only of such matters as have given us food for thought during the day.

Perhaps the most obvious explanation for the fact that I dream about some indifferent impression of the day, while the impression which is justifiably stirring furnishes the occasion for dreaming, is that this again is a phenomenon of the dream-disfigurement, which we have above traced to a psychic power acting as a censor. The recollection of the monograph on the genus cyclamen is employed as though it were an allusion to the conversation with my friend, very much as mention of the friend in the dream of the deferred supper is represented by the allusion “smoked salmon.” The only question is, by what intermediate steps does the impression of the monograph come to assume the relation of an allusion to the conversation with the eye specialist, since such a relation is not immediately evident. In the example of the deferred supper, the relation is set forth at the outset; “smoked salmon,” as the favourite dish of the friend, belongs at once to the series of associations which the person of the friend would call up in the lady who is dreaming. In our new example we have two separated impressions, which seem at first glance to have nothing in common except that they occur on the same day. The monograph catches my attention in the forenoon; I take part in the conversation in the evening. The answer supplied by the analysis is as follows: Such relations between the two impressions do not at first exist, but are established subsequently between the presentation content of the one impression and the presentation content of the other.

I have recently emphasised the components in this relation in the course of recording the analysis. With the notion of the monograph on cyclamen I should probably associate the idea that cyclamen is my wife’s favourite flower only under some outside influence, and this is perhaps the further recollection of the bunch of flowers missed by Mrs. L. I do not believe that these underlying thoughts would have been sufficient to call forth a dream.

“There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave To tell us this,” as we read in Hamlet. But behold! I am reminded in the analysis that the name of the man who interrupted our conversation was Gärtner (Gardener), and that I found his wife in blooming health;[AS] I even remember now that one of my female patients, who bears the pretty name of Flora, was for a time the main subject of our conversation. It must have happened that I completed the connection between the two events of the day, the indifferent and the exciting one, by means of these links from the series of associations belonging to the idea of botany. Other relations are then established, that of cocaine, which can with perfect correctness form a go-between connecting the person of Dr. Koenigstein with the botanical monograph which I have written, and strengthen the fusion of the two series of associations into one, so that now a portion of the first experience may be used as an allusion to the second.

I am prepared to find this explanation attacked as arbitrary or artificial. What would have happened if Professor Gärtner and his blooming wife had not come up, and if the patient who was talked about had been called, not Flora, but Anna? The answer is easy, however. If these thought-relations had not been present, others would probably have been selected. It is so easy to establish relations of this sort, as the joking questions and conundrums with which we amuse ourselves daily suffice to show. The range of wit is unlimited. To go a step further: if it had been impossible to establish interrelations of sufficient abundance between the two impressions of the day, the dream would simply have resulted differently; another of the indifferent impressions of the day, such as come to us in multitudes and are forgotten, would have taken the place of the monograph in the dream, would have secured a connection with the content of the talk, and would have represented it in the dream. Since it was the impression of the monograph and no other that had this fate, this impression was probably the most suitable for the establishment of the connection. One need not be astonished, like Lessing’s Hänschen Schlau, because “it is the rich people of the world who possess the most money.”

Still the psychological process by which, according to our conception, the indifferent experience is substituted for the psychologically important one, seems odd to us and open to question. In a later chapter we shall undertake the task of making this seemingly incorrect operation more intelligible. We are here concerned only with consequences of this procedure, whose assumption we have been forced to make by the regularly recurring experiences of dream analysis. But the process seems to be that, in the course of those intermediate steps, a displacement—let us say of the psychic accent—has taken place, until ideas that are at first weakly charged with intensity, by taking over the charge from ideas which have a stronger initial intensity, reach a degree of strength, which enables them to force their way into consciousness. Such displacements do not at all surprise us when it is a question of the bestowal of affects or of the motor actions in general. The fact that the woman who has remained single transfers her affection to animals, that the bachelor becomes a passionate collector, that the soldier defends a scrap of coloured cloth, his flag, with his life-blood, that in a love affair a momentary clasping of hands brings bliss, or that in Othello a lost handkerchief causes a burst of rage—all these are examples of psychic displacement which seem unquestionable to us. But if, in the same manner and according to the same fundamental principles,

a decision is made as to what is to reach our consciousness and what is to be withheld from it, that is to say, what we are to think—this produces an impression of morbidity, and we call it an error of thought if it occurs in waking life. We may here anticipate the result of a discussion which will be undertaken later—namely, to the effect that the psychic process which we have recognised as dream displacement proves to be not a process morbidly disturbed, but a process differing from the normal merely in being of a more primitive nature.

We thus find in the fact that the dream content takes up remnants of trivial experiences a manifestation of dream disfigurement (by means of displacement), and we may recall that we have recognised this dream disfigurement as the work of a censor which controls the passage between two psychic instances. We accordingly expect that dream analysis will regularly reveal to us the genuine, significant source of the dream in the life of the day, the recollection of which has transferred its accent to some indifferent recollection. This conception brings us into complete opposition to Robert’s theory, which thus becomes valueless for us. The fact which Robert was trying to explain simply doesn’t exist; its assumption is based upon a misunderstanding, upon the failure to substitute the real meaning of the dream for its apparent content. Further objection may be made to Robert’s doctrine: If it were really the duty of the dream, by means of a special psychic activity, to rid our memory of the “slag” of the recollections of the day, our sleep would have to be more troubled and employed in a more strained effort than we may suppose it to be from our waking life. For the number of indifferent impressions received during the day, against which we should have to protect our memory, is obviously infinitely large; the night would not be long enough to accomplish the task. It is very much more probable that the forgetting of indifferent impressions takes place without any active interference on the part of our psychic powers.

Still something cautions us against taking leave of Robert’s idea without further consideration. We have left unexplained the fact that one of the indifferent day-impressions—one from the previous day indeed—regularly furnished a contribution to the dream-content. Relations between this impression and the real source of the dream do not always exist from the beginning; as we have seen, they are established only subsequently, in the course of the dream-work, as though in order to serve the purpose of the intended displacement. There must, therefore, be some necessity to form connections in this particular direction, of the recent, although indifferent impression; the latter must have special fitness for this purpose because of some property. Otherwise it would be just as easy for the dream thoughts to transfer their accent to some inessential member of their own series of associations.

The following experiences will lead us to an explanation. If a day has brought two or more experiences which are fitted to stimulate a dream, then the dream fuses the mention of both into a single whole; it obeys an impulse to fashion a whole out of them; for instance: One summer afternoon I entered a railroad compartment, in which I met two friends who were unknown to each other. One of them was an influential colleague, the other a member of a distinguished family, whose physician I was; I made the two gentlemen acquainted with each other; but during the long ride I was the go-between in the conversation, so that I had to treat a subject of conversation now with the one, now with the other. I asked my colleague to recommend a common friend who had just begun his medical practice. He answered that he was convinced of the young man’s thoroughness, but that his plain appearance would make his entrance into households of rank difficult. I answered: “That is just why he needs recommendation.” Soon afterwards I asked the other fellow-traveller about the health of his aunt—the mother of one of my patients—who was at the time prostrated by a serious illness. During the night after this journey I dreamt that the young friend, for whom I had asked assistance, was in a splendid salon, and was making a funeral oration to a select company with the air of a man of the world—the oration being upon the old lady (now dead for the purposes of the dream) who was the aunt of the second fellow-traveller. (I confess frankly that I had not been on good terms with this lady.) My dream had thus found connections between the two impressions of the day, and by means of them composed a unified situation.

In view of many similar experiences, I am driven to conclude that a kind of compulsion exists for the dream function, forcing it to bring together in the dream all the available sources of dream stimulation into a unified whole.[AT] In a subsequent chapter (on the dream function) we shall become acquainted with this impulse for putting together as a part of condensation another primary psychic process. I shall now discuss the question whether the source from which the dream originates, and to which our analysis leads, must always be a recent (and significant) event, or whether a subjective experience, that is to say, the recollection of a psychologically valuable experience—a chain of thought—can take the part of a dream stimulus. The answer, which results most unequivocally from numerous analyses, is to the following effect. The stimulus for the dream may be a subjective occurrence, which has been made recent, as it were, by the mental activity during the day. It will probably not be out of place here to give a synopsis of various conditions which may be recognised as sources of dreams. The source of a dream may be: (a) A recent and psychologically significant experience which is directly represented in the dream.[AU] (b) Several recent, significant experiences, which are united by the dream into a whole.[AV]

(c) One or more recent and significant experiences, which are represented in the dream by the mention of a contemporary but indifferent experience.[AW] (d) A subjective significant experience (a recollection, train of thought), which is regularly represented in the dream by the mention of a recent but indifferent impression.[AX] As may be seen, in dream interpretation the condition is firmly adhered to throughout that each component of the dream repeats a recent impression of the day. The element which is destined to representation in the dream may either belong to the presentations surrounding the actual dream stimulus itself—and, furthermore, either as an essential or an inessential element of the same—or it may originate in the neighbourhood of an indifferent impression, which, through associations more or less rich, has been brought into relation with the thoughts surrounding the dream stimulus. The apparent multiplicity of the conditions here is produced by the alternative according to whether displacement has or has not taken place, and we may note that this alternative serves to explain the contrasts of the dream just as readily as the ascending series from partially awake to fully awake brain cells in the medical theory of the dream (cf. p. 64).

Concerning this series, it is further notable that the element which is psychologically valuable, but not recent (a train of thought, a recollection) may be replaced, for the purposes of dream formation, by a recent, but psychologically indifferent, element, if only these two conditions be observed: 1. That the dream shall contain a reference to something which has been recently experienced; 2. That the dream stimulus shall remain a psychologically valuable train of thought. In a single case (a) both conditions are fulfilled by the same impression. If it be added that the same indifferent impressions which are used for the dream, as long as they are recent, lose this availability as soon as they become a day (or at most several days) older, the assumption must be made that the very freshness of an impression gives it a certain psychological value for dream formation, which is somewhat equivalent to the value of emotionally accentuated memories or trains of thought. We shall be able to see the basis of this value of recent impressions for dream formation only with the help of certain psychological considerations which will appear later.[AY]

Incidentally our attention is called to the fact that important changes in the material comprised by our ideas and our memory may be brought about unconsciously and at night. The injunction that one should sleep for a night upon any affair before making a final decision about it is obviously fully justified. But we see that at this point we have proceeded from the psychology of dreaming to that of sleep, a step for which there will often be occasion. Now there arises an objection threatening to invalidate the conclusions we have just reached. If indifferent impressions can get into the dream only in case they are recent, how does it happen that we find also in the dream content elements from earlier periods in our lives, which at the time when they were recent possessed, as Strümpell expresses it, no psychic value, which, therefore, ought to have been forgotten long ago, and which, therefore, are neither fresh nor psychologically significant?

This objection can be fully met if we rely upon the results furnished by psychoanalysis of neurotics. The solution is as follows: The process of displacement which substitutes indifferent material for that having psychic significance (for dreaming as well as for thinking) has already taken place in those earlier periods of life, and has since become fixed in the memory. Those elements which were originally indifferent are in fact no longer so, since they have acquired the value of psychologically significant material. That which has actually remained indifferent can never be reproduced in the dream.

It will be correct to suppose from the foregoing discussion that I maintain that there are no indifferent dream stimuli, and that, accordingly, there are no harmless dreams. This I believe to be the case, thoroughly and exclusively, allowance being made for the dreams of children and perhaps for short dream reactions to nocturnal sensations. Whatever one may dream, it is either manifestly recognisable as psychically significant or it is disfigured, and can be judged correctly only after a complete interpretation, when, as before, it may be recognised as possessing psychic significance. The dream never concerns itself with trifles; we do not allow ourselves to be disturbed in our sleep by matters of slight importance. Dreams which are apparently harmless turn out to be sinister if one takes pains to interpret them; if I may be permitted the expression, they all have “the mark of the beast.” As this is another point on which I may expect opposition, and as I am glad of an opportunity to show dream-disfigurement at work, I shall here subject a number of dreams from my collection to analysis. 1. An intelligent and refined young lady, who, however, in conduct, belongs to the class we call reserved, to the “still waters,” relates the following dream:—

_Her husband asks: “Should not the piano be tuned?” She answers: “It won’t pay; the hammers would have to be newly buffed too.”_ This repeats an actual event of the previous day. Her husband had asked such a question, and she had answered something similar. But what is the significance of her dreaming it? She tells of the piano, indeed, that it is a disgusting old box which has a bad tone; it is one of the things which her husband had before they were married,[AZ] &c., but the key to the true solution lies in the phrase: It won’t pay. This originated in a visit made the day before to a lady friend. Here she was asked to take off her coat, but she declined, saying, “It won’t pay. I must go in a moment.” At this point, I recall that during yesterday’s analysis she suddenly took hold of her coat, a button of which had opened. It is, therefore, as if she had said, “Please don’t look in this direction; it won’t pay.” Thus “box” develops into “chest,” or breast-box (“bust”), and the interpretation of the dream leads directly to a time in her bodily development when she was dissatisfied with her shape. It also leads to earlier periods, if we take into consideration “disgusting” and “bad tone,” and remember how often in allusions and in dreams the two small hemispheres of the feminine body take the place—as a substitute and as an antithesis—of the large ones.

II. I may interrupt this dream to insert a brief harmless dream of a young man. He dreamt that he was putting on his winter overcoat again, which was terrible. The occasion for this dream is apparently the cold weather, which has recently set in again. On more careful examination we note that the two short portions of the dream do not fit together well, for what is there “terrible” about wearing a heavy or thick coat in the cold? Unfortunately for the harmlessness of this dream, the first idea educed in analysis is the recollection that on the previous day a lady had secretly admitted to him that her last child owed its existence to the bursting of a condom. He now reconstructs his thoughts in accordance with this suggestion: A thin condom is dangerous, a thick one is bad. The condom is an “overcoat” (Überzieher), for it is put over something; Ueberzieher is also the name given in German to a thin overcoat. An experience like the one related by the lady would indeed be “terrible” for an unmarried man.—We may now return to our other harmless dreamer.

III. _She puts a candle into a candlestick; but the candle is broken, so that it does not stand straight. The girls at school say she is clumsy; the young lady replies that it is not her fault._ Here, too, there is an actual occasion for the dream; the day before she had actually put a candle into a candlestick; but this one was not broken. A transparent symbolism has been employed here. The candle is an object which excites the feminine genitals; its being broken, so that it does not stand straight, signifies impotence on the man’s part (“it is not her fault”). But does this young woman, carefully brought up, and a stranger to all obscenity, know of this application of the candle? She happens to be able to tell how she came by this information. While riding in a boat on the Rhine, another boat passes containing students who are singing or rather yelling, with great delight: “When the Queen of Sweden with closed shutters and the candles of Apollo....”

She does not hear or understand the last word. Her husband is asked to give her the required explanation. These verses are then replaced in the dream content by the harmless recollection of a command which she once executed clumsily at a girls’ boarding school, this occurring by means of the common features closed shutters. The connection between the theme of onanism and that of impotence is clear enough. “Apollo” in the latent dream content connects this dream with an earlier one in which the virgin Pallas figured. All this is obviously not harmless.

IV. Lest it may seem too easy a matter to draw conclusions from dreams concerning the dreamer’s real circumstances, I add another dream coming from the same person which likewise appears harmless. “I dreamt of doing something,” she relates, “_which I actually did during the day, that is to say, I filled a little trunk so full of hooks that I had difficulty in closing it. My dream was just like the actual occurrence._” Here the person relating the dream herself attaches chief importance to the correspondence between the dream and reality. All such criticisms upon the dream and remarks about it, although they have secured a place in waking thought, regularly belong to the latent dream content, as later examples will further demonstrate. We are told, then, that what the dream relates has actually taken place during the day. It would take us too far afield to tell how we reach the idea of using the English language to help us in the interpretation of this dream. Suffice it to say that it is again a question of a little box (cf. p. 130, the dream of the dead child in the box) which has been filled so full that nothing more can go into it. Nothing in the least sinister this time.

In all these “harmless” dreams the sexual factor as a motive for the exercise of the censor receives striking prominence. But this is a matter of primary importance, which we must postpone. (b) Infantile Experiences as the Source of Dreams

As the third of the peculiarities of the dream content, we have cited from all the authors (except Robert) the fact that impressions from the earliest times of our lives, which seem not to be at the disposal of the waking memory, may appear in the dream. It is, of course, difficult to judge how often or how seldom this occurs, because the respective elements of the dream are not recognised according to their origin after waking. The proof that we are dealing with childhood impressions must thus be reached objectively, and the conditions necessary for this happen to coincide only in rare instances. The story is told by A. Maury, as being particularly conclusive, of a man who decided to visit his birthplace after twenty years’ absence. During the night before his departure, he dreams that he is in an altogether strange district, and that he there meets a strange man with whom he has a conversation. Having afterward returned to his home, he was able to convince himself that this strange district really existed in the neighbourhood of his home town, and the strange man in the dream turned out to be a friend of his dead father who lived there. Doubtless, a conclusive proof that he had seen both the man and the district in his childhood. The dream, moreover, is to be interpreted as a dream of impatience, like that of the girl who carries her ticket for the concert of the evening in her pocket (p. 110), of the child whose father had promised him an excursion to the Hameau, and the like. The motives explaining why just this impression of childhood is reproduced for the dreamer cannot, of course, be discovered without an analysis.

One of the attendants at my lectures, who boasted that his dreams were very rarely subject to disfigurement, told me that he had sometime before in a dream seen his former tutor in bed with his nurse, who had been in the household until he was eleven years old. The location of this scene does not occur to him in the dream. As he was much interested, he told the dream to his elder brother, who laughingly confirmed its reality. The brother said he remembered the affair very well, for he was at the time six years old. The lovers were in the habit of making him, the elder boy, drunk with beer, whenever circumstances were favourable for nocturnal relations. The smaller child, at that time three years old—our dreamer—who slept in the same room as the nurse, was not considered an obstacle.

In still another case it may be definitely ascertained, without the aid of dream interpretation, that the dream contains elements from childhood; that is, if it be a so-called perennial dream, which being first dreamt in childhood, later appears again and again after adult age has been reached. I may add a few examples of this sort to those already familiar, although I have never made the acquaintance of such a perennial dream in my own case. A physician in the thirties tells me that a yellow lion, about which he can give the most detailed information, has often appeared in his dream-life from the earliest period of his childhood to the present day. This lion, known to him from his dreams, was one day discovered in natura as a long-forgotten object made of porcelain, and on that occasion the young man learned from his mother that this object had been his favourite toy in early childhood, a fact which he himself could no longer remember.

If we now turn from the manifest dream content to the dream thoughts which are revealed only upon analysis, the co-operation of childhood experiences may be found to exist even in dreams whose content would not have led us to suspect anything of the sort. I owe a particularly delightful and instructive example of such a dream to my honoured colleague of the “yellow lion.” After reading Nansen’s account of his polar expedition, he dreamt that he was giving the bold explorer electrical treatment in an ice field for an ischæmia of which the latter complained! In the analysis of this dream, he remembered a story of his childhood, without which the dream remains entirely unintelligible. When he was a child, three or four years old, he was listening attentively to a conversation of older people about trips of exploration, and presently asked papa whether exploration was a severe illness. He had apparently confused “trips” with “rips,” and the ridicule of his brothers and sisters prevented his ever forgetting the humiliating experience.

The case is quite similar when, in the analysis of the dream of the monograph on the genus cyclamen, I happen upon the recollection, retained from childhood, that my father allowed me to destroy a book embellished with coloured plates when I was a little boy five years old. It will perhaps be doubted whether this recollection actually took part in the composition of the dream content, and it will be intimated that the process of analysis has subsequently established the connection. But the abundance and intricacy of the ties of association vouch for the truth of my explanation: cyclamen—favourite flower—favourite dish—artichoke; to pick to pieces like an artichoke, leaf by leaf (a phrase which at that time rang in our ears à propos of the dividing up of the Chinese Empire)—herbarium-bookworm, whose favourite dish is books. I may state further that the final meaning of the dream, which I have not given here, has the most intimate connection with the content of the childhood scene. In another series of dreams we learn from analysis that the wish itself, which has given rise to the dream, and whose fulfilment the dream turns out to be, has originated in childhood—until one is astonished to find that the child with all its impulses lives on in the dream.

I shall now continue the interpretation of a dream which has already proved instructive—I refer to the dream in which friend R. is my uncle (p. 116). We have carried its interpretation far enough for the wish-motive, of being appointed professor, to assert itself tangibly; and we have explained the affection displayed in the dream for friend R. as a fiction of opposition and spite against the aspersion of the two colleagues, who appear in the dream thoughts. The dream was my own; I may, therefore, continue the analysis by stating that my feelings were not quite satisfied by the solution reached. I know that my opinion of these colleagues who are so badly treated in the dream thoughts would have been expressed in quite different terms in waking life; the potency of the wish not to share their fate in the matter of appointment seemed to me too slight to account for the discrepancy between my estimate in the dream and that of waking. If my desire to be addressed by a new title proves so strong it gives proof of a morbid ambition, which I did not know to exist in me, and which I believe is far from my thoughts. I do not know how others, who think they know me, would judge me, for perhaps I have really been ambitious; but if this be true, my ambition has long since transferred itself to other objects than the title and rank of assistant-professor.

Whence, then, the ambition which the dream has ascribed to me? Here I remember a story which I heard often in my childhood, that at my birth an old peasant’s wife had prophesied to my happy mother (I was her first-born) that she had given to the world a great man. Such prophecies must occur very frequently; there are so many mothers happy in expectation, and so many old peasant wives whose influence on earth has waned, and who have therefore turned their eyes towards the future. The prophetess was not likely to suffer for it either. Might my hunger for greatness have originated from this source? But here I recollect an impression from the later years of my childhood, which would serve still better as an explanation. It was of an evening at an inn on the Prater,[BA] where my parents were accustomed to take me when I was eleven or twelve years old. We noticed a man who went from table to table and improvised verses upon any subject that was given to him. I was sent to bring the poet to our table and he showed himself thankful for the message. Before asking for his subject he threw off a few rhymes about me, and declared it probable, if he could trust his inspiration, that I would

one day become a “minister.” I can still distinctly remember the impression made by this second prophecy. It was at the time of the election for the municipal ministry; my father had recently brought home pictures of those elected to the ministry—Herbst, Giskra, Unger, Berger, and others—and we had illuminated them in honour of these gentlemen. There were even some Jews among them; every industrious Jewish schoolboy therefore had the making of a minister in him. Even the fact that until shortly before my enrolment in the University I wanted to study jurisprudence, and changed my plans only at the last moment, must be connected with the impressions of that time. A minister’s career is under no circumstances open to a medical man. And now for my dream! I begin to see that it transplants me from the sombre present to the hopeful time of the municipal election, and fulfils my wish of that time to the fullest extent. In treating my two estimable and learned colleagues so badly, because they are Jews, the one as a simpleton and the other as a criminal—in doing this I act as though I were the minister of education, I put myself in his place. What thorough revenge I take upon his Excellency! He refuses to appoint me professor extraordinarius, and in return

I put myself in his place in the dream.

Another case establishes the fact that although the wish which actuates the dream is a present one, it nevertheless draws great intensification from childhood memories. I refer to a series of dreams which are based upon the longing to go to Rome. I suppose I shall still have to satisfy this longing by means of dreams for a long time to come, because, at the time of year which is at my disposal for travelling, a stay at Rome is to be avoided on account of considerations of health.[BB] Thus I once dreamt of seeing the Tiber and the bridge of St. Angelo from the window of a railroad compartment; then the train starts, and it occurs to me that I have never entered the city at all. The view which I saw in the dream was modelled after an engraving which I had noticed in passing the day before in the parlour of one of my patients. On another occasion some one is leading me upon a hill and showing me Rome half enveloped in mist, and so far in the distance that I am astonished at the distinctness of the view. The content of this dream is too rich to be fully reported here. The motive, “to see the promised land from afar,” is easily recognisable in it.

The city is Lübeck, which I first saw in the mist; the original of the hill is the Gleichenberg. In a third dream, I am at last in Rome, as the dream tells me. To my disappointment, the scenery which I see is anything but urban. _A little river with black water, on one side of which are black rocks, on the other large white flowers. I notice a certain Mr. Zucker_ (with whom I am superficially acquainted), and make up my mind to ask him to show me the way into the city. It is apparent that I am trying in vain to see a city in the dream which I have never seen in waking life. If I resolve the landscape into its elements, the white flowers indicate Ravenna, which is known to me, and which, for a time at least, deprived Rome of its leading place as capital of Italy. In the swamps around Ravenna we had seen the most beautiful water-lilies in the middle of black pools of water; the dream makes them grow on meadows, like the narcissi of our own Aussee, because at Ravenna it was such tedious work to fetch them out of the water. The black rock, so close to the water, vividly recalls the valley of the Tepl at Karlsbad. “Karlsbad”

now enables me to account for the peculiar circumstance that I ask Mr. Zucker the way. In the material of which the dream is composed appear also two of those amusing Jewish anecdotes, which conceal so much profound and often bitter worldly wisdom, and which we are so fond of quoting in our conversation and letters. One is the story of the “constitution,” and tells how a poor Jew sneaks into the express train for Karlsbad without a ticket, how he is caught and is treated more and more unkindly at each call for tickets by the conductor, and how he tells a friend, whom he meets at one of the stations during his miserable journey, and who asks him where he is travelling: “To Karlsbad, if my constitution will stand it.” Associated with this in memory is another story about a Jew who is ignorant of French, and who has express instructions to ask in Paris for the way to the Rue Richelieu. Paris was for many years the object of my own longing, and I took the great satisfaction with which I first set foot on the pavement in Paris as a warrant that I should also attain the fulfilment of other wishes. Asking for the way is again a direct allusion to Rome, for of course all

roads lead to Rome. Moreover, the name Zucker (English, sugar) again points to Karlsbad, whither we send all persons afflicted with the constitutional disease, diabetes (Zuckerkrankheit, sugar-disease). The occasion for this dream was the proposal of my Berlin friend that we should meet in Prague at Easter. A further allusion to sugar and diabetes was to be found in the matters which I had to talk over with him.

A fourth dream, occurring shortly after the last one mentioned, brings me back to Rome. I see a street-corner before me and am astonished to see so many German placards posted there. On the day before I had written my friend with prophetic vision that Prague would probably not be a comfortable resort for German travellers. The dream, therefore, simultaneously expressed the wish to meet him at Rome instead of at the Bohemian city, and a desire, which probably originated during my student days, that the German language might be accorded more tolerance in Prague. Besides I must have understood the Czech language in the first three years of my childhood, because I was born in a small village of Moravia, inhabited by Slavs. A Czech nursery rhyme, which I heard in my seventeenth year, became, without effort on my part, so imprinted upon my memory that I can repeat it to this day, although I have no idea of its meaning. There is then no lack in these dreams also of manifold relations to impressions from the first years of my life.

It was during my last journey to Italy, which, among other places, took me past Lake Trasimenus, that I at last found what re-enforcement my longing for the Eternal City had received from the impressions of my youth; this was after I had seen the Tiber, and had turned back with painful emotions when I was within eighty kilometers of Rome. I was just broaching the plan of travelling to Naples via Rome the next year, when this sentence, which I must have read in one of our classical authors, occurred to me: “It is a question which of the two paced up and down in his room the more impatiently after he had made the plan to go to Rome—Assistant-Headmaster Winckelman or the great general Hannibal.” I myself had walked in Hannibal’s footsteps; like him I was destined never to see Rome, and he too had gone to Campania after the whole world had expected him in Rome. Hannibal, with whom I had reached this point of similarity, had been my favourite hero during my years at the Gymnasium; like so many boys of my age, I bestowed my sympathies during the Punic war, not on the Romans, but on the Carthaginians. Then, when I came finally to understand the consequences of belonging to an alien race, and was forced by the anti-semitic sentiment among my class-mates to assume a definite attitude, the figure of the semitic commander assumed still greater proportions in my eyes.

Hannibal and Rome symbolised for me as a youth the antithesis between the tenaciousness of the Jews and the organisation of the Catholic Church. The significance for our emotional life which the anti-semitic movement has since assumed helped to fix the thoughts and impressions of that earlier time. Thus the wish to get to Rome has become the cover and symbol in my dream-life for several warmly cherished wishes, for the realisation of which one might work with the perseverance and single-mindedness of the Punic general, and whose fulfilment sometimes seems as little favoured by fortune as the wish of Hannibal’s life to enter Rome.

And now for the first time I happen upon the youthful experience which, even to-day, still manifests its power in all these emotions and dreams. I may have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and to reveal to me his views about the things of this world in his conversation. In this way he once told me, in order to show into how much better times I had been born than he, the following: “While I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday on a street in the village where you were born; I was handsomely dressed and wore a new fur cap. Along comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud with one blow and shouts: “Jew, get off the sidewalk.” “And what did you do?” “I went into the street and picked up the cap,” was the calm answer. That did not seem heroic on the part of the big strong man, who was leading me, a little fellow, by the hand. I contrasted this situation, which did not please me, with another more in harmony with my feelings—the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar[BC] Barka made his boy swear at the domestic altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Since that time Hannibal has had a place in my phantasies.”

I think I can follow my enthusiasm for the Carthaginian general still further back into my childhood, so that possibly we have here the transference of an already formed emotional relation to a new vehicle. One of the first books which fell into my childish hands, after I learned to read, was Thiers’ Konsulat und Kaiserreich (Consulship and Empire); I remember I pasted on the flat backs of my wooden soldiers little labels with the names of the Imperial marshals, and that at that time Masséna (as a Jew Menasse) was already my avowed favourite. Napoleon himself follows Hannibal in crossing the Alps. And perhaps the development of this martial ideal can be traced still further back into my childhood, to the wish which the now friendly, now hostile, intercourse during my first three years with a boy a year older than myself must have actuated in the weaker of the two playmates. The deeper one goes in the analysis of dreams, the more often one is put on the track of childish experiences which play the part of dream sources in the latent dream content.

We have learned (p. 16) that the dream very rarely reproduces experiences in such a manner that they constitute the sole manifest dream content, unabridged and unchanged. Still some authentic examples showing this process have been reported, and I can add some new ones which again refer to infantile scenes. In the case of one of my patients, a dream once gave a barely disfigured reproduction of a sexual occurrence, which was immediately recognised as an accurate recollection. The memory of it indeed had never been lost in waking life, but it had been greatly obscured, and its revivification was a result of the preceding work of analysis. The dreamer had at the age of twelve visited a bed-ridden schoolmate, who had exposed himself by a movement in bed, probably only by chance. At the sight of the genitals, he was seized by a kind of compulsion, exposed himself and took hold of the member belonging to the other boy, who, however, looked at him with surprise and indignation, whereupon he became embarrassed and let go. A dream repeated this scene twenty-three years later, with all the details of the emotions occurring in it, changing it, however, in this respect, that the dreamer took the passive part instead of the active one, while the person of the schoolmate was replaced by one belonging to the present.

As a rule, of course, a childhood scene is represented in the manifest dream content only by an allusion, and must be extricated from the dream by means of interpretation. The citation of examples of this kind cannot have a very convincing effect, because every guarantee that they are experiences of childhood is lacking; if they belong to an earlier time of life, they are no longer recognised by our memory. Justification for the conclusion that such childish experiences generally exist in dreams is based upon a great number of factors which become apparent in psychoanalytical work, and which seem reliable enough when regarded as a whole. But when, for the purposes of dream interpretation, such references of dreams to childish experiences are torn from their context, they will perhaps not make much impression, especially since I never give all the material upon which the interpretation depends. However, I shall not let this prevent me from giving some examples.

I. The following dream is from another female patient: _She is in a large room, in which there are all kinds of machines, perhaps, as she imagines, an orthopædic institute. She hears that I have no time, and that she must take the treatment along with five others. But she resists, and is unwilling to lie down on the bed—or whatever it is—which is intended for her. She stands in a corner and waits for me to say “It is not true.” The others, meanwhile, laugh at her, saying it is all foolishness on her part. At the same time it is as if she were called upon to make many small squares._

The first part of the content of this dream is an allusion to the treatment and a transference on me. The second contains an allusion to a childhood scene; the two portions are connected by the mention of the bed. The orthopædic institute refers to one of my talks in which I compared the treatment as to its duration and nature with an orthopædic treatment. At the beginning of the treatment I had to tell her that for the present I had little time for her, but that later on I would devote a whole hour to her daily. This aroused in her the old sensitiveness, which is the chief characteristic of children who are to be hysterical. Their desire for love is insatiable. My patient was the youngest of six brothers and sisters (hence, “with five others”), and as such the favourite of her father, but in spite of that she seems to have found that her beloved father devoted too little time and attention to her. The detail of her waiting for me to say “It is not true,” has the following explanation: A tailor’s apprentice had brought her a dress, and she had given him the money for it. Then she asked her husband whether she would have to pay the money again if the boy were to lose it. To tease her, her husband answered “Yes” (the teasing in the dream), and she asked again and again, and waited for him to say “It is not true.” The thought of the latent dream-content may now be construed as follows:

Will she have to pay me the double amount if I devote twice the time to her? a thought which is stingy or filthy. (The uncleanliness of childhood is often replaced in the dream by greediness for money; the word filthy here supplies the bridge.) If all that about waiting until I should say, &c., serves as a dream circumlocution for the word “filthy,” the standing-in-a-corner and not lying down-on-the-bed are in keeping; for these two features are component parts of a scene of childhood, in which she had soiled her bed, and for punishment was put into a corner, with the warning that papa would not love her any more, and her brothers and sisters laughed at her, &c. The little squares refer to her young niece, who has shown her the arithmetical trick of writing figures in nine squares, I believe it is, in such a way that upon being added together in any direction they make fifteen.

II. Here is the dream of a man: _He sees two boys tussling with each other, and they are cooper’s boys, as he concludes from the implements which are lying about; one of the boys has thrown the other down, the prostrate one wears ear-rings with blue stones. He hurries after the wrongdoer with lifted cane, in order to chastise him. The latter takes refuge with a woman who is standing against a wooden fence, as though it were his mother. She is the wife of a day labourer, and she turns her back to the man who is dreaming. At last she faces about and stares at him with a horrible look, so that he runs away in fright; in her eyes the red flesh of the lower lid seems to stand out._

The dream has made abundant use of trivial occurrences of the previous day. The day before he actually saw two boys on the street, one of whom threw the other one down. When he hurried up to them in order to settle the quarrel, both of them took flight. Coopers’ boys: this is explained only by a subsequent dream, in the analysis of which he used the expression, “To knock the bottom out of the barrel.” Ear-rings with blue stones, according to his observation, are chiefly worn by prostitutes. Furthermore, a familiar doggerel rhyme about two boys comes up: “The other boy, his name was Mary” (that is, he was a girl). The woman standing up: after the scene with the two boys, he took a walk on the bank of the Danube, and took advantage of being alone to urinate against a wooden fence. A little later during his walk, a decently dressed elderly lady smiled at him very pleasantly, and wanted to hand him her card with her address.

Since in the dream the woman stood as he had while urinating, it is a question of a woman urinating, and this explains the “horrible look,” and the prominence of the red flesh, which can only refer to the genitals which gap in squatting. He had seen genitals in his childhood, and they had appeared in later recollection as “proud flesh” and as “wound.” The dream unites two occasions upon which, as a young boy, the dreamer had had opportunity to see the genitals of little girls, in throwing one down, and while another was urinating; and, as is shown by another association, he had kept in memory a punishment or threat of his father’s, called forth by the sexual curiosity which the boy manifested on these occasions. III. A great mass of childish memories, which have been hastily united in a phantasy, is to be found behind the following dream of a young lady.

_She goes out in trepidation, in order to do some shopping. On the Graben[BD] she sinks to her knees as though broken down. Many people collect around her, especially the hackney-coach drivers; but no one helps her to get up. She makes many unavailing attempts; finally she must have succeeded, for she is put into a hackney-coach which is to take her home. A large, heavily laden basket (something like a market-basket) is thrown after her through the window._

This is the same woman who is always harassed in her dreams as she was harassed when a child. The first situation of the dream is apparently taken from seeing a horse that had fallen, just as “broken down” points to horse-racing. She was a rider in her early years, still earlier she was probably also a horse. Her first childish memory of the seventeen-year-old son of the porter, who, being seized on the street by an epileptic fit, was brought home in a coach, is connected with the idea of falling down. Of this, of course, she has only heard, but the idea of epileptic fits and of falling down has obtained great power over her phantasies, and has later influenced the form of her own hysterical attacks. When a person of the female sex dreams of falling, this almost regularly has a sexual significance; she becomes a “fallen woman,” and for the purpose of the dream under consideration this interpretation is probably the least doubtful, for she falls on the Graben, the place in Vienna which is known as the concourse of prostitutes. The market-basket admits of more than one interpretation; in the sense of refusal (German, Korb = basket—snub, refusal), she remembers the many snubs which she first gave her suitors, and which she later, as she

thinks, received herself. Here belongs also the detail that no one will help her up, which she herself interprets as being disdained. Furthermore, the market-basket recalls phantasies that have already appeared in the course of analysis, in which she imagines she has married far beneath her station, and now goes marketing herself. But lastly the market-basket might be interpreted as the mark of a servant. This suggests further childhood memories—of a cook who was sent away because she stole; she, too, sank to her knees and begged for mercy. The dreamer was at that time twelve years old. Then there is a recollection of a chamber-maid, who was dismissed because she had an affair with the coachman of the household, who, incidentally, married her afterwards. This recollection, therefore, gives us a clue to the coachman in the dream (who do not, in contrast with what is actually the case, take the part of the fallen woman). But there still remains to be explained the throwing of the basket, and the throwing of it through the window. This takes her to the transference of baggage on the railroad, to the Fensterln,[BE] in the country, and to minor impressions received at a country resort, of a gentleman throwing some blue plums to a lady through her window, and of the dreamer’s little

sister being frightened because a cretin who was passing looked in at the window. And now from behind this there emerges an obscure recollection, from her tenth year, of a nurse who made love at the country resort with a servant of the household, of which the child had opportunity to see something, and who was “fired” (thrown out) (in the dream the opposite: “thrown into”), a story which we had also approached by several other paths. The baggage, moreover, or the trunk of a servant, is disparagingly referred to in Vienna as “seven plums.” “Pack up your seven plums and get out.”

My collection, of course, contains an abundant supply of such patients’ dreams, whose analysis leads to childish impressions that are remembered obscurely or not at all, and that often date back to the first three years of life. But it is a mistake to draw conclusions from them which are to apply to the dream in general; we are in every case dealing with neurotic, particularly with hysterical persons; and the part played by childhood scenes in these dreams might be conditioned by the nature of the neurosis, and not by that of the dream. However, I am struck quite as often in the course of interpreting my own dreams, which I do not do on account of obvious symptoms of disease, by the fact that I unsuspectingly come upon a scene of childhood in the latent dream content, and that a whole series of dreams suddenly falls into line with conclusions drawn from childish experiences. I have already given examples of this, and shall give still more upon various occasions. Perhaps I cannot close the whole chapter more fittingly than by citing several of my own dreams, in which recent happenings and long-forgotten experiences of childhood appear together as sources of dreams.

I. After I have been travelling and have gone to bed hungry and tired, the great necessities of life begin to assert their claims in sleep, and I dream as follows: _I go into a kitchen to order some pastry. Here three women are standing, one of whom is the hostess, and is turning something in her hand as though she were making dumplings. She answers that I must wait until she has finished_ (not distinctly as a speech). _I become impatient and go away insulted. I put on an overcoat; but the first one which I try is too long. I take it off, and am somewhat astonished to find that it has fur trimming. A second one has sewn into it a long strip of cloth with Turkish drawings. A stranger with a long face and a short pointed beard comes up and prevents me from putting it on, declaring that it belongs to him. I now show him that it is embroidered all over in Turkish fashion. He asks, “What business are the Turkish (drawings, strips of cloth ...) of yours?” But we then become quite friendly with each other._

In the analysis of this dream there occurs to me quite unexpectedly the novel which I read, that is to say, which I began with the end of the first volume, when I was perhaps thirteen years old. I have never known the name of the novel or of its author, but the conclusion remains vividly in my memory. The hero succumbs to insanity, and continually calls the names of the three women that have signified the greatest good and ill fortune for him during life. Pélagie is one of these names. I still do not know what to make of this name in the analysis. À propos of the three women there now come to the surface the three Parcæ who spin the fate of man, and I know that one of the three women, the hostess in the dream, is the mother who gives life, and who, moreover, as in my case, gives the first nourishment to the living creature. Love and hunger meet at the mother’s breast. A young man—so runs an anecdote—who became a great admirer of womanly beauty, once when the conversation turned upon a beautiful wet nurse who had nourished him as a child, expressed himself to the effect that he was sorry that he had not taken better advantage of his opportunity at

the time. I am in the habit of using the anecdote to illustrate the factor of subsequence in the mechanism of psychoneuroses.... One of the Parcæ, then, is rubbing the palms of her hands together as though she were making dumplings. A strange occupation for one of the Fates, which is urgently in need of an explanation! This is now found in another and earlier childhood memory. When I was six years old, and was receiving my first instructions from my mother, I was asked to believe that we are made of earth, and that therefore we must return to earth. But this did not suit me, and I doubted her teaching. Thereupon my mother rubbed the palms of her hands together—just as in making dumplings, except that there was no dough between them—and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis which were thus rubbed off as a proof that it is earth of which we are made. My astonishment at this demonstration ad oculos was without limit, and I acquiesced in the idea which I was later to hear expressed in words: “Thou owest nature a death.”[BF] Thus the women are really Parcæ whom I visit in the kitchen, as I have done so often in my childhood years when I was hungry, and when my mother used to

order me to wait until lunch was ready. And now for the dumplings! At least one of my teachers at the University, the very one to whom I am indebted for my histological knowledge (epidermis), might be reminded by the name Knoedl (German, Knoedel = dumplings) of a person whom he had to prosecute for committing a plagiarism of his writings. To commit plagiarism, to appropriate anything one can get, even though it belongs to another, obviously leads to the second part of the dream, in which I am treated like a certain overcoat thief, who for a time plied his trade in the auditoria. I wrote down the expression plagiarism—without any reason—because it presented itself to me, and now I perceive that it must belong to the latent dream-content, because it will serve as a bridge between different parts of the manifest dream-content. The chain of associations—Pélagie—plagiarism—plagiostomi[BG] (sharks)—fish bladder—connects the old novel with the affair of Knoedl and with the overcoats (German, Überzieher = thing drawn over—overcoat or condom), which obviously refer to an object belonging to the technique of sexual life.[BH] This, it is true, is a very forced and irrational connection, but it is nevertheless one which I could not establish in waking life if it had not been already established by the activity of the dream.

Indeed, as though nothing were sacred for this impulse to force connections, the beloved name, Bruecke (bridge of words, see above), now serves to remind me of the institution in which I spent my happiest hours as a student, quite without any cares (“So you will ever find more pleasure at the breasts of knowledge without measure”), in the most complete contrast to the urgent desires which vex me while I dream. And finally there comes to the surface the recollection of another dear teacher, whose name again sounds like something to eat (Fleischl—German, Fleisch = meat—like Knoedl), and of a pathetic scene, in which the scales of epidermis play a part (mother—hostess), and insanity (the novel), and a remedy from the Latin kitchen which numbs the sensation of hunger, to wit, cocaine.

In this manner I could follow the intricate trains of thought still further, and could fully explain the part of the dream which is missing in the analysis; but I must refrain, because the personal sacrifices which it would require are too great. I shall merely take up one of the threads, which will serve to lead us directly to the dream thoughts that lie at the bottom of the confusion. The stranger, with the long face and pointed beard, who wants to prevent me from putting on the overcoat, has the features of a tradesman at Spalato, of whom my wife made ample purchases of Turkish cloths. His name was Popovic̓, a suspicious name, which, by the way, has given the humorist Stettenheim a chance to make a significant remark: “He told me his name, and blushingly shook my hand.”[BI] Moreover, there is the same abuse of names as above with Pélagie, Knoedl, Bruecke, Fleischl. That such playing with names is childish nonsense can be asserted without fear of contradiction; if I indulge in it, this indulgence amounts to an act of retribution, for my own name has numberless times fallen a victim to such weak-minded attempts at humour. Goethe once remarked how sensitive a man is about his name with which, as with his skin, he feels that he has grown up, whereupon Herder composed the following on his name:

“Thou who art born of gods, of Goths, or of Kot (mud)— Thy _god_like images, too, are dust.” I perceive that this digression about the abuse of names was only intended to prepare for this complaint. But let us stop here.... The purchase at Spalato reminds me of another one at Cattaro, where I was too cautious, and missed an opportunity for making some desirable acquisitions. (Missing an opportunity at the breast of the nurse, see above.) Another dream thought, occasioned in the dreamer by the sensation of hunger, is as follows: _One should let nothing which one can have escape, even if a little wrong is done; no opportunity should be missed, life is so short, death inevitable._ Owing to the fact that this also has a sexual significance, and that desire is unwilling to stop at a wrong, this philosophy of carpe diem must fear the censor and must hide behind a dream. This now makes articulate counter-thoughts of all kinds, recollections of a time when spiritual food alone was sufficient for the dreamer; it suggests repressions of every kind, and even threats of disgusting sexual punishments. II. A second dream requires a longer preliminary statement:

I have taken a car to the West Station in order to begin a vacation journey to the Aussee, and I reach the station in time for the train to Ischl, which leaves earlier. Here I see Count Thun, who is again going to see the Emperor at Ischl. In spite of the rain, he has come in an open carriage, has passed out at once through the door for local trains, and has motioned back the gate-keeper, who does not know him and who wants to take his ticket, with a little wave of his hand. After the train to Ischl has left, I am told to leave the platform and go back into the hot waiting-room; but with difficulty I secure permission to remain. I pass the time in watching the people who make use of bribes to secure a compartment; I make up my mind to insist on my rights—that is, to demand the same privilege. Meanwhile I sing something to myself, which I afterwards recognise to be the aria from Figaro’s Wedding: “If my lord Count wishes to try a dance, Try a dance, Let him but say so, I’ll play him a tune.” (Possibly another person would not have recognised the song.)

During the whole afternoon I have been in an insolent, combative mood; I have spoken roughly to the waiter and the cabman, I hope without hurting their feelings; now all kinds of bold and revolutionary thoughts come into my head, of a kind suited to the words of Figaro and the comedy of Beaumarchais, which I had seen at the Comédie Française. The speech about great men who had taken the trouble to be born; the aristocratic prerogative, which Count Almaviva wants to apply in the case of Susan; the jokes which our malicious journalists of the Opposition make upon the name of Count Thun (German, thun = doing) by calling him Count Do-Nothing. I really do not envy him; he has now a difficult mission with the Emperor, and I am the real Count Do-Nothing, for I am taking a vacation. With this, all kinds of cheerful plans for the vacation. A gentleman now arrives who is known to me as a representative of the Government at the medical examinations, and who has won the flattering nickname of “Governmental bed-fellow” by his activities in this capacity. By insisting on his official station he secures half of a first-class compartment, and I hear one guard say to the other: “Where are we going to put the gentleman with the first-class half-compartment?” A pretty favouritism; I am paying for a whole first-class compartment. Now I get a whole compartment for myself, but not in a through coach, so that there is no toilet at my disposal during the night. My complaints to the guard are without result; I get even by proposing that at least there be a hole made in the floor of this compartment for the possible needs of the travellers. I really awake at a quarter of three in the morning with a desire to urinate, having had the following dream:

Crowd of people, meeting of students.... _A certain Count (Thun or Taafe) is making a speech. Upon being asked to say something about the Germans, he declares with contemptuous mien that their favourite flower is Colt’s-foot, and then puts something like a torn leaf, really the crumpled skeleton of a leaf, into his buttonhole. I make a start, I make a start then,[BJ] but I am surprised at this idea of mine._ Then more indistinctly: _It seems as though it were the vestibule (Aula), the exits are jammed, as though it were necessary to flee. I make my way through a suite of handsomely furnished rooms, apparently governmental chambers, with furniture of a colour which is between brown and violet, and at last I come to a passage where a housekeeper, an elderly, fat woman (Frauenzimmer), is seated. I try to avoid talking to her, but apparently she thinks I have a right to pass because she asks whether she shall accompany me with the lamp. I signify to her to tell her that she is to remain standing on the stairs, and in this I appear to myself very clever, for avoiding being watched at last. I am downstairs now, and I find a narrow, steep way along which I go._

Again indistinctly.... _It is as if my second task were to get away out of the city, as my earlier was to get out of the house. I am riding in a one-horse carriage, and tell the driver to take me to a railway station. “I cannot ride with you on the tracks,” I say, after he has made the objection that I have tired him out. Here it seems as though I had already driven with him along a course which is ordinarily traversed on the railroad. The stations are crowded; I consider whether I shall go to Krems or to Znaim, but I think that the court will be there, and I decide in favour of Graz or something of the sort. Now I am seated in the coach, which is something like a street-car, and I have in my buttonhole a long braided thing, on which are violet-brown violets of stiff material, which attracts the attention of many people. Here the scene breaks off._

_I am again in front of the railroad station, but I am with a elderly gentleman. I invent a scheme for remaining unrecognised, but I also see this plan already carried out. Thinking and experiencing are here, as it were, the same thing. He pretends to be blind, at least in one eye, and I hold a male urinal in front of him (which we have had to buy in the city or did buy), I am thus a sick attendant, and have to give him the urinal because he is blind. If the conductor sees us in this position, he must pass us by without drawing attention. At the same time the attitude of the person mentioned is visually observed._ Then I awake with a desire to urinate.

The whole dream seems a sort of phantasy, which takes the dreamer back to the revolutionary year 1848, the memory of which had been renewed by the anniversary year 1898, as well as by a little excursion to Wachau, where I had become acquainted with Emmersdorf, a town which I wrongly supposed to be the resting-place of the student leader Fischof, to whom several features of the dream content might refer. The thought associations then lead me to England, to the house of my brother, who was accustomed jokingly to tell his wife of “Fifty years ago,” according to the title of a poem by Lord Tennyson, whereupon the children were in the habit of correcting: “Fifteen years ago.” This phantasy, however, which subtilely attaches itself to the thoughts which the sight of the Count Thun has given rise to, is only like the façade of Italian churches which is superimposed without being organically connected with the building behind it; unlike these façades, however, the phantasy is filled with gaps and confused, and the parts from within break through at many places. The first situation of the dream is concocted from several scenes, into which I am able to separate it. The arrogant attitude of the Count in the dream is copied from a scene at the Gymnasium which took

place in my fifteenth year. We had contrived a conspiracy against an unpopular and ignorant teacher, the leading spirit in which was a schoolmate who seems to have taken Henry VIII. of England as his model. It fell to me to carry out the coup-d’état, and a discussion of the importance of the Danube (German Donau) for Austria (Wachau!) was the occasion upon which matters came to open indignation. A fellow-conspirator was the only aristocratic schoolmate whom we had—he was called the “giraffe” on account of his conspicuous longitudinal development—and he stood just like the Count in the dream, while he was being reprimanded by the tyrant of the school, the Professor of the German language. The explanation of the favourite flower and the putting into the buttonhole of something which again must have been a flower (which recalls the orchids, which I had brought to a lady friend on the same day, and besides that the rose of Jericho) prominently recalls the scene in Shakespeare’s historical plays which opens the civil wars of the Red and the White Roses; the mention of Henry VIII. has opened the way to this reminiscence. It is not very far now from roses to red and white carnations. Meanwhile two little rhymes, the one German, the other Spanish, insinuate themselves into the analysis:

“Roses, tulips, carnations, all flowers fade,” and “Isabelita, no llores que se marchitan las flores.” The Spanish is taken from Figaro. Here in Vienna white carnations have become the insignia of the Anti-Semites, the red ones of the Social Democrats. Behind this is the recollection of an anti-Semitic challenge during a railway trip in beautiful Saxony (Anglo-Saxon). The third scene contributing to the formation of the first situation in the dream takes place in my early student life. There was a discussion in the German students’ club about the relation of philosophy to the general sciences. A green youth, full of the materialistic doctrine, I thrust myself forward and defended a very one-sided view. Thereupon a sagacious older school-fellow, who has since shown his capacity for leading men and organising the masses, and who, moreover, bears a name belonging to the animal kingdom, arose and called us down thoroughly; he too, he said, had herded swine in his youth, and had come back repentant to the house of his father. I started up (as in the dream), became very uncivil, and answered that since I knew he had herded swine, I was not surprised at the tone of his discourse. (In the dream I am surprised at my national German sentiment.) There was great commotion; and the demand came from

all sides that I take back what I had said, but I remained steadfast. The man who had been insulted was too sensible to take the advice, which was given him, to send a challenge, and let the matter drop.

The remaining elements of this scene of the dream are of more remote origin. What is the meaning of the Count’s proclaiming the colt’s foot? Here I must consult my train of associations. Colt’s-foot (German: Huflattich)—lattice—lettuce—salad-dog (the dog that grudges others what he cannot eat himself). Here plenty of opprobrious epithets may be discerned: Gir-affe (German Affe = monkey, ape), pig, sow, dog; I might even find means to arrive at donkey, on a detour by way of a name, and thus again at contempt for an academic teacher. Furthermore I translate colt’s-foot (Huflattich)—I do not know how correctly—by “pisse-en-lit.” I got this idea from Zola’s Germinal, in which children are ordered to bring salad of this kind. The dog—chien—has a name sounding like the major function (chier, as pisser stands for the minor one). Now we shall soon have before us the indecent in all three of its categories; for in the same Germinal, which has a lot to do with the future revolution there is described a very peculiar contest, depending upon the production of gaseous excretions, called flatus.[BK] And now I must remark how the way to this flatus has been for a long while preparing, beginning with the flowers, and proceeding to the Spanish rhyme of Isabelita to Ferdinand and Isabella, and, by way of Henry VIII., to English history at the time of the expedition of the Armada against England, after the victorious termination of which the English struck a medal with the inscription: “Afflavit et dissipati sunt,” for the storm had scattered the Spanish fleet. I had thought of taking this phrase for the title of a chapter on “Therapeutics”—to be meant half jokingly—if I should ever have occasion to give a detailed account of my conception and treatment of hysteria.

I cannot give such a detailed solution of the second scene of the dream, out of regard for the censor. For at this point I put myself in the place of a certain eminent gentleman of that revolutionary period, who also had an adventure with an eagle, who is said to have suffered from incontinence of the bowels, and the like; and I believe I should not be justified at this point in passing the censor, although it was an aulic councillor (aula, consilarius aulicus) who told me the greater part of these stories. The allusion to the suite of rooms in the dream relates to the private car of his Excellency, into which I had opportunity to look for a moment; but it signifies, as so often in dreams, a woman (Frauenzimmer; German Zimmer—room is appended to Frauen—woman, in order to imply a slight amount of contempt).[BL] In the person of the housekeeper I give scant recognition to an intelligent elderly lady for the entertainment and the many good stories which I have enjoyed at her house.... The feature of the lamp goes back to Grillparzer, who notes a charming experience of a similar nature, which he afterwards made use of in “Hero and Leander” (the billows of the ocean and of love—the Armada and the storm).[BM]

I must also forgo detailed analysis of the two remaining portions of the dream; I shall select only those elements which lead to two childhood scenes, for the sake of which alone I have taken up the dream. The reader will guess that it is sexual matter which forces me to this suppression; but he need not be content with this explanation. Many things which must be treated as secrets in the presence of others are not treated as such with one’s self, and here it is not a question of considerations inducing me to hide the solution, but of motives of the inner censor concealing the real content of the dream from myself. I may say, then, that the analysis shows these three portions of the dream to be impertinent boasting, the exuberance of an absurd grandiose idea which has long since been suppressed in my waking life, which, however, dares show itself in the manifest dream content by one or two projections (I seem clever to myself), and which makes the arrogant mood of the evening before the dream perfectly intelligible. It is boasting, indeed, in all departments; thus the mention of Graz refers to the phrase: What is the price of Graz? which we are fond of using when we feel over-supplied with money. Whoever will recall

Master Rabelais’s unexcelled description of the “Life and Deeds of Gargantua and his Son Pantagruel,” will be able to supply the boastful content intimated in the first portion of the dream. The following belongs to the two childhood scenes which have been promised. I had bought a new trunk for this journey, whose colour, a brownish violet, appears in the dream several times. (Violet-brown violets made of stiff material, next to a thing which is called “girl-catcher”—the furniture in the governmental chambers). That something new attracts people’s attention is a well-known belief of children. Now I have been told the following story of my childhood; I remember hearing the story rather than the occurrence itself. I am told that at the age of two I still occasionally wetted my bed, that I was often reproached on this subject, and that I consoled my father by promising to buy him a beautiful new red bed in N. (the nearest large city). (Hence the detail inserted in the dream that we bought the urinal in the city or had to buy it; one must keep one’s promises. Attention is further called to the identity of the male urinal and the feminine trunk, box). All the megalomania of the child is contained in this promise. The significance of the dream of difficulty in

urinating in the case of the child has been already considered in the interpretation of an earlier dream (cf. the dream on p. 145).

Now there was another domestic occurrence, when I was seven or eight years old, which I remember very well. One evening, before going to bed I had disregarded the dictates of discretion not to satisfy my wants in the bedroom of my parents and in their presence, and in his reprimand for this delinquency my father made the remark: “That boy will never amount to anything.” It must have terribly mortified my ambition, for allusions to this scene return again and again in my dreams, and are regularly coupled with enumerations of my accomplishments and successes, as though I wanted to say: “You see, I have amounted to something after all.” Now this childhood scene furnishes the elements for the last image of the dream, in which of course, the rôles are interchanged for the sake of revenge. The elderly man, obviously my father, for the blindness in one eye signifies his glaucoma[BN] on one side is now urinating before me as I once urinated before him. In glaucoma I refer to cocaine, which stood my father in good stead in his operation, as though I had thereby fulfilled my promises. Besides that I make sport of him; since he is blind I must hold the urinal in front of him, and I gloat over allusions to my discoveries in the theory of hysteria, of which I am so proud.[BO]

If the two childhood scenes of urinating are otherwise closely connected with the desire for greatness, their rehabilitation on the trip to the Aussee was further favoured by the accidental circumstance that my compartment had no water-closet, and that I had to expect embarrassment on the ride as actually happened in the morning. I awoke with the sensation of a bodily need. I suppose one might be inclined to credit these sensations with being the actual stimulus of the dream; I should, however, prefer a different conception—namely, that it was the dream thoughts which gave rise to the desire to urinate. It is quite unusual for me to be disturbed in sleep by any need, at least at the time of this awakening, a quarter of four in the morning. I may forestall further objection by remarking that I have hardly ever felt a desire to urinate after awakening early on other journeys made under more comfortable circumstances. Moreover, I can leave this point undecided without hurting my argument.

Since I have learned, further, from experience in dream analysis that there always remain important trains of thought proceeding from dreams whose interpretation at first seems complete (because the sources of the dream and the actuation of the wish are easily demonstrable), trains of thought reaching back into earliest childhood, I have been forced to ask myself whether this feature does not constitute an essential condition of dreaming. If I were to generalise this thesis, a connection with what has been recently experienced would form a part of the manifest content of every dream and a connection with what has been most remotely experienced, of its latent content; and I can actually show in the analysis of hysteria that in a true sense these remote experiences have remained recent up to the present time. But this conjecture seems still very difficult to prove; I shall probably have to return to the part played by the earliest childhood experiences, in another connection (Chapter VII.).

Of the three peculiarities of dream memory considered at the beginning, one—the preference for the unimportant in the dream content—has been satisfactorily explained by tracing it back to dream disfigurement. We have been able to establish the existence of the other two—the selection of recent and of infantile material—but we have found it impossible to explain them by the motive of dream. Let us keep in mind these two characteristics, which still remain to be explained or evaluated; a place for them will have to be found elsewhere, either in the psychology of the sleeping state, or in the discussion of the structure of the psychic apparatus which we shall undertake later, after we have learned that the inner nature of the apparatus may be observed through dream interpretation as though through a window. Just here I may emphasize another result of the last few dream analyses. The dream often appears ambiguous; not only may several wish-fulfilments, as the examples show, be united in it, but one meaning or one wish-fulfilment may also conceal another, until at the bottom one comes upon the fulfilment of a wish from the earliest period of childhood; and here too, it may be questioned whether “often” in this sentence may not more correctly be replaced by “regularly.” (c) Somatic Sources of Dreams

If the attempt be made to interest the cultured layman in the problems of dreaming, and if, with this end in view, he be asked the question from what source dreams originate according to his opinion, it is generally found that the person thus interrogated thinks himself in assured possession of a part of the solution. He immediately thinks of the influence which a disturbed or impeded digestion (“Dreams come from the stomach”), accidental bodily position, and little occurrences during sleep, exercise upon the formation of dreams, and he seems not to suspect that even after the consideration of all these factors there still remains something unexplained.

We have explained at length in the introductory chapter (p. 16), what a rôle in the formation of dreams the scientific literature credits to the account of somatic exciting sources, so that we need here only recall the results of this investigation. We have seen that three kinds of somatic exciting sources are distinguished, objective sensory stimuli which proceed from external objects, the inner states of excitation of the sensory organs having only a subjective basis, and the bodily stimuli which originate internally; and we have noticed the inclination on the part of the authors to force the psychic sources of the dream into the background or to disregard them altogether in favour of these somatic sources of stimulation (p. 32).

In testing the claims which are made on behalf of these classes of somatic sources of stimulation, we have discovered that the significance of the objective stimuli of the sensory organs—whether accidental stimuli during sleep or those stimuli which cannot be excluded from our dormant psychic life—has been definitely established by numerous observations and is confirmed by experiments (p. 18); we have seen that the part played by subjective sensory stimuli appears to be demonstrated by the return of hypnogogic sensory images in dreams, and that although the referring of these dream images and ideas, in the broadest sense, to internal bodily stimulation is not demonstrable in every detail, it can be supported by the well-known influence which an exciting state of the digestive, urinary, and sexual organs exercise upon the contents of our dreams. “Nerve stimulus” and “bodily stimulus,” then, would be the somatic sources of the dream—that is, the only sources whatever of the dream, according to several authors. But we have already found a number of doubts, which seem to attack not so much the correctness of the somatic theory of stimulation as its adequacy.

However certain all the representatives of this theory may have felt about the actual facts on which it is based—especially in case of the accidental and external nerve stimuli, which may be recognised in the content of the dream without any trouble—nevertheless none of them has been able to avoid the admission that the abundant ideal content of dreams does not admit of explanation by external nerve-stimuli alone. Miss Mary Whiton Calkins has tested her own dreams and those of another person for a period of six weeks with this idea in mind, and has found only from 13·2 per cent. to 6·7 per cent. in which the element of external sensory perception was demonstrable; only two cases in the collection could be referred to organic sensations. Statistics here confirm what a hasty glance at our own experience might have led us to suspect. The decision has been made repeatedly to distinguish the “dream of nerve stimulus” from the other forms of the dream as a well-established sub-species. Spitta divided dreams into dreams of nerve stimulus and association dreams. But the solution clearly remained unsatisfactory as long as the link between the somatic sources of dreams and their ideal content could not be demonstrated.

Besides the first objection, of the inadequate frequency of external exciting sources, there arises as a second objection the inadequate explanation of dreams offered by the introduction of this sort of dream sources. The representatives of the theory accordingly must explain two things, in the first place, why the external stimulus in the dream is never recognised according to its real nature, but is regularly mistaken for something else (cf. the alarm-clock dreams, p. 22), and secondly, why the reaction of the receiving mind to this misrecognised stimulus should result so indeterminately and changefully. As an answer to these questions, we have heard from Strümpell that the mind, as a result of its being turned away from the outer world during sleep, is not capable of giving correct interpretation to the objective sensory stimulus, but is forced to form illusions on the basis of the indefinite incitements from many directions. As expressed in his own words (p. 108):

“As soon as a sensation, a sensational complex, a feeling, or a psychic process in general, arises in the mind during sleep from an outer or inner nerve-stimulus, and is perceived by the mind, this process calls up sensory images, that is to say, earlier perceptions, either unembellished or with the psychic values belonging to them, from the range of waking experiences, of which the mind has remained in possession. It seems to collect about itself, as it were, a greater or less number of such images, from which the impression which originates from the nerve-stimulus receives its psychic value. It is usually said here, as the idiom does of waking thought, that the mind interprets impressions of nerve-stimuli in sleep. The result of this interpretation is the so-called nerve-stimulus dream—that is to say, a dream whose composition is conditioned by the fact that a nerve-stimulus brings about its effect in psychic life according to the laws of reproduction.”

The opinion of Wundt agrees in all essentials with this theory. He says that the ideas in the dream are probably the result, for the most part, of sensory stimuli, especially of those of general sensation, and are therefore mostly phantastic illusions—probably memory presentations which are only partly pure, and which have been raised to hallucinations. Strümpell has found an excellent simile (p. 84). It is as “if the ten fingers of a person ignorant of music should stray over the keyboard of an instrument”—to illustrate the relation between dream content and dream stimuli, which follows from this theory. The implication is that the dream does not appear as a psychic phenomenon, originating from psychic motives, but as the result of a physiological stimulus, which is expressed in psychic symptomology, because the apparatus which is affected by the stimulus is not capable of any other expression. Upon a similar assumption is based, for example, the explanation of compulsive ideas which Meynert tried to give by means of the famous simile of the dial on which individual figures are prominent because they are in more marked relief.

However popular this theory of somatic dream stimuli may have become, and however seductive it may seem, it is nevertheless easy to show the weak point in it. Every somatic dream stimulus which provokes the psychic apparatus to interpretation through the formation of illusions, is capable of giving rise to an incalculable number of such attempts at interpretation; it can thus attain representation in the dream content by means of an extraordinary number of different ideas. But the theory of Strümpell and Wundt is incapable of instancing any motive which has control over the relation between the external stimulus and the dream idea which has been selected to interpret it, and therefore of explaining the “peculiar choice” which the stimuli “often enough make in the course of their reproductive activity” (Lipps, Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, p. 170). Other objections may be directed against the fundamental assumption of the whole theory of illusions—the assumption that during sleep the mind is not in a condition to recognise the real nature of the objective sensory stimuli. The old physiologist Burdach proves to us that the mind is quite capable even during sleep of interpreting correctly the sensory impressions which reach it, and of reacting in accordance with the correct interpretation. He establishes this by showing that it is possible to exempt certain impressions which seem important to the individuals, from the neglect of sleeping (nurse and child), and that one is more surely awakened by one’s own name than by an indifferent auditory impression, all of which presupposes, of course, that the mind distinguishes among sensations, even in sleep (Chapter I., p.

41). Burdach infers from these observations that it is not an incapability of interpreting sensory stimuli in the sleeping state which must be assumed, but a lack of interest in them. The same arguments which Burdach used in 1830, later reappear unchanged in the works of Lipps in the year 1883, where they are employed for the purpose of attacking the theory of somatic stimuli. According to this the mind seems to be like the sleeper in the anecdote, who, upon being asked, “Are you asleep?” answers “No,” and upon being again addressed with the words, “Then lend me ten florins,” takes refuge in the excuse: “I am asleep.”

The inadequacy of the theory of somatic dream stimuli may also be demonstrated in another manner. Observations show that I am not urged to dream by external stimulations, even if these stimulations appear in the dream as soon as, and in case that, I dream. In response to the tactile or pressure stimulus which I get while sleeping, various reactions are at my disposal. I can overlook it and discover only upon awakening that my leg has been uncovered or my arm under pressure; pathology shows the most numerous examples where powerfully acting sensory and motor stimuli of different sorts remain without effect during sleep. I can perceive a sensation during sleep through and through sleep, as it were, which happens as a rule with painful stimuli, but without weaving the pain into the texture of the dream; thirdly, I can awaken on account of the stimulus in order to obviate it. Only as a fourth possible reaction, I may be impelled to dream by a nerve stimulus; but the other possibilities are realised at least as often as that of dream formation. This could not be the case if the motive for dreaming did not lie outside of the somatic sources of dreams.

Taking proper account of the defect in the explanation of dreams by somatic stimuli which has just been shown, other authors—Scherner, who was joined by the philosopher Volkelt—have tried to determine more exactly the psychic activities which cause the variegated dream images to arise from the somatic stimuli, and have thus transferred the essential nature of dreams back to the province of the mind, and to that of psychic activity. Scherner not only gave a poetically appreciative, glowing and vivid description of the psychic peculiarities which develop in the course of dream formation; he also thought he had guessed the principle according to which the mind proceeds with the stimuli that are at its disposal. The dream activity, according to Scherner—after phantasy has been freed from the shackles imposed upon it during the day, and has been given free rein—strives to represent symbolically the nature of the organ from which the stimulus proceeds. Thus we have a kind of dream-book as a guide for the interpretation of dreams, by means of which bodily sensations, the conditions of the organs and of the stimuli may be inferred from dream images. “Thus the image of a cat expresses an angry discontented mood, the image of a light-coloured bit of smooth pastry the nudity of the body. The human body as a whole