188

V

THE MATERIAL AND SOURCES OF DREAMS

AFTER coming to realise from the analy-
sis of Irma’s injection that the dream is the fulfil-
ment of a wish, our interest was next directed to ascertaining
whether we had thus discovered a universal characteristic of
the dream, and for the time being we put aside every other
question which may have been aroused in the course of that
interpretation. Now that we have reached the goal upon one
of these paths, we may turn back and select a new starting-
point for our excursions among the problems of the dream,
even though we may lose sight for a time of the theme of
wish-fulfilment, which has been as yet by no means exhaustively
treated.
Now that we are able, by applying our process of inter-
pretation, to discover a latent dream content which far sur-
passes the manifest dream content in point of significance, we
are impelled to take up the individual dream problems afresh,
in order to see whether the riddles and contradictions which
seemed, when we had only the manifest content, beyond our
reach may not be solved for us satisfactorily.

The statements of the authors concerning the relation of
the dream to waking life, as well as concerning the source of
the dream material, have been given at length in the intro-
ductory chapter. We may recall that there are three pecu-
liarities of recollection in the dreams, which have been often
remarked but never explained:

1. That the dream distinctly prefers impressions of the
few days preceding (Robert,⁵⁵ Strümpell,⁵⁶ Hildebrandt,³⁵ also
Weed-Hallam ³³).

2. That it makes its selection according to principles other
than those of our waking memory, in that it recalls not what
is essential and important, but what is subordinate and dis-
regarded (cf. p. 13).

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THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

3. That it has at its disposal the earliest impressions of
our childhood, and brings to light details from this period of
life which again seem trivial to us, and which in waking life
were considered long ago forgotten.^*

These peculiarities in the selection of the dream material
have of course been observed by the authors in connection
with the manifest dream content.

(a) Recent and Indifferent Impressions in the Dream

If I now consult my own experience concerning the source
of the elements which appear in the dream, I must at once
express the opinion that some reference to the experiences of
the day which has most recently passed is to be found in every
dream. Whatever dream I take up, whether my own or
another’s, this experience is always re-affirmed. Knowing
this fact, I can usually begin the work of interpretation by
trying to learn the experience of the previous day which has
stimulated the dream; for many cases, indeed, this is the
quickest way. In the case of the two dreams which I have
subjected to close analysis in the preceding chapter (of Irma’s
injection, and of my uncle with the yellow beard) the reference
to the previous day is so obvious that it needs no further
elucidation. But in order to show that this reference may be
regularly demonstrated, I shall examine a portion of my own
dream chronicle. I shall report the dreams only so far as is
necessary for the discovery of the dream stimulus in question.

1. I make a visit at a house where I am admitted only with
difficulty, &c., and meanwhile I keep a woman waiting for me.
Source.—A conversation in the evening with a female
relative to the effect that she would have to wait for some aid
which she demanded until, &c.

2. I have written a monograph about a certain (obscure)
species of plant.
Source.—I have seen in the show-
window of a book store a
monograph upon the genus cyclamen.

^*It is clear that the conception of Robert, that the dream is intended to
rid our memory of the useless impressions which it has received during the
day, is no longer tenable, if indifferent memories of childhood appear in the
dream with some degree of frequency. The conclusion would have to be
drawn that the dream ordinarily performs very inadequately the duty which
is prescribed for it.

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

3. I see two women on the street, mother and daughter, the
latter of whom is my patient.
Source.—A female patient who is under treatment has told
me what difficulties her mother puts in the way of her continu-
ing the treatment.
4. At the book store of S. and R. I subscribe to a periodical
which costs 20 florins annually.
Source.—During the day my wife has reminded me that I
still owe her 20 florins of her weekly allowance.
5. I receive a communication, in which I am treated as a
member, from the Social Democratic Committee.
Source.—I have received communications simultaneously from
the Liberal Committee on Elections and from the president of
the Humanitarian Society, of which I am really a member.
6. A man on a steep rock in the middle of the ocean, after
the manner of Boecklin.
Source.—Dreyfus on Devil’s Island; at the same time news
from my relatives in England, &c.
The question might be raised, whether the dream is in-
variably 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 im-
pression 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.^*

^*As mentioned in the first chapter, p. 67, H. Swoboda applies broadly
to the psychic activity the biological intervals of twenty-three and twenty-
eight days discovered by W. Fliess, and lays especial emphasis upon the fact
that these periods are determinant for the appearance of the dream elements

141

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

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,

in dreams. There would be no material change in dream interpretation if
this could be proven, but it would result in a new source for the origin of
the dream material. I have recently undertaken some examination of my
own dreams in order to test the applicability of the “Period Theory” to the
dream material, and I have selected for this purpose especially striking
elements of the dream content, whose origin could be definitely ascertained:–

I.—Dream from October 1–2, 1910

(Fragment) … Somewhere in Italy. Three daughters show me small
costly objects, as if in an antiquity shop. At the same time they sit down
on my lap. Of one of the pieces I remark: “Why, you got this from me.”
I also see distinctly a small profile mask with the angular features of
Savonarola.

When have I last seen a picture of Savonarola? According to my travel-
ling diary, I was in Florence on the fourth and fifth of September, and while
there thought of showing my travelling companion the plaster medallion of
the features of the fanatical monk in the Piazza Signoria, the same place
where he met his death by burning. I believe that I called his attention to
it at 3 A.M. To be sure, from this impression, until its return in the dream,
there was an interval of twenty-seven and one days—a “feminine period,”
according to Fliess. But, unfortunately for the demonstrative force of this
example, I must add that on the very day of the dream I was visited (the
first time after my return) by the able but melancholy-looking colleague
whom I had already years before nicknamed “Rabbi Savonarola.” He
brought me a patient who had met with an accident on the Pottebba rail-
road, on which I had myself travelled eight days before, and my thoughts
were thus turned to my last Italian journey. The appearance in the dream
content of the striking element of Savonarola is explained by the visit of
my colleague on the day of the dream; the twenty-eight day interval had no
significance in its origin.

II.—Dream from October 10–11

I am again studying chemistry in the University laboratory. Court
Councillor L. invites me to come to another place, and walks before me in
the corridor carrying in front of him in his uplifted hand a lamp or some
other instrument, and assuming a peculiar attitude, his head stretched for-
ward. We then come to an open space … (rest forgotten).

In this dream content, the most striking part is the manner in which
Court Councillor L. carries the lamp (or lupe) in front of him, his gaze
directed into the distance. I have not seen L. for many years, but I now
know that he is only a substitute for another greater person—for Archimedes
near the Arethusa fountain in Syracuse, who stands there exactly like L.
in the dream, holding the burning mirror and gazing at the besieging army

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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

of the Romans. When had I first (and last) seen this monument? Accord-
ing to my notes, it was on the seventeenth day of September, in the evening,
and from this date to the dream there really passed 13 and 10, equals
23, days—according to Fliess, a “masculine period.”
But I regret to say that here, too, this connection seems somewhat less
inevitable when we enter into the interpretation of this dream. The dream
was occasioned by the information, received on the day of the dream, that
the lecture-room in the clinic in which I was invited to deliver my lectures
had been changed to some other place. I took it for granted that the new
room was very inconveniently situated, and said to myself, it is as bad as not
having any lecture-room at my disposal. My thoughts must have then
taken me back to the time when I first became a docent, when I really had
no lecture-room, and when, in my efforts to get one, I met with little en-
couragement from the very influential gentlemen councillors and professors.
In my distress at that time, I appealed to L., who then had the title of dean,
and whom I considered kindly disposed. He promised to help me, but that
was all I ever heard from him. In the dream he is the Archimedes, who
gives me the πῆστοω and leads me into the other room. That neither the
desire for revenge nor the consciousness of one’s own importance is absent
in this dream will be readily divined by those familiar with dream inter-
pretation. I must conclude, however, that without this motive for the
dream, Archimedes would hardly have got into the dream that night. I
am not certain whether the strong and still recent impression of the statue
in Syracuse did not also come to the surface at a different interval of time.

III.—Dream from October 2–3, 1910.

(Fragment) . . . Something about Professor Oser, who himself prepared
the menu for me, which served to restore me to great peace of mind (rest
forgotten).

The dream was a reaction to the digestive disturbances of this day, which
made me consider asking one of my colleagues to arrange a diet for me.
That in the dream I selected for this purpose Professor Oser, who had died
in the summer, is based on the recent death (October 1) of another university
teacher, whom I highly revered. But when did Oser die, and when did I
hear of his death? According to the newspaper notice, he died on the
22nd of August, but as I was at the time in Holland, whither my Vienna
newspapers were regularly sent me, I must have read the obituary notice
on the 24th or 25th of August. This interval no longer corresponds to any
period. It takes in 7 and 30 and 2, equals 39, days, or perhaps 38 days. I
cannot recall having spoken or thought of Oser during this interval.
Such intervals as were not available for the “period theory” without
further elaboration, were shown from my dreams to be far more frequent
than the regular ones. As maintained in the text, the only thing constantly
found is the relation to an impression of the day of the dream itself.

143

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

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 re-
proach 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

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

since the introduc-
tion 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 intro-
duction of cocaine had been brought together on one case.

I now proceed to think of the time when I was last re-
minded 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 pro-
perties 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

145

higher classes together in order to have them inspect and
clean the herbarium. Small worms had been found-
worms. 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 com-
posites. 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 col-
league 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 mono-

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

graphs, 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.^*
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

^*Cf. my essay, “Ueber Deckerinnerungen,” in the Monatschrift für
Psychiatrie und Neurologie, 1899.

147

and industrious student ;” in both cases, then : “ I can afford
to do that.” But I may dispense with the further inter-
pretation 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 con-
verges 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

148

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 im-
pression 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 re-
lations 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 ; ^* I even remember now that one of

^*Ger., blühend.

149

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 inter-
relations 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 repre-
sented 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
Hanschen 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 pro-
 

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

cedure, 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 inter-
mediate 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 momen-
tary 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 funda-
mental 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 dis-
cussion 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’s⁵⁵
theory, which thus becomes valueless for us. The fact which
Robert was trying to explain simply doesn’t exist; its assump-
 

151

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

tion 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 re-
collections 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 unex-
plained 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 estab-
lished only subsequently, in the course of the dream-work,
as though in order to serve the purpose of the intended dis-
placement. 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 col-
league, 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

152

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

in the conversation, so that I had to treat a subject of con
versation 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 con
vinced 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 recom
mendation.” Soon afterwards I asked the other fellow
traveller—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 im
pressions 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.^* 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

^*The tendency of the dream function to fuse everything of interest
which is present into simultaneous treatment has already been noticed by
several authors, for instance, by Delage,¹⁵ p. 41, Delbœuf,¹⁶ Rapprochement
Forcé, p. 236.

153

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.^*
(b) Several recent, significant experiences, which are united
by the dream into a whole.^†
(c) One or more recent and significant experiences, which
are represented in the dream by the mention of a contem-
porary but indifferent experience.^‡
(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.^§

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 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

^*The dream of Irma’s injection; the dream of the friend who is my
uncle.

^†The dream of the funeral oration of the young physician.

^‡The dream of the botanical monograph.

^§The dreams of my patients during analysis are mostly of this kind.

154

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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 im-
pression. 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.^*

Incidentally our attention is called to the fact that im-
portant 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 pro-
ceeded 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 in-
different 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

^* Cf. Chap. VII. upon “Transference.”

155

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,^* &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,

^*Substitution of the opposite, as will become clear to us after inter-
pretation.

156

therefore, as if she had said, “Please don’t look in this direc-
tion; 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” (Ueberzieher), 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

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THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

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 con-
clusions from dreams concerning the dreamer’s real circum-
stances, I add another dream coming from the same person
which likewise appears harmless. “I dreamt of doing some-
thing,” she relates, “which I actually did during the day, that
is to say, I filled a little trunk so full of books that I had difficulty
in closing it. My dream was just like the actual occurrence.”
Here the person relating the dream herself attaches chief im-
portance 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, re-
gularly 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 pro-
minence. 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

158

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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,⁴⁸ 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 dis-
trict in his childhood. The dream, moreover, is to be inter-
preted 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 ex-
cursion 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 re-
lations. 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.

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THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

In still another case it may be definitely ascertain-
ed, without
the aid of dream interpretation, that the dream contains
elements from childhood; that is, if it be a so-called peren-
nial
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 peren-
nial dream
in my own case. A physician in the thirties tells me that a
yellow lion, about which he can give the most detailed in-
formation, 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 discov-
ered in
natura as a long-forgotten object made of porce-
lain, 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 ex-
plorer 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 un-
intelligible. When he was a child,
three or four years old, he was listening atten-
tively to a con-
versation of older people about trips of exploration, and
presently asked papa whether explora-
tion 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
recollec-
tion, retained from childhood, that my father allowed
me to destroy a book embell-
ished with coloured plates when I
was a little boy five years old. It will perhaps be doubted
whether this recollec-
tion actually took part in the composition

160

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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 arti-
choke, 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 child-
hood—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 interpreta-
tion far enough for the wish-motive, of being appointed pro-
fessor, 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 col-
leagues, 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 appoint-
ment 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

161

to me? Here I rem-
ember a story which I heard often in my
childhood, that at my birth an old peasant’s wife had pro-
phesied 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 ex-
pectation, 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,^*
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

^* The Prater is the principal drive of Vienna. (Transl.)

162

I take upon his Excellency! He refuses to appoint me pro
fessor 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
a 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.^*
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

^* I have long since learned that it only requires a little courage to fulfil
even such unattainable wishes,

163

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 com-
posed 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 conversa-
tion 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 oc-
casion 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 men-
tioned, 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 comfort-
able 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

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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 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 im-
patiently 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 pro-
portions 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 signi-
ficance for our emotional life which the anti-semitic move-
ment
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

165

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 up-
on 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^*
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 re-
member 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

^*In the first edition there was printed here the name Hasdrubal, a con-
fusing error, the explanation of which I have given in my Psychopathologie
des Alltagslebens.

166

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 repro-
duces 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 occur-
rence, 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 revi-
fication was a result of the preceding work of analysis. The
dreamer had at the age of twelve visited a bed-ridden school-
mate, who had exposed himself by a movement in bed, pro-
bably 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 school-mate 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 con-
vincing effect, because every guarantee that they are experi-
ences 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

167

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

when, for the purposes of dream interpretation, such re-
ferences 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 con-
nected 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

168

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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 ex-
pression, “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

169

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

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 squat-
ting. 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 follow-
ing dream of a young lady.

She goes out in trepidation, in order to do some shopping.
On the Graben ^* 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 un-
availing 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 in-
fluenced the form of her own hysterical attacks. When a

^*A street in Vienna.

170

person of the female sex dreams of falling, this almost re-
gularly has a sexual significance; she becomes a “fallen
woman,” and for the purpose of the dream under considera-
tion 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,^*
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

^*Fensterln is the practice, now falling into disuse, found in rural dis-
tricts of the German Schwarzwald, of lovers wooing at the windows of their
sweethearts, bringing ladders with them, and becoming so intimate that they
practically enjoy a system of trial marriages. The reputation of the young
woman never suffers on account of fensterln, unless she becomes intimate
with too many suitors. (Translator.)

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THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

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 im-
pressions 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 con-
ditioned 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 child-
hood 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

172

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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

173

death.” ^* 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 ^†
(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.^‡ 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 recollec-
tion of another dear teacher, whose name again sounds like
^*

^*Both the emotions which belong to these childish scenes—astonishment
and resignation to the inevitable—had appeared in a dream shortly before,
which was the first thing that brought back the memory of this childhood
experience.

^†I do not elaborate plagiostomi purposely ; they recall an occasion of
angry disgrace before the same teacher.

^‡Cf. Maury’s dream about kilo-
lotto, p. 50.

174

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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 Popović, 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.”^* 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 godlike 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

^*Popo=backside in German nursery language.

175

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 state-
ment :

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.

176

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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 nick-
name 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 Taaffe) 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 some
thing like a torn leaf, really the crumpled skeleton of a leaf, into
his buttonhole. I make a start, I make a start then,^* 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

* This repetition has insinuated itself into the text of the dream appa-
rently through my absent-
mindedness, and I allow it to remain because the
analysis shows that it has its significance.

177

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 some-
thing 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 atten-
tion. 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 ac-
quainted 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

178

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 develop-
ment—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 his-
torical 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 car-
nations have become the insignia of the Anti-Semites, the
red ones of the Social Democrats. Behind this is the recollec-
tion of an anti-Semitic challenge during a railway trip in
beautiful Saxony (Anglo-Saxon). The third scene contribut-
ing to the formation of the first situation in the dream takes

179

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), 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 sound-
ing 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.^* And now I must remark

^* Not in Germinal, but in La Terre—a mistake of which I became aware
only in the analysis. I may call attention also to the identity of the letters
in Huflattich and Flatus.

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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 termina-
tion of which the English struck a medal with the in-
scription : “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).^* 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).^†

I must also forgo detailed analysis of the two remaining
portions of the dream ; I shall select only those elements

^* Translator’s note.

^† In his significant work (“Phantasie und Mythos,” Jahrbuch für Psycho-
analyse, Bd. ii., 1910), H. Silberer has endeavoured to show from this part
of the dream that the dreamwork is able to reproduce not only the latent
dream thoughts, but also the psychic processes in the dream formation
(“Das functionale Phänomen”).

181

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 pro-
jections (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 inti-
mated 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 megalo-
mania of the child is contained in this promise. The signi-
ficance of the dream of difficulty in urinating in the case of the

182

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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 inter-
changed for the sake of revenge. The elderly man, obviously
my father, for the blindness in one eye signifies his glaucoma ^*
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.^†

^* Another interpretation: He is one-eyed like Odin, the father of the
gods . . . Odin’s consolation. The consolation in the childish scene, that I
will buy him a new bed.

^† I here add some material for interpretation. Holding the urinal
recalls the story of a peasant who tries one glass after another at the opticians,
but still cannot read (peasant-
catcher, like girl-
catcher in a portion of the
dream). The treatment among the peasants¹⁾ of the father who has become
weak-
minded in Zola’s La Terre. The pathetic atonement that in his last
days the father soils his bed like a child ; hence, also, I am his sick-
attendant
in the dream. Thinking and experiencing are here, as it were ; the same
thing recalls a highly revolutionary closet drama by Oscar Panizza, in which
the Godhead is treated quite contemptuously, as though he were a paralytic
old man. There occurs a passage : “Will and deed are the same thing with
him, and he must be prevented by his archangel, a kind of Ganymede, from
scolding and swearing, because these curses would immediately be fulfilled.”
Making plans is a reproach against my father, dating from a later period in
the development of my critical faculty ; just as the whole rebellious, sovereign-
offending dream, with its scoff at high authority, originates in a revolt against
my father. The sovereign is called father of the land (Landesvater), and
the father is the oldest, first and only authority for the child, from the
absolutism of which the other social authorities have developed in the

183

If the two childhood scenes of urinating are otherwise
closely connected with the desire for greatness, their rehabilita-
tion 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 concep-
tion—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 awak-
ening, a quarter
of four in the morning. I may forestall further objec-
tion by
remarking that I have hardly ever felt a desire to urinate
after awakening early on other journeys made under more
comfortable circum-
stances. 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 interpreta-
tion 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

• course of the history of human civilisation (in so far as the “mother’s right”
does not force a qualification of this thesis). The idea in the dream, “think-
ing and experiencing are the same thing,” refers to the explanation of
hysterical symptoms, to which the male urinal (glass) also has a relation. I
need not explain the principle of the “Gschnas” to a Viennese ; it consists in
constructing objects of rare and costly appearance out of trifles, and pre-
ferably out of comical and worthless material—for example, making suits of
armour out of cooking utensils, sticks and “salzstangeln” (elongated rolls), as
our artists like to do at their jolly parties. I had now learned that hysterical
subjects do the same thing ; besides what has actually occurred to them, they
unconsciously conceive horrible or extravagant fantastic images, which they
construct from the most harmless and commonplace things they have ex-
perienced. The symptoms depend solely upon these phantasies, not upon
the memory of their real experiences, be they serious or harmless¹⁾. This
explanation helped me to overcome many difficulties and gave me much
pleasure. I was able to allude to it in the dream element “male urinal” (glass)
because I had been told that at the last “Gschnas” evening a poison chalice
of Lucretia Borgia had been exhibited, the chief constituent of which had
consisted of a glass urinal for men, such as is used in hospitals.

184

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

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 con-
nection (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 estab-
lish 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 else-
where, 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 interro-
gated 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

185

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 investiga-
tion. 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

186

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 ¹² 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 re-
ferred 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 ⁶⁴ 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 ⁶⁶
that the mind, as a result of its being turned away from the
outer world during sleep, is not capable of giving correct inter-
pretation 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,

187

earlier perceptions, either unem-
bellished or with the psychic
values belonging to them, from the range of waking experi-
ences, 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 con-
ditioned by the fact that a nerve-stimulus brings about its
effect in psychic life according to the laws of reproduction.”

The opinion of Wundt ⁷⁶ 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 in-
dividual 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

188

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, Grundthatsachen des Seelenlebens, p. 170). Other ob-
jections 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 Burdach⁸
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 in-
different 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 observa-
tions 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 awaken-
ing that my leg has been uncovered or my arm under pressure ;
pathology shows the most numerous examples where power-

189

fully 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,⁵⁸ who was joined by the philosopher
Volkelt ⁷²—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 Scher-
erner—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 is pictured as a house
by the phantasy of the dream, and each individual organ of
the body as a part of the house. In ‘toothache-dreams’ a
high vaulted vestibule corresponds to the mouth and a stair
to the descent of the gullet to the alimentary canal; in the
‘headache-dream’ the ceiling of a room which is covered
with disgusting reptile-
like spiders is chosen to denote the

190

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

“Several different
upper part of the head” (Volkelt, p. 39).
symbols are used by the dream for the same organ, thus the
breathing lungs find their symbol in an oven filled with flames
and with a roaring draught, the heart in hollow chests and
baskets, and the bladder in round, bag-
shaped objects or
anything else hollow. It is especially important that at the
end of a dream the stimulating organ or its function be repre-
sented undisguised and usually on the dreamer’s own body.
Thus the ‘toothache-dream’ usually ends by the dreamer
drawing a tooth from his own mouth” (p. 35). It cannot be
said that this theory has found much favour with the authors.
Above all, it seems extravagant ; there has been no inclination
even to discover the small amount of justification to which it
may, in my opinion, lay claim. As may be seen, it leads to a
revival of the dream interpretation by means of symbolism,
which the ancients used, except that the source from which
the interpretation is to be taken is limited to the human body.
The lack of a technique of interpretation which is scientifically
comprehensible must seriously limit the applicability of
Scherner’s theory. Arbitrariness in dream interpretation
seems in no wise excluded, especially since a stimulus may be
expressed by several representations in the content of the
dream ; thus Scherner’s associate, Volkelt, has already found
it impossible to confirm the representation of the body as a
house. Another objection is that here again dream activity
is attributed to the mind as a useless and aimless activity,
since according to the theory in question the mind is content
with forming phantasies about the stimulus with which it is
concerned, without even remotely contemplating anything
like a discharge of the stimulus.

But Scherner’s theory of the symbolisation of bodily stimuli
by the dream receives a heavy blow from another objection.
These bodily stimuli are present at all times, and according to
general assumption the mind is more accessible to them during
sleep than in waking. It is thus incomprehensible why the
mind does not dream continually throughout the night, and
why it does not dream every night and about all the organs.
If one attempts to avoid this objection by making the condition
that especial stimuli must proceed from the eye, the ear, the
teeth, the intestines in order to arouse dream activity, one is

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THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

confronted by the difficulty of proving that this increase of
stimulation is objective, which is possible only in a small
number of cases. If the dream of flying is a symbolisation
of the upward and downward motion of the pulmonary lobes,
either this dream, as has already been remarked by Strümpell,
would be dreamt much oftener, or an accentuation of the
function of breathing during the dream would have to be
demonstrable. Still another case is possible—the most
probable of all—that now and then special motives directing
attention to the visceral sensations which are universally
present are active, but this case takes us beyond the range of
Schern-
er’s theory.

The value of Schern-
er’s and Volkelt’s discussions lies in
the fact that they call attention to a number of characteristics
of the dream content which are in need of explanation, and
which seem to promise new knowledge. It is quite true that
symbolisations of organs of the body and of their functions
are contained in dreams, that water in a dream often signifies
a desire to urinate, that the male genital may often be repre-
sented by a staff standing erect or by a pillar, &c. In dreams
which show a very animated field of vision and brilliant
colours, in contrast to the dimness of other dreams, the inter-
pretation may hardly be dismissed that they are “dreams of
visual stimulation,” any more than it may be disputed that
there is a contribution of illusory formations in dreams which
contain noise and confusion of voices. A dream like that of
Scherner, of two rows of fair handsome boys standing opposite
to each other on a bridge, attacking each other and then
taking their places again, until finally the dreamer himself
sits down on the bridge and pulls a long tooth out of his jaw;
or a similar one of Volkelt’s, in which two rows of drawers play
a part, and which again ends in the extraction of a tooth;
dream formations of this sort, which are related in great
numbers by the authors, prevent our discarding Schern-
er’s
theory as an idle fabrication without seeking to find its kernel
of truth. We are now confronted by the task of giving the
supposed symbolisation of the dental stimulus an explanation
of a different kind.

Throughout our consideration of the theory of the somatic
sources of dreams, I have refrained from urging the argument

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

which is inferred from our dream analyses. If we have suc
ceeded in proving, by a procedure which other authors have
not applied in their investigation of dreams, that the dream
as a psychic action possesses value peculiar to itself, that a
wish supplies the motive for its formation, and that the experi
ences of the previous day furnish the immediate material for
its content, any other theory of dreams neglecting such an
important method of investigation, and accordingly causing
the dream to appear a useless and problematic psychic reaction
to somatic stimuli, is dismissible without any particular
comment. Otherwise there must be—which is highly im
probable—two entirely different kinds of dreams, of which
only one has come under our observation, while only the
other has been observed by the earlier connoisseurs of the
dream. It still remains to provide a place for the facts which
are used to support the prevailing theory of somatic dream
stimuli, within our own theory of dreams.
We have already taken the first step in this direction in
setting up the thesis that the dream activity is under a com
pulsion to elaborate all the dream stimuli which are simul
taneously present into a unified whole (p. 151). We have
seen that when two or more experiences capable of making
an impression have been left over from the previous day, the
wishes which result from them are united into one dream;
similarly, that an impression possessing psychic value and the
indifferent experiences of the previous day are united in the
dream material, provided there are available connecting ideas
between the two. Thus the dream appears to be a reaction to
everything which is simultaneously present as actual in the
sleeping mind. As far as we have hitherto analysed the
dream material, we have discovered it to be a collection of
psychic remnants and memory traces, which we were obliged
to credit (on account of the preference shown for recent and
infantile material) with a character of actuality, though the
nature of this was not at the time determinable. Now it will
not be difficult to foretell what will happen when new material
in the form of sensations is added to these actualities of
memory. These stimuli likewise derive importance for the
dream because they are actual; they are united with the
other psychic actualities in order to make up the material for

193

dream formation. To express it differently, the stimuli
which appear during sleep are worked over into the fulfilment
of a wish, the other component parts of which are the remnants
of daily experience with which we are familiar. This union,
however, is not inevitable; we have heard that more than one
sort of attitude towards bodily stimuli is possible during sleep.
Wherever this union has been brought about, it has simply
been possible to find for the dream content that kind of pre-
sentation material which will give representation to both
classes of dream sources, the somatic as well as the psychic.

The essential nature of the dream is not changed by this
addition of somatic material to the psychic sources of the
dream; it remains the fulfilment of a wish without reference
to the way in which its expression is determined by the actual
material.

I shall gladly find room here for a number of peculiarities,
which serve to put a different face on the significance of exter-
nal stimuli for the dream. I imagine that a co-
operation of
individual, physiological, and accidental factors, conditioned
by momentary circumstances, determines how one will act in
each particular case of intensive objective stimulation during
sleep; the degree of the profoundness of sleep whether habitual
or accidental in connection with the intensity of the stimulus,
will in one case make it possible to suppress the stimulus, so
that it will not disturb sleep; in another case they will force
an awakening or will support the attempt to overcome the
stimulus by weaving it into the texture of the dream. In
correspondence with the multiplicity of these combinations,
external objective stimuli will receive expression more frequently
in the case of one person than in that of another. In the case
of myself, who am an excellent sleeper, and who stubbornly
resists any kind of disturbance in sleep, this intermixture of
external causes of irritation into my dreams is very rare, while
psychic motives apparently cause me to dream very easily.
I have indeed noted only a single dream in which an objective,
painful source of stimulation is demonstrable, and it will be
highly instructive to see what effect the external stimulus had
in this very dream.

I am riding on a grey horse, at first timidly and awkwardly,
as though I were only leaning against something. I meet a

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

colleague P., who is mounted on a horse and is wearing a heavy
woollen suit ; he calls my attention to something (probably to the
fact that my riding position is bad). Now I become more and
more expert on the horse, which is most intelligent ; I sit com-
fortably, and I notice that I am already quite at home in the
saddle. For a saddle I have a kind of padding, which completely
fills the space between the neck and the rump of the horse. In
this manner I ride with difficulty between two lumber-wagons.
After having ridden up the street for some dis-
tance, I turn around
and want to dismount, at first in front of a little open chapel,
which is situated close to the street. Then I actually dismount in
front of a chapel which stands near the first ; the hotel is in the
same street, I could let the horse go there by itself, but I prefer to
lead it there. It seems as if I should be ashamed to arrive there
on horseback. In front of the hotel is standing a hall-boy who
shows me a card of mine which has been found, and who ridicules
me on account of it. On the card is written, doubly under-
lined, “ Eat nothing,” and then a second sentence (indistinct) something
like “ Do not work ” ; at the same time a hazy idea that I am in a
strange city, in which I do no work.

It will not be apparent at once that this dream originated
under the influence, or rather under the compulsion, of a
stimulus of pain. The day before I had suffered from furuncles,
which made every movement a torture, and at last a furuncle
had grown to the size of an apple at the root of the scrotum,
and had caused me the most intolerable pains that accom-
panied every step ; a feverish lassitude, lack of appetite, and
the hard work to which I had nevertheless kept myself during
the day, had conspired with the pain to make me lose my
temper. I was not altogether in a condition to discharge my
duties as a physician, but in view of the nature and the location
of the malady, one might have expected some performance
other than riding, for which I was very especially unfit-
ted.

It is this very activity, of riding into which I am plunged by
the dream ; it is the most energetic denial of the suffering
which is capable of being conceived. In the first place, I do
not know how to ride, I do not usually dream of it, and I
never sat on a horse but once—without a saddle-
and then I
did not feel comfortable. But in this dream I ride as though
I had no furuncle on the perineum, and why ? just because I

195

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

don’t want any. According to the description my saddle is
the poultice which has made it possible for me to go to sleep.
Probably I did not feel anything of my pain—as I was thus
taken care of—during the first few hours of sleeping. Then
the painful sensations announced themselves and tried to
wake me up, whereupon the dream came and said soothingly :
“ Keep on sleeping, you won’t wake up anyway ! You have
no furuncle at all, for you are riding on a horse, and with a
furuncle where you have it riding is impossible ! ” And the
dream was successful ; the pain was stifled, and I went on
sleeping.

But the dream was not satisfied with “ suggesting away ”
the furuncle by means of tenaciously adhering to an idea
incompatible with that of the malady, in doing which it behaved
like the hallucinatory insanity of the mother who has lost her
child, or like the merchant who has been deprived of his
fortune by losses.^* In addition the details of the denied
sensation and of the image which is used to displace it are
employed by the dream as a means to connect the material
ordinarily actually present in the mind with the dream situa-
tion, and to give this material representation. I am riding
on a grey horse—the colour of the horse corresponds exactly
to the pepper-
and-salt costume in which I last met my colleague
P. in the country. I have been warned that highly seasoned
food is the cause of furunculosis, but in any case it is preferable
as an etiological explanation to sugar which ordinarily suggests
furunculosis. My friend P. has been pleased to “ ride the high
horse ” with regard to me, ever since he superseded me in the
treatment of a female patient, with whom I had performed
great feats (in the dream I first sit on the horse side-saddle
fashion, like a circus rider), but who really led me wherever
she wished, like the horse in the anecdote about the Sunday
equestrian. Thus the horse came to be a symbolic representa-
tion of a lady patient (in the dream it is most intelligent).
“ I feel quite at home up here,” refers to the position which I
occupied in the patient’s household until I was replaced by my
colleague P. “ I thought you were securely seated in the

^* Cf. the passage in Griesinger³¹ and the remarks in my second essay on
the “defence-neuropsychoses”—Selected Papers on Hysteria, translated by
A. A. Brill.

196

saddle,” one of my few well-
wishers among the great physicians
of this city recently said to me with reference to the same
household. And it was a feat to practise psychotherapy for
ten hours a day with such pains, but I know that I cannot
continue my particularly difficult work for any length of time
without complete physical health, and the dream is full of
gloomy allusions to the situation which must in that case
result (the card such as neurasthenics have and present to
doctors) : No work and no food. With further interpretation
I see that the dream activity has succeeded in finding the
way from the wish-
situation of riding to very early infantile
scenes of quarrelling, which must have taken place between
me and my nephew, who is now living in England, and who,
moreover, is a year older than I. Besides it has taken up
elements from my journeys to Italy ; the street in the dream
is composed of impressions of Verona and Siena. Still more
exhaustive interpretation leads to sexual dream-thoughts,
and I recall what significance dream allusions to that beautiful
country had in the case of a female patient who had never been
in Italy (Itlay—German gen Italien—Genitalien—genitals).
At the same time there are references to the house in which I
was physician before my friend P., and to the place where the
furuncle is located.

Among the dreams mentioned in the previous chapter
there are several which might serve as examples for the elabora-
tion of so-called nerve stimuli. The dream about drinking in
full draughts is one of this sort ; the somatic excitement in it
seems to be the only source of the dream, and the wish resulting
from the sensation—thirst—the only motive for dreaming.
Something similar is true of the other simple dreams, if the
somatic excitement alone is capable of forming a wish. The
dream of the sick woman who throws the cooling apparatus
from her cheek at night is an instance of a peculiar way of
reacting to painful excitements with a wish-fulfilment ; it
seems as though the patient had temporarily succeeded in
making herself analgesic by ascribing her pains to a stranger.

My dream about the three Parcæ is obviously a dream of
hunger, but it has found means to refer the need for food back
to the longing of the child for its mother’s breast, and to make
the harmless desire a cloak for a more serious one, which is

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THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

not permitted to express itself so openly. In the dream about
Count Thun we have seen how an accidental bodily desire is
brought into connection with the strongest, and likewise the
most strongly suppressed emotions of the psychic life. And
when the First Consul incorporates the sound of an exploding
bomb into a dream of battle before it causes him to wake, as
in the case reported by Garnier, the purpose for which psychic
activity generally concerns itself with sensations occurring
during sleep is revealed with extraordinary clearness. A young
lawyer, who has been deeply preoccupied with his first great
bankruptcy proceed-
ing, and who goes to sleep during the
afternoon following, acts just like the great Napoleon. He
dreams about a certain G. Reich in Hussiatyn (German husten—
to cough), whom he knows in connection with the bankruptcy
proceeding, but Hussiatyn forces itself upon his attention still
further, with the result that he is obliged to awaken, and hears
his wife—who is suffering from bronchial catarrh—coughing
violently.

Let us compare the dream of Napoleon I., who, incidentally,
was an excellent sleeper, with that of the sleepy student, who
was awakened by his landlady with the admonition that he
must go to the hospital, who thereupon dreams himself into
a bed in the hospital, and then sleeps on, with the following
account of his motives: If I am already in the hospital, I
shan’t have to get up in order to go there. The latter is
obviously a dream of convenience; the sleeper frankly admits
to himself the motive for his dreaming; but he thereby
reveals one of the secrets of dreaming in general. In a certain
sense all dreams are dreams of convenience; they serve the
purpose of continuing sleep instead of awakening. The dream
is the guardian of sleep, not the disturber of it. We shall justify
this conception with respect to the psychic factors of awakening
elsewhere; it is possible, however, at this point to prove its
applicability to the influence exerted by objective external
excitements. Either the mind does not concern itself at all
with the causes of sensations, if it is able to do this in spite of
their intensity and of their significance, which is well understood
by it; or it employs the dream to deny these stimuli; or
thirdly, if it is forced to recognise the stimulus, it seeks to find
that interpretation of the stimulus which shall represent the

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

actual sensation as a component part of a situation which is
desired and which is compatible with sleep. The actual sen-
sation is woven into the dream in order to deprive it of its
reality. Napoleon is permitted to go on sleeping; it is only a
dream recollection of the thunder of the cannon at Arcole
which is trying to disturb him.^*

The wish to sleep, by which the conscious ego has been sus-
pended, and which along with the dream-censor contributes its
share to the dream, must thus always be taken into account as a
motive for the formation of dreams, and every successful dream
is a fulfilment of this wish. The relation of this general, re-
gularly present, and invariable sleep-wish to the other wishes,
of which now the one, now the other is fulfilled, will be the
subject of a further explanation. In the wish to sleep we
have discovered a factor capable of supplying the deficiency
in the theory of Strümpell and Wundt, and of explaining the
perversity and capriciousness in the interpretation of the
outer stimulus. The correct interpretation, of which the
sleeping mind is quite capable, would imply an active interest
and would require that sleep be terminated; hence, of those
interpretations which are possible at all, only those are ad-
mitted which are agreeable to the absolute censorship of the
somatic wish. It is something like this: It’s the nightingale
and not the lark. For if it’s the lark, love’s night is at an
end. From among the interpretations of the excitement
which are at the moment possible, that one is selected which
can secure the best connection with the wish-possibilities that
are lying in wait in the mind. Thus everything is definitely
determined, and nothing is left to caprice. The misinter-
pretation is not an illusion, but—if you will—an excuse.
Here again, however, there is admitted an action which is a
modification of the normal psychic procedure, as in the case
where substitution by means of displacement is effected for
the purposes of the dream-censor.

If the outer nerve stimuli and inner bodily stimuli are
sufficiently intense to compel psychic attention, they represent
—that is, in case they result in dreaming and not in awakening
—a definite point in the formation of dreams, a nucleus in the

^*In the two sources from which I am acquainted with this dream, the
report of its contents do not agree.

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THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

dream material, for which an appropriate wish-
fulfilment is
sought, in a way similar (see above) to the search for connecting
ideas between two dream stimuli. To this extent it is true
for a number of dreams that the somatic determines what their
content is to be. In this extreme case a wish which is not
exactly actual is aroused for the purpose of dream formation.
But the dream can do nothing but represent a wish in a situa-
tion as fulfilled; it is, as it were, confronted by the task of
seeking what wish may be represented and fulfilled by means
of the situation which is now actual. Even if this actual
material is of a painful or disagreeable character, still it is not
useless for the purposes of dream formation. The psychic
life has control even over wishes the fulfilment of which brings
forth pleasure—a statement which seems contradictory, but
which becomes intelligible if one takes into account the presence
of two psychic instances and the censor existing between
them.

There are in the psychic life, as we have heard, repressed
wishes which belong to the first system, and to whose fulfilment
the second system is opposed. There are wishes of this kind—
and we do not mean this in an historic sense, that there have
been such wishes and that these have then been destroyed—
but the theory of repression, which is essential to the study of
psychoneurosis, asserts that such repressed wishes still exist,
contemporaneously with an inhibition weighing them down.
Language has hit upon the truth when it speaks of the “sup-
pression” of such impulses. The psychic contrivance for
bringing such wishes to realisation remains preserved and in a
condition to be used. But if it happens that such a suppressed
wish is fulfilled, the vanquished inhibition of the second
system (which is capable of becoming conscious) is then ex-
pressed as a painful feeling. To close this discussion; if
sensations of a disagreeable character which originate from
somatic sources are presented during sleep, this constellation
is taken advantage of by the dream activity to represent the
fulfilment—with more or less retention of the censor—of an
otherwise suppressed wish.

This condition of affairs makes possible a number of anxiety
dreams, while another series of the dream formations which
are unfavourable to the wish theory exhibits a different

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

mechanism. For anxiety in dreams may be of a psycho-
neurotic nature, or it may originate in psychosexual excite-
ments, in which case the anxiety corresponds to a repressed
libido. Then this anxiety as well as the whole anxiety dream
has the significance of a neurotic symptom, and we are at the
dividing-line where the wish-fulfilling tendency of dreams
disappears. But in other anxiety-dreams the feeling of anxiety
comes from somatic sources (for instance in the case of persons
suffering from pulmonary or heart trouble, where there is
occasional difficulty in getting breath), and then it is used to
aid those energetically suppressed wishes in attaining fulfil-
ment in the form of a dream, the dreaming of which from
psychic motives would have resulted in the same release of
fear. It is not difficult to unite these two apparently dis-
crepant cases. Of two psychic formations, an emotional
inclination and an ideal content, which are intimately con-
nected, the one, which is presented as actual, supports the
other in the dream; now anxiety of somatic origin supports
the suppressed presentation content, now the ideal content,
which is freed from suppression, and which proceeds with the
impetus given by sexual emotion, assists the discharge of
anxiety. Of the one case it may be said that an emotion of
somatic origin is psychically interpreted; in the other case
everything is of psychic origin but the content which has been
suppressed is easily replaced by a somatic interpretation which
is suited to anxiety. The difficulties which lie in the way of
understanding all this have little to do with the dream; they
are due to the fact that in discussing these points we are
touching upon the problems of the development of anxiety
and of repression.

Undoubtedly the aggregate of bodily feelings is to be
included among the commanding dream stimuli which originate
internally. Not that it is able to furnish the dream content,
but it forces the dream thoughts to make a choice from the
material destined to serve the purpose of representation in the
dream content; it does this by putting within easy reach
that part of the material which is suited to its own character,
while withholding the other. Moreover this general feeling,
which is left over from the day, is probably connected with the
psychic remnants which are significant for the dream.

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THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

If somatic sources of excitement occurring during sleep—
that is, the sensations of sleep—are not of unusual intensity,
they play a part in the formation of dreams similar, in my
judgment, to that of the impressions of the day which have
remained recent but indifferent. I mean that they are drawn
into the dream formation, if they are qualified for being united
with the presentation content of the psychic dream-
source, but in no other case. They are treated as a cheap ever-
ready material, which is utilised as often as it is needed, instead of
prescribing, as a precious material does, the manner in which
it is to be utilised. The case is similar to that where a patron
of art brings to an artist a rare stone, a fragment of onyx, in
order that a work of art may be made of it. The size of the
stone, its colour, and its marking help to decide what bust or
what scene shall be represented in it, while in the case where
there is a uniform and abundant supply of marble or sandstone
the artist follows only the idea which takes shape in his mind.
Only in this manner, it seems to me, is the fact explicable
that the dream content resulting from bodily excitements
that have not been accentuated to a usual degree, does not
appear in all dreams and during every night.

Perhaps an example, which takes us back to the interpreta-
tion of dreams, will best illustrate my meaning. One day I
was trying to understand the meaning of the sensations of
being impeded, of not being able to move from the spot, of
not being able to get finished, &c., which are dreamt about so
often, and which are so closely allied to anxiety. That night
I had the following dream: I am very incompletely dressed,
and I go from a dwelling on the ground floor up a flight of stairs
to an upper story. In doing this I jump over three steps at a
time, and I am glad to find I can mount the steps so quickly.
Suddenly I see that a servant girl is coming down the stairs,
that is, towards me. I am ashamed and try to hurry away, and
now there appears that sensation of being impeded; I am glued
to the steps and cannot move from the spot.

Analysis: The situation of the dream is taken from every-
day reality. In a house in Vienna I have two apartments,
which are connected only by a flight of stairs outside. My
consultation-rooms and my study are on an elevated portion
of the ground floor, and one story higher are my living-rooms.

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

When I have finished my work downstairs late at night, I
go up the steps into my bedroom. On the evening before the
dream I had actually gone this short distance in a somewhat
disorderly attire—that is to say, I had taken off my collar,
cravat, and cuffs; but in the dream this has changed into a
somewhat more advanced degree of undress, which as usual
is indefinite. Jumping over the steps is my usual method of
mounting stairs; moreover it is the fulfilment of a wish that
has been recognised in the dream, for I have reassured myself
about the condition of my heart action by the ease of this
accomplishment. Moreover the manner in which I climb the
stairs is an effective contrast to the sensation of being impeded
which occurs in the second half of the dream. It shows me—
something which needed no proof—that the dream has no
difficulty in representing motor actions as carried out fully
and completely; think of flying in dreams!

But the stairs which I go up are not those of my house; at
first I do not recognise them; only the person coming toward
me reveals to me the location which they are intended to
signify. This woman is the maid of the old lady whom I
visit twice daily to give hypodermic injections; the stairs,
too, are quite similar to those which I must mount there twice
daily.

How do this flight of stairs and this woman get into my
dream? Being ashamed because one is not fully dressed, is
undoubtedly of a sexual character; the servant of whom I
dream is older than I, sulky, and not in the least attractive.
These questions call up exactly the following occurrences:
When I make my morning visit at this house I am usually
seized with a desire to clear my throat; the product of the
expectoration falls upon the steps. For there is no spittoon
on either of these floors, and I take the view that the stairs
should not be kept clean at my expense, but by the provision
of a spittoon. The housekeeper, likewise an elderly and sulky
person, with instincts for cleanliness, takes another view of
the matter. She lies in wait for me to see whether I take
the liberty referred to, and when she has made sure of it, I
hear her growl distinctly. For days thereafter she refuses to
show me her customary regard when we meet. On the day
before the dream the position of the housekeeper had been

203

strengthened by the servant girl. I had just finished my usual
hurried visit to the patient when the servant confronted me in
the ante-
room and observed : “You might as well have wiped
your shoes to-
day, doctor, before you came into the room.
The red carpet is all dirty again from your feet.” This is the
whole claim which the flight of stairs and the servant-
girl
can make for appearing in my dream.

An intimate connection exists between my flying over the
stairs and my spitting on the stairs. Pharyngitis and diseases
of the heart are both said to be punishments for the vice of
smoking, on account of which vice, of course, I do not enjoy a
reputation for great neatness with my housekeeper in the one
house any more than in the other, both of which the dream
fuses into a single image.

I must postpone the further interpretation of this dream
until I can give an account of the origin of the typical dream of
incomplete dress. I only note as a preliminary result from
the dream which has just been cited that the dream sensation
of inhibited action is always aroused at a point where a certain
connection requires it. A peculiar condition of my motility
during sleep cannot be the cause of this dream content, for a
moment before I saw myself hurrying over the steps with ease,
as though in confirmation of this fact.

(d) Typical Dreams

In general we are not in a position to interpret the dream of
another person if he is unwilling to furnish us with the uncon-
scious thoughts which lie behind the dream content, and for
this reason the practical applicability of our method of dream
interpretation is seriously curtailed.^* But there are a certain
number of dreams-
in contrast with the usual freedom dis-
played by the individual in fashioning his dream world with
characteristic peculiarity, and thereby making it unintelligible
-
which almost every one has dreamed in the same manner,
and of which we are accustomed to assume that they have
the same significance in the case of every dreamer. A peculiar

^*An exception is furnished by those cases in which the dreamer utilises
in the expression of his latent dream thoughts the symbols which are
familiar to us.

204

interest belongs to these typical dreams for the reason that
they probably all come from the same sources with every
person, that they are thus particularly suited to give us
information upon the sources of dreams.

Typical dreams are worthy of the most exhaustive investi-
gation. I shall, however, only give a somewhat detailed con-
sideration to examples of this species, and for this purpose I
shall first select the so-called embarrassment dream of naked-
ness, and the dream of the death of dear relatives.

The dream of being naked or scantily clad in the presence
of strangers occurs with the further addition that one is not
at all ashamed of it, &c. But the dream of nakedness is worthy
of our interest only when shame and embarrassment are felt
in it, when one wishes to flee or to hide, and when one feels the
strange inhibition that it is impossible to move from the spot
and that one is incapable of altering the disagreeable situation.
It is only in this connection that the dream is typical ; the
nucleus of its content may otherwise be brought into all kinds
of relations or may be replaced by individual amplifications.
It is essentially a question of a disagreeable sensation of the
nature of shame, the wish to be able to hide one’s nakedness,
chiefly by means of locomotion, without being able to accom-
plish this. I believe that the great majority of my readers
will at some time have found themselves in this situation in a
dream.

Usually the nature and manner of the experience is indis-
tinct. It is usually reported, “I was in my shirt,” but this
is rarely a clear image ; in most cases the lack of clothing is so
indeterminate that it is designated in the report of the dream
by a set of alternatives : “I was in my chemise or in my
petticoat.” As a rule the deficiency in the toilet is not serious
enough to justify the feeling of shame attached to it. For a
person who has served in the army, nakedness is often replaced
by a mode of adjustment that is contrary to regulations. “I
am on the street without my sabre and I see officers coming,”
or “I am without my necktie,” or “I am wearing checkered
civilian’s trousers,” &c.

The persons before whom one is ashamed are almost always
strangers with faces that have been left undetermined. It
never occurs in the typical dream that one is reproved or even

205

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

noticed on account of the dress which causes the embarrass-
ment to one’s self. Quite on the contrary, the people have an
air of indifference, or, as I had opportunity to observe in a
particularly clear dream, they look stiffly solemn. This is
worth thinking about.

The shamed embarrassment of the dreamer and the in-
difference of the spectators form a contradiction which often
occurs in the dream. It would better accord with the feelings
of the dreamer if the strangers looked at him in astonishment
and laughed at him, or if they grew indignant. I think,
however, that the latter unpleasant feature has been obviated
by the tendency to wish-fulfilment, while the embarrassment,
being retained on some account or other, has been left standing,
and thus the two parts fail to agree. We have interesting
evidence to show that the dream, whose appearance has been
partially disfigured by the tendency to wish-fulfilment, has not
been properly understood. For it has become the basis of a
fairy tale familiar to us all in Andersen’s version,^* and it has
recently received poetic treatment by L. Fulda in the Talisman.

In Andersen’s fairy tale we are told of two impostors who
weave a costly garment for the Emperor, which, however, shall
be visible only to the good and true. The Emperor goes forth
clad in this invisible garment, and, the fabric serving as a sort
of touchstone, all the people are frightened into acting as
though they did not notice the nakedness of the Emperor.

But such is the situation in our dream. It does not require
great boldness to assume that the unintelligible dream content
has suggested the invention of a state of undress in which the
situation that is being remembered becomes significant. This
situation has then been deprived of its original meaning, and
placed at the service of other purposes. But we shall see
that such misunderstanding of the dream content often occurs
on account of the conscious activity of the second psychic
system, and is to be recognised as a factor in the ultimate
formation of the dream; furthermore, that in the develop-
ment of the obsessions and phobias similar misunderstandings,
likewise within the same psychic personality, play a leading
part. The source from which in our dream the material
for this transformation is taken can also be explained. The

* “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

206

impostor is the dream, the Emperor is the dreamer himself, and
the moralising tendency betrays a hazy knowledge of the fact
that the latent dream content is occupied with forbidden
wishes which have become the victims of repression. The
connection in which such dreams appear during my analysis
of neurotics leaves no room for doubting that the dream is
based upon a recollection from earliest childhood. Only in
our childhood was there a time when we were seen by our
relatives as well as by strange nurses, servant girls, and visitors,
in scanty clothing, and at that time we were not ashamed of
our nakedness.^*

It may be observed in the case of children who are a little
older that being undressed has a kind of intoxicating effect
upon them, instead of making them ashamed. They laugh,
jump about, and strike their bodies ; the mother, or whoever
is present, forbids them to do this, and says : “Fie, that is
shameful—you mustn’t do that.” Children often show ex-
hibitional cravings ; it is hardly possible to go through a
village in our part of the country without meeting a two or
three-year-old tot who lifts up his or her shirt before the
traveller, perhaps in his honour. One of my patients has
reserved in his conscious memory a scene from the eighth year
of his life in which he had just undressed previous to going to
bed, and was about to dance into the room of his little sister
in his undershirt when the servant prevented his doing it.
In the childhood history of neurotics, denudation in the
presence of children of the opposite sex plays a great part ; in
paranoia the desire to be observed while dressing and un-
dressing may be directly traced to these experiences ; among
those remaining perverted there is a class which has accen-
tuated the childish impulse to a compulsion—they are the
exhibitionists.

This age of childhood in which the sense of shame is lacking
seems to our later recollections a Paradise, and Paradise itself
is nothing but a composite phantasy from the childhood of
the individual. It is for this reason, too, that in Paradise
human beings are naked and are not ashamed until the moment
arrives when the sense of shame and of fear are aroused ; ex-
 

^*The child also appears in the fairy tale, for there a child suddenly
calls : “Why, he hasn’t anything on at all.”

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THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

pulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development
begin. Into this Paradise the dream can take us back every
night; we have already ventured the conjecture that the
impressions from earliest childhood (from the prehistoric
period until about the end of the fourth year) in themselves,
and independently of everything else, crave reproduction,
perhaps without further reference to their content, and that
the repetition of them is the fulfilment of a wish. Dreams of
nakedness, then, are exhibition dreams.^*

One’s own person, which is seen not as that of a child, but
as belonging to the present, and the idea of scanty clothing,
which became buried beneath so many later négligée recollec-
tions or because of the censor, turns out to be obscure—these
two things constitute the nucleus of the exhibition dream.
Next come the persons before whom one is ashamed. I
know of no example where the actual spectators at those
infantile exhibitions reappear in the dream. For the dream
is hardly ever a simple recollection. Strangely enough, those
persons who are the objects of our sexual interest during child-
hood are omitted from all the reproductions of the dream, of
hysteria, and of the compulsion neurosis; paranoia alone
puts the spectators back into their places, and is fanatically
convinced of their presence, although they remain invisible.
What the dream substitutes for these, the “many strange
people,” who take no notice of the spectacle which is presented,
is exactly the wish-opposite of that single, intimate person for
whom the exposure was intended. “Many strange people,”
moreover, are often found in the dream in any other favourable
connection; as a wish-opposite they always signify “a secret.”^†
It may be seen how the restoration of the old condition of
affairs, as it occurs in paranoia, is subject to this antithesis.
One is no longer alone. One is certainly being watched, but
the spectators are “many strange, curiously indeterminate
people.”

Furthermore, repression has a place in the exhibition

^*Ferenczi has reported a number of interesting dreams of nakedness
in women which could be traced to an infantile desire to exhibit, but which
differ in some features from the “typical” dream of nakedness discussed
above.

^†For obvious reasons the presence of the “whole family” in the dream
has the same significance.

208

dream. For the disagreeable sensation of the dream is
the reaction of the second psychic instance to the fact
that the exhibition scene which has been rejected by it
has in spite of this succeeded in securing representation.
The only way to avoid this sensation would be not to revive
the scene.

Later on we shall again deal with the sensation of being
inhibited. It serves the dream excellently in representing
the conflict of the will, the negation. According to our un-
conscious purpose exhibition is to be continued; according to
the demands of the censor, it is to be stopped.

The relation of our typical dreams to fairy tales and to
other poetic material is neither a sporadic nor an accidental
one. Occasionally the keen insight of a poet has analytically
recognised the transforming process — of which the poet is
usually the tool—and has followed it backwards, that is to
say, traced it to the dream. A friend has called my attention
to the following passage in G. Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich :
“I do not wish, dear Lee, that you should ever come to realise
from experience the peculiar piquant truth contained in the
situation of Odysseus, when he appears before Nausikaa and
her playmates, naked and covered with mud ! Would you
like to know what it means ? Let us consider the incident
closely. If you are ever separated from your home, and from
everything that is dear to you, and wander about in a strange
country, when you have seen and experienced much, when you
have cares and sorrows, and are, perhaps, even miserable and
forlorn, you will some night inevitably dream that you are
approaching your home ; you will see it shining and beaming
in the most beautiful colours ; charming, delicate and lovely
figures will come to meet you ; and you will suddenly discover
that you are going about in rags, naked and covered with dust.
A nameless feeling of shame and fear seizes you, you try to
cover yourself and to hide, and you awaken bathed in sweat.
As long as men exist, this will be the dream of the care-
laden, fortune-battered man, and thus Homer has taken his situation
from the profoundest depths of the eternal character of
humanity.”

This profound and eternal character of humanity, upon
the touching of which in his listeners the poet usually calculates,

209

is made up of the stirrings of the spirit which are rooted in
childhood, in the period which later becomes prehistoric.
Suppressed and forbidden wishes of childhood break forth
under cover of those wishes of the homeless man which are
unobjectionable and capable of becoming conscious, and for
that reason the dream which is made objective in the legend
of Nausikaa regularly assumes the form of a dream of
anxiety.

My own dream, mentioned on p. 201, of hurrying up the
stairs, which is soon afterward changed into that of being glued
to the steps, is likewise an exhibition dream, because it shows
the essential components of such a dream. It must thus
permit of being referred to childish experiences, and the
possession of these ought to tell us how far the behaviour of
the servant girl towards me—her reproach that I had soiled
the carpet—helped her to secure the position which she occupies
in the dream. I am now able to furnish the desired explana-
tion. One learns in psychoanalysis to interpret temporal
proximity by objective connection; two thoughts, apparently
without connection, which immediately follow one another,
belong to a unity which can be inferred; just as an a and a t,
which I write down together, should be pronounced as one
syllable, at. The same is true of the relation of dreams to one
another. The dream just cited, of the stairs, has been taken
from a series of dreams, whose other members I am familiar
with on account of having interpreted them. The dream which
is included in this series must belong to the same connection.
Now the other dreams of the series are based upon the recol-
lection of a nurse to whom I was entrusted from some time in
the period when I was suckling to the age of two and a half
years, and of whom a hazy recollection has remained in my
consciousness. According to information which I have re-
cently obtained from my mother, she was old and ugly, but
very intelligent and thorough; according to inferences which
I may draw from my dreams, she did not always give me the
kindest treatment, and said hard words to me when I showed
insufficient aptitude for education in cleanliness. Thus by
attempting to continue this educational work the servant
girl develops a claim to be treated by me, in the dream, as an
incarnation of the prehistoric old woman. It is to be assumed

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THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

that the child bestowed his love upon this governess in spite
of her bad treatment of him.^*

Another series of dreams which might be called typical are
those which have the content that a dear relative, parent,
brother, or sister, child or the like, has died. Two classes of
these dreams must immediately be distinguished—those in
which the dreamer remains unaffected by sorrow while dream-
ing, and those in which he feels profound grief on account of
the death, in which he even expresses this grief during sleep
by fervid tears.

We may ignore the dreams of the first group; they have
no claim to be reckoned as typical. If they are analysed, it is
found that they signify something else than what they contain,
that they are intended to cover up some other wish. Thus it
is with the dream of the aunt who sees the only son of her
sister lying on a bier before her (p 129). This does not signify
that she wishes the death of her little nephew; it only con-
ceals, as we have learned, a wish to see a beloved person once
more after long separation—the same person whom she had
seen again after a similar long intermission at the funeral of
another nephew. This wish, which is the real content of
the dream, gives no cause for sorrow, and for that reason no
sorrow is felt in the dream. It may be seen in this case that
the emotion which is contained in the dream does not belong
to the manifest content of the dream, but to the latent one,
and that the emotional content has remained free from the
disfigurement which has befallen the presentation content.

It is a different story with the dreams in which the death
of a beloved relative is imagined and where sorrowful emotion
is felt. These signify, as their content says, the wish that the
person in question may die, and as I may here expect that the
feelings of all readers and of all persons who have dreamt
anything similar will object to my interpretation, I must
strive to present my proof on the broadest possible basis.

We have already had one example to show that the wishes

^*A supplementary interpretation of this dream: To spit on the stairs,
led me to “esprit d’escalier” by a free translation, owing to the fact that
“Spucken” (English: spit, and also to act like a spook, to haunt) is an occu-
pation of ghosts. “Stair-wit” is equivalent to lack of quickness at repartee
(German: Schlagerfertigkeit—readiness to hit back, to strike) with which I
must really reproach myself. Is it a question, however, whether the nurse
was lacking in “readiness to hit”?

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THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

represented in the dream as fulfilled are not always actual
wishes. They may also be dead, discarded, covered, and re-
pressed wishes, which we must nevertheless credit with a sort
of continuous existence on account of their reappearance in
the dream. They are not dead like persons who have died in
our sense, but they resemble the shades in the Odyssey which
awaken a certain kind of life as soon as they have drunk blood.
In the dream of the dead child in the box (p. 130) we were
concerned with a wish that had been actual fifteen years
before, and which had been frankly admitted from that time.
It is, perhaps, not unimportant from the point of view of dream
theory if I add that a recollection from earliest childhood is at
the basis even of this dream. While the dreamer was a little
child–it cannot be definitely determined at what time–she
had heard that during pregnancy of which she was the fruit
her mother had fallen into a profound depression of spirits
and had passionately wished for the death of her child before
birth. Having grown up herself and become pregnant, she
now follows the example of her mother.
If some one dreams with expressions of grief that his
father or mother, his brother or sister, has died, I shall not
use the dream as a proof that he wishes them dead now.
The theory of the dreams does not require so much; it is
satisfied with concluding that the dreamer has wished them
dead–at some one time in childhood. I fear, however, that
this limitation will not contribute much to quiet the objectors;
they might just as energetically contest the possibility that
they have ever had such thoughts as they are sure that they
do not cherish such wishes at present. I must, therefore,
reconstruct a part of the submerged infantile psychology on
the basis of the testimony which the present still furnishes.^*

Let us at first consider the relation of children to their
brothers and sisters. I do not know why we presuppose that
it must be a loving one, since examples of brotherly and sisterly
enmity among adults force themselves upon every one’s ex-
perience, and since we so often know that this estrangement
originated even during childhood or has always existed. But

* Cf. “Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben” in the Jahrbuch
für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, vol. i., 1909, and
“Ueber infantile Sexualtheorien,” in Sexualprobleme, vol. i., 1908.

212

many grown-
up people, who to-day are tenderly attached to
their brothers and sisters and stand by them, have lived with
them during childhood in almost uninterrupted hostility.
The older child has ill-treated the younger, slandered it, and
deprived it of its toys; the younger has been consumed by
helpless fury against the elder, has envied it and feared it,
or its first impulse toward liberty and first feelings of injustice
have been directed against the oppressor. The parents say
that the children do not agree, and cannot find the reason for
it. It is not difficult to see that the character even of a well-
behaved child is not what we wish to find in a grown-up person.
The child is absolutely egotistical; it feels its wants acutely
and strives remorselessly to satisfy them, especially with its
competitors, other children, and in the first instance with its
brothers and sisters. For doing this we do not call the child
wicked—we call it naughty; it is not responsible for its evil
deeds either in our judgment or in the eyes of the penal law.
And this is justifiably so; for we may expect that within
this very period of life which we call childhood, altruistic
impulses and morality will come to life in the little egotist,
and that, in the words of Meynert, a secondary ego will overlay
and restrain the primary one. It is true that morality does
not develop simultaneously in all departments, and further-
more, the duration of the unmoral period of childhood is of
different length in different individuals. In cases where the
development of this morality fails to appear, we are pleased
to talk about “degeneration”; they are obviously cases of
arrested development. Where the primary character has
already been covered up by later development, it may be at
least partially uncovered again by an attack of hysteria. The
correspondence between the so-called hysterical character
and that of a naughty child is strikingly evident. A com-
pulsion neurosis, on the other hand, corresponds to a super-
morality, imposed upon the primary character that is again
asserting itself, as an increased check.
Many persons, then, who love their brothers and sisters,
and who would feel bereaved by their decease, have evil wishes
towards them from earlier times in their unconscious wishes,
which are capable of being realised in the dream. It is
particularly interesting to observe little children up to three

213

years old in their attitude towards their brothers and sisters.
So far the child has been the only one ; he is now informed that
the stork has brought a new child. The younger surveys the
arrival, and then expresses his opinion decidedly : “ The stork
had better take it back again.” ^*

I subscribe in all seriousness to the opinion that the child
knows enough to calculate the disadvantage it has to expect
on account of the new-
comer. I know in the case of a lady of
my acquaintance who agrees very well with a sister four years
younger than herself, that she responded to the news of her
younger sister’s arrival with the following words : “ But I
shan’t give her my red cap, anyway.” If the child comes to
this realisation only at a later time, its enmity will be aroused
at that point. I know of a case where a girl, not yet three
years old, tried to strangle a suckling in the cradle, because
its continued presence, she suspected, boded her no good.
Children are capable of envy at this time of life in all its in-
tensity and distinctness. Again, perhaps, the little brother or
sister has really soon disappeared ; the child has again drawn
the entire affection of the household to itself, and then a new
child is sent by the stork ; is it then unnatural for the favourite
to wish that the new competitor may have the same fate as
the earlier one, in order that he may be treated as well as he
was before during the interval ? Of course this attitude of
the child towards the younger infant is under normal circum-
stances a simple function of the difference of age. After a
certain time the maternal instincts of the girl will be excited
towards the helpless new-
born child.

Feelings of enmity towards brothers and sisters must occur
far more frequently during the age of childhood than is noted
by the dull observation of adults.

In case of my own children, who followed one another
rapidly, I missed the opportunity to make such observations ;
I am now retrieving it through my little nephew, whose com-
plete domination was disturbed after fifteen months by the

^*The three-and-a-half-year-old Hans, whose phobia is the subject of
analysis in the above-mentioned publication, cries during fever shortly after
the birth of his sister : “ I don’t want a little sister.” In his neurosis, one
and a half years later, he frankly confesses the wish that the mother should
drop the little one into the bath-
tub while bathing it, in order that it may die.
With all this, Hans is a good-natured, affectionate child, who soon becomes
fond of his sister, and likes especially to take her under his protection.

214

arrival of a female competitor. I hear, it is true, that the
young man acts very chivalrously towards his little sister, that
he kisses her hand and pets her; but in spite of this I have
convinced myself that even before the completion of his
second year he is using his new facility in language to criticise
this person who seems superfluous to him. Whenever the
conversation turns upon her, he chimes in and cries angrily :
“Too (l)ittle, too (l)ittle.” During the last few months, since
the child has outgrown this unfavourable criticism, owing to
its splendid development, he has found another way of justify-
ing his insistence that she does not deserve so much attention.
On all suitable occasions he reminds us, “She hasn’t any
teeth.”^* We have all preserved the recollection of the eldest
daughter of another sister of mine—how the child which was
at that time six years old sought assurance from one aunt
after another for an hour and a half with the question : “Lucy
can’t understand that yet, can she?” Lucy was the com-
petitor, two and a half years younger.

I have never failed in any of my female patients to find
this dream of the death of brothers and sisters denoting
exaggerated hostility. I have met with only one exception,
which could easily be reinterpreted into a confirmation of the
rule. Once in the course of a sitting while I was explaining
this condition of affairs to a lady, as it seemed to have a bear-
ing upon the symptoms under consideration, she answered, to
my astonishment, that she had never had such dreams. How-
ever, she thought of another dream which supposedly had
nothing to do with the matter—a dream which she had first
dreamed at the age of four, when she was the youngest child,
and had since dreamed repeatedly. “A great number of
children, all of them the dreamer’s brothers and sisters, and
male and female cousins, were romping about in a meadow.
Suddenly they all got wings, flew up, and were gone.” She
had no idea of the significance of the dream; but it will not
be difficult for us to recognise it as a dream of the death of all
the brothers and sisters, in its original form, and little in-
fluenced by the censor. I venture to insert the following
interpretation : At the death of one out of a large number of

^*The three-and-a-half-year old Hans embodies his crushing criticism of
his little sister in the identical word (see previous notes). He assumes that
she is unable to speak on account of her lack of teeth.

215

children—in this case the children of two brothers were brought
up in common as brothers and sisters—is it not probable that
our dreamer, at that time not yet four years old, asked a wise,
grown-
up person : “What becomes of children when they
are dead ?” The answer probably was : “They get wings
and become angels.” According to this explanation all the
brothers and sisters and cousins in the dream now have wings
like angels and—this is the important thing—they fly away.
Our little angel-
maker remains alone, think of it, the only
one after such a multitude ! The feature that the children
are romping about on a meadow points with little ambiguity
to butterflies, as though the child had been led by the same
association which induced the ancients to conceive Psyche
as having the wings of a butterfly.

Perhaps some one will now object that, although the inimical
impulses of children towards their brothers and sisters may
well enough be admitted, how does the childish disposition
arrive at such a height of wickedness as to wish death to a
competitor or stronger playmate, as though all transgressions
could be atoned for only by the death-
punishment ? Whoever
talks in this manner forgets that the childish idea of “being
dead” has little else but the words in common with our own.
The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering
in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing, which
the grown-
up person, as all the myths concerning the Great
Beyond testify, finds it so hard to bear in his conception. Fear
of death is strange to the child ; therefore it plays with the
horrible word and threatens another child : “If you do that
again you will die, as Francis died,” whereat the poor mother
shudders, for perhaps she cannot forget that the great majority
of mortals do not succeed in living beyond the years of child-
hood. It is still possible, even for a child eight years old, on
returning from a museum of natural history, to say to its
mother : “Mamma, I love you so ; if you ever die, I am going
to have you stuffed and set you up here in the room so I can
always, always see you !” So little does the childish conception
of being dead resemble our own.^*

^* I heard the following idea expressed by a gifted boy of ten, after the
sudden death of his father : “I understand that father is dead, but I cannot
see why he does not come home for supper.”

216

Being dead means for the child, which has been spared
the scenes of suffering previous to dying, the same as “being
gone,” not disturbing the survivors any more. The child
does not distinguish the manner and means by which this
absence is brought about, whether by travelling, estrangement,
or death. If, during the prehistoric years of a child, a nurse
has been sent away and its mother has died a short while
after, the two experiences, as is revealed by analysis, overlap
in his memory. The fact that the child does not miss very
intensely those who are absent has been realised by many a
mother to her sorrow, after she has returned home after a
summer journey of several weeks, and has been told upon
inquiry: “The children have not asked for their mother a
single time.” But if she really goes to that “undiscovered
country from whose bourn no traveller returns,” the children
seem at first to have forgotten her, and begin only subsequently
to remember the dead mother.

If, then, the child has motives for wishing the absence of
another child, every restraint is lacking which would prevent
it from clothing this wish in the form that the child may die,
and the psychic reaction to the dream of wishing death proves
that, in spite of all the differences in content, the wish in the
case of the child is somehow or other the same as it is with
adults.

If now the death-
wish of the child towards its brothers and
sisters has been explained by the childish egotism, which causes
the child to regard its brothers and sisters as competitors,
how may we account for the same wish towards parents, who
bestow love on the child and satisfy its wants, and whose pre-
servation it ought to desire from these very egotistical motives ?

In the solution of this difficulty we are aided by the experi-
ence that dreams of the death of parents predominantly refer
to that member of the parental couple which shares the sex
of the dreamer, so that the man mostly dreams of the death of
his father, the woman of the death of her mother. I cannot
claim that this happens regularly, but the predominating
occurrence of this dream in the manner indicated is so evident
that it must be explained through some factor that is uni-
versally operative! To express the matter boldly, it is as
though a sexual preference becomes active at an early period,

217

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

as though the boy regards his father as a rival in love, and as
though the girl takes the same attitude toward her mother—
a rival by getting rid of whom he or she cannot but profit.
Before rejecting this idea as monstrous, let the reader
consider the actual relations between parents and children.
What the requirements of culture and piety demand of this
relation must be distinguished from what daily observation
shows us to be the fact. More than one cause for hostile
feeling is concealed within the relations between parents and
children; the conditions necessary for the actuation of wishes
which cannot exist in the presence of the censor are most
abundantly provided. Let us dwell at first upon the relation
between father and son. I believe that the sanctity which we
have ascribed to the injunction of the decalogue dulls our
perception of reality. Perhaps we hardly dare to notice that
the greater part of humanity neglects to obey the fifth
commandment. In the lowest as well as in the highest strata of
human society, piety towards parents is in the habit of receding
before other interests. The obscure reports which have come
to us in mythology and legend from the primeval ages of human
society give us an unpleasant idea of the power of the father
and the ruthlessness with which it was used. Kronos devours
his children, as the wild boar devours the brood of the sow;
Zeus emasculates his father ^* and takes his place as a ruler.
The more despotically the father ruled in the ancient family,
the more must the son have taken the position of an enemy,
and the greater must have been his impatience, as designated
successor, to obtain the mastery himself after his father’s
death. Even in our own middle-
class family the father is
accustomed to aid the development of the germ of hatred which
naturally belongs to the paternal relation by refusing the son
the disposal of his own destiny, or the means necessary for
this. A physician often has occasion to notice that the son’s
grief at the loss of his father cannot suppress his satisfaction
at the liberty which he has at last obtained. Every father
frantically holds on to whatever of the sadly antiquated potestas

^*At least a certain number of mythological representations. According
to others, emasculation is only practised by Kronos on his father.
With regard to mythological significance of this motive, cf. Otto Rank’s
“Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden,” fifth number of Schriften zur
angew. Seelenkunde, 1909.

218

patris still remains in the society of to-day, and every poet
who, like Ibsen, puts the ancient strife between father and son
in the foreground of his fiction is sure of his effect. The causes
of conflict between mother and daughter arise when the daughter
grows up and finds a guardian in her mother, while she desires
sexual freedom, and when, on the other hand, the mother has
been warned by the budding beauty of her daughter that the
time has come for her to renounce sexual claims.

All these conditions are notorious and open to everyone’s
inspection. But they do not serve to explain dreams of the
death of parents found in the case of persons to whom piety
towards their parents has long since come to be inviolable.
We are furthermore prepared by the preceding discussion to
find that the death-
wish towards parents is to be explained by
reference to earliest childhood.

This conjecture is reaffirmed with a certainty that makes
doubt impossible in its application to psychoneurotics through
the analyses that have been undertaken with them. It is
here found that the sexual wishes of the child—in so far as
they deserve this designation in their embryonic state—
awaken at a very early period, and that the first inclinations of
the girl are directed towards the father, and the first childish
cravings of the boy towards the mother. The father thus
becomes an annoying competitor for the boy, as the mother
does for the girl, and we have already shown in the case of
brothers and sisters how little it takes for this feeling to lead
the child to the death-
wish. Sexual selection, as a rule, early
becomes evident in the parents ; it is a natural tendency for
the father to indulge the little daughter, and for the mother
to take the part of the sons, while both work earnestly for the
education of the little ones when the magic of sex does not
prejudice their judgment. The child is very well aware of
any partiality, and resists that member of the parental couple
who discourages it. To find love in a grown-
up person is for
the child not only the satisfaction of a particular craving, but
also means that the child’s will is to be yielded to in other
respects. Thus the child obeys its own sexual impulse, and
at the same time re-
enforces the feeling which proceeds from
the parents, if it makes a selection among the parents that
corresponds to theirs.

219

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

Most of the signs of these infantile inclinations are usually
overlooked ; some of them may be observed even after the
first years of childhood. An eight-year-old girl of my ac-
quaintance, when her mother is called from the table, takes
advantage of the opportunity to proclaim herself her suc-
cessor. “Now I shall be Mamma; Charles, do you want some
more vegetables? Have some, I beg you,” &c. A particu-
larly gifted and vivacious girl, not yet four years old, with
whom this bit of child psychology is unusually transparent,
says outright: “Now mother can go away; then father must
marry me and I shall be his wife.” Nor does this wish by any
means exclude from child life the possibility that the child
may love his mother affectionately. If the little boy is allowed
to sleep at his mother’s side whenever his father goes on a
journey, and if after his father’s return he must go back to the
nursery to a person whom he likes far less, the wish may be
easily actuated that his father may always be absent, in order
that he may keep his place next to his dear, beautiful mamma;
and the father’s death is obviously a means for the attainment
of this wish; for the child’s experience has taught him that
“dead” folks, like grandpa, for example, are always absent;
they never return.

Although observations upon little children lend them-
selves, without being forced, to the proposed interpretation,
they do not carry the full conviction which psychoanalyses
of adult neurotics obtrude upon the physician. The dreams
in question are here cited with introductions of such a nature
that their interpretation as wish-dreams becomes unavoidable.
One day I find a lady sad and weeping. She says: “I do not
want to see my relatives any more; they must shudder at
me.” Thereupon, almost without any transition, she tells
that she remembers a dream, whose significance, of course,
she does not know. She dreamed it four years before, and it
is as follows: A fox or a lynx is taking a walk on the roof; then
something falls down, or she falls down, and after that her mother is
carried out of the house dead—whereat the dreamer cries bitterly.
No sooner had I informed her that this dream must signify a
wish from her childhood to see her mother dead, and that it is
because of this dream that she thinks that her relatives must
shudder at her, than she furnished some material for explaining

220

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

the dream. “Lynx-
eye” is an opprobrious epithet which a
street boy once bestowed on her when she was a very small
child; when she was three years old a brick had fallen on her
mother’s head so that she bled severely.
I once had opportunity to make a thorough study of a
young girl who underwent several psychic states. In the state
of frenzied excitement with which the illness started, the
patient showed a very strong aversion to her mother; she
struck and scolded her as soon as she approached the bed,
while at the same time she remained loving and obedient to a
much older sister. Then there followed a clear but somewhat
apathetic state with very much disturbed sleep. It was in
this phase that I began to treat her and to analyse her dreams.
An enormous number of these dealt in a more or less abstruse
manner with the death of the mother; now she was present
at the funeral of an old woman, now she saw her sisters sitting
at the table dressed in mourning; the meaning of the dreams
could not be doubted. During the further progress of the
convalescence hysterical phobias appeared; the most tortur-
ing of these was the idea that something happened to her
mother. She was always having to hurry home from wherever
she happened to be in order to convince herself that her mother
was still alive. Now this case, in view of my other experiences,
was very instructive; it showed in polyglot translations, as it
were, the different ways in which the psychic apparatus reacts
to the same exciting idea. In the state of excitement which
I conceive as the overpowering of the second psychic instance,
the unconscious enmity towards the mother became potent
as a motor impulse; then, after calmness set in, following the
suppression of the tumult, and after the domination of the
censor had been restored, this feeling of enmity had access
only to the province of dreams in order to realise the wish that
the mother might die; and after the normal condition had
been still further strengthened, it created the excessive concern
for the mother as a hysterical counter-reaction and manifesta-
tion of defence. In the light of these considerations it is no
longer inexplicable why hysterical girls are so often extrava-
gantly attached to their mothers.
On another occasion I had opportunity to get a profound
insight into the unconscious psychic life of a young man for

221

whom a compulsion-neurosis made life almost unendurable,
so that he could not go on the street, because he was harassed
by the obsession that he would kill every one he met. He spent
his days in arranging evidence for an alibi in case he should be
charged with any murder that might have occurred in the
city. It is superfluous to remark that this man was as moral
as he was highly cultured. The analysis–which, moreover,
led to a cure–discovered murderous impulses toward the
young man’s somewhat over-strict father as the basis of these
disagreeable ideas of compulsion–impulses which, to his great
surprise, had received conscious expression when he was seven
years old, but which, of course, had originated in much earlier
years of childhood. After the painful illness and death of
the father, the obsessive reproach transferred to strangers in
the form of the afore-mentioned phobia, appeared when the
young man was thirty-one years old. Anyone capable of
wishing to push his own father from a mountain-
top into an abyss is certainly not to be trusted to spare the lives of those
who are not so closely bound to him; he does well to lock
himself into his room.

According to my experience, which is now large, parents,
play a leading part in the infantile psychology of all later
neurotics, and falling in love with one member of the parental
couple and hatred of the other help to make up that fateful
sum of material furnished by the psychic impulses, which has
been formed during the infantile period, and which is of such
great importance for the symptoms appearing in the later
neurosis. But I do not think that psychoneurotics are here
sharply distinguished from normal human beings, in that
they are capable of creating something absolutely new and
peculiar to themselves. It is far more probable, as is shown
also by occasional observation upon normal children, that in
their loving or hostile wishes towards their parents psycho-
neurotics only show in exaggerated form feelings which are
present less distinctly and less intensely in the minds of most
children. Antiquity has furnished us with legendary material
to confirm this fact, and the deep and universal effectiveness of
these legends can only be explained by granting a similar
universal applicability to the above-mentioned assumption in
infantile psychology.

222

I refer to the legend of King Oedipus and the drama of the
same name by Sophocles. Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of
Thebes, and of Jocasta, is exposed while a suckling, because
an oracle has informed the father that his son, who is still
unborn, will be his murderer. He is rescued, and grows up as
the king’s son at a foreign court, until, being uncertain about
his origin, he also consults the oracle, and is advised to avoid
his native place, for he is destined to become the murderer of
his father and the husband of his mother. On the road leading
away from his supposed home he meets King Laius and strikes
him dead in a sudden quarrel. Then he comes to the gates
of Thebes, where he solves the riddle of the Sphynx who is
barring the way, and he is elected king by the Thebans in
gratitude, and is presented with the hand of Jocasta. He
reigns in peace and honour for a long time, and begets two sons
and two daughters upon his unknown mother, until at last a
plague breaks out which causes the Thebans to consult the
oracle anew. Here Sophocles’ tragedy begins. The mes-
sengers bring the advice that the plague will stop as soon as the
murderer of Laius is driven from the country. But where is
he hidden ?

“ Where are they to be found? How shall we trace the
perpetrators of so old a crime where no conjecture leads to
discovery ? ”^*

The action of the play now consists merely in a revelation,
which is gradually completed and artfully delayed—resembling
the work of a psychoanalysis—of the fact that Oedipus
himself is the murderer of Laius, and the son of the dead man
and of Jocasta. Oedipus, profoundly shocked at the mon-
strosities which he has unknowingly committed, blinds himself
and leaves his native place. The oracle has been fulfilled.

The Oedipus Tyrannus is a so-called tragedy of fate ; its
tragic effect is said to be found in the opposition between the
powerful will of the gods and the vain resistance of the human
beings who are threatened with destruction ; resignation to
the will of God and confession of one’s own helplessness is the
lesson which the deeply-moved spectator is to learn from the
tragedy. Consequently modern authors have tried to obtain
a similar tragic effect by embodying the same opposition in a

^*Act. i. sc. 2. Translated by George Somers Clark.

223

story of their own invention. But spectators have sat unmoved
while a curse or an oracular sentence has been fulfilled on
blameless human beings in spite of all their struggles; later
tragedies of fate have all remained without effect.
If the Oedipus Tyrannus is capable of moving modern men
no less than it moved the contemporary Greeks, the explana-
tion of this fact can-not lie merely in the assumption that the
effect of the Greek tragedy is based upon the opposition be-
tween fate and human will, but is to be sought in the peculiar
nature of the material by which the opposition is shown.
There must be a voice within us which is prepared to recognise
the compelling power of fate in Oedipus, while we justly con-
demn the situations occurring in Die Ahnfrau or in other
tragedies of later date as arbitrary inventions. And there must
be a factor corresponding to this inner voice in the story of
King Oedipus. His fate moves us only for the reason that it
might have been ours, for the oracle has put the same curse
upon us before our birth as upon him. Perhaps we are all
destined to direct our first sexual impulses towards our
mothers, and our first hatred and violent wishes towards our
fathers; our dreams convince us of it. King Oedipus, who
has struck his father Laius dead and has married his mother
Jocasta, is nothing but the realised wish of our childhood.
But more fortunate than he, we have since succeeded, unless
we have become psychoneurotics, in withdrawing our sexual
impulses from our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of
our fathers. We recoil from the person for whom this primitive
wish has been fulfilled with all the force of the repression which
these wishes have suffered within us. By his analysis, showing
us the guilt of Oedipus, the poet urges us to recognise our own
inner self, in which these impulses, even if suppressed, are still
present. The comparison with which the chorus leaves us—

“ … Behold ! this Oedipus, who unravelled the famous
riddle and who was a man of eminent virtue; a man who
trusted neither to popularity nor to the fortune of his citizens;
see how great a storm of adversity hath at last overtaken
him ” (Act v. sc. 4).

This warning applies to ourselves and to our pride, to us, who
have grown so wise and so powerful in our own estimation

224

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

since the years of our childhood. Like Oedipus, we live in
ignorance of the wishes that offend morality, wishes which
nature has forced upon us, and after the revelation of which we
want to avert every glance from the scenes of our childhood.

In the very text of Sophocles’ tragedy there is an unmis-
takable reference to the fact that the Oedipus legend originates
in an extremely old dream material, which consists of the
painful disturbance of the relation towards one’s parents by
means of the first impulses of sexuality. Jocasta comforts
Oedipus—who is not yet enlightened, but who has become
worried on account of the oracle—by mentioning to him
the dream which is dreamt by so many people, though she
attaches no significance to it—

“For it hath already been the lot of many men in dreams
to think themselves partners of their mother’s bed. But he
passes most easily through life to whom these circumstances
are trifles” (Act iv. sc. 3).

The dream of having sexual intercourse with one’s mother
occurred at that time, as it does to-day, to many people, who
tell it with indignation and astonishment. As may be under-
stood, it is the key to the tragedy and the complement to the
dream of the death of the father. The story of Oedipus is
the reaction of the imagination to these two typical dreams,
and just as the dream when occurring to an adult is experienced
with feelings of resistance, so the legend must contain terror
and self-chastisement. The appearance which it further
assumes is the result of an uncomprehending secondary elab-
oration which tries to make it serve theological purposes
(cf. the dream material of exhibitionism, p. 206). The at-
tempt to reconcile divine omnipotence with human responsi-
bility must, of course, fail with this material as with every
other.^*

^*Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
is founded on the same basis as the Oedipus. But the whole difference in
the psychic life of the two widely separated periods of civilisation—the age-
long progress of repression in the emotional life of humanity—is made
manifest in the changed treatment of the identical material. In Oedipus
the basic wish-phantasy of the child is brought to light and realised as it is
in the dream; in Hamlet it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence
—somewhat as in the case of a neurosis—only by the inhibition which
results from it. The fact that it is possible to remain in complete darkness

225

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

I must not leave the typical dream of the death of dear
relatives without somewhat further elucidating the subject
concerning the character of the hero, has curiously shown itself to be consistent
with the overpowering effect of the modern drama. The play is based upon
Hamlet’s hesitation to accomplish the avenging task which has been assigned
to him; the text does not avow the reasons or motives of this hesitation, nor
have the numerous attempts at interpretation succeeded in giving them.
According to the conception which is still current to-
day, and which goes
back to Goethe, Hamlet represents the type of man whose prime energy
is paralysed by over-development of thought activity. (“Sicklied o’er with
the pale cast of thought.”) According to others the poet has attempted to
portray a morbid, vacillating character who is subject to neurasthenia. The
plot of the story, however, teaches us that Hamlet is by no means intended
to appear as a person altogether incapable of action. Twice we see him
asserting himself actively: once in headlong passion, where he stabs the
eavesdropper behind the arras, and on another occasion where he sends the
two courtiers to the death which has been intended for himself—doing this
deliberately, even craftily, and with all the lack of compunction of a prince
of the Renaissance. What is it, then, that restrains him in the accomplish-
ment of the task which his father’s ghost has set before him? Here the
explanation offers itself that it is the peculiar nature of this task. Hamlet
can do everything but take vengeance upon the man who has put his father
out of the way, and has taken his father’s place with his mother—upon the
man who shows him the realisation of his repressed childhood wishes. The
loathing which ought to drive him to revenge is thus replaced in him by
self-reproaches, by conscientious scruples, which represent to him that he
himself is no better than the murderer whom he is to punish. I have thus
translated into consciousness what had to remain unconscious in the mind
of the hero; if some one wishes to call Hamlet a hysteric subject I cannot
but recognise it as an inference from my interpretation. The sexual dis-
inclination which Hamlet expresses in conversation with Ophelia, coincides
very well with this view—it is the same sexual disinclination which was to
take possession of the poet more and more during the next few years of his
life, until the climax of it is expressed in Timon of Athens. Of course it
can only be the poet’s own psychology with which we are confronted in
Hamlet; from a work on Shakespeare by George Brandes (1896), I take
the fact that the drama was composed immediately after the death of
Shakespeare’s father—that is to say, in the midst of recent mourning for
him—during the revival, we may assume, of his childhood emotion towards
his father. It is also known that a son of Shakespeare’s, who died early,
bore the name of Hamnet (identical with Hamlet). Just as Hamlet treats
of the relation of the son to his parents, Macbeth, which appears subse-
quently, is based upon the theme of childlessness. Just as every neurotic
symptom, just as the dream itself, is capable of re-interpretation, and even
requires it in order to be perfectly intelligible, so every genuine poetical
creation must have proceeded from more than one motive, more than one
impulse in the mind of the poet, and must admit of more than one inter-
pretation. I have been attempted to interpret only the most profound group
of impulses in the mind of the creative poet. The conception of the Hamlet
problem contained in these remarks has been later confirmed in a detailed
work based on many new arguments by Dr. Ernest Jones, of Toronto
(Canada). The connection of the Hamlet material with the “Mythos von
der Geburt des Helden” has also been demonstrated by O. Rank.—“The
Oedipus Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: a Study in Motive”
(American Journal of Psychology, January 1910, vol. xxi.).

226

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

of their significance for the theory of the dream in general.
These dreams show us a realisation of the very unusual case
where the dream thought, which has been created by the
repressed wish, completely escapes the censor, and is transferred
to the dream without alteration. There must be present
peculiar conditions making possible such an outcome. I find
circumstances favourable to these dreams in the two following
factors: First, there is no wish which we believe further from
us; we believe such a wish “would never occur to us in a
dream”; the dream censor is therefore not prepared for this
monstrosity, just as the legislation of Solon was incapable of
establishing a punishment for patricide. Secondly, the re-
pressed and unsuspected wish is in just this case particularly
often met by a fragment of the day’s experience in the shape
of a concern about the life of the beloved person. This con-
cern cannot be registered in the dream by any other means
than by taking advantage of the wish that has the same
content; but it is possible for the wish to mask itself behind
the concern which has been awakened during the day. If one
is inclined to think all this a more simple process, and that
one merely continues during the night and in dreams what
one has been concerned with during the day, the dream of the
death of beloved persons is removed from all connection with
dream explanation, and an easily reducible problem is uselessly
retained.

It is also instructive to trace the relation of these dreams to
anxiety dreams. In the dream of the death of dear persons
the repressed wish has found a way of avoiding the censor,
and the distortion which it causes. In this case the inevitable
concomitant manifestation is that disagreeable sensations are
felt in the dream. Thus the dream of fear is brought about
only when the censor is entirely or partially overpowered,
and, on the other hand, the overpowering of the censor is made
easier when fear has already been furnished by somatic sources.
Thus it becomes obvious for what purpose the censor performs
its office and practises dream distortion; it does this in order
to prevent the development of fear or other forms of disagreeable
emotion.

I have spoken above of the egotism of the infantile mind,
and I may now resume this subject in order to suggest that

227

dreams preserve this characteristic—thus showing their con-
nection with infantile life. Every dream is absolutely egotis-
tical; in every dream the beloved ego appears, even though it
may be in a disguised form. The wishes that are realised in
dreams are regularly the wishes of this ego; it is only a de-
ceptive appearance if interest in another person is thought to
have caused the dream. I shall subject to analysis several
examples which appear to contradict this assertion.

I. A boy not yet four years old relates the following: 
 

He
saw a large dish garnished, and upon it a large piece of roast meat,
and the meat was all of a sudden—not cut to pieces—but eaten up.
He did not see the person who ate it.^*

Who may this strange person be of whose luxurious repast
this little fellow dreams? The experiences of the day must
give us the explanation of this. For a few days the boy had
been living on a diet of milk according to the doctor’s pre-
scription; but on the evening of the day before the dream he
had been naughty, and as a punishment he had been deprived of
his evening meal. He had already undergone one such hunger-
cure, and had acted very bravely. He knew that he would get
nothing to eat, but he did not dare to indicate by a word that
he was hungry. Education was beginning to have its influence
upon him; this is expressed even in the dream which shows
the beginnings of dream disfigurement. There is no doubt
that he himself is the person whose wishes are directed toward
this abundant meal, and a meal of roast meat at that. But
since he knows that this is forbidden him, he does not dare, as
children do in the dream (cf. the dream about strawberries of
my little Anna, p. 110), to sit down to the meal himself. The
person remains anonymous.

II. Once I dream that I see on the show-table of a book-
store a new number in the Book-lovers’ Collec-
tion—the collec-
tion which I am in the habit of buying (art mono-
graphs, mono-
graphs on the history of the world, famous art centres, &c.).

^*Likewise, anything large, over-abundant, enormous and exaggerated,
may be a childish characteristic. The child knows no more intense wish
than to become big, and to receive as much of everything as grown-ups; the
child is hard to satisfy; it knows no enough, and insatiably demands the
repetition of whatever has pleased it or tasted good to it. It learns to
practise moderation, to be modest and resigned, only through culture and
education. As is well known, the neurotic is also inclined toward im-
moderation and excess.

228

The new collection is called Famous Orators (or Orations), and
the first number bears the name of Doctor Lecher.

In the course of analysis it appears improbable that the
fame of Dr. Lecher, the long-
winded orator of the German
Opposition, should occupy my thoughts while I am dreaming.
The fact is that, a few days before, I undertook the psychic
cure of some new patients, and was now forced to talk for
from ten to twelve hours a day. Thus I myself am the long-
winded orator.

III. Upon another occasion I dream that a teacher of my
acquaintance at the university says: My son, the Myopic.
Then there follows a dialogue consisting of short speeches and
replies. A third portion of the dream follows in which I and
my sons appear, and as far as the latent dream content is
concerned, father, son, and Professor M. are alike only lay
figures to represent me and my eldest son. I shall consider
this dream again further on because of another peculiarity.

IV. The following dream gives an example of really base
egotistical feelings, which are concealed behind affectionate
concern :

My friend Otto looks ill, his face is brown and his eyes bulge.

Otto is my family physician, to whom I owe a debt greater
than I can ever hope to repay, since he has guarded the health
of my children for years. He has treated them successfully
when they were taken sick, and besides that he has given them
presents on all occasions which gave him any excuse for doing
so. He came for a visit on the day of the dream, and my
wife noticed that he looked tired and exhausted. Then comes
my dream at night, and attributes to him a few of the symptoms
of Basedow’s disease. Any one disregarding my rules for
dream interpretation would understand this dream to mean
that I am concerned about the health of my friend, and that
this concern is realised in the dream. It would thus be a
contradiction not only of the assertion that the dream is a
wish-fulfilment, but also of the assertion that it is accessible
only to egotistic impulses. But let the person who interprets
the dream in this manner explain to me why I fear that Otto
has Basedow’s disease, for which diagnosis his appearance
does not give the slightest justification ? As opposed to this,
my analysis furnishes the following material, taken from an

229

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS

occurrence which happened six years ago. A small party of
us, including Professor R., were driving in profound darkness
through the forest of N., which is several hours distant from
our country home. The coachman, who was not quite sober,
threw us and the wagon down a bank, and it was only by a
lucky accident that we all escaped unhurt. But we were
forced to spend the night at the nearest inn, where the news of
our accident awakened great sympathy. A gentleman, who
showed unmistakable signs of the morbus Basedowii—nothing
but a brownish colour of the skin of the face and bulging eyes,
no goitre—placed himself entirely at our disposal and asked
what he could do for us. Professor R. answered in his decided
way: “Nothing but lend me a night-shirt.” Whereupon our
generous friend replied: “I am sorry but I cannot do that,”
and went away.

In continuing the analysis, it occurs to me that Basedow
is the name not only of a physician, but also of a famous
educator. (Now that I am awake I do not feel quite sure of
this fact.) My friend Otto is the person whom I have asked
to take charge of the physical education of my children—
especially during the age of puberty (hence the night-shirt)—
in case anything should happen to me. By seeing Otto in
the dream with the morbid symptoms of our above-mentioned
generous benefactor, I apparently mean to say, “If anything
happens to me, just as little is to be expected for my children
from him as was to be expected then from Baron L., in spite of
his well-meaning offers.” The egotistical turn of this dream
ought now to be clear.^*

But where is the wish-fulfilment to be found? It is not
in the vengeance secured upon my friend Otto, whose fate it
seems to be to receive ill-treatment in my dreams, but in the
following circumstances: In representing Otto in the dream
as Baron L., I have at the same time identified myself with
some one else, that is to say, with Professor R., for I have asked
something of Otto, just as R. asked something of Baron L.

^*While Dr. Jones was delivering a lecture before an American scientific
society, and speaking of egotism in dreams, a learned lady took exception
to this unscientific generalisation. She thought that the lecturer could only
pronounce such judgment on the dreams of Austrians, and had no right to
include the dreams of Americans. As for herself she was sure that all her
dreams were strictly altruistic.

230

at the time of the occurrence which has been mentioned. And
that is the point. For Professor R. has pursued his way
independently outside the schools, somewhat as I have done,
and has only in later years received the title which he earned
long ago. I am therefore again wishing to be a professor!
The very phrase “in later years” is the fulfilment of wish,
for it signifies that I shall live long enough to pilot my boy
through the age of puberty myself.

I gave only a brief account of the other forms of typical
dreams in the first edition of this book, because an insufficient
amount of good material was at my disposal. My experience,
which has since been increased, now makes it possible for me
to divide these dreams into two broad classes—first, those
which really have the same meaning every time, and secondly,
those which must be subjected to the most widely different
interpretations in spite of their identical or similar content.
Among the typical dreams of the first sort I shall closely
consider the examination dream and the so-called dream of
dental irritation.

Every one who has received his degree after having passed
the final college examination, complains of the ruthlessness
with which he is pursued by the anxiety dream that he will
fail, that he must repeat his work, &c. For the holder of the
university degree this typical dream is replaced by another,
which represents to him that he has to pass the examination
for the doctor’s degree, and against which he vainly raises the
objection in his sleep that he has already been practising for
years—that he is already a university instructor or the head
of a law firm. These are the ineradicable memories of the
punishments which we suffered when we were children for
misdeeds which we had committed—memories which were
revived in us on that dies irae, dies illa of the severe exami-
nation at the two critical junctures in our studies. The
“examination-phobia” of neurotics is also strengthened by
this childish fear. After we have ceased to be schoolboys it
is no longer our parents and guardians as at first, or our
teachers as later on, who see to our punishment; the inexorable
chain of causes and effects in life has taken over our further
education. Now we dream of examinations for graduation