Freud, Sigmund (1922-001/1922.en): Dreams and telepathy

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
OF

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

VOLUME III SEPTEMBER 1922 PART 3

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY'
BY
SIGM. FREUD
VIENNA

At the present time, when such a great interest is felt in what are
called “occult” phenomena, very definite anticipations will doubtless
be aroused by the announcement of a paper with this title. I will
therefore hasten to explain that there is no ground for any such
anticipations. You will learn nothing from this lecture of mine
about the riddle of telepathy; indeed, you will not even gather
whether I do or do not believe in the existence of “telepathy’.
On this occasion I have set myself the very modest task of examining
the relation of telepathic occurrences, whatever may be their origin,
to dreams: more exactly, to our theory of dreams. You will know
that the connection between dreams and telepathy is commonly
held to be a very intimate one; I shall propound the view that the
two have little to do with each other, and that if the existence
of telepathic dreams were established there would be no need to
alter in any way our conception of dreams.

The material on which the present communication is based is
very slight. In the first place I must express my regret that I could
make no use of my own dreams as I did when I wrote the
‘Traumdeutung’ (1900). But I have never had a ‘telepathic'
dream. Not that I have been entirely without dreams that conveyed
an impression of a certain definite occurrence taking place at some
distant place, leaving it to the dreamer to, decide whether the
occurrence is taking place at that moment or will do so at some

ı Paper read before the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. Trans-
lated by C.J. M. Hubback.

19 283

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284 SIGM. FREUD

later time. In waking life too I have often become aware of
presentiments of distant events. But these indications, foretellings,
and forebodings have none of them been fulfilled: there proved
to be no external reality corresponding to them, and they had
therefore to be regarded as purely subjective anticipations.

For example, I once dreamt during the war that one of my
sons then serving at the front had fallen. This was not directly
stated in the dream, but was expressed in an unmistakable manner
by means of the well-known death-symbolism of which an account
was first given by W. Stekel. (Let us not omit here to fulfil the
duty, often felt as inconvenient, of making literary acknowledge-
ments!) I saw the young soldier standing on a landing-stage,
between land and water, as it were; he looked to me very pale;
I spoke to him but he did not answer. There were other
unmistakable indications. He was not wearing military uniform,
but a ‚ski-ing costume' that he had worn when a serious ski-ing
accident had happened to him several years before the war. He
stood on something raised like a footstool with a chest in front of
him; a situation always closely associated in my mind with the
idea of ‘falling’, through a memory of my own childhood. As a
child of little more than two years old I had myself climbed on
such a footstool to get something out of a chest—probably
something good to eat—whereupon I fell and gave myself a
blow, of which I can even now show the scar. My son, however,
whom the dream pronounced to be dead, came home from the
war unscathed.

Only a short time ago, I had another dream announcing
misfortune; it was, I think, just before I decided on putting together

. these few remarks. This time there was not much attempt at
disguise: I saw my two nieces who live in England; they were
dressed in black and said to me ‘We buried her on Thursday’.
I knew the reference was to the death of their mother, now eighty-
seven years of age, the widow of my eldest brother.

A time of disagreeable anticipation followed; there would of

course be nothing surprising in so aged a woman suddenly passing.

away, yet it would be very unpleasant for the dream to coincide
exactly with the occurrencee. The next letter from England,
however, dissipated this fear. For the benefit of those who are
concerned for the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams I may interpolate
a reassurance by saying that there was no difficulty in detecting

SA

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY 285

by analysis the unconscious motives that might be presumed to
exist in these death-dreams just as in others.

Do not now urge the objection that what I have just related
is valueless because negative experiences prove as little here as
they do in less occult matters. I am well aware of that and have
not adduced these instances with any intention whatever of proving
anything or of surreptitiously influencing you in any particular
way. My sole purpose was to justify the limitations of my own
material.

Another fact certainly seems to me of more significance, namely,
that during my twenty-seven years of work as an analyst I have
never been in the position to observe a truly telepathic dream in
any of my patients. The people among whom my practice lay
certainly formed a good collection of very neurotic and ‘highly
sensitive’ temperaments; many of them have related to me most
remarkable incidents in their previous life on which they based a
belief in mysterious occult influences. Events such as accidents
or illnesses of near relatives, in particular the death of one of the
parents, have often enough happened during the treatment and
interrupted it; but not on one single occasion did these occurrences,
eminently suitable as they were, afford me the opportunity of
registering a single telepathic dream, although the treatment
extended over six months or a year or more. It may be of interest
to some one to attempt an explanation of this fact, limiting as it
does again the material at my disposal. You will see that any
such explanation would not affect the subject of this paper.

Nor does it embarrass me to be asked why I have made no
use of the abundant supply of telepathic dreams that have been
published. I should not have had far to seek, since the publications
of the English as well as of the American Society for Psychical
Research are accessible to me as a member of both societies. In all
these communications no attempt is ever made to subject such
dreams to analytic investigation, which would be our first interest
in such cases.” Moreover, you will soon perceive that for the
purposes of this paper one single dream will serve well enough.

2 In two writings of W. Stekel (Der Telepathische Traum, no date,
and Die Sprache des Traumes, Zweite Auflage, 1922) there are at least
attempts to apply the analytic technique to alleged telepathic dreams.
The author expresses his belief in the reality of telepathy.

Ig*

286 SIGM. FREUD

. My material thus consists simply and solely of two communi-
cations which have reached me from correspondents in Germany.
They are not personally known to me, but they give their names
and addresses: I have not the least ground for presuming any
intention to mislead on the part of the writers.

I

With the first I had already been in correspondence; he had
been good enough to send me, as many of my readers do,
observations of every-day occurrences and the like. He is obviously
an educated and highly intelligent man; this time he expressiy
places his material at my disposal if I care to turn it ‘to literary
account’.

His letter runs as follows:

“I consider the following dream of sufficient interest to give
you some material for your researches.

“I must first state the following facts. My daughter, who is
married and lives in Berlin, was expecting her first confinement in
the middle of December of this year. I intended to go to Berlin about
that time with my (second) wife, my daughter’s step-mother. During
the night of November 16—17 I dreamt, with a vividness and
clearness I have never before experienced, that my wife had given
birth to twins. I saw quite plainly the two-healthy infants with
their chubby faces lying in their cot side by side; ] was not sure
of their sex: one with fair hair had distinctly my features anıl
something of my wife’s, the other with chestnut-brown hair clearly
resembled her with a look of me. I said to my wife, who has
red-gold hair, “ probably “your” child’s chestnut hair will also
go red later on”. My wife gave them the breast. In the dream
she had also made some jam in a wash-basin and the two children
erept about on all fours in the basin and licked up the contents.
So much for the dream. Four or five times I had half awaked from
it, asked myself if it were true that we had twins, but did not come
to the conclusion with any certainty that it was only a dream. The
dream lasted till I woke, and after that it was some little time
before I felt quite clear as to the true state of affairs. At breakfast
I told my wife the dream, which much amused her. She said
“Surely Ilse (my daughter) won’t have twins?” I answered
“I should hardly think so, as there have never been twins either

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY 287

in my family or in G.’s” (her husband). On November the ı$8th
at ten o’clock in the morning I received a telegram from my
son-in-Jaw handed in the afternoon before, telling me of the birth of
twins, boy and girl. The birth thus took place at the time when
I was dreaming that my wife had twins. The confinement occurred
four weeks earlier than had been expected by my daughter and
her husband.

“But there is a further circumstance: the next night I dreamt
that my dead wife, my daughter’s own mother, had undertaken the
care of forty-eight new-born infants. When the first dozen were
being brought in, I protested. At that point the dream ended.

“My dead wife was very fond of children. She often talked
about it, saying she would like a whole troop round her, the more
the better, and that she would do very well if she had charge of
a Kindergarten and would be quite happy so. The noise children
make was music to her. On one occasion she invited in a whole
troop of children from the streets and regaled them with chocolates
and cakes in the courtyard of our villa. My daugnter must have
thought at once of her mother after her confinement, especially
because of the surprise of its coming on prematurely, the arrival of
twins, and their difference in sex. She knew her mother would
have greeted the event with the liveliest joy and sympathy. “Only
think what mother would say, if she were by me now!” This
thought must undoubtediy have gone through her mind. And then
I dream of my dead wife, of whom I very seldom dream, and had
neither spoken of nor thought of since the first dream.

‘Do you think the coincidence between dream and event in both
cases accidental? My daughter is much attached to me and was
most certainly thinking of me during the lahour, particularly because
we had often exchanged letters during the pregnancy and I had
constantly given her advice.’

It is easy to guess what my answer to this letter was. I was
sorry to find that my correspondent’s interest in analysis had been
so completely killed by that in telepathy; I therefore avoided his
direct question, and, remarking that the dream contained a good
deal besides its connection with the birth of the twins, I asked him
to let me know what information or incidents could give me a clue
to the meaning of the dream.

Thereupon I received the following second letter which certainly
did not give me what I wanted:

288 SIGM. FREUD

‘I have not been able to answer your kind letter of the 24th
until to-day. I shall be only too pleased to tell you “ without
omission or reserve” all the associations that occur to me.
Unfortunately there is not much, more would come out in talking.

Well then—my wife and I do not wish for any more children.
We very rarely have sexual intercourse, at any rate at the time
of the dream there was certainly no “danger”. My daughter’s
confinement, which was expected about the middle of December,
was naturally a frequent subject of conversation between us. My
daughter had been examined and skiagraphed in the summer, and
the doctor making the examination had made sure that the child
would be a boy. My wife said at the time “I should laugh if after
all it were a girl”. At the time she also thought to herself it
would be better if it were an H. rather than a G. (my son-in-law's
family name); my daughter is handsomer and has a better figure
than my son-in-law, although he has been a naval officer. I have
made some study of the question of heredity and am in the habit
of looking at small children to see whom they resemble. One more
thing! We havea small dog which sits with us at table in the evening
to have his food and licks the plates and dishes. All this material
appears in the dream.

“I am fond of small children and have often said that I should
like to have the bringing up of a child once more, now that I should
have so much more understanding, interest and time to devote to
it, but with my wife I should not wish it, as she does not possess
the necessary qualities for rearing a child judiciously. The dream
makes me a present of two children—I am not sure of the sex.
I see them even at this moment Iying in the bed and I recognise
the features, the one more like myself, the other like my wife, but
each with minor traits from the other side. My wife has auburn
hair, one of the children chestnut (red) brown. I say “yes, it will
later on be red too”. Both the children crawl round a large
wash-basin in which my wife has been stirring jam and lick it all
over (dream). The origin of this detail is easily explicable, just
as is the dream as a whole; it would not be difficult to understand
or interpret it, if it had not coincided with the unexpectediy early
arrival of my grandchildren (three weeks too soon), a coincidence
of time almost to the hour (I cannot exactly say when the dream
began; my grandchildren were born at nine p.m. and a quarter
past; I went to bed at about eleven and dreamed during the night).

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY 289

Our knowledge too that the child would be a boy adds to the
difficulty, though possibly the doubt whether this had been fully
established might account for the appearance of twins in the dream.
Still, all the same, there is the coincidence of the dream with the
unexpected and premature appearance of my daughter’s twins.

“It is not the first time that distant events have become known
to me before I received the actual news. To give one instance
among many. In October I had a visit from my three brothers.
We had not all seen one another together for thirty years (naturally
one had seen another oftener), once only at my father’s funeral
and once at my mother’s. Both deaths were expected, and I had
had no “presentiments” in either case. But, when about twenty-
‚five years ago my youngest brother died quite suddenly and
unexpectediy at the age of nine, as the postman handed me the
postcard with the news of his death, before I even glanced at it,
the thought came to me at once “ That is to say that your brother
is dead”. He was the only one left at home, a strong healthy lad,
while we four elder brothers were already fully fledged and had
left the parents’ house. At the-time of their visit to me the talk
by chance came round to this experience of mine, and, as if on
the word of command, all three brothers came out with the
declaration that exactly the same thing had happened to them.
Whether exactly in the same way I cannot say; at all events each
one said that he had felt perfectly certain of the death in advance
before the quite unexpected news had been communicated, following
closely as it did on the presentiment. We are all from the mother’s
side of a sensitive disposition, though tall, strong men, but not
one of us is in the least inclined towards spiritism or occultism;
on the contrary, we disclaim adherence to either. My brothers are
all three University men, two are schoolmasters, one a surveyor, all
rather pedants than visionaries. That is all I can tell you in regard
to the dream. If you can turn it to account in any of your writings,
I am delighted to place it at your disposal”.

I am afraid that you will behave like the writer of these letters.
You, too, will be primarily interested in the question whether this
dream can really be .regarded as a telepathic notification of the
unexpected birth of the twin children, and you will not be disposed
to submit this dream like any other to analysis. I foresee that
it will always be so when psycho-analysis and occultism encounter
each other. The former has, so to speak, all our instinctive

290 SIGM. FREUD

prepossessions against it; the latter is met half-way by powerful
and mysterious sympathies. ] am not, however, going to take up
the position that I am nothing but a psycho-analyst, that the
problems of occultism do not concern me: you would rightly judge
that to be only an evasion of the problem. On the contrary,
I maintain that it would be a great satisfaction to me if I could
convince myself and others on unimpeachable evidence of the
existence of telepathic processes, but I also consider that the data
about this dream are altogether inadequate to justify any such
pronouncement. You will observe that it does not once occur to
this intelligent man, deeply interested as he is in the problem of
his dream, to tell us when he had last seen his daughter or what
news he had lately had from her; he writes in the first letter that
the birth was a month too soon, in the second, however, the month
has become three weeks only, and in neither do we gain the
information whether the birth was really premature, or whether,
as so often happens, those concerned were out in their
reckoning. But we should have to consider these and other details
of the occurrence if we are to weigh the probability of the dreamer
making unconscious estimates and guesses. I felt too that it would
be of no use even if I succeeded in getting answers to such questions.
In the course of arriving at the information new doubts would
constantly arise which could only be set at rest if one had the man
in front of one and could revive all the relevant memories, which
he has perhaps dismissed as unessential. He is certainly right in
what he says at the beginning of his second letter, more would come
out if he were able to talk to me.

Consider another and similar case, in which the disturbing
interest of occultism has nu part. You must often have been in the
position to compare the anamnesia and the information about the
illness given during the first sitting by any neurotic with what you
have gained from him after some months of psycho-analysis. Apart
from the inevitable abbreviations of the first communication, how
many essentials were left out or suppressed, how many displacements
made in the relation the various facts bear to one another, how
much that was incorrect or untrue was related to you that first time!
You will not call me hyper-critical if I refuse in the eircumstances
to make any pronouncement whether the dream in question is a
telepathic fact or a particularly subtle achievement on the part of
the dreamer’s unconscious or whether it is simply to be taken as

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY 291

a striking coincidence. Our curiosity must be allayed with the
hope of some later opportunity for detailed oral examination of the
dreamer. But you cannot say that this outcome of our investigation
has disappointed you, for I prepared you for it; I said you would
hear nothing which would throw any light on the problem of
telepathy.

If we now pass on to the analytic treatment of this dream, we
are obliged again to admit that we are not satisfied. The material
that the dreamer associates with the manifest content of the dream
is insufficient to make any analysis possible. The dream, for
example, goes into great detail over the likeness of the children to
the parents, discusses the colour of their hair and the probable
change of colour at a later age, and as an explanation of this much
spun-out detail we only have the dry piece of information from the
dreamer that he has always been interested in questions of likeness
and heredity; we are certainly accustomed to push the matter rather
further! But at one point the dream does admit of an analytic
interpretation, and just at this point analysis, otherwise having no
connection with occultism, comes to the aid of telepathy in a
remarkable way. It is only on account of this single point that I
am asking for your attention to this dream at all.

Rightly viewed, this dream has no right whatever to be called
“telepathic”. It does not inform the dreamer of anything that is
taking place elsewhere—apart from what is otherwise ‘known to
him. What on the other hand the dream does relate is something
quite different from the event reported in the telegram the Second
day after the night of the dream. Dream and actual occurrence
diverge at a particularly important point, and only agree, apart
from the coincidence of time, in another very interesting element.
In the dream the dreamer’s wife has twins. The occurrence,
however, is that his daughter has given birth to twins in her distant
home. The dreamer does not overlook this difference, he does not
seem to know any way of getting over it and, as according to his
own account he has no leaning towards the occult, he only asks
quite tentatively whether the coincidence between dream and
occurrence on the point of the twin-birth can be more than an
accident. The psycho-analytic interpretation of dreams, however,
does away with this difference between the dream and the event, and
‚gives to both the same content. If we consult the association-
material to this dream, it proves to us, in spite of its sparseness,

292 SIGM. FREUD

that an inner bond of feeling exists between this father and daughter,
a bond of feeling which is so usual and so natural that we ought
to cease to be ashamed of it, one that in daily life merely finds
expression as a tender interest and only in dreams is drawn to
final conclusions. The father knows that his daughter clings to
him, he is convinced that she often thought of him during the labour,
in his heart I think he grudges her to the son-in-law, about whom
in one letter he makes a few disparaging remarks. On the occasion
of her confinement (whether expected or communicated by telepathy)
the unconscious though repressed wish becomes active: ‘she ought
rather to be my (second) wife’; it is this wish that has distorted
the dream-thoughts and is the cause of the difference between the
manifest dream-content and the event. We are entitled to replace
the second wife in the dream by the daughter. If we possessed
more associations with the dream, we could undoubtedly verify and
deepen this interpretation.

And now I have reached the point I wish to put before you.
We have endeavoured to maintain the strictest impartiality and have
allowed two conceptions of the dream to rank as equally probable
and equally unproved. According to the first the dream is a reaction
to the telepathic message: ‘your daughter has just brought twins
into the world’. According to the second an unconscious chain of
thought underlies the dream, which may be reproduced somewhat as
follows: ‘to-day is undoubtedly the day the confinement will take
place if the young people in Berlin are out in their reckoning by a
month, as I strongly suspect. And if my (first) wife were still
alive, she certainly would not be content with one grandchild!
To please her there would have to be at least twins.’ If this second
view is right, no new problems arise. It is simply a dream like
any other. The (preconscious) dream thoughts as outlined above
are reinforced by the (unconscious) wish, that no other than the
daughter should have been the second wife of the dreamer, and
thus the manifest dream as described to us arises.

If you prefer to assume that a telepathic message about the
daughter’s confinement reached the sleeper, further questions arise
of the relation of such a message to the dream and of its influence
on the formation of the dream. The answer is not far to seek and
is not at all ambiguous. The telepathic message has been treated
as a portion of the material that goes to the formation of a dream,
like any other external or internal stimulus, like a disturbing noise

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY 293

in the street or an insistent organic sensation in the sleeper’s own
body. In our example it is evident how the message, with the help
of a lurking repressed wish, becomes remodelled into a wish-
fulfilment: it is unfortunately less easy to show that it blends with
other material that becomes active at the same time so as to make
a dream. The telepathic message—if we are justified in recognizing
its existence—can thus make no alteration in the structure of the
dream; telepathy has nothing, to do with the essential nature
of dreams. And that I may avoid the impression that I am trying
to conceal a vague notion behind an abstract and fine-sounding
word, I am willing to repeat: the essential nature of dreams consists
in the peculiar process of the “dream-work’ whereby the pre-
conscious thoughts (residue from the previous day) are worked over
into the manifest dream-content by means of an unconscious wish-
activity. The problem of telepathy concerns dreams as little as the
problem of anxiety.

I am hoping that you will grant this, but that you will raise the
objection that there are, nevertheless, other telepathic dreams, in
which there is no difference between the event and the dream, and
in which there is nothing else to be found but the undisguised
reproduction of the event. I have no knowledge of such dreams
from my own experience, but I know they have often been reported.
If we now assume that we have such an undisguised and
unadulterated telepathic dream to deal with, another question arises.
Ought we to call such a telepathic experience a ‘dream’ at all?
You will certainly do so as long as you keep to popular usage, in
which everything that takes place in mental life during sleep is
called a dream. You, too, perhaps say, ‘I tossed about in my
dream’, and you are not conscious of anything incorrect when you
say, ‘I shed tears in my dream’ or ‘I felt apprehensive in my
dream’. But notice that in all these cases you are using ‘dream’
and ‘sleep’ and ‘state of being asleep’ interchangeably, as if there
were no distinction between them. I think it would be in the
interests of scientific accuracy to keep ‘dream’ and .‘state of
sleep’ more distinctiy separate. Why should we provide a
counterpart to the confusion conjured up by Maeder who, by
refusing to distinguish between the dream-work and the latent dream
thoughts, has discovered a new function for dreams? Supposing
then we are brought face to face with such a pure telepathic ‘dream’,
let us rather call it a telepathic experience in a state of sleep.

294 SIGM. FREUD

A dream without condensation, distortion, dramatization, most of
all without wish-fulfilment, surely hardly deserves the name. You
will remind me that there are other mental products in sleep to
which the name of ‘dream’ is properly refused. Actual experiences
of the day are known to be simply repeated in sleep; reproductions
of traumatic scenes in ‘dreams’ have led us only lately to revise
the theory of dreams. There are dreams which by certain special
qualities are to be distinguished ‚from the usual type, which are
properly speaking nothing but night-phantasies, not having
undergone additions or alterations of any kind and otherwise similar
to the well-known day-dreams. lt would be awkward, certainly,
to exclude these imaginings from the realm of “dreams’. But still
they all come from within, are products of our mental life, whereas
the very conception of the purely “telepathic dream’ lies in its
being a perception of something external, in relation to which
mental life remains passive and receptive.

I

The second case I intend to bring before your notice belongs
actually to quite another type. This is not a telepathic dream, but
a dream that has recurred from childhood onwards in a person who
has had many telepathic experiences. Her letter, which I reproduce
here, contains much that is remarkable, about which we cannot
pronounce any judgement. Some part of it is of interest in
connection with the problem of the relation of telepathy to dreams.

1. “..My doctor, Herr Dr. N. advises me to give you an
account of a dream that has haunted me for about thirty or thirty-
two years. I am following his advice, and perhaps the dream
may possess interest for you in some scientific respect. Since, in
your opinion, such dreams are to be traced to an experience of a
sexual nature in the first years of childhood, I reproduce some
reminiscences of childhood, that is, experiences which even now make
an impression on me and were of so marked a character as to have
determined my religion for me.

“May I beg of you to send me word in what way you explain
this dream and whether it is not possible to banish it from my
life, for it haunts me like a ghost, and the circumstances that always
accompany it—I always fall out of bed, and have inflicted on

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY 295

myself not inconsiderable injuries—make it particularly disagreeable
and distressing '.

2. ‘I am thirty-seven years old, very strong and in good physical
health, but in childhood I had, besides measles and scarlet fever,
an attack of inflammation of the kidneys. In my fifth year I had
a very severe inflammation of the eyes, which left double vision. One
image slants towards the other and the edges of the image are
blurred, as the scars from the ulcers affect the clearness. In the
specialist’s opinion there is nothing more to be done to the eyes
and no chance of improvement. The left side of my face is somewhat
awry, from having screwed up my left eye to see better. By dint
of practice and determination I can do the finest needlework, and
similarly, when a six-year-old child, I broke myself of squinting
sideways by practising in front of a looking-glass, so that now there
is no external sign of the defect in vision.

“In my earliest years I was always lonely, kept apart from
other children, and had visions (clairvoyance and clairaudience);
I was not able to distinguish these from reality, and was often in
consequence in embarrassing positions, with the result that I am
a very reserved and shy person. Since as a quite small child I
already knew far more than I could have learnt, I simply did not
understand children of my own age. I am myself the eldest of a
family of twelve.

‘“From'six to ten years old I attended the elementary school and
up to sixteen the high-school of the Ursuline Nuns in B. At ten
years old I had taken in as much French in four weeks, in eight
lessons, as other children learn in two years. ] had only to repeat
it and it was just as if I had already learnt it and only forgotten it.
I have never had any need to learn French, in contradistinction
to English, which certainly gave me no trouble but was not known
to me beforehand. The same thing happened to me with Latin
as with French and I have never properly learnt it, only knowing
it from ecclesiastical Latin, which is however quite familiar to me.
If I read a French book to-day, then I immediately begin thinking
in French, whereas this never happens to me with English, although
I have more command of English—My parents are peasant
people who for generations have never spoken any languages except
German and Polish.

“Visions: Sometimes reality vanishes for some moments and
I see something quite different. In my house, for example, I often

296 SIGM. FREUD

see an old couple and a child; the house is then differently furnished.
In hospital a friend once came into my room at about four
in the morning; I was awake, had the amp burning, and was sitting
at my table reading, as I suffer much from sleeplessness. This
apparition of her always means a trying time for me—as also
on this occasion.

‘In 1914 my brother was on active service; I was not with
nıy parents in B., but in C. It was ten in the morning on August
the 22nd when I heard my brother’s voice calling ‘Mother, mother ’.
It came again ten minutes later, but I saw nothing. On August
the 24th I came home, found my mother greatly oppressed, and in
answer to my questions she said that the boy had appeared on
August the 22nd. She had been in the garden in the morning, when
she had heard him call ‘Mother, mother’. I tried to comfort her
and said nothing about myself. Three weeks after there came a
card from my brother, written on August the 22nd between nine
and ten in the morning; shortly after that he died.

“On September the 27th, 1921, while in the hospital, I received
a message of some kind. There were violent knockings two or
three times repeated on the bed of the patient who shared my room.
We were both awake; I asked if she had knocked; she had not heard
anything at all. Eight weeks later I heard that one of my friends
had died in the night of the 26th to 27th.

‘Now something which may be a hallucination, a matter of
opinion! I have a friend who married a widower with five children;
I got to know the husband only through my friend. Nearly every
time that I have been to see her, I have seen a lady going in and
out of the house. It was natural to suppose that this was the
husband’s first wife. I asked at some convenient opportunity for
a portrait of her, but could not identify the apparition with the
photograph. Seven years later I saw a picture with the features
of the lady belonging to one of the children. It was after all the
first wife. In the first picture she looked in much better health:
she had just been through a feeding-up treatment and that alters
the appearance of a consumptive patient.—These are only a few
examples out of many. .

"The dream: I see a tongue of land surrounded by water. The
waves are driven to and fro by the surf. On this piece of land
stands a palm-tree, bent somewhat towards the water. A woman
has her arm wound round the stem of the palm and is bending low

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY' 297

towards the water, where a man is trying to reach the shore. At
last she lies down on the ground, holds tightly to the palm-tree with
her left hand and stretches out her right hand as far as she can
towards the man in the water, but without reaching him. At that
point I fall out of bed and wake. I was about fifteen or sixteen
years old when I realised that this woman was myself, and from
that time I not only went through all the woman’s apprehensions
for the man but I stood there many a time as a third who was not
taking part and only looked on. I dreamed this dream too in
separate scenes. As the interest in men awoke in me (eighteen to
twenty years old), I tried to see the man’s face; it was never
possible. The foam hid everything but the neck and the back of
the head. I have twice been engaged to be married, but the head
and build were not those of either of the two men.—Once, when
I was lying in hospital under the influence of paraldehyde, I saw
the man’s face, which I now always see in this dream. It was that
of the doctor under whose care I was. I like him as a doctor but
there was nothing more between us.

‘Memories: Six to nine months old. I was in a perambulator.
Quite close to me were two horses; one, a chestnut, is looking at me
very hard and in a way full of meaning. This is the most vivid
experience; I had the feeling that it was a human being.

‘One year old. Father and I in the töwn-park, where a park-
keeper is putting a little bird into my hand. Its eyes look into mine.
I feel “ That is a live creature like yourself”,

“Animals being slaughtered. When I heard.the pigs screaming
I always called for help and cried out “ You are killing a person”
(four years old). I have always avoided eating meat. Pork always
makes me sick. I came to eat meat during the war, but only against
my will; now I have given it up again.

‘Five years old. My mother was confined and I heard her cry
out. I had the feeling, “There is a human being or an animal in
the greatest distress”, just as I had over the pig-killing.

“I was quite indifferent as a child to sexual matters; at ten
years old I had as yet no conception of offences against chastity.
Menstruation came on at the age of twelve The woman first
awaked in me at six and twenty, after I had given birth to a child;
up to that time (six months) I constantly had violent vomiting after.
intercourse. This also came on whenever I was at all oppressed
in mood.

298 SIGM. FREUD

“I have extraordinarily keen powers of observation, and quite
exceptionally sharp hearing, also a very keen sense of smell. I can
pick out by smell people I know from among a crowd with my
eyes bandaged.

“I do not regard my abnormal powers of sight and hearing as
pathological, but ascribe them to finer perceptions and greater
quickness of thought; but I have only spoken of it to my pastor and
doctor— very unwillingly to the latter, as I was afraid he
would tell me that what I regarded as plus-qualities were minus-
qualities, and also because from being misunderstood in childhood
I am very reserved and shy’.

The dream which the writer of the letter asks us to interpret
is not hard to understand. It is a dream of saving from water,
a typical birth-dream. The language of symbolism, as you are
aware, knows no grammar; it is an extreme case of a language of
infinitives, and even the active and passive are represented by one
and the same image. If in a dream a woman pulls (or wishes to
pull) a man out of the water, that may mean she wishes to be his
mother (takes him for her son as Pharoah’s daughter did with
Moses), or equally she wishes him to make her into a mother, to have
a son by him, a son who shall be as like him as a copy. The tree-
trunk to which the woman clings is easily recognised as a phallic
symbol, even though it is not standing straight up, but inclined
towards the surface of the water—in the dream the word is ‘ bent’.

The on-rush and recoil of the surf brought to the mind of another:
dreamer who was relating a similar dream the comparison with
the intermittent pains of labour, and when, knowing that she had
not yet borne a child, I asked her how she knew of this characteristic
of labour, she said that one imagined labour as a kind of colic,
a quite unimpeachable description physiologically. She gave the
association ‘Waves of the Sea and Waves of Passion’ How our
dreamer at so early an age can have arrived at the finer details of
the symbolism: tongue of land, palm-tree, I am naturally unable
to say. We must not however overlook the fact that, when peopie
maintain that they have for years been haunted by the same dream,
it often turns out that the manifest content is not throughout quite
the same. Only the kernel of the dream has recurred each time; the
details of the content are changed or additions are made to them.

®|*Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen’, the title of a play by Grill-
parzer. Ed.]

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY 299

At the end of this dream, which is evidently charged with
anxiety, the dreamer falls out of bed. This is a fresh representation
of child-birth; analytic investigation of the fear of heights, of the
dread of an impulse to throw oneself out of the window, has
doubtless led you all to the same conclusion.

Who then is the man, by whom the dreamer wishes to have a
child, or of whose very image she would like to be the mother?
She has often tried to see his face, but the dream never allows of
it; the man has to remain a mystery. We know from countless
analyses what this veiling means, and the conclusion we should base
on analogy is verified by another statement of the dreamer’s.
Under the influence of paraldehyde she once recognized the face
of the man in the dream as that of the hospital physician who was
treating her, and who meant nothing more to her conscious emotional
life. The original thus never divulged its identity, but this
impression of it in “transference”’ establishes the conclusion that
earlier it must have always been the father. Ferenczi is undoubtediy
perfectly right in pointing out that these ‘dreams of the unsuspecting ’
are valuable sources of information confirming the conjectures of
analysis. Our dreamer was the eldest of twelve children; how
often must she have gone through the pangs of jealousy and
disappointment when not she, but her mother, obtained from her
father the longed-for child!

Our dreamer has quite correctly supposed that her first memories
of childhood would be of value in the interpretation of her early
and recurrent dream. In the first scene, in the first year of her
life, as she sits in her perambulator she sees two horses close to
her, one looking hard at her in a significant way. This she describes
as her most vivid experience; she had the feeling that it was a
human being. This is a judgement with which we can do nothing
but agree, assuming as we do that the two horses represent, in this
case as so often, man and wife, father and mother. It is, as it were,
a flash of infantile totemism. If we could, we should ask the writer
whether the brown horse who looks at her in so human a way
could not be recognised by its colouring as her father. The second
recollection is associatively connected with the first through the
same ‘understanding’ gaze. ‘Taking the little bird in her hand’
reminds the analyst, who by the way has prejudices of his own
at times, of a feature in the dream in which the woman’s hand
is again in contact with another phallic symbol.

20

300 SIGM. FREUD

The next two memories belong together; they make still slighter
demands on the interpreter. The mother erying out during her
confinement reminded the daughter directly of the pigs screaming
when they are killed and put her into the same frenzy of pity.
We may also conjecture, however, that this is a violent reaction
against a death-wish directed at the mother.

With these indications of tenderness for the father, of contact
with his genitals, and of the death-wish against the mother, the
outline of the female Oedipus complex is sketched. The ignorance
of sexual matters retained so long and the frigidity at a later period
bear out these suppositions. The writer of the letter has been
virtually—and for a time no doubt actually—an hysterical neurotic.
The life-force has, for her own happiness, carried her along with
it, has awakened in her the sexual feelings of a woman and brought
her the joys of motherhood, and the capacity to work, but a portion
of her libido still clings to its point of fixation in childhood; she
still dreams that dream that flings her out of bed and punishes
her for her incestuous object-choice by 'not inconsiderable
injuries.

And now a strange doctor’s explanation, given in a letter, is
to effect something that all the most important experiences of later
life have failed to do. Probably a regular analysis continued
for a considerable time might have some success. As things were,
I was obliged to content myself with writing to her that I was
convinced she was suffering from the after-effects of a strong
emotional tie binding her to her father and from a corresponding
identification with her mother, but that I did not myself expect
that this explanation would help her at all. Spontaneous cures
of neurosis usually leave scars behind, and these smart from time
to time. We are very proud of our art if we achieve a cure through
psycho-analysis, yet even so we cannot always prevent the formation
of a painful scar in the process.

The little series of reminiscences must engage our attention for
a while longer. I have on one occasion stated that such scenes of
childhood are “screen-memories’ selected at a later period, put
together, and thereby not infrequently falsified. This subsequent
elaboration serves a purpose that is easy to guess. In our case one
can practically hear the ego of the writer glorifying or soothing
itself throughout the whole series of recollections. ‘I was from
a tiny thing a particularly large-hearted and compassionate child.

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY 301

I learnt quite early that the animals have souls as we have, and
could not endure cruelty to animals. The sins of the flesh were
far from me and I preserved my chastity till late.’ With declarations
such as these she loudly contradicts the inferences that we have
to make about her early childhood on the basis of our analytical
experience, namely, that she had an abundance of premature sexual
emotions and violent feelings of hatred for her mother and her
younger brothers and sisters. (Beside the genital significance
assigned to it, the little bird may also have that of a child-symbol,
like all small animals; her memory also accentuates in a very
insistent way that this tiny creature had the same right to exist
as she herself.) The short series of recollections in fact
furnishes a very nice example of a mental structure with a two-fold
aspect. Viewed superficially, we may find in it the expression of
an abstract idea, here, as usually, with an ethical reference. In
H. Silberer’s nomenclature the structure has an anagogic content;
on deeper investigation it reveals itself as a chain of phenomena
belonging to the region of the repressed life of the instinets—it
displays its psycho-analytic content. As you know, Silberer, who
was among the first to issue a warning to us on no account to lose
sight of the nobler side of the human soul, has put forward the
view that all or nearly all dreams permit such a two-fold
interpretation, a purer, anagogice one, beside the ordinary, psycho-
analytic one. This is, however, unfortunately not so; on the
contrary, an over-interpretation of this kind is rarely possible; there
has been no valuable example of such a dream-analysis with a
double meaning published up t0 the present time within my
knowledge. But something of the kind can often be observed
within the series of associations that our patients produce during
analytic treatment. The successive ideas are linked on the one
hand by an obvious and coherent association, while on the other
hand you become aware of an underlying theme which is kept secret
and at the same time plays a part in all these ideas. The contrast
between the two themes that dominate the same series of ideas is
not always one between the lofty anagogic and the common psycho-
analytic, but is rather that between shocking and decent or neutral
ideas—a fact that easily explains how such a chain of associations
with a two-fold determination arises. In our present example it is
of course not accidental that the anagogic and the Ppsycho-analytic
interpretations stand in such a sharp contrast to each other; both

z0*

302 SIGM. FREUD

relate to the same material, and the later tendency is the same as
that seen in the reaction-formations erected against the instinctive
forces.

Now why did we make such a special search for the psycho-
analytic interpretation instead of contenting ourselves with the more
accessible anagogic one? The answer to this is linked up with many
other problems: with the existence of neurosis itself and the
explanations it inevitably demands, the fact that virtue does not
reward a man with the joy and strength in life that is expected from
it, as though it brought with it too much from its original source
(this dreamer too had not been well rewarded for her virtue), and
there are various other reasons that I need not discuss before this
audience.

So far, however, in this case we have completely neglected the
question of telepathy, the other point of interest in it for us; it is
time to return to it. In a sense we have here an easier task than
in the case of Herr G. With a person who so easily and so early
in life succumbed before reality and replaced it by the world of
phantasy, the -temptation is irresistible to connect her telepathic
experiences and ‘visions’ with her neurosis and to derive them
from it, although here too we should not allow ourselves to be
deceived as to the cogency of our own arguments. We shall merely
replace what is unknown and unintelligible by possibilities that are
at least comprehensible.

On August the 22nd, 1914, at ten o’clock in the morning, our
correspondent experienced a telepathic impression that her brother
who was at the time on active service was calling: ‘Mother,
Mother! ’; the phenomenon was 'purely acoustic, it was repeated
shortly after, but nothing was seen. Two days later she sees her
mother and finds her much depressed because the young man had
announced himself to her by repeatediy calling “Mother, Mother! ”
She immediately recalls the same telepathic message, which she had
experienced at the same time, and as a matter of fact some weeks
later it was established that the young soldier had died on that day
at the hour stated.

It cannot be proved, but also cannot be disproved, that instead
of this what happened was the following: the mother told her one
day that the son had sent this telepathic message; whereupon the
conviction at once arose in her mind that she had had the same
experience at the same time. Such delusory memories arise in the

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY 303

mind with the force of an obsession, a force derived from
real sources—they have, however, substituted material for psychical
reality. The strength of the delusory memory lies in its being an
excellent way of expressing the sister’s tendency to identify herself
with the mother. ‘You are anxious about the boy, but I am really
his mother, and his cry was meant for me; I had this telepathic
message.’ The sister would naturally firmly decline to consider our
attempt at explanation and would hold to her belief in the authenticity
of the experience. She simply cannot do otherwise; as long as the
reality of the unconscious basis of it in her own mind is
concealed from her she is obliged to believe in the reality of her
pathological logie. Every such delusion derives its strength and
its unassailable character from its source in unconscious psychical
reality. I note in passing that it is not incumbent on us here to
explain the mother’s experience or to investigate its authenticity.
The dead brother is however not only the imaginary child of our
correspondent; he represents also a rival regarded with hatred even
at the time of his birth. By far the greater number of all telepathic
presentiments relate to death or the possibility of death: when
patients under analysis keep telling us of the frequency and
infallibility of their gloomy forebodings, we can with equal regularity
show them that they are fostering particularly strong death-wishes
in their unconscious against their nearest relations and have therefore
long suppressed them. The patient whose history I related in
1909 (‘Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’) was an example
to the point; he was even called a ‘corpse-bird’ by his relations.
But when the kindly and highly intelligent man—who has since
himself perished in the war—began to make progress towards
recovery he himself gave me considerable assistance in clearing up
his own psychological conjuring tricks. In the same way the account
given in our first correspondent’s letter of how he and his three
brothers had received the news of their youngest brother’s death
as a thing they had long been inwardly aware of appears to need
no other explanation. The elder brothers would all have been
equally convinced of the superfluousness of the youngest arrival.
Another of our dreamer's ‘visions’ will probably become more
intelligible in the light of analytical knowledge! Women friends
have obviousiy a considerable significance in her emotional life.
News of the death of one of them is conveyed to her shortly after
the event by knocking at night on the bed of a room-mate in the

304 SIGM. FREUD '

hospital. Another friend had many years before married a widower
with several (five) children. On the occasion of her visits to their
house she regularly saw the apparition of a lady, whom she felt
constrained to suppose to be the dead first wife; this did not at first
permit of confirmation, and only became a matter of certainty with
her seven years later on the discovery of a fresh photograph of the
dead woman. This achievement in the way of a vision has the
same inner dependence on the family-complex already recognised
in our correspondent as her presentiment of the brother’s death. By
identifying herself with her friend she could in her person achieve
her own wish-fulfilment; for all eldest daughters of a numerous
family build up in their unconscious the phantasy of becoming the
father’s second wife by the death of the mother. If the mother is
ill or dies, the eldest daughter takes her place as a matter of course
in relation to the younger brothers and sisters, and may even in
respect to the father take over some part of the functions of the
wife. The unconscious wish fills in the other part.

I am now almost at the end of what I wish to tell you. I might
however add the observation that the cases of telepathic messages
or occurrences which have been discussed here are clearly connected
with emotions belonging to the sphere of the Oedipus complex.
This may sound startling; I do not intend to publish it as a great
discovery, however. I would rather revert to the result we arrived
at through investigating the dream I considered first. Telepathy
has no relation to the essential nature of dreams; it cannot deepen
in any way what we already understand of them by analysis. On
the other hand, psycho-analysis may do something to advance the
study of telepathy, in so far as, by the help of its interpretations,
many of the puzzling characteristics of telepathic phenomena may
be rendered more intelligible to us; or other, still doubtful
phenomena be for the first time definitely ascertained to be of a
telepathic nature.

There remains one element of the apparently intimate connection
between telepathy and dreams to be considered: namely, the
incontestable fact that sleep creates favourable conditions for
telepathy. Sleep is not, it is true, indispensable to the
accomplishment of the process—whether it originates in messages
or in an unconscious activity of some kind. If you are not already
aware of this, you will learn it from the instance given by our
second correspondent, of the message coming from the young man

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY 305

between nine and ten in the morning. We must add, however, that
no one has a right to take exception to telepathic occurrences on
the ground that the event and the presentiment (or message) do
not exactly coincide in astronomical time. It is perfectly conceivable
that a telepathic message might arrive contemporaneously with the
event and yet only penetrate to consciousness the following night
during sleep (or even in waking life only after a while, during
some pause in the usual mental activity). We are, as you know,
of opinion that dream-formation itself does not necessarily wait for
the onset of sleep to begin. Often the latent dream-thoughts
may have been Iying ready during the whole day. till at
night they find the contact with the unconscious wish that shapes.
them into a dream. But if the phenomenon of telepathy is only an
activity of the unconscious mind, then no fresh problem lies before
us. The laws of unconscious mental life may then: be taken for
granted as applying to telepathy.

Have I given you the impression that I am secretly inclined to
support the reality of telepathy in the occult sense? If so, I should
very much regret that it is so diffieult to avoid giving such an
impression. In reality, however, I was anxious to be strietly
impartial. I have every reason to be so, for I have no opinion;
I know nothing about it.