Freud - Complete Works (150 page)

   Before assigning the fourth of
the factors which govern the formation of dreams to its proper
place, I propose to quote a number of examples from my collection.
These will serve partly to illustrate the interplay between the
three factors already known to us and partly to provide
confirmatory evidence for what have hitherto been unsupported
assertions or to indicate some conclusions which inevitably follow
from them. In giving an account of the dream-work, I have found
very great difficulty in backing my findings by examples. Instances
in support of particular propositions carry conviction only if they
are treated in the context of the interpretation of a dream as a
whole. If they are torn from their context they lose their virtue;
while, on the other hand, a dream-interpretation which is carried
even a little way below the surface quickly becomes so voluminous
as to make us lose the thread of the train of thought which it was
designed to illustrate. This technical difficulty must serve as my
excuse if in what follows I string together all sorts of things,
whose only common bond is their connection with the contents of the
preceding sections of this chapter.

   I will begin by giving a few
instances of peculiar or unusual modes of representation in
dreams.

   A lady had the following dream:
A servant girl was standing on a ladder as if she were cleaning
a window, and had a chimpanzee with her and a gorilla-cat
(the
dreamer afterwards corrected this to
an angora cat
). She
hurled the animals at the dreamer; the chimpanzee cuddled up to
her, which was very disgusting
. - This dream achieved its
purpose by an extremely simple device: it took a figure of speech
literally and gave an exact representation of its wording.
‘Monkey’, and animals’ names in general, are used
as invectives; and the situation in the dream meant neither more
nor less than ‘hurling invectives’. In the course of
the present series of dreams we shall come upon a number of other
instances of the use of this simple device during the
dream-work.

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861

   Another dream adopted a very
similar procedure.
A woman had a child with a remarkably
deformed skull. The dreamer had heard that the child had grown like
that owing to its position in the uterus. The doctor said that the
skull might be given a better shape by compression, but that that
would damage the child’s brain. She reflected that as he was
a boy it would do him less harm
. -This dream contained a
plastic representation of the abstract concept of
‘impressions on children’ which the dreamer had met
with in the course of the explanations given her during her
treatment.

   The dream-work adopted a slightly
different method in the following instance. The dream referred to
an excursion to the Hilmteich near Graz.
The weather outside was
fearful. There was a wretched hotel, water was dripping from the
walls of the room, the bedclothes were damp
. (The latter part
of the dream was reported less directly than I have given it.) The
meaning of the dream was ‘superfluous’. This abstract
idea, which was present in the dream-thoughts, was in the first
instance given a somewhat forced twist and put into some such form
as ‘overflowing’, ‘flowing over’ or
‘fluid’ - after which it was represented in a number of
similar pictures: water outside, water on the walls inside, water
in the dampness of the bed-clothes-everything flowing or
‘overflowing.’

   We shall not be surprised to find
that, for the purpose of representation in dreams, the spelling of
words is far less important than their sound, especially when we
bear in mind that the same rule holds good in rhyming verse. Rank
(1910, 482) has recorded in detail, and analysed very fully, a
girl’s dream in which the dreamer described how she was
walking through the fields and cutting off rich ears
[‘
Ähren
’] of barley and wheat. A friend of
her youth came towards her, but she tried to avoid meeting him. The
analysis showed that the dream was concerned with a kiss - an
‘honourable kiss’ [‘
Kuss in Ehren
’
pronounced the same as ‘
Ähren
’]. In the
dream itself the ‘
Ähren
’, which had to be
cut off, not pulled off, figured as ears of corn, while, condensed
with ‘
Ehren
’, they stood for a whole number of
other thoughts.

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862

   On the other hand, in other
cases, the course of linguistic evolution has made things very easy
for dreams. For language has a whole number of words at its command
which originally had a pictorial and concrete significance, but are
used to-day in a colourless and abstract sense. All that the dream
need do is to give these words their former, full meaning or to go
back a little way to an earlier phase in their development. A man
had a dream, for instance, of his brother being in a
Kasten
[‘box’]. In the course of interpretation the
Kasten
was replaced by a
Schrank
[‘cupboard’ - also used abstractly for
‘barrier’, ‘restriction’]. The
dream-thought had been to the effect that his brother ought to
restrict himself [‘
sich einschränken
’] -
instead of the dreamer doing so.

   Another man dreamt that he
climbed to the top of a mountain which commanded a quite unusually
extensive view
. Here he was identifying himself with a
brother of his who was the editor of a
survey
which dealt
with
far
Eastern affairs.

   In
Der Grüne Heinrich
a dream is related in which a mettlesome horse was rolling about in
a beautiful field of oats, each grain of which was ‘a sweet
almond, a raisin and a new penny piece . . . wrapped
up together in red silk and tied up with a bit of pig’s
bristle.’ The author (or dreamer) gives us an immediate
interpretation of this dream-picture: the horse felt agreeably
tickled and called out ‘Der Hafer sticht mich!’

   According to Henzen dreams
involving puns and turns of speech occur particularly often in the
old Norse sagas, in which scarcely a dream is to be found which
does not contain an ambiguity or a play upon words.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

863

   It would be a work in itself to
collect these modes of representation and to classify them
according to their underlying principles. Some of these
representations might almost be described as jokes, and they give
one a feeling that one would never have understood them without the
dreamer’s help.

   (1) A man dreamt that
he was
asked someone’s name but could not think of it.
He
himself explained that what this meant was that ‘he would
never dream of such a thing’.

   (2) A woman patient told me a
dream in which
all the people were especially big
.
‘That means’, she went on, ‘that the dream must
be to do with events in my early childhood, for at that time, of
course, all grown-up people seemed to me enormously big.’ She
herself did not appear in the content of this dream. - The fact of
a dream referring to childhood may also be expressed in another
way, namely by a translation of time into space. The characters and
scenes are seen as though they were at a great distance, at the end
of a long road, or as though they were being looked at through the
wrong end of a pair of opera-glasses.

   (3) A man who in his working life
tended to use abstract and indefinite phraseology, though he was
quite sharp-witted in general, dreamt on one occasion that
he
arrived at a railway station just as a train was coming in. What
then happened was that the platform moved towards the train, while
the train stopped still
- an absurd reversal of what actually
happens. This detail was no more than an indication that we should
expect to find another reversal in the dream’s content. The
analysis of the dream led to the patient’s recollecting some
picture-books in which there were illustrations of men standing on
their heads and walking on their hands.

   (4) Another time the same dreamer
told me a short dream which was almost reminiscent of the technique
of a rebus. He dreamt that
his uncle gave him a kiss in an
automobile
. He went on at once to give me the interpretation,
which I myself would never have guessed: namely that it meant
auto-erotism. The content of this dream might have been produced as
a joke in waking life.

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864

   (5) A man dreamt that
he was
pulling a woman out from behind a bed
. The meaning of this was
that he was giving her preference.

   (6) A man dreamt that
he was
an officer sitting at a table opposite the Emperor
. This meant
that he was putting himself in opposition to his father.

   (7) A man dreamt that
he was
treating someone for a broken limb
. The analysis showed that
the broken bone [‘
Knochenbruch
’] stood for a
broken marriage [‘
Ehebruch
’, properly
‘adultery’].

   (8) The time of day in dreams
very often stands for the age of the dreamer at some particular
period in his childhood. Thus, in one dream, ‘a quarter past
five in the morning’ meant the age of five years and three
months, which was significant, since that was the dreamer’s
age at the time of the birth of his younger brother.

   (9) Here is another method of
representing ages in a dream. A woman dreamt that
she was
walking with two little girls whose ages differed by fifteen
months
. She was unable to recall any family of her acquaintance
to whom this applied. She herself put forward the interpretation
that the two children both represented herself and that the dream
was reminding her that the two traumatic events of her childhood
were separated from each other by precisely that interval. One had
occurred when she was three and a half, the other when she was four
and three-quarters.

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865

   (10) It is not surprising that a
person undergoing psycho-analytic treatment should often dream of
it and be led to give expression in his dreams to the many thoughts
and expectations to which the treatment gives rise. The imagery
most frequently chosen to represent it is that of a journey,
usually by motor-car, as being a modern and complicated vehicle.
The speed of the car will then be used by the patient as an
opportunity for giving vent to ironical comments. -If ‘the
unconscious’, as an element in the subject’s waking
thoughts, has to be represented in a dream, it may be replaced very
appropriately by subterranean regions. -These, where they occur
without
any reference to analytic treatment, stand for the
female body or the womb. -’Down below’ in dreams often
relates to the genitals, ‘up above’, on the contrary,
to the face, mouth or breast. -Wild beasts are as a rule employed
by the dream-work to represent passionate impulses of which the
dreamer is afraid, whether they are his own or those of other
people. (It then needs only a slight displacement for the wild
beasts to come to represent the people who are possessed by these
passions. We have not far to go from here to cases in which a
dreaded father is represented by a beast of prey or a dog or wild
horse - a form of representation recalling totemism.) It might be
said that the wild beasts are used to represent the libido, a force
dreaded by the ego and combated by means of repression. It often
happens, too, that the dreamer separates off his neurosis, his
‘sick personality’, from himself and depicts it as an
independent person.

   (11) Here is an example recorded
by Hanns Sachs (1911): ‘We know from Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams
that the dream-work makes use of
different methods for giving a sensory form to words or phrases.
If, for instance, the expression that is to be represented is an
ambiguous one, the dream-work may exploit the fact by using the
ambiguity as a switch-point: where one of the meanings of the word
is present in the dream-thoughts the other one can be introduced
into the manifest dream. This was the case in the following short
dream in which ingenious use was made for representational purposes
of appropriate impressions of the previous day. I was suffering
from a cold on the "dream-day", and I had therefore
decided in the evening that, if I possibly could, I would avoid
getting out of bed during the night. I seemed in the dream merely
to be continuing what I had been doing during the day. I had been
engaged in sticking press-cuttings into an album and had done my
best to put each one in the place where it belonged. I dreamt that
I was trying to paste a cutting into the album. But it
wouldn’t go on to the page
[
"er geht nicht auf
die Seite"
]
, which caused me much pain
. I woke up
and became aware that the pain in the dream persisted in the form
of a pain in my inside, and I was compelled to abandon the decision
I had made before going to bed. My dream, in its capacity of
guardian of my sleep, had given me the illusion of a fulfilment of
my wish to stop in bed, by means of a plastic representation of the
ambiguous phrase "
er geht nicht auf die Seite
"
["he isn’t going to the lavatory"].’

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866

   We can go so far as to say that
the dream-work makes use, for the purpose of giving a visual
representation of the dream-thoughts, of any methods within its
reach, whether waking criticism regards them as legitimate or
illegitimate. This lays the dream-work open to doubt and derision
on the part of everyone who has only
heard
of
dream-interpretation but never practised it. Stekel’s book,
Die Sprache des Traumes
(1911), is particularly rich in
examples of this kind. I have, however, avoided quoting instances
from it, on account of the author’s lack of critical
judgement and of the arbitrariness of his technique, which give
rise to doubts even if unprejudiced minds.