Freud - Complete Works (158 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

898

VII

   At the beginning of a dream,
which I have so far hardly touched upon, there was a clear
expression of astonishment at the subject which had cropped up.
Old Brücke must have set me some task
;
STRANGELY ENOUGH
,
it related to a
dissection of the lower part of my own body, my pelvis and legs
which I saw before me as though in the dissecting-room, but without
noticing their absence in myself and also without a trace of any
gruesome feeling. Louise N. was standing beside me and doing the
work with me. The pelvis had been eviscerated, and it was visible
now in its superior, now in its inferior, aspect, the two being
mixed together. Thick flesh-coloured protuberances (which, in the
dream itself, made me think of haemorrhoids) could be seen.
Something which lay over it and was like crumpled
silver-paper
¹
had also to be carefully fished out. I was
then once more in possession of my legs and was making my way
through the town. But (being tired) I took a cab. To my
astonishment the cab drove in through the door of a house, which
opened and allowed it to pass along a passage which turned a corner
at its end and finally led into the open air again.
²
Finally I was making a journey through a changing landscape with
an Alpine guide who was carrying my belongings. Part of the way he
carried me too, out of consideration for my tired legs. The ground
was boggy; we went round the edge; people were sitting on the
ground like Red Indians or gypsies - among them a girl. Before this
I had been making my own way forward over the slippery ground with
a constant feeling of surprise that I was able to do it so well
after the dissection. As we reached a small wooden house at the end
of which was an open window. There the guide set me down and laid
two wooden boards, which were standing ready, upon the window-sill,
so as to bridge the chasm which had to be crossed over from the
window. At that point I really became frightened about my legs, but
instead of the expected crossing, I saw two grown-up men lying on
wooden benches that were along the walls of the hut, and what
seemed to be two children sleeping beside them. It was as though
what was going to make the crossing possible was not the boards but
the children. I awoke in a mental fright
.

  
¹
Stanniol, which was an allusion to the book
by Stannius on the nervous system of fishes. (Cf. loc.
cit.)

  
²
It was the place on the ground-floor of my
block of flats where the tenants keep their perambulators; but it
was over-determined in several other ways.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

899

   Anyone who has formed even the
slightest idea of the extent of condensation in dreams will easily
imagine what a number of pages would be filled by a full analysis
of this dream. Fortunately, however, in the present context I need
only take up one point in it, which provides an example of
astonishment in dreams, as exhibited in the interpolation
‘
strangely enough
’. The following was the
occasion of the dream. Louise N., the lady who was assisting me in
my job in the dream, had been calling on me. ‘Lend me
something to read’, she had said. I offered her Rider
Haggard’s
She
. ‘A
strange
book, but full
of hidden meaning’, I began to explain to her; ‘the
eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions . . .’ Here
she interrupted me: ‘I know it already. Have you nothing of
your own?’ - ‘No, my own immortal works have not yet
been written.’ - ‘Well, when are we to expect these
so-called ultimate explanations of yours which you’ve
promised even
we
shall find readable?’ she asked, with
a touch of sarcasm. At that point I saw that someone else was
admonishing me through her mouth and I was silent. I reflected on
the amount of self-discipline it was costing me to offer the public
even my book upon dreams - I should have to give away so much of my
own private character in it.

                                                               
Das Beste was du wissen kannst,

                                                               
Darfst du den Buben doch nicht sagen.

The task which was imposed on me in the dream
of carrying out a dissection of
my own body
was thus my
self-analysis
which was linked up with my giving an account
of my dreams. Old Brücke came in here appropriately; even in
the first years of my scientific work it happened that I allowed a
discovery of mine to lie fallow until an energetic remonstrance on
his part drove me into publishing it. The further thoughts which
were started up by my conversation with Louise N. went too deep to
become conscious. They were diverted in the direction of the
material that had been stirred up in me by the mention of Rider
Haggard’s
She
. The judgement ‘
strangely
enough
’ went back to that book and to another one,
Heart of the World
, by the same author; and numerous
elements of the dream were derived from these two imaginative
novels. The boggy ground over which people had to be carried, and
the chasm which they had to cross by means of boards brought along
with them, were taken from
She
; the Red Indians, the girl
and the wooden house were taken from
Heart of the World
. In
both novels the guide is a woman; both are concerned with perilous
journeys; while
She
describes an adventurous road that had
scarcely ever been trodden before, leading into an undiscovered
region. The tired feeling in my legs, according to a note which I
find I made upon the dream, had been a real sensation during the
day-time. It probably went along with a tired mood and a doubting
thought: ‘How much longer will my legs carry me?’ The
end of the adventure in
She
is that the guide, instead of
finding immortality for herself and the others, perishes in the
mysterious subterranean fire. A fear of that kind was unmistakably
active in the dream-thoughts. The ‘wooden house’ was
also, no doubt, a coffin, that is to say, the grave. But the
dream-work achieved a masterpiece in its representation of this
most unwished-for of all thoughts by a wish-fulfilment. For I had
already been in a grave once, but it was an excavated Etruscan
grave near Orvieto, a narrow chamber with two stone benches along
its walls, on which the skeletons of two grown-up men were lying.
The inside of the wooden house in the dream looked exactly like it,
except that the stone was replaced by wood. The dream seems to have
been saying: ‘If you must rest in a grave, let it be the
Etruscan one.’ And, by making this replacement, it
transformed the gloomiest of expectations into one that was highly
desirable. Unluckily, as we are soon to hear, a dream can turn into
its opposite the
idea
accompanying an affect but not always
the affect itself. Accordingly, I woke up in a ‘
mental
fright
’, even after the successful emergence of the idea
that children may perhaps achieve what their father has failed to -
a fresh allusion to the strange novel in which a person’s
identity is retained through a series of generations for over two
thousand years.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

900

VIII

   Included in yet another of my
dreams there was an expression of surprise at something I had
experienced in it; but the surprise was accompanied by such a
striking, far-fetched and almost brilliant attempt at an
explanation that, if only on
its
account, I cannot resist
submitting the whole dream to analysis, quite apart from the
dream’s possessing two other points to attract our interest.
I was travelling along the
Südbahn
railway line during
the night of July 18-19th, and in my sleep I heard:
‘
Hollthurn, ten minutes’ being called out. I at once
thought of holothurians - of a natural history museum - that this
was the spot at which valiant men had fought in vain against the
superior power of the ruler of their country - yes, the
Counter-Reformation in Austria - it was as though it were a place
in Styria or the Tyrol. I then saw indistinctly a small museum, in
which the relics or belongings of these men were preserved. I
should have liked to get out, but hesitated to do so. There were
women with fruit on the platform. They were crouching on the ground
and holding up their baskets invitingly. - I hesitated because I
was not sure whether there was time, but we were still not moving.
- I was suddenly in another compartment, in which the upholstery
and seats were so narrow that one’s back pressed directly
against the back of the carriage.
1
I
was surprised by this,
but I reflected that
I MIGHT HAVE
CHANGED CARRIAGES WHILE I WAS IN A SLEEPING STATE
.
There
were several people, including an English brother and sister; a row
of books were distinctly visible on a shelf on the wall. I saw
‘The Wealth of Nations’ and ‘Matter and
Motion’ (by Clerk-Maxwell), a thick volume and bound in brown
cloth. The man asked his sister about a book by Schiller, whether
she had forgotten it. It seemed as though the books were sometimes
mine and sometimes theirs. I felt inclined at that point to
intervene in the conversation in a confirmatory or substantiating
sense
. . . . I woke up perspiring all over
because all the windows were shut. The train was drawn up at
Marburg.

   While I was writing the dream
down a new piece of it occurred to me, which my memory had tried to
pass over.
I said to the brother and sister, referring to a
‘articular work: ‘It is from . . .’, but
corrected myself: ‘It is by . . .’ ‘Yes’,
the man commented to his sister’,he said that
right
.’

  
¹
This description was unintelligible even to
myself; but I have followed the fundamental rule of reporting a
dream in the words which occurred to me as I was writing it down.
The wording chosen is itself part of what is represented by the
dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

901

   The dream opened with the name of
the station, which must no doubt have partly woken me up. I
replaced its name,
Marburg
, by
Hollthurn
. The fact
that I heard ‘Marburg’ when it was first called out, or
perhaps later, was proved by the mentioning in the dream of
Schiller, who was born at Marburg, though not at the one in
Styria.¹ I was making my journey on that occasion, although I
was travelling first class, under very uncomfortable conditions.
The train was packed full, and in my compartment I had found a lady
and gentleman who appeared to be very aristocratic and had not the
civility, or did not think it worth the trouble, to make any
disguise of their annoyance at my intrusion. My polite greeting met
with no response. Although the man and his wife were sitting side
by side (with their backs to the engine) the woman nevertheless
made haste, under my very eyes, to engage the window-seat facing
her by putting an umbrella on it. The door was shut immediately,
and pointed remarks were exchanged between them on the subject of
opening windows. They had probably seen at once that I was longing
for some fresh air. It was a hot night and the atmosphere in the
completely closed compartment soon became suffocating. My
experiences of travelling have taught me that conduct of this
ruthless and overbearing kind is a characteristic of people who are
travelling on a free or half-price ticket. When the
ticket-collector came and I showed him the ticket I had bought at
such expense, there fell from the lady’s mouth, in haughty
and almost menacing tones, the words: ‘My husband has a free
pass.’ She was an imposing figure with discontented features,
of an age not far from the time of the decay of feminine beauty;
the man uttered not a word but sat there motionless. I attempted to
sleep. In my dream I took fearful vengeance on my disagreeable
companions; no one could suspect what insults and humiliations lay
concealed behind the broken fragments of the first half of the
dream. When this need had been satisfied a second wish made itself
felt - to change compartments. The scene is changed so often in
dreams, and without the slightest objection being raised, that it
would not have been in the least surprising if I had promptly
replaced my travelling companions by more agreeable ones derived
from my memory. But here was a case in which something resented the
change of scene and thought it necessary to explain it. How did I
suddenly come to be in another compartment? I had no recollection
of having changed. There could be only one explanation:
I must
have left the carriage while I was in a sleeping state
- a rare
event, of which, however, examples are to be found in the
experience of a neuropathologist. We know of people who have gone
upon railway journeys in a twilight state, without betraying their
abnormal condition by any signs, till at some point in the journey
they have suddenly come to themselves completely and been amazed at
the gap in their memory. In the dream itself, accordingly, I was
declaring myself to be one of these cases of ‘
automotisme
ambulatoire
’.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] Schiller was
not born at any Marburg, but at Marbach, as every German school-boy
knows, and as I knew myself. This was one more of those mistakes
(see above,
p. 681 
n
.
)
which slip in as a substitute for an intentional falsification at
some other point, and which I have tried to explain in my
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
.