Freud - Complete Works (429 page)

   The situation from which this
last dream grows can be construed according to these suggestions as
follows. The sleeper is overcome by a strong erotic need which is
indicated in fairly clear symbols at the beginning of the dream.
(He had heard that wheat - probably equivalent to semen - was
standing at a high price. He charged forward in order to drive with
his horse and cart - genital symbols - through the open gates of
Heaven.) But this libidinal impulse probably applies to an
unattainable object. The gates close, he gives up his intention and
wants to return to the earth. But his wife, who lies by him, does
not attract him; he exerts himself in vain to get an erection for
her. The wish to discard her in order to replace her by another and
better woman is in the infantile sense a death-wish. When someone
cherishes such wishes in his unconscious against a person who is
nevertheless really loved, they are transformed for him into fear
of death, fear for his own life. Hence the presence in these dreams
of the state of being dead, the assumption to Heaven, the
hypocritical longing to see wife and children again. But the
disappointed sexual libido finds release along the path of
regression in the excremental wishful impulse, which abuses and
soils the unserviceable sexual object.

  
¹
[
Marginal Note by
Oppenheim:] In a
story which comes from Picardy, pushing a ring down on a finger
serves as a symbolic way of depicting an erection. The lower the
ring goes, the longer the penis becomes - the analogy naturally has
a magical force. (
Kryptadia
,
1
, No. 32.)

  
² Cf. Stekel, 1911
a
.

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2535

   If this particular dream makes an
interpretation of this kind plausible, then, in view of the
peculiarities of the material which the dream-contains, we can only
succeed in proving the interpretation by applying the same one to a
whole succession of dreams with an allied content. With this aim in
view, let us turn back to the dreams mentioned earlier, where we
find the situation of a sleeper who has a man as his bedfellow. The
connection in which the woman appears in these dreams now acquires
an added significance in retrospect. The sleeper, overcome by a
libidinal impulse, rejects the man; he wishes him far away and a
woman in his place. A death-wish directed against the
dreamer’s unwanted male bedfellow is naturally not so
severely punished by the moral censorship as one directed against
his wife, but the reaction is sufficiently far-reaching to turn the
wish against himself or against the female object he desires. The
dreamer himself is carried off by death; not the man, but the woman
the dreamer longs for, is dead. In the end, however, the rejection
of the male sexual object finds an outlet in defiling him, and this
is felt and avenged by the other as an affront.

   Our interpretation thus fits this
group of dreams. If we now turn back to the dreams accompanied by
defilement of the woman, we shall be prepared to find that elements
missing or only hinted at in the dream we have taken as the type
are expressed unmistakably in other similar dreams.

   In the following
defaecation-dream the dirtying of the woman is not emphasized, but
we are told quite clearly, as far as can be in the realm of
symbolism, that the libidinal impulse is directed towards another
woman. The dreamer does not want to dirty his own field, but
intends to defaecate on his neighbour’s land.

MUTTON-HEAD!
¹

   A
peasant dreamt that he was at work in his clover field. He was
overtaken by an urgent need and, since he did not want to foul his
own clover, he hurried off to the tree standing in his
neighhour’s field, pulled down his breeches and slapped down
a pat of number two on to the ground. At last, when he had happily
come to an end, he wanted to clean himself and began to tear up
grass with a will. But what was that? Our little peasant woke up
from his sleep with a jerk, and clutched at his painfully smarting
cheek which someone had just slapped. ‘You deaf old
mutton-head!’ - the peasant, coming to himself, heard his
wife in bed beside him scolding. ‘So you’d go on
pulling the hair right off my body would you!’

  
¹
F. Wernert, ‘Deutsche
Bauernerzählungen gesammelt im Ober- und Unterelsass [German
Peasant-Tales, Collected in Upper and Lower Alsace]’,
Anthropophyteia
,
4
, 138, No. 173.

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2536

   Tearing out hair (grass), which
here takes the place of defiling, is found mentioned alongside it
in the next dream. Psycho-analytic experience shows that it
originates from the group of symbols concerning masturbation
(
ausreissen
,
abreissen
[to pull out, to pull
off]).

   The dreamer’s death-wish
directed against his wife would seem to be what most requires
confirming in our interpretation. But in the dream which follows
next, the dreamer actually buries his wife (hypocritically
designated as a treasure) by digging the vessel which contains the
gold into the earth and, as is familiar to us in dreams about
treasure, planting a heap of faeces on the top to mark the place.
During the digging he is working his hands in his wife’s
vagina.¹

THE DREAM OF THE TREASURE
²

  
Once upon a time a peasant had a terrible dream. It seemed to him
just like it was war-time and the whole district was being
plundered by the enemy soldiers. But he had a treasure that he was
so scared about that he didn’t rightly know what to do with
it and where he should really hide it. At last he thought he would
bury it in his garden, where he knew of a proper fine place. Now he
dreams on further how he goes right out and comes to the place
where he wants to dig up the earth so he can put the big pot in the
hole. But when he looks for a tool to dig with he finds nix round
about, and at last he has to take his hands to it. So he makes the
hole with his bare hands, puts the crock with the money into it and
covers the whole lot over again with earth. Now he wants to go, but
he stops a while standing there and thinks to himself: ‘But
when the soldiers have gone away again, how’ll I find my
treasure then if I don’t put a sign there?’ And
straight away he begins to hunt about; he hunts up and down and to
and fro, wherever he can. No, in the end he finds nix nowhere that
would show him again straight away where he has buried his money.
But just then he feels a need. ‘Ah,’ he says to
himself, ‘now that’ll be fine, I can shit on it.’
So of course he pulls his breeches down right away and does a fine
heap on the place where he has put the crock in. Then he sees
nearby a bit of grass and is going to pull it out, so he cam wipe
himself with it. But that moment he gets such a fine clout that for
a second he is quite silly and looks round all dazed. And straight
after he hears his wife, who is quite beside herself with rage,
yelling at him: ‘You cheeky bastard, you good-for-nothing!
D’you think I’ve got to put up with everything from
you? First you mess about with both hands in my cunt, then you shit
on it and now you even want to pull all the hair off
it!’

  
¹ [
Marginal Note by
Oppenheim:]
Significance?

  
² A Riedl, ‘Schwänke und Schnurren
niederösterreichischer Landleute [Comic and Curious Anecdotes
from Lower-Austrian Country People]’,
Anthropophyteia
,
5
, 10, No. 19.

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2537

   With this example of a dream we
have returned to the treasure-dreams from which we started out, and
we observe that those defaecation-dreams which are concerned with
treasure contain little or no fear of death, whereas the others, in
which the relation to death is expressed directly (dreams of an
assumption to Heaven), disregard treasure and motivate the
defaecation in other ways. It is almost as though the hypocritical
transformation of the wife into a treasure had obviated punishment
for the death-wish.¹

   A death-wish directed against the
woman is most clearly admitted to in another dream of an assumption
to Heaven, which, however, ends not in defaecating on the
woman’s body but in sexual activity involving her genitals,
as already happened in the previous dream. The dreamer actually
shortens his wife’s life in order to lengthen his own, by
putting oil from her lamp of life into his own. As a kind of
compensation for this undisguised hostility there appears at the
end of the dream something like an attempt at a caress.

THE LIGHT OF LIFE
²

  
Saint Peter appeared to a man when he was fast asleep and led him
away to Paradise. The man agreed to go with all his heart and went
with Saint Peter. They wandered about in Paradise for a long time
and came to a copse, which was large and spacious but kept in
beautiful order, and where hanging lamps were burning on every
tree. The man asked Saint Peter what this could mean. Saint Peter
answered that they were hanging lamps which only burned as long as
a man lived. But as soon as the oil vanished and the lamp went out,
the man had to die at once too. This interested the man very much
and he asked Saint Peter if he would lead him to his own hanging
lamp. Saint Peter granted his request and led him to his
wife’s lamp, and just by it was the man’s own lamp. The
man saw that his wife’s lamp still had a lot of oil in it,
but there was very little in his own and this made him very sorry
because he would have to die soon, and he asked Saint Peter if he
would pour a little more oil into his lamp. Saint Peter said that
God put the oil in at the moment when a man was born and determined
for each the length of his life. This made the man very downcast
and he wept and wailed beside his lamp. Saint Peter said to him:
‘You stay there, but I must go on - I have more to do.’
The man rejoiced at this and hardly was Saint Peter out of sight
when he began to dip his finger in his wife’s hanging lamp
and to drip the oil into his own. He did this several times and
when Saint Peter approached he started up terrified, and awoke from
his dream, and saw that he had been dipping his finger in his
wife’s cunt and then dribbling it into his mouth and licking
his finger.

  
Note
. According to a version told by a journeyman in
Sarajevo, the man awoke after getting a box on the ears from his
wife, whom he had awakened by fumbling around in her pudenda. Here
Saint Peter is missing and instead of hanging lamps there are
glasses with oil burning in them. According to a third version,
which I heard from a student in Mostar, a venerable greybeard shows
the man various burning candles. His own is very thin, his
wife’s enormously thick. In order to lengthen his life, the
man then begins with burning zeal to lick the thick candle. But
then he gets a tremendous clout. ‘I knew that you were an ox,
but I honestly didn’t know that you were a swine as
well,’ his wife said to him, for he was licking her cunt in
his sleep.

   The
story is extraordinarily widespread in Europe.
³

  
¹
[
Marginal Note by
Oppenheim:] What
about the treasure in the dreams of one of two male
bedfellows?

  
²
Narrated by a Secondary School teacher in
Belgrade, based on a version told by a peasant woman from the
region of Kragujevac.
Anthropophyteia
,
4
, 255, No.
10.

  
³
[
Marginal Note by
Oppenheim:] Cf. a
very similar story from the Ukraine,
Kryptadia
,
5
,
15.

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2538

   This is the moment to recall the
‘bad dream’ of the woman who ended by pulling at her
husband’s organ as if she wanted to tear it out. The
interpretation which we found; reason to make in that instance
agrees completely with the interpretation of the defaecation-dreams
dreamt by men which is expounded here. In the dream of the
unsatisfied wife, she, as well, shamelessly gets rid of her husband
(and the child) as obstacles in the way of satisfaction.

   Another defaecation-dream, about
whose interpretation we cannot perhaps be completely certain,
suggests, however, that we should concede that there are certain
differences in the purpose of these dreams, and throws new light on
dreams like the ones we have just mentioned and on some that are
still to follow, in which the dream-action consists in a
manipulation of the woman’s genitals.

‘FROM FRIGHT’
¹

   The
Pasha passed the night with the Bey. When the next day came, the
Bey lay on in bed and did not want to get up. The Bey asked the
Pasha: ‘What did you dream?’ ‘I dreamt that on
the minaret there was another minaret.’ ‘Could that
really be?’ wondered the Bey. ‘And what else did you
dream?’ ‘I dreamt,’ he said, ‘that on the
minaret there stood a copper jug, and there was water in the jug.
The wind blew and the copper jug rocked. Now what would you have
done if you had dreamt that?’ ‘I should have pissed
myself and shat myself as well, from fright.’ ‘And, you
see, I only pissed myself.’

   This dream calls for a symbolic
interpretation, because its manifest content is quite
incomprehensible whereas the symbols are unmistakably clear. Why
should the dreamer really feel frightened at the sight of a
water-jug rocking on the tip of a minaret? But a minaret is
excellently suited to be a symbol for the penis, and the
rhythmically moving water-vessel seems a good symbol of the female
genitals in the act of copulation The Pasha, then, has had a
copulation-dream, and if his host suggests defaecation in
connection with it this makes it likely that the interpretation is
to be sought in the circumstance that both of them are old and
impotent men, in whom old age has occasioned the same proverbial
replacement of sexual by excremental pleasure which, as we have
seen, came about in the other dreams owing to the lack of an
appropriate sexual object. For a man who can no longer copulate, so
say the common people with their crude love of truth, there still
remains the pleasure of shitting; we can say of such a man there is
a recurrence of anal erotism, which was there before genital
erotism and