Psychoanalysis, Sleep and Dreams

CHAPTER VI: CONVENIENCE DREAMS

Dreams of urination can be considered as typical convenience dreams. In the morning, when the pressure of urine on the walls of the bladder becomes stronger, dreams build up a convenient explanation around that unpleasant stimulus. Our wish to urinate is either represented as gratified or we are shown the impossibility of gratifying it (no toilet, doors locked, people looking, etc.). Unless the pressure is absolutely unbearable, we generally sleep on, satisfied or discouraged by such convenience dreams.

Freud tells in his “Interpretation of Dreams” of a striking convenience dream of his and of a variation it underwent on one occasion: “If in the evening I eat anchovies, olives or any other strongly salted food, I become thirsty at night, whereupon I awaken. The awakening, however, is preceded by a dream, which, each time has the same content, namely that I am drinking. The dream serves a function, the nature of which I soon guess. If I succeed in assuaging my thirst by means of a dream that I am drinking, I need not wake up in order to satisfy that need. The dream substitutes itself for action, as elsewhere in life. This same dream recently appeared in modified form. On this occasion I became thirsty before going to bed and emptied the glass of water which stood on a chest near my bed. Several hours later in the night, came a new attack of thirst, accompanied by discomfort. In order to obtain water I would have had to get up and fetch the glass which stood on a chest near my wife’s bed. I appropriately dreamt that my wife was giving me to drink from a vase, an Etruscan cinerary urn. But the water in it tasted so salty, apparently from the ashes, that I had to wake up.”

On a chilly summer night a woman patient had the following dream:

“A man took me in a canoe to the middle of a lake and upset the canoe, saying: ‘Now you belong to me.’”

She woke up shivering.

The lake, the canoe upset and the man in the dream were associated with many conscious thoughts and memories of hers. But this was mainly a convenience dream, which endeavoured to explain away the chilliness of the night through an appropriate scene. When the unavoidable awakening took place it was dramatized, as it is in so many cases of awakening, through a fall accompanied by a certain fear of death.

The few examples I have given and which could be multiplied, tend to show that the dream, far from being a disturber of sleep, is sleep’s best protector.

It seeks to explain away physical stimuli which might cause the sleeper to awake and it visualizes many reasons for not experiencing the fear usually connected with a certain stimulus.

In every convenience dream which I have analysed, I have found a close connection between the image conjured up by the dream work and the ideas generally occupying the dreamer’s mind in his waking states.

In almost every case it could also be noticed that the convenience dream made use of some experience or observation of the previous waking state, which increases the plausibility of the dream’s visualization.

CHAPTER VII: DREAM LIFE

In fact we seldom hear sounds in our dreams, unless they are actual sounds produced in our immediate environment; the people who address us in dreams do not actually emit sounds but seem to communicate their thought to us directly without any auditory medium. Seldom do we taste or smell things in dreams.

On the other hand, we translate every stimulus reaching our senses in sleep, be it sound, taste, smell, touch, into a visual presentation. This process is to be compared to the gesticulation of primitive individuals who attempt to visualize everything they describe, indicating the length, height, bulk of objects through more or less appropriate mimic and who convey the idea of a bad odour by holding their nose, of pleasing food, by rubbing their stomach, etc.

The dramatization of every thought and every problem follows the line of least effort. And this explains the popularity of the movies, the enjoyment of which does not presuppose on the part of the audience any capacity to conceive abstract ideas.

Movie audiences are undoubtedly the least intelligent aggregations of people. They are not told that a crime has been committed, they are shown the crime while it is being committed. Captions warn them of what they are going to see, that they may not misunderstand the meaning of any scene. The movie, like our unconscious, translates every thought into a visual sensation, and when a psychological change cannot very well be visualized, for instance when the villain decides not to kill the ingenue, the fact is flashed on the screen in large type.

Pleasures of the eye are probably stronger and simpler than those vouchsafed by other sensory organs.[3] The most uninteresting parade will attract thousands of people, many more for instance, than free concerts in the open. Illustrated lectures appeal to more people than lectures without illustrations. Displays in shop windows, picturesque signs, possess a greater selling power than the best advertising copy.

In our waking life, we express our thoughts to ourselves and others through the algebra of abstract concepts. We speak of length, height, volume, weight, hardness, coldness, etc. It is doubtful, however, whether we can imagine length without thinking specifically of something long. In our dreams, the concept length disappears and is always replaced by something long.

We notice that abstract thinking is more tiresome than descriptive thinking, that abstract facts demand more exertion in order to be grasped, than concrete facts. A philosopher expounding his theories to an audience tires himself and the audience quicker than an explorer would, describing his travels and possibly illustrating his talk by means of lantern slides.

Dream life is further simplified through condensation. This process is the one through which, in waking life, we reach generalizations. When we think of a house we select the essential characteristics of the various houses we have seen, the properties wherein a house essentially differs from, let us say, a bird or a river. In our dreams, condensation is less subtle and more directly based upon our experience.

We combine several persons into one, selecting as a rule the most striking features of every one of them. We may see a dream character with the eyes of one person, the nose of another and the beard of a third one.

Freud having made one proposal to two different men, Dr. M. and his brother, the former having a beard and the latter being clean shaven and suffering from hip trouble, combined them in a dream in a figure which looked like Dr. M., but was beardless and limped.

One of Ferenczi’s patients dreamt of a monster with the head of a physician, the body of a horse and draped in a nightgown.

Silberer dreamt of an animal which had the head of a tiger and the body of a horse.

This is a process similar to the one which in the infancy of the race gave birth to strange composite gods and mythological creatures like the Assyrian bull a combination of man’s intelligence, the bull’s strength and the bird’s power of flight, the various Egyptian deities in whom the process was reversed, for so many had the heads of animals and the bodies of men, the satyrs and syrens, combining respectively man and goat, woman and fish, Pegasus, the winged horse, etc.

Finally, dream life is simplified through the symbolic representation of human beings or inanimate things.

In symbolization, one striking characteristic of some complicated object is isolated from the others and some other object with only one characteristic substituted for it. Slang is made up of such symbolizations. Think of the expression “bats in the belfry,” in which the complicated human head is replaced by an architectural detail much simpler in character and occupying in an edifice the same position which the head occupies in human anatomy. Then, instead of describing absurd ideas, of a sinister colouring, without definite direction, we simply visualize queer creatures, half bird and half mouse, flitting about blindly.

Instead of explaining that the central figure of the christian religion is a godlike creature who died crucified, we select the most striking detail of the Passion, the cross, which to the initiated and uninitiated alike signifies christianity. In many cases we do not even represent the cross as that instrument of torture really looked but we simplify it, we symbolize it, by using a conventional design in which the proportion between the cross pieces has been entirely disregarded.

Symbolization is a reduction of an object to one essential detail which has struck us as more important than the others.

A child will designate a watch as a “tick-tick,” a dog as a “bow-wow,” because to his simple mind, ticking and barking are the essential characteristics of a watch and a dog.

In dreams, we simplify the concept of the body and often represent it by a house. The authority vested in the father and mother causes them often to be symbolized by important personages, etc.

Without any more explanation, I shall sum up the various dream symbols whose selection is easily understood.

Birth is often symbolized by a plunge into water or some one climbing out of it or rescuing some one from the water.

Death is represented by taking a journey, being dead, by darksome suggestions.

A great many symbols in dreams are sexual symbols. The figure 3, all elongated or sharp objects, such as sticks, umbrellas, knifes, daggers, revolvers, plowshares, pencils, files, objects from which water flows, faucets, fountains, animals such as reptiles and fishes, in certain cases hats and cloaks are used to represent the male sex.

The female sex is symbolized on the contrary by hollow objects, pits, caves, boxes, trunks, pockets, ships.

The breasts are represented by apples, peaches and fruits in general, balconies, etc.

Fertility is symbolized by ploughed fields, gardens, etc.

I have shown in another book, “Psychoanalysis, Its History, Theory and Practice,” that symbols are absolutely universal and that the folklore of the various races and of the various centuries draws upon the same material for the purpose of simplified representation. Differences in climate, fauna and flora are purely superficial. Dwellers of the Polar regions are not likely to compare anything to a palm tree which they have never seen, nor will tropical races symbolize coldness through snowfields.

Experiments made by Dr. Karl Schrötter have confirmed Freud’s and Jung’s theories of symbolization in dreams. To the uninitiated and sceptical, dream symbols generally appear rather ludicrous fancies and not a few opponents of psychoanalysis hold that symbols were resorted to by analysts unable to read an obvious wish fulfilment in every dream.

Schrötter hypnotized his patients, then suggested to them a dream outline, ordering them also to indicate through an appropriate gesture when the dream would begin and end. This enabled him, by the way, to record the duration of every dream.[4]

He then awakened the subject and made him tell his dream.

One of his patients, a woman drawing toward middle age, who had been greatly upset when she learnt that the man she loved was suffering from syphilis, was asked to have a dream symbolizing her state of mind. Here is the vision she had:

“I am walking through a forest on an autumn day. The path is steep and I feel chilly. Some one whom I cannot distinguish is near me. I only feel the touch of a hand. I am very thirsty. I would like to slake my thirst at a spring but there is a sign on the spring that means poison: a skull and cross bones.”

The fancy is rather poetical and this example is quite typical of the symbolization of our life’s incidents by the dream work.

A patient with a strong resistance to the analytic method saw me in a dream “carrying a fake refrigerator full of make-believe meats, vegetables and fruits.”

The interpretation is obvious. I am carrying in a deceptive way an assortment of ideas which can be of no use to any one.

The refrigerator implies that the ideas are not even new but old and stale.

The patient’s repressions were such that, although the dream struck him as strange and he remembered it several months, he was unable to puzzle out its meaning. It expressed his mental state at the time and yet having made up his mind not to doubt me or the analytic treatment, he become unable to accept any disparaging thought consciously.

Unconsciously, however, he expressed his doubts in most striking symbolism which he did not himself understand.

This should be borne in mind if we wish to understand the psychology of nightmares. For in nightmares we may express a wish through a symbol which expresses it fittingly, but which we do not understand and which, on that account, may frighten us.

Let those who sneer at the study of symbols watch some of the attitudes assumed by insane people[5] who have reached the lowest level of deterioration. Let them see a picture published in the issue of the Journal of Mental and Nervous Disease for January, 1920, and which represents a hospital patient who has reached the lowest degree of infantilism. The patient hung herself in a blanket attached to a nail in front of a window. There she spent her days in the characteristic attitude of the unborn child in the womb.

Everything in that attitude was symbolical of her regression to, not only infancy, but the prenatal condition.

CHAPTER VIII: WISH FULFILMENT

On one occasion she was taken across a lake and enjoyed the trip so much that she cried bitterly at the landing when compelled to leave the boat. The next morning she told the family a dream in which she had been sailing on the lake.

Freud’s little nephew, Hermann, aged twenty-one months, was once given the task of offering his uncle, as a birthday present, a little basket full of cherries. He performed that duty rather reluctantly. The following day he awakened joyously with the information which could only have been derived from a dream: “Hermann ate all the cherries.”

The London Times of Nov. 8, 1919, had a report of a lecture by Dr. C. W. Kimmins, chief inspector of the London Education Committee, on the significance of children’s dreams. He based his statements on the written records of the dreams of 500 children between the ages of eight and sixteen years.

Up to the age of ten, dreams of eating predominated, but their number fell off after ten, when dreams of visits to the country began to increase. Dreams of presents and eating at all ages from eight to fourteen, were much more frequent with children of the poorer classes that with those from well-to-do districts and there was an appreciable increase of their number about Christmas time. Retrospective dreams were very uncommon among all children.

Obvious wish fulfilment dreams were less common among boys than among girls, the proportion being respectively twenty-eight and forty-two per cent.

Boys below ten had more fear dreams than girls of the same age. In both sexes it was some “old man” who terrified the dreamers. Both sexes suffered equally from the fear of animals, lions, tigers and bulls in the case of the boys, dogs, rats, snakes and mice in the case of the girls.

From ten to fifteen a falling off in the number of fear dreams was very noticeable among boys, whereas among girls it rather increased.

That increase was especially striking among girls of 16 and over, who were generally frightened by animals and strange men and women.

When school life played a part in children’s dreams it was more frequently the playgrounds than the classrooms which were visualized.

The war affected boys’ more than girls’ dreams. The dreaming boy was a valorous fighter, mentioned in dispatches, rewarded with the Victoria Cross, thanked personally by the King; or he returned home wildly cheered by crowds.

Girls, thirteen or over, saw themselves as Red Cross nurses, but no such dreams were observed in girls below ten.

Normal, healthy children delighted in dreaming and telling their dreams with a wealth of detail.

Dr. Kimmins mentioned that, while the dreams of school children were generally easy to interpret, the dreams of students from 18 to 22 “were so heavily camouflaged that it would be impossible for any one who was not a trained expert in psychoanalysis to deal with them satisfactorily.”

We can see how the repression made necessary by life conditions in modern communities slowly but surely transforms the obvious wish-fulfilment dreams of children into the symbolical and often distressing visions of the adult. The development of sexuality in boys and girls and the repression to which it is submitted explains easily the proportion of fear dreams in girls and boys.

Sexual talk and sexual curiosity are more common among boys than girls and therefore occupy the boys’ minds more constantly than the girls’ minds. On the other hand, many of the boys above sixteen find forms of sexual satisfaction of which the girls of the same age are deprived. Fear dreams are therefore more frequent among growing girls, being simply a symbolical form of sexual gratification.

The dreams of adults are far from being as uniformly pleasurable as those of young and healthy children.

A few of them are frankly pleasant; most of them are apparently indifferent and a few of them frankly unpleasant.

The pleasant dreams of the adults require as little interpretation as those of children and are obviously the fulfilment of conscious or unconscious wishes.

A patient of mine, camping in the woods alone, dreamt during a rainy night that some of his friends were camping with him, that one of them had gone to a neighbouring inn to secure better accommodations and finally that he was in his own bed at home.

Nordenskjold in his book “The Antarctic,” published in 1904, mentions that during the winter which he spent in the polar wilderness, his dreams and those of his men “were more frequent and more vivid than they had ever been before. They all referred to the outer world which was so far from us.... Eating and drinking formed the central point around which most of our dreams were grouped. One of us, who was fond of going to big dinner parties, was exceedingly glad when he could report in the morning that he had had a three course dinner. Another dreamed of tobacco, mountains of it; still another dreamed of a ship approaching on the open sea under full sail. Still another dream deserves mention: the postman brought the mail and gave a long explanation of why he had to wait so long.... One can readily understand why we longed for sleep. It alone could give us all the things which we most ardently desired.” [Capitals mine.]

Other dreams of wish-fulfilment appear at first glance either indifferent or absurd. Interpreted according to the technique outlined in Chapter XVII, however, they soon yield a meaning which is rather convincing.

The following dream, recorded by a patient, would not lead the inexperienced interpreter to suspect the sinister death wish which it is meant to express in an indirect way.

“I was visiting a factory and saw Charles working as a glassblower.”

Charles was the first name of a wealthy man who seduced a girl with whom the dreamer was in love. The wealthy man is reduced to the condition of a working man. The patient’s unconscious association to glass blower proved to be consumption. The patient had once read statistics showing that a large number of glassblowers died from that disease. A very neatly concealed death wish.

In other cases the death wish, while obvious in the manifest dream content, appears absurd and may cause the patient some anxiety. One of Ferenczi’s patients, who was extremely fond of dogs, dreamt that she was choking a little white dog to death.

Word associations brought out the memory of a relative with an unusually pallid face whom she had recently ordered out of her house, saying later that she would not have such a snarling dog about her. It was that white-faced woman, not a white dog, whose neck she wished to wring.

Here is another example in which the wish fulfilment is cleverly concealed.

“I am standing on a hill with Albert and somebody else. Bombs are falling about us. One of them strikes his car which is destroyed.”[6]

The patient, a woman, is in love with Albert and enjoys greatly riding with him in his car. Why should she wish to see it wrecked?

The key to the enigma was given by the associations to the “somebody else.” The somebody else was another woman whom Albert had taken to ride on several occasions and of whom my patient was very jealous. By destroying the car, the jealous woman was putting an end to the rides which had especially aroused her jealousy.

The following dream seems rather unpleasant without being however an actual nightmare.

Dream: I heard a noise downstairs and went to investigate. Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs, I found a man lying on the floor with his coat off and drunk. Later he was hiding from me and running about the house. The man was captured and brought back by another man who cross-examined him. The other man made excuses for the thief and said he probably intended to steal but as he had a toothache he had sought the cellar and drunk to deaden the pain. To prove his explanations he opened the thief’s mouth and pointed to a large cavity in one tooth.

Interpretation: The patient who brought me the dream was a young woman who, at the time, was worrying lest her husband should discover an indiscretion she had committed in her own house. The thief in the dream turned out to be her lover and the man who captures him, her husband. Everything is made simple and pleasant by the fact that the husband takes it upon himself to make excuses for the man he has captured. The excuse of the cavity was an allusion to alleged visits to a dentist’s office which supplied her with alibis on various occasions.

We spend a part of the night, if not the entire night, seeking solutions for the problems of the day. Patients who have been trained to remember and record their dreams accurately, sometimes bring a series of visions, apparently unrelated, but which after interpretation, prove to be successive presentations of one and the same problem from different angles.

CHAPTER IX: NIGHTMARES

The anxiety connected with those visions is due to the subject’s inability or unwillingness to recognize as his the unconscious desires expressed by symbols.

In not a few cases, the sleeper creates a dream situation which is distressing, full of danger, but which leads to a triumphal climax in which his ego reaps a rich reward of glory.

Stekel in “The Language of the Dream,” records a fine dream of his in which his egotism is vouchsafed all forms of gratification.

Dream: “I am in a great hall. On the stage there is a composite, centaurlike creature, half horse and half wolf or tiger. I am standing near the door, fearing that the beast might get out of bounds. In fact the tiger tears himself loose from the horse and leaps toward the door. I slam it shut and lock it up. After a while, I re-enter the hall. I behold a wild panic. Krafft-Ebing, the lion tamer, is rushing here and there. A man with two children is shaking with fear. Trumpet calls are heard coming from the tower.”

Interpretation: “The dream was connected with a heated discussion in which I had taken part, about Zola’s ‘The Human Beast.’ I contended that in every man there is a pathological strain and that no one is in absolute control of the beast. I see myself under two different aspects. I am the wolf or tiger and I lock the door in order that the wild cravings may not get loose. How great I am in this dream! Krafft-Ebing, the famous expert in sexual pathology, runs about helpless, while I hold the beasts in my power. The fear-stricken fellow with the two children is myself, an obviously tragic figure, symbolizing another side of my nature. The trumpet calls are from Beethoven’s Fidelio. My marital faithfulness triumphs over my wildest urges. I am a model for all to imitate and I sound loud warnings.”

In a dream reported by a patient who was unconsciously trying to break his appointment with me, the anxiety is purely hypocritical, for each new obstacle placed in the dreamer’s path is a new excuse for not reaching my office on time.

“I was on Riverside Drive, strolling north. Mr. Tridon came along in the same direction, bare-headed and riding on a bicycle. He came near running into a boy, also on a bicycle, but swerved sharply and avoided a collision.

“I was hurrying to keep the appointment with Mr. Tridon which I had for 5.30 P. M. (I really had an appointment for 11.30 in the morning) but felt that I could not be there on time. My watch had stopped and the clocks I saw in stores had stopped likewise. The location was the slope of Morningside Heights and my direction still seemed to be northerly.

“Another transition and I was climbing a hill near what looked like the 99th Street station of the 3rd Avenue L. Near the summit the going became very steep and I was unable to go on, although I tried to scramble up on my hands and knees. I turned to the left, however, and climbed stairs leading through a white house, which I understood to be a school. There was a woman there with a few children. I then issued into a wide avenue running east and west which looked like Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn. A trolley came along but as I ran for it, it seemed as though I had lost my coat. I turned back anxiously to find it but discovered that I was carrying it on my arm. I woke up before the next car came along.”

After attempting to ridicule me, the dreamer rehearsed all the excuses he might offer me for missing an appointment: Mistake about the hour, clocks stopped, going to the wrong direction (north instead of south), finally landing in Brooklyn, far from my office and missing several cars, etc....

A young woman who had been invited several times by a friend to come and visit her and who had exhausted all the possible excuses for refusing such an invitation had the following dream after receiving one more letter renewing the invitation:

“My friend’s abode was a new apartment and I spent a night there. Upon awaking in the morning I discovered something crawling on my bed which looked like a caterpillar. I was disgusted and frightened. I went into the bathroom and there too found insects of the same species but very small in size. They reminded me of spiders and the ceiling and the walls were entirely ‘decorated’ with them.

“I then decided to tell my friend to call this to the attention of the landlady and as I entered my friend’s room I found her and the landlady cleaning my friend’s bed.

“I told the landlady how unpleasant it is to have such creatures in one’s apartment and she said: ‘The rooms were left unpainted for some time and this is the cause of it.’”

An unpleasant dream, containing a little anxiety and some disgust and yet, a solution offered for the young woman’s problem, a reason for not accepting the invitation. The place is not clean.

The next dream is also an effort at finding a solution for a distressing problem:

Dream: “I was at home; some one looking like a nurse said: ‘Come up stairs. You are going to have a baby.’ I was neither surprised nor worried. The nurse added: ‘When you have had the baby, you can select a husband for yourself.’ I followed her and lay on a bed waiting for pains. Feeling nothing I grew impatient and went downstairs. Suddenly I became frightened and decided I must not have the child. I started to think how I could find a doctor to perform an abortion. I awoke suddenly with a tremendous sense of relief.”

Interpretation: The patient is a southern girl living in New York. Home for her means the small town where her family resides. She has had a liaison and has often worried about possible consequences. The first part of the dream is a solution offered by the dream. She is at home, pregnant, but it seems natural to every one and the nurse (a nurse girl of her childhood days) is not only taking the matter as natural but shows her the advantages of her condition. On the other hand, the girl is frigid in love and used to associate pregnancy with orgasm. The pregnancy means here the fulfilment of her wish for an orgasm. Also it reveals her secret desire that her lover might be compelled to marry her. The lack of labor pains is another form of wish-fulfilment. The end of the dream indicates the mental processes of the patient, and her struggle against a regression. She first attempts to solve the problem by running back to “home and nurse” but insight enables her to analyse her dream and return to real life.

There is no doubt but some painful dreams are, without any symbolism or distortion of any kind, dreams of obvious wish-fulfilment.

There is a human type which enjoys pain, be it inflicted by others or self-torture, and to which fear and anxiety vouchsafe a good deal of gratification.

When we remember the workings of our autonomic nerves we may not wonder at that fact. Pain, anxiety or fear pour into our blood stream fuel which gives us for a few minutes or a few hours a feeling of energy and power we may lack, and secretions which cause an arterial tension translated easily into “excitement,” “exhilaration,” etc.

Children of the masochistic type like to have some one tell them stories of the most nightmarish variety which fill them with terror. We have all met the child who at some time or other makes the strange request: “Scare me.”

Anxiety dreams may play the part of a bracer and tonic in subjects of that type. The strange ritual of some primitive races, ancient and modern, in which mourners slash themselves or pull their hair or beards, corresponds closely from the endocrine point of view to the craving for terrible fairy tales or the frequency of certain anxiety dreams. The secretions brought forth by that self-inflicted pain may combat successfully the depression due to the loss of a dearly beloved person.

CHAPTER X: TYPICAL DREAMS AND SLEEP WALKING

Generally speaking, flying dreams seem to correspond to one of the most universal cravings of mankind: to liberate itself from the tyranny of the law of gravity and enjoy the freedom which winged creatures enjoy. All races have wished to fly and that desire, never gratified in waking life until recently, was bound to express itself in the dreams of all races at all periods of history.

Freud has suggested that such dreams repeat memories of childhood games, rocking, see-sawing; Federn has seen in them a symbol of sexual excitement, both of which explanations sound unconvincing.

There may be a symbolism of a different sort about flying dreams.

If for some reason or other, our sleep becomes suddenly much deeper, we may represent our “flight” from reality through a flight through the air. We soar to the dream level which we feel to be higher than the waking level, to which on awakening, we fall painfully. Variations in the sleep depth would thus account for the frequent relation of sequence which is observable between flying and falling dreams. Flying dreams are never connected with any fear of anxiety, while falling dreams are almost always nightmares of usually short duration.

The Freudians see in many falling dreams memories of falls in childhood. “Nearly all children,” Freud writes, “have fallen occasionally and then been picked up and fondled; if they fell out of bed at night, they were picked up by their nurse and taken into her bed.”

This explanation fits only an insignificant number of cases.

The symbolism of the falling dream is found upon analysis to be much richer.

In women, dreams of falling are very often symbolical of sexual surrender. Anxiety or pleasure connected with falling dreams reveals the fear or pleasure connected with such a thought in the dreamer’s mind. Not a few falling dreams transform themselves after a slight period of anxiety into flying dreams, thus indicating that the feeling of inferiority connected with the idea of surrender was very slight and easily replaced by a feeling of power, freedom and superiority to environment and conventions.

Dreams of falling are sometimes “followed” by a terrified awakening. In reality it is the awakening due to some physical stimulus, noise, light, pain, etc., which is followed by a falling dream. The dream in that case is symbolical of the act of awaking.

The anxiety is the natural displeasure felt by the dreamer when suddenly compelled to pass from dreamland into reality. This symbolism is rather apt, for the awakening lowers us from the free and irresponsible estate of the dream creature to the slavery entailed by leading a real life. We fall from the heights of our dreams to the depths of reality.

At times, the dreamer has the impression of being mangled or killed as a result of that fall.

Death is again a powerful symbol indicative of the dreamer’s attitude. He feels he is dying when compelled to return to reality. Such a type is more dangerously attached to his fiction than the one who only resents awaking as a diminution of his ego and power.

Dreams of falling teeth may be symbolical of unconscious onanistic tendencies. The slang of many languages has established a connection which cannot be casual between the pulling of teeth and sexual self-gratification.

In dreams in which teeth grow again in the dreamer’s mouth we may see a return to childish attitudes and memories of the years when the first teeth fell out and were replaced by stronger ones. An optimistic attitude, if somewhat regressive.

When a certain tooth or group of teeth keeps on recurring in dream pictures, an X-ray examination of the entire denture should be made. I have observed several cases in which such dreams revealed the presence of root abscesses causing absolutely no conscious irritation and only felt unconsciously. Those dreams were both a warning and a wish-fulfilment (painless extraction).

Dreams of nakedness, like dreams of flying, seem to express one of mankind’s cravings, freedom from clothes. In the Earthly Paradise, Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed; all the gods and goddesses of the ancient religions were unclothed; even in our days academic sculptors represent modern heroes naked. Painters and sculptors of all epochs have been inclined to glorify the nude in their works.

It is quite unnecessary to construct such dreams as a return to infantilism, as a regression, as the Freudians generally do.

The attitude of the onlookers in those dreams contains a very obvious form of wish-fulfilment: whether we sit at a banquet or walk across a drawing room or appear on a street naked or half unclothed, no one seems to notice us. We generally try to hide or to drape ourselves in as dignified a manner as possible in whatever scanty garments we retain, but the anxiety is all on our side.

Such dreams cannot be dreams of exhibitionism for they are never accompanied by the wish that people should see us, nor do we ever derive any pleasure from our exposure. I would be inclined to consider them in almost every case as symbolic dreams of attitudes. We are labouring under the burden of some secret which we are afraid of revealing. In spite of our anxiety, we are comforted by the fact that our secret (our total or partial nakedness) escapes the beholders. Our danger and our escape are simply visualized and symbolized.

The symbolism of our exposure is quite obvious. The upper part of our body is usually covered up and it is the “lower” part of it which is exposed, and which we awkwardly try to wrap up in our shirt tails or to conceal under a table cloth or behind furniture or bushes. We are concealing something shameful, “low.” Everybody knows the symbolism of high and low, right and left, which is expressed by the language of all races.

One form of anxiety dream in which we grope our way through endless narrow passages, room after room, up and down flights of stairs, has been considered by some analysts as a memory of the first event of our life, when we were forced violently, painfully, through a narrow passage and finally reached the light of day. When the detail of those dreams is closely analysed it will prove much more valuable and important than a mere regression to the infantile.

They will generally turn out to be the sort of dreams that coincide with the solution of a crisis and indicate that an adaptation to life has been reached, that the subject has been “reborn.”

Sleep walking is one variety of typical dream characterized by a greater motor activity than the usual dream in which we either lie still or only perform incomplete motions. Sleep walkers, like ordinary dreamers, performed in their somnambulistic states actions which they have refrained from performing in their waking states. While the sense of direction and of orientation seems unimpaired in sleep walkers, their perception of reality is very rudimentary.

Two cases reported by the Encyclopédie Française and by Krafft-Ebing, respectively, illustrate that point.

A young man used to get up at night, go to his study and write.

Observers would now and then substitute a sheet of blank paper for the sheet which he had covered with writing. When he had finished, he would read over his manuscript aloud and repeat correctly, while holding the blank sheet before his eyes, the words written on the sheet which had been taken from him.

One night the prior of a monastery was seated at his desk. A monk entered, a knife in his hand. He took no notice of the prior but went to the bed and plunged his knife into it several times; after which he returned to his cell. The next morning the monk told the prior of a terrible dream he had had. The prior had killed the monk’s mother and the monk had avenged her by stabbing the prior to death. Thereupon he had awakened, horrified, and thanking God that the whole affair had only been a dream.

In sleep walking dreams there is an accuracy, a singleness of purpose, a concentration of attention which has always struck all observers.

The sleeper often wakes up when called by name, but he generally obeys without waking, all commands of a sensible character, such as to go back to bed.

The sleeper often finds his way and locates the objects he may need for the purposes of his dream with his eyes closed, but noises and collisions with objects often fail to bring him back to waking consciousness.

Sadger has attempted to point a connection between moonlight and sleep walking, which he calls at times “moon walking.”

The conclusions which he reaches at the end of his book on the subject are as follows:

“Sleep walking, under or without the influence of the moon, represents a motor outbreak of the unconscious and serves, like the dream, the fulfilment of secret, forbidden wishes, first of the present, behind which, however, infantile wishes regularly hide. Both prove themselves in all the cases analysed more or less completely as of a sexual erotic nature.

“Also those wishes which present themselves without disguise, are mostly of the same nature. The leading wish may be claimed to be that the sleepwalker, male or female, would climb into bed with the loved object as in childhood. The love object need not belong necessarily to the present; it can much more likely be one of earliest childhood.

“Not infrequently the sleep walker identifies himself with the beloved person, sometimes even puts on his clothes, linen or outer garments, or imitates his manner.

“Sleep walking can also have an infantile prototype, when the child pretends to be asleep, that it may be able without fear or punishment to experience all sorts of forbidden things, because it cannot be held accountable for what it does ‘unconsciously in its sleep.’ The same cause works also psychically, when sleep walking occurs mostly in the deepest sleep, even if organic causes are likewise responsible for it.

“The motor outbreak during sleep, which drives one from rest in bed and results in sleep walking and wandering under the light of the moon, may be referred to this, that all sleep walkers exhibit a heightened muscular irritability and muscle erotic, the endogenous excitement of which can compensate for the giving up of the rest in bed. In accordance with this, these phenomena are especially frequent in the offspring of alcoholics, epileptics, sadists and hysterics, with preponderating involvement of the motor apparatus.

“Sleep walking and moon walking are in themselves as little symptoms of hysteria as of epilepsy; yet they are found frequently in conjunction with the former.

“The moon’s light is reminiscent of the light in the hand of a beloved parent. Fixed gazing upon the planet also has probably an erotic colouring.

“It seems possible that sleep walking and moon walking may be permanently cured through the psychoanalytic method.”

CHAPTER XI: PROPHETIC DREAMS

A few times in my life, I have had the infinite surprise when lifting the telephone receiver, of hearing the voice of the very person I was going to call up and who had called me up at the same minute. On the other hand, I have endeavoured with the help of very intimate friends to effect synchronic transmission of thought and have failed dismally on every occasion.

While I have never had prophetic dreams I have recorded one dream of mine which might be characterized as a “second sight” dream.

One day I mislaid some documents which once belonged to my father.

That night my father appeared to me and pointed to a desk drawer where the papers would be found. The next morning I looked in that drawer and found the documents.

I certainly placed the documents myself in that drawer the day before and forgot the fact. But the unconscious memory of that action was retained and came up at night while my mind was at work solving the problem of the lost documents.

If that explanation should meet with scepticism I would remind the reader that the wealth of information with which our unconscious is filled permits of unconscious mental operations of which in our conscious states we would be incapable. Janet’s subject, Lucie, who was lacking in mathematical ability, could, in her unconscious states, perform calculations of an extreme complication. He would give her under hypnosis the following order: “When the figures which I am going to read off to you, leave six when subtracted one from the other, make a gesture of the hand.” Then he would wake her up, and ask several people to talk to her and to make her talk. Standing at a certain distance from her, he would then read rapidly in a low voice a list of figures, but when the appropriate figures were read, Lucie never failed to make the gesture agreed upon.

We notice thousands of things unconsciously, which means simply that every sensorial impression causes a modification of our autonomic system and probably of our sensory-motor system which is never completely effaced.

During our waking hours only those memory impressions which are needed rise to consciousness. The many observations we have made, consciously or otherwise, enable us to calculate the distance between us and an automobile, the speed of that automobile, the width of the street, the dryness or the slippery conditions of the pavement, and to select the time for crossing as well as the speed at which we shall cross.

In our sleep, when we are revolving the day’s problems and searching for solutions, many other facts, stored up in our nervous systems, rise to consciousness and are used in solving the problem.

In the personal case I cited, my unconscious applied its searchlight to recent events; in other cases reported in the literature of the subject the unconscious is shown bringing back events which seemed to have been entirely forgotten.

Our organism never forgets.

Forgotten incidents which suddenly rise to consciousness in dreams are sometimes responsible for visions which on superficial observation appear truly prophetic. Maury cites the following in his book on “Sleep and Dreams”:

“Mr. F. decided once to visit the house where he had been brought up in Montbrison and which he had not seen in twenty-five years. The night before he started on his trip, he dreamt that he was in Montbrison and that he met a man who told him he was a friend of his father. Several days later, while in Montbrison he actually met the man he had seen in his dream and who turned out to be some one he really knew in his childhood, but had forgotten in the intervening years. The real person was much older than the one in the dream, which is quite natural.”

One finds in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research many remarkable examples of dreams which, to the uninitiated, appear truly miraculous. Remembering, however, the wonders accomplished by Lucie under the influence of a hypnotic command, we may realize that the book-keepers who suddenly find in a dream the mistakes which have prevented them from balancing their books, or the various people who locate missing objects, are simply continuing in their sleep the day’s work, drawing no longer upon their limited store of conscious memories and impressions, but upon all the wealth of information which is contained in their unconscious.

Even the famous dream of Professor Hilprecht loses much of its glamour when viewed from this angle. Hilprecht had spent quite some time trying to decipher two small fragments of agate which were supposed to belong to the finger rings of some Babylonian god. He had given up the task and classified the fragments as undecipherable in a book on the subject. One night he had put his “o. k.” on the final proofs of that book, feeling, however, rather dissatisfied at his inability to account for the inscriptions found on those ancient stones. He went to bed, weary and exhausted and had a remarkable dream: A tall, thin priest of Nippur appeared to him, led him to the treasure chamber of the temple of Bel and told him that the two fragments in question should be put together, as they were, not finger rings, but earrings made for a god by cutting a votive cylinder into three parts. The next morning he did as the dream priest had told him to do, and was able to read the inscription without any difficulty.

I have received many letters from persons relating that they had dreamt of the San Francisco earthquake, of the sinking of the Lusitania, of the death of some friend or relative the very night preceding the event.

I show in another chapter how treacherous and unreliable our memory of dreams can be at times.

Happenings following quickly the awakening are likely to become “parasites” on the night’s dreams and to appear as a component part of them.

Time and over again, the newspaper one reads at breakfast adds details to the night’s remembered dreams. Reading about some accident in the early morning may cause us to believe that we dreamt of the accident in the course of the night.

When the German submarines began to sink passenger ships, thousands of dreamers who either wished unconsciously for such sinkings or feared them (which is generally the same thing) and many also who craved the excitement such catastrophes would bring them, must have had dreams in which large ships were sunk. And those thousands must have impressed themselves and their family circle by announcing, when the morning newspaper came out, that they had seen the tragedy enacted in a dream.

Here again we are groping our way over uncharted fields and not until thousands of scientific observations made with the care characteristic of the chemical laboratory have been made, all explanations will only be tentative and all positive statements misleading.

Those mentioning such dreams to me have at times been rather annoyed when I made them confess the wish lurking in them.

One man told me that he had three brothers at the front during the war and that in a dream he saw one of them killed by the Germans. Soon afterward, news of his death reached the family.

I asked him point blank why he wanted to get rid of that brother. He avoided giving me a direct answer but admitted that if one of the three was to die, the one whose death he saw in his dream would be least missed by his family as he had always made trouble and was the “black sheep.”...

Even in such cases the wish fulfilment theory holds good.

CHAPTER XII: ATTITUDES REFLECTED IN DREAMS

Vague dreams, full of moods rather than of action, indicate stagnation, aimlessness.

Dreams of adulthood, dealing with the present or the future, indicate progression. Dreams of childhood or dealing mainly with the past, indicate attempts at a regression.

In his latest book, “Introduction to Psychoanalysis,” Freud states that “the unconscious in our psychic life is the infantile.”

This is one of the great Freudian exaggerations. Such a statement is true of the neurotic and explains why he is a neurotic. In fact the more infantile the unconscious appears to be, the more severe the neurosis generally is, until in certain forms of malignant regression, the patient acts like a helpless newly born infant. The predominance of infantile material in dreams indicates a fixation on infantile gratifications which makes the subject especially ill adapted to adult life. But in the normal individual the amount of infantile material is very small indeed.

We start gathering unconscious material at the very minutes of our birth, if not before birth, but we keep on accumulating experiences, most of them unconscious and only rising to consciousness when needed, and conscious experiences which become unconscious when not needed.

It is the proportion of material from the various periods of our life which enables us to gauge the level a human being has reached through his intelligent, positive acceptance of present day reality. I say acceptance of reality rather than adaptation to reality, for adaptation implies a certain suppression, and suppression may mean neurosis.

It is the human being who satisfies all his infantile cravings within a sphere of activity beneficial to himself and the world, who remains healthy. He who tries to satisfy them through infantile or childish ways merges into a neurosis.

We have seen that the dreams of children and of simple, normal people are obvious and devoid of any symbolic disfigurement. Children dream of the food or the pleasures they had to forego in the previous waking state. Nordenskjold and his sailors, icebound in the Antarctic, dreamt of fine meals, of tobacco, of ships sailing the open sea, of mail from home, in other words of the things of which they had been deprived for months.

The use of symbols in dreams, on the other hand, indicates a lack of freedom of expression due to some fear or repression. A repressed vision appears on the screen of our mind in symbolized form.

A highly symbolical dream is almost always a pathological dream. It means that we do not dare, even in our dreams, to visualize directly the thing we are thinking of.

The phenomenon which Freud has designated as “displacement” also indicates an attempt at repressing certain important facts by harping on other facts of lesser importance.

A child surprised in a part of the house where his presence is suspicious is not likely to reveal abruptly his plans. He will in all likelihood tell some story from which the real reason for his presence is carefully excluded. A young pie fiend found in the pantry would never mention the word pie but make great ado over the “fact” that his ball has rolled under the cupboard.

And likewise it is very often the part of a dream which a patient has not told which holds the key to the enigma of the patient’s mental disturbance.

One of my hypnagogic visions which I have already mentioned, simple as it is, reveals my entire attitude, not only to sleep, but to life in general.

I do not feel overwhelmed by sleep. I give myself up to sleep as voluntarily as I wade into the sea or plunge into a swimming pool. Sleep will refresh me as a swim would. When the proper depth is reached I swim out, conscious of my ability and experiencing no fear.

I use sleep as a means to exercise my mental activities as I enjoy the muscular exertion necessary for swimming.

Finally there is no one in the picture but myself. I am the central figure of the dream.

To go into more details, I may confide to the reader that I have never enjoyed any form of sport, indoor or outdoors in which I do not play an important, if not the leading part, or which prevents me from indulging my own whims. Witnessing some one else’s athletic performances bores me to extinction and games such as cards, checkers or golf which are surrounded with iron clad regulations appear to me not as a relaxation but as a useless form of hard work.

Readers may think that these self-revelations are prompted by egotism, but an analyst should analyse himself as ruthlessly as he analyses others and egotism happens to be the dominant feature of my attitude to life.

The following dream draws a remarkable picture of uncertainty, indecision and gloom:

Dream. “I am standing at the foot of marble stairs. I expect some danger from the left where a person clothed in authority, with tyrannical appearance, is approaching. I ask a female figure standing at the top of the steps, and who seems to be some acquaintance, relative, mother or sister, for help. I try to run up the steps but cannot. The figure extends me a helping hand but that hand is so weak, lifeless, that I feel helpless. I wake up in deep anxiety.”

Attitude. We have in this case a “flight to the mother” coupled with fear of the powerful father. The patient had always suffered from some fear, fear of examinations as a school child, fear of competition in all life matters, fear of marriage, fear of decisions. He lived with his mother and sister and had an affair with a woman considerably older than himself whom he called “mother” and who called him her “boy.”

We shall now see a dreamer wrestling with a sentimental problem, seeking a solution for it and refusing to accept the solution suggested by an outsider.

Dream. “I was in a car with Albert, sitting in my usual seat but the steering gear had been moved so that I could steer from my seat. I was very inexperienced and felt anxiety. I was going down a steep city street and at the bottom, saw a house before which I wished to park; there were red lanterns and signs, however, which prevented me from stopping there. I went on and Albert disappeared, then I was in the open country climbing a hill and a man (A.T.) stood there and I asked him which way to go. The machinery bothered me, I didn’t know what button to push but trusted my intuition and went all right. Finally I reached a desert stretch where there was nothing and in great anxiety awoke.”

Attitude. The subject in love with a married man, had long hoped that he would secure a divorce and marry her. She often went motoring with him. Their affair was not satisfactory, however, and she had often considered the possibility of a separation.

The situation is handled in the dream as follows. She has had her way and is running the car from her usual seat (he has come to her point of view) but she has misgivings about the experiment (unconsciously, she is not very keen any more to marry him); she tries to park in front of a house (their future home); red lanterns (danger signs, obstacles, law, custom) prevent her from doing so. She then starts out without him and asks her analyst for advice. He encourages her to go on her way but she reaches a deserted place and feels so forlorn, so hungry for human company that she escapes from the nightmare through awaking.

Even when no change is observable in a patient’s condition in the course of an analysis, constant attention to his dreams will enable the analyst to notice unconscious changes which very soon afterward translate themselves into a conscious modification of attitude.

The following dreams illustrate that point:

At the beginning of the analysis a patient, following in his dreams as well as in his neurosis, the line of least effort, dreamt he had solved a mechanical problem by means of a very simple apparatus consisting in a rocking chair, two thumb tacks and an old rubber coat. Later when he resumed closer contact with life, the machinery of his dreams became real machinery and he continued in his sleeping thoughts the calculations which had occupied him during the day and which to him were a constant source of pleasure.

A patient whose ambition was to become a singer but whose husband was decidedly hostile to her plans, first brought me the following dream in which she frankly relied on me for advice: