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
An evening paper published recently a cartoon showing a kiddie in bed who asks his mother: “What makes me dream?”—“You eat too much meat,” the mother answers. The next scene is laid in the kitchen where the mother finds her child ransacking the ice box for meat.