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.