“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.