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.