It would be absurd to believe that the sight of the execution “put the idea of suicide into his head.” He undoubtedly had been consciously or unconsciously revolving death thoughts in his mind.
The sight of the execution made those ideas more concrete and more obsessive. The recurrence of a death dream simply showed that the obsession was gradually overpowering his personality and seeking realization. The dream work, endeavouring to solve the problem of how to end his life, offered an easy solution: he did not have to commit suicide; he was being put to death. Finally the death wishes overthrew his personality and he killed himself.
An epileptic was tortured every night by a dream in which a group of boys playing Wild West (he personifying the Indian) were pursuing him, throwing sticks and stones at him and finally cornering him. At the very minute where they were laying hands on him, he would experience a “dying” feeling and wake up in great discomfort. One night he turned round to face the gang which dwindled down to one small urchin whom he spanked. That night he slept soundly and the next day his fears of having a new fit disappeared. Neither that dream nor his fits have returned. It was not the dream that gave him fits, nor was it the last dream which cured him. The obsessive dreams were wish-fulfilment dreams, showing him how to dodge life’s duties through his sickness which was a convenient, though painful, unconscious excuse and how to solve his life problems by getting out of reality.
The last dream revealed a change in his mental attitude. He was not to seek any longer a neurotic escape from reality but face reality and fight his own battles.
A patient suffering from delusions had the following dream:
“A woman appeared to me and told me that it was all a dream and that all my troubles would soon end.”
Associations to that dream showed that the woman who appeared to my patient was a midwife who had helped her in a confinement some thirty years before (rebirth symbolism). At that time she almost died from puerperal fever and was also “saved” by a dream in which her grandparents appeared to her and told her that she would recover.
Her dreams, in which she placed in the mouth of other people the expression of her own wish for health, corresponded well in their mechanism with her delusions in which she heard people berating her for her imaginary sins.
At the time of the dreams, her delusions had lost their terrifying character and were only a mild annoyance to her. She had acquired enough insight to doubt their reality and to refer them to her unconscious thoughts.
The woman who imagines that in every voice she hears she can distinguish the voice of the man she unconsciously loves builds up a “story” like the dreamer who, perceiving coldness in her feet at night, saw herself falling into a lake.