What makes it difficult for neurotics at times to tell the difference between their dreams and reality is that the emotions felt in dreams are accompanied by the same inner secretions as when felt in the waking life. A fear dream releases adrenin and a vivid sexual dream is followed by a pollution. The bodily sensations following certain dreams are evidential facts which some neurotics do not know how to controvert.
The hallucinations of delirium tremens patients which are generally accompanied by anxiety, illustrate the fact that we can be terrified and tortured by a dream which is a symbolized fulfilment of our conscious or unconscious wishes.
It is admitted by all but the very ignorant that immoderate drinking is not induced by a taste for drink but by a desire to escape reality, in the majority of cases, to drown the consciousness of financial or sexual difficulties.
The most common hallucinations of drunkards are those of snakes and lice. Snakes are almost without exception symbolical of the male sex. To the majority of neurotics, lice are symbolical of money and American slang recognizes that association in the expression lousy with money.
The “DT” patient has his wishes fulfilled. He is covered with vermin and snakes crawl about his bed. He has all the symbolical wealth and the symbolical potency or homosexual love he could wish for. But curiously enough he does not understand those symbols and is terrified by the manifest content of his morbid dream.
The story of Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel is a fine illustration of the relation between dreams and insanity.
The king began to lose his sleep which was disturbed by nightmares. In the morning, however, the memory of those nightmares seemed to be entirely gone. Daniel contrived to reconstruct a forgotten anxiety dream in which the king saw a gigantic figure with head of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs of brass, legs of iron and feet of iron and clay and which toppled down when struck by a stone.
Here we have a morbid attitude to reality, the king visualizing his position (which unconsciously appeared to him precarious), through that unstable figure, and also expressing a neurotic wish to be delivered from his anxiety through the final catastrophe.
Later the king had another dream visualizing his fears and death wishes through a different image: A mighty tree grew till its head reached the heavens. Then an angel cried: “Hew down the tree, leave the stump and roots in the earth, in the tender grass of the field; let it be wet with the dew and let his portion be with the beasts.”
Fear of defeat and a neurotic desire to escape reality via a regression to the animal level are clearly indicated in this dream and in Daniel’s interpretation of it.