“What do you dream about?” he asked her.
“I don’t exactly know,” she replied. “I am sure I dream a good deal, though, for when I wake I always seem to have been dreaming, and to have had horrid dreams. All I can say is that I dimly remember seeing in them many ugly faces.”
“Is your brother-in-law’s face among them?”
“Yes, and other people’s faces. But I’m sure I don’t know who they are.”
Subjected to a special process of “mind tunneling” of Doctor Sidis’s own invention, the patient recalled a number of dreams in vivid detail. Most of them showed a strong resemblance to one another, in that they had as their setting a forest, and as their chief actors men of repulsive aspect, usually dressed in the roughest of clothing, and usually intent on capturing the dreamer. Only the night before, she declared, she had dreamed that a man was trying to choke her, and she had awakened panic-stricken, and so drenched with perspiration that her nurse—who corroborated her statement—had had to change her night-gown.
“Can you identify the men of your dreams—the men dressed in rough clothing who pursue you so fiercely?” Doctor Sidis asked, while she still was in the artificial state into which he had put her.
“Yes, yes,” she answered, much agitated. “I know them only too well.”
Now, for the first time, she related to him two most significant episodes of her girlhood. Once, it appeared, when she was hardly nine years old, she was walking along a country road, past a forest, when a wood-cutter—“a big man, with big arms and hands projecting from short sleeves”—tried to catch her and carry her into the forest. “He ran after me with outstretched arms. I screamed, and ran from him as fast as I could, calling for help all the time.” And, on another occasion, when she was even younger—only six—on her way to school through the woods, a man met her, gave her candy, talked to her nicely, and all at once seized her so roughly that she began to scream with fright and pain. At that moment somebody came along, and the man released her and fled.