A dream is rarely the representation, one might say the staging, of a single thought, but generally of a number of them, a web of thoughts. In Hanold’s dream there is conspicuous another component of the content, whose disfigurement is easily put aside so that one may learn the latent idea represented by it. This is the end of the dream to which the assurance of reality can also be extended. In the dream the beautiful walker, Gradiva, is transformed into a bas-relief. That is, of course, nothing but an ingenious and poetic representation of the actual procedure. Hanold had, indeed, transferred his interest from the living girl to the bas-relief; the beloved had been transformed into a stone relief. The latent dream-thoughts, which remain unconscious, wish to transform the relief back into the living girl; in connection with the foregoing they speak to him somewhat as follows: “You are, of course, interested in the bas-relief of Gradiva only because it reminds you of the present, here-living Zoë.” But this insight would mean the end of the delusion, if it could become conscious.
Is it our duty to substitute unconscious thoughts thus for every single bit of the manifest dream-content? Strictly speaking, yes; in the interpretation of a dream which had actually been dreamed, we should not be allowed to avoid this duty. The dreamer would then have to give us an exhaustive account. It is easily understood that we cannot enforce such a demand in connection with the creature of our author; we will not, however, overlook the fact that we have not yet submitted the chief content of this dream to the work of interpretation and translation.
Hanold’s dream is, of course, an anxiety-dream. Its content is fearful; anxiety is felt by the dreamer in sleep, and painful feelings remain after it. That is not of any great help for our attempt at explanation; we are again forced to borrow largely from the teachings of dream-interpretation. This admonishes us not to fall into the error of deriving the fear that is felt in a dream from the content of a dream, not to use the dream-content like the content of ideas of waking life. It calls to our attention how often we dream the most horrible things without feeling any trace of fear. Rather the true fact is a quite different one, which cannot be easily guessed, but can certainly be proved. The fear of the anxiety-dream corresponds to a sex-feeling, a libidinous emotion, like every neurotic fear, and has, through the process of repression, proceeded from the libido.[[9]] In the interpretation of dreams, therefore, one must substitute for fear sexual excitement. The fear which has thus come into existence, exercises now—not regularly, but often—a selective influence on the dream-content and brings into the dream ideational elements which seem suitable to this fear for the conscious and erroneous conception of the dream. This is, as has been said, by no means regularly the case, for there are anxiety dreams in which the content is not at all frightful, in which, therefore, one cannot explain consciously the anxiety experienced.
I know that this explanation of fear in dreams sounds odd, and is not easily believed; but I can only advise making friends with it. It would, moreover, be remarkable if Norbert Hanold’s dream allowed itself to be connected with this conception of fear and to be explained by it. We should then say that in the dreamer, at night, the erotic desire stirs, makes a powerful advance to bring his memory of the beloved into consciousness and thus snatch him from the delusion, experiences rejection and transformation into fear, which now, on its part, brings the fearful pictures from the academic memory of the dreamer into the dream-content. In this way the peculiar unconscious content of the dream, the amorous longing for the once known Zoë, is transformed into the manifest-content of the destruction of Pompeii and the loss of Gradiva.
I think that sounds quite plausible so far. One might justly demand that if erotic wishes form the undisfigured content of this dream, then one must be able to point out, in the transformed dream, at least a recognizable remnant of them hidden somewhere. Well, perhaps even this will come about with the help of a suggestion which appears later in the story. At the first meeting with the supposed Gradiva, Hanold remembers this dream and requests the apparition to lie down again as he has seen her.[[10]] Thereupon the young lady rises, indignant, and leaves her strange companion, in whose delusion-ridden speech she has heard the suggestion of an improper erotic wish. I think we may adopt Gradiva’s interpretation; even from a real dream one cannot always demand more definiteness for the representation of an erotic wish.
Thus the application of some rules of dream-interpretation have been successful on Hanold’s first dream, in making this dream comprehensible to us in its chief features, and in fitting it into the sequence of the story. Then it must probably have been produced by its author with due consideration for these rules. One could raise only one more question: why the author should introduce a dream for further development of the delusion. Well, I think that is very cleverly arranged and again keeps faith with reality. We have already heard that in actual illness the formation of a delusion is very often connected with a dream, but after our explanation of the nature of dreams, we need find no new riddle in this fact. Dreams and delusion spring from the same source, the repressed; the dream is, so to speak, the physiological delusion of the normal human being. Before the repressed has become strong enough to push itself up into waking life as delusion, it may easily have won its first success under the more favourable circumstances of sleep, in the form of a dream having after-effects. During sleep, with the diminution of psychic activity, there enters a slackening in the strength of the resistance, which the dominant psychic forces oppose to the repressed. This slackening is what makes the dream-formation possible and therefore the dream becomes, for us, the best means of approach to knowledge of the unconscious psyche. Only the dream usually passes rapidly with the re-establishment of the psychic revival of waking life, and the ground won by the unconscious is again vacated.
III
In the further course of the story there is another dream, which can tempt us, even more perhaps than the first, to try to interpret it and fit it into the psychic life of the hero; but we save little if we leave the representation of the author of Gradiva here, to hasten directly to this second dream, for whoever wishes to interpret the dream of another, cannot help concerning himself, as extensively as possible, with every subjective and objective experience of the dreamer. Therefore it would be best to hold to the thread of the story and provide this with our commentaries as we progress.
The new delusion of the death of Gradiva at the destruction of Pompeii in the year 79 is not the only after-effect of the first dream analysed by us. Directly afterwards Hanold decides upon a trip to Italy, which finally takes him to Pompeii. Before this, however, something else has happened to him; leaning from his window, he thinks he sees on the street a figure with the bearing and walk of his Gradiva, hastens after her, in spite of his scanty attire, does not overtake her, but is driven back by the jeers of the people on the street. After he has returned to his room, the song of a canary whose cage hangs in the window of the opposite house calls forth in him a mood such as if he wished to get from prison into freedom, and the spring trip is immediately decided upon and accomplished.