The numeral 18, with which the judgment in the dream is meaninglessly connected, still preserves a trace of the context from which the real judgment was torn. Finally, “I am not certain what year it is” is intended for nothing else than to carry out my identification with the paralytic, in the examination of whom this point of confirmation had actually been established.
In the solution of these apparent acts of judgment, in the dream, it may be well to call attention to the rule of interpretation which says that the coherence which is fabricated in the dream between its constituent parts is to be disregarded as specious and unessential, and that every dream element must be taken by itself and traced to its source. The dream is a conglomeration, which is to be broken up into its elements for the purposes of investigation. But other circumstances call our attention to the fact that a psychic force is expressed in dreams which establishes this apparent coherence—that is to say, which subjects the material that is obtained by the dream activity to a secondary elaboration. We are here confronted with manifestations of this force, upon which we shall later fix our attention as being the fourth of the factors which take part in the formation of the dream.
VI. I select other examples of critical activity in the dreams which have already been cited. In the absurd dream about the communication from the common council I ask the question: “You married shortly after? I figure that I was born in 1856, which appears to me as though following immediately.” This quite takes the form of an inference. My father married shortly after his attack in the year 1851; I am the oldest son, born in 1856; this agrees perfectly. We know that this inference has been interpolated by the wish-fulfilment, and that the sentence which dominates the dream thoughts is to the following effect: 4 or 5 years, that is no time at all, that need not enter the calculation. But every part of this chain of inferences is to be determined from the dream thoughts in a different manner, both as to its content and as to its form. It is the patient—about whose endurance my colleague complains—who intends to marry immediately after the close of the treatment. The manner in which I deal with my father in the dream recalls an inquest or examination, and with that the person of a university instructor who was in the habit of taking a complete list of credentials at the enrolment of his class: “You were born when?” In 1856. “Patre?” Then the applicant gave the first name of his father with a Latin ending, and we students assumed that the Aulic Councillor drew inferences from the first name of the father which the name of the enrolled student would not always have supplied. According to this, the drawing of inferences in the dream would be merely a repetition of the drawing of inferences which appears as part of the subject-matter in the dream thoughts. From this we learn something new. If an inference occurs in the dream content, it invariably comes from the dream thoughts; it may be contained in these as a bit of remembered material, or it may serve as a logical connective in a series of dream thoughts. In any case an inference in the dream represents an inference in the dream thoughts.[[EZ]]
The analysis of this dream should be continued here. With the inquest of the Professor there is connected the recollection of an index (published in Latin during my time) of the university students; also of my course of studies. The five years provided for the study of medicine were as usual not enough for me. I worked along unconcernedly in the succeeding years; in the circle of my acquaintances I was considered a loafer, and there was doubt as to whether I would “get through.” Then all at once I decided to take my examinations; and I got “through,” in spite of the postponement. This is a new confirmation of the dream thoughts, which I defiantly hold up to my critics: “Even though you are unwilling to believe it, because I take my time, I shall reach a conclusion (German Schluss, meaning either end or conclusion, inference). It has often happened that way.”
In its introductory portion this dream contains several sentences which cannot well be denied the character of an argumentation. And this argumentation is not at all absurd; it might just as well belong to waking thought. In the dream I make sport of the communication of the Common Council, for in the first place I was not yet in the world in 1851, and in the second place, my father, to whom it might refer, is already dead. Both are not only correct in themselves, but coincide completely with the arguments that I should use in case I should receive a communication of the sort mentioned. We know from our previous analysis that this dream has sprung from deeply embittered and scornful dream thoughts; if we may assume further that the motive for censorship is a very strong one, we shall understand that the dream activity has every reason to create a flawless refutation of a baseless insinuation according to the model contained in the dream thoughts. But analysis shows that in this case the dream activity has not had the task of making a free copy, but it has been required to use subject-matter from the dream thoughts for its purpose. It is as if in an algebraic equation there occurred plus and minus signs, signs of powers and of roots, besides the figures, and as if someone, in copying this equation without understanding it, should take over into his copy the signs of operation as well as the figures, and fail to distinguish between the two kinds. The two arguments may be traced to the following material. It is painful for me to think that many of the assumptions upon which I base my solution of psychoneuroses, as soon as they have become known, will arouse scepticism and ridicule. Thus I must maintain that impressions from the second year of life, or even from the first, leave a lasting trace upon the temperament of persons who later become diseased, and that these impressions—greatly distorted it is true, and exaggerated by memory—are capable of furnishing the original and fundamental basis of hysterical symptoms. Patients to whom I explain this in its proper place are in the habit of making a parody upon the explanation by declaring themselves willing to look for reminiscences of the period when they were not yet alive. It would quite accord with my expectation, if enlightenment on the subject of the unsuspected part played by the father in the earliest sexual impulses of feminine patients should get a similar reception. (Cf. the discussion on p. 218.) And, nevertheless, both positions are correct according to my well-founded conviction. In confirmation I recall certain examples in which the death of the father happened when the child was very young, and later events, otherwise inexplicable, proved that the child had unconsciously preserved recollections of the persons who had so early gone out of its life. I know that both of my assertions are based upon inferences the validity of which will be attacked. If the subject-matter of these very inferences which I fear will be contested is used by the dream activity for setting up incontestable inferences, this is a performance of the wish-fulfilment.
VII. In a dream which I have hitherto only touched upon, astonishment at the subject to be broached is distinctly expressed at the outset.
“The elder Bruecke must have given me some task or other; strangely enough it relates to the preparation of my own lower body, pelvis and legs, which I see before me as though in the dissecting room, but without feeling my lack of body and without a trace of horror. Louise N. is standing near, and doing her work next to me. The pelvis is eviscerated; now the upper, now the lower view of the same is seen, and the two views mingle. Thick fleshy red lumps (which even in the dream make me think of hæmorrhoids) are to be seen. Also something had to be carefully picked out, which lay over these and which looked like crumpled tinfoil.[[FA]] Then I was again in possession of my legs and made a journey through the city, but took a wagon (owing to my fatigue). To my astonishment the wagon drove into a house door, which opened and allowed it to pass into a passage that was snapped off at the end, and finally led further on into the open.[[FB]] At last I wandered through changing landscapes with an Alpine guide, who carried my things. He carried, me for some way, out of consideration for my tired legs. The ground was muddy, and we went along the edge; people sat on the ground, a girl among them, like Indians or Gypsies. Previously I had moved myself along on the slippery ground, with constant astonishment that I was so well able to do it after the preparation. At last we came to a small wooden house which ended in an open window. Here the guide set me down, and laid two wooden boards which stood in readiness on the window sill, in order that in this way the chasm might be bridged which had to be crossed in order to get to the window. Now, I grew really frightened about my legs. Instead of the expected crossing, I saw two grown-up men lying upon wooden benches which were on the walls of the hut, and something like two sleeping children next to them. It seems as though not the boards but the children were intended to make possible the crossing. I awakened with frightened thoughts.”
Anyone who has formed a proper idea of the abundance of dream condensation will easily be able to imagine how great a number of pages the detailed analysis of this dream must fill. Luckily for the context, I shall take from it merely the one example of astonishment, in the dream, which makes its appearance in the parenthetical remark, “strangely enough.” Let us take up the occasion of the dream. It is a visit of this lady, Louise N., who assists at the work in the dream. She says: “Lend me something to read.” I offer her She, by Rider Haggard. “A strange book, but full of hidden sense,” I try to explain to her; “the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions——” Here she interrupts me: “I know that book already. Haven’t you something of your own?” “No, my own immortal works are still unwritten.” “Well, when are you going to publish your so-called latest revelations which you promised us would be good reading?” she asks somewhat sarcastically. I now perceive that she is a mouthpiece for someone else, and I become silent. I think of the effort it costs me to publish even my work on the Dream, in which I have to surrender so much of my own intimate character. “The best that you know you can’t tell to the children.” The preparation of my own body, which I am ordered to make in the dream, is thus the self-analysis necessitated in the communication of my dreams. The elder Bruecke very properly finds a place here; in these first years of my scientific work it happened that I neglected a discovery, until his energetic commands forced me to publish it. But the other trains of thought which start from my conversation with Louise N. go too deep to become conscious; they are side-tracked by way of the related material which has been awakened in me by the mention of Rider Haggard’s She. The comment “strangely enough” goes with this book, and with another by the same author, The Heart of the World, and numerous elements of the dream are taken from these two fantastic novels. The muddy ground over which the dreamer is carried, the chasm which must be crossed by means of the boards that have been brought along, come from She; the Indians, the girl, and the wooden house, from the Heart of the World. In both novels a woman is the leader, both treat of dangerous wanderings; She has to do with an adventurous journey to the undiscovered country, a place almost untrodden by foot of man. According to a note which I find in my record of the dream, the fatigue in my legs was a real sensation of those days. Doubtless in correspondence with this came a tired frame of mind and the doubting question: “How much further will my legs carry me?” The adventure in She ends with the woman leader’s meeting her death in the mysterious fire at the centre of the earth, instead of attaining immortality for herself and others. A fear of this sort has unmistakably arisen in the dream thoughts. The “wooden house,” also, is surely the coffin—that is, the grave. But the dream activity has performed its masterpiece in representing this most unwished-for of all thoughts by means of a wish-fulfilment. I have already once been in a grave, but it was an empty Etruscan grave near Orvieto—a narrow chamber with two stone benches on the walls, upon which the skeletons of two grown-up persons had been laid. The interior of the wooden house in the dream looks exactly like this, except that wood has been substituted for stone. The dream seems to say: “If you must so soon lie in your grave, let it be this Etruscan grave,” and by means of this interpolation it transforms the saddest expectation into one that is really to be desired. As we shall learn, it is, unfortunately, only the idea accompanying an emotion which the dream can change into its opposite, not usually the emotion itself. Thus I awake with “frightened thoughts,” even after the dream has been forced to represent my idea—that perhaps the children will attain what has been denied to the father—a fresh allusion to the strange novel in which the identity of a person is preserved through a series of generations covering two thousand years.
VIII. In the context of another dream there is a similar expression of astonishment at what is experienced in the dream. This, however, is connected with a striking and skilfully contrived attempt at explanation which might well be called a stroke of genius—so that I should have to analyse the whole dream merely for the sake of it, even if the dream did not possess two other features of interest. I am travelling during the night between the eighteenth and the nineteenth of July on the Southern Railway, and in my sleep I hear someone call out: “Hollthurn, 10 minutes.” I immediately think of Holothurian—of a museum of natural history—that here is a place where brave men have vainly resisted the domination of their overlord. Yes, the counter reformation in Austria! As though it were a place in Styria or the Tyrol. Now I distinctly see a little museum in which the remains or the possessions of these men are preserved. I wish to get off, but I hesitate to do so. Women with fruit are standing on the platform; they crouch on the floor, and in that position hold out their baskets in an inviting manner. I hesitate, in doubt whether we still have time, but we are still standing. I am suddenly in another compartment in which the leather and the seats are so narrow that one’s back directly touches the back rest.[[FC]] I am surprised at this, but I may have changed cars while asleep. Several people, among them an English brother and sister; a row of books distinctly on a shelf on the wall. I see The Wealth of Nations, then Matter and Motion (by Maxwell)—the books are thick and bound in brown linen. The man asks his sister for a book by Schiller, and whether she has forgotten it. These are books which first seem mine, then seem to belong to the brother and sister. At this point I wish to join in the conversation in order to confirm and support what is being said——. I awaken sweating all over my body, because all the windows are shut. The train stops at Marburg.
While writing down the dream, a part of it occurs to me which my memory wished to omit. I say to the brother and sister about a certain work: “It is from ...” but I correct myself: “It is by ...” The man remarks to his sister: “He said it correctly.”