“Concerning a man who possesses the remarkable quality of never dreaming nonsense....”
“Your marvellous characteristic of dreaming as you wake is based upon your virtues, upon your goodness, your justice, and your love for truth; it is the moral clearness of your nature which makes everything about you intelligible.”
“But if you think the matter over carefully,” replied the other, “I almost believe that all people are created as I am, and that no human being ever dreams nonsense! A dream which is so distinctly remembered that it can be reproduced, which is therefore no dream of delirium, always has a meaning; why, it cannot be otherwise! For that which is in contradiction with itself can never be grouped together as a whole. The fact that time and space are often thoroughly shaken up detracts nothing from the real meaning of the dream, because neither of them has had any significance whatever for its essential contents. We often do the same thing in waking life; think of the fairy-tale, of many daring and profound phantastic creations, about which only an ignorant person would say: ‘That is nonsense! For it is impossible.’”
“If it were only always possible to interpret dreams correctly, as you have just done with mine!” said the friend.
“That is certainly not an easy task, but the dreamer himself ought always to succeed in doing it with a little concentration of attention.... You ask why it is generally impossible? Your dreams seem to conceal something secret, something unchaste of a peculiar and higher nature, a certain mystery in your nature which cannot easily be revealed by thought; and it is for that reason that your dreaming seems so often to be without meaning, or even to be a contradiction. But in the profoundest sense this is by no means the case; indeed it cannot be true at all, for it is always the same person, whether he is asleep or awake.”
[DT]. I have since given the complete analysis and synthesis of two dreams in the Bruchstueck einer Hysterieanalyse, 1905.
[DU]. From a work of K. Abel, Der Gegensinn der Urworte, 1884 (see my review of it in the Bleuler-Freud Jahrbuch, II., 1910), I learned with surprise a fact which is confirmed by other philologists, that the oldest languages behaved in this regard quite like the dream. They originally had only one word for both extremes in a series of qualities or activities (strong—weak, old—young, far—near, to tie—to separate), and formed separate designations for the two extremes only secondarily through slight modifications of the common primitive word. Abel demonstrated these relationships with rare exceptions in the old Egyptian, and he was able to show distinct remnants of the same development in the Semitic and Indo-Germanic languages.
[DV]. If I do not know behind which of the persons which occur in the dream I am to look for my ego, I observe the following rule: That person in the dream who is subject to an emotion which I experience while asleep, is the one that conceals my ego.
[DW]. The hysterical attack sometimes uses the same device—the inversion of time-relations—for the purpose of concealing its meaning from the spectator. The attack of a hysterical girl, for example, consists in enacting a little romance, which she has unconsciously fancied in connection with an encounter in the street car. A man, attracted by the beauty of her foot, addresses her while she is reading, whereupon she goes with him and experiences a stormy love scene. Her attack begins with the representation of this scene in writhing movements of the body (accompanied by motions of the lips to signify kissing, entwining of the arms for embraces), whereupon she hurries into another room, sits down in a chair, lifts her skirt in order to show her foot, acts as though she were about to read a book, and speaks to me (answers me).
[DX]. Accompanying hysterical symptoms: Failure to menstruate and profound depression, which was the chief ailment of the patient.