I must also forgo detailed analysis of the two remaining portions of the dream; I shall select only those elements which lead to two childhood scenes, for the sake of which alone I have taken up the dream. The reader will guess that it is sexual matter which forces me to this suppression; but he need not be content with this explanation. Many things which must be treated as secrets in the presence of others are not treated as such with one’s self, and here it is not a question of considerations inducing me to hide the solution, but of motives of the inner censor concealing the real content of the dream from myself. I may say, then, that the analysis shows these three portions of the dream to be impertinent boasting, the exuberance of an absurd grandiose idea which has long since been suppressed in my waking life, which, however, dares show itself in the manifest dream content by one or two projections (I seem clever to myself), and which makes the arrogant mood of the evening before the dream perfectly intelligible. It is boasting, indeed, in all departments; thus the mention of Graz refers to the phrase: What is the price of Graz? which we are fond of using when we feel over-supplied with money. Whoever will recall Master Rabelais’s unexcelled description of the “Life and Deeds of Gargantua and his Son Pantagruel,” will be able to supply the boastful content intimated in the first portion of the dream. The following belongs to the two childhood scenes which have been promised. I had bought a new trunk for this journey, whose colour, a brownish violet, appears in the dream several times. (Violet-brown violets made of stiff material, next to a thing which is called “girl-catcher”—the furniture in the governmental chambers). That something new attracts people’s attention is a well-known belief of children. Now I have been told the following story of my childhood; I remember hearing the story rather than the occurrence itself. I am told that at the age of two I still occasionally wetted my bed, that I was often reproached on this subject, and that I consoled my father by promising to buy him a beautiful new red bed in N. (the nearest large city). (Hence the detail inserted in the dream that we bought the urinal in the city or had to buy it; one must keep one’s promises. Attention is further called to the identity of the male urinal and the feminine trunk, box). All the megalomania of the child is contained in this promise. The significance of the dream of difficulty in urinating in the case of the child has been already considered in the interpretation of an earlier dream (cf. the dream on p. 145).
Now there was another domestic occurrence, when I was seven or eight years old, which I remember very well. One evening, before going to bed I had disregarded the dictates of discretion not to satisfy my wants in the bedroom of my parents and in their presence, and in his reprimand for this delinquency my father made the remark: “That boy will never amount to anything.” It must have terribly mortified my ambition, for allusions to this scene return again and again in my dreams, and are regularly coupled with enumerations of my accomplishments and successes, as though I wanted to say: “You see, I have amounted to something after all.” Now this childhood scene furnishes the elements for the last image of the dream, in which of course, the rôles are interchanged for the sake of revenge. The elderly man, obviously my father, for the blindness in one eye signifies his glaucoma[[BN]] on one side is now urinating before me as I once urinated before him. In glaucoma I refer to cocaine, which stood my father in good stead in his operation, as though I had thereby fulfilled my promises. Besides that I make sport of him; since he is blind I must hold the urinal in front of him, and I gloat over allusions to my discoveries in the theory of hysteria, of which I am so proud.[[BO]]
If the two childhood scenes of urinating are otherwise closely connected with the desire for greatness, their rehabilitation on the trip to the Aussee was further favoured by the accidental circumstance that my compartment had no water-closet, and that I had to expect embarrassment on the ride as actually happened in the morning. I awoke with the sensation of a bodily need. I suppose one might be inclined to credit these sensations with being the actual stimulus of the dream; I should, however, prefer a different conception—namely, that it was the dream thoughts which gave rise to the desire to urinate. It is quite unusual for me to be disturbed in sleep by any need, at least at the time of this awakening, a quarter of four in the morning. I may forestall further objection by remarking that I have hardly ever felt a desire to urinate after awakening early on other journeys made under more comfortable circumstances. Moreover, I can leave this point undecided without hurting my argument.
Since I have learned, further, from experience in dream analysis that there always remain important trains of thought proceeding from dreams whose interpretation at first seems complete (because the sources of the dream and the actuation of the wish are easily demonstrable), trains of thought reaching back into earliest childhood, I have been forced to ask myself whether this feature does not constitute an essential condition of dreaming. If I were to generalise this thesis, a connection with what has been recently experienced would form a part of the manifest content of every dream and a connection with what has been most remotely experienced, of its latent content; and I can actually show in the analysis of hysteria that in a true sense these remote experiences have remained recent up to the present time. But this conjecture seems still very difficult to prove; I shall probably have to return to the part played by the earliest childhood experiences, in another connection (Chapter VII.).
Of the three peculiarities of dream memory considered at the beginning, one—the preference for the unimportant in the dream content—has been satisfactorily explained by tracing it back to dream disfigurement. We have been able to establish the existence of the other two—the selection of recent and of infantile material—but we have found it impossible to explain them by the motive of dream. Let us keep in mind these two characteristics, which still remain to be explained or evaluated; a place for them will have to be found elsewhere, either in the psychology of the sleeping state, or in the discussion of the structure of the psychic apparatus which we shall undertake later, after we have learned that the inner nature of the apparatus may be observed through dream interpretation as though through a window.
Just here I may emphasize another result of the last few dream analyses. The dream often appears ambiguous; not only may several wish-fulfilments, as the examples show, be united in it, but one meaning or one wish-fulfilment may also conceal another, until at the bottom one comes upon the fulfilment of a wish from the earliest period of childhood; and here too, it may be questioned whether “often” in this sentence may not more correctly be replaced by “regularly.”
(c) Somatic Sources of Dreams
If the attempt be made to interest the cultured layman in the problems of dreaming, and if, with this end in view, he be asked the question from what source dreams originate according to his opinion, it is generally found that the person thus interrogated thinks himself in assured possession of a part of the solution. He immediately thinks of the influence which a disturbed or impeded digestion (“Dreams come from the stomach”), accidental bodily position, and little occurrences during sleep, exercise upon the formation of dreams, and he seems not to suspect that even after the consideration of all these factors there still remains something unexplained.
We have explained at length in the introductory chapter (p. 16), what a rôle in the formation of dreams the scientific literature credits to the account of somatic exciting sources, so that we need here only recall the results of this investigation. We have seen that three kinds of somatic exciting sources are distinguished, objective sensory stimuli which proceed from external objects, the inner states of excitation of the sensory organs having only a subjective basis, and the bodily stimuli which originate internally; and we have noticed the inclination on the part of the authors to force the psychic sources of the dream into the background or to disregard them altogether in favour of these somatic sources of stimulation (p. 32).
In testing the claims which are made on behalf of these classes of somatic sources of stimulation, we have discovered that the significance of the objective stimuli of the sensory organs—whether accidental stimuli during sleep or those stimuli which cannot be excluded from our dormant psychic life—has been definitely established by numerous observations and is confirmed by experiments (p. 18); we have seen that the part played by subjective sensory stimuli appears to be demonstrated by the return of hypnogogic sensory images in dreams, and that although the referring of these dream images and ideas, in the broadest sense, to internal bodily stimulation is not demonstrable in every detail, it can be supported by the well-known influence which an exciting state of the digestive, urinary, and sexual organs exercise upon the contents of our dreams.