There are several examples of punning to record—not brilliant, even somewhat vulgar yet interesting as exhibiting varieties of mental action. I dream that I am at a barn yard trying to hold the gate shut. In the yard are two men, each with an animal, a kid, one light, one dark. The light kid is unmanageable, pawing and shaking its head. Some days elapsed before the interpretation dawned upon me but once noted could not be doubted. Several weeks previously I had a business engagement and of two pairs of gloves—kids—I hesitated which to wear. I was to do some writing necessitating their removal and as one fastening of a light glove was difficult I fixed upon the dark pair, as to ask help would under the circumstances, have proved exceedingly embarrassing.
A friend had informed me of her approaching marriage. I dream of eating at a table with her. I take meat but she wants me to do she does. So I return the meat I had chosen and take spare-rib. This variety of meat I had neither eaten nor thought of for months and the conclusion that the reference is to the story of Adam and Eve is inevitable. I dream of eating at the table of a friend. I am a little sick and cannot eat all that is given me. My friend points smilingly to a package of stuffed dates on my plate. One date is apart from the package. This dream relates unmistakably to a day when I had a pressure of engagements and had not time to eat; when I did feel slightly ill, and when one very significant engagement was made unexpectedly—a date apart from the others. A kiss of her lover upon the lips of a young girl becomes in my dream a piece of court plaster on her upper lip, and a woman about whose prospective marriage some one asked, returns, in my night vision to a university to obtain the degree of B. Ed., which in sleep I took to indicate Bachelor of Education but which is open to a different interpretation.
Visions of natural scenery are most remote, strange, beautiful and delightful. They are doubtless composites of actual localities but in their construction and use fine powers of imagination are at work and real life seems left far behind. In my dreams of this type the ocean stands as a symbol of Life itself, of the mighty and profound procreative force the entrance into whose domination is the crisis of existence. For this experience is demanded the mightiest symbol. It is evening. I am on the seashore with my father and mother. Greatwaves are rolling in. I look backward and see one wave break where we have passed. My mother is afraid but we cannot turn back. I am calm. Then—this immediately follows—I am in a kind of tunnel and fear that I shall suffocate. This and the following might be construed as symbolising my own birth. I am in a boat on the ocean with my mother. The waves are tremendous and as she goes out on deck to close a great door I fear she will be washed away. But she is safe. Next there is a violent jar and the boat is aground. Then I see down a city street. In a particularly impressive dream I approach the sea at early morning. I think I shall see the sun rise from the water. I go over a hill to reach the ocean which is frozen near the shore. I go into a little house and when I come out I can not close the door. The wind is high and the waves enormous. Then there is calm and I see a man on horseback in the water. Next a fog rises and out of the mist a little boat comes toward me, the oars flashing like silver. Then a little boy comes ashore. There are strange dreams of a frozen ocean, and of being out in a small boat with a friend, soon to be married, with ships passing and we afraid. I am near the ocean and longing to see it, and once trying to go with some one to see the foundation of the sea but am hindered.
Among visions of mountains is the following.—I see high and beautiful mountains as I stand on a bridge. I hear the squeal of a horse. Then stones fall from a mountain-top into the stream and spirals of bright water rise to meet them. After receiving from a man of vigorous, vital personality an atomizer for a slight hay fever, I dream of high mountains and at the foot of one is an irregular patch of red sunlight. Above are two houses, not side by side. In front of them is a fine, slanting veil of rain. A dream in which indications of the reputed "father complex" may be found is one of my father and myself in a team at the top of a high mountain, at the end of the road. My father wants to drive off among the peaks but I fear that we shall be lost. I dread the night there but think I can call for help. Somewhat similar is the following.—I am in a high, steep place with my father. I fear. He moves a stone and in the hollow of a rock I see moss or fungus. There are often brief, passing dreams in which no person figures. I see a bridge across a chasm; it is long and extends beyond where a bridge is necessary. I see two rivers join and wonder what the resulting stream is called. I see a river from the side of which emerges a spring of water and a new stream. A small, steep hill, snow-capped. A river with water above the banks.
To dream of moving to an old house—what signifies this? Apparently nothing. If one is to dream it must be of something—houses or people or scenery. But to dream often of going to live in an ancient house,—of trying to find in it my room; mosquito netting at the window, not quite tight; from my room into a smaller one a door which I try to fasten but can not because at the bottom it is a swaying curtain, the wall paper loose and a mouse hole near the floor; a long, sunshiny room where I see what appears to be a rat but which becomes a little kitten, weak from long confinement, that follows me from room to room and at last through a door leading to a porch;—why all these accessories? Once I go through many rooms—furnished but uninhabited—and come to an upper bed chamber where, upon a couch, lies a woman, quite dead I think; but presently she moves one hand. Again I go through room after room until I reach one where still another woman—or is it the same—lies dead on the bed. As I look she becomes a beautiful child who has lain there forty years. The child stirs and opens its eyes; I think something should be done to keep it alive but the eyes close, and sleep, or death, reigns again. After calling upon an expectant mother who showed me her layette, all white and blue, I dream that I go in an old house to a room with blue papered walls, a blue and white spread on the bed and a case of books, one of which is Dickens' Great Expectations. In one old house I find the bulbs of some plant sprouting on a shelf; in another I open the stove and find to my surprise that fire is still there. In still another house I see behind the stove a closed door which I long to open. I go about the house, up steep, worn stairs, down again and out into a garden where there is a single strawberry and I think staminate and pistillate plants should be set out to insure fertilization. Always I think of the closed door and presently I return to the house and enter the room behind the stove. On the floor is a green veil of firm texture. And at last there are cobwebs on the ceiling of my old house and I still search for my room.
After the presentation of this array of symbolism quite spontaneously the interpretation arose in my mind. The old house is the recurring abode of life. I would dwell there and take my place in the line of succession. Quite in line with this symbolism was the very beautiful dream of a young woman not many months before her bridal which I give in her words—"With a crowd of unknown people I was to visit and go over a haunted house. The living room was nicely furnished in antique furniture and the whole house was very still. We went upstairs, and it passed through my mind that people who were dead and gone had moved through the rooms. I was coming down the stairs when suddenly a pipe organ burst forth. That was the haunted part—music in the air, no organ at all. We were awestricken and I awoke with the same feeling." In dreams of this character we find it necessary to predicate a creative, myth-making tendency in the structure of the mind by means of which currents of life flowing beneath all thought become articulate.
Coming now to examples of reasoning by analogy directly expressive of the desire for maternity, I wish to make still more plain my view of the reason for symbolism. Maternity is untold ages old; intelligent comprehension of the function very recent. That portion of the mind functioning in dreams—that is in the majority of dreams—is unable to picture the process and its necessary antecedents. (Frankly sexual dreams occurred to me very rarely.) Instinctive acts are the last to be made objects of thought; a relatively high degree of mental development is necessary before the requisite detachment from the process can be obtained and as we have seen this detachment is beyond the power of the self that dreams. Hence the recourse to analogy and symbolism.
I call upon a woman who is pregnant and whose face is slightly bloated. In that night's dream I look in a mirror and see that my face is plump. I think I am too old. I see on the street a young girl in short skirts wheeling a baby carriage. My friend tells me that the girl is a mother. That night I dream of being in a shop to buy an article which I in reality intended to purchase and in addition looking at a dress for a girl of twelve or fourteen. I hear of a pregnant woman who ran away and worked for a time in a mill and a night or two after I have a dream of a devious walk with many details which finally ends at a kind of factory. An expectant mother tells me of her trip to a neighboring town where a friend gave her a tiny crocheted jacket. Soon after I start in a dream for that town, afoot, in the dark, without lantern or money, and hampered and stumbling, make the weary journey.
A dream which upon analysis proves extremely interesting is the following:— I come out from a house and stand looking at other houses. I am waiting for some one, and look toward the street. In the yard I see a large elm tree nearly sawed off but at one side the wood is continuous,—to indicate that the tree is still alive. I look up. A bough sways and I am dizzy. I think the bough will fall. Beneath the tree is a sick woman on a couch. Until the clue was found this appeared a mere aimless mixture of imagery but one circumstance makes it very clear. Shortly before I was reading a book on biology and in the section devoted to the influence of environment on organisms a portion of the trunk of an elm tree was shown and the influence of various factors noted as indicated by the annual rings of growth. One considerable variation was due to the fact that children had swung from one limb of the tree. At the time of reading the fact made so slight an impression that after the dream some time elapsed before I recalled it and then so faintly that I had to refer to the book for verification. Thus we see upon what slight and obscure basis a dream may be constructed.
That all dreams do not originate in one section or at one level of the mind is quite evident. The range extends from those which almost merge with waking thought to creations strangely remote and primitive. When I dream that Goethe is a guest at my home and I am trying to ask him in regard to Faust, Wilhelm Meister and Mignon,—when after reading of x-rays, ether waves and electrons wake with the thought, "To solve the problem of matter would prove materialism,"—when I dream that I am conversing with a conservative friend who says that he does not like new religions and I reply that Moses and Jesus were new once, it is plain that a different stratum of mind is operative than when I dream that I am in an old fort and chased by three rats, or that a snake is on my bed and my father kills it with a pitchfork, or strangest of all, that I throw an egg at the plug of a sap bucket which it hits and then flies to the left; it is rotten. Again, a very vague dream, I, see two eggs and then am climbing inside a kind of tower. A dream which immediately preceded the menstrual period, is as follows:—I pass a narrow, dark canal which seems to be under cover. On the very brink is a child and I fear it will fall in. A man is there whose business it is to save the child but be does not. That this indicates the impending passage from the body of the ovum can hardly be doubted. Under like conditions—this before sleep—I see a doorway filled with flowers.