Standing with father at a wide stream. A little white steamboat departs from us, turning and twisting like a reptile. I would have liked very much to be on it (though I do not know where I could have found place, it was like a microcosm). The ship is delayed and now we have to return by train. That the ship would have made better time is an opinion I dare not share with father.
Next day I enter a grotto through which a number of others are wandering ahead of me. The pathway is tortuous and leads upwards. Who among my acquaintances is joining me I do not know. My whole attention is centered on snakes which I carry on a cord. They have very friendly heads, yet somehow I have the impression they can bite. I say to some one close by that their poison glands have already been removed. Eventually I reach a house in full daylight and at the top they turn into dogs who escape my control and quickly clatter down the deep stairway. Presently they are back and allow meekly to be held in leash.
At home I find a package of handkerchiefs neatly wrapped in tissue paper.
This is a combination of a spermatozoon dream and a maternal body phantasy. The stream in which the tiny boat is moving about, the life stream, the stream of spermatic fluid carries a particular spermatozoon, himself. He, now grown up, wants to revert back to the tiny thing, wiggling like a reptile. He wants to be tiny again, not a child merely, a spermatozoon (Samenfaden). He is dissatisfied with life and would like to begin his life all over. The path leads from the stream into a grotto cave,—the maternal body. At the same time the dream symbolizes his whole life, which leads him upwards through pitfalls and dangers to the sunshiny heights. His thoughts are represented here as snakes. They have friendly heads, to be sure, i. e., sin beckons, but he holds them captive. All sins are overcome, all snakes are captive and wear muzzles. The shiny house is the church. Thus this dream shows the life’s beginning and end.
The next dream about handkerchiefs, becomes intelligible when we find out that he masturbates into his handkerchiefs. The packing in tissue paper shows that the specific masturbatory phantasy is covered up.
The dream is concerned with the father. During the last few days he has been thinking a great deal about his father. He tells me about that:
“I have had some hard days and I only see now how strongly I was fixed on father and what a tremendous rôle he has played in my life. Yesterday I felt in me all the strong hatred that I bore for years against father.”
“Why did you hate your father?”
“In the first place because he made me and passed on to me his weakly characteristics. Such men should have no children. I have taken over all his morbid predispositions. Then I hated him because he parted me from my friend through that letter which he wrote at mother’s behest.”
“Then you ought to hate your mother. Is it not strange that you should condone the same conduct in the mother but not in the father? You seem to appreciate your mother’s side but not your father’s.”