Freud - Complete Works (105 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

624

   Dreams of convenience like these
were very frequent in my youth. Having made it a practice as far
back as I can remember to work late into the night, I always found
it difficult to wake early. I used then to have a dream of being
out of bed and standing by the washing-stand; after a while I was
no longer able to disguise from myself the fact that I was really
still in bed, but in the meantime I had had a little more sleep. A
slothful dream of this kind, which was expressed in a particularly
amusing and elegant form, has been reported to me by a young
medical colleague who seems to share my liking for sleep. The
landlady of his lodgings in the neighbourhood of the hospital had
strict instructions to wake him in time every morning but found it
no easy job to carry them out. One morning sleep seemed peculiarly
sweet. The landlady called through the door: ‘Wake up, Herr
Pepi! It’s time to go to the hospital!’ In response to
this he had a dream that he was lying in bed in a room in the
hospital, and that there was a card over the bed on which was
written: ‘Pepi H., medical student, age 22.’ While he
was dreaming, he said to himself ‘As I’m already
in
the hospital, there’s no need for me to go there
' - and turned over and went on sleeping. In this way he openly
confessed the motive for his dream.

   Here is another dream in which
once again the stimulus produced its effect during actual sleep.
One of my women patients, who had been obliged to undergo an
operation on her jaw which had taken an unfavourable course, was
ordered by her doctors to wear a cooling apparatus on the side of
her face day and night. But as soon as she fell asleep she used to
throw it off. One day, after she had once more thrown the apparatus
on the floor, I was asked to speak to her seriously about it.
‘This time I really couldn’t help it’, she
answered. ‘It was because of a dream I had in the night. I
dreamt I was in a box at the opera and very much enjoying the
performance. But Herr Karl Meyer was in the nursing-home and
complaining bitterly of pains in his jaw. So I told myself that as
I hadn’t any pain I didn’t need the apparatus; and I
threw it away.’ The dream of this poor sufferer seems almost
like a concrete representation of a phrase that sometimes forces
its way on to people’s lips in unpleasant situations:
‘I must say I could think of something more agreeable than
this.’ The dream gives a picture of this more agreeable
thing. The Herr Karl Meyer on to whom the dreamer transplanted her
pains was the most indifferent young man of her acquaintance that
she could call to mind.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

625

   The wish-fulfilment can be
detected equally easily in some other dreams which I have collected
from normal people. A friend of mine, who knows my theory of dreams
and has told his wife of it, said to me one day: ‘My wife has
asked me to tell you that she had a dream yesterday that she was
having her period. You can guess what that means.’ I could
indeed guess it. The fact that this young married woman dreamt that
she was having her period meant that she had missed her period. I
could well believe that she would have been glad to go on enjoying
her freedom a little longer before shouldering the burden of
motherhood. It was a neat way of announcing her first pregnancy.
Another friend of mine wrote and told me that, not long before, his
wife had dreamt that she had noticed some milk stains on the front
of her vest. This too was an announcement of pregnancy, but not of
a first one. The young mother was wishing that she might have more
nourishment to give her second child than she had had for her
first.

   A young woman had been cut off
from society for weeks on end while she nursed her child through an
infectious illness. After the child’s recovery, she had a
dream of being at a party at which, among others, she met Alphonse
Daudet, Paul Bourget, and Marcel Prévost; they were all most
affable to her and highly amusing. All of the authors resembled
their portraits, except Marcel Prévost, of whom she had
never seen a picture; and he looked like . . . the
disinfection officer who had fumigated the sick-room the day before
and who had been her first visitor for so long. Thus it seems
possible to give a complete translation of the dream:
‘It’s about time for something more amusing than this
perpetual sick-nursing.’

   These examples will perhaps be
enough to show that dreams which can only be understood as
fulfilments of wishes and which bear their meaning upon their faces
without disguise are to be found under the most frequent and
various conditions. They are mostly short and simple dreams, which
afford a pleasant contrast to the confused and exuberant
compositions that have in the main attracted the attention of the
authorities. Nevertheless, it will repay us to pause for a moment
over these simple dreams. We may expect to find the very simplest
forms of dreams in
children
, since there can be no doubt
that their psychical productions are less complicated than those of
adults. Child psychology, in my opinion, is destined to perform the
same useful services for adult psychology that the investigation of
the structure or development of the lower animals has performed for
research into the structure of the higher classes of animals. Few
deliberate efforts have hitherto been made to make use of child
psychology for this purpose.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

626

   The dreams of young children are
frequently pure wish-fulfilments and are in that case quite
uninteresting compared with the dreams of adults. They raise no
problems for solution; but on the other hand they are of
inestimable importance in proving that, in their essential nature,
dreams represent fulfilments of wishes. I have been able to collect
a few instances of such dreams from material provided by my own
children.

   I have to thank an excursion
which we made to the lovely village of Hallstatt in the summer of
1896 for two dreams: one of these was dreamt by my daughter, who
was then eight and a half, and the other by her brother of five and
a quarter. I must explain by way of preamble that we had been
spending the summer on a hillside near Aussee, from which, in fine
weather, we enjoyed a splendid view of the Dachstein. The Simony
Hütte could be clearly distinguished through a telescope. The
children made repeated attempts at seeing it through the telescope
- I cannot say with what success. Before our excursion I had told
the children that Hallstatt lay at the foot of the Dachstein. They
very much looked forward to the day. From Hallstatt we walked up
the Echerntal, which delighted the children with its succession of
changing landscapes. One of them, however, the five year-old boy,
gradually became fretful. Each time a new mountain came into view
he asked if that was the Dachstein and I had to say ‘No, only
one of the foothills.’ After he had asked the question
several times, he fell completely silent; and he refused
point-blank to come with us up the steep path to the waterfall. I
thought he was tired. But next morning he came to me with a radiant
face and said: ‘Last night I dreamt we were at the Simony
Hütte.’ I understood him then. When I had spoken about
the Dachstein, he had expected to climb the mountain in the course
of our excursion to Hallstatt and to find himself at close quarters
with the hut which there had been so much talk about in connection
with the telescope. But when he found that he was being fobbed off
with foothills and a waterfall, he felt disappointed and out of
spirits. The dream was a compensation. I tried to discover its
details, but they were scanty: ‘You have to climb up steps
for six hours’ - which was what he had been told.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

627

   The same excursion stirred up
wishes in the eight-and-a-half year-old girl as well - wishes which
had to be satisfied in a dream. We had taken our neighbour’s
twelve-year-old son with us to Hallstatt. He was already a
full-blown gallant, and there were signs that he had engaged the
young lady’s affections. Next morning she told me the
following dream: ‘Just fancy! I had a dream that Emil was one
of the family and called you "Father" and
"Mother" and slept with us in the big room like the boys.
Then Mother came in and threw a handful of big bars of chocolate,
wrapped up in blue and green paper, under our beds.’ Her
brothers, who have evidently not inherited a faculty for
understanding dreams, followed the lead of the authorities and
declared that the dream was nonsense. The girl herself defended one
part of the dream at least; and it throws light on the theory of
the neuroses to learn
which
part. ‘Of course
it’s nonsense Emil being one of the family; but the part
about the bars of chocolate isn’t.’ It had been
precisely on that point that I had been in the dark, but the
girl’s mother now gave me the explanation. On their way home
from the station the children had stopped in front of a
slot-machine from which they were accustomed to obtain bars of
chocolate of that very kind, wrapped in shiny metallic paper. They
had wanted to get some; but their mother rightly decided that the
day had already fulfilled enough wishes and left this one over to
be fulfilled by the dream. I myself had not observed the incident.
But the part of the dream which had been proscribed by my daughter
was immediately clear to me. I myself had heard our well-behaved
guest telling the children on the walk to wait till Father and
Mother caught up with them. The little girl’s dream turned
this temporary kinship into permanent adoption. Her affection was
not yet able to picture any other forms of companionship than those
which were represented in the dream and which were based on her
relation to her brothers. It was of course impossible to discover
without questioning her why the bars of chocolate were thrown under
the beds.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

628

   A friend of mine has reported a
dream to me which was very much like my son’s. The dreamer
was an eight-year-old girl. Her father had started off with several
children on a walk to Dornbach, with the idea of visiting the
Rohrer Hütte. As it was getting late, however, he had turned
back, promising the children to make up for the disappointment
another time. On their way home they had passed the sign-post that
marks the path up to the Hameau. The children had then asked to be
taken up to the Hameau; but once again for the same reason they had
to be consoled with the promise of another day. Next morning the
eight-year-old girl came to her father and said in satisfied tones:
‘Daddy, I dreamt last night that you went with us to the
Rohrer Hütte and the Hameau.’ In her impatience she had
anticipated the fulfilment of her father’s promises.

   Here is an equally
straightforward dream, provoked by the beauty of the scenery at
Aussee in another of my daughters, who was at that time three and a
quarter. She had crossed the lake for the first time, and the
crossing had been too short for her: when we reached the
landing-stage she had not wanted to leave the boat and had wept
bitterly. Next morning she said: ‘Last night I went on the
lake.’ Let us hope that her dream-crossing had been of a more
satisfying length.

   My eldest boy, then eight years
old, already had dreams of his phantasies coming true: he dreamt
that he was driving in a chariot with Achilles and that Diomede was
the charioteer. As may be guessed, he had been excited the day
before by a book on the legends of Greece which had been given to
his elder sister.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

629

   If I may include words spoken by
children in their sleep under the heading of dreams, I can at this
point quote one of the most youthful dreams in my whole collection.
My youngest daughter, then nineteen months old, had had an attack
of vomiting one morning and had consequently been kept without food
all day. During the night after this day of starvation she was
heard calling out excitedly in her sleep: ‘Anna Fweud,
stwawbewwies, wild stwawbewwies, omblet, pudden!’ At that
time she was in the habit of using her own name to express the idea
of taking possession of something. The menu included pretty well
everything that must have seemed to her to make up a desirable
meal. The fact that strawberries appeared in it in two varieties
was a demonstration against the domestic health regulations. It was
based upon the circumstance, which she had no doubt observed, that
her nurse had attributed her indisposition to a surfeit of
strawberries. She was thus retaliating in her dream against this
unwelcome verdict.¹

   Though we think highly of the
happiness of childhood because it is still innocent of sexual
desires, we should not forget what a fruitful source of
disappointment and renunciation, and consequently what a stimulus
to dreaming, may be provided by the other of the two great vital
instincts.² Here is another instance of this. My nephew, aged
22 months, had been entrusted with the duty of congratulating me on
my birthday and of presenting me with a basket of cherries, which
are still scarcely in season at that time of year. He seems to have
found the task a hard one, for he kept on repeating ‘Chewwies
in it’ but could not be induced to hand the present over.
However, he found a means of compensation. He had been in the habit
every morning of telling his mother that he had a dream of the
‘white soldier’ - a Guards officer in his white cloak
whom he had once gazed at admiringly in the street. On the day
after his birthday sacrifice he awoke with a cheerful piece of
news, which could only have originated from a dream: ‘Hermann
eaten all the chewwies!³