Whenever one and the same motive, with perhaps slight variations, recurs
frequently in dreams we may assume that it is the leading motive of the
dreamer's waking life. Whenever a person plays a dominant part in our
dreaming, we can rest assured that that person dominates and directs our
behaviour directly or indirectly.
A man of forty-five, suffering from dizziness, was sent to me by his
family physician after numberless tests had failed to attribute his
illness to a "physical" cause. The patient had been troubled for two years
with vertigo, which he insisted on attributing to arteriosclerosis
(against the advice of several physicians). His legs had become very weak
and unsteady. He had developed a deep sense of worthlessness and was
haunted by suicidal ideas.
My query as to his most frequent dream elicited the answer:
"I dream very frequently of my father."
His father had died two years before, from arteriosclerosis, and his main
complaint had been dizziness, weakness of the legs and depression. To
any one but the patient, the psychological connection between his illness
and his father's illness would have been obvious. He, too, saw some
connection between the two, only he placed upon that fact a more sinister
construction. The heredity bogey was terrifying him. His father had
bequeathed his illness to him, and he was to die as his father had died.
It came out in the course of the analysis that he had been from infancy
his father's constant companion, working for him till he was over forty
years of age. Although he had always been fond of women, he had never
thought of marrying until his father died. After reciting the usual
arguments of the average bachelor directed against matrimony, he confessed
that he had never had the courage to bring to his home any young woman he
liked and who might have become his wife. Fear of his father's sarcastic
remarks set to nought any plans he might have made for a home of his own.
After his father's death, he went half-heartedly into various business
ventures of which his father would have disapproved and he naturally lost
his investment. Every time he met with a reverse, he would be tortured by
remorse. "This is my father's money which I have been squandering." "My
father would be furious if he knew what I have done."
He would then dream that his father stalked past him, cold, indifferent,
stern, and he "knew" his father had "come back" to show him his
resentment.
The superficial symptoms of the patient's trouble were easily removed when
he acquired enough insight to realize that he had been imitating all of
his father's attitudes and repressing his own ego.
Physical exercise soon restored to his legs the steadiness which they had
lost while the patient, imitating his father's helplessness, would sit in
his father's chair day after day, never taking a walk. A more critical
attitude of mind toward the father whom he worshipped, removed gradually
the sense of worthlessness which had almost lead him to suicide.
Suicide to him was the road that led back to his father, upon whom he
wished to shift his responsibilities, and for whom he wished to work (as a
younger man), etc.
The case was much more complicated but the few details of it which I have
presented are sufficient to show the close connection which existed
between the patient's most frequent dream and his imaginary neurotic goal.
A homosexual patient always dreamt of her stepmother whom her father
married when she, the patient, was only twelve years of age. That marriage
was the culmination of a complicated family tragedy, double divorce,
unsavoury publicity, bitterness and hostility, puritanical gossip about
sex, passion, etc., which made on the child an indelible impression.
She felt obscurely then that relations between sexes were something
unutterably filthy and while she liked a few boys in her flapper days, she
could not master a feeling of disgust whenever their attitude reminded her
of the "nasty" things which had wrecked her family.
On the other hand, the pretty young woman whom her father introduced into
his home, personified in her thoughts sexual attraction in its most
irresistible form, a symbol of sin and bliss. To this day she has love
affair after love affair with women, every affair followed by a "nervous
breakdown" in which she repents her immorality and experiences terrible
remorse. At every stay in a sanitarium, however, dreams of her stepmother,
representing veiled and symbolized homosexual situations, obsess her
night after night. In one of those dreams she took the place of her father
and married the young woman, after which the hostility of the family,
manifesting itself in various forms, transformed the pleasant fancy into a
painful anxiety dream.
Another patient, tyrannized over by an aunt who had brought her up, would,
whenever an emergency arose and she had to take a decision, dream of the
severe, forbidding aunt and feel so depressed the next day that she could
not accomplish anything and thus postponed the solution of her
difficulties.
In certain cases, a recurring dream may bear a strange likeness to a
splitting of the personality such as we observed in cases of dual
personalities.
The famous Rosegger dream, analysed by Freud and Maeder, should be
reanalysed in the light of the statements made in the previous chapters.
Rosegger went through a hard mental struggle from which he emerged
victorious, but the recurring dream he relates in his book "Waldheimat"
tells us much about the trials of a little tailor who managed to make a
place for himself in the artistic world but for a long while felt out of
place in his new environment.
"I usually enjoy a sound sleep," Rosegger writes, "but many a night I have
no rest. I lead side by side with my life as student and littérateur, the
shadow life of a tailor's apprentice. This I have dragged with me through
long years, like a ghost, without being able to get rid of it.... Whenever
I dreamed, I was the tailor's apprentice, ... working without compensation
in my master's workshop.... I felt I did not belong there any more ... and
regretted the loss of time in which I could have employed myself more
usefully.... How happy I was to wake up after such tedious hours! I
resolved that if this insistent dream should come again, I would throw it
off and shout: 'This is only a make believe. I am in bed and wish to
sleep.' Yet the next time I was again in the tailor's workshop. One night,
at last, the master said to me: 'You have no talent for tailoring. You can
go, you are dismissed.' I was so frightened by this that I awoke."
Freud compares this dream with a similar dream which pestered him for
years and in which he saw himself as a young physician, working in a
laboratory, making analyses and unable as yet to earn a regular living.
This is his interpretation of it:
"I had as yet no standing and did not know how to make ends meet; but just
then it was clear to me that I might have the choice of several women whom
I could have married. I was young again in the dream and she was young
too, the wife who had shared with me all those years of hardship.
"This betrayed the unconscious dream agent as being one of the insistent
gnawing wishes of the aging man. The fight between vanity and
self-criticism, waged in other psychic layers, had decided the dream
content, but only the deeper rooted wish for youth had made it possible as
a dream. Often, awake, we say to ourselves: Everything is all right as it
is today and those were hard times, but it was fine at that time. You are
still young."
Maeder, of Zurich, refuses to accept such a simple explanation and offers
a more complicated one, burdened, like many psychological interpretations
of the Swiss school, with ethical considerations.
"By his own efforts," Maeder writes, "Rosegger had worked himself up to a
high position in life. This has made him proud and vain, two faults which
easily disturb mankind, for they cause a man to suffer in the presence of
superiors and place him in a parvenu position among the lowly.... Deep
down, there takes place, in the sensitive poet, a gradual elaboration, a
development of the moral personality.... The long series of tormenting
dreams shows us the development of the psychic process which ends in a
deep but effective humiliation of the dreamer.... His being sent away,
dismissed, symbolizes in my opinion, the overcoming of the pride and
vanity of the upstart."
I agree with Freud on the wish for youth expressed by Rosegger's dream and
fulfilled by way of a regression. But neither Freud, bent on introducing a
sexual element into his interpretation, nor Maeder, overfond of
moralizing, seem to have realized the tremendous meaning of such a series
of dreams, culminating as they did in a changed attitude to life.
I have shown in another book, "Psychoanalysis and Behavior," that in cases
of dual personalities, the second personality is always one that leads a
simpler, less arduous life, fraught with lesser responsibilities, than the
normal life led by the first personality. The Rev. Ansel Bourne, being
tired and needing rest, was transformed for several weeks into A. Brown, a
fruit dealer in a small town far away from his home. Miss Beauchamp, prim,
overconsciencious, repressed, became the irresponsible Sallie, devoid of
manners or taste. The Rev. Thomas Carson Hanna, overworked and a spiritual
disciplinarian, woke up from a fit of unconsciousness a newborn baby,
helpless and in-organized.
Rosegger, rising from manual to intellectual labour, compelled to adapt
himself to the mannerisms of a different world, and to adopt a new set of
social habits and customs for which his bringing up in a proletarian home
had not prepared him, compelled also to ransack his brain constantly for
new ideas to express or for new forms in which to clothe old ideas, may
have at times regretted unconsciously the simpler life of a tailor, less
rich in egotistical satisfactions but more comfortable intellectually and
requiring infinitely less ingenuity.
And some of the remarks which he appends to his dream, confirm my
suspicions.
What does he say of his awakening? "I felt as if I had just newly
recovered this idylically sweet life of mine, peaceful, poetical,
spiritualized, in which so often I had realized human happiness to the
uttermost."
Undoubtedly he had for a long while failed to enjoy it and unconsciously
planned to escape from it through a regression to his former estate.
Several lines further down the page we find this statement which is, I
think, absolutely conclusive proof of what his mental attitude had been
and of the crisis he had lived through.
"I no longer dream of my tailoring days _which in their way were so jolly
in their simplicity and without demands_."
Rosegger's dream is one of those morbid manifestations which enable us to
follow a neurotic struggle going on within the organism, a struggle for
adaptation to life, a struggle of which the subject is consciously
ignorant, because he has burnt his bridges and has repressed the most
fleeting thought of a possible change.
Rosegger must have smarted under the _demands_ of his new life, but it was
out of the question for him to do anything else. The conflict, however,
played itself off in his dreams, offering a solution of a regressive type.
When, years later, the tailor's adaptation to the life of a writer was
completed, his master dismissed him. The dream solution was no longer
needed.
Recurring dreams often give us valuable indications of physical trouble
which should be investigated and remedied at once. Even in ancient times,
the relation between recurring dreams of physical disability and some
physical disability setting in at a later date had been noticed. In those
days, however, the interpretation of such dreams was that the vision was a
warning sent by the gods, or that the vision was responsible for the
subsequent trouble. We read for instance of a man who dreamt that he had a
stone leg. A few days later paralysis set in.
In discussing dental dreams I have pointed out the importance of having
the denture examined for possible pus pockets.
Dreams of animals gnawing at some organ may indicate a cancer developing
in that region. Dreams of exhaustion from climbing hills often denote
heart disease.
H. Addington Bruce had for several months had the same dream: a cat was
clawing at his throat. Examination of the throat revealed a small growth
which required immediate surgical intervention. The cat never came back.