those speeches in the dream which have something of the sensational
character of a speech, and which are described as “speeches.” The others
which have not, as it were, been felt as though heard or spoken (which
have no accompanying acoustic or motor emphasis in the dream) are simply
thoughts such as occur in our waking thought activity, and are
transferred without change into many dreams. Our reading, also, seems to
furnish an abundant and not easily traceable source of material for
speeches, this material being of an indifferent nature. Everything,
however, which appears conspicuously in the dream as a speech can be
referred to real speeches which have been made or heard by the dreamer
himself.
We have already found examples for the explanation of such dream
speeches in the analysis of dreams cited for other purposes. Here is one
example in place of many, all of which lead to the same conclusion.
_A large courtyard in which corpses are cremated. The dreamer says: “I’m
going away from here, I can’t look at this.”_ (Not a distinct speech.)
_Then he meets two butcher boys and asks: “Well, did it taste good?” One
of them answers: “No, it wasn’t good.” As though it had been human
flesh._
The harmless occasion for this dream is as follows: After taking supper
with his wife, the dreamer pays a visit to his worthy but by no means
appetising neighbour. The hospitable old lady is just at her evening
meal, and _urges_ him (instead of this word a composite
sexually-significant word is jocosely used among men) to taste of it. He
declines, saying that he has no appetite. “_Go on_, you can stand some
more,” or something of the kind. The dreamer is thus forced to taste and
praise what is offered. “But that’s good!” After he is alone again with
his wife, he scolds about the neighbour’s importunity and about the
quality of the food he has tasted. “I can’t stand the sight of it,” a
phrase not appearing even in the dream as an actual speech, is a thought
which has reference to the physical charms of the lady who invites him,
and which would be translated as meaning that he does not want to look
at her.
The analysis of another dream which I cite at this point for the sake of
the very distinct speech that forms its nucleus, but which I shall
explain only when we come to consider emotions in the dream—will be more
instructive. I dream very distinctly: _I have gone to Bruecke’s
laboratory at night, and upon hearing a soft knocking at the door, I
open it to (the deceased) Professor Fleischl, who enters in the company
of several strangers, and after saying a few words sits down at his
table._ Then follows a second dream: _My friend Fl. has come to Vienna
in July without attracting much attention; I meet him on the street
while he is in conversation with my_ (deceased) _friend P., and I go
somewhere or other with these two, and they sit down opposite each other
as though at a little table, while I sit at the narrow end of the table
facing them. Fl. tells about his sister and says: “In three-quarters of
an hour she was dead,” and then something like: “That is the threshold.”
As P. does not understand him, Fl. turns to me, and asks me how much I
have told of his affairs. Whereupon, seized by strange emotions, I want
to tell Fl. that P._ (can’t possibly know anything because he) _is not
alive. But, noticing the mistake myself, I say: “Non vixit.” Then I look
at P. searchingly, and under my gaze he becomes pale and blurred, his
eyes a morbid blue—and at last he dissolves. I rejoice greatly at this;
I now understand that Ernest Fleischl, too, was only an apparition, a
revenant, and I find that it is quite possible for such a person to
exist only as long as one wants him to, and that he can be made to
disappear by the wish of another person._
This beautiful dream unites so many of the characteristics of the dream
content which are problematic—the criticism made in the dream itself in
that I myself notice my mistake in having said “Non vixit” instead of
“Non vivit”; the unconstrained intercourse with dead persons, whom the
dream itself declares to be dead; the absurdity of the inference and the
intense satisfaction which the inference gives me—that “by my life” I
should like to give a complete solution of these problems. But in
reality I am incapable of doing this—namely, the thing I do in the
dream—of sacrificing such dear persons to my ambition. With every
revelation of the true meaning of the dream, with which I am well
acquainted, I should have been put to shame. Hence I am content with
selecting a few of the elements of the dream, for interpretation, some
here, and others later on another page.
The scene in which I annihilate P. by a glance forms the centre of the
dream. His eyes become strange and weirdly blue, and then he dissolves.
This scene is an unmistakable copy of one really experienced. I was a
demonstrator at the physiological institute, and began my service in the
early hours, and _Bruecke_ learned that I had been late several times in
getting to the school laboratory. So one morning he came promptly for
the opening of the class and waited for me. What he said to me was brief
and to the point; but the words did not matter at all. What overwhelmed
me was the terrible blue eyes through which he looked at me and before
which I melted away—as P. does in the dream, for P. has changed rôles
with him much to my relief. Anyone who remembers the eyes of the great
master, which were wonderfully beautiful until old age, and who has ever
seen him in anger, can easily imagine the emotions of the young
transgressor on that occasion.
But for a long time I was unable to account for the “Non Vixit,” with
which I execute sentence in the dream, until I remembered that these two
words possessed such great distinctness in the dream, not because they
were heard or spoken, but because they were _seen_. Then I knew at once
where they came from. On the pedestal of the statue of Emperor Joseph in
the Hofburg at Vienna, may be read the following beautiful words:
Saluti patriae _vixit
non_ diu sed totus.
I had culled from this inscription something which suited the one
inimical train of thought in the dream thoughts and which now intended
to mean: “That fellow has nothing to say, he is not living at all.” And
I now recalled that the dream was dreamed a few days after the unveiling
of the memorial to _Fleischl_ in the arcades of the university, upon
which occasion I had again seen _Bruecke’s_ statue and must have thought
with regret (in the unconscious) how my highly gifted friend P. with his
great devotion to science had forfeited his just claim to a statue in
these halls by his premature death. So I set up this memorial to him in
the dream; the first name of my friend P. is Joseph.[EP]
According to the rules of dream interpretation, I should still not be
justified in replacing _non vivit_, which I need, by _non vixit_, which
is placed at my disposal by the recollection of the Joseph monument.
Something now calls my attention to the fact that in the dream scene,
two trains of thought concerning my friend P. meet, one hostile, the
other friendly—of which the former is superficial, the latter veiled,
and both are given representation in the same words: _non vixit_.
Because my friend P. has deserved well of science, I erect a statue to
him; but because he has been guilty of an evil wish (which is expressed
at the end of the dream) I destroy him. I have here constructed a
sentence of peculiar resonance, and I must have been influenced by some
model. But where can I find similar antithesis, such a parallel between
two opposite attitudes towards the same person, both claiming to be
entirely valid, and yet both trying not to encroach upon each other?
Such a parallel is to be found in a single place, where, however, a deep
impression is made upon the reader—in Brutus’ speech of justification in
Shakespeare’s _Julius Cæsar_: “As Cæsar loved me, I weep for him; as he
was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as
he was ambitious, I slew him.” Is not this which I have discovered, the
same sentence structure and thought contrast as in the dream thought? I
thus play Brutus in the dream. If I could only find in the dream
thoughts, one further trace of confirmation for this astonishing
collateral connection! I think the following might be such: My friend
comes to Vienna in _July_. This detail finds no support whatever in
reality. To my knowledge my friend has never been in Vienna during the
month of _July_. But the month of _July_ is named after _Julius Cæsar_,
and might therefore very well furnish the required allusion to the
intermediary thought that I am playing the part of Brutus.[EQ]
Strangely enough I once actually played the part of Brutus. I presented
the scene between Brutus and Cæsar from Schiller’s poems to an audience
of children when I was a boy of fourteen years. I did this with my
nephew, who was a year older than I, and who had come to us from
England—also a _revenant_—for in him I recognised the playmate of my
first childish years. Until the end of my third year we had been
inseparable, had loved each other and scuffled with each other, and, as
I have already intimated, this childish relation has constantly
determined my later feelings in my intercourse with persons of my own
age. My nephew John has since found many incarnations, which have
revivified first one aspect, then another, of this character which is so
ineradicably fixed in my unconscious memory. Occasionally he must have
treated me very badly and I must have shown courage before my tyrant,
for in later years I have often been told of the short speech with which
I vindicated myself when my father—his grandfather—called me to account:
“I hit him because he hit me.” This childish scene must be the one which
causes _non vivit_ to branch off into _non vixit_, for in the language
of later childhood striking is called _wichsen_ (German, _wichsen_—to
smear with shoe-polish, to tan, _i.e._, to flog); the dream activity
does not hesitate to take advantage of such connections. My hostility
towards my friend P., which has so little foundation in reality—he was
far superior to me, and might therefore have been a new edition of the
playmate of my childhood—can certainly be traced to my complicated
relations with John during our infancy. I shall, however, return to this
dream later.
(_f_) _Absurd Dreams—Intellectual Performances in the Dream_
In our interpretation of dreams thus far we have come upon the element
of _absurdity_ in the dream-content so often that we must no longer
postpone an investigation of its cause and significance. We remember, of
course, that the absurdity of dreams has furnished the opponents of
dream investigation with their chief argument for considering the dream
nothing but the meaningless product of a reduced and fragmentary
activity of the mind.
I begin with specimens in which the absurdity of the dream-content is
only apparent and immediately disappears when the dream is more
thoroughly examined. There are a few dreams which—accidentally one is at
first inclined to think—are concerned with the dead father of the
dreamer.
I. Here is the dream of a patient who had lost his father six years
before:
_A terrible accident has occurred to his father. He was riding in the
night train when a derailment took place, the seats came together, and
his head was crushed from side to side. The dreamer sees him lying on
the bed with a wound over his left eyebrow, which runs off vertically.
The dreamer is surprised that his father has had a misfortune (since he
is dead already, as the dreamer adds in telling his dream). His father’s
eyes are so clear._
According to the standards prevailing in dream criticism, this
dream-content would have to be explained in the following manner: At
first, when the dreamer is picturing his father’s misfortune, he has
forgotten that his father has already been in his grave for years; in
the further course of the dream this memory comes to life, and causes
him to be surprised at his own dream even while he is still dreaming.
Analysis, however, teaches us that it is entirely useless to attempt
such explanations. The dreamer had given an artist an order for a bust
of his father, which he had inspected two days before the dream. This is
the thing which seems to him to have met with an _accident_. The
sculptor has never seen the father, and is working from photographs
which have been given him. On the very day before the dream the pious
son had sent an old servant of the family to the studio in order to see
whether he would pass the same judgment upon the marble head, namely,
that it had turned out too _narrow from side to side_, from temple to
temple. Now follows the mass of recollections which has contributed to
the formation of this dream. The dreamer’s father had a habit, whenever
he was harassed by business cares or family difficulties, of pressing
his temples with both hands, as though he were trying to compress his
head, which seemed to grow too large for him. When our dreamer was four
years old he was present when the accidental discharge of a pistol
blackened his father’s eyes (_his eyes are so clear_). While alive his
father had had a deep wrinkle at the place where the dream shows the
injury, whenever he was thoughtful or sad. The fact that in the dream
this wrinkle is replaced by a wound points to the second occasion of the
dream. The dreamer had taken a photograph of his little daughter; the
plate had fallen from his hand, and when picked up showed a crack that
ran like a vertical furrow across the forehead and reached as far as the
orbital curve. He could not then get the better of his superstitious
forebodings, for, on the day before his mother’s death, a photographic
plate with her likeness had cracked as he was handling it.
Thus the absurdity of the dream is only the result of an inaccuracy of
verbal expression, which does not take the trouble to distinguish the
bust and the photograph from the original. We are all accustomed to say
of a picture, “Don’t you think father is good?” Of course the appearance
of absurdity in this dream might easily have been avoided. If it were
permissible to pass judgment after a single experience, one might be
tempted to say that this semblance of absurdity is admitted or desired.
II. Here is another very similar example from my own dreams (I lost my
father in the year 1896):
_After his death my father has been politically active among the
Magyars, and has united them into a political body_; to accompany which
I see a little indistinct picture: _a crowd of people as in the
Reichstag; a person who is standing on one or two benches, others round
about him. I remember that he looked very like Garibaldi on his
death-bed, and I am glad that this promise has really come true._
This is certainly absurd enough. It was dreamed at the time that the
Hungarians got into a lawless condition, through Parliamentary
obstruction, and passed through the crisis from which Koloman Szell
delivered them. The trivial circumstance that the scene beheld in the
dream consists of such little pictures is not without significance for
the explanation of this element. The usual visual representation of our
thoughts results in pictures which impress us as being life-size; my
dream picture, however, is the reproduction of a wood-cut inserted in
the text of an illustrated history of Austria, representing Maria
Theresa in the Reichstag of Pressburg—the famous scene of “Moriamur pro
rege nostro.”[ER] Like Maria Theresa, my father, in the dream, stands
surrounded by the multitude; but he is standing on one or two benches,
and thus like a judge on the bench. (He has _united_ them—here the
intermediary is the phrase, “We shall need no _judge_.”) Those of us who
stood around the death-bed of my father actually noticed that he looked
much like Garibaldi. He had a _post-mortem_ rise of temperature, his
cheeks shone redder and redder ... involuntarily we continue: “And
behind him lay in phantom radiance that which subdues us all—the common
thing.”
This elevation of our thoughts prepares us for having to deal with this
very “common thing.” The _post-mortem_ feature of the rise in
temperature corresponds to the words, “after his death” in the dream
content. The most agonising of his sufferings had been a complete
paralysis of the intestines (_obstruction_), which set in during the
last weeks. All sorts of disrespectful thoughts are connected with this.
A man of my own age who had lost his father while he was still at the
Gymnasium, upon which occasion I was profoundly moved and tendered him
my friendship, once told me, with derision, about the distress of a lady
relative whose father had died on the street and had been brought home,
where it turned out upon undressing the corpse, that at the moment of
death, or _post-mortem_, an evacuation of the bowels had taken place.
The daughter of the dead man was profoundly unhappy at having this ugly
detail stain her memory of her father. We have now penetrated to the
wish that is embodied in this dream. _To stand before one’s children
pure and great after one’s death_, who would not wish that? What has
become of the absurdity of the dream? The appearance of it has been
caused only by the fact that a perfectly permissible mode of speech—in
the case of which we are accustomed to ignore the absurdity that happens
to exist between its parts—has been faithfully represented in the dream.
Here, too, we are unable to deny that the semblance of absurdity is one
which is desired and has been purposely brought about.[ES]
III. In the example which I now cite I can detect the dream activity in
the act of purposely manufacturing an absurdity for which there is no
occasion at all in the subject-matter. It is taken from the dream that I
had as a result of meeting Count Thun before my vacation trip. “_I am
riding in a one-horse carriage, and give orders to drive to a railway
station. ‘Of course I cannot ride with you on the railway line itself,’
I say, after the driver made an objection as though I had tired him out;
at the same time it seems as though I had already driven with him for a
distance which one usually rides on the train._” For this confused and
senseless story the analysis gives the following explanation: During the
day I had hired a one-horse carriage which was to take me to a remote
street in Dornbach. The driver, however, did not know the way, and kept
on driving in the manner of those good people until I noticed the fact
and showed him the way, not sparing him a few mocking remarks withal.
From this driver a train of thought led to the aristocratic personage
whom I was destined to meet later. For the present I shall only remark
that what strikes us middle-class plebeians about the aristocracy is
that they like to put themselves in the driver’s seat. Does not Count
Thun guide the Austrian car of state? The next sentence in the dream,
however, refers to my brother, whom I identify with the driver of the
one-horse carriage. I had this year refused to take the trip through
Italy with him (“of course I cannot ride with you on the railway line
itself”), and this refusal was a sort of punishment for his wonted
complaint that I usually tired him out on this trip (which gets into the
dream unchanged) by making him take hurried trips and see too many nice
things in one day. That evening my brother had accompanied me to the
railroad station, but shortly before getting there had jumped out, at
the state railway division of the Western Station, in order to take a
train to Purkersdorf. I remarked to him that he could stay with me a
little longer, inasmuch as he did not go to Purkersdorf by the state
railway but by the Western Railway. This is how it happens that in the
dream I rode in the wagon a distance _which one usually rides on the
train_. In reality, however, it was just the opposite; I told my
brother: The distance which you ride on the state railway you could ride
in my company on the Western Railway. The whole confusion of the dream
is therefore produced by my inserting in the dream the word “wagon”
instead of “state railway,” which, to be sure, does good service in
bringing together the driver and my brother. I then find in the dream
some nonsense which seems hardly straightened out by my explanation, and
which almost forms a contradiction to my earlier speech (“Of course I
cannot ride with you on the railway line itself”). But as I have no
occasion whatever for confounding the state railway with the one-horse
carriage, I must have intentionally formed the whole puzzling story in
the dream in this way.
But with what intention? We shall now learn what the absurdity in the
dream signifies, and the motives which admitted it or created it. The
solution of the mystery in the case in question is as follows: In the
dream I needed something absurd and incomprehensible in connection with
“riding” (Fahren) because in the dream thoughts I had a certain judgment
which required representation. On an evening at the house of the
hospitable and clever lady who appears in another scene of the same
dream as the “hostess,” I heard two riddles which I could not solve. As
they were known to the other members of the party, I presented a
somewhat ludicrous figure in my unsuccessful attempts to find a
solution. They were two equivoques turning on the words “Nachkommen” (to
come after—offspring) and “vorfahren” (to ride in advance—forefathers,
ancestry). They read as follows:
The coachman does it
At the master’s behest;
Everyone has it,
In the grave does it rest.
(Ancestry.)
It was confusing to find half of the second riddle identical with the
first.
The coachman does it
At the master’s behest;
Not everyone has it,
In the cradle does it rest.
(Offspring.)
As I had seen Count Thun ride in advance (vorfahren), so high and
mighty, and had merged into the Figaro-mood which finds the merit of
aristocratic gentlemen in the fact that they have taken the trouble to
be born (Nachkommen—to become offspring), the two riddles became
intermediary thoughts for the dream-work. As aristocrats can be readily
confounded with coachmen, and as coachmen were in our country formerly
called brothers-in-law, the work of condensation could employ my brother
in the same representation. But the dream thought at work in the
background was as follows: _It is nonsense to be proud of one’s
ancestry. (Vorfahren.) I would rather be myself an ancestor. (Vorfahr.)_
For the sake of this judgment, “it is nonsense,” we have the nonsense in
the dream. We can now also solve the last riddle in this obscure passage
of the dream, namely, that I have already driven before (vorher
gefahren, vorgefahren) with the coachman.
Thus the dream is made absurd if there occurs as one of the elements in
the dream thoughts the judgment “_That is nonsense_,” and in general if
disdain and criticism are the motives for one of the trains of
unconscious thought. Hence absurdity becomes one of the means by which
the dream activity expresses contradiction, as it does by reversing a
relation in the material between the dream thoughts and dream content,
and by utilising sensations of motor impediment. But absurdity in the
dream is not simply to be translated by “no”; it is rather intended to
reproduce the disposition of the dream thoughts, this being to show
mockery and ridicule along with the contradiction. It is only for this
purpose that the dream activity produces anything ridiculous. Here again
it transforms _a part of the latent content into a manifest form_.[ET]