Part 31

Moreover, inversion or transformation into an opposite is one of the favourite methods of representation, and one of the methods most capable of varied application which the dream activity possesses. Its first function is to create the fulfilment of a wish with reference to a definite element of the dream-thoughts. “If it were only just the other way!” is often the best expression of the relation of the ego to a disagreeable recollection. But inversion becomes extraordinarily useful for the purposes of the censor, for it brings about in the material represented a degree of disfiguration which all but paralyses our understanding of the dream. For this reason it is always permissible, in cases where the dream stubbornly refuses to yield its meaning, to try the inversion of definite portions of its manifest content, whereupon not infrequently everything becomes clear.

Besides this inversion, the subject-matter inversion in temporal relation is not to be overlooked. A frequent device of dream disfigurement consists in presenting the final issue of an occurrence or the conclusion of an argument at the beginning of the dream, or in supplying the premises of a conclusion or the causes of an effect at the end of it. Any one who has not considered this technical method of dream disfigurement stands helpless before the problem of dream interpretation.

Indeed in some cases we can obtain the sense of the dream only by subjecting the dream content to manifold inversion in different directions. For example, in the dream of a young patient suffering from a compulsion neurosis, the memory of an infantile death-wish against a dreaded father was hidden behind the following words: His father upbraids him because he arrives so late. But the context in the psychoanalytic treatment and the thoughts of the dreamer alike go to show that the sentence must read as follows: He is angry at his father, and, further, that his father is always coming home too early (i.e. too soon). He would have preferred that his father should not come home at all, which is identical with the wish (see page 219) that his father should die. As a little boy the dreamer was guilty of sexual aggression against another person while his father was away, and he was threatened with punishment in the words: “Just wait until father comes home.”

If we attempt to trace the relations between dream content and dream thoughts further, we shall do this best by making the dream itself our starting-point and by asking ourselves the question: What do certain formal characteristics of dream representation signify with reference to the dream thoughts? The formal characteristics which must attract our attention in the dream primarily include variations in the distinctness of individual parts of the dream or of whole dreams in relation to one another. The variations in the intensity of individual dream images include a whole scale of degrees ranging from a distinctness of depiction which one is inclined to rate as higher—without warrant, to be sure—than that of reality, to a provoking indistinctness which is declared to be characteristic of the dream, because it cannot altogether be compared to any degree of indistinctness which we ever see in real objects. Moreover, we usually designate the impression which we get from an indistinct object in the dream as “fleeting,” while we think of the more distinct dream images as remaining intact for a longer period of perception. We must now ask ourselves by what conditions in the dream material these differences in the vividness of the different parts of the dream content are brought about.

There are certain expectations which will inevitably arise at this point and which must be met. Owing to the fact that real sensations during sleep may form part of the material of the dream, it will probably be assumed that these sensations or the dream elements resulting from them are emphasized by peculiar intensity, or conversely, that what turns out to be particularly vivid in the dream is probably traceable to such real sensations during sleep. My experience has never confirmed this. It is incorrect to say that those elements of the dream which are the derivatives of impressions occurring in sleep (nervous excitements) are distinguished by their vividness from others which are based on recollections. The factor of reality is of no account in determining the intensity of dream images.

Furthermore, the expectation will be cherished that the sensory intensity (vividness) of individual dream images has a relation to the psychic intensity of the elements corresponding to them in the dream-thoughts. In the latter intensity is identical with psychic value; the most intense elements are in fact the most significant, and these are the central point of the dream. We know, however, that it is just these elements which are usually not accepted in the dream content owing to the censor. But still it might be possible that the elements immediately following these and representing them might show a higher degree of intensity, without, however, for that reason constituting the centre of the dream representation. This expectation is also destroyed by a comparison of the dream and the dream material. The intensity of the elements in the one has nothing to do with the intensity of the elements in the other; a complete “transvaluation of all psychic values” takes place between the dream-material and the dream. The very element which is transient and hazy and which is pushed into the background by more vigorous images is often the single and only element in which may be traced any direct derivative from the subject which entirely dominated the dream-thoughts.

The intensity of the elements of the dream shows itself to be determined in a different manner—that is, by two factors which are independent of each other. It is easy to see at the outset that those elements by means of which the wish-fulfilment is expressed are most distinctly represented. But then analysis also teaches us that from the most vivid elements of the dream, the greatest number of trains of thought start, and that the most vivid are at the same time those which are best determined. No change of sense is involved if we express the latter empirical thesis in the following form: the greatest intensity is shown by those elements of the dream for which the most abundant condensation activity was required. We may therefore expect that this condition and the others imposed by the wish-fulfilment can be expressed in a single formula.

The problem which I have just been considering—the causes of greater or less intensity or distinctness of individual elements of the dream—is one which I should like to guard against being confused with another problem, which has to do with the varying distinctness of whole dreams or sections of dreams. In the first case, the opposite of distinctness is blurredness; in the second, confusion. It is of course unmistakable that the intensities rise and fall in the two scales in unison. A portion of the dream which seems clear to us usually contains vivid elements; an obscure dream is composed of less intense elements. But the problem with which we are confronted by the scale, ranging from the apparently clear to the indistinct or confused, is far more complicated than that formed by variations in the vividness of the dream elements; indeed the former will be dropped from the discussion for reasons which will be given later. In isolated cases we are astonished to find that the impression of clearness or indistinctness produced by the dream is altogether without significance for its structure, and that it originates in the dream material as one of its constituents. Thus I remember a dream which seemed particularly well constructed, flawless, and clear, so that I made up my mind, while I was still in the somnolent state, to recognise a new class of dreams—those which had not been subject to the mechanism of condensation and displacement, and which might thus be designated “Fancies while asleep.” A closer examination proved that this rare dream had the same breaches and flaws in its construction as every other; for this reason I abandoned the category of dream fancies. The content of the dream, reduced to its lowest terms, was that I was reciting to a friend a difficult and long-sought theory of bisexuality, and the wish-fulfilling power of the dream was responsible for the fact that this theory (which, by the way, was not stated in the dream) appeared so clear and flawless. What I considered a judgment upon the finished dream was thus a part of the dream content, and the essential one at that. The dream activity had extended its operations, as it were, into waking thought, and had presented to me in the form of a judgment that part of the dream material which it had not succeeded in reproducing with exactness. The exact opposite of this once came to my attention in the case of a female patient who was at first altogether unwilling to tell a dream which was necessary for the analysis, “because it was so obscure and confused,” and who declared, after repeatedly denying the accuracy of her description, that several persons, herself, her husband, and her father, had occurred in the dream, and that it seemed as though she did not know whether her husband was her father, or who her father was anyway, or something of that sort. Upon considering this dream in connection with the ideas that occurred to the dreamer in the course of the sitting, it was found unquestionably to be concerned with the story of a servant girl who had to confess that she was expecting a child, and who was now confronted with doubts as to “who was really the father.” The obscurity manifested by the dream, therefore, is again in this case a portion of the material which excited it. A part of this material was represented in the form of the dream. The form of the dream or of dreaming is used with astonishing frequency to represent the concealed content.

Comments on the dream and seemingly harmless observations about it often serve in the most subtle manner to conceal—although they usually betray—a part of what is dreamed. Thus, for example, when the dreamer says: Here the dream is vague, and the analysis gives an infantile reminiscence of listening to a person cleaning himself after defecation. Another example deserves to be recorded in detail. A young man has a very distinct dream which recalls to him phantasies from his infancy which have remained conscious to him: he was in a summer hotel one evening, he mistook the number of his room, and entered a room in which an elderly lady and her two daughters were undressing to go to bed. He continues: “Then there are some gaps in the dream; then something is missing; and at the end there was a man in the room who wished to throw me out with whom I had to wrestle.” He endeavoured in vain to recall the content and purpose of the boyish fancy to which the dream apparently alludes. But we finally become aware that the required content had already been given in his utterances concerning the indistinct part of the dream. The “gaps” were the openings in the genitals of the women who were retiring: “Here something is missing” described the chief character of the female genitals. In those early years he burned with curiosity to see a female genital, and was still inclined to adhere to the infantile sexual theory which attributes a male genital to the woman.

All the dreams which have been dreamed in the same night belong to the same whole when considered with respect to their content; their separation into several portions, their grouping and number, all these details are full of meaning, and may be considered as information coming from the latent dream content. In the interpretation of dreams consisting of many principal sections, or of dreams belonging to the same night, one must not fail to think of the possibility that these different and succeeding dreams bring to expression the same feelings in different material. The one that comes first in time of these homologous dreams is usually the most disfigured and most bashful, while the succeeding is bolder and more distinct.

Even Pharaoh’s dream in the Bible of the ears and the kine, which Joseph interpreted, was of this kind. It is reported by Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews, bk. ii. chap, iii.) in greater detail than in the Bible. After relating the first dream, the King said: “When I had seen this vision I awaked out of my sleep, and being in disorder, and considering with myself what this appearance should be, I fell asleep again, and saw another dream much more wonderful than the first, which did still more affright and disturb me.” After listening to the report of the dream, Joseph said, “This dream, O King, although seen under two forms, signifies one and the same issue of things.”

Jung, who, in his Beitrag zur Psychologie des Gerüchtes relates how the veiled erotic dream of a school-girl was understood by her friends without interpretation and continued by them with variations, remarks in connection with reports of this dream, “that the last of a long series of dream pictures contained precisely the same thought whose representation had been attempted in the first picture of the series. The censor pushed the complex out of the way as long as possible, through constantly renewed symbolic concealments, displacements, deviations into the harmless, &c.” (l.c. p. 87). Scherner was well acquainted with the peculiarities of dream disfigurement and describes them at the end of his theory of organic stimulation as a special law, p. 166: “But, finally, the phantasy observes the general law in all nerve stimuli emanating from symbolic dream formations, by representing at the beginning of the dream only the remotest and freest allusions to the stimulating object; but towards the end, when the power of representation becomes exhausted, it presents the stimulus or its concerned organ or its function in unconcealed form, and in the way this dream designates its organic motive and reaches its end.”

A new confirmation of Scherner’s law has been furnished by Otto Rank in his work, A Self Interpretation Dream. This dream of a girl reported by him consisted of two dreams, separated in time of the same night, the second of which ended with pollution. This pollution dream could be interpreted in all its details by disregarding a great many of the ideas contributed by the dreamer, and the profuse relations between the two dream contents indicated that the first dream expressed in bashful language the same thing as the second, so that the latter—the pollution dream—helped to a full explanation of the former. From this example, Rank, with perfect justice, draws conclusions concerning the significance of pollution dreams in general.

But in my experience it is only in rare cases that one is in a position to interpret clearness or confusion in the dream as certainty or doubt in the dream material. Later I shall try to discover the factor in the formation of dreams upon whose influence this scale of qualities essentially depends.

In some dreams, which adhere for a time to a certain situation and scenery, there occur interruptions described in the following words: “But then it seemed as though it were at the same time another place, and there such and such a thing happened.” What thus interrupts the main trend of the dream, which after a while may be continued again, turns out to be a subordinate idea, an interpolated thought in the dream material. A conditional relation in the dream-thoughts is represented by simultaneousness in the dream (wenn—wann; if—when).

What is signified by the sensation of impeded movement, which so often occurs in the dream, and which is so closely allied to anxiety? One wants to move, and is unable to stir from the spot; or one wants to accomplish something, and meets one obstacle after another. The train is about to start, and one cannot reach it; one’s hand is raised to avenge an insult, and its strength fails, &c. We have already encountered this sensation in exhibition dreams, but have as yet made no serious attempt to interpret it. It is convenient, but inadequate, to answer that there is motor paralysis in sleep, which manifests itself by means of the sensation alluded to. We may ask: “Why is it, then, that we do not dream continually of these impeded motions?” And we are justified in supposing that this sensation, constantly appearing in sleep, serves some purpose or other in representation, and is brought about by a need occurring in the dream material for this sort of representation.

Failure to accomplish does not always appear in the dream as a sensation, but also simply as a part of the dream content. I believe that a case of this sort is particularly well suited to enlighten us about the significance of this characteristic of the dream. I shall give an abridged report of a dream in which I seem to be accused of dishonesty. The scene is a mixture, consisting of a private sanatorium and several other buildings. A lackey appears to call me to an examination. I know in the dream that something has been missed, and that the examination is taking place because I am suspected of having appropriated the lost article. Analysis shows that examination is to be taken in two senses, and also means medical examination. Being conscious of my innocence, and of the fact that I have been called in for consultation, I calmly follow the lackey. We are received at the door by another lackey, who says, pointing to me, “Is that the person whom you have brought? Why, he is a respectable man.” Thereupon, without any lackey, I enter a great hall in which machines are standing, and which reminds me of an Inferno with its hellish modes of punishment. I see a colleague strapped on to one apparatus who has every reason to be concerned about me; but he takes no notice of me. Then I am given to understand that I may now go. Then I cannot find my hat, and cannot go after all.

The wish which the dream fulfils is obviously that I may be acknowledged to be an honest man, and may go; all kinds of subject-matter containing a contradiction of this idea must therefore be present in the dream-thoughts. The fact that I may go is the sign of my absolution; if, then, the dream furnishes at its close an event which prevents me from going, we may readily conclude that the suppressed subject-matter of the contradiction asserts itself in this feature. The circumstance that I cannot find my hat therefore means: “You are not an honest man after all.” Failure to accomplish in the dream is the expression of a contradiction, a “No”; and therefore the earlier assertion, to the effect that the dream is not capable of expressing a negation, must be revised accordingly.

In other dreams which involve failure to accomplish a thing not only as a situation but also as a sensation, the same contradiction is more emphatically expressed in the form of a volition, to which a counter volition opposes itself. Thus the sensation of impeded motion represents a conflict of will. We shall hear later that this very motor paralysis belongs to the fundamental conditions of the psychic process in dreaming. Now the impulse which is transferred to motor channels is nothing else than the will, and the fact that we are sure to find this impulse impeded in the dream makes the whole process extraordinarily well suited to represent volition and the “No” which opposes itself thereto. From my explanation of anxiety, it is easy to understand why the sensation of thwarted will is so closely allied to anxiety, and why it is so often connected with it in the dream. Anxiety is a libidinous impulse which emanates from the unconscious, and is inhibited by the foreconscious. Therefore, when a sensation of inhibition in the dream is accompanied by anxiety, there must also be present a volition which has at one time been capable of arousing a libido; there must be a sexual impulse.

What significance and what psychic force is to be ascribed to such manifestations of judgment as “For that is only a dream,” which frequently comes to the surface in dreams, I shall discuss in another place (vide infra, p. 390). For the present I shall merely say that they serve to depreciate the value of the thing dreamed. An interesting problem allied to this, namely, the meaning of the fact that sometimes a certain content is designated in the dream itself as “dreamed”—the riddle of the “dream within the dream”—has been solved in a similar sense by W. Stekel through the analysis of some convincing examples. The part of the dream “dreamed” is again to be depreciated in value and robbed of its reality; that which the dreamer continues to dream after awakening from the dream within the dream, is what the dream-wish desires to put in place of the extinguished reality. It may therefore be assumed that the part “dreamed” contains the representation of the reality and the real reminiscence, while, on the other hand, the continued dream contains the representation of what the dreamer wished. The inclusion of a certain content in a “dream within the dream” is therefore equivalent to the wish that what has just been designated as a dream should not have occurred. The dream-work utilises the dream itself as a form of deflection.

(d) Regard for Presentability

So far we have been attempting to ascertain how the dream represents the relations among the dream-thoughts, but we have several times extended our consideration to the further question of what alterations the dream material undergoes for the purposes of dream formation. We now know that the dream material, after being stripped of the greater parts of its relations, is subjected to compression, while at the same time displacements of intensity among its elements force a psychic revaluation of this material. The displacements which we have considered were shown to be substitutions of one idea for another, the substitute being in some way connected with the original by associations, and the displacements were put to the service of condensation by virtue of the fact that in this manner a common mean between two elements took the place of these two elements in the formation of the dream. We have not yet mentioned any other kind of displacement. But we learn from the analyses that another exists, and that it manifests itself in a change of the verbal expression employed for the thought in question. In both cases we have displacement following a chain of associations, but the same process takes place in different psychic spheres, and the result of this displacement in the one case is that one element is substituted for another, while in the other case an element exchanges its verbal expression for another.

This second kind of displacement occurring in dream formation not only possesses great theoretical interest, but is also peculiarly well fitted to explain the semblance of phantastic absurdity in which the dream disguises itself. Displacement usually occurs in such a way that a colourless and abstract expression in the dream-thought is exchanged for one that is visual and concrete. The advantage, and consequently the purpose, of this substitution is obvious. Whatever is visual is capable of representation in the dream, and can be wrought into situations where the abstract expression would confront dream representation with difficulties similar to those which would arise if a political editorial were to be represented in an illustrated journal. But not only the possibility of representation, but also the interests of condensation and of the censor, can be furthered by this change. If the abstractly expressed and unwieldy dream-thought is recast into figurative language, this new expression and the rest of the dream material are more easily furnished with those identities and cross references, which are essential to the dream activity and which it creates whenever they are not at hand, for the reason that in every language concrete terms, owing to their evolution, are more abundant in associations than conceptual ones. It may be imagined that in dream formation a good part of the intermediary activity, which tries to reduce the separate dream-thoughts to the tersest and simplest possible expression in the dream, takes place in the manner above described—that is to say, in providing suitable paraphrase for the individual thoughts. One thought whose expression has already been determined on other grounds will thus exert a separating and selective influence upon the means available for expressing the other, and perhaps it will do this constantly throughout, somewhat after the manner of the poet. If a poem in rhyme is to be composed, the second rhyming line is bound by two conditions; it must express the proper meaning, and it must express it in such a way as to secure the rhyme. The best poems are probably those in which the poet’s effort to find a rhyme is unconscious, and in which both thoughts have from the beginning exercised a mutual influence in the selection of their verbal expressions, which can then be made to rhyme by a means of slight remodification.

In some cases change of expression serves the purposes of dream condensation more directly, in making possible the invention of a verbal construction which is ambiguous and therefore suited to the expression of more than one dream-thought. The whole range of word-play is thus put at the service of the dream activity. The part played by words in the formation of dreams ought not to surprise us. A word being a point of junction for a number of conceptions, it possesses, so to speak, a predestined ambiguity, and neuroses (obsessions, phobias) take advantage of the conveniences which words offer for the purposes of condensation and disguise quite as readily as the dream. That dream conception also profits by this displacement of expression is easily demonstrated. It is naturally confusing if an ambiguous word is put in the place of two ambiguous ones; and the employment of a figurative expression instead of the sober everyday one thwarts our understanding, especially since the dream never tells us whether the elements which it shows are to be interpreted literally or figuratively, or whether they refer to the dream material directly or only through the agency of interpolated forms of speech. Several examples of representations in the dream which are held together only by ambiguity have already been cited (“her mouth opens without difficulty,” in the dream of Irma’s injection; “I cannot go yet,” in the last dream reported, p. 312), &c. I shall now cite a dream in the analysis of which the figurative expression of abstract thought plays a greater part. The difference between such dream interpretation and interpretation by symbolism may again be sharply distinguished; in the symbolic interpretation of dreams the key to the symbolism is arbitrarily chosen by the interpreter, while in our own cases of verbal disguise all these keys are universally known and are taken from established customs of speech. If the correct notion occurs at the right opportunity, it is possible to solve dreams of this sort completely or in part, independently of any statements made by the dreamer.

A lady, a friend of mine, dreams: She is in the opera-house. It is a Wagnerian performance which has lasted till 7.45 in the morning. In the parquette and parterre there are tables, around which people dine and drink. Her cousin and his young wife, who have just returned from their honeymoon, sit next to her at one of these tables, and next to them sits one of the aristocracy. Concerning the latter the idea is that the young wife has brought him back with her from the wedding journey. It is quite above board, just as if she were bringing back a hat from her trip. In the midst of the parquette there is a high tower, on the top of which is a platform surrounded by an iron grating. There, high up, stands the conductor with the features of Hans Richter; he is continually running around behind the grating, perspiring awfully, and from this position conducting the orchestra, which is arranged around the base of the tower. She herself sits in a box with a lady friend (known to me). Her youngest sister tries to hand her from the parquette a big piece of coal with the idea that she did not know that it would last so long and that she must by this time be terribly cold. (It was a little as if the boxes had to be heated during the long performance.)

The dream is senseless enough, though the situation is well developed too—the tower in the midst of the parquette from which the conductor leads the orchestra; but, above all, the coal which her sister hands her! I purposely asked for no analysis of this dream. With the knowledge I have of the personal relations of the dreamer, I was able to interpret parts of it independently. I knew that she had entertained warm feelings for a musician whose career had been prematurely blasted by insanity. I therefore decided to take the tower in the parquette verbally. It was apparent, then, that the man whom she wished to see in the place of Hans Richter towered above all the other members of the orchestra. This tower must, therefore, be designated as a composite picture formed by an apposition; with its pedestal it represents the greatness of the man, but with its gratings on top, behind which he runs around like a prisoner or an animal in a cage (an allusion to the name of the unfortunate man), it represents his later fate. “Lunatic-tower” is perhaps the word in which both thoughts might have met.

Now that we have discovered the dream’s method of representation, we may try with the same key to open the second apparent absurdity,—that of the coal which her sister hands her. “Coal” must mean “secret love.”

“No coal, no fire so hotly glows As the secret love which no one knows.”