Part 18

In this manner I could follow the intricate trains of thought still further, and could fully explain the part of the dream which is missing in the analysis; but I must refrain, because the personal sacrifices which it would require are too great. I shall merely take up one of the threads, which will serve to lead us directly to the dream thoughts that lie at the bottom of the confusion. The stranger, with the long face and pointed beard, who wants to prevent me from putting on the overcoat, has the features of a tradesman at Spalato, of whom my wife made ample purchases of Turkish cloths. His name was Popovic̓, a suspicious name, which, by the way, has given the humorist Stettenheim a chance to make a significant remark: “He told me his name, and blushingly shook my hand.”[BI] Moreover, there is the same abuse of names as above with Pélagie, Knoedl, Bruecke, Fleischl. That such playing with names is childish nonsense can be asserted without fear of contradiction; if I indulge in it, this indulgence amounts to an act of retribution, for my own name has numberless times fallen a victim to such weak-minded attempts at humour. Goethe once remarked how sensitive a man is about his name with which, as with his skin, he feels that he has grown up, whereupon Herder composed the following on his name:

“Thou who art born of _gods_, of _Goths_, or of _Kot_ (mud)— Thy _god_like images, too, are dust.”

I perceive that this digression about the abuse of names was only intended to prepare for this complaint. But let us stop here.... The purchase at Spalato reminds me of another one at Cattaro, where I was too cautious, and missed an opportunity for making some desirable acquisitions. (Missing an opportunity at the breast of the nurse, see above.) Another dream thought, occasioned in the dreamer by the sensation of hunger, is as follows: _One should let nothing which one can have escape, even if a little wrong is done; no opportunity should be missed, life is so short, death inevitable._ Owing to the fact that this also has a sexual significance, and that desire is unwilling to stop at a wrong, this philosophy of _carpe diem_ must fear the censor and must hide behind a dream. This now makes articulate counter-thoughts of all kinds, recollections of a time when spiritual food alone was sufficient for the dreamer; it suggests repressions of every kind, and even threats of disgusting sexual punishments.

II. A second dream requires a longer preliminary statement:

I have taken a car to the West Station in order to begin a vacation journey to the Aussee, and I reach the station in time for the train to Ischl, which leaves earlier. Here I see Count Thun, who is again going to see the Emperor at Ischl. In spite of the rain, he has come in an open carriage, has passed out at once through the door for local trains, and has motioned back the gate-keeper, who does not know him and who wants to take his ticket, with a little wave of his hand. After the train to Ischl has left, I am told to leave the platform and go back into the hot waiting-room; but with difficulty I secure permission to remain. I pass the time in watching the people who make use of bribes to secure a compartment; I make up my mind to insist on my rights—that is, to demand the same privilege. Meanwhile I sing something to myself, which I afterwards recognise to be the aria from Figaro’s Wedding:

“If my lord Count wishes to try a dance, Try a dance, Let him but say so, I’ll play him a tune.”

(Possibly another person would not have recognised the song.)

During the whole afternoon I have been in an insolent, combative mood; I have spoken roughly to the waiter and the cabman, I hope without hurting their feelings; now all kinds of bold and revolutionary thoughts come into my head, of a kind suited to the words of Figaro and the comedy of Beaumarchais, which I had seen at the Comédie Française. The speech about great men who had taken the trouble to be born; the aristocratic prerogative, which Count Almaviva wants to apply in the case of Susan; the jokes which our malicious journalists of the Opposition make upon the name of Count Thun (German, _thun_ = doing) by calling him Count Do-Nothing. I really do not envy him; he has now a difficult mission with the Emperor, and I am the real Count Do-Nothing, for I am taking a vacation. With this, all kinds of cheerful plans for the vacation. A gentleman now arrives who is known to me as a representative of the Government at the medical examinations, and who has won the flattering nickname of “Governmental bed-fellow” by his activities in this capacity. By insisting on his official station he secures half of a first-class compartment, and I hear one guard say to the other: “Where are we going to put the gentleman with the first-class half-compartment?” A pretty favouritism; I am paying for a whole first-class compartment. Now I get a whole compartment for myself, but not in a through coach, so that there is no toilet at my disposal during the night. My complaints to the guard are without result; I get even by proposing that at least there be a hole made in the floor of this compartment for the possible needs of the travellers. I really awake at a quarter of three in the morning with a desire to urinate, having had the following dream:

Crowd of people, meeting of students.... _A certain Count (Thun or Taafe) is making a speech. Upon being asked to say something about the Germans, he declares with contemptuous mien that their favourite flower is Colt’s-foot, and then puts something like a torn leaf, really the crumpled skeleton of a leaf, into his buttonhole. I make a start, I make a start then,[BJ] but I am surprised at this idea of mine._ Then more indistinctly: _It seems as though it were the vestibule (Aula), the exits are jammed, as though it were necessary to flee. I make my way through a suite of handsomely furnished rooms, apparently governmental chambers, with furniture of a colour which is between brown and violet, and at last I come to a passage where a housekeeper, an elderly, fat woman (Frauenzimmer), is seated. I try to avoid talking to her, but apparently she thinks I have a right to pass because she asks whether she shall accompany me with the lamp. I signify to her to tell her that she is to remain standing on the stairs, and in this I appear to myself very clever, for avoiding being watched at last. I am downstairs now, and I find a narrow, steep way along which I go._

Again indistinctly.... _It is as if my second task were to get away out of the city, as my earlier was to get out of the house. I am riding in a one-horse carriage, and tell the driver to take me to a railway station. “I cannot ride with you on the tracks,” I say, after he has made the objection that I have tired him out. Here it seems as though I had already driven with him along a course which is ordinarily traversed on the railroad. The stations are crowded; I consider whether I shall go to Krems or to Znaim, but I think that the court will be there, and I decide in favour of Graz or something of the sort. Now I am seated in the coach, which is something like a street-car, and I have in my buttonhole a long braided thing, on which are violet-brown violets of stiff material, which attracts the attention of many people. Here the scene breaks off._

_I am again in front of the railroad station, but I am with a elderly gentleman. I invent a scheme for remaining unrecognised, but I also see this plan already carried out. Thinking and experiencing are here, as it were, the same thing. He pretends to be blind, at least in one eye, and I hold a male urinal in front of him (which we have had to buy in the city or did buy), I am thus a sick attendant, and have to give him the urinal because he is blind. If the conductor sees us in this position, he must pass us by without drawing attention. At the same time the attitude of the person mentioned is visually observed._ Then I awake with a desire to urinate.

The whole dream seems a sort of phantasy, which takes the dreamer back to the revolutionary year 1848, the memory of which had been renewed by the anniversary year 1898, as well as by a little excursion to Wachau, where I had become acquainted with Emmersdorf, a town which I wrongly supposed to be the resting-place of the student leader Fischof, to whom several features of the dream content might refer. The thought associations then lead me to England, to the house of my brother, who was accustomed jokingly to tell his wife of “Fifty years ago,” according to the title of a poem by Lord Tennyson, whereupon the children were in the habit of correcting: “Fifteen years ago.” This phantasy, however, which subtilely attaches itself to the thoughts which the sight of the Count Thun has given rise to, is only like the façade of Italian churches which is superimposed without being organically connected with the building behind it; unlike these façades, however, the phantasy is filled with gaps and confused, and the parts from within break through at many places. The first situation of the dream is concocted from several scenes, into which I am able to separate it. The arrogant attitude of the Count in the dream is copied from a scene at the Gymnasium which took place in my fifteenth year. We had contrived a conspiracy against an unpopular and ignorant teacher, the leading spirit in which was a schoolmate who seems to have taken Henry VIII. of England as his model. It fell to me to carry out the _coup-d’état_, and a discussion of the importance of the Danube (German _Donau_) for Austria (Wachau!) was the occasion upon which matters came to open indignation. A fellow-conspirator was the only aristocratic schoolmate whom we had—he was called the “giraffe” on account of his conspicuous longitudinal development—and he stood just like the Count in the dream, while he was being reprimanded by the tyrant of the school, the Professor of the German language. The explanation of the favourite flower and the putting into the buttonhole of something which again must have been a flower (which recalls the orchids, which I had brought to a lady friend on the same day, and besides that the rose of Jericho) prominently recalls the scene in Shakespeare’s historical plays which opens the civil wars of the Red and the White Roses; the mention of Henry VIII. has opened the way to this reminiscence. It is not very far now from roses to red and white carnations. Meanwhile two little rhymes, the one German, the other Spanish, insinuate themselves into the analysis: “Roses, tulips, carnations, all flowers fade,” and “Isabelita, no llores que se marchitan las flores.” The Spanish is taken from _Figaro_. Here in Vienna white carnations have become the insignia of the Anti-Semites, the red ones of the Social Democrats. Behind this is the recollection of an anti-Semitic challenge during a railway trip in beautiful Saxony (Anglo-Saxon). The third scene contributing to the formation of the first situation in the dream takes place in my early student life. There was a discussion in the German students’ club about the relation of philosophy to the general sciences. A green youth, full of the materialistic doctrine, I thrust myself forward and defended a very one-sided view. Thereupon a sagacious older school-fellow, who has since shown his capacity for leading men and organising the masses, and who, moreover, bears a name belonging to the animal kingdom, arose and called us down thoroughly; he too, he said, had herded swine in his youth, and had come back repentant to the house of his father. I started up (as in the dream), became very uncivil, and answered that since I knew he had herded swine, I was not surprised at the tone of his discourse. (In the dream I am surprised at my national German sentiment.) There was great commotion; and the demand came from all sides that I take back what I had said, but I remained steadfast. The man who had been insulted was too sensible to take the advice, which was given him, to send a challenge, and let the matter drop.

The remaining elements of this scene of the dream are of more remote origin. What is the meaning of the Count’s proclaiming the colt’s foot? Here I must consult my train of associations. Colt’s-foot (German: _Huflattich_)—lattice—lettuce—salad-dog (the dog that grudges others what he cannot eat himself). Here plenty of opprobrious epithets may be discerned: Gir-affe (German _Affe_ = monkey, ape), pig, sow, dog; I might even find means to arrive at donkey, on a detour by way of a name, and thus again at contempt for an academic teacher. Furthermore I translate colt’s-foot (_Huflattich_)—I do not know how correctly—by “pisse-en-lit.” I got this idea from Zola’s _Germinal_, in which children are ordered to bring salad of this kind. The dog—_chien_—has a name sounding like the major function (_chier_, as _pisser_ stands for the minor one). Now we shall soon have before us the indecent in all three of its categories; for in the same _Germinal_, which has a lot to do with the future revolution there is described a very peculiar contest, depending upon the production of gaseous excretions, called flatus.[BK] And now I must remark how the way to this flatus has been for a long while preparing, beginning with the flowers, and proceeding to the Spanish rhyme of Isabelita to Ferdinand and Isabella, and, by way of Henry VIII., to English history at the time of the expedition of the Armada against England, after the victorious termination of which the English struck a medal with the inscription: “_Afflavit_ et dissipati sunt,” for the storm had scattered the Spanish fleet. I had thought of taking this phrase for the title of a chapter on “Therapeutics”—to be meant half jokingly—if I should ever have occasion to give a detailed account of my conception and treatment of hysteria.

I cannot give such a detailed solution of the second scene of the dream, out of regard for the censor. For at this point I put myself in the place of a certain eminent gentleman of that revolutionary period, who also had an adventure with an eagle, who is said to have suffered from incontinence of the bowels, and the like; and I believe I _should not be justified at this point in passing_ the censor, although it was an aulic councillor (_aula_, _consilarius aulicus_) who told me the greater part of these stories. The allusion to the suite of rooms in the dream relates to the private car of his Excellency, into which I had opportunity to look for a moment; but it signifies, as so often in dreams, a woman (Frauenzimmer; German _Zimmer_—room is appended to _Frauen_—woman, in order to imply a slight amount of contempt).[BL] In the person of the housekeeper I give scant recognition to an intelligent elderly lady for the entertainment and the many good stories which I have enjoyed at her house.... The feature of the lamp goes back to Grillparzer, who notes a charming experience of a similar nature, which he afterwards made use of in “Hero and Leander” (the billows of the ocean and of love—the Armada and the storm).[BM]

I must also forgo detailed analysis of the two remaining portions of the dream; I shall select only those elements which lead to two childhood scenes, for the sake of which alone I have taken up the dream. The reader will guess that it is sexual matter which forces me to this suppression; but he need not be content with this explanation. Many things which must be treated as secrets in the presence of others are not treated as such with one’s self, and here it is not a question of considerations inducing me to hide the solution, but of motives of the inner censor concealing the real content of the dream from myself. I may say, then, that the analysis shows these three portions of the dream to be impertinent boasting, the exuberance of an absurd grandiose idea which has long since been suppressed in my waking life, which, however, dares show itself in the manifest dream content by one or two projections (_I seem clever to myself_), and which makes the arrogant mood of the evening before the dream perfectly intelligible. It is boasting, indeed, in all departments; thus the mention of Graz refers to the phrase: What is the price of Graz? which we are fond of using when we feel over-supplied with money. Whoever will recall Master Rabelais’s unexcelled description of the “Life and Deeds of Gargantua and his Son Pantagruel,” will be able to supply the boastful content intimated in the first portion of the dream. The following belongs to the two childhood scenes which have been promised. I had bought a new trunk for this journey, whose colour, a brownish violet, appears in the dream several times. (Violet-brown violets made of stiff material, next to a thing which is called “girl-catcher”—the furniture in the governmental chambers). That something new attracts people’s attention is a well-known belief of children. Now I have been told the following story of my childhood; I remember hearing the story rather than the occurrence itself. I am told that at the age of two I still occasionally wetted my bed, that I was often reproached on this subject, and that I consoled my father by promising to buy him a beautiful new red bed in N. (the nearest large city). (Hence the detail inserted in the dream that _we bought the urinal in the city or had to buy it_; one must keep one’s promises. Attention is further called to the identity of the male urinal and the feminine trunk, box). All the megalomania of the child is contained in this promise. The significance of the dream of difficulty in urinating in the case of the child has been already considered in the interpretation of an earlier dream (_cf._ the dream on p. 145).

Now there was another domestic occurrence, when I was seven or eight years old, which I remember very well. One evening, before going to bed I had disregarded the dictates of discretion not to satisfy my wants in the bedroom of my parents and in their presence, and in his reprimand for this delinquency my father made the remark: “That boy will never amount to anything.” It must have terribly mortified my ambition, for allusions to this scene return again and again in my dreams, and are regularly coupled with enumerations of my accomplishments and successes, as though I wanted to say: “You see, I have amounted to something after all.” Now this childhood scene furnishes the elements for the last image of the dream, in which of course, the rôles are interchanged for the sake of revenge. The elderly man, obviously my father, for the blindness in one eye signifies his glaucoma[BN] on one side is now urinating before me as I once urinated before him. In glaucoma I refer to cocaine, which stood my father in good stead in his operation, as though I had thereby fulfilled my promises. Besides that I make sport of him; since he is blind I must hold the urinal in front of him, and I gloat over allusions to my discoveries in the theory of hysteria, of which I am so proud.[BO]

If the two childhood scenes of urinating are otherwise closely connected with the desire for greatness, their rehabilitation on the trip to the Aussee was further favoured by the accidental circumstance that my compartment had no water-closet, and that I had to expect embarrassment on the ride as actually happened in the morning. I awoke with the sensation of a bodily need. I suppose one might be inclined to credit these sensations with being the actual stimulus of the dream; I should, however, prefer a different conception—namely, that it was the dream thoughts which gave rise to the desire to urinate. It is quite unusual for me to be disturbed in sleep by any need, at least at the time of this awakening, a quarter of four in the morning. I may forestall further objection by remarking that I have hardly ever felt a desire to urinate after awakening early on other journeys made under more comfortable circumstances. Moreover, I can leave this point undecided without hurting my argument.

Since I have learned, further, from experience in dream analysis that there always remain important trains of thought proceeding from dreams whose interpretation at first seems complete (because the sources of the dream and the actuation of the wish are easily demonstrable), trains of thought reaching back into earliest childhood, I have been forced to ask myself whether this feature does not constitute an essential condition of dreaming. If I were to generalise this thesis, a connection with what has been recently experienced would form a part of the manifest content of every dream and a connection with what has been most remotely experienced, of its latent content; and I can actually show in the analysis of hysteria that in a true sense these remote experiences have remained recent up to the present time. But this conjecture seems still very difficult to prove; I shall probably have to return to the part played by the earliest childhood experiences, in another connection (Chapter VII.).

Of the three peculiarities of dream memory considered at the beginning, one—the preference for the unimportant in the dream content—has been satisfactorily explained by tracing it back to dream disfigurement. We have been able to establish the existence of the other two—the selection of recent and of infantile material—but we have found it impossible to explain them by the motive of dream. Let us keep in mind these two characteristics, which still remain to be explained or evaluated; a place for them will have to be found elsewhere, either in the psychology of the sleeping state, or in the discussion of the structure of the psychic apparatus which we shall undertake later, after we have learned that the inner nature of the apparatus may be observed through dream interpretation as though through a window.

Just here I may emphasize another result of the last few dream analyses. The dream often appears ambiguous; not only may several wish-fulfilments, as the examples show, be united in it, but one meaning or one wish-fulfilment may also conceal another, until at the bottom one comes upon the fulfilment of a wish from the earliest period of childhood; and here too, it may be questioned whether “often” in this sentence may not more correctly be replaced by “regularly.”

(_c_) _Somatic Sources of Dreams_

If the attempt be made to interest the cultured layman in the problems of dreaming, and if, with this end in view, he be asked the question from what source dreams originate according to his opinion, it is generally found that the person thus interrogated thinks himself in assured possession of a part of the solution. He immediately thinks of the influence which a disturbed or impeded digestion (“Dreams come from the stomach”), accidental bodily position, and little occurrences during sleep, exercise upon the formation of dreams, and he seems not to suspect that even after the consideration of all these factors there still remains something unexplained.

We have explained at length in the introductory chapter (p. 16), what a rôle in the formation of dreams the scientific literature credits to the account of somatic exciting sources, so that we need here only recall the results of this investigation. We have seen that three kinds of somatic exciting sources are distinguished, objective sensory stimuli which proceed from external objects, the inner states of excitation of the sensory organs having only a subjective basis, and the bodily stimuli which originate internally; and we have noticed the inclination on the part of the authors to force the psychic sources of the dream into the background or to disregard them altogether in favour of these somatic sources of stimulation (p. 32).