Hanold’s dream is, of course, an anxiety-dream. Its content is fearful;
anxiety is felt by the dreamer in sleep, and painful feelings remain
after it. That is not of any great help for our attempt at explanation;
we are again forced to borrow largely from the teachings of
dream-interpretation. This admonishes us not to fall into the error of
deriving the fear that is felt in a dream from the content of a dream,
not to use the dream-content like the content of ideas of waking life.
It calls to our attention how often we dream the most horrible things
without feeling any trace of fear. Rather the true fact is a quite
different one, which cannot be easily guessed, but can certainly be
proved. The fear of the anxiety-dream corresponds to a sex-feeling, a
libidinous emotion, like every neurotic fear, and has, through the
process of repression, proceeded from the libido.[9] In the
interpretation of dreams, therefore, one must substitute for fear sexual
excitement. The fear which has thus come into existence, exercises
now—not regularly, but often—a selective influence on the
dream-content and brings into the dream ideational elements which seem
suitable to this fear for the conscious and erroneous conception of the
dream. This is, as has been said, by no means regularly the case, for
there are anxiety dreams in which the content is not at all frightful,
in which, therefore, one cannot explain consciously the anxiety
experienced.
I know that this explanation of fear in dreams sounds odd, and is not
easily believed; but I can only advise making friends with it. It would,
moreover, be remarkable if Norbert Hanold’s dream allowed itself to be
connected with this conception of fear and to be explained by it. We
should then say that in the dreamer, at night, the erotic desire stirs,
makes a powerful advance to bring his memory of the beloved into
consciousness and thus snatch him from the delusion, experiences
rejection and transformation into fear, which now, on its part, brings
the fearful pictures from the academic memory of the dreamer into the
dream-content. In this way the peculiar unconscious content of the
dream, the amorous longing for the once known Zoë, is transformed into
the manifest-content of the destruction of Pompeii and the loss of
Gradiva.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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