A few of them are frankly pleasant; most of them are apparently
indifferent and a few of them frankly unpleasant.
The pleasant dreams of the adults require as little interpretation as
those of children and are obviously the fulfilment of conscious or
unconscious wishes.
A patient of mine, camping in the woods alone, dreamt during a rainy night
that some of his friends were camping with him, that one of them had gone
to a neighbouring inn to secure better accommodations and finally that he
was in his own bed at home.
Nordenskjold in his book "The Antarctic," published in 1904, mentions that
during the winter which he spent in the polar wilderness, his dreams and
those of his men "were more frequent and more vivid than they had ever
been before. They all referred to the outer world which was so far from
us.... Eating and drinking formed the central point around which most of
our dreams were grouped. One of us, who was fond of going to big dinner
parties, was exceedingly glad when he could report in the morning that he
had had a three course dinner. Another dreamed of tobacco, mountains of
it; still another dreamed of a ship approaching on the open sea under full
sail. Still another dream deserves mention: the postman brought the mail
and gave a long explanation of why he had to wait so long.... One can
readily understand why we longed for sleep. IT ALONE COULD GIVE US ALL THE
THINGS WHICH WE MOST ARDENTLY DESIRED." [Capitals mine.]
Other dreams of wish-fulfilment appear at first glance either indifferent
or absurd. Interpreted according to the technique outlined in Chapter
XVII, however, they soon yield a meaning which is rather convincing.
The following dream, recorded by a patient, would not lead the
inexperienced interpreter to suspect the sinister death wish which it is
meant to express in an indirect way.
"I was visiting a factory and saw Charles working as a glassblower."
Charles was the first name of a wealthy man who seduced a girl with whom
the dreamer was in love. The wealthy man is reduced to the condition of a
working man. The patient's unconscious association to _glass blower_
proved to be _consumption_. The patient had once read statistics showing
that a large number of glassblowers died from that disease. A very neatly
concealed death wish.
In other cases the death wish, while obvious in the manifest dream
content, appears absurd and may cause the patient some anxiety. One of
Ferenczi's patients, who was extremely fond of dogs, dreamt that she was
choking a little white dog to death.
Word associations brought out the memory of a relative with an unusually
_pallid_ face whom she had recently ordered out of her house, saying later
that she would not have such a snarling _dog_ about her. It was that
white-faced woman, not a white dog, whose neck she wished to wring.
Here is another example in which the wish fulfilment is cleverly
concealed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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