"I am standing on a hill with Albert and somebody else. Bombs are falling
about us. One of them strikes his car which is destroyed."[6]
The patient, a woman, is in love with Albert and enjoys greatly riding
with him in his car. Why should she wish to see it wrecked?
The key to the enigma was given by the associations to the "somebody
else." The somebody else was another woman whom Albert had taken to ride
on several occasions and of whom my patient was very jealous. By
destroying the car, the jealous woman was putting an end to the rides
which had especially aroused her jealousy.
The following dream seems rather unpleasant without being however an
actual nightmare.
DREAM: I heard a noise downstairs and went to investigate. Upon reaching
the bottom of the stairs, I found a man lying on the floor with his coat
off and drunk. Later he was hiding from me and running about the house.
The man was captured and brought back by another man who cross-examined
him. The other man made excuses for the thief and said he probably
intended to steal but as he had a toothache he had sought the cellar and
drunk to deaden the pain. To prove his explanations he opened the thief's
mouth and pointed to a large cavity in one tooth.
INTERPRETATION: The patient who brought me the dream was a young woman
who, at the time, was worrying lest her husband should discover an
indiscretion she had committed in her own house. The thief in the dream
turned out to be her lover and the man who captures him, her husband.
Everything is made simple and pleasant by the fact that the husband takes
it upon himself to make excuses for the man he has captured. The excuse
of the cavity was an allusion to alleged visits to a dentist's office
which supplied her with alibis on various occasions.
We spend a part of the night, if not the entire night, seeking solutions
for the problems of the day. Patients who have been trained to remember
and record their dreams accurately, sometimes bring a series of visions,
apparently unrelated, but which after interpretation, prove to be
successive presentations of one and the same problem from different
angles.
CHAPTER IX: NIGHTMARES
The Freudian theory of wish-fulfilment easily accepted by the layman as
solving the problem of pleasant or indifferent dreams, meets with a most
sceptical reception when it is applied to unpleasant dreams, to
nightmares, which are characterized by a varying degree of anxiety.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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