Such dreams cannot be dreams of exhibitionism for they are never
accompanied by the wish that people should see us, nor do we ever derive
any pleasure from our exposure. I would be inclined to consider them in
almost every case as symbolic dreams of attitudes. We are labouring under
the burden of some secret which we are afraid of revealing. In spite of
our anxiety, we are comforted by the fact that our secret (our total or
partial nakedness) escapes the beholders. Our danger and our escape are
simply visualized and symbolized.
The symbolism of our exposure is quite obvious. The upper part of our body
is usually covered up and it is the "lower" part of it which is exposed,
and which we awkwardly try to wrap up in our shirt tails or to conceal
under a table cloth or behind furniture or bushes. We are concealing
something shameful, "low." Everybody knows the symbolism of high and low,
right and left, which is expressed by the language of all races.
One form of anxiety dream in which we grope our way through endless narrow
passages, room after room, up and down flights of stairs, has been
considered by some analysts as a memory of the first event of our life,
when we were forced violently, painfully, through a narrow passage and
finally reached the light of day. When the detail of those dreams is
closely analysed it will prove much more valuable and important than a
mere regression to the infantile.
They will generally turn out to be the sort of dreams that coincide with
the solution of a crisis and indicate that an adaptation to life has been
reached, that the subject has been "reborn."
Sleep walking is one variety of typical dream characterized by a greater
motor activity than the usual dream in which we either lie still or only
perform incomplete motions. Sleep walkers, like ordinary dreamers,
performed in their somnambulistic states actions which they have refrained
from performing in their waking states. While the sense of direction and
of orientation seems unimpaired in sleep walkers, their perception of
reality is very rudimentary.
Two cases reported by the Encyclopédie Française and by Krafft-Ebing,
respectively, illustrate that point.
A young man used to get up at night, go to his study and write.
Observers would now and then substitute a sheet of blank paper for the
sheet which he had covered with writing. When he had finished, he would
read over his manuscript aloud and repeat correctly, while holding the
blank sheet before his eyes, the words written on the sheet which had
been taken from him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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