Here, too, there is an actual occasion for the dream; the day before she
had actually put a candle into a candlestick; but this one was not
broken. A transparent symbolism has been employed here. The candle is an
object which excites the feminine genitals; its being broken, so that it
does not stand straight, signifies impotence on the man’s part (“it is
not her fault”). But does this young woman, carefully brought up, and a
stranger to all obscenity, know of this application of the candle? She
happens to be able to tell how she came by this information. While
riding in a boat on the Rhine, another boat passes containing students
who are singing or rather yelling, with great delight: “When the Queen
of Sweden with closed shutters and the candles of Apollo....”
She does not hear or understand the last word. Her husband is asked to
give her the required explanation. These verses are then replaced in the
dream content by the harmless recollection of a command which she once
executed clumsily at a girls’ boarding school, this occurring by means
of the common features _closed shutters_. The connection between the
theme of onanism and that of impotence is clear enough. “Apollo” in the
latent dream content connects this dream with an earlier one in which
the virgin Pallas figured. All this is obviously not harmless.
IV. Lest it may seem too easy a matter to draw conclusions from dreams
concerning the dreamer’s real circumstances, I add another dream coming
from the same person which likewise appears harmless. “_I dreamt of
doing something_,” she relates, “_which I actually did during the day,
that is to say, I filled a little trunk so full of hooks that I had
difficulty in closing it. My dream was just like the actual
occurrence._” Here the person relating the dream herself attaches chief
importance to the correspondence between the dream and reality. All such
criticisms upon the dream and remarks about it, although they have
secured a place in waking thought, regularly belong to the latent dream
content, as later examples will further demonstrate. We are told, then,
that what the dream relates has actually taken place during the day. It
would take us too far afield to tell how we reach the idea of using the
English language to help us in the interpretation of this dream. Suffice
it to say that it is again a question of a little box (_cf._ p. 130, the
dream of the dead child in the box) which has been filled so full that
nothing more can go into it. Nothing in the least sinister this time.
In all these “harmless” dreams the sexual factor as a motive for the
exercise of the censor receives striking prominence. But this is a
matter of primary importance, which we must postpone.
(_b_) _Infantile Experiences as the Source of Dreams_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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