Maury reports another example demonstrating just as nicely the
reliability of infantile reminiscences appearing in dreams. Mr. F——, who
had lived as a child in Montbrison, decided to visit his home and old
friends of his family after an absence of twenty-five years. The night
before his departure he dreamt that he had reached his destination, and
that he met near Montbrison a man, whom he did not know by sight, who
told him he was Mr. F., a friend of his father. The dreamer remembered
that as a child he had known a gentleman of this name, but on waking he
could no longer recall his features. Several days later, having really
arrived at Montbrison, he found the supposedly unknown locality of his
dream, and there met a man whom he at once recognised as the Mr. F. of
his dream. The real person was only older than the one in the dream
picture.
I may here relate one of my own dreams in which the remembered
impression is replaced by an association. In my dream I saw a person
whom I recognised, while dreaming, as the physician of my native town.
The features were indistinct and confused with the picture of one of my
colleague teachers, whom I still see occasionally. What association
there was between the two persons I could not discover on awakening. But
upon questioning my mother about the physician of my early childhood, I
discovered that he was a one-eyed man. My teacher, whose figure
concealed that of the physician in the dream, was also one-eyed. I have
not seen the physician for thirty-eight years, and I have not to my
knowledge thought of him in my waking state, although a scar on my chin
might have reminded me of his help.
As if to counterbalance the immense rôle ascribed to the infantile
impressions in the dream, many authors assert that the majority of
dreams show elements from the most recent time. Thus Robert[55] (p. 46)
declares that the normal dream generally occupies itself only with the
impressions of the recent days. We learn indeed that the theory of the
dream advanced by Robert imperatively demands that the old impressions
should be pushed back, and the recent ones brought to the front.
Nevertheless the fact claimed by Robert really exists; I can confirm
this from my own investigations. Nelson,[50] an American author, thinks
that the impressions most frequently found in the dream date from two or
three days before, as if the impressions of the day immediately
preceding the dream were not sufficiently weakened and remote.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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