If the two childhood scenes of urinating are otherwise closely connected
with the desire for greatness, their rehabilitation on the trip to the
Aussee was further favoured by the accidental circumstance that my
compartment had no water-closet, and that I had to expect embarrassment
on the ride as actually happened in the morning. I awoke with the
sensation of a bodily need. I suppose one might be inclined to credit
these sensations with being the actual stimulus of the dream; I should,
however, prefer a different conception—namely, that it was the dream
thoughts which gave rise to the desire to urinate. It is quite unusual
for me to be disturbed in sleep by any need, at least at the time of
this awakening, a quarter of four in the morning. I may forestall
further objection by remarking that I have hardly ever felt a desire to
urinate after awakening early on other journeys made under more
comfortable circumstances. Moreover, I can leave this point undecided
without hurting my argument.
Since I have learned, further, from experience in dream analysis that
there always remain important trains of thought proceeding from dreams
whose interpretation at first seems complete (because the sources of the
dream and the actuation of the wish are easily demonstrable), trains of
thought reaching back into earliest childhood, I have been forced to ask
myself whether this feature does not constitute an essential condition
of dreaming. If I were to generalise this thesis, a connection with what
has been recently experienced would form a part of the manifest content
of every dream and a connection with what has been most remotely
experienced, of its latent content; and I can actually show in the
analysis of hysteria that in a true sense these remote experiences have
remained recent up to the present time. But this conjecture seems still
very difficult to prove; I shall probably have to return to the part
played by the earliest childhood experiences, in another connection
(Chapter VII.).
Of the three peculiarities of dream memory considered at the beginning,
one—the preference for the unimportant in the dream content—has been
satisfactorily explained by tracing it back to dream disfigurement. We
have been able to establish the existence of the other two—the selection
of recent and of infantile material—but we have found it impossible to
explain them by the motive of dream. Let us keep in mind these two
characteristics, which still remain to be explained or evaluated; a
place for them will have to be found elsewhere, either in the psychology
of the sleeping state, or in the discussion of the structure of the
psychic apparatus which we shall undertake later, after we have learned
that the inner nature of the apparatus may be observed through dream
interpretation as though through a window.
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