Among the dreams mentioned in the previous chapter there are several
which might serve as examples for the elaboration of so-called nerve
stimuli. The dream about drinking in full draughts is one of this sort;
the somatic excitement in it seems to be the only source of the dream,
and the wish resulting from the sensation—thirst—the only motive for
dreaming. Something similar is true of the other simple dreams, if the
somatic excitement alone is capable of forming a wish. The dream of the
sick woman who throws the cooling apparatus from her cheek at night is
an instance of a peculiar way of reacting to painful excitements with a
wish-fulfilment; it seems as though the patient had temporarily
succeeded in making herself analgesic by ascribing her pains to a
stranger.
My dream about the three Parcæ is obviously a dream of hunger, but it
has found means to refer the need for food back to the longing of the
child for its mother’s breast, and to make the harmless desire a cloak
for a more serious one, which is not permitted to express itself so
openly. In the dream about Count Thun we have seen how an accidental
bodily desire is brought into connection with the strongest, and
likewise the most strongly suppressed emotions of the psychic life. And
when the First Consul incorporates the sound of an exploding bomb into a
dream of battle before it causes him to wake, as in the case reported by
Garnier, the purpose for which psychic activity generally concerns
itself with sensations occurring during sleep is revealed with
extraordinary clearness. A young lawyer, who has been deeply preoccupied
with his first great bankruptcy proceeding, and who goes to sleep during
the afternoon following, acts just like the great Napoleon. He dreams
about a certain G. Reich in _Hussiatyn_ (German _husten_—to cough), whom
he knows in connection with the bankruptcy proceeding, but _Hussiatyn_
forces itself upon his attention still further, with the result that he
is obliged to awaken, and hears his wife—who is suffering from bronchial
catarrh—coughing violently.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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