_The dreamer is riding with much company to X-street, where there is a
modest road-house_ (which is not the fact). _A theatrical performance is
being given in its rooms. He is first audience, then actor. Finally the
company is told to change their clothes, in order to get back into the
city. Some of the people are assigned to the rooms on the ground floor,
others to the first floor. Then a dispute arises. Those above are angry
because those below have not yet finished, so that they cannot come
down. His brother is upstairs, he is below, and he is angry at his
brother because there is such crowding._ (This part obscure.) _Besides
it has already been decided upon their arrival who is to be upstairs and
who down. Then he goes alone over the rising ground, across which
X-street leads toward the city, and he has such difficulty and hardship
in walking that he cannot move from the spot. An elderly gentleman joins
him and scolds about the King of Italy. Finally, towards the end of the
rising ground walking becomes much easier._
The difficulties experienced in walking were so distinct that for some
time after waking he was in doubt whether they were dream or reality.
According to the manifest content, this dream can hardly be praised.
Contrary to the rules, I shall begin with that portion which the dreamer
referred to as the most distinct.
The difficulties which were dreamed of, and which were probably
experienced during the dream—difficult climbing accompanied by
dyspnœa—is one of the symptoms which the patient had actually shown
years before, and which, in conjunction with other symptoms, was at that
time attributed to tuberculosis (probably hysterically simulated). We
are already from exhibition dreams acquainted with this sensation of
being hindered, peculiar to the dream, and here again we find it used
for the purpose of any kind of representation, as an ever-ready
material. That part of the dream content which ascribes the climbing as
difficult at first, and as becoming easier at the end of the hill, made
me think while it was being told of the well-known masterful
introduction to _Sappho_ by A. Daudet. Here a young man carries the girl
whom he loves upstairs—she is at first as light as a feather; but the
higher he mounts the more heavily she weighs upon his arm, and this
scene symbolises a course of events by recounting which Daudet tries to
warn young men not to waste serious affection upon girls of humble
origin or of questionable past.[DI] Although I knew that my patient had
recently had a love affair with a lady of the theatre, and had broken it
off, I did not expect to find that the interpretation which had occurred
to me was correct. Moreover, the situation in _Sappho_ was the _reverse_
of that in the dream; in the latter the climbing was difficult at the
beginning and easy later on; in the novel the symbolism serves only if
what was at first regarded as easy finally turns out to be a heavy load.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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