Even Pharaoh’s dream in the Bible of the ears and the kine, which Joseph
interpreted, was of this kind. It is reported by Josephus (_Antiquities
of the Jews_, bk. ii. chap, iii.) in greater detail than in the Bible.
After relating the first dream, the King said: “When I had seen this
vision I awaked out of my sleep, and being in disorder, and considering
with myself what this appearance should be, I fell asleep again, and saw
another dream much more wonderful than the first, which did still more
affright and disturb me.” After listening to the report of the dream,
Joseph said, “This dream, O King, although seen under two forms,
signifies one and the same issue of things.”
Jung,[99] who, in his _Beitrag zur Psychologie des Gerüchtes_ relates
how the veiled erotic dream of a school-girl was understood by her
friends without interpretation and continued by them with variations,
remarks in connection with reports of this dream, “that the last of a
long series of dream pictures contained precisely the same thought whose
representation had been attempted in the first picture of the series.
The censor pushed the complex out of the way as long as possible,
through constantly renewed symbolic concealments, displacements,
deviations into the harmless, &c.” (_l.c._ p. 87). Scherner[58] was well
acquainted with the peculiarities of dream disfigurement and describes
them at the end of his theory of organic stimulation as a special law,
p. 166: “But, finally, the phantasy observes the general law in all
nerve stimuli emanating from symbolic dream formations, by representing
at the beginning of the dream only the remotest and freest allusions to
the stimulating object; but towards the end, when the power of
representation becomes exhausted, it presents the stimulus or its
concerned organ or its function in unconcealed form, and in the way this
dream designates its organic motive and reaches its end.”
A new confirmation of Scherner’s law has been furnished by Otto
Rank[106] in his work, _A Self Interpretation Dream_. This dream of a
girl reported by him consisted of two dreams, separated in time of the
same night, the second of which ended with pollution. This pollution
dream could be interpreted in all its details by disregarding a great
many of the ideas contributed by the dreamer, and the profuse relations
between the two dream contents indicated that the first dream expressed
in bashful language the same thing as the second, so that the latter—the
pollution dream—helped to a full explanation of the former. From this
example, Rank, with perfect justice, draws conclusions concerning the
significance of pollution dreams in general.
But in my experience it is only in rare cases that one is in a position
to interpret clearness or confusion in the dream as certainty or doubt
in the dream material. Later I shall try to discover the factor in the
formation of dreams upon whose influence this scale of qualities
essentially depends.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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