_A terrible accident has occurred to his father. He was riding in the
night train when a derailment took place, the seats came together, and
his head was crushed from side to side. The dreamer sees him lying on
the bed with a wound over his left eyebrow, which runs off vertically.
The dreamer is surprised that his father has had a misfortune (since he
is dead already, as the dreamer adds in telling his dream). His father’s
eyes are so clear._
According to the standards prevailing in dream criticism, this
dream-content would have to be explained in the following manner: At
first, when the dreamer is picturing his father’s misfortune, he has
forgotten that his father has already been in his grave for years; in
the further course of the dream this memory comes to life, and causes
him to be surprised at his own dream even while he is still dreaming.
Analysis, however, teaches us that it is entirely useless to attempt
such explanations. The dreamer had given an artist an order for a bust
of his father, which he had inspected two days before the dream. This is
the thing which seems to him to have met with an _accident_. The
sculptor has never seen the father, and is working from photographs
which have been given him. On the very day before the dream the pious
son had sent an old servant of the family to the studio in order to see
whether he would pass the same judgment upon the marble head, namely,
that it had turned out too _narrow from side to side_, from temple to
temple. Now follows the mass of recollections which has contributed to
the formation of this dream. The dreamer’s father had a habit, whenever
he was harassed by business cares or family difficulties, of pressing
his temples with both hands, as though he were trying to compress his
head, which seemed to grow too large for him. When our dreamer was four
years old he was present when the accidental discharge of a pistol
blackened his father’s eyes (_his eyes are so clear_). While alive his
father had had a deep wrinkle at the place where the dream shows the
injury, whenever he was thoughtful or sad. The fact that in the dream
this wrinkle is replaced by a wound points to the second occasion of the
dream. The dreamer had taken a photograph of his little daughter; the
plate had fallen from his hand, and when picked up showed a crack that
ran like a vertical furrow across the forehead and reached as far as the
orbital curve. He could not then get the better of his superstitious
forebodings, for, on the day before his mother’s death, a photographic
plate with her likeness had cracked as he was handling it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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