Thus the absurdity of the dream is only the result of an inaccuracy of
verbal expression, which does not take the trouble to distinguish the
bust and the photograph from the original. We are all accustomed to say
of a picture, “Don’t you think father is good?” Of course the appearance
of absurdity in this dream might easily have been avoided. If it were
permissible to pass judgment after a single experience, one might be
tempted to say that this semblance of absurdity is admitted or desired.
II. Here is another very similar example from my own dreams (I lost my
father in the year 1896):
_After his death my father has been politically active among the
Magyars, and has united them into a political body_; to accompany which
I see a little indistinct picture: _a crowd of people as in the
Reichstag; a person who is standing on one or two benches, others round
about him. I remember that he looked very like Garibaldi on his
death-bed, and I am glad that this promise has really come true._
This is certainly absurd enough. It was dreamed at the time that the
Hungarians got into a lawless condition, through Parliamentary
obstruction, and passed through the crisis from which Koloman Szell
delivered them. The trivial circumstance that the scene beheld in the
dream consists of such little pictures is not without significance for
the explanation of this element. The usual visual representation of our
thoughts results in pictures which impress us as being life-size; my
dream picture, however, is the reproduction of a wood-cut inserted in
the text of an illustrated history of Austria, representing Maria
Theresa in the Reichstag of Pressburg—the famous scene of “Moriamur pro
rege nostro.”[ER] Like Maria Theresa, my father, in the dream, stands
surrounded by the multitude; but he is standing on one or two benches,
and thus like a judge on the bench. (He has _united_ them—here the
intermediary is the phrase, “We shall need no _judge_.”) Those of us who
stood around the death-bed of my father actually noticed that he looked
much like Garibaldi. He had a _post-mortem_ rise of temperature, his
cheeks shone redder and redder ... involuntarily we continue: “And
behind him lay in phantom radiance that which subdues us all—the common
thing.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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