III. In the example which I now cite I can detect the dream activity in
the act of purposely manufacturing an absurdity for which there is no
occasion at all in the subject-matter. It is taken from the dream that I
had as a result of meeting Count Thun before my vacation trip. “_I am
riding in a one-horse carriage, and give orders to drive to a railway
station. ‘Of course I cannot ride with you on the railway line itself,’
I say, after the driver made an objection as though I had tired him out;
at the same time it seems as though I had already driven with him for a
distance which one usually rides on the train._” For this confused and
senseless story the analysis gives the following explanation: During the
day I had hired a one-horse carriage which was to take me to a remote
street in Dornbach. The driver, however, did not know the way, and kept
on driving in the manner of those good people until I noticed the fact
and showed him the way, not sparing him a few mocking remarks withal.
From this driver a train of thought led to the aristocratic personage
whom I was destined to meet later. For the present I shall only remark
that what strikes us middle-class plebeians about the aristocracy is
that they like to put themselves in the driver’s seat. Does not Count
Thun guide the Austrian car of state? The next sentence in the dream,
however, refers to my brother, whom I identify with the driver of the
one-horse carriage. I had this year refused to take the trip through
Italy with him (“of course I cannot ride with you on the railway line
itself”), and this refusal was a sort of punishment for his wonted
complaint that I usually tired him out on this trip (which gets into the
dream unchanged) by making him take hurried trips and see too many nice
things in one day. That evening my brother had accompanied me to the
railroad station, but shortly before getting there had jumped out, at
the state railway division of the Western Station, in order to take a
train to Purkersdorf. I remarked to him that he could stay with me a
little longer, inasmuch as he did not go to Purkersdorf by the state
railway but by the Western Railway. This is how it happens that in the
dream I rode in the wagon a distance _which one usually rides on the
train_. In reality, however, it was just the opposite; I told my
brother: The distance which you ride on the state railway you could ride
in my company on the Western Railway. The whole confusion of the dream
is therefore produced by my inserting in the dream the word “wagon”
instead of “state railway,” which, to be sure, does good service in
bringing together the driver and my brother. I then find in the dream
some nonsense which seems hardly straightened out by my explanation, and
which almost forms a contradiction to my earlier speech (“Of course I
cannot ride with you on the railway line itself”). But as I have no
occasion whatever for confounding the state railway with the one-horse
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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