Parts of the dream seem to analyze very nicely, but there are parts which
seem to resist analysis; I did not try to force the analysis but gave only
the part which came spontaneously. In the first part of the dream I was
driving in a buggy, I crossed a creek and had trouble with unharnessing a
horse. Several times recently, I have mentioned the fact that I never liked
to work with horses, even when on the farm at home. I do not remember of
having mentioned this fact on the day of the dream, but Mr. C. had stopped
in to call on me that evening and had mentioned that he drove in in a buggy.
I had not seen the buggy and had wondered what he did with it, and had not
remembered to ask him. He had also told me that he was going to a place
called Yellow Springs; I knew about where Yellow Springs are, but could not
quite place them and had tried to figure out what direction he would go.
This seemed to come out very clearly in the dream, when I was trying to find
out where these unknown springs by the side of the road were. I had related
during the evening how I recently fell into a creek with my clothes on and
this probably accounted for the creek over which I drove in the dream. In
the dim second part of the dream, the rotunda seems to have resembled the
chapel of the new college building which is being builded, and about which I
was talking that afternoon.
The last part of the dream seems to have been the important part, and in it
several of the Freudian mechanisms show up very plainly. Just before going
to bed, I had read an article about Vera Cheberiak, the Russian murderess of
the Mendel Beilis case, and how she is now engaged in suing different people
for slander. The article had described her as coolly and impudently sitting
up in court and seeming to realize her power over her enemies, and it had
also made a point of the great fear in which she is held. I had read another
article about the city of Salem, which has recently burned, and I had
remembered that it was the "witch" town of colonial days where people were
supposed to be turned into black cats. I had read still another article,
descriptive of country life, which described how a man had climbed a tree
after a cat which was eating young robins. I had just a day or two before
received a letter from my wife, which contained the news that she was going
to visit this woman whom she fears, but whom she must visit because of their
social relation As already mentioned, the woman in the dream looked just
like this one, and it will readily be recognized that the dream woman was a
condensation of Vera Cheberiak, a Salem "witch," and the woman whom my wife
fears. The fact that she was hypnotized into thinking she was a cat would
naturally accompany the Salem witch, and the cat in the apple tree,
concerning which I had read, might also have entered the dream. Aside from
these, there is another element which may have been instrumental in causing
my wife to be punished by thinking she was a cat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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