see behind the stove a closed door which I long to open. I go about the
house, up steep, worn stairs, down again and out into a garden where there
is a single strawberry and I think staminate and pistillate plants should be
set out to insure fertilization. Always I think of the closed door and
presently I return to the house and enter the room behind the stove. On the
floor is a green veil of firm texture. And at last there are cobwebs on the
ceiling of my old house and I still search for my room.
After the presentation of this array of symbolism quite spontaneously the
interpretation arose in my mind. The old house is the recurring abode of
life. I would dwell there and take my place in the line of succession.
Quite in line with this symbolism was the very beautiful dream of a young
woman not many months before her bridal which I give in her words--"With a
crowd of unknown people I was to visit and go over a haunted house. The
living room was nicely furnished in antique furniture and the whole house
was very still. We went upstairs, and it passed through my mind that people
who were dead and gone had moved through the rooms. I was coming down the
stairs when suddenly a pipe organ burst forth. That was the haunted
part--music in the air, no organ at all. We were awestricken and I awoke
with the same feeling." In dreams of this character we find it necessary to
predicate a creative, myth-making tendency in the structure of the mind by
means of which currents of life flowing beneath all thought become
articulate.
Coming now to examples of reasoning by analogy directly expressive of the
desire for maternity, I wish to make still more plain my view of the reason
for symbolism. Maternity is untold ages old; intelligent comprehension of
the function very recent. That portion of the mind functioning in
dreams--that is in the majority of dreams--is unable to picture the process
and its necessary antecedents. (Frankly sexual dreams occurred to me very
rarely.) Instinctive acts are the last to be made objects of thought; a
relatively high degree of mental development is necessary before the
requisite detachment from the process can be obtained and as we have seen
this detachment is beyond the power of the self that dreams. Hence the
recourse to analogy and symbolism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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