CHAPTER 3

Erotic interpretations of
Interpretation of sexual
non-sexual symbols
symbols
Nunnery
= secret love
Promiscuity
= good health
Nun
= to fall out of love
Seduction
= bad luck
Peach
= reunited
Intercourse
= sorrow, em-
love
barrass- ment
Knocking
= inconstancy
Seeing bride or
= childless
in love
bridegroom
marriage
Man beats
= faithful
Being a bride
= misfortune
woman
love
Full moon
= blessed
Bride dying
= long mar-
marriage
riage
Easter eggs
= luck in love
Man with bosom
= promiscuity
Rubble heap
= marriage
Adultery
= fire
Finding
= luck in love
Jealousy
= faithful mar-
stockings
riage part- ner.
Freud and prophetic dreams
In the summer of 1900, Sigmund Freud, then Professor of Neurology at the University of Vienna, gave a series of lectures on a singularly unacademic topic: dream interpretation. Though his colleagues frowned at his bizarre notions, they felt it was better to pass over his activities in silence, than to cause a public scandal. And, in fact, what happened proved them right. The students showed not the slightest interest in Freud's eccentric behaviour, and no more than three of them attended his first lecture.^ Freud's book on the subject, published in the same year was equally unsuccessful. This work, which was later to cause such a stir in academic circles, sold no more than 123 copies during the first six months of its existence, and it was not until eight years later that the 600 copies of this edition were sold out
1 Alfred Winterstein: Vber die Traumlehre Freuds. Centenary address to the Viennese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology, 14th May 1956.
THE WORLD OF DREAMS 123
Perhaps Freud would have found a readier audience had he told his students and readers how to realise mankind's age-old ambition to tell the future from dreams. As it was, he told them quite unequivocally that dreams could tell them nothing whatever about real things to come. Prophetic dreams were of purely historical interest, for they were mere examples of archaic forms of primitive belief. His Interpretation of Dreams ended with this devastating attack on dream diviners: "And what of the value of dreams in regard to our knowledge of the future? That, of course, is quite out of the question. One would like to substitute the words: 'in regard to our knowledge of the past'. For in every sense a dream has its origin in the past. The ancient belief that dreams reveal the future is not indeed entirely devoid of truth. By representing a wish as fulfilled, the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, which the dreamer accepts as his present, has been shaped in the likeness of the past by the indestructible wish."^
Freud retained this basic attitude in all subsequent editions of the book, even though he became a little more conciliatory:
"Much as modest and unprejudiced scientists must welcome the attempt to include even despised 'occult' phenomena in the sphere of scientific investigations, they will nevertheless remain convinced that this study will fail to force two conclusions upon them: belief in existence after death, and knowledge of an incalculable future."^
Freud took an even more uncompromising stand in his Additional Remarks on the Interpretation of Dreams:^ "There can be no doubt that prophetic dreams can be said to exist in the sense that they deal with projections into the future; what is doubtful, however, is whether this structure corresponds, to any remarkable extent, with actual future events. I confess that, in this case, my principle of impartiality has deserted me. The fact that any mental effort other than shrewd calculation should be able to foresee future events in detail, is on the one hand far too
^ The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (N.Y. 1938), p. 549, trans- lated from Die Traumdeutung (1st. ed. 1900) by A. A. Brill. ^ Sigmund Freud: Die Traumdeutung (7th ed., Vienna 1922). ^ Sigmund Freud: Erganzungen und Zusatzartikel zur Traumdeutung, Collected Works, Vol. Ill, p. 180 f.
124 CHAPTER 3
opposed to scientific expectations and attitudes, and, on the other hand, corresponds far too closely with ancient and well-known human wishes, for critics not to reject it as an unjustified pre- sumption. It is my belief, therefore, that if we set the un- reliability, credulity, and incredibility of most reports side by side with the possibilities of affectively induced memory falsifi- cations and the inevitability of occasional coincidences, we may expect the spectre of true prophetic dreams to dissolve into nothingness. I personally have never experienced anything that could cause me to form a less biased opinion."
The dream censor
We have quoted Freud's opinions at such length, because they have become the basis of most psychological dream investiga- tions during the past fifty years. Not only psycho-analysts but other schools of psychology as well, have accepted the dicta of the undisputed master, and have resolutely set their face against any possibility of predicting the future from dreams. Neverthe- less, psychologists are agreed that dreams may give them a fair indication of how the dreamer imagines the future, what his secret wishes and hopes are, and how, if it were left to him alone, he would try to fashion his life.
People might object that if this is all that dream-interpreta- tion is good for, we might as well drop it right here and now, since most men do not need dreams to tell them what they long for. The psycho-analyst's reply would then be, that most men are, in fact, quite unaware of their unconscious wishes. From earliest childhood men are loaded with so many complexes, bitter disappointments, and spiritual injuries, that they bear the scars for life. It is these scars which frequently repress their wishes into subconsciousness, and only during sleep can they overcome their inner resistances, and realise their hidden wishes in dream images.
Admittedly, men cannot rid themselves of all their inhibitions even in sleep, so that their dreams often represent displaced rather than direct wishes, which the analyst then has to interpret correctly. Undisguised dreams normally occur in children or in
THE WORLD OF DREAMS 125
infantile adults alone ;^ the adult who has outgrown the psychic life of the child is never quite free. Even his dreams are subject to supervision by an inner monitor. Freud's dream censor has psychological properties, quite distinct from those of the censor who dictates our deliberate decisions. The dream censor appears to be a bit lax when it comes to manifestly sexual dreams. 2 This is probably due to the fact that we generally sleep and dream in bed, and beds are notoriously immoral places. Apart from this slight moral lapse, however, the dream censor is no less strict and intolerant than the Lord Chamberlain. He disfigures and displaces our wishes by changing them into their direct opposites and plagues us with nightmares when our wishes become too over-riding.
What we dream, therefore, is often as unconnected with our real wishes, as, say, a Picasso painting is with a real nude: the eyes have travelled to unaccustomed places, the nose looks out of joint, arms and legs are too short or too long or else a tangle of lines. Those who look at the canvas in the hope of finding a photographic copy of a real woman will be sorely disappointed, and only after those who understand the artist have talked to them at great length, may they get a glimmering of what he was really trying to tell them and why, of all things, he called his painting "Portrait of a Woman".
In dreams, things are more complicated still, since dreams rarely portray a single situation. As a rule, a dream is an entire drama in which the dreamer sometimes takes the stage himself, but in which more often he is a mere observer of the objects of his positive and negative wishes dressed up in the strangest disguises. Every dreamer is a poet who works with an almost inexhaustible store of fantasy that rarely stops short where the professional dramatist would. Laws of space and time, and of cause and effect are completely discarded, processes are speeded up even more quickly than they would be in American films, and passions are masked beyond recognition. Freud mentions a dream in which an old gentleman suffering from arterio- sclerosis is surprised by a strange visitor during an act of
1 Sigmund Freud: Vber den Traum ( 1901 ), Collected Works, Vol. Ill, p. 240.
2 Sigmund Freud: Ergdnzungen und Zusatzartikel zur Traumdeutung, Collected Works, Vol. Ill, p. 176.
126 CHAPTER 3
intimacy. The old gentleman's only reaction is to roar with laughter, even though — at least according to Freud — the stranger was death, and the laughter the old gentleman's way of covering up his fear of approaching impotence.
Prophetic and creative dreams
If the mechanisms of dreams are so different from those of conscious thought processes, what point is there in relating the two and in deducing mutual effects? Is not the dream world a world of its own from which it would be quite illegitimate to draw conclusions about the dreamer's real attitude to the future? Most modern psychologists reject so radical a separation of the two spheres and prefer to look upon dreams as subsidiary manifestations of consciousness. Some consider dreams as mere reflexes of conscious thoughts, and in the 19th century it was even held that dreams were the sludge of waking life, in which the experiences of the preceding day were rehashed in disorganised ways. Thus the leading philosopher amongst Freud's contem- poraries, Henri Bergson, said that dreams contain all the elements of mental life except one very important component: concentration. In sleep we are completely detached, and allow our thoughts to rush about foolishly and aimlessly.
Unlike all these theories which turned the dream into a mere satellite of the waking state, psycho-analysis saw it as an important manifestation of life. According to Freud, every dream is significant, in that it expresses the dreamer's hidden wishes or aims. For this reason dreams have to be interpreted by the special psycho-analytical techniques, developed by Freud and his pupils.
These techniques are questioned as much today as they were fifty years ago. Critics point out that psycho-analysis works with crude sexual symbols and they object particularly to the mechanical list of such symbols, the first of which was published by Freud's pupil Wilhelm Stekel in 1911.^ Actually, there has never been a complete psycho-analytical dream book with the help of which one could decipher more complicated dreams, and 1 Wilhelm Stekel: Die Sprache des Traumes (Wiesbaden 1911).
THE WORLD OF DREAMS 127
such a book is, in fact, unlikely to be published since the language of dreams is a highly individual picture language, and since there is hardly a single dream which, even according to psycho- analysis does not admit of more than one interpretation.^ Leading dream interpreters, therefore, rightly rely on intuition and their ow^n long experience rather than on fixed rules. ^
In any case, however good the interpretations, they can tell us little about the future. For even if the dreamer were told his real motives by the analyst, it is an open question whether he will be able to do anything about them.
In some cases, on the other hand, the dreamer needs no interpreter to tell him how to act on his dreams. Childhood and later memories may rise up so vividly, that the effect is carried over into waking life, with a consequent change in behaviour that may have lasting effects on the dreamer's future.
Next to "prospective" dreams, i.e. dreams which reveal latent possibilities that may or may not be put into practice,^ people also have far more painful premonitory dreams. We know that many people are extraordinarily sensitive in dreams to physical pain, so much so that the pressure of the edge of the bed, which they would normally ignore, can be felt as a paralysing pain. Now similar pains may also be "dreamt" at the inception of a disease, the symptoms of which are still too slight to have any effects in the waking state. Strictly speaking, such dreams are therefore prophetic in character, for though the disease has started, the patient is unaware of it. French psycho- logists call such dreams reves premonitoires^ and some doctors attach some diagnostic significance to them. However, we must not exaggerate the importance of this phenomenon, for there are many perfectly healthy people who suffer similar pains in their dreams. Even in this respect, therefore, the dream is a very uncertain prophet.
Finally, we must mention a third and more pleasant kind of "prophetic" dream. It is a known fact that
^ Peter W. Hofstatter: Einfiihrung in die Tiejenpsycbologie (Vienna
1948), p. 151.
2 H. Schultz-Hencke: Lehrbuch der Traumanalyse (Stuttgart 1949).
^ C. G. Jung: Allgemeine Gesichtspunkte zur Psycbologie des Traumes.
Psych. Trans. (Zurich 1948), II, p. 143.
* Jean Lhermitte: Les Reves (Paris 1955), p. 54 fF.
128 CHAPTER 3
ally release creative and particularly artistic or poetic faculties. Even important technical inventions and scientific discoveries are alleged to have been discovered in that way. Thus Gauss is said to have discovered his laws of induction in a dream, Kekule to have dreamt of the benzole ring, Paul Ehrlich of his side-chain theory, and Niels Bohr of his atomic model. On closer investiga- tion, however, all these stories turn out to be so many old wives' tales. 1 What really happened is that the scientists concerned were day-dreaming rather than dreaming when they had their flashes of intuition. On the other hand, there is a good deal of evidence that poetic, artistic, or religious ideas have, in fact, been born in real dreams, subsequently to be developed by their dreamers.
Still, there is nothing particularly prophetic about such dreams. In no respect, whatsoever, have dreams been shown to be the real workshops of the future, even though they may occasionally provide man with hints of, or, in rare cases lend wings to, his creative faculties. If we compare the role of dreams even in that respect with the role of consciousness, we shall see how insignificant it really is.
Telepathy and Clairvoyance
This is true even if we extend our remarks to include such para- psychological phenomena as telepathic dreams, although Freud, who repeatedly stressed his disbelief in the existence of super- naturally inspired prophetic dreams, was nevertheless unwilling to dismiss them without further ado. While he considered tele- pathic dreams to be outisde his chosen field of analysis, he still felt impelled to grant that they might, in fact, occur.
Freud himself seems to have received one such "telepathic" message, when during the first World War he dreamt that one of his sons had been killed in action. Contrary to his usual practice, he did not analyse the dream, even though it looked very much like a displaced wish — i.e. that his son would come home alive. Fortunately, the message proved false for his son
1 Werner Kemper: Der Traum und seine Be-Deutung (Hamburg 1955), p. 120-122.
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