I.
An intelligent and refined young woman, who in real life is distinctly reserved, one of those people of whom one says that “still waters run deep,” relates the following dream: “I dreamt that I arrived at the market too late, and could get nothing from either the butcher or the greengrocer woman.” Surely a guileless dream, but as it has not the appearance of a real dream I induce her to relate it in detail. Her report then runs as follows: She goes to the market with her cook, who carries the basket. The butcher tells her, after she has asked him for something: “That is no longer to be obtained,” and waits to give her something else, with the remark: “That is good, too.” She refuses, and goes to the greengrocer woman. The latter tries to sell her a peculiar vegetable, which is bound up in bundles, and is black in colour. She says: “I don’t know that, I won’t take it.”
The connection of the dream with the preceding day is simple enough. She had really gone to the market too late, and had been unable to buy anything. The meatshop was already closed, comes into one’s mind as a description of the experience. But wait, is not that a very vulgar phrase which- or rather, the opposite of which- denotes a certain neglect with regard to man’s clothing? The dreamer has not used these words; she has perhaps avoided them: but let us look for the interpretation of the details contained in the dream.
When in a dream something has the character of a spoken utterance- that is, when it is said or heard, not merely thought, and the distinction can usually be made with certainty- then it originates in the utterances of waking life, which have, of course, been treated as raw material, dismembered, and slightly altered, and above all removed from their context. * In the work of interpretation we may take such utterances as our starting- point. Where, then, does the butcher’s statement, That is no longer to be obtained, come from? From myself; I had explained to her some days previously “that the oldest experiences of childhood are no longer to be obtained as such, but will be replaced in the analysis by transferences and dreams.” Thus, I am the butcher, and she refuses to accept these transferences to the present of old ways of thinking and feeling. Where does her dream utterance, I don’t know that, I won’t take it, come from? For the purposes of the analysis this has to be dissected. I don’t know that she herself had said to her cook, with whom she had a dispute on the previous day, but she had then added: Behave yourself decently. Here a displacement is palpable; of the two sentences which she spoke to her cook, she included the insignificant one in her dream; but the suppressed sentence, Behave yourself decently! alone fits in with the rest of the dream-content. One might use the words to a man who was making indecent overtures, and had neglected “to close his meat-shop.” That we have really hit upon the trail of the interpretation is proved by its agreement with the allusions made by the incident with the greengrocer woman. A vegetable which is sold tied up in bundles (a longish vegetable, as she subsequently adds), and is also black: what can this be but a dream-combination of asparagus and black radish? I need not interpret asparagus to the initiated; and the other vegetable, too (think of the exclamation: “Blacky, save yourself!”), seems to me to point to the sexual theme at which we guessed in the beginning, when we wanted to replace the story of the dream by “the meat-shop is closed.” We are not here concerned with the full meaning of the dream; so much is certain, that it is full of meaning and by no means guileless. *(2)
* Cf. what is said of speech in dreams in the chapter on “The Dream-Work.” Only one of the writers on the subject- Delboeuf- seems to have recognized the origin of the speeches heard in dreams; he compares them with cliches.
*(2) For the curious, I may remark that behind the dream there is hidden a phantasy of indecent, sexually provoking conduct on my part, and of repulsion on the part of the lady. If this interpretation should seem preposterous, I would remind the reader of the numerous cases in which physicians have been made the object of such charges by hysterical women, with whom the same phantasy has not appeared in a distorted form as a dream, but has become undisguisedly conscious and delusional. With this dream the patient began her psycho-analytical treatment. It was only later that I learned that with this dream she repeated the initial trauma in which her neurosis originated, and since then I have noticed the same behaviour in other persons who in their childhood were victims of sexual attacks, and now, as it were, wish in their dreams for them to be repeated.
II.
Another guileless dream of the same patient, which in some respects is a pendant to the above. Her husband asks her: “Oughtn’t we to have the piano tuned?” She replies: “It’s not worth while, the hammers would have to be rebuffed as well.” Again we have the reproduction of an actual event of the preceding day. Her husband had asked her such a question, and she had answered it in such words. But what is the meaning of her dreaming it? She says of the piano that it is a disgusting old box which has a bad tone; it belonged to her husband before they were married, * etc., but the key to the true solution lies in the phrase: It isn’t worth while. This has its origin in a call paid yesterday to a woman friend. She was asked to take off her coat, but declined, saying: “Thanks, it isn’t worth while, I must go in a moment.” At this point I recall that yesterday, during the analysis, she suddenly took hold of her coat, of which a button had come undone. It was as though she meant to say: “Please don’t look in, it isn’t worth while.” Thus box becomes chest, and the interpretation of the dream leads to the years when she was growing out of her childhood, when she began to be dissatisfied with her figure. It leads us back, indeed, to earlier periods, if we take into consideration the disgusting and the bad tone, and remember how often in allusions and in dreams the two small hemispheres of the female body take the place- as a substitute and an antithesis- of the large ones.
* A substitution by the opposite, as will be clear after analysis.
III.
I will interrupt the analysis of this dreamer in order to insert a short, innocent dream which was dreamed by a young man. He dreamt that he was putting on his winter overcoat again; this was terrible. The occasion for this dream is apparently the sudden advent of cold weather. On more careful examination we note that the two brief fragments of the dream do not fit together very well, for what could be terrible about wearing a thick or heavy coat in cold weather? Unfortunately for the innocency of this dream, the first association, under analysis, yields the recollection that yesterday a lady had confidentially confessed to him that her last child owed its existence to the splitting of a condom. He now reconstructs his thoughts in accordance with this suggestion: A thin condom is dangerous, a thick one is bad. The condom is a “pullover” (Ueberzieher = literally pullover), for it is pulled over something: and Uebersieher is the German term for a light overcoat. An experience like that related by the lady would indeed be terrible for an unmarried man.
We will now return to our other innocent dreamer.
IV.
She puts a candle into a candlestick; but the candle is broken, so that it does not stand up. The girls at school say she is clumsy; but she replies that it is not her fault.
Here, too, there is an actual occasion for the dream; the day before she had actually put a candle into a candlestick; but this one was not broken. An obvious symbolism has here been employed. The candle is an object which excites the female genitals; its being broken, so that it does not stand upright, signifies impotence on the man’s part (it is not her fault). But does this young woman, carefully brought up, and a stranger to all obscenity, know of such an application of the candle? By chance she is able to tell how she came by this information. While paddling a canoe on the Rhine, a boat passed her which contained some students, who were singing rapturously, or rather yelling: “When the Queen of Sweden, behind closed shutters, with the candles of Apollo…”
She does not hear or else understand the last word. Her husband was asked to give her the required explanation. These verses are then replaced in the dream-content by the innocent recollection of a task which she once performed clumsily at her boarding- school, because of the closed shutters. The connection between the theme of masturbation and that of impotence is clear enough. Apollo in the latent dream-content connects this dream with an earlier one in which the virgin Pallas figured. All this is obviously not innocent.
V.
Lest it may seem too easy a matter to draw conclusions from dreams concerning the dreamer’s real circumstances, I add another dream originating with the same person, which once more appears innocent. “I dreamt of doing something,” she relates, “which I actually did during the day, that is to say, I filled a little trunk so full of books that I had difficulty in closing it. My dream was just like the actual occurrence.” Here the dreamer herself emphasizes the correspondence between the dream and the reality. All such criticisms of the dream, and comments on the dream, although they have found a place in the waking thoughts, properly belong to the latent dream-content, as further examples will confirm. We are told, then, that what the dream relates has actually occurred during the day. It would take us too far afield to show how we arrive at the idea of making use of the English language to help us in the interpretation of this dream. Suffice it to say that it is again a question of a little box (cf. chap. IV, the dream of the dead child in the box) which has been filled so full that nothing can go into it.
In all these “innocent” dreams the sexual factor as the motive of the censorship is very prominent. But this is a subject of primary significance, which we must consider later.
