I here insert the promised flower-dream of a female patient, in which I shall print in Roman type everything which is to be sexually interpreted. This beautiful dream lost all its charm for the dreamer once it had been interpreted.
(a) Preliminary dream: She goes to the two maids in the kitchen and scolds them for taking so long to prepare a little bite of food. She also sees a very large number of heavy kitchen utensils in the kitchen, heaped into piles and turned upside down in order to drain. Later addition: The two maids go to fetch water, and have, as it were, to climb into a river which reaches up to the house or into the courtyard. *
* For the interpretation of this preliminary dream, which is to be regarded as casual, see earlier in this chapter, C.
(b) Main dream: * She is descending from a height *(2) over curiously constructed railings, or a fence which is composed of large square trellis-work hurdles with small square apertures. *(3) It is really not adapted for climbing; she is constantly afraid that she cannot find a place for her foot, and she is glad that her dress doesn’t get caught anywhere, and that she is able to climb it so respectably. *(4) As she climbs she is carrying a big branch in her hand, *(5) really like a tree, which is thickly studded with red flowers; a spreading branch, with many twigs. *(6) With this is connected the idea of cherry-blossoms (Bluten = flowers), but they look like fully opened camellias, which of course do not grow on trees. As she is descending, she first has one, then suddenly two, and then again only one. *(7) When she has reached the ground the lower flowers have already begun to fall. Now that she has reached the bottom she sees an “odd man” who is combing- as she would like to put it- just such a tree, that is, with a piece of wood he is scraping thick bunches of hair from it, which hang from it like moss. Other men have chopped off such branches in a garden, and have flung them into the road, where they are lying about, so that a number of people take some of them. But she asks whether this is right, whether she may take one, too. *(8) In the garden there stands a young man (he is a foreigner, and known to her) toward whom she goes in order to ask him how it is possible to transplant such branches in her own garden. *(9) He embraces her, whereupon she struggles and asks him what he is thinking of, whether it is permissible to embrace her in such a manner. He says there is nothing wrong in it, that it is permitted. *(10) He then declares himself willing to go with her into the other garden, in order to show her how to put them in, and he says something to her which she does not quite understand: “Besides this I need three metres (later she says: square metres) or three fathoms of ground.” It seems as though he were asking her for something in return for his willingness, as though he had the intention of indemnifying (reimbursing) himself in her garden, as though he wanted to evade some law or other, to derive some advantage from it without causing her an injury. She does not know whether or not he really shows her anything.
* Her career.
*(2) Exalted origin, the wish-contrast to the preliminary dream.
*(3) A composite formation, which unites two localities, the so- called garret (German: Boden = “floor,” “garret”) of her father’s house, in which she used to play with her brother, the object of her later phantasies, and the farm of a malicious uncle, who used to tease her.
*(4) Wish-contrast to an actual memory of her uncle’s farm, to the effect that she used to expose herself while she was asleep.
*(5) Just as the angel bears a lily-stem in the Annunciation.
*(6) For the explanation of this composite formation, see earlier in this chapter, C.; innocence, menstruation, La Dame aux Camelias.
*(7) Referring to the plurality of the persons who serve her phantasies.
*(8) Whether it is permissible to masturbate. [Sich einem herunterreissen means "to pull off" and colloquially "to masturbate."- TR.]
*(9) The branch (Ast) has long been used to represent the male organ, and, moreover, contains a very distinct allusion to the family name of the dreamer.
*(10) Refers to the matrimonial precautions, as does that which immediately follows.
The above dream, which has been given prominence on account of its symbolic elements, may be described as a biographical dream. Such dreams occur frequently in psychoanalysis, but perhaps only rarely outside it. *
* An analogous biographical dream is recorded later in this chapter, among the examples of dream symbolism.
I have, of course, an abundance of such material, but to reproduce it here would lead us too far into the consideration of neurotic conditions. Everything points to the same conclusion, namely, that we need not assume that any special symbolizing activity of the psyche is operative in dream-formation; that, on the contrary, the dream makes use of such symbolizations as are to be found ready-made in unconscious thinking, since these, by reason of their case of representation, and for the most part by reason of their being exempt from the censorship, satisfy more effectively the requirements of dream-formation.
