therefore, as if she had said, "Please don't look in this direction; it won't pay." Thus "box" develops into "chest," or breast-box ("bust"), and the interpretation of the dream leads directly to a time in her bodily development when she was dissatisfied with her shape. It also leads to earlier periods, if we take into consideration "disgusting" and "bad tone," and remember how often in allusions and in dreams the two small hemispheres of the feminine body take the place—as a substitute and as an antithesis—of the large ones.
II. I may interrupt this dream to insert a brief harmless dream of a young man. He dreamt that he was putting on his winter overcoat again, which was terrible. The occasion for this dream is apparently the cold weather, which has recently set in again. On more careful examination we note that the two short portions of the dream do not fit together well, for what is there "terrible" about wearing a heavy or thick coat in the cold? Unfortunately for the harmlessness of this dream, the first idea educed in analysis is the recollection that on the previous day a lady had secretly admitted to him that her last child owed its existence to the bursting 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 an "overcoat" (Ueberzieher), for it is put over something; Ueberzieher is also the name given in German to a thin overcoat. An experience like the one related by the lady would indeed be "terrible" for an unmarried man.—We may now return to our other harmless dreamer.
III. She puts a candle into a candlestick; but the candle is broken, so that it does not stand straight. The girls at school say she is clumsy; the young lady 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. A transparent symbolism has been employed here. The candle is an object which excites the feminine genitals; its being broken, so that it does not stand straight, 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 this application of the candle? She happens to be able to tell how she came by this information. While riding in a boat on the
