strengthened by the servant girl. I had just finished my usual hurried visit to the patient when the servant confronted me in the ante-room and observed: "You might as well have wiped your shoes to-day, doctor, before you came into the room. The red carpet is all dirty again from your feet." This is the whole claim which the flight of stairs and the servant-girl can make for appearing in my dream.
An intimate connection exists between my flying over the stairs and my spitting on the stairs. Pharyngitis and diseases of the heart are both said to be punishments for the vice of smoking, on account of which vice, of course, I do not enjoy a reputation for great neatness with my housekeeper in the one house any more than in the other, both of which the dream fuses into a single image.
I must postpone the further interpretation of this dream until I can give an account of the origin of the typical dream of incomplete dress. I only note as a preliminary result from the dream which has just been cited that the dream sensation of inhibited action is always aroused at a point where a certain connection requires it. A peculiar condition of my motility during sleep cannot be the cause of this dream content, for a moment before I saw myself hurrying over the steps with ease, as though in confirmation of this fact.
(d) Typical Dreams
In general we are not in a position to interpret the dream of another person if he is unwilling to furnish us with the unconscious thoughts which lie behind the dream content, and for this reason the practical applicability of our method of dream interpretation is seriously curtailed.[1] But there are a certain number of dreams—in contrast with the usual freedom displayed by the individual in fashioning his dream world with characteristic peculiarity, and thereby making it unintelligible—which almost every one has dreamed in the same manner, and of which we are accustomed to assume that they have the same significance in the case of every dreamer. A peculiar
- ↑ An exception is furnished by those cases in which the dreamer utilises in the expression of his latent dream thoughts the symbols which are familiar to us.
