to deny that the semblance of absurdity is one which is desired and has been purposely brought about.[1]
III. In the example which I now cite I can detect the dream activity in the act of purposely manufacturing an absurdity for which there is no occasion at all in the subject-matter. It is taken from the dream that I had as a result of meeting Count Thun before my vacation trip. "I am riding in a one-horse carriage, and give orders to drive to a railway station. 'Of course I cannot ride with you on the railway line itself,' I say, after the driver made an objection as though I had tired him out; at the same time it seems as though I had already driven with him for a distance which one usually rides on the train." For this confused and senseless story the analysis gives the following explanation: During the day I had hired
- ↑ The frequency with which in the dream dead persons appear as living, act, and deal with us, has called forth undue astonishment and given rise to strange explanations, from which our ignorance of the dream becomes strikingly evident. And yet the explanation for these dreams lies very close at hand. How often we have occasion to think: "If father were still alive, what would he say to it?" The dream can express this if in no other way than by present time in a definite situation. Thus, for instance, a young man, whose grandfather has left him a great inheritance, dreams that his grandfather is alive and demands an accounting of him, upon an occasion when the young man had been reproached for making too great an expenditure of money. What we consider a resistance to the dream—the objection made by our better knowledge, that after all the man is already dead—is in reality a consolation, because the dead person did not have this or that experience, or satisfaction at the knowledge that he has nothing more to say.
Another form of absurdity found in dreams of deceased relatives does not express folly and absurdity, but serves to represent the most extreme rejection; as the representation of a repressed thought which one would gladly have appear as something least thought of. Dreams of this kind are only solvable if one recalls that the dream makes no distinction between things desired and realities. Thus, for example, a man who nursed his father during his sickness, and who felt his death very keenly, sometime afterward dreamed the following senseless dream: The father was again living, and conversed with him. as usual, but (the remarkable thing about it) he had nevertheless died, though he did not know it. This dream can be understood if after "he had nevertheless died," one inserts in consequence of the dreamer's wish, and if after "but he did not know it" one adds that the dreamer has entertained this wish. While nursing his father, the son often wishes his father's death; i.e. he entertained the really compassionate desire that death finally put an end to his suffering. While mourning after his death, this very wish of compassion became an unconscious reproach, as if it had really contributed to shorten the life of the sick man. Through the awakening of early infantile feelings against the father, it became possible to express this reproach as a dream; and it was just because of the world-wide contrast between the dream inciter and day thought that this dream had to come out so absurdly (cf. with this,"Formulierungen über die zwei Prizipien des seelischen Geschehens, Jahrbuch, Bleuler-Freud, III, 1, 1911).
