one-sidedness, that of intellectual development may be referred to. Does it not seem as though the scene in the dream, with all its madness, were putting its negative on just this anxiety? After the child has said his word of parting on the one side, he calls out its opposite on the other side, as though in order to establish an equilibrium. He is acting, as it were, in obedience to bilateral symmetry!
Thus the dream frequently has the profoundest meaning in places where it seems most absurd. In all ages those who had something to say and were unable to say it without danger to themselves gladly put on the cap and bells. The listener for whom the forbidden saying was intended was more likely to tolerate it if he was able to laugh at it, and to flatter himself with the comment that what he disliked was obviously something absurd. The dream proceeds in reality just as the prince does in the play who must counterfeit the fool, and hence the same thing may be said of the dream which Hamlet says of himself, substituting an unintelligible witticism for the real conditions: "I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw."[1]
Thus my solution of the problem of the absurdity of dreams is that the dream thoughts are never absurd—at least not those belonging to the dreams of sane persons—and that the dream activity produces absurd dreams and dreams with individual absurd elements if criticism, ridicule, and derision in the dream thoughts are to be represented by it in its manner of expression. My next concern is to show that the dream activity is primarily brought about by the co-operation of the three factors which have been mentioned—and of a fourth one which remains to be cited—that it accomplishes nothing short of a transposition of the dream thoughts, observing the three conditions which are prescribed for it, and that the question whether the mind operates in the dream with all its faculties, or only with a portion of them, is deprived
- ↑ This dream also furnishes a good example for the general thesis that dreams of the same night, even though they be separated in memory, spring from the same thought material. The dream situation in which I am rescuing my children from the city of Rome, moreover, is disfigured by a reference to an episode belonging to my childhood. The meaning is that I envy certain relatives who years ago had occasion to transplant their children to another soil.
