II. A similar case: One of my patients has a dream which seems interesting to him, for he says to himself immediately after awakening: "I must tell that to the doctor." The dream is analysed, and shows the most distinct allusion to an affair in which he had become involved during the treatment, and of which he had decided to tell me nothing."[1]
III. Here is a third example from my own experience:
I go to the hospital with P. through a region in which houses and gardens occur. With this comes the idea that I have already seen this region in dreams several times. I do not know my way very well; P. shows me a way which leads through a corner to a restaurant (a room, not a garden); here I ask for Mrs. Doni, and I hear that she is living in the background in a little room with three children. I go there, and while on the way I meet an indistinct person with my two little girls, whom I take with me after I have stood with them for a while. A kind of reproach against my wife for having left them there.
Upon awakening I feel great satisfaction, the cause for this being the fact that I am now going to learn from the analysis what is meant by the idea "I have already dreamed of that."[2] But the analysis of the dream teaches me nothing on the subject; it only shows me that the satisfaction belongs to the latent dream content, and not to my judgment upon the dream. It is satisfaction over the fact that I have had children by my marriage. P. is a person in whose company I walked the path of life for a certain space, but who has since far outdistanced me socially and materially—whose marriage, however, has remained childless. The two occasions for the dream furnishing the proof of this may be found by means of complete analysis. On the previous day I had read in the paper the obituary notice of a certain Mrs. Dona Ay (out of which I make Doni), who had died in childbirth; I was told by my wife that the dead woman had been nursed by the same midwife she herself had had at the birth of our two
- ↑ The injunction or purpose contained in the dream, "I must tell that to the doctor," which occurs in dreams that are dreamed in the course of psycho-analytical treatment, regularly corresponds to a great resistance to the confession involved in the dream, and is not infrequently followed by forgetting of the dream.
- ↑ A subject about which an extensive discussion has taken place in the volumes of the Revue Philosophique—(Paramnesia in the Dream).
