Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/304

292 painter whose work (oil paintings, Ol is German for oil) has struck me in the Louvre, and also of a particular Flemish friend: two days previously I had seen in the hospital a Dutchman with a very similar name. In short, turn which way I would, all parts of the dream stubbornly refused to associate themselves with anything but Netherland topics, the analysis of which resolutely led in only one direction.

(3) A patient, a woman of thirty-seven, dreamt that ''she was sitting in a grand stand as though to watch some spectacle. A military band approached, playing a gay martial air. It was at the head of a funeral, which seemed to be of a Mr. X; the casket rested on a draped gun carriage. She had a lively feeling of astonishment at the absurdity of making such an ado about the death of so insignificant a person. Behind followed the dead man' s brother and one of his sisters, and behind them his two other sisters; they were incongruously dressed in a bright grey check. The brother advanced ^like a savage" dancing and waving his arms; on his back was a yucca tree with a number of young blossoms''. This dream is a good example of the second of the three types mentioned above, being perfectly clear and yet apparently impossible to fit into the patient's waking mental life. The true meaning of it, however, became only too clear on analysis. The figure of Mr. X veiled that of her husband. Both men had promised much when they were young, but the hopes their friends had built on them had not been fulfilled; the one had ruined his health and career by his addiction to morphia, the other by his addiction to alcohol. Under the greatest stress of emotion the patient related that her husband's alcoholic habits had completely alienated her wifely feeling for him, and that in his drunken moments he even inspired her with an intense physical loathing. In the dream her repressed wish that he would die was realised by picturing the funeral of a third person whose career resembled that of her husband's, and who like her husband, had one brother and three sisters. Further than this, her almost savage contempt for her husband, which arose from his lack of ambition and other more intimate circumstances, came to expression in the dream by her reflecting how absurd it was that any one should make an ado over the death of such a nonentity, and by the gaiety shown at his funeral not only by all the world (the gay air of the band; her husband is, by the way, an officer in the volunteers, while Mr. X has no connection with the army), but even by his nearest relative (the brother's dancing, the bright clothes). It is noteworthy that no wife appeared in the dream, though Mr. X is married, a fact that illustrates the frequent projection on to others of sentiments that the subject himself experiences but repudiates.