Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/314

302 designation of King Charles I., "that man Charles Stuart"—the medical practitioner of his family, whose name was Stuart Rankings, and who had died when the patient was nine years old. Then came the memory of a painful scene, previously quite forgotten, in which the doctor had roughly extracted two teeth from the terror-stricken patient after forcibly gagging his mouth open; before he could accomplish this the doctor had had his left hand badly bitten. The date of this occurrence could from extrinsic evidence be referred to the patient's fifth year. From a number of reasons that cannot be given here it became clear that the dream thoughts altogether clustered around this childhood experience. The assailant in the dream was no other than the doctor whose treatment of the patient was nearly thirty years after his death thus fearfully revenged in the latter's dream. The play on his name Stuart Rankings (Rank-kings), which enabled him to become identified first with the Stuart King Charles, and then with Charles Stuart, and finally to be called in the dream plain Charles, is interesting. It should be added that the Dr. Charles Stuart mentioned above is a dental surgeon, who a week previously had in the patient's presence performed a painful tooth extraction on the latter's wife; on the day before the dream he had enquired of the patient concerning his wife's health. The identification of the man with the dog in the latter part of the dream was greatly over-determined. The doctor in question was a noted dog fancier, and had given the patient a fine collie to whom he became greatly attached; he led a very irregular life, and the patient often heard his father refer to him as a gay dog; finally he died "like a dog," from an accidental overdose of poison, in the presence of a number of people who were from ignorance powerless to render the slight assistance that would have saved his life.

The source of some dream material is to be found in somatic stimuli during sleep, though by no means so frequently as many writers maintain. They are, however, in no case the cause of the dream, but are merely woven into its fabric in exactly the same way as any other psychical material, and only when they fulfil certain conditions. The exaggerated claims sometimes made out for the importance of these stimuli are easily disproved by, for instance, the following considerations. A sleeper may react to a given somatic stimulation when this is of a lively nature, such as bad pain, in one of several different ways. In the first place he may altogether ignore it, as