Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/335

Rh and the scene of the obvious dream was shifted to the animal kingdom. Memory images of human executions serves as a connecting link for this displacement.

This example gives me the opportunity to repeat that, with few exceptions, the conscious dream-content is not the true reproduction of our dream thoughts, but only a displaced wrongly accented caricature, whose original can only be reconstructed by the help of psychoanalysis.

It is a noteworthy phenomenon of dream work that the material of abstract thought, the concept, is capable of presentation in the dream only little or not at all, that rather the dream as it were dramatizes thoughts only in optic or acoustic senseimages, changes them to scenes enacted on a stage, and in this way brings them to presentation. Freud characterizes very strikingly the difficulty which this necessity of working only with concrete material imposes upon the dream, when he says that the dream itself has to turn the thoughts of a political editorial into illustrations.

Dreams are fond of using ambiguous words and interpretations of all sorts of expressions in concrete or metaphorical senses in order to make abstract concepts and thoughts capable of presentation and so of inclusion in the dream.

The memory of every halfway educated man contains a large number of proverbs, quotations, modes of expression, parables, fragments of verse and so forth. The content of these offers an ever present, very suitable material which can be applied to the scenic presentation of a thought or to an allusion to it. I will attempt to explain this by a series of examples. One of my patients related to me the following dream; "I go into a great park, walking on a long path. I cannot see the end of the path or of the garden hedge, but I think I will go on until I arrive at the end." The park and hedge of the dream resembled the garden of one of her aunts, with whom she had passed many happy holidays of her youth. She remembers in connection with this aunt that they customarily shared the same chamber, but when her uncle was at home the guest was "put out" into a neighboring room. The girl at that time only had a very fragmentary conception of the affairs of sex, and tried often by peeping through cracks in the door and through the keyhole, to find out what was going on within.

The wish to get to the end of the hedge symbolized in this dream the wish to get to the bottom of what was going on between the married pair. This wish was moreover determined by an experience of the day before.