Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/336

324 Another patient dreamed of the corridor of the girls' boarding school in which she was educated. She saw her own closet there, and desired to open it, but could not find the key, so that she was forced to break the door. But as she violently opened the door, it became evident that there was nothing within. The whole dream proved to be a symbolic masturbation-phantasy, a memory from the time of puberty; the female genitals were, as so often happens, presented as a closet. But the supplement to the dream, "there is nothing within" (es ist nichts darin) means in the Hungarian language the same as the German expression "it is no matter" (es ist nichts daran), and is a sort of exculpation or self-consolation of this sufferer from a bad conscience.

Another girl, whose neurosis was brought on by the death of her brother, who, according to her view, married too early and was not happy in his marriage, dreamed continually of the dead man. Once she saw him lying in his grave, but the head was turned to one side in a peculiar manner, or the skull had grown to a bough; another time she saw him in his childhood dress on an elevation from which he had to jump down. All this symbolism was a complaint against the wife and the father-in-law of the dead man, who turned the boy's head, when he was almost a child, and in the end made him "jump down" (which is a pure Hungarian idiom), and with all that did not consider him as their equal, for they once called him, referring to his modest origin, "one fallen from a bough" (again a Hungarian idiom).

Very often falling from a great height pictures in a concrete way the threat of ethical or material fall; with girls sitting may mean spinsterhood (Sitzenbleiben); with men a great basket may mean the fear of an unsuccessful wooing. It occurs still more commonly that the human body is symbolized by a house, whose windows and doors symbolize the natural openings of the body. My patient who suffered from sexual impotence made use of a trivial Hungarian expression for coitus, namely the word "to shoot," and dreamed very often of shooting, missing fire, the rusting of his firearms, and so forth.

It would be an enticing problem to assemble the fragments of dreams which can be explained symbolically and to write a modern dreambook, in which the explanation could be found for the separate parts of dreams. But this is not possible, for although much typical material recurs in dreams and in most cases can be rightly explained without analysis, symbols may have different meanings with different individuals, and even with the same individual at different times. Accordingly, if we wish to know in any particular case all the determinants of the single dream fragments there is nothing left for us but