Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/217

 wife had the following dream: She dreamt, and this is the whole dream: “Luke 137.” The analysis of the number gives the following. To 1 she associates: The doctor has another child. He had three. If all her children were living she would have 7; now she has only 3 — 1 = 2. But she desires 1 + 3 + 7 = 11 (a twin number, 1 and 1), which expresses her wish that her two children had been pairs of twins, for then she would have reached the same number of children as the doctor. Her mother once had twins. The hope of getting a child by her husband is very precarious; this had for a long time turned her ideas in the unconscious towards a second marriage. Other phantasies pictured her as “done with,” i.e. having reached the climacteric at 44. She is now 33 years old, therefore in 11 years she will have reached her 44th year. This is an important period as her father died in his 44th year. Her phantasy of the 44th year contains the idea of the death of her father. The emphasis of the death of her father corresponds to the repressed phantasy of the death of her husband, who is the obstacle to a second marriage. At this place the material belonging to the dream “Luke 137” comes in to solve the conflict. The dreamer is, one soon discovers, in no wise well up in her Bible, she has not read her Bible for an incredible time, she is not at all religious. It were therefore quite purposeless to have recourse to associations here. The dreamer’s ignorance of her Bible is so great that she did not even know that the citation “Luke 137” could only refer to the Gospel of St. Luke. When she turned up the New Testament she came to the Acts of the Apostles. As chapter i. has only 26 verses and not 37, she took the 7th verse, “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.”

But if we turn to Luke i. 37, we find the Annunciation of the Virgin.

Verse 35. The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.