Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/175

Rh Rhine, another boat passes containing students who are singing or rather yelling, with great delight: "When the Queen of Sweden with closed shutters and the candles of Apollo..."

She does not hear or understand the last word. Her husband is asked to give her the required explanation. These verses are then replaced in the dream content by the harmless recollection of a command which she once executed clumsily at a girls' boarding school, this occurring by means of the common features closed shutters. The connection between the theme of onanism and that of impotence is clear enough. "Apollo" in the latent dream content connects this dream with an earlier one in which the virgin Pallas figured. All this is obviously not harmless.

IV. Lest it may seem too easy a matter to draw conclusions from dreams concerning the dreamer's real circumstances, I add another dream coming from the same person which likewise appears harmless. "I dreamt of doing something," she relates, "which I actually did during the day, that is to say, I filled a little trunk so full of books that I had difficulty in closing it. My dream was just like the actual occurrence." Here the person relating the dream herself attaches chief importance to the correspondence between the dream and reality. All such criticisms upon the dream and remarks about it, although they have secured a place in waking thought, regularly belong to the latent dream content, as later examples will further demonstrate We are told, then, that what the dream relates has actually taken place during the day. It would take us too far afield to tell how we reach the idea of using the English language to help us in the interpretation of this dream. Suffice it to say that it is again a question of a little box (cf. p. 130, the dream of the dead child in the box) which has been filled so full that nothing more can go into it. Nothing in the least sinister this time.

In all these "harmless" dreams the sexual factor as a motive for the exercise of the censor receives striking prominence. But this is a matter of primary importance, which we must postpone.

(b) Infantile Experiences as the Source of Dreams

As the third of the peculiarities of the dream content, we