Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/272

254 the end, and to the experienced interpreter it becomes evident that in the second scene of the dream the influence of another subject has begun to assert itself; in this his father's business and his dishonest practices signify the first vagina represented as a shaft so that one might think of a reference to the mother.

4. The male genital symbolised by persons and the female by a landscape.

(Dream of a woman of the lower class, whose husband is a policeman, reported by B. Dattner.)

...Then someone broke into the house and anxiously called for a policeman. But he went with two tramps by mutual consent into a church, to which led a great many stairs; behind the church there was a mountain, on top of which a dense forest. The policeman was furnished with a helmet, a gorget, and a cloak. The two vagrants, who went along with the policeman quite peaceably, had tied to their loins sack-like aprons. A road led from the church to the mountain. This road was overgrown on each side with grass and brushwood, which became thicker and thicker as it reached the height of the mountain, where it spread out into quite a forest.

5. A stairway dream.

(Reported and interpreted by Otto Rank.)

For the following transparent pollution dream, I am indebted to the same colleague who furnished us with the dental-irritation dream reported on p. 235.

"I am running down the stairway in the stair-house after a little girl, whom I wish to punish because she has done something to me. At the bottom of the stairs some one held the child for me. (A grown-up woman?) I grasp it, but do not know whether I have hit it, for I suddenly find myself in the middle of the stairway where I practise coitus with the child (in the air as it were). It is really no coitus, I only rub my genital on her external genital, and in doing this I see it very distinctly, as distinctly as I see her head which is lying