Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/311

Rh ''them, and heaped up in a pile. The two maids go to fetch water, and must, as it were, step into a river, which reaches up to the house or into the yard.''

Then follows the main dream, which begins as follows: She is descending from a high place, over balustrades that are curiously fashioned, and she is glad that her dress doesn't get caught anywhere, &c. Now the introductory dream refers to the house of the lady's parents. Probably she has often heard from her mother the words which are spoken in the kitchen. The piles of unwashed dishes are taken from an unpretentious earthenware shop which was located in the same house. The second part of this dream contains an allusion to the dreamer's father, who always had a great deal to do with servant girls, and who later contracted a fatal disease during a flood—the house stood near the bank of a river. The thought which is concealed behind the introductory dream, then, is to this effect: "Because I was born in this house, under such limited and unlovely circumstances." The main dream takes up the same thought, and presents it in a form that has been altered by the tendency to wish-fulfilment: "I am of exalted origin." Properly then: "Because I was born in such low circumstances, my career has been so and so."

As far as I can see, the partition of a dream into two unequal portions does not always signify a causal relation between the thoughts of the two portions. It often appears as though the same material were being presented in the two dreams from different points of view; or as though the two dreams have proceeded from two separated centres in the dream material and their contents overlap, so that the object which is the centre of one dream has served in the other as an allusion, and vice versa. But in a certain number of cases a division into shorter fore-dreams and longer subsequent dreams actually signifies a causal relation between the two portions. The other method of representing causal relation is used with less abundant material and consists in the change of one image in the dream, whether a person or a thing, into another. It is only in cases where we witness this change taking place in the dream that any causal relation is asserted to exist, not where we merely notice that one thing has taken