Whenever one and the same motive, with perhaps slight variations, recurs frequently in dreams we may assume that it is the leading motive of the dreamer’s waking life. Whenever a person plays a dominant part in our dreaming, we can rest assured that that person dominates and directs our behaviour directly or indirectly.

A man of forty-five, suffering from dizziness, was sent to me by his family physician after numberless tests had failed to attribute his illness to a “physical” cause. The patient had been troubled for two years with vertigo, which he insisted on attributing to arteriosclerosis (against the advice of several physicians). His legs had become very weak and unsteady. He had developed a deep sense of worthlessness and was haunted by suicidal ideas.

My query as to his most frequent dream elicited the answer:

“I dream very frequently of my father.”

His father had died two years before, from arteriosclerosis, and his main complaint had been dizziness, weakness of the legs and depression. To any one but the patient, the psychological connection between his illness and his father’s illness would have been obvious. He, too, saw some connection between the two, only he placed upon that fact a more sinister construction. The heredity bogey was terrifying him. His father had bequeathed his illness to him, and he was to die as his father had died.

It came out in the course of the analysis that he had been from infancy his father’s constant companion, working for him till he was over forty years of age. Although he had always been fond of women, he had never thought of marrying until his father died. After reciting the usual arguments of the average bachelor directed against matrimony, he confessed that he had never had the courage to bring to his home any young woman he liked and who might have become his wife. Fear of his father’s sarcastic remarks set to nought any plans he might have made for a home of his own.

After his father’s death, he went half-heartedly into various business ventures of which his father would have disapproved and he naturally lost his investment. Every time he met with a reverse, he would be tortured by remorse. “This is my father’s money which I have been squandering.” “My father would be furious if he knew what I have done.”

He would then dream that his father stalked past him, cold, indifferent, stern, and he “knew” his father had “come back” to show him his resentment.

The superficial symptoms of the patient’s trouble were easily removed when he acquired enough insight to realize that he had been imitating all of his father’s attitudes and repressing his own ego.

Physical exercise soon restored to his legs the steadiness which they had lost while the patient, imitating his father’s helplessness, would sit in his father’s chair day after day, never taking a walk. A more critical attitude of mind toward the father whom he worshipped, removed gradually the sense of worthlessness which had almost lead him to suicide.

Suicide to him was the road that led back to his father, upon whom he wished to shift his responsibilities, and for whom he wished to work (as a younger man), etc.

The case was much more complicated but the few details of it which I have presented are sufficient to show the close connection which existed between the patient’s most frequent dream and his imaginary neurotic goal.

A homosexual patient always dreamt of her stepmother whom her father married when she, the patient, was only twelve years of age. That marriage was the culmination of a complicated family tragedy, double divorce, unsavoury publicity, bitterness and hostility, puritanical gossip about sex, passion, etc., which made on the child an indelible impression.

She felt obscurely then that relations between sexes were something unutterably filthy and while she liked a few boys in her flapper days, she could not master a feeling of disgust whenever their attitude reminded her of the “nasty” things which had wrecked her family.

On the other hand, the pretty young woman whom her father introduced into his home, personified in her thoughts sexual attraction in its most irresistible form, a symbol of sin and bliss. To this day she has love affair after love affair with women, every affair followed by a “nervous breakdown” in which she repents her immorality and experiences terrible remorse. At every stay in a sanitarium, however, dreams of her stepmother, representing veiled and symbolized homosexual situations, obsess her night after night. In one of those dreams she took the place of her father and married the young woman, after which the hostility of the family, manifesting itself in various forms, transformed the pleasant fancy into a painful anxiety dream.

Another patient, tyrannized over by an aunt who had brought her up, would, whenever an emergency arose and she had to take a decision, dream of the severe, forbidding aunt and feel so depressed the next day that she could not accomplish anything and thus postponed the solution of her difficulties.

In certain cases, a recurring dream may bear a strange likeness to a splitting of the personality such as we observed in cases of dual personalities.

The famous Rosegger dream, analysed by Freud and Maeder, should be reanalysed in the light of the statements made in the previous chapters. Rosegger went through a hard mental struggle from which he emerged victorious, but the recurring dream he relates in his book “Waldheimat” tells us much about the trials of a little tailor who managed to make a place for himself in the artistic world but for a long while felt out of place in his new environment.

“I usually enjoy a sound sleep,” Rosegger writes, “but many a night I have no rest. I lead side by side with my life as student and littÉrateur, the shadow life of a tailor’s apprentice. This I have dragged with me through long years, like a ghost, without being able to get rid of it.... Whenever I dreamed, I was the tailor’s apprentice, ... working without compensation in my master’s workshop.... I felt I did not belong there any more ... and regretted the loss of time in which I could have employed myself more usefully.... How happy I was to wake up after such tedious hours! I resolved that if this insistent dream should come again, I would throw it off and shout: ‘This is only a make believe. I am in bed and wish to sleep.’ Yet the next time I was again in the tailor’s workshop. One night, at last, the master said to me: ‘You have no talent for tailoring. You can go, you are dismissed.’ I was so frightened by this that I awoke.”

Freud compares this dream with a similar dream which pestered him for years and in which he saw himself as a young physician, working in a laboratory, making analyses and unable as yet to earn a regular living. This is his interpretation of it:

“I had as yet no standing and did not know how to make ends meet; but just then it was clear to me that I might have the choice of several women whom I could have married. I was young again in the dream and she was young too, the wife who had shared with me all those years of hardship.

“This betrayed the unconscious dream agent as being one of the insistent gnawing wishes of the aging man. The fight between vanity and self-criticism, waged in other psychic layers, had decided the dream content, but only the deeper rooted wish for youth had made it possible as a dream. Often, awake, we say to ourselves: Everything is all right as it is today and those were hard times, but it was fine at that time. You are still young.”

Maeder, of Zurich, refuses to accept such a simple explanation and offers a more complicated one, burdened, like many psychological interpretations of the Swiss school, with ethical considerations.

“By his own efforts,” Maeder writes, “Rosegger had worked himself up to a high position in life. This has made him proud and vain, two faults which easily disturb mankind, for they cause a man to suffer in the presence of superiors and place him in a parvenu position among the lowly.... Deep down, there takes place, in the sensitive poet, a gradual elaboration, a development of the moral personality.... The long series of tormenting dreams shows us the development of the psychic process which ends in a deep but effective humiliation of the dreamer.... His being sent away, dismissed, symbolizes in my opinion, the overcoming of the pride and vanity of the upstart.”

I agree with Freud on the wish for youth expressed by Rosegger’s dream and fulfilled by way of a regression. But neither Freud, bent on introducing a sexual element into his interpretation, nor Maeder, overfond of moralizing, seem to have realized the tremendous meaning of such a series of dreams, culminating as they did in a changed attitude to life.

I have shown in another book, “Psychoanalysis and Behavior,” that in cases of dual personalities, the second personality is always one that leads a simpler, less arduous life, fraught with lesser responsibilities, than the normal life led by the first personality. The Rev. Ansel Bourne, being tired and needing rest, was transformed for several weeks into A. Brown, a fruit dealer in a small town far away from his home. Miss Beauchamp, prim, overconsciencious, repressed, became the irresponsible Sallie, devoid of manners or taste. The Rev. Thomas Carson Hanna, overworked and a spiritual disciplinarian, woke up from a fit of unconsciousness a newborn baby, helpless and in-organized.

Rosegger, rising from manual to intellectual labour, compelled to adapt himself to the mannerisms of a different world, and to adopt a new set of social habits and customs for which his bringing up in a proletarian home had not prepared him, compelled also to ransack his brain constantly for new ideas to express or for new forms in which to clothe old ideas, may have at times regretted unconsciously the simpler life of a tailor, less rich in egotistical satisfactions but more comfortable intellectually and requiring infinitely less ingenuity.

And some of the remarks which he appends to his dream, confirm my suspicions.

What does he say of his awakening? “I felt as if I had just newly recovered this idylically sweet life of mine, peaceful, poetical, spiritualized, in which so often I had realized human happiness to the uttermost.”

Undoubtedly he had for a long while failed to enjoy it and unconsciously planned to escape from it through a regression to his former estate.

Several lines further down the page we find this statement which is, I think, absolutely conclusive proof of what his mental attitude had been and of the crisis he had lived through.

“I no longer dream of my tailoring days which in their way were so jolly in their simplicity and without demands.”

Rosegger’s dream is one of those morbid manifestations which enable us to follow a neurotic struggle going on within the organism, a struggle for adaptation to life, a struggle of which the subject is consciously ignorant, because he has burnt his bridges and has repressed the most fleeting thought of a possible change.

Rosegger must have smarted under the demands of his new life, but it was out of the question for him to do anything else. The conflict, however, played itself off in his dreams, offering a solution of a regressive type. When, years later, the tailor’s adaptation to the life of a writer was completed, his master dismissed him. The dream solution was no longer needed.

Recurring dreams often give us valuable indications of physical trouble which should be investigated and remedied at once. Even in ancient times, the relation between recurring dreams of physical disability and some physical disability setting in at a later date had been noticed. In those days, however, the interpretation of such dreams was that the vision was a warning sent by the gods, or that the vision was responsible for the subsequent trouble. We read for instance of a man who dreamt that he had a stone leg. A few days later paralysis set in.

In discussing dental dreams I have pointed out the importance of having the denture examined for possible pus pockets.

Dreams of animals gnawing at some organ may indicate a cancer developing in that region. Dreams of exhaustion from climbing hills often denote heart disease.

H. Addington Bruce had for several months had the same dream: a cat was clawing at his throat. Examination of the throat revealed a small growth which required immediate surgical intervention. The cat never came back.