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قراءة كتاب The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Volume 10
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
years, and I never was especially addicted to them. Two years ago I made an introductory study of dreams,[1] and at that time dreamed profusely, but recently I have been dreaming very rarely, and when I do dream the experiences are not at all vivid. I use the term "nightmare" in a somewhat popular sense to mean a painful or frightful dream accompanied by physical disturbances, such as heart flutter and disturbances of breathing, and followed on awakening by a certain amount of the painful emotion which was a part of the dream. Accepting this definition, the experience which I have to relate was a typical nightmare. A few words of explanation are necessary to give the proper setting for the experience. At present I am teaching in the summer school at this place and my wife is visiting her folks; during her absence, in order to keep from getting too lonesome, I invited one of the young men in the summer school to come and room with me and keep me company. With this as an explanation, I shall copy the original account of the dream as nearly as possible, making a few corrections of the barbarous language I used in the half-asleep state.
[1] At Clark University, 1912-1913.
On the night of August 9, 1914, I went to bed at 11.40 o'clock and was soon asleep. About 3.40 in the morning, the young man, F. K. S., roused me and I awoke weak, scared, and with a fluttering heart; he said I had been making a distressing sort of noise, but he could not distinguish any words. Immediately, I judged that the dream was caused by my lying on my back, and in an uncomfortable position. As a rule I do not sleep on my back, but for some reason I had gone to sleep that way this time. Also, it had been raining when I went to bed, and I had put the windows down, and the ventilation was bad.
The dream, as nearly as it was remembered, was as follows: I was with somebody in a buggy and we drove down a hill, across a little stream, and up the other hill, where we arrived at our destination. I seemed to find trouble in getting a place to hitch, and I had to take the horse out of the buggy and I think take the harness off. I distinctly remember that in the dream this was a hardship to me, as it would have been in waking life, for I am not a good hand with horses, and do not like to work with them. All this is very hazy to me, and I do not know with whom I was driving, but think it was a lady, possibly my wife. There were other people at this place and other horses and buggies. (Could it be called a case of reversion to childhood, in that there were only horses and buggies and no automobiles?) There is a break in the dream here, and we were within some kind of a building where there was a crowd of people. As it seems now, we were around some kind of a rotunda, but this is very vague. The important part seems to be that there were two people, a man and a woman, who were talking very stealthily and earnestly to each other, and they soon drew me into the conversation. It runs in my head now that the man was my father (who has been dead for some years), though I am not sure about this, while there is no recollection of who the woman was. Now it appeared that there was some woman in the crowd who had some peculiar evil influence over every one and whom everybody feared. This man and woman were planning to slip off from this wicked woman and meet me and the one with me on the road, and in some way, which is not now clear, we were to circumvent this bad woman and break her power. The man explained and explained to me that we were to meet at certain springs which were at the side of the road, but it seemed that I could not get it into my head where they were, and I was afraid I would not stop at the right place. At last I thought I knew where he meant, and told him that I would stop there and wait until he came up, but then I happened to think that he might be ahead of me anyhow, and could stop and wait for me; then I was sure he would be ahead, for I remembered that I had to harness and hitch up the horse and his was all ready. And now we seemed to be getting our horses, and I remarked to him that I was not a bit good hand at working with horses, and he expressed his sympathy that I had this work to do.
Here was a second break in the dream, and I was standing in a hallway, looking through a window into a room. In this room sat my wife and the evil woman whom everybody feared. She had learned our play (I was conscious of this in the dream), and was determined to have her revenge, and prevent us carrying out our plan. She had hypnotized my wife, and had her scared so that she was in great mental agony. I heard her saying, "Now you are a big black cat," or something much like this, at any rate making her think she was a cat and at the same time leaving her partly conscious of who she was. This woman looked exactly like a woman who lives in the neighborhood where my wife is now visiting and of whom she has always been somewhat afraid because of her sharp tongue and unpleasant ways. Immediately, I was filled with a great fear for my wife and with a raging anger against the woman. I broke out into calling her all kinds of names, especially saying, "You devil, you devil," and trying to get through the window to her. I tore out the screen, but had a great deal of difficulty in doing so. When I had finally succeeded in tearing the screen out, I threw it at her head, but she did not dodge, but sat boldly upright and seemed to defy me. Then I tried to jump through the window to get to her, but was so weak that I could not do so; this seems strange since the window was not more than three feet from the floor. I was making unsuccessful attempts to get through, and was railing at the woman when S. awoke me. I awoke weak, and for some time continued to feel frightened, though not enough so to keep me from talking and writing out the dream. I got up and put up the windows (since the rain had stopped), and about this time a very fair explanation of parts of the dream came to me. I immediately told it to S., in order to keep from forgetting it, and then decided to write it down, which I proceeded to do.
Parts of the dream seem to analyze very nicely, but there are parts which seem to resist analysis; I did not try to force the analysis but gave only the part which came spontaneously. In the first part of the dream I was driving in a buggy, I crossed a creek and had trouble with unharnessing a horse. Several times recently, I have mentioned the fact that I never liked to work with horses, even when on the farm at home. I do not remember of having mentioned this fact on the day of the dream, but Mr. C. had stopped in to call on me that evening and had mentioned that he drove in in a buggy. I had not seen the buggy and had wondered what he did with it, and had not remembered to ask him. He had also told me that he was going to a place called Yellow Springs; I knew about where Yellow Springs are, but could not quite place them and had tried to figure out what direction he would go. This seemed to come out very clearly in the dream, when I was trying to find out where these unknown springs by the side of the road were. I had related during the evening how I recently fell into a creek with my clothes on and this probably accounted for the creek over which I drove in the dream. In the dim second part of the dream, the rotunda seems to have resembled the chapel of the new college building which is being builded, and about which I was talking that afternoon.
The last part of the dream seems to have been the important part, and in it several of the Freudian mechanisms show up very plainly. Just before going to bed, I had read an article about Vera Cheberiak, the Russian murderess of the Mendel Beilis case, and how she is now engaged in suing different people for slander. The article had described her as coolly and impudently sitting up in court and seeming to realize her power over her enemies, and it had also made a point of the great fear in which she is held. I had


