There are trivial, confused dreams and there are real dreams. The trivial dream bears the same relationship to the real as a column of gutter-press news-print to a folio page of a play of Shakespeare. The dreams are as varied as are the books we read, the pictures we look at, or the people we meet. “O dreams — we know where you Freudians think your dreams come from!” Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. A great many of them come from the same source as the script or Scripture, the Holy Writ or Word. And there too we read of Joseph, how his brethren scoffed, Behold this dreamer cometh.
With the Professor, I discussed a few real dreams, some intermediate dreams that contained real imagery or whose “hieroglyph” linked with authentic images, and some quaint, trivial, mocking dreams that danced, as it were, like masquerading sweeps and May queens round the Maypole. But the most luminous, the most clearly defined of all the dream-content while I was with the Professor was the dream of the Princess, as we called her.
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She was a dark lady. She wore a clear-colored robe, yellow or faint-orange. It was wrapped round her as in one piece, like a sari worn as only a high-caste Indian lady could wear it. But she is not Indian, she is Egyptian. She appears at the top of a long staircase; marble steps lead down to a river. She wears no ornament, no circlet or scepter shows her rank, but anyone would know this is a Princess. Down, down the steps she comes. She will not turn back, she will not stop, she will not alter the slow rhythm of her pace. She has nothing in her arms, there is no one with her; there is no extraneous object with her or about her or about the carved steps to denote any symbolic detail or side issue involved. There is no detail. The steps are geometrical, symmetrical and she is as abstract as a lady could be, yet she is a real entity, a real person. I, the dreamer, wait at the foot of the steps. I have no idea who I am or how I got there. There is no before or after, it is a perfect moment in time or out of time. I am concerned about something, however. I wait below the lowest step. There, in the water beside me, is a shallow basket or ark or box or boat. There is, of course, a baby nested in it. The Princess must find the baby. I know that she will find this child. I know that the baby will be protected and sheltered by her and that is all that matters.
We have all seen this picture. I pored over this picture as a child, before I could read, in our illustrated Doré Bible. But the black and white Doré illustration has nothing in common with this, except the subject. The name of this picture is Moses in the Bulrushes and the Professor of course knows that. The Professor and I discuss this picture. He asks if it is I, the dreamer, who am the baby in the reed basket? I don’t think I am. Do I remember if the picture as I knew it as a child had any other figure? I can’t remember. The Professor thinks there is the child Miriam, half concealed in the rushes; do I remember? I half remember. Am I, perhaps, the child Miriam? Or am I, after all, in my fantasy, the baby? Do I wish myself, in the deepest unconscious or subconscious layers of my being, to be the founder of a new religion?
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Any amateur dabbler with the theories of psychoanalysis can reconstruct, even from this so-far brief evidence, the motive or material or suppressed or repressed psychic urge that projected this dream-picture. There is the little girl with her doll in her father’s study. She has come to her father’s study to be alone or to be alone with him. Her brother’s interests are more lively and exterior and her brother does not enter readily into her doll-family games. He should be the dolls’ father or the dolls’ doctor, who is called in occasionally. But this does not interest him. He has soldiers and marbles and likes to race about, outdoors and indoors. Here in our father’s study, we must be quiet. A girl-child, a doll, an aloof and silent father form this triangle, this family romance, this trinity which follows the recognized religious pattern: Father, aloof, distant, the provider, the protector — but a little un-get-at-able, a little too far away and giant-like in proportion, a little chilly withal; Mother, a virgin, the Virgin, that is, an untouched child, adoring, with faith, building a dream, and the dream is symbolized by the third member of the trinity, the Child, the doll in her arms.
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The doll is the dream or the symbol of the dream of this particular child, as these various Ra, Nut, Hathor, Isis, and Ka figures that are dimly apprehended on their shelves or on the Professor’s table in the other room are the dream or the symbol of the dream of other aspiring and adoring souls. The childhood of the individual is the childhood of the race, we have noted, the Professor has written somewhere. The child in me has gone. The child has vanished and yet it is not dead. This contact with the Professor intensifies or projects this dream of a Princess, the river, the steps, the child. The river is an Egyptian river, the Nile; the Princess is an Egyptian lady. Egypt is present, as I say, actually or by inference or suggestion, in the old-fashioned print or engraving of the Temple at Karnak, hanging on the wall above me, as well as in the dimly outlined egg-shaped Ra or Nut or Ka figures on the Professor’s desk in the other room. A Queen or Princess is obvious mother-symbol; moreover, there had been casual references, from time to time, to the Professor’s French translator, Madame Marie Bonaparte, “the Princess” or “our Princess,” as the Professor calls her.
Perhaps here too, as on the occasion of the Professor’s birthday in the house at Döbling, I wanted something different or I wanted to give the Professor something different. Princess George of Greece had been consistently helpful and used her influence in the general interests of the Psycho-Analytical Association. She was “our Princess” in that, as Marie Bonaparte, she had translated the Professor’s difficult German into French and was ready to stand by him now that the Nazi peril was already threatening Vienna. She was “our Princess” in the world, devoted and influential. But is it possible that I sensed another world, another Princess? Is it possible that I (leaping over every sort of intellectual impediment and obstacle) not wished only, but knew, the Professor would be born again?
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For things had happened in my life, pictures, “real dreams,” actual psychic or occult experiences that were superficially, at least, outside the province of established psychoanalysis. But I am working with the old Professor himself; I want his opinion on a series of events. It is true, I had not discussed these experiences openly, but I had sought help from one or two (to my mind) extremely wise and gifted people in the past and they had not helped me. At least, they had not been able to lay, as it were, the ghost. If the Professor could not do this, I thought, nobody could. I could not get rid of the experience by writing about it. I had tried that. There was no use telling the story, into the air, as it were, repeatedly, like the Ancient Mariner who plucked at the garments of the wedding guest with that skinny hand. My own skinny hand would lay, as it were, the cards on the table — here and now — here with the old Professor. He was more than the world thought him — that I well knew. If he could not “tell my fortune,” nobody else could. He would not call it telling fortunes — heaven forbid! But we would lead up to the occult phenomena, we would show him how it happened. That, at least, we could do — in part, at any rate. I could say, I did say that I had had a number of severe shocks; the news of the death of my father, following the death in action of my brother in France, came to me when I was alone outside London in the early spring of that bad influenza winter of 1919. I myself was waiting for my second child — I had lost the first in 1915, from shock and repercussions of war news broken to me in a rather brutal fashion.