A Dream of Self-Dissection
Old Brücke must have set me some task; STRANGELY ENOUGH, it
related to a dissection of the lower part of my own body, my pelvis and
legs, which I saw before me as though in the dissecting-room, but without
noticing their absence in myself and also without a trace of any gruesome
feeling.
Finally I was making a journey through a changing landscape with
an Alpine guide who was carrying my belongings... The ground was boggy;
we went round the edge; people were sitting on the ground like Red Indians
or gipsies...
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At last we reached a small wooden house....
I saw two grown-up men lying on wooden benches that were along
the walls of the hut, and what seemed to be two children sleeping beside
them.
I awoke in mental fright.
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'strangely enough'
Louise N. ... had been calling on me. 'Lend me something to read',
she had said. I offered her Rider Haggard's She. 'A strange
book, but full of hidden meaning', I began to explain to her....
Here she interrupted me: 'I know it already. Have you nothing of
your own?' - 'No, my own immortal works have not yet been written.'
I reflected on the amount of self-discipline it was costing me
to offer the public even my book upon dreams - I should have to give away
so much of my own private character in it.
The task which was imposed on me in the dream of carrying out a
dissection of my own body was thus my self-analysis which
was linked up with my giving an account of my dreams.
Old Brücke came in here appropriately; even in the first years
of my scientific work it happened that I allowed a discovery of mine to
lie fallow until an energetic remonstrance on his part drove me into publishing
it.
The Red Indians, the girl and the wooden house were taken from
[Rider Haggard's] Heart of the World.
The 'wooden house' was also, no doubt, a coffin, that is to say,
the grave. But the dream-work achieved a masterpiece in its representation
of this most unwished-for of all thoughts by a wish-fulfilment. For I had
already been in a grave once, but it was an excavated Etruscan grave near
Orvieto...
The dream seems to have been saying: 'If you must rest in a grave,
let it be the Etruscan one.' And by making this replacement, it transformed
the gloomiest of expectations into one that was highly desirable.
Unluckily ... a dream can turn into its opposite the idea accompanying
an affect but not always the affect itself. Accordingly, I woke up in a
'mental fright'...
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