Unit 3: Selection Vocabulary 3

In what we may term "prescientific days" people were in no uncertainty about the interpretation of dreams.

But since the downfall of the mythological hypothesis an interpretation of the dream has been wanting. The conditions of its origin; its relationship to our psychical life when we are awake; its independence of disturbances which, during the state of sleep, seem to compel notice; its many peculiarities repugnant to our waking thought...

...the incongruence between its images and the feelings they engender; then the dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it...

There is, firstly, the psychical significance of the dream, its position with regard to the psychical processes, as to a possible biological function; secondly, has the dream a meaning—can sense be made of each single dream as of other mental syntheses?

The manifold analogies of dream life with the most diverse conditions of psychical disease in the waking state have been rightly insisted upon by a number of medical observers.

Reflecting upon this dream does not make it a bit clearer to my mind. I will now, however, present the ideas, without premeditation and without criticism, which introspection yielded.

The dream was passionless, disconnected, and unintelligible.

My father, who was a free-thinker, and who had sprung from sentimental Barcelona, the Barcelona of “Clavé choirs,” the anarchists and the Ferrer trial, made it a matter of principle not to put me into the Christian schools or those of the Marist brothers, which would have been appropriate for people of our rank, my father being a notary and one of the most esteemed men of the town.

I alone had an immaculate bandage put on the slightest scratch, I alone wore a sailor suit with insignia embroidered in thick gold on the sleeves, and stars on my cap, I alone had hair that was combed a thousand times and that smelt good of a perfume that must have seemed so troubling to the other children who would take turns coming up to me to get a better sniff of my privileged head.

...I couldn’t even manage by myself to take off my sailor blouse which slipped over the head, a few experiments in this exercise having convinced me of the danger of dying of suffocation.

He would take advantage of his brief awakenings to reach for a pinch of snuff and to chastise, by pulling their ears till they bled, those going beyond the limit of the usual uproar who either by an adroitly aimed wad of spittle or by a fire kindled with books to roast chestnuts managed to anticipate his normal awakening with a disagreeable jolt.

My curiosity to see the ants again was enormous, but I was surprised that they were no longer there, just as there was no longer a trace of a hole.