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In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud reported a dream of a lady of his acquaintance with an opera by Wagner in its manifest content that to date still remains unidentified. The relevance of knowing which opera is included in the dream is twofold. On the one hand, this seemingly insignificant piece of data adds knowledge of specific sources that may have triggered the dream, enhancing understanding of Freud's example as well as of dream formation and dream interpretation when operas appear in dreams. On the other hand, from a historical point of view, the title of the opera is additional evidence of the scope of Freud's acquaintance with Wagner's operas, hereto unknown (see Díaz de Chumaceiro, 1990a, , in press).
The significance and handling of operatic material is the same, whether operas appear in dreams, or in spontaneous and/or induced evocations. Detailed knowledge of opera plots and roles of the main protagonists permit access to contents beyond evokers' awareness, by tracing the actions, images, and dialogues mentioned back to their original source. Then the operatic elements that have been borrowed, condensed, and displaced by evokers become evident (Díaz de Chumaceiro, 1987).
In this paper, I present a microstructure analysis (Ingram, 1988, 1989) to demonstrate that the opera in the latent content of the dream is Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman). This opera, in three acts, composed in 1841, is based on a legend told by Heinrich Heine (1796-1856), in Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski and was premiered at the Hofoper in Dresden on January 2, 1843. Initially, however, the opera was a failure, and after only four performances, it was stored in Dresden and out of circulation for twenty years (Simon, 1960).
In this dream, Freud considered that “a considerable part was played by the turning of abstract thought into pictures.” He presented this example to illustrate cases in which the words used as disguise in the manifest content