4 August 1959. Cogitations

One way of dealing with the problem of scientific evidence for dream theories would be to restrict the search for data to experience shared by analyst and patient, or at which analyst and patient are both present. Such occasions might be all those on which the patient said he had had a dream, or all those on which there appear to be events taking place, e.g. the patient sits up and looks around in a dazed way; the analyst, identifying himself with the patient, feels that the experience the patient is having would be more understandable if the patient were asleep and dreaming.

‘More understandable.’ Why? Because it is more appropriate to the facts as the analyst sees them. But this means that if the analyst were feeling what the patient seems to be feeling, then he, the analyst, would be disposed to say, “I must have been dreaming”.

Just then I found I had been asleep; just before I woke I seemed to be saying to F that I was feeling I was going mad because I could not sort out the feeling I was having in the dream about having a dream and who I was. The dream seemed to be that I was trying to solve the problem I am in fact trying to solve, but with the addition of the fear of going mad – a sort of mental disintegration.

Last night, as I was trying to understand a passage in Quine's Mathematical Logic [p. 31] in which ‘negative’ occurred, I had a dream – having fallen into a sleep or doze – in which a negro appeared. The dream, I thought as I wakened, was associated with ‘neg’ being both negro and negative. But why did I not write it down then? And now I think of negative and native: ‘natives’ is associated with memories of India, my mother, and natives as being coloured people like Indians who were ‘inferior’. Also ‘dative’ as being a present, and dates which I liked. ‘Ablative’, to lift off or take away. Negro, as he appeared in the dream, now seems to me to be not a real person but an ideogram. My theory is that this ideogram has enabled me to store all these ideas wh