Two Dreams

The following dream is reported for the light which it throws on the meaning of silver in dreams and on the female castration complex:—

I dreamed about money all over the ground; in the frozen footprints were silver coins, 25-cent pieces, 5-cent pieces, and 10-cent pieces. It

was a public highway, dozens of people were walking over it all the time, and yet no one saw the money except myself. I kept picking it up and picking it up; I even called other people's attention to it, they were amazed, but still they didn't see it lying at their feet. I woke up just when I had both hands overflowing with shining silver coins, no coppers or bills, but silver.

The public highway represents (by inversion of meaning) the private parts. In view of the phallic symbol of the foot, the footprints will also stand for the dreamer's vagina. The coins in the footprints should therefore contain a reference to the man's penis. But why are they silver? The answer is found in the words 'shining silver coins, no coppers or bills, but silver'. (The word 'silver' was doubly underlined in the dreamscript.) Since copper and paper-money are both notorious fæcal symbols, the rejection of them in the dream and the emphatic substitution of silver show that in the dreamer's unconscious, the male organ has been assimilated to the image of the fæcal column. This is the equation which the censorship seeks to repudiate, yet betrays by the negation 'no coppers or bills'. The fæcal significance of coppers and bills is evidently too close to the dreamer's consciousness to allow this kind of money to enter affirmatively into the dream; the censorship therefore makes a positive use only of the silver coins, the shining whiteness of which is intended to conceal (yet actually reveals) their fæcal meaning. The dream thus confirms the equation fæces = penis put forward by Freud in his article 'On the Transformation of Instincts with Special Reference to Anal Erotism', and also reveals the anal-erotic