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The patient, a happily married woman who was pregnant, dreamed that she did not know whether the father of her child was X. or Y. (the implication being that she was unmarried). She was in despair, and after she had awoken the dream still seemed real to her and her mood of depression continued all day. In actual fact there seemed to be no cause for the dream, as the patient was in love with her husband and was glad to be going to have a baby. It turned out, however, that before her marriage she had led a very free life and had had sexual intercourse with several men, among them X. and Y. She had had no sense of guilt about this at the time, although she moved in a strict society, and had taken so little thought about the possibility of becoming pregnant that she had used no contraceptives.
The motives of the dream seem to have been a deferred attempt to master anxiety (i.e. an old fear, unconscious at the time, of becoming pregnant and being found out), a self-punishment in order to appease her unconscious sense of guilt, a fulfilment of masochistic desires and, last but not least, a secret pleasure in contrasting the unpleasant 'might-have-been' with the actual happiness which was her lot.