Typical Anxiety Dreams and Object Relations

Since their first mention by Freud, the typical anxiety dreams have received little systematic attention from psycho-analytic investigators. This dearth of attention is somewhat surprising inasmuch as Freud stated that these dreams were worthy of further study, that because of their rather invariable manifest content their unconscious meaning might be understood without recourse to the dreamer's associations, and inasmuch as Freud's first exposition of the important oedipal complex derived from one such typical anxiety dream, that of the death of the beloved person (9). In this paper my main endeavour is, as in previous papers, to draw attention to the possible import of the two most commonly reported typical anxiety dreams. Whereas in the earlier papers clues to this import were derived from diagnostic material, they are here presented principally from treatment material obtained from 57 patients who have undergone psycho-analysis and psychotherapy with me in the past ten years.

In the previous papers (11) I wrote about the typical anxiety dreams as follows:

• i.In large samples of 'normal' and emotionally disturbed adults and children, the two kinds of typical anxiety dreams reported as most unpleasant were: (a) dreams of falling from some height (hereafter referred to as the falling dream) and (b) dreams of being attacked, chased, or threatened by some object in the environment (hereinafter referred to as the attacked dream).

• ii.There were individual differences as to whether the person reported having had one dream or the other and, if he had had both, as to which dream was the more unpleasant.

Of the two dreams, the attacked dream has been described and discussed in psycho-analytic literature much more than has the falling dream. Its relation to the conflicts of the oedipal phase has been pointed out by Jones (14), Sperling (16), and others. In contrast, the falling dream has been scantily dealt with. Although Freud suggested that it reflected