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It is on Wednesday 2 January 1959 that she returns from the Christmas holiday and brings me this dream:
There are three men, all with deformed paralysed hands. She thought it was their left hands, now realizes it was their right hands. She goes up to one of them who is like, or perhaps is, Father Proudman (a priest she knows). He says, ‘You don't know me—you've never seen me before.’
And on the next day she adds to this account by saying:
The three men came up, one by one, and shook hands with her, all fair men with red faces—she doesn't like that kind of man—yes, they are like babies. And the third man, Father Proudman, had a kind of crinkled deformed side to his face—it looked horrible.
When I said I wondered why there were three men she replied, ‘The Three Wise Men, Three Kings’; she adds she thought there were six in the Bible story, but now knows they were the same. There had been no association to the distorted crinkled cheek, though she was able to say that the man's hand, which she had to shake, was distorted, ‘perhaps because the fingers had not grown properly separate, perhaps like a pig's trotter’—but, she adds, she likes pigs.
What I said about this dream was that it seemed to have something to do with the question of what she has got to give, some contrast between the Proudman who is like a baby but who has a distorted hand and cheek and the Three Wise Men who were also kings who bring their gifts and humble themselves before the Mother and Child; and I also pointed out the theme of a new era beginning, as shown by her association to the first Christmas, perhaps a new era for her. (Although I had