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A case of angioneurotic edema and one of convulsive seizure are described. Both developed the symptoms of their sickness only during and after a dream state. The first patient, a man, suffered from severe episodes of abdominal cramps and edema of the extremities. While under hypnosis he relived witnessing, at the age of three, the butchering and castrating of hogs by his father. In another hypnotic trance he relived a period of intense rebellious excitement preceding the first attack of abdominal cramps, and he also remembered dreams which always occurred before the onset of each period of illness. While still under hypnosis he gave all the associative material needed to analyze his masochistic, homosexual, submissive and rebellious attitude towards his father and father figures. It seems that the symptoms appeared when the dream began to fail in its function of protecting sleep.
The second patient was a man with epileptic seizures. He, too, disclosed under hypnosis dreams which he had had the night before attacks, and also remembered his intense death wish against his father on an occasion during childhood when his father threatened to hurt the boy's mother physically.
This man was finally able to trace every convulsive seizure to an initiating dream. The day before the dream was filled with intense conflict characterized by aggressive feelings toward his father or an authority figure. The dream content was always that of an attack on him by a symbolic figure which association