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A state of psychological trauma originates when an ego is overwhelmed by events and cannot deal adequately with reality. The study of such a state can provide much information about the degree of preparedness for the traumatic event, about the effect of the trauma, and about the subsequent restitutive devices used to re-establish a state of equilibrium.
An important field for such a study is the dream life of the traumatized. The dream is a technique the ego uses, actually or potentially, to deal with dangerous situations that arise during sleep. Using the residual thoughts of the previous day, the dream work re-cathects repressed conflicts and expresses them in camouflage in the manifest dream text. If the dream fails to bind anxiety, the sleeper may awaken and call upon waking defenses to attain this end.
With the artificially maintained continuous sleep of anesthesia, waking up cannot be used as a safety valve; the ego must rely on other emergency devices. Our study deals with this matter. Two patients, one in psychoanalysis, the other in psychotherapy, furnished us with dreams that occurred during surgical procedures. A subsequent analysis of the dreams revealed the unconscious meaning of the surgical intervention and the ego's defensive and adaptive activities that were mobilized by the traumatic events. To test a number of hypotheses that suggested themselves concerning the ego's function during such dreams, we undertook a preliminary investigation. In this report, we shall first present the pertinent psychoanalytic data that gave rise to tentative hypotheses; secondly, our further investigations