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The dreams of one analysand at ages five, thirteen, and twenty show how an infantile wish can be understood in its many developmental vicissitudes, thus deepening
our understanding of the adult dreaming process. Alexander, on beginning his five-year analysis at age five, dreamed, “There was an octopus big as the Empire State Building. I had a stick. It [the octopus] swallowed me. I was fighting it. It spat me out.” The dream came to be understood as expressing many aspects of his terror of object hunger and loss, hidden in phallic preoccupations and disguises.
When he returned for a consulation at age thirteen, his dream of being chased by snakes that he tried to divert toward younger children expressed his early adolescent version of these themes: fear of his phallic power which in puberty had achieved more evident potency, and the temptations of regression.
At age twenty, in a further consultation, the phallic and oedipal themes appeared in yet another developmental transformation. He dreamed of taking control of the Batmobile and giving chase to the bad guys. In the context of his current life, the dream expressed his adolescent passage toward object removal and adult sexual relations with all the new excitement and dangers entailed. The author emphasizes the value of understanding dreams as expressing infantile wishes, but also as reflecting phase-specific anxieties and creative phase-specific solutions.