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Upon reading Eugene Mahon's charming, brief clinical paper, “A Joke in a Dream: A Note on the Complex Aesthetics of Disguise” (2002), I was reminded of some notes I made a number of years ago about a psychoanalytic patient who presented a dream in which a joke was hidden in the manifest content of the dream. Not only was the dreamer himself consciously unaware of the dream joke, but the analyst, too, was taken by surprise in the course of listening to the report of the dream. Though obviously related to Mahon's observation, and to Freud's original comments on absurdity in dreams (1900), the incident I recalled seems to me to represent a variant on those themes not elsewhere described, and is offered herewith as a matter of clinical interest.
My patient, a man in his late twenties, had come to analysis because of a near-paralytic degree of inhibition in his sexual life and in his ambition to establish a career. He had managed with some difficulty to be graduated from a prestigious university. He had had but one rather serious sexual liaison, which was broken up by his parents, who objected to his girlfriend's ordinary, middle-class background. He came from a socially elevated, quite wealthy family; he