The Synthesis of Dreams: a Study of a Series of One Hundred Dreams

DREAM CIX. This dream took place four years later and is of rather different type, seeming to indicate a more mature stage of development.

I cannot remember exactly how the dream began, but I see myself in bed with my favorite brother (lost in the war); we were both naked and lying spoon—fashion, I with my back to him. (It was the position in which I had actually gone to sleep.) It is my brother, but at the same time it is Death. He is dear to me. We are loving each other tenderly but yet he is Death as well as Love, those two divine things, which he is forever in my thoughts since Death took him from me. This mystic lover—Death, Brother, and Love—is loving me and caressing me, and I feel very happy with his flesh against mine. He caresses me with his hands, covering all my naked body, especially the thighs and legs, with large slow movements full of tenderness. I feel all through how much he is a lover, but also how much he is Death, and how sweet and tender. Though my back is turned to him, I seem to see him, lean and bony, like a skeleton, hardly covered by flesh, and yet that flesh is so sweet to me, and the head, which I also seem to see, is small (as those of skeletons seem to be compared with those of the living), bald, beardless, but not terrifying; without definitely recalling my brother's features, I know that it is his face, rosy, with a tender rosiness like a child's face and quite unlike a death's head. Yet it is indeed Death that is loving me, and at the same time it is indeed my brother. After these delicious caresses, he sits up and throwing back the bedclothes and finding me lying flat on my back he raises the nightgown which I then seem to be wearing (before we had both been naked) and uncovers my legs, stomach, and body, which is then seen to be, on the left side, from beneath the breast to low down on the belly, adorned by a very beautiful picture in colors, a landscape. My brother says tenderly, and with gentle