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After years of stagnation in the study of dream analysis we have been witnessing recently a striking revival of psychoanalytic interest in dreams. In quick succession books on dream analysis have appeared by Gutheil (4, 5), Wolff (7), Fromm (3), Fliess (2), and Boss (1) just to mention a few.
With all the wealth of new theories, or slants of old ones, we should not neglect the work of gathering and checking of further evidence which, among other things, is the modest purpose of this article. We wish to deal with a very specific, circumscribed dream phenomenon: dream analysis as seen and elaborated in dreams.
This phenomenon is by no means unknown. Gutheil, for example, mentions the following dream:
I am travelling in a railroad car. After getting out of the car, I notice that I take an old and shabby hat instead of a new one … etc. I say: “Apparently there is a resistance against the renovated hat and a tendency towards self-punishment in my taking the old hat.”
This example does not quite fit our purpose: the dream analyzes a freudian slip but not a dream. Such dreams are not rare in patients under analysis as well as in analysts (Gutheil). I can confirm this on the basis of my own dreams.
On another occasion, however, Gutheil presents precisely the phenomenon discussed here:
I dreamed that I dreamed that my daughter died. I awoke in my dream and told you this dream in our session. You said to me in a very calm voice: “Don't worry.”
Gutheil says that this is an example of what these dreams mean: a wish of the patient to turn a certain real experience (in this case frigidity) into a dream, to deprecate the dream's content, and to weaken its emotional charge. At the same time it is a transference dream.
In my own experience, transference was obviously the main theme of many such dreams while the other mechanism—turning reality into dream—was less frequently encountered. This, however, may be due to differences in either the type of patients or the type of analysts.
Gutheil sa