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This is the dream that invented the faucet. It was dreamed by a young man on the 216th anniversary of the birth of George Washington.
“I dreamed I got out of bed and went into the bathroom and attempted to turn on the water faucet. I turned and turned but no water came out. I then decided to call the plumber. Soon afterwards the door opened and an individual dressed in coveralls approached me. Upon closer examination I discovered the plumber was a female. I scoffed at the idea of a lady plumber. But unruffled she went to the basin, turned the faucet, and water immediately flowed. This was when the emission occurred.”
In this wet dream, faucet equals penis. Faucet is the symbol object, penis is the referent object. Ask a person why this analogy between faucet and penis exists in the mind of the dreamer, and he will probably respond with the commonsense answer of association psychology— “because they resemble one another.” True enough, a faucet from which water flows is analogous to a penis from which semen flows. Isn't cock a common slang word for penis? In order to remove any doubt that such a resemblance exists, the dreamer obligingly ejaculated when water started to flow from the faucet. He knew what the faucet in his dream stood for.
Why did the dreamer choose to represent his sex organ by a faucet instead of by any one of the other hundreds of symbols in dreams and language for penis? We dealt with this question in a previous article.1 The gist of what we said then was that a dream symbol represents a conception of a referent. In the present example, the choice of faucet expressed the dreamer's conception of his penis on the night of February 22, 1948. Since a person has many conceptions of the same thing, on another occasion he would probably