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Over the years since Freud's publication of the Interpretation of Dreams (1900), there have been intriguing hints that dreams could not only provide the royal road to discerning unconscious psychical processes but that they could, possibly, provide an additional royal road to understanding somatic processes as well. Several recent instances of this possible dream-somatic connection are relevant.
For example, Eissler (1955, pp. 132-138), in a perceptive analysis of a patient's dream, demonstrated how the patient revealed to him that he was having a recurrence of a malignancy that necessitated an immediate resumption of his chemotherapy and radiation treatments. More recently, Alston (1989), in a preliminary report of an ongoing study, recorded a series of dreams of an AIDS patient in which she was able to show that the course of the patient's physical condition (i.e., his AIDS-engendered condition) was closely coordinated with his dream life. In one dream, just prior to his diagnosis of having AIDS, her patient reported: “I'm running across a water surface—like a lake. It is important that I meet someone on the other side. I feel that I can do it [get to the other side], but then I keep sinking down in the water and I woke up suddenly feeling terribly anxious.” Following a short incubation period, the patient concluded that the dream was quite clear to him, that he was indeed “sinking in