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DURING THE FIRST HOURS OF HIS ANALYSIS, DAN, A 9-YEAR-old boy with a severe learning problem and lifelong enuresis, described five different nighttime events:
A Dream: "There was someone like the Million-Dollar Man, like a robot. He was strong and no one could beat him."
A Nightmare: "I was walking down the street when a man with a beard came out of the house. The rest of the family was tied up in the basement. He was like a burglar. The man had a beard, moustache, sideburns, lots of hair. He was overweight. He had a gun and I ran behind some bushes. You were walking by; the man shot you through your hat. You looked so surprised; you jumped and dove behind the bushes with me. It was scary and woke me up."
The analysis of this nightmare, a task to which we returned over several years, revealed the burglar to combine elements of a demanding and exciting tutor, a camp counselor, Dan's father, himself, and myself. The bushes represented safety, his mother, her genitals, quite or exciting protective closeness to mother, frightening and forbidden possession of mother. The gun represented phallic forms of danger, threat, bodily harm,