Promised Dream Reply

• The Roles of Control Mastery Theory in a New Model of REM Dreaming by Vic Comello, 5/8/97
  • Welcome Vic! by Jesscia Broitman, 5/9/97
    • Claification and Agreement! by Jessica Broitman, 5/10/97
      
      

You asked about the idea that there is a testing progression over a night of REM dreaming. This is a conjecture on my part. For evidence, there is little more than the quote I provided from Offenkrantz and Rechtschaffen and another early study by Paul Verdone (Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1965, 20, 1253-1268), which showed that temporal references in dreams of a night move backward in time. I take this to suggest that early learnings become applied more and more to a person's adaptive solutions over the course of a night of dreaming.

I don't know how often you see your patients, but if it were daily, you might witness a phenomenon that could also be interpreted in this same vein. If the foregoing is true, I would expect that a person who had a particularly bold day would get hammered by his pathogenic beliefs during sleep, with the result that he would be inhibited the next day, rather than bolder still, even if everything went fine that previous day.

Did I ever analyze anyone else's dreams but Freud's? I made stabs at analyzing my own dreams, which is a form of folly, but I tried it anyway. At one time, it was important for me to know how dreams began. So obsessed did I become about this that one night, when a dream began, I tried memorizing and analyzing that beginning moment while still dreaming. I woke up nearly immediately with a very strange feeling in my head.

Although dreams give us simple messages, as Weiss says in his recent book, they are able to do so because they are incredibly ingenious in construction. I would never have been able to analyze the Irma dream if all I had to go on were Freud's stated associations. Without the insights and amplifications of Erik Erikson, Max Schur, Alexander Grinstein, and others, I would have gotten nowhere.

My purpose in attempting to analyze the Irma dream from the points of view of both structure and meaning was to establish a series of self-consistency tests. The assumptions I made to make sense of structure had to work when it came to meaning too. Isn't it still possible that all I constructed was a house of cards that would collapse completely when I tried to apply the same notions to other dreams? Sure. And 22 years ago, I was a one-trick pony, but recently I applied the same notions to several other of Freud's dreams, and they seem to work. I can't take these analyses to the level of structure, because I have little more than Freud's and Grinstein's statements to go by, but I can still apply rule 5 with no problem and come up with a plausible meaning.

There is another reason I think I'm not too far off in my analysis of the Irma dream, particularly. When you try to construct a tight logical structure, you can get yourself into trouble very quickly. Sometimes your entire analysis can hang on a word. That happened while working on the Irma dream.

Max Schur showed (Psychoanalysis--A General Psychology, 1966, 45-85) that a patient of Freud's named Emma was certainly alluded to in the Irma dream, even though Freud made no mention of her. She was someone Freud had turned over to Fliess for treatment. Fliess nearly killed her through his incompetence. I came to believe that the Emma incident was central to the Irma dream, that a good part of the plot of the dream was a reliving of a telling moment when Freud visited her bedside afterwards.

When I first analyzed the dream, I did so using A.A. Brill's translation, and Brill at one point has Freud saying: "She is generally pale, and once, when she had not felt particularly well, she was puffy." Terrific! Everything fit. I felt I was right on. Then when I got hold of Strachey's translation, which is generally regarded to be more accurate, I took a look at that same passage as Strachey rendered it. To my horror, he had Freud saying, "...and once, when she was feeling particularly well, she was puffy." With that, suddenly puffy in the sense of possibly swollen was changed to puffy in the sense of God know what but certainly not swollen.

So I went to the original German version: "...und als sie einmal eine besonders gute Zeit hatte, war sie gedunsen." There it was, just the way Strachey translated it. But Brill was right, too, because Freud used the word "gedunsen" for puffy, a word that is never used in connection with good health. The word means swollen. Freud rarely edited his writing very much. Telling little lapses like this appear often, and that was particularly true of his letters to Fliess regarding the Emma incident.

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