The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900)

this compartment, to serve the possible needs of passengers. At a quarter to three in the morning I wake, with an urgent desire to urinate, from the
following dream:
A crowd, a students' meeting.... A certain Count (Thun or Taaffe) is making a speech. Being asked to say something about the Germans, he
declares, with a contemptuous gesture, that their favourite flower is coltsfoot, and he then puts into his buttonhole something like a torn leaf,
really the crumpled skeleton of a leaf. I jump up, and I jump up,[22] but I am surprised at my implied attitude. Then, more indistinctly: It seems
as though this were the vestibule (Aula); the exits are thronged, and one must escape. I make my way through a suite of handsomely appointed
rooms, evidently ministerial apartments, with furniture of a colour between brown and violet, and at last I come to a corridor in which a
housekeeper, a fat, elderly woman, is seated. I try to avoid speaking to her, but she apparently thinks I have a right to pass this way, because she
asks whether she shall accompany me with the lamp. I indicate with a gesture, or tell her, that she is to remain standing on the stairs, and it seems
to me that I am very clever, for after all I am evading detection. Now I am downstairs, and I find a narrow, steeply rising path, which I follow. -
Again indistinctly: It is as though my second task were to get away from the city, just as my first was to get out of the building. I am riding in a
one-horse cab, and I tell the driver to take me to a railway station. "I can't drive with you on the railway line itself," I say, when he reproaches me
as though I had tired him out. Here it seems as though I had already made a journey in his cab which is usually made by rail. The stations are
crowded; I am wondering whether to go to Krems or to Znaim, but I reflect that the Court will be there, and I decide in favour of Graz or some
such place. Now I am seated in the railway carriage, which is rather like a tram, and I have in my buttonhole a peculiar long braided thing, on
which are violet-brown violets of stiff material, which makes a great impression on people. Here the scene breaks off.
I am once more in front of the railway station, but I am in the company of an elderly gentleman. I think out a scheme for remaining unrecognized,
but I see this plan already being carried out. Thinking and experiencing are here, as it were, the same thing. He pretends to be blind, at least in one
eye, and I hold before him a male glass urinal (which we have to buy in the city, or have bought). I am thus a sick-nurse, and have to give him the
urinal because he is blind. If the conductor sees us in this position, he must pass us by without drawing attention to us. At the same time the
position of the elderly man, and his urinating organ, is plastically perceived. Then I wake with a desire to urinate.
The whole dream seems a sort of phantasy, which takes the dreamer back to the year of revolution, 1848, the memory of which had been revived
by the jubilee of 1898, as well as by a little excursion to Wachau, on which I visited Emmersdorf, the refuge of the student leader Fischof,[23] to
whom several features of the manifest dream- content might refer. The association of ideas then leads me to England, to the house of my brother,
who used in jest to twit his wife with the title of Tennyson's poem Fifty Years Ago, whereupon the children were used to correct him: Fifteen
Years Ago. This phantasy, however, which attaches itself to the thoughts evoked by the sight of Count Thun, is, like the facade of an Italian
church, without organic connection with the structure behind it, but unlike such a facade it is full of gaps, and confused, and in many places
portions of the interior break through. The first situation of the dream is made up of a number of scenes, into which I am able to dissect it. The
arrogant attitude of the Count in the dream is copied from a scene at my school which occurred in my fifteenth year. We had hatched a conspiracy
against an unpopular and ignorant teacher; the leading spirit in this conspiracy was a schoolmate who since that time seems to have taken Henry
VIII of England as his model. It fell to me to carry out the coup d'etat, and a discussion of the importance of the Danube (German, Donau) to
Austria (Wachau!) was the occasion of an open revolt. One of our fellow-conspirators was our only aristocratic schoolmate- he was called "the
giraffe" on account of his conspicuous height- and while he was being reprimanded by the tyrant of the school, the professor of the German
language, he stood just as the Count stood in the dream. The explanation of the favourite flower, and the putting into a button-hole of something
that must have been a flower (which recalls the orchids which I had given that day to a friend, and also a rose of Jericho) prominently recalls the
incident in Shakespeare's historical play which opens the civil wars of the Red and the White Roses; the mention of Henry VIII has paved the way
to this reminiscence. Now it is not very far from roses to red and white carnations. (Meanwhile two little rhymes, the one German, the other
Spanish, insinuate themselves into the analysis: Rosen, Tulpen, Nelken, alle Blumen welken,[24] and Isabelita, no llores, que se marchitan las
flores.[25] The Spanish line occurs in Figaro.) Here in Vienna white carnations have become the badge of the Anti-Semites, red ones of the Social
Democrats. Behind this is the recollection of an anti-Semitic challenge during a railway journey in beautiful Saxony (Anglo Saxon). The third
scene contributing to the formation of the first situation in the dream dates from my early student days. There was a debate in a German students'
club about the relation of philosophy to the general sciences. Being a green youth, full of materialistic doctrines, I thrust myself forward in order
to defend an extremely one-sided position. Thereupon a sagacious older fellow- student, who has since then shown his capacity for leading men
and organizing the masses, and who, moreover, bears a name belonging to the animal kingdom, rose and gave us a thorough dressing-down; he
too, he said, had herded swine in his youth, and had then returned repentant to his father's house. I jumped up (as in the dream), became piggishly
rude, and retorted that since I knew he had herded swine, I was not surprised at the tone of his discourse. (In the dream I am surprised at my
German Nationalistic feelings.) There was a great commotion, and an almost general demand that I should retract my words, but I stood my
ground. The insulted student was too sensible to take the advice which was offered him, that he should send me a challenge, and let the matter
drop. -
The remaining elements of this scene of the dream are of more remote origin. What does it mean that the Count should make a scornful reference
to coltsfoot? Here I must question my train of associations. Coltsfoot (German: Huflattich), Lattice (lettuce), Salathund (the dog that grudges
others what he cannot eat himself). Here plenty of opprobrious epithets may be discerned: Gir-affe (German: Affe = monkey, ape), pig, sow, dog;
I might even arrive, by way of the name, at donkey, and thereby pour contempt upon an academic professor. Furthermore, I translate coltsfoot
(Huflattich)- I do not know whether I do so correctly- by pisse-en-lit. I get this idea from Zola's Germinal, in which some children are told to
bring some dandelion salad with them. The dog- chien- has a name sounding not unlike the verb for the major function (chier, as pisser stands for