HIDDEN WISHES

Hokitika Guardian, 28 December 1931, Page 7

HIDDEN WISHES

BEHIND OUR DREAMS. Of all the tilings under the sun which are not new, one of the oldest must be dreams. The animals wen. certainly dreaming before Adam came, as any dog will tell you to-day (writes H. C. Daily, in the “Daily Telegraph”). To believe in his dreams is the mark of thy savage in his most primitive state. And as this is an age of very primitive emotions and intelligence, we have returned to an earnest faith in dreams. Our ancestors went to a witch or a prophet to know what their dreams meant, and what they were to do about it. AYe go to a mental specialist. The names change, but not the principle. And perhaps the process has not changed much either. The early practitioners had not attained unanimity.. The psycho-an-alysts of Pharaoh and of Nebuchadnezzar failed to make anything of those dreams which the still newer psychology of Joseph and Daniel worked out so impressively. It is, of course, to be remembered that we have only Joseph’s and Daniel’s interpretations of the cases. What the 'Egyptian and the Babylonian (experts thought about them would probably "be inters sting. For there is a beautiful and developing variety among the modern sages.

Some thirty, years have gone since Dr Sigmund Freud brought dreams into fashipn again. There is great bitterness among the faithful when any outsider attempts to state in plain language what Dr Freud really meant, but we can take it that his book of dreams is- based on the doctrine that each and every dream has to do with the fulfilment of a wish. Ever since that simple creed was published other experts have been writing dream books to show that the Freudian magic, like that of the Egyptians and the Babylonians, will not always work.

Even before Dr Freud arose to lighten our darkness, nobody can have doubted that the desire of a dreamer’s heart had a lot to do with some dreams. When Pharaoh’s chief butler in prison dreamed of squeezing grapes into a cup and giving it to his master, the wish to recover his office was plainly active. Joseph had the advantage of the modern mental specialist ill being able to assure the patient that the dream was coming true. For in spite of the boasts that the psychology of Dr Freud has made everything about our minds and souls certain as mathematics, no practitioner can tell whether your dream has come through the gate of ivory or the gate of liqv.n, ,y;h.e}h,er ,it is liable tip or not.

But if the meaning of everything in the mind and its causes can be discovered, surely somebody should have been able to advise us whether or not it was worth while to act on r dream that Cainerojiian won the Two Thousand Guineas.

•By any of the dream books, new 01 old, the meaning of a dream is as seldom as possible what is seems to be. Dnniel was good at turning a thing into a symbol of something els. but, he was a child to those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge oi Dr Freud. Somebody in Mr Frederick Pierce’s new book on dreams has a dream of a psycho-analyst handing her a towel marked “Francis Fox.” So the towel is a symbol of the clearing of the head by pyseho-analysis* also of hidden guilt; and also (Dr Pierce has said it, not 1), the word “fox“ was a symbol of the analyst.

But this is comparatively easy. Somebody else had a dream of being in a boat and going to a delightful island with a held of poppies. Here are symbols “suggesting a desire t return to the peaceful security of the pre-natal life,” Out of a boat, and a happy island, and poppies, you could make symbols of half a hundred things in human experience. Why drag in what nobody knojivs anything about ?

Obviously magic must have rides. The same thing and the same action must be given itlie same meaning, whenever they turn up or the magic is resolved into, a series of d’sconnected guesses. And still there is an awful difficulty.. If anything can be a symbol, why not everything? Somebody in Mr Pierce’s book dreams of old men fussing in his board room till a spiral of smoke rose through the ceiling, and the dreamer climbed along the mantel piece to reach the spiral, feeling that he must at once pack up and catch a train. Quite a good dream. But the ascending spiral is a symbol of ascending evolution, and the old men are obstacles, and the moral is that the dreamer should vigorously push on with his work.

Why should not the ceiling and the mantelpiece and the board room he symbols, too, and quite incompatible, and climbing mean something wholly different from progress? Your new psychologist is, like John Forster, a “harbitrary gent.”