Among the dreams which have been communicated to me by others, there is one which is at this point especially worthy of our attention. It was
told me by a female patient who had heard it related in a lecture on dreams. Its original source is unknown to me. This dream evidently made a
deep impression upon the lady, since she went so far as to imitate it, i.e., to repeat the elements of this dream in a dream of her own; in order, by
this transference, to express her agreement with a certain point in the dream.
The preliminary conditions of this typical dream were as follows: A father had been watching day and night beside the sick-bed of his child. After
the child died, he retired to rest in an adjoining room, but left the door ajar so that he could look from his room into the next, where the child's
body lay surrounded by tall candles. An old man, who had been installed as a watcher, sat beside the body, murmuring prayers. After sleeping for
a few hours the father dreamed that the child was standing by his bed, clasping his arm and crying reproachfully: "7father, don't you see that I am
burning?" The father woke up and noticed a bright light coming from the adjoining room. Rushing in, he found that the old man had fallen asleep,
and the sheets and one arm of the beloved body were burnt by a fallen candle.
The meaning of this affecting dream is simple enough, and the explanation given by the lecturer, as my patient reported it, was correct. The bright
light shining through the open door on to the sleeper's eyes gave him the impression which he would have received had he been awake: namely,
that a fire had been started near the corpse by a falling candle. It is quite possible that he had taken into his sleep his anxiety lest the aged watcher
should not be equal to his task.
We can find nothing to change in this interpretation; we can only add that the content of the dream must be overdetermined, and that the speech