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Notice the details, e.g., the rosebushes, the sun, the rain, the hedge. On the “well builded house” of Section 10, I shall only remark that Scherner has noticed in this connection that the human body represents a building. “Well built house” signifies “beautiful body.”
If, according to Scherner, the dream seems to play with a symboling representation of the body, we know that this is the work of certain unconscious phantasies which have probably given in to sexual emotions, and that these phantasies come to expression not only in dreams but also in hysterical phobias and in other symptoms.
Scherner gives an amusing case of a youth who was permitted to whisper his name into the ear of his obdurate mistress, the consequence of which was that the lady contracted a habit of dreaming about him, which led to a felicitous change of feeling on her part. The two lower senses, smell and taste, seem to play a less-important part in the production of dream-illusions.
Thus Scherner, in his interesting though somewhat fanciful work, Das Leben des Traumes, contends that the various regions of the body regularly disclose themselves to the dream-fancy under the symbol of a building or group of buildings; a pain in the head calling up, for example, the image of spiders on the ceiling, intestinal sensations exciting an image of a narrow alley, and so on.
We have fully recognized the rôle which Scherner ascribes to the dream phantasy, and even his interpretation; but we have been obliged, so to speak, to conduct them to another department in the problem. It is not the dream that produces the phantasy but the unconscious phantasy that takes the greatest part in the formation of the dream thoughts.
We are indebted to Scherner for his clew to the source of the dream thoughts, but almost everything that he ascribes to the dream-work is attributable to the activity of the unconscious, which is at work during the day, and which supplies incitements not only for dreams but for neurotic symptoms as well.
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