Hypnosis and dreams Dream Meanings

Many experiments have been done using hypnosis in connection with dreams. In the early pan of this century Carl Schroetter hypnotised Miss E, a pharmacist, in an attempt to test Freud’s theory of symbol formation. He suggested Miss E would dream of having homosexual inter­course with a female friend, L.

The dream she subsequently reported was ‘1 sit in a small dirty cafe holding a tremendous French newspaper ...

A woman with a strong Yiddish ac­cent—L is Jewish—asks me twice, “Don’t you need any­thing?” I don’t answer . . . she comes a third time . . . I recognise her as my acquaintance. She holds a threadbare suitcase with a sticker on it that reads “For ladies only!” I leave the cafe with her . . . she hangs onto me which I find unpleasant but suffer it . . . Before her house she pulls out an enormous bunch of keys and gives one to me. “1 trust only you with it; it is the key to this case. You might like to use it. Just watch that my husband doesn’t get hold of it.” ‘ The dream contains several of the classical Freudian symbols of sex, such as the suitcase, the key and the phrase For ladies only’. Miss E had not, according to Schroetter, heard or read of Freud’s ideas.

Roffenstein, suspecting Miss E may have known something of Freudian ideas, chose ‘a 28-year-old, totally uneducated nursemaid of lower than average intelligence, who grew up and still lives in an uneducated milieu’. He suggested she dream of intercourse with her father. She reported: ‘I dreamt about my father, as if he had presented me with a great bag and with it he gave me a large key. It was a very large key. It looked like the key to a house. I had a sad feeling. I opened the bag. I snake jumped out against my mouth; I shrieked aloud.

More recent expenments are reponed by Woods and Greenhouse in New Wbrld of Dreams.

The suggestion was made to one subject that as a child she had wet the bed and her mother scolded her. That night she dreamt she fell into a pond in winter and her mother was angry.

An interesting aspect of these experiments is that another subject under hyp­nosis was told the dream and asked what it meant. Without hesitation she said. Oh, that girl must have wet the bed.’ This and other experiments suggest humans have an inherent, al­though perhaps unconscious, ability to understand the lan­guage of dreams.