Freud starts off the last bit of his "common dreams" section with dreams containing numbers. Dream content, he says, "may be shown in an instructive manner by the numbers...which occur in dreams." Essentially, numbers are significant pieces of data that represent content (as do symbols). He gives us an interesting (but farfetched) example. There is a lady who has enrolled her daughter at school in Vienna. The lady stays in Vienna only because her daughter studies there. Meanwhile, she is under Freud's treatment and she has a dream where she is paying for something. In this dream, her daughter takes out "3 florins 65 kreuzer from her purse" to pay, and she replies "What are you doing? It costs only 21 kreuzer." Freud jumps right to the connection with the numbers and says that the 3 florins and 65 kreuzer represents 365 days, i.e.: 365 days in a year, (which refers to an academic year). 21 kreuzer relates to the duration of Freud's treatment, in days. So, he says that the lady wants her daughter to stay in school 365 more days so she can stay longer and do another session of treatment. Quite odd.
Freud also shows us that dreams cannot do math, period. A man dreams that he is sitting in a house of a family he once knew. He asks the girl next to him, Amy, "How old are you?" She replies, "I was born in 1882." And he "calculates", "Ah, then you are 28 years old." The dream was dreamt in 1898...so, that was not possible...she would've been only 16. The thing Freud overlooks here, is what if the dreamer was dreaming in a different time period than his own? Like, he dreamt that dream as if it was in the year 1910, when the girl would really be 28. Since Freud does not mention this, I consider it bad writing...because even though it is general instinct to assume that the dream was "dreamt" in the same year as the real year, we are not really sure. I feel Freud should have mentioned that, just to clarify. Regardless, the point is that dreams are unable to do calculations (this is probably not true all the time...) and this is because the subconscious treats numbers the same way it does with other dream material; It just takes pieces of the material and strings them together, like it did with the man's numbers. It just picked out 1882 (the year he was married), and 28 (an estimate at the age of one of Freud's clients whom he was interested in). The subconscious picked those numbers for their significance, but it just put them together, saying that the current year, 1898, minus 1882 somehow equaled 28. (I hope that makes sense).
1 comment:
The last paragraph was very confusing, I still can't understand how those numbers are supposed to make sense. This posting was less substantial and objective than your last posts, it is somewhat vague and confusing. I realize that sometimes it is hard to post when the book doesn't really give you a lot to work with. You can do a better job than you did in this post.
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