§ 33. Seventh Principal Group: The Affect-Dreams

§ 33. Seventh Principal Group: The Affect-Dreams.

The affect is rooted, like the mood of the soul, in the disposition; but whereas the mood lingers, oscillating, within the disposition and passively suffices unto itself, the affect stands opposed to it as an active excitation of the disposition, and always reveals a striving that is active beyond itself, because it is a vigorous excitation of the soul. For this very reason every excitation of affect in the dream, sharing as it does with the mood the same origin out of waking life, appears with every mark of energy. Its nature is courageous in itself and disposed toward actions; hence the dream-imagination must correspondingly set the dreamer into activity and active action; the affect-dream therefore continually plays itself out in very lively psychical and bodily (apparent) action, and where the imagination has reason to turn the liveliness away from the dream-ego itself and toward the surrounding scenery, it sets in place of the dreamer's diminished action an all the more expressive life in his surroundings. But bound up immediately with this restlessness of action is the ceaseless, unquiet roving and leaping of the affect from image to image, whereby ever-new creative power of the action develops; and if the gentler mood-dream already had the power to indulge itself in the expenditure of marked memory-images, then the far more courageous affect must possess this power to a much higher degree; and if it is of an ill-humored kind, it comes forward burrowingly, as though stirring through the very entrails of the whole dream-sphere, and it hunts up the strongest and the most repulsive images from every age of the dreamer's past life, or else it fashions, out of the more harmless ones, all the more irritating or, respectively, more absurd scenes, playing tricks now upon the dreamer's disposition, now upon his understanding. Precisely on account of its impetuosity it also allows itself to be led into drawing to itself images which do not share the same tone of excitation, provided only that they express the same degree of excitability; yet this shows itself chiefly only in ill-humored affects, and the joyful ones display, for their part, just as clear and uniform a cheerfulness of tone as the more tolerant moods do on theirs. — After this, the following facts, which we shall bring forward as variously as possible according to the measure of the material we ourselves have collected, will be easy to judge; we place the shorter affect-dreams before those which show the succession of the action unfolded at greater length.

Boy's Dream for Vexed Affect.

The dreamer is the same gentle-natured boy of whom the pearl-dream, in the previous group, was told. Occasion: the boy's wounded sense of honor on the evening before, because another boy always knew how to answer more quickly than he did. He dreamed: