s," but to which the dream
distinctly alludes by the selection of the birds' heads. I must have
suspected the sexual significance of the word from the facial expression
of my worldly-wise teacher. My mother's features in the dream were
copied from the countenance of my grandfather, whom I had seen a few
days before his death snoring in the state of coma. The interpretation
of the secondary elaboration in the dream must therefore have been that
my mother was dying; the tomb relief, too, agrees with this. In this
anxiety I awoke, and could not calm myself until I had awakened my
parents. I remember that I suddenly became calm on coming face to face
with my mother, as if I needed the assurance that my mother was not
dead. But this secondary interpretation of the dream had been effected
only under the influence of the developed anxiety. I was not frightened
because I dreamed that my mother was dying, but I interpreted the dream
in this manner in the foreconscious elaboration because I was already
under the domination of the anxiety. The latter, however, could be
traced by means of the repression to an obscure obviously sexual desire,
which had found its satisfying expression in the visual content of the
dream.

A man twenty-seven years old who had been severely ill for a year had
had many terrifying dreams between the ages of eleven and thirteen. He
thought that a man with an ax was running after him; he wished to run,
but felt paralyzed and could not move from the spot. This may be taken
as a good example of a very common, and apparently sexually indifferent,
anxiety dream. In the analysis the dreamer first thought of a story told
him by his uncle, which chronologically was later than the dream, viz.
that he was attacked at night by a suspicious-looking individual. This
occurrence led him to believe that he himself might have already heard
of a similar episode at the time of the dream. In connection with the ax
he recalled that during that period of his life he once hurt his hand
with an ax while chopping wood. This immediately led to his relations
with his younger brother, whom he used to maltreat and knock down. In
particular, he recalled an occasion when he struck his brother on the
head with his boot until he bled, whereupon his mother remarked: "I fear
he will kill him some day." While he was seemingly thinking of the
subject of violence, a reminiscence from his ninth year suddenly
occurred to him. His parents came ho