Sweet dreams (Father, don't you see that I am burning?)

Dear reader,

let me tell you a bedtime story. One of Freud's clients came to him and told him of a father, who had the following dream (from “The Interpretation of Dreams“ by Sigmund Freud):

“A father had been watching day and night beside the sick-bed of his child. After the child died, he retired to rest in an adjoining room, but left the door ajar so that he could look from his room into the next, where the child's body lay surrounded by tall candles. An old man, who had been installed as a watcher, sat beside the body, murmuring prayers. After sleeping for a few hours the father dreamed that the child was standing by his bed, clasping his arm and crying reproachfully: "Father, don't you see that I am burning?" The father woke up and noticed a bright light coming from the adjoining room. Rushing in, he found that the old man had fallen asleep, and the sheets and one arm of the beloved body were burnt by a fallen candle.”

How could a dream like that happen? One option may be that the father sensed the smoke or the light and integrated it into his dream. That's how we're supposedly dream anyway, we dream of things we experienced during the day and/or actual sensations we experience now creep into the dream. A logical explanation. But it doesn't explain why time and again there are people burning to death in their bed after having fallen asleep with a light cigarette or something. Also they say about hypnosis and trance that if we really have to be awake, because there's danger ahead, we'd be out of hypnosis or trance instantly and ready to act. Without having experienced that personally, I do believe that about hypnosis and trance to be true. But it doesn't explain the burn victims.

Next theory. We enjoy dreaming. Likewise many people enjoy being in a trance. That means that in order to wake up, we need either a strong outside stimulus or the dream has to be so uncomfortable, that being awake seems more pleasant and that's why we wake up. The father dreamed of his son, to be close to him. But the fire was a stimulus that needed to action. So he dreamed of his son waking him up. Sounds logical, doesn't it? Maybe. But much like the paragraph above, shouldn't we wake up with a fire all the time? Either waking up from the fire itself or from dreams forcing us to wake up?

Taking into account the possibility of a life after death or that the soul lives on after death or something like that, the son could also have contacted his father for real in or through that dream. Although personally I rule out that theory. Because I know that Harry Houdini wanted to contact his mother very much. After he was dead, he would have done everything possible, to contact his living wife. Even if he tried, there's no account of him actually succeeding in it to this day.

What then can we make of this dream? Your theories?

Until next blog,

sarah