and dizziness attached to it; in after years they create a repetition of this in the dream, but in the dream they omit the hands which have held them, so that they now freely float and fall. The fondness of all small children for games like rocking and see-sawing is well known; and if they see gymnastic tricks at the circus their recollection of this rocking is refreshed. With some boys the hysterical attack consists simply in the reproduction of such tricks, which they accomplish with great skill. Not infrequently sexual sensations are excited by these movement games, harmless as they are in themselves.[1] To express the idea by a word which is current among us, and which covers all of these matters: It is the wild playing ("Hetzen") of childhood which dreams about flying, falling, vertigo, and the like repeat, and the voluptuous feelings of which have now been turned into fear. But as every mother knows, the wild playing of children has often enough culminated in quarrelling and tears.
I therefore have good reason for rejecting the explanation that the condition of our dermal sensations during sleep, the sensations caused by the movements of the lungs, and the like, give rise to dreams of flying and falling. I see that these very sensations have been reproduced from the memory with which the dream is concerned—that they are, therefore, a part of the dream content and not of the dream sources.
This material, similar in its character and origin consisting of sensations of motion, is now used for the representation of the most manifold dream thoughts. Dreams of flying, for the most part characterised by delight, require the most widely different interpretations—altogether special interpretations in the case of some persons, and even interpretations of a typical nature in that of others. One of my patients was in the habit of dreaming very often that she was suspended above the
- ↑ A young colleague, who is entirely free from nervousness, tells me in this connection: "I know from my own experience that while swinging, and at the moment at which the downward movement had the greatest impetus, I used to get a curious feeling in my genitals, which I must designate, although it was not really pleasant to me, as a voluptuous feeling." I have often heard from patients that their first erections accompanied by voluptuous sensations had occurred in boyhood while they were climbing. It is established with complete certainty by psychoanalyses that the first sexual impulses have often originated in the scufflings and wrestlings of childhood.
