Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/283

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THE DREAM-WORK
265

and "monograph," penetrates deeper and deeper into the confused tangle of the dream thoughts. To "botanical " belong the recollections of the person of Professor Gartner (German: Gärtner = gardener), of his blooming wife, of my patient whose name is Flora, and of a lady about whom I told the story of the forgotten flowers. Gartner, again, is connected with the laboratory and the conversation with Koenigstein; the mention of the two female patients also belongs to the same conversation. A chain of thoughts, one end of which is formed by the title of the hastily seen monograph, leads off in the other direction from the lady with the flowers to the favourite flowers of my wife. Besides this, "botanical" recalls not only an episode at the Gymnasium, but an examination taken while I was at the university; and a new subject matter—my hobbies—which was broached in the conversation already mentioned, is connected by means of my humorously so-called favourite flower, the artichoke, with the chain of thoughts proceeding from the forgotten flowers; behind "artichoke" there is concealed on the one hand a recollection of Italy, and on the other a reminiscence of a childhood scene in which I first formed my connection with books which has since grown so intimate. "Botanical," then, is a veritable nucleus, the centre for the dream of many trains of thought, which, I may assure the reader, were correctly and justly brought into relation to one another in the conversation referred to. Here we find ourselves in a thought factory, in which, as in the "Weaver's Masterpiece":

"One tread moves thousands of threads,
The little shuttles fly back and forth,
The threads flow on unseen,
One stroke ties thousands of knots."

"Monograph" in the dream, again, has a bearing upon two subjects, the one-sidedness of my studies and the costliness of my hobbies.

The impression is gained from this first investigation that the elements "botanical" and "monograph" have been accepted in the dream content because they were able to show the most extensive connections with the dream thoughts, and thus represent nuclei in which a great number of dream thoughts come together, and because they have manifold