LITMIR.BIZ

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is as follows: One should let nothing which one can have escape, even if a little wrong is done; no opportunity should be missed, life is so short, death inevitable. Owing to the fact that this also has a sexual significance, and that desire is unwilling to stop at a wrong, this philosophy of carpe diem must fear the censor and must hide behind a dream. This now makes articulate counter-thoughts of all kinds, recollections of a time when spiritual food alone was sufficient for the dreamer; it suggests repressions of every kind, and even threats of disgusting sexual punishments.

      II. A second dream requires a longer preliminary statement:

      I have taken a car to the West Station in order to begin a vacation journey to the Aussee, and I reach the station in time for the train to Ischl, which leaves earlier. Here I see Count Thun, who is again going to see the Emperor at Ischl. In spite of the rain, he has come in an open carriage, has passed out at once through the door for local trains, and has motioned back the gate-keeper, who does not know him and who wants to take his ticket, with a little wave of his hand. After the train to Ischl has left, I am told to leave the platform and go back into the hot waiting-room; but with difficulty I secure permission to remain. I pass the time in watching the people who make use of bribes to secure a compartment; I make up my mind to insist on my rights—that is, to demand the same privilege. Meanwhile I sing something to myself, which I afterwards recognise to be the aria from Figaro's Wedding:

      "If my lord Count wishes to try a dance,

       Try a dance,

       Let him but say so,

       I'll play him a tune."

      (Possibly another person would not have recognised the song.)

      During the whole afternoon I have been in an insolent, combative mood; I have spoken roughly to the waiter and the cabman, I hope without hurting their feelings; now all kinds of bold and revolutionary thoughts come into my head, of a kind suited to the words of Figaro and the comedy of Beaumarchais, which I had seen at the Comédie Française. The speech about great men who had taken the trouble to be born; the aristocratic prerogative, which Count Almaviva wants to apply in the case of Susan; the jokes which our malicious journalists of the Opposition make upon the name of Count Thun (German, thun = doing) by calling him Count Do-Nothing. I really do not envy him; he has now a difficult mission with the Emperor, and I am the real Count Do-Nothing, for I am taking a vacation. With this, all kinds of cheerful plans for the vacation. A gentleman now arrives who is known to me as a representative of the Government at the medical examinations, and who has won the flattering nick-name of "Governmental bed-fellow" by his activities in this capacity. By insisting on his official station he secures half of a first-class compartment, and I hear one guard say to the other: "Where are we going to put the gentleman with the first-class half-compartment ?" A pretty favouritism; I am paying for a whole first-class compartment. Now I get a whole compartment for myself, but not in a through coach, so that there is no toilet at my disposal during the night. My complaints to the guard are without result; I get even by proposing that at least there be a hole made in the floor of this compartment for the possible needs of the travellers. I really awake at a quarter of three in the morning with a desire to urinate, having had the following dream:

      Crowd of people, meeting of students.... A certain Count (Thun or Taafe) is making a speech. Upon being asked to say something about the Germans, he declares with contemptuous mien that their favourite flower is Colt's-foot, and then puts something like a torn leaf, really the crumpled skeleton of a leaf, into his buttonhole. I make a start, I make a start then,21 but I am surprised at this idea of mine. Then more indistinctly: It seems as though it were the vestibule (Aula), the exits are jammed, as though it were necessary to flee. I make my way through a suite of handsomely furnished rooms, apparently governmental chambers, with furniture of a colour which is between brown and violet, and at last I come to a passage where a housekeeper, an elderly, fat woman (Frauenzimmer), is seated. I try to avoid talking to her, but apparently she thinks I have a right to pass because she asks whether she shall accompany me with the lamp. I signify to her to tell her that she is to remain standing on the stairs, and in this I appear to myself very clever, for avoiding being watched at last. I am downstairs now, and I find a narrow, steep way along which I go.

      Again indistinctly... It is as if my second task were to get away out of the city, as my earlier was to get out of the house. I am riding in a one-horse carriage, and tell the driver to take me to a railway station. "I cannot ride with you on the tracks," I say, after he has made the objection that I have tired him out. Here it seems as though I had already driven with him along a course which is ordinarily traversed on the railroad. The stations are crowded; I consider whether I shall go to Krems or to Znaim, but I think that the court will be there, and I decide in favour of Graz or something of the sort. Now I am seated in the coach, which is something like a street-car, and I have in my buttonhole a long braided thing, on which are violet-brown violets of stiff material, which attracts the attention of many people. Here the scene breaks off.

      I am again in front of the railroad station, but I am with a elderly gentleman. I invent a scheme for remaining unrecognised, but I also see this plan already carried out. Thinking and experiencing are here, as it were, the same thing. He pretends to be blind, at least in one eye, and I hold a male urinal in front of him (which we have had to buy in the city or did buy), I am thus a sick attendant, and have to give him the urinal because he is blind. If the conductor sees us in this position, he must pass us by without drawing attention. At the same time the attitude of the person mentioned is visually observed. Then I awake with a desire to urinate.

      The whole dream seems a sort of phantasy, which takes the dreamer back to the revolutionary year 1848, the memory of which had been renewed by the anniversary year 1898, as well as by a little excursion to Wachau, where I had become acquainted with Emmersdorf, a town which I wrongly supposed to be the resting-place of the student leader Fischof, to whom several features of the dream content might refer. The thought associations then lead me to England, to the house of my brother, who was accustomed jokingly to tell his wife of "Fifty years ago," according to the title of a poem by Lord Tennyson, whereupon the children were in the habit of correcting: "Fifteen years ago." This phantasy, however, which subtilely attaches itself to the thoughts which the sight of the Count Thun has given rise to, is only like the façade of Italian churches which is superimposed without being organically connected with the building behind it; unlike these façades, however, the phantasy is filled with gaps and confused, and the parts from within break through at many places. The first situation of the dream is concocted from several scenes, into which I am able to separate it. The arrogant attitude of the Count in the dream is copied from a scene at the Gymnasium which took place in my fifteenth year. We had contrived a conspiracy against an unpopular and ignorant teacher, the leading spirit in which was a schoolmate who seems to have taken Henry VIII. of England as his model. It fell to me to carry out the coup-d 'état, and a discussion of the importance of the Danube (German Donau) for Austria (Wachau!) was the occasion upon which matters came to open indignation. A fellow-conspirator was the only aristocratic schoolmate whom we had—he was called the "giraffe" on account of his conspicuous longitudinal development—and he stood just like the Count in the dream, while he was being reprimanded by the tyrant of the school, the Professor of the German language. The explanation of the favourite flower and the putting into the buttonhole of something which again must have been a flower (which recalls the orchids, which I had brought to a lady friend on the same day, and besides that the rose of Jericho) prominently recalls the scene in Shakespeare's historical plays which opens the civil wars of the Red and the White Roses; the mention of Henry VIII. has opened the way to this reminiscence. It is not very far now from roses to red and white carnations. Meanwhile two little rhymes, the one German, the other Spanish, insinuate themselves into the analysis: "Roses, tulips, carnations, all flowers fade," and "Isabelita, no llores que se marchitan las flores." The Spanish is taken from Figaro. Here in Vienna white carnations have become the insignia of the Anti-Semites, the red ones of the Social Democrats. Behind this is the recollection of an anti-Semitic challenge during a railway trip in beautiful Saxony (Anglo-Saxon). The third scene contributing to the formation of the first situation in the dream takes place in my early student life. There was a discussion in the German students' club about the relation of philosophy to the general sciences. A green youth,

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