9

Wyrd and Wishes — Metabolizing the Future in Dreams

Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall find the truth . . . but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.

— Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, speech on his dream-discovery of the ring structure of benzene (1890)

T he inevitability of things prophesied is one factor that has always made prophecy so taboo, something not to be toyed with, and thus somewhat fearful. After all, it is from the future that death and downfall ultimately arrive—nothing good. Thus in a world gripped by fate’s time-looping iron law, writers of tragedies did not depict the ability to see the future as a possible “superpower” or as a way of improving an individual’s fortunes, the way modern writers about “developing your ESP powers” or “honing your intuition” might. Stories like that of Oedipus highlight the tragic folly of trying to evade or avoid something foreseen by an oracle, and those prophecies are generally ominous. Getting a preview of the future, like meddling in the past (for instance, tampering with royal succession), comes at a cost, or else is a consolation prize for some grave loss. It cannot liberate us from our fate because there is always something we don’t know about ourselves, and that thing is bound to be our undoing.

The Anglo-Saxons of Northern Europe had their own word for a fate or destiny that can only be seen in hindsight because of the obliquity of foresight. Wyrd is one of a large and fascinating family of w-r words still found in our language connoting change and exchange, turning and turning-into, but also (along with this) the twisting both of objects and of minds and souls. Wyrd comes from weorthan , “to become,” but with a sense of turning or spinning—as in the “spinning” of the thread of our life. Thus it embeds a fan of connotations ranging from a man’s worth to the writhing and wriggling of worms , and the wrath of wraiths . Wyrd, as becoming and as turning, represents “what has turned out” or “what will have turned out” or “what you will have turned into.” It is a kind of future-perfect tense, a retrospective view from a future vantage point that can turn, look back, and survey the ironic (or even warped ) paths a life has taken. Hindsight, in other words. Post-selection by another name.

Other than through a common appearance in fantasy novels, including the Discworld series of Terry Pratchett, the word wyrd survives now in English solely via the wonderful word weird , and this is thanks entirely to Shakespeare’s Macbeth . The “weird sisters” whose prophecies captured the mind of an ambitious young Scottish general and his wife were three witches living alone in the wilderness. They were inspired by the Norns of Norse mythology, the three sister-goddesses—analogous to the Greek Fates—who together wove a man’s destiny and could thus foretell it. Even up to Shakespeare’s day, weird didn’t simply mean “strange” as it does now; it meant more the inevitability of things prophesied as well as prophecy’s cunning misdirection. It is always one step ahead of us and speaks a deceptive language that, by luring us with our wishes, tricks us into fulfilling it. ¹

The weird sisters’ first prophecy that Macbeth would be made king seems like a good thing, but weirdly, neurotically even, instead of just letting it come to pass in whatever way the world wills, Macbeth actively pursues this outcome—goaded by his even-more-ambitious wife—and finds that the “positive outcome” foreseen is fraught with paranoia and guilt. The later prophecies conjured for Macbeth by the sisters are far more oblique—that Macbeth will be safe until Birnam Wood marches on Dunsinane and that he will not be harmed by anyone “of woman born.” These Macbeth takes as reassurances. But clearly, when outcomes are dark, “weird” (i.e., wyrd ) speaks a figurative language similar to dream, and the prophecies about Macbeth’s downfall come to pass: Malcolm’s army attacks Dunsinane Castle under cover of boughs cut from Birnam Wood; and Macduff, who fights and kills Macbeth at the end, turns out to have been “untimely ripp’d” from his mother’s womb (Caesarean section, in other words), not birthed in the usual way. Here, just as in the Oedipus story, foresight operates in the shadow realm of our self-ignorance.

The necessary obliquity of prophecy in a post-selected (i.e., possible) universe is one of the reasons why, despite Sigmund Freud’s strong resistances to the subject, we must enlist his aid, recruit him over his own dead body as it were, in our study of it. Specifically, any theory of the oblique language spoken by prophecy and the time-looping way it shapes our lives must bring Freud’s theory of dreams as symbolically disguised wish-fulfillments into dialogue with J. W. Dunne’s observations about precognitive dreams and the pragmatic impediments to observing them, along with recent developments in the neuroscience of sleep and memory. The tropes and detours Freud identified as the symbolic language of the unconscious turn out to be none other than the associative laws that govern how the brain stores and retrieves information, the rules by which new experiences in our lives are linked with older ones. We are now learning that it is precisely in dreaming that these associations are forged, making dreams the “royal road” not only to memory but, I argue, to “premory” as well. Yet ironically, because Freud, the great dream pioneer, rejected the possibility of prophecy, it ruled his fate in a tragically wyrd way—not unlike Macbeth, or indeed Oedipus.

The Invisible Key to Dreams

The dream that started it all, the one that revealed to Freud the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, centered on a close friend named Anna Hammerschlag, whom Freud had treated for hysteria briefly in spring of 1895. He had the dream one night the following July, while on vacation, and gave Hammerschlag the name “Irma” in his description:

A large hall—numerous guests, whom we were receiving. —Among them was Irma. I at once took her to one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my ‘solution’ yet. I said to her: ‘If you still get pains, it’s really only your fault.’ She replies: ‘If you only knew what pains I’ve got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen—it’s choking me.’ —I was alarmed and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after all I must be missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and looked down her throat, and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her to do that. She then opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose. ²

At this point, Freud summons a trio of medical friends in the dream to get their opinion. “Dr. M,” his friend “Otto,” and another friend “Leopold” examine Irma. Dr. M confirms what the dreamer has seen in Irma’s mouth, and the men poke and prod Irma’s shoulder and abdomen. They agree she has some sort of infection, which her dysentery should eliminate from her body.

We were directly aware, too, of the origin of the infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls ... propionic acid ... trimethylamin (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type). ... Injections of this sort ought not to be given so thoughtlessly ... And probably the syringe had not been clean. ³

The method Freud hit on was to free associate on each separate element of the dream—that is, reflect honestly and spontaneously on what each figure, each object, each noticed element reminded him of, and follow the trains of association where they led. The force of this method was like splitting the atom: A dream that may fill a paragraph or less of description (the “manifest content”) mushrooms into pages and pages of associations that, in many cases—Freud argued all cases—present in multiple ways a single coherent latent (or unconscious) thought or a nexus of closely related thoughts.

Freud’s free association on each of the elements of the Irma dream runs to some 14 pages in his 1899 masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams , and he admits that even then he has not exhausted the dream’s many possible layers of meaning. He begins by identifying the “day residues,” obvious points of contact with the previous day’s activities and preoccupations. Most dreams have one or two, and here there were several. Freud had this dream while summering at an open spacious house called Bellevue, near a resort outside of Vienna. While not as vast as the drawing room in the dream, the house did have a similar expansive quality. The day before the dream, Freud had received a visit from the family pediatrician, Dr. Oskar Rie, who appears in the dream as Otto. Although Rie was a friend, Freud felt ambivalently toward Rie and disliked his habit of bringing gifts whenever he visited. On this occasion, Rie specifically annoyed Freud by bringing two things: a bottle of spoiled Ananas or pineapple brandy that, when opened, smelled like fusel oil (similar to the smell of the chemicals in the dream injection); Rie also brought news that their mutual friend Anna (dream Irma) was “better, but not fully recovered.” It happened that she was going to be invited to a party at the Freuds’ a few days hence, for which preparations were already being made. And on the evening prior to the dream, to clear his conscience about her treatment, Freud had spent time writing up a report on her case. It is worth emphasizing that Anna Hammerschlag’s “condition” was hysteria that had emerged in the aftermath of the loss of her husband, nothing like the organic disease that was displayed in the dream.

It is impossible to adequately summarize in a few sentences, but most of the associations in the dream, including the figures present, pointed to professional worries Freud was then having. He was feeling vulnerable firstly because of his support for his best friend, Wilhelm Fliess, a quack ear, nose, and throat doctor who had recently seriously botched a nose operation on a mutual friend and who had recommended a questionable course of treatment for one of Freud’s patients that had caused serious complications. Major and minor medical malpractice was going around in Freud’s medical circle, and Freud himself bore his share of guilt. In addition to the patient he had seriously injured following Fliess’s advice, his treatment of another, psychotic patient a few years earlier with an injection of the dangerous drugs chloral hydrate and sulfonal had led to the patient’s death. Another friend and patient of Freud had died after injecting himself with cocaine that Freud had prescribed to be used only orally. As he was venturing into brand-new territory in his psychiatric work with hysterics, he could not have been without a measure of doubt about his new “talking cure” and would have been eager for any news of his treatment successes. ⁴ Instead, hearing from Dr. Rie, dream Otto, that their friend Anna was “better, but not fully recovered” was not what he wanted to hear.

Despite the air of anxiety and guilt that seemed to oppress his waking professional life at this period, the conclusions he was able to draw from this one dream analysis, as far as it went, excited him greatly:

If we adopt the method of interpreting dreams which I have indicated here, we shall find that dreams really have a meaning and are far from being the expression of a fragmentary activity of the brain, as the authorities have claimed. When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish . ⁵

What was the wish in this case? There are many layers to it, but briefly, it boiled down to Freud not being responsible for Anna/Irma’s condition but that Dr. Rie/Otto instead should be responsible. (Remember that dream Otto had “thoughtlessly” given Irma the injection that caused her infection, and the syringe he had used had not been clean.) It was a wish that Freud be beyond any kind of professional or personal reproach in Anna’s case. ⁶

Five years later, Freud revisited the house in Bellevue, and wrote to Fliess:

Do you suppose that some day a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these words?—

In This House, on July 24, 1895 the Secret of Dreams was Revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud. ⁷

We see here again Freud’s obsession with commemorating his real or imagined accomplishments—first marble busts, now marble tablets. But his achievement here was indeed groundbreaking. Nobody in history had given so much detailed attention to a single dream and in the process divulged so many personal vulnerabilities, private sources of guilt, and deep desires in a public forum. Freud’s book goes on to subject several other dreams of his own and those of his patients to similarly close scrutiny, in some cases to more convincing effect. More than any other single exploit in Freud’s work, though, this one dream interpretation catapulted him to ultimate immortality and fame. It was a milestone in psychology that some have compared to Darwin’s contributions to biology a few decades earlier or Einstein’s contributions to physics a few years later.

The dream itself seemed to “know” how scientifically significant it was. Its culminating image, the formula for the organic compound trimethylamine in bold type, would naturally have called to mind August Kekulé’s famous discovery of the hexagonal structure of the benzene molecule after a dream of a snake biting its own tail. Although the Czech-Austrian chemist alleged he had had his dream in 1861, it was only in 1890, five years before Freud’s dream, that Kekulé told the story for the first time at a Berlin conference to honor the discovery. “I was sitting writing at my textbook,” Kekulé said, “but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere”—

I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eyes, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformations; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twisting and turning in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis. ⁸

It quickly became a famous, proud moment in Austrian science, and to this day no discussion of dreams in the context of genius, creativity, or scientific discovery fails to cite it. It would have provided Freud with a template for his own making of a milestone scientific discovery in a dream—in his case, a discovery about dreams. ⁹ You can’t get more snake-biting-its-tail-ish (or fractal) than that.

Freud’s interpretation of his dream was a cultural watershed, leading to the post-Victorian epoch of self-inquiry and self-scrutiny, a kind of novelistic approach to the soul. Freud’s writings made psychological causation complex and mysterious, and through them he got Westerners to see themselves and their lives as having infinite, perhaps unplumbable depths. After Freud, it was no longer easy to see humans as simple creatures with clear-cut, straightforward motives and needs—even if certain root principles, such as a drive for satisfaction or pleasure, could be discerned at the root of it all. The twists and turns through which our desires flow, in Freud’s picture, have the sublime complexity of a weather system or a butterfly, not a simple steam engine. As we will see later, there are also more than a few similarities between the invisible, warring motives in the unconscious as Freud depicted it and the obscure “superposition” of unmeasured particles in the emerging science of quantum physics; the latter lent an almost “psychodynamic” mystery and inscrutability to the world of material interactions.

Many Freudian constructs are easily parodied for sure. The single-minded obsession with sex and childhood incestuous desires, as well as constructs like “penis envy,” can be bracketed or set aside (or, some argue, thrown out like bathwater). But the Freudian big picture has retained its power. Humans are complex, conflicted, inconsistent creatures with warring impulses, contradictory emotions, and divided aims. Our conscious self or ego is a construct and a compromise, a treaty appeasing these various sides of ourselves, weaving them into a somewhat coherent and productive whole that at best accommodates cultural expectations while giving us sufficient leeway to satisfy most of our needs and desires. Calling our attention to the dimension of ambivalence in our mental life has probably been the most important, basic, and enduring contribution of Freudian psychoanalysis, even if the precise nature and “location” of the unconscious, where these divided aims lurk, is debatable.

Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory of dreams has fared less well than some of his other ideas. Although it was long popular with the wider public, it was highly controversial in psychology even at the time he proposed it, and it was later rejected out of hand by most scientists. Popperian science rests on the ability to falsify hypotheses with evidence and repeat an experiment to gain better confidence in one’s conclusions, but there is no way to falsify an interpretation of a dream. Indeed, there is really no objective basis from which to assess any claim related to meaning. For example, how can we ever know that Freud’s many, sometimes brilliant, sometimes strained interpretations of his and his patients’ dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams do not reflect his own “wish” to prove his theory correct? We will see later, in fact, that Freud’s own wishes about his dream theory may have been precisely—and fractally—part of his (mis)interpretation of the Irma dream, causing him to miss a stunning precognitive dimension.

As I argued earlier, the “schizophrenia” of dreams—being amenable either to biological or hermeneutic study—reflects their unstable position on the fault line between C. P. Snow’s “two worlds” of the sciences and the humanities. The humanities all in one way or another address meaning as it comes to be encoded in language or other cultural forms, but meaning always boils down the value of a thing to or for an individual. There is no way really to get at meaning without losing our grip on objectivity, and vice versa. It is directly analogous in fact to basic tradeoffs of knowledge that define quantum physics. Niels Bohr showed that an experimenter is prohibited from gaining knowledge of both the position and momentum of a particle because the tools necessary to gain one type of information are actually antithetical to the tools necessary to gain the other, complementary type. ¹⁰ The philosopher Slavoj Žižek uses the term “parallax” to describe dual-aspect phenomena that cannot be apprehended other than in a kind of alternating gestalt, like the famous duck-rabbit of psychological research on perception. ¹¹ Dreams are perfect examples of objects that need to be approached obliquely, flickeringly, from multiple, non-integral perspectives, in a kind of “parallax view.”

To acknowledge the inability to scientifically adjudicate the “correct” meaning of a dream, precognitive or not, is not equivalent to saying that there can be no meaning in the dream. It is only to concede that such meaning (or its absence) is not something that can be readily evaluated solely through the usual scientific tools of quantification and replication, since the dreamer is an n of 1. Yet Freud-bashers in scientific psychology and neuroscience have historically committed the oddly superstitious mistake of thinking that if the scientific tools do not exist to verify a dream’s meaning, then dreams are therefore not meaningful. It is not just like searching under the proverbial streetlight for one’s lost keys just because the light is better there, even though you know you probably dropped them in the dark alley nearby. It is more like saying the keys must be somewhere in this pool of light because that is where light exists to detect them, denying the existence of the alley altogether. When you cannot find the keys you remember you once had, you will end up either with a theory of invisible keys or a theory that your memory of ever having had keys in the first place is false.

Until recently, much of the neuroscience of dreaming has read like a theory of invisible or nonexistent keys. J. Allan Hobson, the most outspoken contemporary dream neuroscientist and the most vocal and persistent critic of the Freudian wish-fulfillment theory, argued in 1977 that dreaming represents chaotic hyper-activation of the brainstem during sleep. ¹² Dreams contain no symbolic meaning, he insisted; the conscious mind simply imposes meaningful order on that chaos, sort of the way a patient will see suggestive pictures in a Rorschach inkblot. Nobel Prize-winning biologist Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of DNA, lent fuel and the weight of authority to the anti-Freudians in a 1983 paper arguing that dreams are the discharging of mental static, random and meaningless associations, a way the brain gets rid of unwanted or unneeded information. ¹³ Other functional theories have also found some support in the peculiarities of nocturnal brain activation, such as the theory that dreams prepare us to face threats or emotional challenges in waking life. ¹⁴ The common theme in these accounts is: Dreams may be interesting neurological phenomena, but they do not contain any hidden or obscure meaning or represent any covert, “off-stage” portion of our meaning-making mind.

In recent years, however, cognitive science and neuroscience have made greater peace with Freud, having been “obliged” by mounting evidence to acknowledge that his core theory of the unconscious accurately characterizes many dimensions of cognition. Again, Freud’s terminology is often replaced by the less baggage-laden term implicit processing. Research has also started to vindicate some of Freud’s ideas about dreams, albeit with some key modifications.

Evidence from sleep science over the past few decades has pointed to a role for dreaming in the solidification or consolidation of memories and the forming of new associations to events that occurred in recent waking life. Newly learned material is better remembered after being “slept on,” and complex material is simplified during sleep, or reduced to its gist. ¹⁵ If you are exposed to material in a morning lesson, you will do better on a quiz the following morning, after a night of sleep, than you will on a quiz the preceding afternoon. There is an evolutionary correlation between REM sleep, when the brain is most active at night, and learning. Altricial animals (those most dependent at birth, like humans and birds and some mammals, such as dogs and cats) show much more REM sleep than precocial animals (those born able to function). In other words, the more an animal needs to learn in order to survive and function, the more its brain is active at night, and the more it seems to dream. ¹⁶ Rodent studies have shown that brain areas activated during daytime exploration and learning are reactivated during sleep (compared to control animals that haven’t engaged in learning). And the hippocampus, which can be likened to the brain’s librarian or archivist, is extremely active during sleep. ¹⁷

But while dreams contain tantalizing bits of our recent daily life—Freud’s “day residues”—they seldom if ever replay experiences of the previous day in any literal fashion, and their surreal quality (or “bizarreness”) has always frustrated scientists’ attempt to link the content of dreams to the formation of new memories. But in 2013, a psychologist named Sue Llewellyn hit on a colorful and inspiring answer. She did so by venturing out of the science stacks into the alien world of the humanities and ancient history, unifying the available neurobiology of sleep and memory with insights drawn from the study of the ancient “art of memory” used by orators in pre-Gutenberg and preliterate times. ¹⁸ To link to-be-remembered new information to older contents of their memory, practitioners of this art playfully used puns, analogies, and substitution to create bizarre and memorable mnemonic images. Llewellyn suggested that dreams are essentially the ancient art of memory operating automatically while we sleep. ¹⁹

Memory seems to work on multiple levels in the brain. The circuit level (multiple interlinked neurons and circuits, involvement of distinct brain areas like the hippocampus, amygdala, and so on) is best understood because it unfolds at a scale that puts it within the granularity of existing research tools. On this level, we can see how “memories” are encoded in the brain physically as the readiness of dispersed groups of neurons to fire together again having fired together in the past (i.e., Hebbian learning—“neurons that fire together, wire together”). Again, long-term potentiation (and its opposite, long-term depression) reflects the constant forging of new connections between neurons and the updating of the weights of existing connections—the readiness of synapses to transmit signals, based on their (prior) history of signal transmission.

According to the mnemonic theory, dreams are the experience of this nightly re-updating of neural connectivity via the triggering of associations around recent experiences in waking life—Hebbian learning at work. Specifically, Llewellyn argues that a dream scene represents a junction retained in the hippocampus, drawing together disparate associations to encode an autobiographical (episodic) memory. Instead of a “junction,” a dream could also be thought of as an associative halo around a salient experience from your day. The experience itself generally will not be represented because the brain does not need to replay that. What it needs to do is connect that experience to other experiences and themes so that it is accessible later via multiple associative pathways, and thus better integrated into long-term memory.

It makes beautiful sense of the weird characteristic of dreams that has long beguiled dreamers: that they seem so closely related to profound concerns and experiences in our waking lives, yet leave those concerns and experiences precisely unrepresented, like a blank at their heart. It is what naturally led the suspicious Freud to think that dreams were specifically hiding something, like spies smuggling letters past checkpoint guards, cloaking their “true meaning” in symbolism. He was probably incorrect in this assumption, but at the same time, the mnemonic theory explains why Freud’s innovative method of free association—saying the first thing or two that a given dream element reminds the dreamer of—is helpful when interpreting a dream. Free associating on a dream’s elements, as Freud showed with his Irma example, quickly produces a wealth of coherent references to recent experiences and concerns in the dreamer’s life, and often the disparate elements in a single dream “point” to the same window or timeframe in waking life, as though the dream is indeed an “art of memory”-style bundle of associations to that narrow window of time. ²⁰ Waking experiences that feed into a dream are seldom more than one degree removed from the bizarre narrative a dreamer will remember on waking. But unless it occurs to the dreamer to free associate on each dream element—unpacking the various puns and other substitutions—that “latent content” will remain mostly or wholly obscure, and the dream will just seem like some baffling and inscrutable message from God-knows-where.

The correspondence between the mnemonic hypothesis and Freud’s theory is close in other ways too. The techniques used by ancient orators to remember speeches and books—puns, absurd juxtapositions and substitutions, vivid and dramatic narratives, and so on—happen to precisely match the tropes that Freud described under his rubrics of “condensation,” “displacement,” and “dramatization.” If dreams are art-of-memory-style associative halos around waking events, it makes sense of why these should be so prevalent in dreams. It also makes sense of why dreams so often contain sexual imagery. One of the trade secrets of medieval and modern mnemonists was making memory images as dirty as possible, because sexy images are easily remembered. ²¹

Dreaming could thus really be described as the nightly metabolism of waking experience by the brain, analogous to the metabolism of food by the digestive system. What Freud thought were symbolic disguises hiding some deep dark secret were really the associative connective tissue of long-term memory, the way recent events are made more accessible and findable by connecting both logically and illogically to things they remind us of. Without knowing it, Freud was really a pioneer in memory research, mapping out the illogical, poetic tropes our brain uses to file and retrieve information. ²² The idea that dreams often represent some satisfying situation or wish is not incompatible with such a view, although even Freud came to admit this was not a universal rule. The mnemonic view, however, omits any need for a “censor” to “repress” unwanted thoughts.

Llewellyn’s mnemonic hypothesis is the most satisfying functional account of dreaming yet offered by a mainstream scientist. It restores color and meaning to dreaming without losing sight of the neurobiological mechanisms. One dream researcher, commenting in Psychology Today , remarked on the irony that it took an outsider to the field of sleep and dream research (Llewellyn teaches at the University of Manchester’s Business School) to weave together those disparate threads from C. P. Snow’s sundered worlds into such a compelling account of dreaming. ²³ But the sour jingle of those invisible keys was also to be heard. The eminent Hobson, in one of numerous professional responses published with her article, praised the elegance and originality of her hypothesis but challenged her to design an experiment that could actually be used to test it, adding that he himself could not imagine one. He specifically forbade any form of “anecdotal self-analysis”—providing examples of one’s own dreams and demonstrating how they support the theory (the standard move in psychoanalytic writing)—and declared that “we must not tolerate neo-Freudianism, no matter how brilliant.” ²⁴

As long as one-sided authorities like Hobson control the playing field, the study of dreams will remain at an impasse. If meaning’s sinews are as idiosyncratic and private as Freudian psychoanalysis presumes (and as working experience with mnemonic techniques also affirms), it would indeed be virtually impossible to design a rigorous experiment to adequately test Llewellyn’s hypothesis. So, unless and until psychological scientists can bring themselves to trust individuals’ meaning-claims, they may be doomed to forever circle that streetlight when it comes to dreams, which are among the most personal and private experiences in our lives. If precognition centers on meaningful personal experiences, it faces the same challenge. We cannot make progress without trusting—however cautiously and critically—those dreaded anecdotes.

Symbolism Versus Obliquity

All of which leads to the obvious—and at this point, obviously rhetorical—question: If dreams do represent a process of recent experiences being accessioned by the brain, could they be doing the same thing with future experiences? If we trust even some of the evidence for precognitive dreaming provided by Dunne and many other writers, the answer seems to be yes. It looks very much like neuronal networks might be being reinforced and conditioned not only by their past history of signaling but also, to some as-yet-undetermined degree, by their future history. Viewing this as a normal function of the brain—the brain’s nightly metabolism of future as well as past time—suggests why precognitive dreaming may potentially be much more common than even Dunne thought. If the function of a dream is to update our memory-search system by triggering associations to “new” material, it could be that, as often as not, it is future experiences that are the “absent center” of a dream. ²⁵

This is where the analogy to the digestive system breaks down, of course. As far as we know, the stomach at night is not digesting tomorrow’s breakfast, let alone a breakfast I might eat several years from now. The brain may be far, far weirder (or wyrd-er) than the stomach.

Although Dunne did not see any conflict between precognition and wish-fulfillment in dreams, he largely ignored the Freudian idea that a dream’s surface content consists mainly of symbols and substitutions and compromises among warring desires—an idea that is readily carried over into the mnemonic theory. Nor did Dunne bother to scratch below the surface of his dreams in search of thoughts or feelings in relation to future events that may have been represented obliquely in them. He was content to look for obvious resemblances of dream motifs to waking experiences, and he imagined, like many laypeople, that free association is a difficult or esoteric exercise. Consequently, he noted that people are unlikely to recognize most precognitive content (or any kind of meaningful content for that matter) because of dreams’ associative logic:

The difficulty of remembering is easily overcome; but the difficulty of associating proves in some cases insurmountable. It is always hard to discover in the average dream any incident which is clearly related to a chronologically definite past waking event, and some people’s dreams are far too complex to allow such connections to be traced. It is obvious that persons thus handicapped would find it equally impossible to discover in their dreams any clear suggestion of precognition. ²⁶

More recent investigators of precognitive dreaming have also typically not gone beyond the level of manifest content (as Freud termed the dream’s surface-level narrative and images), focusing instead on immediately obvious relations of dream elements to things seen or encountered later in waking life. In their experiments with precognitive dreaming, Stanley Krippner, Montague Ullman, and Charles Honorton had independent judges assess the similarity of their psychic subject’s dream descriptions to target scenarios (based on randomly selected paintings) without delving into the dreamer’s private and personal associations or attending to possible symbols or Freudian tropes. ²⁷ Dale E. Graff, who directed the U.S. military’s Star Gate remote viewing program, went on to write two very interesting memoirs about his experiences as well as his personal experiments in precognitive dreaming; in his experiments, he routinely obtained many close matches between dream scenes and newspaper photographs or cartoons—although, since he focuses mainly on visual forms (per standard remote-viewing methods), he has not ventured too deeply into dream symbolism. ²⁸ In an effort to scientifically analyze a huge database of 11,850 of his own dream scenes, many of which he identified as precognitive, film and video game CG artist Andrew Paquette claimed to find a relative in frequency of unambiguous symbols in his dreams, especially those that had veridical precognitive content. ²⁹ On the other hand, a recent writer named Bruce Siegel, replicating Dunne’s experiment in his own life and finding that just over a quarter of his 241-dream sample appeared to be precognitive, noted that his dreams very often used the same tropes—metaphor, substitution, wordplay, etc.—that would be familiar to a psychoanalyst (and that can be glossed, for convenience, as symbolism). ³⁰

Psychoanalytically informed parapsychologists have demonstrated that apparent precognitive dreams not only may be subject to the same kinds of contortions and distortions Freud described but may express the same types of divided feeling and emotional complexity. ³¹ In his 1982 book Paranormal Foreknowledge , Jule Eisenbud provides many examples of what could be called typical Dunne dreams, appearing to match something the patient was about to read in the newspaper or encounter the next day, along with the kind of richly layered (sometimes uncomfortably detailed) commentary that is typical of Freudian case studies. Eisenbud regarded precognitive elements in such dreams as serving the dream’s purpose: fulfilling a repressed wish. But it is easy to reframe the cases he presents in terms of the newer mnemonic hypothesis. What seems like a dream “collecting precognitive bricks” to fulfill a wish can generally be redescribed as a dream about the complex thoughts and emotions that will be triggered by a later, unsettling learning experience in the dreamer’s life. There is not too big a gap between the two theories: If precognition focuses on a person’s future conscious thoughts in response to some experience, those future thoughts may still often be “wishful.”

For example, a female patient with a distinctly “Oedipal” pattern of self-inhibition and frustrating relationships with older men had a dream involving her roommate, who had just become engaged to a man the patient herself had previously dated.

Shortly after the engagement was announced, the roommate, who had been visiting her parents’ home in the east, took a plane to join her fiancé in the Midwest. On the eve of her flight the patient dreamed that the plane crashed and that her roommate was killed. The roommate’s plane did not crash, but a later one out of the same city the next day did, and many lives were lost. The crash occurred several hours after my patient reported her dream to me. ³²

Following standard Freudian theory, this dream appears to Eisenbud as the use of psi-acquired information (an imminent fatal plane crash out of the same city her roommate was in) to help represent an unconscious wish about the death of the roommate, who was a rival for a man’s affections. In light of the mnemonic theory, we might flip this and say that the dream was pre -presenting a “what if” that would naturally have occurred to the dreamer upon learning of a fatal plane crash out of that city. Note that whereas Eisenbud would assume the death wish to be a thought that already existed (but was repressed) in the patient’s unconscious, and that seized on a convenient future brick to represent itself in the dream, I am proposing that the dreamer simply precognized a thought or mental image she would consciously, albeit perhaps fleetingly, have the next day on hearing of the disaster.

Another of Eisenbud’s patients reported a dream of being smothered in a landslide, “a vast roaring avalanche of mud and rock,” ³³ from which he awoke in terror, quickly realizing to his relief that the dream had been triggered by his wife flushing the toilet. First thing the next morning, though, he read in the paper about a man and boy tragically being buried alive under 20 tons of coal in a coal hopper accident. Eisenbud suggests that the patient was using this bit of psi-acquired data to represent his “anal” anxieties, his wife’s flushing of the toilet acting as a kind of nucleus “attracting” information appearing in the next day’s news to help express those anxieties. But it could just as easily be supposed that the toilet flush “preminded” him of the disturbing reading experience the next morning about people being buried in black muck—a kind of prime in reverse (like in the temporally inverted priming experiments of Daryl Bem). The real source and subject of the dream might have been relief that this muck-burial happened to someone else and not him. As we will see in the next chapter, the main message “sent back” from future learning experiences about disasters and deaths seems to be the rewarding thought “but I survived.” Another possibility for the previous dream about the plane crash, too, is that it was not really about a death wish for the roommate so much as thoughts of personal survival provoked by news of a disaster befalling or “nearly” befalling someone close to the dreamer.

I propose that Dunne, in his comment about dreams collecting future bricks to build a wish-fulfilling edifice, was nearly right, but that we should reverse his formulation: A precognitive dream uses past and present bricks to pre-present (or, per the mnemonic hypothesis, simply associate to or perhaps “encode”) a future thought . That is to say, a dream should be interpreted from the temporal vantage point not of the dream itself but from the future point at which the dreamer will have those thoughts consciously, in waking life (as well as, in rare cases, realize that those thoughts/experiences supply the meaning of that remembered dream). Often there isn’t too much time delay—a matter of hours or minutes, or even seconds in some cases ³⁴ —but there are plenty of examples in which years or decades pass before the experience that “makes sense” of an old dream. Vladimir Nabokov’s dream of “Harry and Kuvyrkin” comes to mind, and we will see further examples. Once again, what Freud naturally took as evidence of an off-stage or submerged unconscious agency, harboring secret thoughts that must take nightly symbolic form to escape a censor, may really just be future conscious thoughts associatively pre-presented at some earlier point in time.

Let’s apply this idea to some well-documented dreams that we have already encountered in this book, to see how it adds to our understanding.

Less Guilty by a Factor of 10

First, we can revisit Dunne’s most well-known disaster dream, about the eruption of Mont Pelée. Commentators naturally tend to focus on the eruption (which, we should note, does not actually happen in the dream) and his death toll closely matching the headline but not the reality. They seldom comment on the “bureaucratic nightmare” sequence, in which Dunne’s dream-self tried to save all those lives but could get no one to believe his warnings. This part of the dream may have related to thoughts the soldier would naturally have had in response to the strange experience of reading about the eruption in the newspaper, having just dreamed of it.

Having uncannily “foreseen” the imminent death of “4,000” people on a French island volcano in a dream, Dunne could not have read the bold Daily Telegraph headline about 40,000 dead in Martinique with idle detachment. Besides the usual shock people feel learning of some disaster that claims the lives of many innocent (though anonymous) people far away, he would have also felt excitement that he had just dreamed about such an event—including, he thought, the exact same number dead; he notes that he misread the estimated death toll in the headline as “4,000” (and remembered it that way for several years thereafter). But tempering such excitement (or at least curiosity), how could he not have also had the thought as he read the news story that, if he’d dreamed about it, there ought (pun intended) to have been some way of using this foreknowledge to intervene and save those lives?

There is no way to get inside Dunne’s head and know for certain that this thought process went through his mind when he read the Daily Telegraph article. It didn’t occur to him to record his reactions in greater detail, and why would it? So to some degree we are playing a game of suppositions here. But the whole second part of the dream appears to represent anguished frustration at being unable to avert a catastrophe that only he knew was imminent. This part of the dream is particularly interesting because it seems to represent a set of emotions that many people do report upon learning that something tragic or sad that they have dreamed about has come true.

Physician Larry Dossey, in his book The Power of Premonitions , cites several examples of people who failed or were unable to act on a premonition of death or disaster and then were stricken by guilt. One, a patient of Dossey’s, was a radio dispatcher at a police station who had a history of accurate premonitions. At work one morning he had a distinct sense that a toddler was walking near a pool and was about to fall in. It had a vividness that he had learned to trust over the years, but because he had no way of knowing when or where the event was going to occur, what could he do about it? Less than an hour later, a police unit reported finding a child who had drowned in a nearby apartment complex; the dispatcher was devastated, requiring counseling over the following months. ³⁵ Elizabeth Krohn, the Houston woman who began experiencing accurate precognitive dreams of plane crashes following a near-death experience (Chapter 1), initially felt her new ability was a curse rather than a gift, because these depressing previews of death and catastrophe seemed to be without purpose—or, at least, the purpose was not to avert those catastrophes or save lives. ³⁶

If vaguely guilty thoughts did cross Dunne’s mind upon reading the Daily Telegraph article, reason would quickly have stepped in to absolve the young soldier of too much hand-wringing. Even if he had not been camped out far from civilization or communication, “warning someone” would never have occurred to him at the time he actually had the dream, since until he read the headline he had no idea the dream was actually a premonition. And even if he had had some sense of the dream’s premonitory nature, he could not possibly have known where and when the eruption might occur, and thus whom to warn. But if Freud’s work has taught us anything, it is that humans are not rational creatures, and that the unconscious has no sense of time and logic. Thoughts of using prophecy to improve our outcomes or save others, and a guilt when others fall victim to outcomes we have seen in our dreams, may be—indeed, must be—inevitable. This is a big part of the confusion and taboo that surrounds the whole topic of precognition and part of what deflects most people away from thinking too deeply about the subject.

Dunne’s dream seems to have represented precisely this emotional mélange. In other words, it does not seem to have been merely a dream about a news story; it seems to have been a dream about a very particular train of thought as well as associated emotions (a sense of frustration and even guilt) that would have arisen in him because of the fact that he had dreamed about it beforehand . This time loop would also make sense of the matter of the missing “nought.” A less prophecy-averse Freud would certainly have insisted that Dunne’s misreading of the terrible death toll of 40,000 as the less terrible (by a factor of 10) 4,000 would have reflected a bit of wish-fulfillment to offset his guilt, or at least cut it down to a slightly more manageable size.

The more we scrutinize cases of precognitive dreaming, the more we find this self-similar or fractal structure, including sometimes even a representation of the shock at having dreamed of the event, or of the value of the dream to the dreamer, within the body of the dream itself. (We will see a particularly striking example of this later—the famous “scarab dream” of one of Carl Jung’s patients.)

The Wyrd of the Air Marshal

Another example of a precognitive dream that seems to contain fractal spirals of self-reference and onion-like layers of possible psychodynamic significance is Captain Gladstone’s dream about Victor Goddard’s plane crash.

Remember that it was Goddard’s letter to Gladstone, and not the crash itself, that would have been the source of Gladstone’s dream, setting the whole time loop in motion. Presumably the contents of Goddard’s letter consisted of an abbreviated version of what he wrote nearly a decade after the incident in his Saturday Evening Post article. Our only direct evidence of how Gladstone reacted to the story—his “reader response”—is the testimony of his cordial reply, reproduced at the end of that article (Chapter 2). It is all very “how do” and “cheerio”—very British and very polite … and also very brief, even curt (in contrast to what Goddard said was a lengthy letter). Again, it expresses regret at the incident and relief that no one was hurt—what one would expect him to say. But when he received Goddard’s letter, how could Gladstone not have also felt a mix of complex emotions, not unlike what Dunne would have experienced upon reading about Mont Pelée in the newspaper?

Freud enlightened us to the dark side of human feelings where the lives of others are concerned, especially others who aren’t close to us. Apart from the ordinary and expected sentiments expressed in the letter, Gladstone would also, and probably even mainly, have felt excited to learn that the event had happened, because it meant he really had had a Dunne dream. That confirmation would also have effectively undone some of his embarrassment at the party months earlier, when he had assumed that its honoree, Goddard, was dead and then was immediately proved wrong and subtly shamed by the revenant Goddard himself.

Goddard’s narrative in The Saturday Evening Post does not at all flatter “Dewing” (the pseudonym given to Gladstone) ³⁷ —it makes him out to be a bit of a fool, albeit a fool surreally vindicated by fate. Goddard very thinly conceals his lack of respect for the bold but evidently not-too-bright naval officer—first because of the man’s absurd confidence that he, Goddard, was actually dead, based solely on a dream he couldn’t even place in time (when pressed, he didn’t know if he’d had the dream the previous night versus that afternoon), but also for what turned out to be Gladstone’s somewhat limited grasp of Dunne’s book. Clearly irritated, not to mention slightly unsettled, Goddard admits he was inclined to argue with Gladstone about how Dunne meant readers to conduct his “experiment with time” in their own lives. ³⁸ So, added to his embarrassment at his mistake, Gladstone would have felt chagrined at how this eminent RAF hero so coolly and condescendingly schooled him on the finer points of the book that he himself had just been enthusiastically reading.

It is thus irresistible to psychoanalyze Gladstone’s dream and the one discrepancy from the real outcome that is evident in it: that in his dream it had been a fatal crash. Freud, even if he would have found some way to deny the whole matter of dream prophecy (let alone time loops), would eagerly point out that this error was a death wish. At least as Goddard reports it, there is a bit of glee in Gladstone’s certain pronouncement to the other unnamed man at the party that Goddard was dead. Gladstone’s slip-of-the-tongue reaction to seeing Goddard alive, again if accurately reported, is telling: “I’m terribly sorry! I mean I’m terribly glad …”

Like Dunne’s presumed guilt upon reading the headline about Mont Pelée, such ill will on Gladstone’s part would have been temporally “impossible.” It could not have come from any prior experience of Gladstone’s, since at the time he had his dream he had not yet met Air Marshal Goddard let alone been talked down to by him. Thus, such a death wish (if true) would have been based on ill will he would only feel later, after their conversation at the party, thus adding further twists to the time-looping nature of the whole weird—or, wyrd—affair.

So much for Gladstone’s being “sorry.” “I’m terribly glad ” could additionally be Goddard’s subtle, clever hint to the reader about the real identity of “Dewing.” And this raises the further interesting question: Was Gladstone’s dream based only on Goddard’s letter, or could it have been based also, or instead, on a future reading of the Saturday Evening Post article itself?

The Saturday Evening Post was an American magazine, but it is not impossible that Gladstone would have read it, and this is made much more likely by the fact that the article was made into an acclaimed 1956 British film, The Night My Number Came Up , starring Michael Redgrave as the air marshal. If Gladstone saw the film, its depiction of the harrowing flight and the crash in a snowy valley near the Japanese beach, in which the plane ends up nearly face down in the snow, could have supplied his precognitive imagination with the vivid images in his dream and the sense that it had been a fatal crash. The film depicts his character (“Commander Lindsay,” portrayed by Michael Hordern) as amiable and innocent. It is not insulting toward his intelligence and even adds the embellishment that his dream helps the authorities locate the crash at the end. But Gladstone might well have also sought out the article to see how he had been portrayed by Goddard there, and if so, he would easily have taken offense at Goddard’s portrayal of him, for the reasons given above. This would have added insult to the injury of his embarrassment at the party and perhaps compounded his retroactive “death wish” for the RAF hero.

Here, again, we veer very far into speculation, as all this is would be impossible to verify without actually putting Gladstone on the couch or knowing whether and when he read Goddard’s article and/or saw the film based on it. But when we add the possibility of time loops to the Freudian picture—or when we add Freud to the Dunnean theory of precognition—it alerts us to the possibility that people may be subject to conflicted feelings and guilt about situations that haven’t occurred yet in the flow of time, as well as pre-experience feelings that will arise later because of their premonitory experiences. More basically, it also underscores that what dreamers are precognizing, when they precognize, is neither events per se nor even the way they hear about them, for instance in the media. What they are precognizing are their own thoughts and emotions triggered by those learning experiences. They even seem to precognize their memories , again in a true fractal spiral.

Close but No Cigar

Lastly, we come full circle. There is no more stunning and ironic example of the fractal nature of dream precognition than the very dream that started it all, Freud’s “specimen dream” about “Irma” (Anna Hammerschlag) on the night of July 23-24, 1895—the dream that, he believed and asserted, had given him the precious key to dreams. Freud claimed that this dream concealed, through various tropes (substitutions, puns, etc.), a wish that he be blameless in his patient’s treatment. He had quite naturally assumed it reflected wishes relevant to his life at the time he had his dream; indeed, what else did he have to go on but his own memories? But the benefit of time and hindsight reveals a very different, premonitory interpretation, one that Freud himself could hardly have failed to detect but that he nevertheless kept silent about.

In early 1923, Freud found that he had leukoplakia, a patch of precancerous white tissue inside his mouth, on his right cheek and spreading to his palate. It was the result of a life of indulging in his famous cigars, which his friend Wilhelm Fliess had already advised him to quit smoking at the time of the dream. Though his doctors in 1923 were not fully frank with him, it was plain that they were concerned that the tissue had already become cancerous. After handwringing and frank consideration of suicide, Freud grudgingly subjected himself to a series of awful and life-changing surgeries. First the affected tissue was removed. Then, after a few months, when his doctors determined the cancer was more invasive than previously thought, a surgeon removed a large section of Freud’s upper jaw and palate with a chisel—with the patient only under local anesthetic—leaving a gaping hole between his mouth and his nasal cavity that had to be fitted with a prosthetic. Afterwards, scabs formed where the tissue had been cut away. Several courses of radiation therapy also followed, along with several more surgeries over the remainder of his life—16 more years—and the contraction of tissue inside his mouth left Freud with limited ability to open his mouth or talk. ³⁹

In 1982, an Argentinean psychoanalyst and cancer surgeon named José Schavelzon, who studied the histopathology of Freud’s cancer, noticed that the description of the lesion in “Irma’s” mouth in Freud’s dream strikingly matched the course of Freud’s own disease and the complications from its treatment. It begins with his leukoplakia (the white patches), then the scabs produced by the surgery, then the nasal cavity visible inside his mouth upon removal of the palate (i.e., a feature in the mouth reminding Freud of the turbinal bones in the nose, which in fact are just over the palate), as well as the reluctance or inability to open the mouth due to a prosthesis (i.e., the notion that Irma was like a woman shy to open her mouth because of dentures). ⁴⁰

It is a startling discovery, and deeply ironic—indeed, deeply wyrd . How strange that of all his dreams, this one dream, his number-one “smoking gun” for the wish-fulfillment theory—what could be considered Freud’s equivalent of Darwin’s famous finches—would match so closely the illness that, Freud believed, and his doctors believed, was going to take his life three decades hence. ⁴¹

Was the dream a “warning unheeded”? Robert Moss (and following Moss, Larry Dossey) reads it that way and contrasts Freud with Carl Jung, who allegedly gave up smoking after a dream. ⁴² Moss, clearly unwilling to countenance precognition in the sense being advocated here, proposes that a single cancer cell already lurking in 1895 might have sent some kind of chemical alert to Freud’s brain that manifested as a specific and uncannily correct dream-warning. Such a notion seems like another evasion of prophecy by granting inferential superpowers to the unconscious (and in this case, the body’s tissues), although the question of any intentionality in the unconscious is somewhat paradoxical in any case. The precognitive hypothesis proposed here assumes no “intent” to send messages to oneself backward in time—the postcards we get from our future selves are sent automatically, even if the thoughts they represent are conscious ones. Rather than warning his younger self, it seems very much as though Freud’s dreaming brain used various elements of his life in 1895 as “bricks” to pre-present significant thoughts—including wishes—he was going to have 28 years later.

What would Freud’s thoughts and wishes have been in 1923?

It’s not hard to answer this question. Firstly, and most obviously, Freud would undoubtedly have wished that he had heeded his friend Fliess’s warnings to him all those years ago about his cigar use. Freud notes in his own interpretation of the dream that some anxiety about his health was already on his mind in 1895, yet it clearly had not been enough to break him of his smoking habit. The doctors—both the rhinologist who performed the initial surgery and his personal physician, Felix Deutsch—kept Freud in the dark about the true, dire extent of his cancer, per standard medical practice at the time, but they both made it clear to him that his cigar smoking was the cause. ⁴³ Recall that his first reaction to Irma’s complaint in the dream is that “it’s really only your fault .”

Freud noted that dreams often swap and transpose attributes of people and situations, and they often disavow undesired qualities of the dreamer, or undesired situations, by giving them to other figures. It very much seems like his specimen dream transposed his own medical condition in 1923 to his friend and patient Anna Hammerschlag in 1895 and that his telling her it was her own fault was really a kind of self-reproach. Interestingly, all the other symptoms displayed by dream Irma or identified by the dream doctors examining her have been identified as Freud’s own illnesses prior to or at the time of the dream—including intestinal symptoms (Irma’s “dysentery”) and rheumatism (a “dull area” the doctor’s note on Irma’s left side). Freud biographer Didier Anzieu notes that the examination performed by the trio of doctors mirrored Fliess’s recent examination of Freud’s chest for heart trouble, which Fliess had attributed to Freud’s nicotine addiction. “Freud is the patient he himself examines in the dream,” Anzieu asserts. ⁴⁴

Very significantly, at the time of the dream, Freud had just resumed smoking after a period of abstinence, and he was specifically worried about what Fliess would think of that lapse. Did this specific concern resonate with his situation in 1923, sparking a kind of temporal short-circuit?

When interpreting the dream, Freud had unsurprisingly attached sexual meaning to the “injection” that he surmised was somehow responsible for Anna/Irma’s condition. In life, Freud was feeling anxious about his advice to Anna that she seek some sexual release—the “solution” that he initially blames her for not accepting. Freud attributed Anna’s hysteria to her (by then) nine years of widowhood; she had evidently become reclusive and depressed following her husband’s death in 1886, just a year after her marriage. It is likely Freud also felt some anxiety about his own attraction to her. Freud had known her since they had been teenagers, as she was the daughter of his Hebrew teacher, and she had been a great beauty in her youth. Freud’s fondness for her continued through his life, and he always used the intimate du form of address with her (instead of the more usual Sie ). ⁴⁵ The “probably not clean” syringe he imagined had caused her disease in the dream is easily seen, among other things, as a phallic symbol standing in either for his own desires or at least for his own advice that she seek some sexual outlet—advice that he was now forced to doubt (since as Dr. Rie had pointed out, she was “better but not fully recovered”). ⁴⁶ But in hindsight, from the vantage point of his 1923 realization that his smoking habit really had been fatally toxic to his health, does the unclean syringe not take on an even more compelling and also straightforward, totally un-Freudian meaning as … just a cigar ?

Thoughts of mortality were at the forefront of Freud’s thoughts in 1923, and not only because of his cancer. Freud had lost his daughter Sophie to Spanish Flu in 1920, shortly after writing his famous book about death and trauma, Beyond the Pleasure Principle . Even more crushingly for Freud, not long after his initial surgery, Sophie’s four-year-old son, Heinerle, Freud’s favorite grandson, died of a fever. Freud was devastated, and the depression he endured for the rest of his life was as much over this loss as about his own greatly diminished quality of life as a result of his illness. In short, Freud was thinking about death, and he was specifically thinking about pediatric illness and the death of children. (Freud really lost two grandchildren since Sophie had been pregnant at the time of her death.) The pediatrician “Otto” (Dr. Rie), who had cared for Sophie and his other children decades earlier, would thus also have made sense as an association to the tragedies he was enduring in 1923, if only as a figure standing in for a general theme.

Through the catastrophe of Freud’s initial diagnosis and surgeries, and for the remainder of his life, his youngest child, Anna, was a nearly constant companion, acting as his nurse in addition to being his psychoanalytic protégé (the one individual among his followers who could literally carry forward “the name of the father” of the psychoanalytic movement). Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, writes that Freud “made a pact with [Anna] at the beginning [of his illness] that no sentiment was to be displayed; all that was necessary had to be performed in a cool, matter-of-fact fashion with the absence of emotion characteristic of a surgeon. This attitude, her courage and firmness, enabled her to adhere to the pact even in the most agonizing of situations.” ⁴⁷ So Anna too would have been much on Freud’s mind in this period, and it is conceivable that Anna Hammerschlag was, in addition to standing in for Freud himself, also a kind of precognitive dream stand-in for his daughter, her namesake. Anna Freud was born five months after the “Irma” dream and may even have been consciously named after its central figure, perhaps as a kind of commemoration of Hammerschlag’s importance in Freud’s life as a result of that dream. Hammerschlag, who as Gerhard Fichtner puts it, was the “secret godmother of The Interpretation of Dreams ,” ⁴⁸ was also godmother to young Anna.

While it would be difficult, even in a life so thoroughly documented as Freud’s, to identify a single experience in 1923 or after that might definitively have been the target/source of Freud’s dream, one episode in Jones’ biography highlights Freud’s dependency on his daughter and the nature of his infirmity, and it readily calls to mind the dream scene of trying to get “Irma” to open her mouth and calling for the assistance of another physician:

The huge prosthesis, a sort of magnified denture or obdurator, designed to shut off the mouth from the nasal cavity, was a horror; it was labeled “the monster.” In the first place it was very difficult to take out or replace because it was impossible for him to open his mouth at all widely. On one occasion, for instance, the combined efforts of Freud and his daughter failed to insert it after struggling for half an hour, and the surgeon had to be fetched for the purpose. ⁴⁹

Most importantly, I suggest that in 1923 and after, Freud would have been reminded of the role of his specimen dream in his life and career. How could he not have been struck, precisely as he had been on receiving the medallion in 1906, by the uncanny closeness of a significant, ominous turn of events in his own life to something he had dreamed/fantasized years earlier? Would he have secretly recognized that dream in hindsight as a premonition? I find it hard to imagine he would not have at least harbored some thoughts on this coincidence, although admitting them would have been unthinkable at that point. It would have been, so to speak, hard to open his mouth about any private doubts he may have had about the adequacy of his dream theory in hindsight. ⁵⁰

Let’s suppose for a moment that, on some level, Freud did recognize that the dream had been premonitory and thus that his wish-fulfillment theory—at least as he had formulated it in the book that put him on the scientific map—was not, after all, a complete theory of dreams. The dream would have caught him in a Catch-22. He would have recognized his theory was inadequate, that it missed a whole prophetic dimension of dreaming, but he would have nevertheless reflected that, had it not been for his premature interpretation of the dream as fulfilling various wishes he had had at the time of the dream, he would not enjoy the stature he was coming to enjoy late in life. His fame—in fact, nothing less than his immortality —rested in no small part on the confidence that this one dream interpretation had given him. The sentiment Freud had conveyed to Fliess, that a marble tablet should commemorate the house outside of Vienna where “the secret of dreams was revealed” to him, was thus quite appropriate in the context of his life and career. But reflecting on it after the fact, from hindsight dominated by the encroaching reality of his death, how can there not have been a sense of hubris followed by nemesis, the law that governed the Greek tragedies? Maybe he didn’t answer the sphinx’s riddle, as he so confidently claimed to have done. Was his whole theory thus a kind of malpractice ?

Remember that the famous “snake eating its tail” dream of August Kekulé seems to have provided a kind of precedent and template for the role the Irma dream was set to play in Freud’s life. ⁵¹ Although Freud did not pick up on it in his own analysis, the Kekulé story seems to be vividly indexed in his dream by terminating in the formula for an organic molecule, highlighted in bold type as though for special emphasis. But this indexing of the Kekulé story may also take on a more equivocal meaning if we view the dream from the standpoint of hindsight.

In the published text of Kekulé’s speech at the 1890 Benzolfeier event, the chemist followed his dream narrative with an admonition: “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall find the truth . . . but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding ” (my emphasis). ⁵² Freud would not have been in a position, either in 1895 or later in his life, to know that Kekulé probably had an ulterior motive in telling his dream story: to shore up his own priority in making the discovery of benzene’s ring structure in light of the uncomfortable fact that three other chemists had actually published on it as much as three years before he did. ⁵³ Belatedly saying “it came to me in a dream” at a fest in his honor was a way of asserting he had not plagiarized ⁵⁴ … and implying that through great scientific caution he had not rushed to publish his insight until he was sure it was true was a way of accounting for the strange discrepancy in publication dates. But to the 67-year-old Freud, Kekulé’s famous words about not rushing to publish on the meaning of our dreams before we really know what they are about might have taken a different meaning: an admonishment for his hubris and prematurity in publishing his thesis that dreams are only the fulfillments of repressed wishes—in other words, an admonishment for “not waiting for the sugar to melt.”

So, I suggest that it may have been exactly Freud’s belated ambivalence or doubt about the nature of dreams as wish fulfillments (versus premonitions), in light of the Irma dream seeming premonitory , that could be the most important latent “meaning” of his Irma dream. If there was a single overriding wish in Freud’s life during the terrible year 1923, it would have been precisely that the dream had in fact been (just) a wish fulfillment, just as he had asserted all those years ago. It was a wish that he had been right about dreams being (just) wishes . Talk about fractal spirals of self-reference—or snakes eating their own tails! It would not only “wish away” his cancer but reinforce his own correctness about his own great dream “discovery,” putting him beyond any professional reproach. Displacing his own illnesses—all of them, past as well as future—onto another figure (Anna/Irma) not only fulfilled his wish but also made it possible to disavow the dream as a premonition, creating the ambiguity that necessarily typifies refluxing information in a post-selected universe. The dream’s choice of this particular patient as a “brick” to represent these future thoughts also enabled him to deflect his deeper anxieties over prophecy onto something more acceptably “Freudian”—that is, sexual—in nature.

Freud’s dreaming brain might have seen a “transference” of his illnesses onto Anna Hammerschlag as an acceptable compromise. Committing the malpractice of failing to notice an organic lesion in a patient (and friend)—perhaps symbolically his own daughter/nurse—was “less than” having to endure it himself. Maybe some guilt for overlooking the illness of a patient—exactly the kind of guilt that was “going around” at that point in his circle of medical men—would have been preferable to the depression he was now suffering, and also preferable to the malpractice of getting the world to believe (wrongly) that dreams never referred to future events other than in the straightforward Newtonian way that they may point us in a certain direction (i.e., “By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future.” ⁵⁵ ). And, placing the blame for his patient’s treatment on the family pediatrician (who in the dream delivered a bottle of pineapple brandy, Ananas —remember that Anna would be born a few months later) would have been a kind of reproach against fate, and perhaps the limits of medicine, for the death of his grandson and Sophie, whom Rie had treated as a child. (Sophie would have been two years old when Freud had the Irma dream.) Later commentators like Didier Anzieu argue we must consider Freud’s dream-interpretation to be part of the dream-work, ⁵⁶ so we might see not just the dream itself but the whole complex of interpretation surrounding it as premonitory.

What is so striking is how very like Oedipus Freud really seems to have been. As a young man he treaded boldly into a fresh new kingdom ready for a leader, the kingdom of dreams and the unconscious, all the while batting away the buzzing gnats of experiences that seemed prophetic, using various evasions, denials, and rationalizations why that can’t possibly be true. And his most famous dream, the dream that launched his career and for which he imagined a marble monument in his honor—equivalent to his answer to the sphinx—turned out to have a vastly different meaning than he had claimed. In hindsight, that dream became like the blind prophet Tiresias at the end of Sophocles’ tragedy, pronouncing Oedipus’s guilt. It leveled a guilty pointing finger.

This is what makes Freud’s medallion episode also so deeply wyrd. The denial of prophecy by the hapless prince-cum-king was the real meaning of the Oedipus story that Freud had so centralized in his personal myth and the theory that immortalized him, and he reenacted this denial and displacement (i.e., “focus on the incest”) in his own life and works. More than that, he himself seems to have been a precog—if only because he paid more attention to his dreams and parapraxes than most people. The truth of prophecy, and the truth of his own prophecies, was staring him in his face his whole life, but he could not squarely face it.

The belated doubt I am suggesting Freud must have felt about his dream theory may also provide a new light in which to see his late “conversion” to telepathy, which his skeptical friend Ernest Jones found so baffling and regrettable. This softening toward the occult may have been a kind of compromise formation, a concession protecting himself against cognitive dissonance. Telepathy enabled him to navigate cunningly between the possibility he could not face—that the unconscious could be prophetic—and a humbler idea he could more easily accept, and indeed that had motivated him even as a young psychiatrist developing a radical new theory of the psyche: the idea that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

Where All Royal Roads Lead

In his late masterpiece Civilization and Its Discontents , Freud metaphorically likened the unconscious to the Eternal City, Rome, in the way that it preserves the past layers of its history. A visitor to Rome, Freud wrote, would see traces of the earliest stages of the city’s history still in the landscape, and shaping the modern city that has grown amid the ruins. “Except for a few gaps, he will find the wall of Aurelian almost unchanged. In some places, he will be able to find sections of the Servian wall where they have been excavated and brought to light.” ⁵⁷ Some periods are represented by ruins, “not … ruins of themselves but of later restorations made after fires or destruction. … There is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried in the soil of the city or beneath its modern buildings.” ⁵⁸

This resolutely, even desperately past-oriented psychological pioneer wanted to believe—indeed needed to believe, for his theory to work—that the human psyche goes well beyond this level of preservation, that “nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.” ⁵⁹ He thus conjured a remarkable image of the psychological Rome almost as a kind of augmented-reality or virtual-reality experience, with every period flickeringly superimposed: “Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. …” ⁶⁰

But even if the universe can be characterized as a glass block where everything in the past still exists and everything in the future already exists, such a picture does not reflect how information is retained in our heads. Science has long since demolished Freud’s picture of human memory as a place where everything is preserved whole and intact. The brain’s preservation of information is in a constant tension with its need to revise and update itself; thus memory, it is now argued, is much more like the real Rome, with bits and pieces of the past here and there but mostly ruins that, while they look authentic, are in fact reconstructions made at some later date. Most of the past is gone, the stones and bricks of old experiences having long since been reappropriated and rearranged to make edifices serving more recent needs. Dreaming, as it is coming to be characterized by today’s neuroscience and psychology, is the nightly activity of modernizing this old city, making facelifts and repairs and building new structures, slowly obliterating the more distant past to make way for episodes and concerns that are more contemporary and pertinent.

But if anything like the hypothesis I am developing in this book is true, one’s personal Rome may be even stranger than this, and stranger than Freud’s flickering virtual-reality tour through perfectly preserved layers of the past. Some of those ruins that seem like they belong to the past are really future temples, future Coliseums, belonging to a kind of science-fictional Rome where buildings are constructed for purposes that can’t be anticipated or imagined yet, but confusingly using the “bricks” of our past experience. How much of the “symbolism” of our dreams really reflects our as-yet-unfathomable future purposes and future thoughts remains an open question. And what about our inscrutable neurotic behavior and parapraxes—might those also issue just as often from our future as from our past? How many of the traumas that shape our lives might really be, as in Freud’s own case, catastrophes that lie ahead of us?