This section is from the book "Dream Psychology", by Maurice Nigoll. Also available from Amazon: Dream psychology.
I have said enough to outline how it is possible to understand the symbol of the enemy troops in the first case. Superficially, if necessary, one can see in the dream some more literal application, but beneath it it is possible to see another motive that clothes itself in the symbols that it borrows from the crucial position of the nation, and applies to the inner personal situation. The dream touches on a relationship between her position and the nation's position. It sees in them something identical and applies the factors of reality as symbols of her life.
If we turn to the second dream, a most significant feature is the lack of correspondence between it and the conscious attitude of the dreamer. She thought that she was uninterested in the war. It concerned neither her nor her husband. How far is such an attitude true or possible when individuals are plunged into the cataracts of life ? To be indifferent, and to assume an attitude of indifference, are two distinct things. The assumption of a particular attitude means that other attitudes are possible and that one is chosen. The others are excluded. Now when most of the incidents of daily life, when indeed nine-tenths of the incoming stimuli of the senses, are connected with war, to keep the conscious mind busied with other things must denote an effort of strain, avoidance, and suppression. In such cases the activities of the unconscious and marginal mind are interesting to watch, for in sleep the checks that operate in waking hours have not the same values. Marginal material may become central. In her case there may have been a reason for this attitude of avoidance, connected with her husband. Let us examine the dream in this light. It shows her in a familiar domestic scene suddenly confronted by those forces that she would seek to ignore and leave to others for their solution. Her own garden is filled with enemy troops. In the situation she instinctively turns to her husband for help. He is asleep and she has lost the power of calling him to her help. She was very much attached to her husband and he occupied a large part of her interest. The dream shows a reversal of the dispositions of interest as controlled by her in consciousness. That which she chose to ignore is present in bulk. That which she clings to—her interest in her husband—is cut off from her. He is asleep and she cannot call him. This reversal of the balance of interest must mean something. The emotion that accompanies it is one of helpless terror. Now what relation can we find between her, the enemy troops, and the hus-, band ? We can find an immediate one in the fact that the war might take her husband away on active service. The marginal recognition of this possibility, therefore, may have been at the bottom of her conscious attitude towards the war. It was an attitude that thrust away something full of terror. It was an artificial compromise. The dream might contain, and probably does contain, this significance, in which case the enemy troops symbolize the fact of war, and, in a large sense, inexorable destiny. She is made to look at it, face to face.
But it is possible to glance at deeper issues in the dream. It is evident that an attitude of artificial suppression of certain aspects of life—of anything that intrudes between the ideal and its attainment—means a false outlook, for it is necessary to assimilate and not to suppress. To shelter behind someone in order to continue the artificial state, and to summon that person immediately any combination of events threatens to break the spell—to expect the fact to be soothingly shaped into the cherished ideal—is but to live a life that is merely a lie. The dispositions of interest in such a person's consciousness are like selected articles in a shop window.
A brief recapitulation may be given here. In the girl's dream, the significance that was outlined was a preparatory one. It was suggested that the symbolism might be looked on as foreshadowing the dreamer's passage from girlhood to womanhood. She leaves her home, and life in the form of a strange man suddenly comes on her while she is near the old and familiar scenes and grasps her arm. She awakes in terror. The second dream was given a corrective or compensatory significance in the sense that it was a reaction to a strain set up by the woman's deliberate conscious attitude, both toward the war and toward anything in life that threatened her.
 
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