It’s daytime and I am driving a car through a rural setting. There are green hills on both sides and green mountains in the distance. The car is travelling at speed, but there’s no noise. I have my two dogs in the car, one is a golden retriever and one is black, but they are different sizes than in waking life, each dog is the size that the other dog is in waking life. The dogs are in the back of the car and my two grandchildren are strapped into their seats in the middle of the car, they are much younger than in waking life. On the winding road the car becomes out of control, I feel paralysed, my legs won’t move to the brakes, and I am pushed back in my seat and so I do not hold the steering wheel. There is a sharp bend and the car veers off the road. It goes through a hedge and then stops, but there is no crash. Throughout the dream in the car I am calm about the situation, not at all panicking, but I am also watching myself in the car and while watching I am very frightened.

I am tidying a chaotic house that has been left very messy by the previous owners. They have also left children's toys, which I put in a rucksack. I have two children in the dream. Inside the house is brown and is uncomfortable. My two dogs kill a young chicken in the back yard of the house, the neighbours are unhappy that the dogs are in the yard. Ghostly children arrive at the house and I offer bedrooms for them, but they do not want to stay in the rooms as they may be haunted. At the front of the house is a canal, with a boat on it. I go for a walk but the town is manky and there are dangerous people around. I go back to the house and sterilise it, although neighbours have access to it I have managed to make it a nice place. I go onto the roof and see a dead black bird. I also see in the distance from a window a castle on snowy mountains, floating on wintery clouds. With the tidying I have created order out of chaos.    

I am at a friend’s apartment and we are planning to maybe go out to eat. Suddenly a man bursts in and threatens us. He is in his 30s or 40s, mean, with close shaved hair. My friend is scared and stands back, but I am forceful and start to push him around and am punching him, we are all over the place. I phone the police and say there’s a man in our place who wants to kill us. I then pull a necklace off his neck. It has on it a small round religious talisman, from a church. I hold the necklace in my hand and see a note attached which says “I had fun, I had a good time.” The man leaves but threatens to come back. I am mad at him but also very worried. Later, in the evening, I go out for dinner with my friend. There are lots of people in the streets. I see the man again, with his friends, and am mad at him. I start kicking him and he grabs my foot. I want to talk to his friends to find out what his name is, because the police said I can only complain if I have his name. His friends walk away. I get my foot back and I want to run after his friends, but I wake up from the nightmare, thinking at least I kept standing up to him.

                                          

For the first time we had the painting and text of the dream printed onto a t-shirt, for the dreamer to wear. Photos below are of Julia showing the t-shirt.

I am looking out of my kitchen window and see a marine emerge from a stream in the garden. He looks annoyed that I have seen him. I then see a group of tigers, some together, some alone, walking past. I call my children to see them, but we realise that they are people. They are going to the beach with inflatables and clothes that make them look like tigers.    

I am on a planet with a savannah-type surface. It has features based on my body: a valley, like a cut I have from shaving; a forest, resembling my hair; and a pool, like an eye. I am with a woman who has black hair. We are then on a darker planet that is based on her. Next, we are on a third planet, which combines the other two planets. It has green rolling hills, like the British countryside. Each planet has small blobby creatures on it, some with legs.

I am in the bathroom of my family home in India, looking at myself in the large mirror. Two of my teeth, one is an implant, start to shake and then fall out. The blood stains the blue dress that I am wearing. I panic and the room starts to have a tinge of black and red. I tell myself that it is just a dream, and close my eyes and spin, but I can’t wake up. I am then in the bathroom of where I live in the UK, it has a white shower curtain with blue houses on. I look in the small bathroom mirror. I realise that it is not a dream. I am in pain and try to phone the hospital for a dentist, but realise that I cannot get one. 
 
In the discussion the dream-sharer told us how this dream, or nightmare, occurs when she is stressed, and that it refers to a childhood accident. 
 
Julia chose the page for painting on as it had two equal-sized paragraphs and a white space between them, which she used to depict the mirror and the real and reflected spaces either side of it.  
There are found words or phrases on the painting.  
In reference to the shaking of the teeth as they fall out: 
owing to the slackening 
slackening 
 
And, in reference to the whole dream: 
allowed to speak  
undesired condition          
 
On the right-hand side of the mirror the index finger wiggling the tooth:
now come
 
And the following emergent found poetry.
On the left-hand side of the mirror the index finger wiggling the tooth and down the arm:
evoke
which is otherwise
freely
violent resistance,
surface.
 
From which Julia created the poem about losing the teeth:       
Now come!
Evoke the surface freely,
which is otherwise
violent resistance.
 
 
And above the head, in the shower curtain, on the right-hand side of the mirror:
undesired
retain
the state of
‘desired’ ones.
 
From which Julia create the Haiku about the lost teeth:       
The undesired
retain the state of being
the ‘desired’ ones.

I am in a city at home with my family, there is myself, my dad, mum, and little brother and sister. It is night-time and outside it is a war zone, we can hear the gunshots. We run outside to try to escape, there is noise everywhere and we can see the red brick buildings of the city. We are then at a petrol station which has four long alleyways, like crossroads, as entrances. The noise gets louder. My dad says that we need to stay, he is very keen to stay but I urge everyone to go. We spin round and see the enemy on horses, like the cavalry, coming along one alleyway, and so run the other way. There are then leaking drains, with water filling up the road. I see two pairs of shoes, one pair are black with a white tick on them. I grab one pair and think that I won’t see the other pair again. There is now more water than we expected and we are swimming as well as running. I then see that my father isn’t there, because he can’t swim, and I’m very sad as I realise I had only been thinking about myself rather than helping him. I’m then imagining coming back to the house much later, and finding there are people in the house. I circle around the outside of the house, and am tense. I knock on the door wondering who is in our old house. I go inside the house and see a young man sitting in a green armchair with a gun on his lap, which is pointing at me. They are the last of the conquered people in the city.

Dream told at Surrealisms 2021, the conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism.

I’m in a busy wide street in New York City. A woman of colour is being arrested for eating popcorn because she has no mask. I am also eating popcorn, outside a restaurant, and a cop who’s next to me leans on the plate glass and says to me ‘you know what’s wrong with the world?’ She continues, ‘like why are we still using Xerox, so far into the pandemic?’ I reply that maybe the problem with the world is a lack of personal responsibility. The cop has a hat with a visor and cannot arrest me because I am eating the popcorn out of a plastic mesh basket, which is within the regulations. The cop is angry and keeps talking to me but is also confiding in me. I look up and see lights in the sky, sparkling purple and green, in rings that are like aeroplanes or alien spaceships. There is also a water fountain which is orange and green. The fountain pops out a single alien spore that drifts and falls on a windowsill. The building collapses due to the spore and there is a botanical explosion with alien plants all over the building, coloured green and tan and beige, unlike the colours of plants on earth. More spores drift from the fountain: fist-size, with a round bottom which is pale off-white, and with two leaves sprouted from the top, like a helicopter spore. I know that the spores can destroy everything and I feel a heavy dread that all will soon be gone.

 
In the discussion the dream sharer told of reading a lot on social media and online discussions about fears for the climate crisis and the collapse of civilization.
 
The pages that Julia used to paint on were chosen by her when she heard the dream on the basis of having a triangle of white which could be used for the perspective in the street scene. The dreamer and police officer are shown in the foreground, on the pavement/sidewalk; the woman of colour, with popcorn, and the arresting officer, are on the right; the street stretches into the distance; and the spores are at the top with the collapsing building at the top right.  
 
During the painting process Julia found words of Freud that were appropriate to the dream. These objet trouvé include the following:

In the middle of the painting, referring to the apocalypse, the words:
in danger
we
ignored these
 
In the police officer’s visor, the words:
attention in the
verbal expression
confronted
 
During the discussion the relationship of the cop and apocalypse to the current Cop-26 conference was noted and for this there are the words at the top of the right-hand page:
the number  
regarding this as a matter of course
we proceeded from this to
dream-content,
following up this clue

In the dream I know I have a girlfriend who has a young daughter, but neither of them appear in the dream. Somehow I am responsible for the death of the daughter. It is not entirely clear if she is ‘fully’ dead, but it seems so and I am devastated. My girlfriend is only in her 20s, I feel somewhat sheepish about this in the dream and don’t want too many people to know as it kind of evokes the image of the wealthy, horny old man with a young attractive woman, but that’s only a minor unimportant point. What is important is that I love my girlfriend dearly and deeply and I am afraid of losing her, afraid that she will leave me, having caused her daughter’s death. I’m beginning to think about a way to bring her daughter back to life. At that point a boy approaches me. The boy is very timid, somehow deeply closed-in on himself, limp and heavy. He is kind of ‘dead’ already. I consider that he will make a good guinea-pig to try out the method of bringing my girlfriend’s daughter back to life.
I tie a long string around his neck, at which point the boy begins to turn into a bird. I pick up the other end of the string, which is a good few metres long, and start swinging it around me in a circle, with the boy, who is turning more and more into a bird, flying at the other end. I swing it high, so that he almost touches the green sun-dappled leaves and branches of nearby trees; I swing it low so that it almost skims the surface of a nearby pond or lake. Round and round through the air, not too slow, not too fast, keeping it circling. Perhaps I hope that the circling was kickstart his own circulation again, make his heart beat again, or that the swishing around will force air into his lungs and make him breathe again. I think of the words 'swing it high, swing it low, swing it fast, swing it slow'.
When I stop and examine the black bird on the ground he is now truly dead, already stiffening a little. From its dead eyes come a few puffs of smoke, dark and acrid, but also like the last bit of life escaping from him. I’m very sad. A Nepalese family (father, mother and two children) comes and tries to console me. I wake up with a deep sense of loss and failure.


During the discussion the dream-sharer related the dream to long-standing themes and recent events in his life.  
 
The painting is composed in a circle, with the boy who becomes a bird, being whirled around high and low.  During the painting process Julia found and highlighted the following words of Freud on the pages:
​
dead     I can’t stand the sight of it
the deceased
because he is not alive
Non vixit [Latin: he did not live]       and his eyes turn
vixit non vivit [Latin: he lived, he does not live]
His eyes become strange and weirdly unmistakeable      the terrible gaze

                 The film of the event can be seen here on our YouTube channel.

A dream that depicts positive transitions in waking life.

I am at the home where I used to live, it is a 1970s light blue Mercedes people-carrier truck. I go up the wooden stairs into the truck. It has wooden walls, all the same as it was back then, when I lived there with my ex-partner and his daughter. My ex-partner and daughter are there but not clearly, but like light rather than shadows. I tidy the place up as I am going to transition there, I am excited about this. I am going to burn down the home, with me inside, and I tell them to go outside. I pour petrol all around and have a large yellow box of "Cook's matches", I am about to strike a match. I hesitate due to fear of it hurting me, but then think that it won’t hurt as it is a dream. Despite being apprehensive I strike the match and the flames get close to me, on my flesh. There is then a change of scene and I am next to an outside large blue swimming pool, it is very sunny with tropical foliage around. I walk along the side of the pool and around it. I am wearing a pink cotton dress, which I actually had when I was 16. I want to jump into the water but have to set up my camera so that I can document it, to show proof of it to my friends. But before I can get ready I fall backwards into the pool and drop down deeply in the water. I slip out of my body and see myself weightless under the blue water. I then suddenly wake up.

I am outside the house where I live. As in waking life, there is the row of houses, a board fence, street, and a row of pine and spruce trees. It is night-time, 2 to 3 am. There are no streetlights or shadows. I am on my own and walk along the fence, the usual walk I do with my dog but my dog isn’t with me. I see two Hispanic men, walking in the same direction as me. They are about 100 feet apart from each other but are together, the one in front is older. I can’t see their faces, they have non-descript brownish or tannish clothing. Their hands are in their pockets, both are looking at the ground and not paying attention to me. Suddenly they are both in front of me, one has his hand over my mouth and I know that I will be assaulted. I wake in panic.   

------------------------------------------

As with all our events, Julia Lockheart chose the pages from Freud's book The Interpretation of Dreams to paint on while the dream was first being told. The choice of pages was on the basis of the shapes of the paragraphs and text. During the painting process Julia found words by Freud on the pages that were relevant to the dream, and she incorporated them as objet trouvé into the artwork:

I am walking in the street
 
the male    the hand    the female   by the mouth
 
imperatively forced upon
 
the symbol of a man
the dream of a young woman
her fear
 
This use of objet trouvé, a characteristic of dadaism and surrealism, is discussed in our forthcoming article in the International Journal of Dream Research.

Dream told by a foundation to counselling course student: I am with someone at a sombre party in a rather run-down Georgian-type house. Everyone is dressed formally, the house has wood-panelled walls. I meet a menacing man who I know, he has ruddy cheeks. A fight starts and I run down a corridor to get away. 

This is the second dream that Dora told Freud. It is a dream of independence, as well as of concern for her father.

Our panel of experts plus a worldwide audience participated in a discussion of the second dream that Dora told Freud, and watched a painting of the dream being made by Julia Lockheart. In the dream Dora is living away from her parents in a town and receives a letter to say that her father has died. She goes past woods to try to get to a railway station, and is then at the family home. While the funeral is happening Dora is in her room and reads a large encyclopaedia-like book.

In her free-associations she tells of a young man she knows who has gone to a German town to work, of instances where she has preferred to be on her own, and of her worries for her father’s health. The dream occurred just before Dora suddenly stopped seeing Freud, which might be relevant to the theme in the dream of an older man dying. The full text of the dream and Dora’s associations are below.
In the painting Julia chose two pages from The Interpretation of Dreams that allowed for the five scenes to be depicted. As usual, by chance words that Freud wrote are relevant and are incorporated into the artwork. For example, in the woods, ‘the strange man in the dream’,  ‘return home’, and ‘dead father’, and, above the stairs at the family home, ‘former household’.      
 
The second dream (Freud. 1905, Fragments of an analysis of a case of hysteria (‘Dora’), Pelican Freud Library, vol.8, pp.133-134): I was walking about in a town which I did not know. I saw streets and squares which were strange to me. Then I came into a house where I lived, went to my room, and found a letter from Mother lying there. She wrote saying that as I had left town without my parents' knowledge she had not wished to write to me to say that Father was ill. "Now he is dead and if you like you can come." I then went to the station and asked about a hundred times: "Where is the station?" I always got the answer: "Five minutes." I then saw a thick wood before me which I went into and there I asked a man whom I met. He said to me: "Two and a half hours more." He offered to accompany me. But I refused and went alone. I saw the station in front of me and could not reach it. At the same time I had the usual feeling of anxiety that one has in dreams when one cannot move forward. Then I was at home. I must have been travelling in the meantime, but I know nothing about that. I walked into the porter's lodge, and enquired for our flat. The maidservant opened the door to me and replied that Mother and the others were already at the cemetery.  
In the next session Dora made two additions: ‘I saw myself particularly distinctly going up the stairs,’ and ‘After she had answered I went to my room, but not the least sadly, and began reading a big book that lay on my writing-table.’ (footnote, p.134.) 
 
Dora’s associations were:

• Strange town, streets, square and monument: At Christmas, a few days before, Dora had been sent an album of views of a German health-resort, including a square with a monument in it, and on the day before the dream had shown it to relatives. It was from a young engineer she knew who had gone there to work ‘so as to become sooner self-supporting’ (p.135), and who wrote often to her.
• Wandering around a strange town: On the day before the dream she had, ‘with complete indifference’, shown a visiting young cousin around Vienna. This visit reminded her of her own first brief visit to Dresden, where she wandered alone, including to the picture gallery, and declined a male cousin’s offer to be her guide. At the gallery she remained two hours in front of a painting of the Madonna, ‘rapt in silent admiration.’
• She had seen her father look tired and ill at a family gathering the previous evening and wondered how long he would live.
• At the family gathering she had been impatient with her mother and had exclaimed that she had asked her ‘a hundred times’ for the key for the drinks sideboard, to get brandy to help her father to sleep.   
• Letter: She had once written a suicide letter to her parents. The letter in the dream had the same phrase (‘if you like’) that was in a letter from Frau K. inviting the family to their house by the lake.
• The thick wood and a man: The shore of the lake where she had had the scene with Herr K. had a wood like in the dream, and after the scene with Herr K. she had spoken to a man there for directions to walk home round the lake. He said it would take ‘Two and a half hours’ and so she went back by boat with Herr K. She had also seen a painting with a thick wood and nymphs at the gallery the day before.
• Regarding arriving at her parent’s house where ‘she went calmly to her room, and began reading a big book that lay on her writing-table’ (p.140), she said that the book was ‘in encyclopaedia format,’ and she remembered that when a boy cousin of Dora’s had fallen dangerously ill with appendicitis, ‘Dora had thereupon looked up in the encyclopaedia to see what the symptoms of appendicitis were.’ (p.141.) She said that later, when her aunt who she was fond of had died, she had pain in her abdomen like the symptoms of appendicitis she had read about.

A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but Father said “I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case.” We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up.


The above dream first occurred in 1898, when Dora was 15 years old and she was propositioned by an older married man who was a friend of the family and with whose wife, Frau K., Dora's father was having an affair. The dream occurred on each of the four nights following the proposition. The man was anonymised as Herr K. by Freud in his 1905 case study on Dora. Freud stated that the meaning of the dream was: ‘This man is persecuting me, he wants to force his way into my room. My “jewel-case” is in danger….’  The dream seems to depict Dora’s wish that she would be rescued from the danger by her father.
Dora, the pseudonym used by Freud for the young woman, now known to be Ida Bauer, then had the dream again a few weeks after starting psychoanalysis with Freud, near the end of 1900. For more details, see our chapter https://psyarxiv.com/379kz/.
At the top left of the painting Julia has depicted the spa town of Merano, where Dora / Ida lived with her family and where the K. family also lived. As occurs in our DreamsID events, for painting on, Julia chooses pages from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams with regard to the shapes of the paragraphs, but then during the painting finds words on the page that are often uncannily relevant to the dream. Note the words ‘female genitals’ appearing twice under the jewel-case, ‘boyish’ in Dora’s brother’s head, ‘17’, at the bottom left, her age at starting to see Freud, ‘was night  room in which dressing to go’, and, most eerie of all, ‘Fräulein K.’ in her mother’s head!
The aim of the Science Festival event was to look at the case study not in how it is often taken, as a criticism of Freud, but to emphasise solely the dream, Dora’s free-associations, and the historical events of Dora’s life, so as to honour her strength and life, and the poignant depiction by the dream of her life at that time. The words highlighted ‘deserves to be recorded in detail  dream’, at the top right-hand side, are therefore relevant, as although there is much in dispute in the case study, we are grateful that the dream was recorded by Freud after she discussed it with him.
The event at which this dream was discussed was part of the Swansea Science Festival and had a large number of attendees worldwide online, and panel members from London (Dany Nobus), Harvard Medical School (Deirdre Barrett), Vienna (Brigitte Holzinger and Zora Wessely), Swansea, and, from Germany, writer Katharina Adler, author of the novel Ida, and great-grand-daughter of Dora / Ida Bauer.

The film of the event can be seen on our YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/ilbPU_TGeVg.
The film of the dream being read by Dr Brigitte Holzinger at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, which was Freud's apartment and offices where Dora / Ida first told the dream to Freud, can be seen on our YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/kkMMeSo1ndk.        

Dream told at event organised by the Dream Research Institute at the Center for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education, London.
I look out of my bedroom window on a sunny day and see traffic on the road outside. It is a busy road with shops opposite and a post office on the corner, with a red post box. I go outside and cross the road to see a Victorian pram with a lacy white sunroof and a white frilly quilt. It is blocking the pavement, and not parked safely. There is a baby girl in the pram, dressed in a pink dress. She appears well looked after, but I think ‘where is her mother?’ I then see my mother in a baby car seat, in the road, it has a sunroof and my mother is small, the right size for the child seat. She is dressed in her everyday clothes with a blue cloth, like a dusting cloth, over her face. She is not moving and I think she is asleep. I know it is dangerous for her and the car seat to be in the road.
I am then at a man’s house, in his wealthy farmhouse-type kitchen. It has lots of wood, and an oak table, with pots and pans hanging and horseshoes on the wall, and a coffee table. He is my intended partner, my love, but his ex-wife is there as well. I am having a friendly discussion with her, she is lovely, and I get on well with her and feel love for her. I ask my intended partner, ‘are you sure you want to leave her?’, and he nods yes, indicating that there is something wrong with her, or not right between them, and that he is no longer with her.
I then go back to my house. In the road there is the child’s car seat, which has been pushed into the gutter. I can’t see fully inside it because of the sunroof but I can see my mother’s tan coloured skirt and brown top, she still has the blue cloth over her face. I have been waiting all day for her to wake up but now realise that she has died. I then hear the baby crying. I know that my mother is the baby’s mother. I pick up the baby to look after her, all the while having a sinking grief feeling about my mother having died. But the baby is giggling, she is happy to see me, and so I take her into my house. She tries to feed on my right breast but I have no milk. My 12-year-old daughter is there and she asks if the baby is ours. I am smiling and thinking that, as the baby has no mother, we can keep her.

Dream of an art and design student who had chosen at the start of the Covid-19 Lockdown not to go back to her home, where her parents live, but instead to go to live with her boyfriend and his parents.
 
I was walking down the short garden path to the back door of my home, where I lived all my life before university and where my parents live. I went in through the back door but know that it is a female teacher's house, I am unsure who she is, and I knew I should not be there. It looked exactly the same as my family home; a fairly small house in a village in the country. As I walked through the hall to the front of the house, I noticed a very small monkey, about 2 or 3 inches in height following me. It was gold or some kind of metal, but it moved as a live monkey would. I remember feeling worried about it, like it was going to alert the homeowner or attack me, but soon I found out that it was not a threat and that it just wanted to be around me. It was quite playful really. I went to the mantelpiece in my kitchen and the monkey followed me. It opened its mouth and hinged its whole face back. Then I had a paint brush. I dipped it into the monkey’s mouth, its head had golden orange paint inside, and I started to paint small gold details onto a black remote control rectangular box that was on the mantelpiece. Then the female teacher’s husband pulled up in an old car in front of the house. I quickly ran away through the house, as I thought he might hurt me or take me to the police, and I went out of the back door. Then I woke up.

Dream of US keyworker delivery driver Mason told online for one of our Covid Lockdown dream events. In waking life Mason was relocating across the US. Dream: 'I am trying to drive up the incline from a suburban house garage but the gears keep crashing and so I can't move into the road to join the traffic there. I release the clutch but find the car is not in gear and it moves backwards and stops. I get out to check that it did not hit the white garage door and am surprised to see that it has damaged the door badly. I get back in the car and see a man and a woman in an old white car looking at me almost with disgust. I feel embarrassed as I was not being able to drive the car, even though I should be able to do so and as it is my job to drive. The car was a brown Mazda Miata, which is not a car I drive in waking life and is a color I would not choose.'