The significance of certain catastrophic dreams

Four examples of catastrophic dreams in which the dream action progressed to include the total destruction of the dreamer's body image are presented. This feature of total destruction of the body image possesses a special heuristic significance because it is a variance with Freund's clinical experience which helped to shape his view of the factors responsible for the creation of traumatic neurosis. He felt that nothing resembling death can ever have been experienced and therefore he dismissed the idea that the traumatic neurosis could arise a direct result of the fear of death. Each of the dreams revived a real life traumatic event which had caused a registration in the mind of a shattering experience without causing the destruction of the actual body at the same time. When the same traumatic event was revived in the dream the ego functions available at that time were evidently insufficient either to modify the traumatic event or to awaken the dreamer prior to its denouement. The powerless ego of the dreamer seemed to have been derived from the powerless ego of the patient at the traumatic moment in waking life which was carried over into the dream as a part of the representation of the traumatic event. The destruction of the body image in these dreams apparently played a role in the production of symptoms characteristic of the dissociative syndromes. On the morning following the dream three of the patients awakened in a depersonalized state and the fourth in a catatonic state.