KAFKA AND THE DREAM
63
began to tremble.')" I could not pursue this further and I was also
bothered by the fact that the connecting links between the dream
details, my reconstruction, and the Messner-Kette story could not
be clearly established.
Last year the text of Kafka's "Letter to My Father" was pub–
lished
in
full for the first time. In a long outpouring of old griefs
and reproaches, there is one memory to which Kafka himself attached
the greatest importance and which provided unexpected confirma–
tion of my construction and the connecting links between the dream
and the Messner-Kette story.
There is only one episode in the early years of which I have a
direct memory. You may remember it, too. Once in the night I kept on
whimpering for water, not, I am certain, because I was thirsty, but
probably partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself. After several
vigorous threats had failed to have any effect, you took me out of bed,
carried me out onto the
paulatche
(a balcony) and left me there alone
for a while in my nightshirt, outside the shut door. I am not going to
say this was wrong-perhaps at the time there was really no other way
of getting peace and quiet that night-but I mention it as typical of
your methods of bringing up a child and their effect on me. I dare say
I was quite obedient afterwards at that period, but it did me inner
harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for
water, and the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were two
things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect
with each other. Even years afterwards I suffered from the tormenting
fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come
almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry
me out onto the
paulatche,
and that therefore I was such a mere noth–
ing for him.
This memory has made its way into the dream and the story.
I would like to propose from the evidence of Kafka's recorded dreams
and his stories that this experience was not the only one in which he
disturbed his father at night with disastrous consequences, for the
theme of sexual observation occurs repeatedly in Kafka's dreams and
his writings. But he is probably truthful in saying that this episode is
the only one of his early years of which he has a direct memory, for
such infantile sexual scenes as I have inferred from the material ordi–
narily undergo repression. It is even probable that Kafka's memory
