KAFKA
AND THE DREAM
67
be closely examined. The latent dream thoughts are themselves dis–
ordered fragments and what we call the manifest dream, the "story"
of the dream, is the attempt on the part of the dream work to give
a semblance of order and coherence to materials which have no logi–
cal connections and are governed by primitive thought processes.
Freud called this aspect of the dream work "secondary elaboration."
The resulting "story" in the dream when considered as a composition
is loosely and often indifferently strung together in a narrative which
combines its elements without regard for compatibility, temporal
sequence, or the boundaries of space. (While many dreams do present
an intelligible
fa~ade,
when we say "like a dream" we usually mean
the disordered dream, the absurd dream.)
Kafka's stories, as in the example studied, are associations to
the dream and are also composed like the dream. The so-called
"dream technique" is like the dream's own method of composition, the
process of secondary elaboration. There is no doubt that Kafka de–
liberately employed this device of the dream for reproducing the
effect of the dream in his stories. But I think it is also true, as I men–
tioned earlier, that his gift in recreating the dream world in his stories
derived from illness. I want to emphasize that I do not think Kafka
was psychotic, but the danger of psychosis was very real, probably as
real as he feared. He never actually lost touch with reality, never lost
his citizenship in the real world even when he pronounced himself
"a citizen of this other world." His writing must be considered as his
strongest bond to the real world and may even be responsible for
maintaining his contact with reality.
I think I can support this last statement from certain remarks of
Kafka regarding the conditions under which he wrote.
If
it were not
for the sleepless nights he would not write at all, he says. (This should
not be taken literally, of course, but it is a fact that most of his writing
was the work of these sleepless nights, and we have seen the close con–
nection between these nocturnal fantasies and the anxiety dreams
which he warded off through insomnia.) He himself connects his fear
of sleep and his fear of death. "Perhaps I am afraid that the soul–
which in sleep leaves me-will never return." In psychological terms,
he is afraid of sleep because in sleep he loses the self, or awareness of
self, and there is the danger that he may not recover it. This is a
common fear in severe neuroses, where the danger of losing the self
