On the night before my book Dream Power was published in New York, I dreamed of a man in long white underwear shooting me down with a machine gun.

I panicked as I now recalled rumors of his critical attacks on guests which had caused many of them to walk out halfway through. My conscious mind had forgotten all this in the excitement of publication events, but my heart remembered every word and threw up a warning in my dream to beware of being "shot down" the following day.

As I had never met Mr. Nebel previously, my dreaming mind pictured a figure in long johns to make its point. It was too late to cancel my appearance--and in any case, my dream merely reflected a fear that he would shoot me down--so I gritted my teeth and awaited the worst, determined to stick it out to the end, come what may.

What happened more than justified the warning, though it was not Mr. Nebel who did the shooting. As he himself did not feel qualified to discuss dreams in depth, he had brought in a psychoanalyst friend as cohost, and I looked forward to a rational, scientific, and stimulating interchange of ideas.

To my astonishment, Dr. S. immediately embarked on a virulent attack on my daring to criticize the great master, Freud, whose ideas (according to him) were now firmly established. When I asked for evidence of this, he quoted an out-of-date paper written by a Freudian analyst in the early 1960s, of no scientific validity whatsoever, and when I corroborated my arguments with genuine scientific authority, he called me an ignorant Britisher and penis-envying woman!

The whole evening continued in this vein, with his opposing all my ideas not with the scientific honesty I had hoped for, but with vicious personal attacks of no relevance whatsoever to the subject of dreams. I left the show at midnight, a sadder but wiser person, little realizing that this was only the first of several such interviews with psychoanalysts of various schools who became quite irrational when confronted with scientific evidence that threatened their pet theories.

That night I dreamed I had been invited to take part in a game of cricket, but when I arrived, found myself involved in a very rough game of baseball, presided over by Long John Nebel and Dr. S. dressed in elaborate gilt uniforms.

People are apt to be incredulous when they first discover the dreaming mind's capacity for playing these kinds of tricks with words, and this is probably the aspect of my own work that has most attracted popular attention, so much so that such dreams are nowadays often called "Faraday dreams," although it was in no sense an original discovery on my part. Freud himself observed it in his work in Vienna at the beginning of the century...

...I think it is worthwhile identifying at least six different kinds of punning in which the dreaming mind is wont to indulge:

1. Dreams based on verbal puns in which one word represents another of similar pronunciation but different spelling--for example, my dream of men being dressed in gilt to express a feeling of their being steeped in guilt.
2. Dreams based on reversal puns--for example, a dream of filling full a jar which expresses a sense of being fulfilled.
3. Dreams based on visual puns in which the dream creates a picture based on one sense of a word in order to express an idea involving a different sense of the same word--for example, my dream of a baseball game to reflect my feeling of being involved in a base, underhand game.
4. Dreams based on puns involving proper names--as when I dreamed of a man in long johns to represent Long John Nebel.
5. Dreams which create a literal picture of some colloquial or slang metaphor--for example, when my dream depicted a man "shooting me down" to express my fear of being attacked verbally, and a cancelled cricket match to express my feeling that something was "not cricket."
6. Dreams which create a literal picture of common body language--for example, a dream of a bare chest to depict a feeling of "getting something off one's chest," and a dream of a one-armed man to reflect a feeling of being "disarmed."

SOURCE: The Dream Game, Ann Faraday, Harper & Row, 1976; pp 92-95. Passage untitled; 'Longjohns' added to aid searches.