INTRODUCTION

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was a Nobel Prize winner for his work in neurology; he essentially discovered the neuron. For decades, Cajal disputed Freud's dream theories.

After retirement, he planned to publish a dream-journal that would disprove Freud's claim that every dream disguises a wish. Cajal thought instead that neurons who'd been squelched all day, that hold old memories or odd associations (including the occasional taboo desire, but generally random) find sleep a time to get harmless exercise, and we experience their workout-orgy as a dream. For Cajal, dreams mean nothing.

This was one he felt proved his point. I'm not so sure. Seven years later, this dream came true; the war was real.

--C. Wayan, ed.

THE DREAM

Before the veronal [sleeping pill] and before 3:30.

Goes fast. Does it happen in the great hall of a theater?

I enter a hall where apparently there was a war between liberals and reactionaries. Before entering in a kind of foyer I come across several wounded men among others who display a bullet wound on the forehead and Lafora walks around saying, I have a serious iniury. He wears no bandages. Unarmed I enter the great hall where shots are heard. Some enemies see me, but they do not shoot from the side where I am. Someone from the other side says: leave, so that nothing happens to you. Very arrogantly, I answer, shoot all you like, that they will take at most a few months off of my life. But they do not shoot. They say that it is not worth the trouble. In view of this I leave. The excitement awakens me.

It seemed like target practice rather than a battlefield. Nothing was compelling me to enter. And it seemed that the fight was of a political nature and was sustained between liberals and reactionaries.

Completely absurd. I did not see dead people.

Causes: The death of Enrique de Mesa from an embolism read earlier in the day. The execution by firing squad of a student who attempted to kill Valdemoros (Finland?). I do not understand it. I do not talk with anyone. My activities during the day have been peaceful; gone in an automobile to my orchard to pick sour cherries.

Inexplicable. I fell asleep reading a book [----l by Julio Camba. I do suspect any repressed desire.

Source: The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal by Benjamin Ehrlich, Oxford Univ. Press, 2017, p.101-2.

AFTERWORD

The War between Liberals & Reactionaries is a typical Cajal dream text--the actual dream is a witty vignette, here mocking bloodless academic debate (big fuss, no deaths), but his waking notes look only for literal borrowings from events that day, or internal inconsistencies (the conflict's lack of realism seems a defect to him--noise, not signal). The very idea the dream could be making a point seems alien to Cajal--let alone that it might be a literal warning of a coming war.

I'm no Freudian, but that slip in the last sentence, "I do suspect any repressed desire" for "I do not..." made me laugh.

The published title wasn't The War between Liberals & Reactionaries, but Fantasy--and that's misleading. The translator Ehrlich says few Cajal dreams have distinctive titles; instead they're just labeled either Sueño, meaning sleep-dreams specifically, or Ensueño, having the same broad sense as the English word 'dream'--night-dreams, but also visions, fantasies, hallucinations, etc. So Ehrlich's title Fantasy merely translates Ensueño, not Fantasía, a nondream fantasy. Cajal woke from it, so it's pretty clearly a dream. Retitle it Dream? Not too helpful! On a website full of dreams, I felt a descriptive title would aid access.

--Wayan, ed.

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