Discussion and painting of Dora's dream of being rescued from a burning house, told to Freud in 1900

Описание: The video is of an online event held for the Swansea Science Festival on 24th October 2020. The event celebrated the 120th anniversary of Dora telling her dream to Freud, and had a large worldwide audience, a panel of experts, and the dream painted by Julia Lockheart during the two hour discussion.
The dream: ‘A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but Father said “I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case.” We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up.’
The dream first occurred in 1998 when Dora was 15 years old and she was propositioned by an older married man, it occurred on the following four nights. She had wanted her father to protect her from the man, anonymised as Herr K. by Freud in his 1905 case study. Dora, the pseudonym used by Freud for the young woman now known to be Ida Bauer, then had the dream again a few weeks after starting psychoanalysis with Freud. Freud suggested that the jewel-case was a female genital symbol, symbolising the danger she was in when awake.
Freud stated that the meaning of the dream was: ‘This man is persecuting me, he wants to force his way into my room. My “jewel-case” is in danger...' and that the dream expressed Dora's wish that her father would rescue her from Herr K..

At the top left of the painting Julia has depicted the spa town of Merano, where Dora / Ida lived with her family and where the K. family also lived. As occurs in our DreamsID events, for painting on, Julia chooses pages from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams with regard to the shapes of the paragraphs, but then during the painting process finds words on the page that are often uncannily relevant to the dream. Note the words ‘female genitals’ appearing twice under the jewel-case, ‘boyish’ in Dora’s brother’s head, ‘17’, at the bottom left, her age at starting to see Freud, ‘was night room in which dressing to go’, and, most eerie of all, ‘Fräulein K.’ in her mother’s head!
The aim of the Science Festival event was to look at the case study not in how it is often taken, as a criticism of Freud, but to emphasise solely the dream, Dora’s free-associations, and the historical events of Dora’s life, so as to honour her strength and life, and the poignant depiction of her life at that time in the dream. The words highlighted ‘deserves to be recorded in detail dream ’, at the top right-hand side, are therefore relevant, as although there is much in dispute in the case study, we are grateful that the dream was recorded by Freud after she discussed it with him.
The inclusion of the event in the Swansea Science Festival follows the extensive work on the science and neuroscience of dreaming conducted by Professor Mark Blagrove, and the science art collaboration DreamsID (Dreams Illustrated and Discussed) between Mark Blagrove and Dr Julia Lockheart. Panel members were from Brunel University, London (Professor Dany Nobus), Harvard Medical School (Dr Deirdre Barrett), Vienna (Dr Brigitte Holzinger and Zora Wessely), Swansea, and, from Germany, writer Katharina Adler, author of the novel Ida, and great-grand-daughter of Dora / Ida Bauer.

Further details of the event and of the DreamsID collaboration can be seen on our website DreamsID.com.