Chapter Two). He also thought of Hamilcar, who made his son swear vengeance on the Romans.129
VELIKOVSKY’S INTERPRETATIONIt is Rome, not however the scenery of a town but “a small stream with black water.” Thus Rome is not the city but the Roman-Catholic Church which Freud had also mentioned in associations.… Rome is for him the symbol “of the cherished wishes, for whose realization one would like to work with the tenacity of the Punic soldier.” “Dark water” is the water of baptism. “On one side of the dark water, black rock”— Judaism, the sad life of the children of the Jewish people, “on the other, meadows with large white flowers ”—Christianity, the happy life of those who are not persecuted. It is characteristic that Freud in his associations twice arrived at the word “constitution.” We shall interpret it in the civic-legal sense. According to the constitution the Jew does not have equal rights. In the anecdote too the Jew does not have equal rights. In the anecdote too the Jew is put off the train again and again “because he has no ticket.” Under this constitution he cannot get on. The anecdote deals really with himself. To be a Jew is a “constitutional disease.” This road to Rome would not be Hannibal’s road. For Hannibal Rome was no “promised land.” But it might be for a Mr. Zucker who knows the roads. Not to submit, but to gain a victory the semitic general led his army towards Rome. But for a Jew the promised land was Jerusalem. The small stream of black water, a border like the Rubicon, signifies temptation and the anguish of the lonely wanderer from that dispersed people of whom he knew that it had stubbornly resisted powerful Rome for a thousand years.130 MY INTERPRETATION AND COMMENTSThe associations to this dream are obviously heavily involved with Freud’s Jewishness, and as Velikovsky and I would both argue, with Roman Catholic Christianity. (Baptismal water was customarily left in the baptismal font year-round in Czech churches; such water would have appeared dark in the dimly lit churches of the 19th century.) But let us go back to Freud’s remarks in The Interpretation of Dreams just before he reported this dream. He said, in reference to an earlier Roman dream, I dreamt once that I was looking out of a railway-carriage window at the Tiber and the Ponte Sant’Angelo. The train began to move off, and it occurred to me that I had not so much as set foot in the city. The view that I had seen in my dream was taken from a well-known engraving which I had caught sight of in the sitting-room of one of my patients.131 This quotation makes it clear that although Freud had not yet been to Rome, he could nonetheless dream of it as an urban environment if that |