The Dream Book of Self-Knowledge
- directly related to sexuality (including sexual indecency, various sexual deviations and abominations) that arise from the depths of the subconscious to the dreamer's consciousness and very subtly affects a person's everyday behavior.
- is nourished by the very essence of the physical body and through a preoccupation with instinctual images in waking consciousness; which gives dream rats the power and ability to multiply in the subconscious and then penetrate dreams as a threatening factor.
- threatening the dreamer: the urge for sexual acts can disrupt the remaining emotional experience.
- feeding a rat: through his acts and conduct in waking consciousness the dreamer is strengthening the power of sexuality in the subconscious and thereby also intensifying his future problems with controlling unconscious sexual impulses arising from within.
- growing: a person is increasingly giving into sexual impulses arising from within.
- hairless: the humanizing of sexual urges could lull a person into the belief that sexual dependency is in fact an emotion; such a symbol is therefore very dangerous and should direct the dreamer toward decisive measures against his own instinctual content.
- white: the dreamer is futilely beatifying the idea that he has already cleared away subconscious sexual urges and that only pure emotion and love is left.
- caught: the dreamer will soon be able to fully control the urge for sexual acts.
- killing: the dreamer will temporarily rid himself of inner sexual impulses, but these impulses will soon (once the rat's offspring grow up) rise to life again and threaten the dreamer's power over himself; the life and death of rats needs to be left to the unconscious which shows us through their fate the true state of the mind.
- in water, by the water, in sewers: impulses urging the dreamer toward sexual acts can survive for an abbreviated period even in emotions (like a rat in water) and can sow here the urge for sexual acts; if, however, they endure in the emotional realm for a longer period it is fatal for the subconscious urge for sexual acts (the rat drowns).
- seeing a dead rat (but the dreamer did not kill it!): deadened inner impulses that drive the dreamer into sexual relationships.
