ABSTRACT

The dreamer is at a social gathering. On leaving, he puts on a stranger’s hat instead of his52 own.

The hat, as a covering for the head, has the general sense of some-53 thing that epitomizes the head. Just as in summing up we bring ideas “under one head” (unter einen Hut), so the hat, as a sort of leading idea, covers the whole personality and imparts its own significance to it. Coronation endows the ruler with the divine nature of the sun, the doctor’s hood bestows the dignity of a scholar, and a stranger’s hat imparts a strange personality. Meyrink uses this theme in his novel The Golem, where the hero puts on the hat of Athanasius Pernath and, as a result, becomes involved in a strange experience. It is clear enough in The Golem that it is the unconscious which entangles the hero in fantastic adventures. Let us stress at once the significance of the Golem parallel and assume that the hat in the dream is the hat of an Athanasius, an immortal, a being beyond time, the universal and everlasting man as distinct from the ephemeral and “accidental” mortal man. Encircling the head, the hat is round like the sun-disc of a crown and therefore contains the first allusion to the mandala. We shall find the attribute of

while the mandala character of the hat comes out in the thirty-fifth mandala dream (par. 254). As a general result of the exchange of hats we may expect a development similar to that in The Golem: an emergence of the unconscious. The unconscious with its figures is already standing like a shadow behind the dreamer and pushing its way into consciousness.