Skeptics suggest that Freud may have imbibed much of Aristotle's "Catharsis," but the accusation is denied by Freud himself on page two of "Interpretation of Dreams." "I have been unable to go more deeply into the Aristotelian treatise because of insufficient preparation and lack of skilled assistance." The learned Teuton admits, however, that the Greek philosopher was fairly well informed upon his subject.

"The good and bad men are least distinguishable when asleep; whence it is a common saying that during one-half of life there is no difference between the happy and the wretched, and this accords with our anticipations; for sleep is an inactivity of the soul insofar as it is demonstrated good or bad except that in some wise some of its movements find their way through the veil and so the good come to have better dreams than ordinary men." - Aristotle's Ethics.

Plato, whose teachings have probably influenced the morals and thoughts of mankind more strongly than those of any other mortal not an avatar, and whose psychic potency was such that even to this day his doctrines are quoted and lived by many who have never heard his name, regards dreams as important physical and psychic symptoms while certain other dreams are conceded as of supernatural origin.

Boehme, Swedenborg and other mystics possessed the faith that saw and heard but lacked the analytical faculty, and their theories of dreams are rather vague.

Descartes who lived in the sixteenth century, and who forestalled modern occultism by teaching the pineal gland as the seat of the brain, says of dreams: "I have sometimes found difficulty in distinguishing dreams from reality." Many times at night he thought that he was in a certain room and that he was clothed and standing near the fireplace, when in truth he was in bed and undressed.

"The one logical Christian," as Nietzsche calls Blaise Pascal, writes of dreams: "Who knows whether that part of life when people think they are awake is but another kind of sleep, a trifle different from the first, to which people are aroused when they think they are asleep."

The nineteenth century with its characteristically unimaginative theory of the dream was redeemed of its utter materialism by Dr. Charcot of Paris. To him the world owes the foundation of ultra-modern knowledge of dreams and dreamers. Professor of anatomy as well as student of nervous diseases and of morbid psychic conditions, he was the first scientist to recognize the limbo that lies between the physical body and the psychic entity. He was the pioneer in the use of hypnotism as a means of reaching the lower or subconscious stratum in the human mind and of thus bringing to the upper mental stratum emotions that had been forgotten by the waking consciousness. Faded memories and dead emotions were thus resuscitated in hypnotic sleep and treated by suggestion. The dream was regarded as symptomatic in the diagnosis of nervous diseases. Though many of Charcot's theories on the conscious and the subconscious have been disproven by more recent investigation, he stands, nevertheless, as the first scientific adventurer in the realm of the subconscious.

Dr. Freud who is said to have studied under Dr. Charcot has ignited controversies innumerable with his theories of the dream. Although his fundamental hypothesis of the sexual origin of every dream has raised storms of anger and ridicule, it has created a cult of Freudians who accept their leader's views unreservedly and who are intolerantly eager to thrust them upon others. The Freudian dream interpretations are invariably elaborate and frequently revolting, yet their originator has done psychology a service in changing scientific opinion, which formerly held all dreams as senseless shibboleths, into accepting them as logical mental or psychic processes, capable of analysis and interpretation.

Dr. Carl Jung of Zurich, formerly a follower of Freud, has founded a rival cult a trifle less revolting in that it rejects the unvarying sexual origin of the dream. Doctors Frink, Brill, Coriat and Leonard Hirshberg are exponents of Freud's theories, although they may differ on minor points.

While the Freudian methods of dream analysis have been accepted and put into practice, the highest authorities upon the subject deny many of Freud's theories. Kronfield, a contemporary, says that "beside Freud's conception of the voroconscious Henroth's 'Demonomania' becomes a modest, scientific theory;" Boris Sidis observes that the "Freudian writings are full of unconscious sexual humor."

Dr. Morton Prince attributes dreams chiefly to memory. Either consciously or subconsciously this faculty forms our opinions, prejudices, superstitions and beliefs; it is also the foundation of the subconscious processes and therefore furnishes the materials from which dreams and other subconscious processes find their source. No experiences in human life are entirely obliterated from the memory, they merely sink below the surface of consciousness into the realm of the subconscious, later to become potent factors in the dream-life. These forgotten, though by no means lost, experiences may be recalled to the consciousness after certain changes of condition. In order to induce these conditions which are those of dreams, hypnosis, etc., Dr. Prince makes use of hypnosis, crystal-gazing and of automatic writing.

The frequent recurrence of childhood's experiences in the adult dream exemplify this theory of subconscious conservation.

Dr. Prince also traces a percentage of dream material to the thoughts that drift through the individual's mind in the hazy, half-waking state that is the foreshadowing of actual sleep. On this drowsy plane of mental mirage, the desires and the hopes of the day assemble, and when they can attain sufficient strength, clamor for fulfillment. This disturbs the slumber and in order to quiet these insistent images that throng the weary brain, the sleeper summons imagination and attempts to substitute dream symbols for waking desire. Dr. Prince agrees with Freud in so far as Freud holds the dream as the imagined fulfillment of a wish.