The fact that discovery is a matter of education should show the folly of striving to dream of soma wonderful thing outside the individual's abilities. Soma persons attempt this; they make up their minds before going to bed that they will dream of something valuable, and expect a dream to be furnished in accordance with their general or specific wishes. Dreams may furnish artists, literary men and others with utilizable material, but if in daily life one is unable to profit by what he sees or what is suggested to him, his dreams will not profit him.

The most common dreams of discovery which are the lot of average folk are those in which errors are located or lost articles found. There are many of these dreams recorded, which, as with all dreams not well understood by the average person, are often considered miraculous. As an example of these dreams the following, from Abercrombie1 is given:

" One of my friends who was employed in one of the principal banks at Glasgow in the capacity of cashier, was at his desk, when an individual presented himself, presenting a claim for the payment of the sum of six pounds. There were several persons before him who were waiting their turn; but he was so impatient, so noisy, and above all, so insupportable by reason of his stammering, that one of the assistants begged the cashier to pay him, in order to get rid of him. The latter gave him what he wanted, with a gesture of impatience, and without paying much attention to the matter. At the end of the year, which was about eight or nine months after, the books could not be balanced, there was a constant error of six pounds. My friend passed several days and nights in a useless search for the deficit; at last, overcome by fatigue, he returned home, went to bed and dreamed that he was at his desk, that the man who stammered had appeared, and soon all the details of the affair had returned to his mind with accuracy. He awoke with his mind full of the dream, and with the hope that he might find what he was looking for. Upon examining his books he found, in fact, that the sum had not been entered on the ledger, and that it corresponded exactly with the deficit."

1 Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers, 1841, p. 280.

This dream can be explained in many ways. We may conceive that by concentrating the cashier narrowed his mental faculties, and that sleep relaxed the mental tension, allowing the solution to appear in consciousness. Further, we may believe that the unconscious was coping with the problem and thrust the solution forward once it was solved, in this case a matter of several days. In the light of modern psychology we may believe that the solution was not found more quickly because the recollection would be associated with something unpleasant, namely the irritation caused by the insistent stammerer.

Outside of mental diseases, there is often much meaning in our forgetting of names, our mislaying of articles, and other failures of memory which are apparently of no significance. In many cases it can be shown that we "forget" because the matter which we wish to make conscious has associations with the unpleasant. As before stated, we strive to forget all unpleasant experiences, since their remembrance would cause us mental pain. By a process of constant repression, incidents and thoughts which we wish to forget no longer come to consciousness; they become buried in the unconscious mind. However, when we meet with something which has an association with the repressed experiences, the latter are stirred up, but there is a resistance to their coming to consciousness because of their painful nature; this resistance we call forgetfulness. In sleep the resisting power is less, and so the sought for material is afforded a better opportunity for coming to consciousness.

It is not necessary that the individual recognize in the memory he wishes to make conscious an association with the unpleasant; the mind does that for him. Often the association with the unpleasant is very slight, and the individual fails to note anything disagreeable in the recalled experience when it does come to mind; however, an analysis will frequently reveal it. In the incident of the cashier, it is probable that the inability to recall was due, in part at least, to the restraining action of the mind in order to keep from consciousness the recollection of the disagreeableness caused by the insistent stammerer.

The limits of space forbid our going into this very interesting subject in any greater detail; the reader who wishes to pursue the subject further is referred to Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life. To Freudians, slips of the tongue and pen, mislaying of articles, forgetting, and various acts of daily life are very significant of unconscious motives. Doubtless there is often much hidden meaning, which may or may not be of significance in understanding an individual's psychic life, in many of the acts of daily life, but it is also true that if we endeavour to account for all forgetting, for example, by the activities of the endopsychic censor, we are apt to spend much time unprofitably.