The physical side of nightmare was the first phase of the dream to receive investigation from modern students, while happy dreams were regarded as the whims of women, poets and children. Woman was supposed to require a larger proportion of sleep than man, a fact frequently quoted as triumphant proof of her mental inferiority.

The purpose of the dream as the preserver of sleep is a recent discovery, developed primarily through physical channels, and through the investigation of the so-called "typical dream", i.e., one common to every race and condition. For these dreams each cult has its specific explanation, though all agree that sleep is preserved by the mysterious psychic function of certain dreams arising from physical needs. In the "thirst dream," for instance, the sleeper dreams of being thirsty and of enjoying a refreshing draught, thus gratifying in fancy thirst that has an actual, physical existence and that unslaked might interrupt slumber. Whatever their other differences, psychologists agree that dreams do not interfere with sleep, but that they protect it

In regarding dreams as an index of the character, ultra-modernism agrees not only with the ancients but with Artemi-dorus of the first century and with Paracelsus, the greatest mediaevalist. While Kant, the predecessor of ultramoderns, suggests in his "Anthropology" that the dream exists in order to bare to us our hidden selves, and to reveal to us, not what we are, but what we might have been under a different environment Although Havelock Ellis quotes Sancto de Sanctis as show-ing on the basis of long experience that the dreams of criminals are usually peaceful, even beautiful, while the visions of innocent persons are frequently horrifying in the extreme, and while Michelet holds that the dreams of the philosophers of the discovery of a panacea and of Eldorado were alike based upon the misery of the peasants during the middle ages, none of these instances can be held as contradicting the theory of the dream as indexing the subconsciousness. Thus, issuing from the unsounded depths of man's being and forming part of his essential self, dreams describe his character as inevitably as the lines upon his face portray his mode of life and as accurately as his fetishes measure the heights of his ideals. Not the individuality formed by training and environment, the product of social inhibitions and the result of parental pruning, or a carefully instilled creed, but the primal, atavistic self, the self that the dreamer does not suspect, an entity answering the description of a "naked soul."

Bede's quaint story of Saint Augustine portrays Pope Gregory's opinion of dreams. On becoming Bishop of Hippo after rather a wild and fitful youth, the Saint inquired of the Pope as to whether after certain dreams, a man may receive the body of our Lord, and whether, if he be a priest he may, under the circumstances, celebrate the holy mysteries.

The reply leaves no doubt as to the papal opinion. Sinful dreams do prohibit a priest from celebrating the holy mysteries, or from administering the sacrament, unless there should happen to be no other priest to take his place.

The therapeutic value of dreams is the most ancient of rediscovered theories. The priests of AEsculapius, the god of medicine whose temple was situated in the ancient Grecian town of Epidaurus, practiced the science of healing by slumber and dreams. On one occasion Euphanes, a child of the town, slept in the temple to be cured of stone. AEsculapius himself appeared to him in a dream.

"What will you give me if I cure you?" demanded the god.

"Ten small bones," answered the boy.

Æsculapius laughed and disappeared and the child awakened cured.

Hippocrates secularized the practice of healing by slumber; he admitted, however, that faith combined with sleep was more efficacious as a cure than sleep alone.

Doctors Frank, Freud, Jung, Prince and numerous other physicians attach strong psychotherapeutic significance to the vision of their patients and they frequently induce hypnosis and its attendant dreams to discover the psychic source of the malady. Apart also from the materialistic and physiological interpretation of the function of dreams many students maintain that they hold a higher purpose. Visionaries attach to them a sort of psychic and poetic justice that lifts them above the functions of the body and beyond the work-a-day world generally. In his dream the cripple waxes strong, the beggar's rags become royal robes, the sorrowing find joy, the mystic sees his God. Meanwhile other students regard the dream as guarding that mysterious entity so baffling to psychologists, so elusive to students of brain structure, in that it has never been located physiologically, although it dies physiologically at the withdrawal of blood from the body. Certain schools of thought term this mystery the soul and a belief in its existence is the oldest and most universal creed known to man. Scientists scout the probable existence of this soul, even as they seek it with all the appliances known to modern ingenuity. Meanwhile they are steadily pushing back the boundaries of the seen towards the world of the unseen, and life defined by Spencer as "a continuous adjustment to external relations" is constantly rising towards the attainment of a perfect equilibrium through the acquisition of knowledge. The primary obligation for modern discoveries is due to purely physical science. Medicine and surgery have been and still are of incalculable aid in the attainment of material comfort, of bodily well being and of the attendant capacity for work, mental and physical. They have vastly assisted the material organism of man, the most perfect and refined of organisms. Yet, on the other hand, there have been countless sacrifices to science and warm human blood has spurted as freely over its altars as it was ever poured forth for the idols of old; quivering limbs have been dissected as relentlessly as they were ever torn or crushed by Juggernaut's car, and still steel has been unable to find the human soul upon which all the history of the human race has its foundation. Skillfully as doctors have examined the human brain, earnestly as they have probed the arteries of men and animals, the very essence of life has eluded their search and avoided the eyes of science even more successfully than in the days of old when the spirit of man was supposed to ascend in the smoke of sacrificial altars. Back of all anatomy there are processes for which anatomical processes can give no adequate explanation and which physical law can not control. Human history, for instance, is frequently heroic when physical instinct would have made it disgraceful. Men battle for truth when truth leads to dishonor and poverty; martyrs go to the stake for ideals when the flames are torturing realities. The repentance of the sinful, the despair of the guilty, and the peace of God alike defy the investigation of the operator's microscope and knife. Physicians realizing these limitations are turning more and more towards psychological work, yet thus far psychology merely skims the surface of psychic thought and applies itself to rules and mental processes. These rules do not apply to the dreams of deeper slumber, for the larger number of dreams are of psychic, not mental origin.

Freud, the radical, tacitly recognizes these conditions: "Other psychic sources of dreams are unknown," he states at one time in his book upon "Dream Interpretation," and at another: "but as a matter of fact no such complete solution of the dream has ever been accomplished in any case, and what is more, every one attempting such solution has found, that in most cases there have remained a great many components of the dream the source of which he has been unable to explain.

. . . The validity ascribed to dream life by some schools of philosophy, the School of Schelling is a distinct echo of the undisputed divinity of dreams in antiquity; nor is the discussion closed on the subject of the mantic or prophetic powers of dreams. This is due to the fact that the attempted psychological explanations are too inadequate to overcome the accumulated material, however strongly those who devote themselves to a scientific mode of thought feel that such assertions should be repudiated." - Freud, "Interpretation of Dreams," Chapter I (Substance Or Shadow).