As the third of the peculiarities of the dream content, we have cited from all the authors (except Robert) the fact that impressions from the earliest times of our lives, which seem not to be at the disposal of the waking memory, may appear in the dream. It is, of course, difficult to judge how often or how seldom this occurs, because the respective elements of the dream are not recognised according to their origin after waking. The proof that wo are dealing with childhood impressions must thus be reached objectively, and the conditions necessary for this happen to coincide only in rare instances. The story is told by A. Maury,*8 as being particularly conclusive, of a man who decided to visit his birthplace after twenty years' absence. During the night before his departure, he dreams that he is in an altogether strange district, and that he there meets a strange man with whom he has a conversation. Having afterward returned to his home, he was able to convince himself that this strange district really existed in the neighbourhood of his home town, and the strange man in the dream turned out to be a friend of his dead father who lived there. Doubtless, a conclusive proof that he had seen both the man and the district in his childhood. The dream, moreover, is to be interpreted as a dream of impatience, like that of the girl who carries her ticket for the concert of the evening in her pocket (p. 110), of the child whose father had promised him an excursion to the Hameau, and the like. The motives explaining why just this impression of childhood is reproduced for the dreamer cannot, of course, be discovered without an analysis. One of the attendants at my lectures, who boasted that his dreams were very rarely subject to disfigurement, told me that he had sometime before in a dream seen his former tutor in bed with his nurse, who had been in the household until he was eleven years old. The location of this scene does not occur to him in the dream. As he was much interested, he told the dream to his elder brother, who laughingly confirmed its reality. The brother said he remembered the affair very well, for he was at the time six years old. The lovers were in the habit of making him, the elder boy, drunk with beer, whenever circumstances were favourable for nocturnal relations. The smaller child, at that time three years old - our dreamer - who slept in the same room as the nurse, was not considered an obstacle.

In still another case it may be definitely ascertained, without the aid of dream interpretation, that the dream contains elements from childhood; that is, if it be a so-called perennial dream, which being first dreamt in childhood, later appears again and again after adult age has been reached. I may add a few examples of this sort to those already familiar, although I have never made the acquaintance of such a perennial dream in my own case. A physician in the thirties tells me that a yellow lion, about which he can give the most detailed information, has often appeared in his dream-life from the earliest period of his childhood to the present day. This lion, known to him from his dreams, was one day discovered in natura as a long-forgotten object made of porcelain, and on that occasion the young man learned from his mother that this object had been his favourite toy in early childhood, a fact which he himself could no longer remember.

If we now turn from the manifest dream content to the dream thoughts which are revealed only upon analysis, the co-operation of childhood experiences may be found to exist even in dreams whose content would not have led us to suspect anything of the sort. I owe a particularly delightful and instructive example of such a dream to my honoured colleague of the "yellow lion." After reading Nansen's account of his polar expedition, he dreamt that he was giving the bold explorer electrical treatment in an ice field for an ischæmia of which the latter complained! In the analysis of this dream, he remembered a story of his childhood, without which the dream remains entirely unintelligible. When he was a child, three or four years old, he was listening attentively to a conversation of older people about trips of exploration, and presently asked papa whether exploration was a severe illness. He had apparently confused "trips" with "rips," and the ridicule of his brothers and sisters prevented his ever forgetting the humiliating experience.

The case is quite similar when, in the analysis of the dream of the monograph on the genus cyclamen, I happen upon the recollection, retained from childhood, that my father allowed me to destroy a book embellished with coloured plates when I was a little boy five years old. It will perhaps be doubted whether this recollection actually took part in the composition of the dream content, and it will be intimated that the process of analysis has subsequently established the connection. But the abundance and intricacy of the ties of association vouch for the truth of my explanation: cyclamen - favourite flower - favourite dish - artichoke; to pick to pieces like an artichoke, leaf by leaf (a phrase which at that time rang in our ears a propos of the dividing up of the Chinese Empire) - herbarium - bookworm, whose favourite dish is books. I may state further that the final meaning of the dream, which I have not given here, has the most intimate connection with the content of the childhood scene.

In another series of dreams we learn from analysis that the wish itself, which has given rise to the dream, and whose fulfilment the dream turns out to be, has originated in childhood - until one is astonished to find that the child with all its impulses lives on in the dream.

I shall now continue the interpretation of a dream which has already proved instructive - I refer to the dream in which friend R. is my uncle (p. 116). We have carried its interpretation far enough for the wish-motive, of being appointed professor, to assert itself tangibly; and we have explained the affection displayed in the dream for friend R. as a fiction of opposition and spite against the aspersion of the two colleagues, who appear in the dream thoughts. The dream was my own; I may, therefore, continue the analysis by stating that my feelings were not quite satisfied by the solution reached. I know that my opinion of these colleagues who are so badly treated in the dream thoughts would have been expressed in quite different terms in waking life; the potency of the wish not to share their fate in the matter of appointment seemed to me too slight to account for the discrepancy between my estimate in the dream and that of waking. If my desire to be addressed by a new title proves so strong it gives proof of a morbid ambition, which I did not know to exist in me, and which I believe is far from my thoughts. I do not know how others, who think they know me, would judge me, for perhaps I have really been ambitious; but if this be true, my ambition has long since transferred itself to other objects than the title and rank of assistant-professor.