He will be able, no doubt, in his consulting-room to get together a number of relevant and interesting facts, but it is likely that far too small a proportion of his observations will be derived from the experiences of perfectly healthy and normal men and women. "They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick." The mental processes of those that are whole, the dream imagery of those of us who are fortunate enough to enjoy the soundest bodily and mental health, are much less likely to come under the doctor's notice than are the experiences of nervous or morbid people, or of persons who, owing to temporary conditions of illness, are not for the moment normal or healthy.

This is an almost inevitable drawback to the conclusions that the specialist particularly interested in this study draws from the cases that come under his observation. Almost of necessity his conclusions are influenced by the proportion of more or less morbid subjects that he will come across. This would seem to be explanatory of much that we find in the writings of so great a specialist as Freud. His books have a world-wide reputation, and on them a great school of teaching is based. Freud's dream theory, very briefly stated, is that dreams are deeply significant, but never by any chance significant of what they would appear superficially to mean. They are symbols, he teaches, of desires, thoughts, or fears, that are sternly repressed by day and that are not admitted to our waking consciousness. By day they are therefore unable to intrude their presence upon us, but by night, when our will-power is in abeyance, they come forth unchecked, repeating themselves allegorically and always under a disguise in dreams. He sees in sex impulse the origin and motive power that excites almost all dream thought and action, and in his interpretation of dream symbols he goes so far as to state in all seriousness that dreams which are conspicuously innocent invariably embody erotic wishes.

Dr. Freud has so elaborated his theory of the dream as the symbol of repressed desire, and of the distortion of the unconscious wish in the dream figure, that it would seem as if the theory had become an obsession to which the facts have had at times to accommodate themselves. Leaving out of account all the other powerful desires and impulses that actuate our waking lives, he sees sex impulse alone amongst them as the force which is able to affect the dream mind.

The examples that he gives of dreams, of various mental processes, of curious lapses of memory, and of humour in dreams, when not drawn from personal experience, were drawn from the patients of his clinic, from persons, that is to say, who were suffering from every kind of nervous and mental disorder, and this no doubt accounts for their abnormal nature and for their ugliness.

The applications of his theory, as Freud has elaborated it, are unsatisfactory to many of his scientific critics, who have condemned the crudities and exaggerations that they discover in them. The value of Freud's contribution to science would seem to lie, not in these applications to his teaching, or in the deductions that his disciples have drawn from it, but in the new and original point of view which he opened up, and in the great stimulus that he gave to explorers in the field of psychological research.

The principles laid down by Freud have profoundly altered the conceptions of this generation. They have been so unhesitatingly accepted that anyone who should question their universal applicability would find himself in a small minority, for the modern school of psycho-analysis that is based on Freud's teaching has an immense vogue both in this country and in America. A study of the numerous books on the subject available to the ordinary reader has made me feel that a greater measure of critical common sense might with advantage be brought to bear on the conclusions of some of these writers. I have no wish to make an attack on the new school of teaching; it has the support of great names, and in many cases of nervous disorder the therapeutic value of psycho-analysis has been established. I only venture to question the universal truth of these theories when applied to the dreams of perfectly normal individuals, for my mind remains unconvinced by the explanations and the analyses that are given of ordinary dreams by Freudian psycho -analysts. I do not believe that all dreams are fashioned after the same manner, I am sure that they differ from one another as widely as our thoughts differ; and that while some may have their origin in obscure places of the unconscious, and may be symbolic of thoughts which are repressed by day, as Freud teaches, the majority of dreams of sane people have in all probability a simpler and happier parentage.1 Many of our dreams are indeed symbolic or allegorical in form, but I believe that they represent in different ways the moods and thoughts which have occupied our minds by day.

Happily there is no need for us to believe that the nature of the dreams which for so many of us make up so great an element of pleasure in life has any close relationship with the morbid obsessions of disease. Nightmares and dreams of fear exist, other ugly and evil imaginings may also be hidden away out of sight, and all these conceptions, side by side with our uncounted half-forgotten memories of fair and happy things, are set free when the will that controls them is wholly or partially suspended at night. But I believe that not only are these sinister visions and interpretations exaggerated, but I shall also hope in this book to show that, in sleep, we are not, or need never be, left at their mercy, because we can if we choose exercise a real and effective control over the nature of our dreams. A sound instinct tells us, and tells us convincingly, that neither the mind as it works by day, nor that which operates in our dreams, acts after the manner described by some of these writers.