Critical readers have now the right to inquire about the origin of that interpolation, not formerly established, which refers to being made fun of by Gradiva. To this _Traumdeutung_ gives the answer; if in dream-thoughts, taunts and sneers, or bitter contradictions occur, they are expressed by the nonsensical course of the manifest dream, through the absurdity in the dream. The latter means, therefore, no paralysis of psychic activity, but is one of the means of representation which the dream-work makes use of. As always in especially difficult passages, our author here comes to our assistance. The nonsensical dream has another postlude in which a bird utters a merry call and takes away the lizard in his beak. Such a laughing call Hanold had heard after Gradiva’s disappearance. It really came from Zoë who was shaking off the melancholy seriousness of her lower world rôle; with this laugh Gradiva had really derided him. The dream-picture, however, of the bird carrying away the lizard may recall that other one in a former dream in which Apollo Belvedere carried away the Capitoline Venus. Perhaps the impression now exists with many readers that the interpretation of the lizard-catching situation by the idea of wooing is not sufficiently justified. Additional support is found here, perhaps in the hint that Zoë, in conversation with her colleague, admits about herself that very thing which Hanold’s thoughts suppose about her, when she tells that she had been sure of “digging up” something interesting for herself here in Pompeii. She thereby delves into the archæological series of associations as he did into the zoological with his allegory of lizard-catching, as if they were opposing each other and each wished to assume properties of the other. Thus we have finished the interpretation of the second dream. Both have become accessible to our understanding under the presupposition that the dreamer, in his unconscious thought, knows all that he has forgotten in his conscious, has in the former rightly judged everything which, in the latter, he delusively misconstrues. In this connection we have, of course, been obliged to make many assertions which sounded odd to the reader because they were strange to him and probably often awakened the suspicion that we were giving out as our author’s meaning what is only our own meaning. We are ready to do everything to dissipate this suspicion and will therefore gladly consider more exhaustively one of the most knotty points—I mean the use of ambiguous words and speeches as in the example, “Somewhere in the Sun Gradiva sat.”