I have just said that the dream is a fulfilled wish. Whoever is not afraid to toil through a difficult book, whoever does not demand that a complicated problem be insincerely and untruthfully presented to him as easy and simple, to save his own effort, may seek in the above-mentioned _Traumdeutung_ ample proof of this statement, and may, until then, cast aside the objection that will surely be expressed against the equivalence of dreams and wish-fulfilment. We have, however, anticipated. The question is not now one of establishing whether the meaning of a dream is, in every case, to be interpreted as the fulfilment of a wish, or, just as frequently, as an anxious expectation, an intention or deliberation, etc. The first question is, rather, whether the dream has any meaning at all, whether one should grant it the value of a psychic process. Science answers, _No_; it explains the dream as a purely physiological process, behind which one need not seek meaning, significance nor intention. Physical excitations play, during sleep, on the psychic instrument and bring into consciousness sometimes some, sometimes other ideas devoid of psychic coherence. Dreams are comparable only to convulsions, not to expressive movements. In this dispute over the estimation of dreams, writers seem to stand on the same side with the ancients, superstitious people and the author of _Traumdeutung_. For, when they cause the people created by their imagination to dream, they follow the common experience that people’s thoughts and feelings continue into sleep, and they seek only to depict the psychic states of their heroes through the dreams of the latter. Story-tellers are valuable allies, and their testimony is to be rated high, for they usually know many things between heaven and earth that our academic wisdom does not even dream of. In psychic knowledge, indeed, they are far ahead of us ordinary people, because they draw from sources that we have not yet made accessible for science. Would that this partizanship of literary workers for the senseful nature of dreams were only more unequivocal! Sharper criticism might object that writers take sides neither for nor against the psychic significance of an isolated dream; they are satisfied to show how the sleeping psyche stirs under the stimuli which have remained active in it as off-shoots of waking life.