Our interest for the way in which story-tellers make use of dreams is not, however, made less intense by this disillusionment. Even if the investigation should teach nothing of the nature of dreams, it may perhaps afford us, from this angle, a little insight into the nature of creative literary production. Actual dreams are considered to be unrestrained and irregular formations, and now come the free copies of such dreams; but there is much less freedom and arbitrariness in psychic life than we are inclined to believe, perhaps none at all. What we, laity, call chance resolves itself, to an acknowledged degree, into laws; also, what we call arbitrariness in psychic life rests on laws only now dimly surmised. Let us see! There are two possible methods for this investigation; one is engrossment with a special case, with the dream-creations of one writer in one of his works; the other consists in bringing together and comparing all the examples of the use of dreams which are found in the works of different story-tellers. The second way seems to be by far the more effective, perhaps the only justifiable one, for it frees us immediately from the dangers connected with the conception of “the writer” as an artistic unity. This unity falls to pieces in investigations of widely different writers, among whom we are wont to honour some, individually, as the most profound connoisseurs of psychic life. Yet these pages will be filled by an investigation of the former kind. It so happened, in the group of men who started the idea, that some one remembered that the bit of fiction which he had most recently enjoyed contained several dreams which looked at him with familiar expression and invited him to try on them the method of _Traumdeutung_. He admitted that the material and setting of the little tale had been partly responsible for the origin of his pleasure, for the story was unfolded in Pompeii, and concerned a young archæologist who had given up interest in life, for that in the remains of the classic past, and now, by a remarkable but absolutely correct détour, was brought back to life. During the perusal of this really poetic material, the reader experienced all sorts of feelings of familiarity and concurrence. The tale was Wilhelm Jensen’s _Gradiva_, a little romance designated by its author himself “A Pompeian Fancy.” In order that my further references may be to familiar material, I must now ask my readers to lay aside this pamphlet, and replace it for some time with _Gradiva_, which first appeared in the book world in 1903. To those who have already read _Gradiva_, I will recall the content of the story in a short epitome, and hope that their memory will of itself restore all the charm of which the story is thereby stripped.