But there are other dreams which linger and haunt the soul. These are true soul-dreams. As we know, life consists of reactions and interrelations from the great centers of primary consciousness. I may start a chain of connection from one center, which inevitably stimulates into activity the corresponding center. For example, I may develop a profound and passional love for my mother, in my days of adolescence. This starts, willy-nilly, the whole activity of adult love at the lower centers. But admission is made only of the upper, spiritual love, the love dynamically polarized at the upper centers. Nevertheless, whether the admission is made or not, once establish the circuit in the upper or spiritual centers of adult love, and you will get a corresponding activity in the lower, passional centers of adult love. The activity at the lower center, however, is denied in the daytime. There is a repression. Then the friction of the night-flow liberates the repressed psychic activity explosively. And then the image of the mother figures in passionate, disturbing, soul-rending dreams. The Freudians point to this as evidence of a repressed incest desire. The Freudians are too simple. It is _always_ wrong to accept a dream-meaning at its face value. Sleep is the time when we are given over to the automatic processes of the inanimate universe. Let us not forget this. Dreams are automatic in their nature. The psyche possesses remarkably few dynamic images. In the case of the boy who dreams of his mother, we have the aroused but unattached sex plunging in sleep, causing a sort of obstruction. We have the image of the mother, the dynamic emotional image. And the automatism of the dream-process immediately unites the sex-sensation to the great stock image, and produces an incest dream. But does this prove a repressed incest desire? On the contrary. The truth is, every man has, the moment he awakes, a hatred of his dream, and a great desire to be free of the dream, free of the persistent mother-image or sister-image of the dream. It is a ghoul, it haunts his dreams, this image, with its hateful conclusions. And yet he cannot get free. As long as a man lives he may, in his dreams of passion or conflict, be haunted by the mother-image or sister-image, even when he knows that the cause of the disturbing dream is the wife. But even though the actual subject of the dream is the wife, still, over and over again, for years, the dream-process will persist in substituting the mother-image. It haunts and terrifies a man.