In the second place, these symbolic relations are not peculiar to the dreamer or to the dream-work by which they are expressed; for we have discovered that the same symbolism is employed in myths and fairy tales, in popular sayings and songs, in colloquial speech and poetic phantasy. The province of symbolism is extraordinarily wide: dream-symbolism is only a small part of it; it would not even be expedient to attack the whole problem from the side of dreams. Many of the symbols commonly occurring elsewhere either do not appear in dreams at all or appear very seldom; on the other hand, many of the dream-symbols are not met with in every other department, but, as you have seen, only here and there. We get the impression that here we have to do with an ancient but obsolete mode of expression, of which different fragments have survived in different fields, one here only, another there only, a third in various spheres perhaps in slightly different forms. At this point I am reminded of the phantasy of a very interesting insane patient, who had imagined a “primordial language” (_Grundsprache_) of which all these symbols were survivals. In the third place, it must strike you that the symbolism occurring in the other fields I have named is by no means confined to sexual themes, whereas in dreams the symbols are almost exclusively used to represent sexual objects and relations. This again is hard to account for. Are we to suppose that symbols originally of sexual significance were later employed differently and that perhaps the decline from symbolic to other modes of representation is connected with this? It is obviously impossible to answer these questions by dealing only with dream-symbolism; all we can do is to hold fast to the supposition that there is a specially close relation between true symbols and sexuality.