_An officer with a red cap was pursuing her in the street. She fled from him and ran up the staircase, with him after her. Breathless, she reached her rooms and slammed and locked the door behind her. The man remained outside and, peeping through the keyhole in the door, she saw him sitting on a bench outside, weeping._ In the pursuit by the officer with the red cap and the breathless climbing of the stairs you will recognize the representation of the sexual act. That the dreamer shuts her pursuer out may serve as an example of the device of inversion so frequently employed in dreams, for in reality it was the man who withdrew before the completion of the sexual act. In the same way, she has projected her own feeling of grief on to her partner, for it is he, who weeps in the dream, his tears at the same time alluding to the seminal fluid. You will certainly have heard it said at some time or other that psycho-analysis maintains that all dreams have a sexual meaning. You are now in a position yourselves to form an opinion as to the falseness of this reproach. You have learnt of wish-fulfilment dreams, dealing with the gratification of the most obvious needs—hunger, thirst, and the longing for liberty—comfort-dreams and impatience-dreams, as well as those which are frankly avaricious and egoistical. You may, however, certainly bear it in mind that, according to the results of psycho-analysis, dreams in which a marked degree of distortion is present _mainly_ (but here again not exclusively) give expression to sexual desires. 6. I have a special motive in giving many instances of the use of symbols in dreams. In our first lecture I complained of the difficulty of demonstrating my statements in such a way as to carry conviction with regard to the findings of psycho-analysis, and since then you have doubtless agreed with me. Now the separate propositions of psycho-analysis are nevertheless so intimately related that conviction on a single point easily leads to acceptance of the greater part of the whole theory. It might be said of psycho-analysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand. If you accept the explanation of errors as satisfactory, you cannot logically stop short of belief in all the rest. Now dream-symbolism provides another, equally good, approach to such acceptance. I will recount to you a dream, which has already been published, of a woman of the poorer classes, whose husband was a watchman and of whom we may be sure that she had never heard of dream-symbolism and psycho-analysis. You can then judge for yourselves whether the interpretation arrived at with the help of sexual symbols can justly be called arbitrary or forced.