What, then, is the theory? Briefly this, that dreams are very largely the expressions of unfulfilled desires. Where, as in children, the waking experience and the sleeping experience differ from each other by very little, the dream, or sleeping experience, readily takes the form of the ungratified desires of the day. But as the mind grows older the dream expression of a desire gets more intricate. By-and-by it is too intricate to be deciphered from direct memory, and then there is a chance for the method of psycho-analysis. What of the dream is remembered gives the cue for the analysis. Take a remembered element of a dream, track it back and back by free association or other method, and you will find that, at one or two removes, the remembered element stirs up forgotten elements, and ultimately brings coherence out of incoherence. This appears simple, but let the reader study the dreams analysed in this essay, and he will find himself stirred by a thousand suggestions. For Professor Freud has constructed empirical laws out of his masses of material. The dream as it appears to the dreamer he calls the _manifest dream ideas_. But as these are too absurd to form a coherent reality, he gives ground for believing that they represent _latent dream ideas_. The manifest dream is a mass of symbols representing elements in the latent dream ideas. How the latent dream ideas generate the manifest dream is discovered by psycho-analysis, the translation from the latent to the manifest is the effect of the _dream work_. The dream work is the very core of the difficulty. It is round this that Professor Freud’s greatest subtleties of method are focussed. He shows that every dream is linked to something that occurs on the previous day, some recent experience, but the experience emerges in the dream as part of the current panorama of the subjective life, and there is no date to the beginning of the panorama—it may go back to any point in the individual’s history, even into the preconscious days of early infancy. The day’s experience and the life’s experience flow in a single stream, and the images that appear in dreams are but the symbols of all the latent ideas of that experience. How, by displacement of this element or that, compound symbols are formed; how, by the foreshortening of experience and the linking of the past with the present in a single idea, masses of old memories are clotted into a single point; how, in the freedom of the dream world, where the tension of the waking life is relaxed, where the exacting stimulations of the day are reduced, where the consciousness of duty to be done in the highly organised conditions of social conduct is lowered, where, in a word, the _censor_ is drowsy or asleep, where the dream symbols shape themselves into dramatic scenes of endless variety—these it is that Professor Freud’s theory endeavours to set forth. Displacement, condensation, dramatisation—these are the short