This should be borne in mind if we wish to understand the psychology of nightmares. For in nightmares we may express a wish through a symbol which expresses it fittingly, but which we do not understand and which, on that account, may frighten us. Let those who sneer at the study of symbols watch some of the attitudes assumed by insane people[5] who have reached the lowest level of deterioration. Let them see a picture published in the issue of the _Journal of Mental and Nervous Disease_ for January, 1920, and which represents a hospital patient who has reached the lowest degree of infantilism. The patient hung herself in a blanket attached to a nail in front of a window. There she spent her days in the characteristic attitude of the unborn child in the womb. Everything in that attitude was symbolical of her regression to, not only infancy, but the prenatal condition. CHAPTER VIII: WISH FULFILMENT An evening paper published recently a cartoon showing a kiddie in bed who asks his mother: "What makes me dream?"--"You eat too much meat," the mother answers. The next scene is laid in the kitchen where the mother finds her child ransacking the ice box for meat. Parents could testify to the illustrator's knowledge of the childish soul. Children like to dream and Freud's statement that every dream contains the fulfilment of some wish is confirmed by the dreams of healthy children. Children attain in their sleep visions the simple pleasures which are denied them in their waking states. Freud's little daughter, three and a half years old, being kept one day on a rather strict diet, owing to some gastric disturbance, was heard to call excitedly in her sleep: "Anna Freud, strawberry, huckleberry, omelette, pap." On one occasion she was taken across a lake and enjoyed the trip so much that she cried bitterly at the landing when compelled to leave the boat. The next morning she told the family a dream in which she had been sailing on the lake. Freud's little nephew, Hermann, aged twenty-one months, was once given the task of offering his uncle, as a birthday present, a little basket full of cherries. He performed that duty rather reluctantly. The following day he awakened joyously with the information which could only have been derived from a dream: "Hermann ate all the cherries." The _London Times_ of Nov. 8, 1919, had a report of a lecture by Dr. C. W. Kimmins, chief inspector of the London Education Committee, on the significance of children's dreams. He based his statements on the written records of the dreams of 500 children between the ages of eight and sixteen years.