Here again we are groping our way over uncharted fields and not until thousands of scientific observations made with the care characteristic of the chemical laboratory have been made, all explanations will only be tentative and all positive statements misleading. Those mentioning such dreams to me have at times been rather annoyed when I made them confess the wish lurking in them. One man told me that he had three brothers at the front during the war and that in a dream he saw one of them killed by the Germans. Soon afterward, news of his death reached the family. I asked him point blank why he wanted to get rid of that brother. He avoided giving me a direct answer but admitted that if one of the three was to die, the one whose death he saw in his dream would be least missed by his family as he had always made trouble and was the "black sheep."... Even in such cases the wish fulfilment theory holds good. CHAPTER XII: ATTITUDES REFLECTED IN DREAMS Dreams reveal to us what our unconscious cravings are and this is of course valuable information. But cravings are only symptoms of something more important and less easily dealt with: the subject's attitude to life. The neurosis is merely a wrong attitude to life and its problems. A fear of darkness, an incestuous desire, an abnormal craving for a certain food are no more important in themselves than a small sore appearing on one's lip. But as the sore may mean that the organism is infected with the spirochaeta of syphilis, the "psychic" phenomena I mentioned may mean that the organism has adopted toward reality a negative attitude leading to death instead of life. Owing to its visualizing powers, the dream makes attitudes extremely obvious at the very first glance. We are as we see ourselves in our dreams. Positive, energetic dreams, full of action, indicate strength either in resolve or in resistance. Vague dreams, full of moods rather than of action, indicate stagnation, aimlessness. Dreams of adulthood, dealing with the present or the future, indicate progression. Dreams of childhood or dealing mainly with the past, indicate attempts at a regression. In his latest book, "Introduction to Psychoanalysis," Freud states that "the unconscious in our psychic life is the infantile." This is one of the great Freudian exaggerations. Such a statement is true of the neurotic and explains why he is a neurotic. In fact the more infantile the unconscious appears to be, the more severe the neurosis generally is, until in certain forms of malignant regression, the patient acts like a helpless newly born infant. The predominance of infantile material in dreams indicates a fixation on infantile gratifications which makes the subject especially ill adapted to adult life. But in the normal individual the amount of infantile material is very small indeed.