"A congressman called Max Sternberg, who looks like me, is on the platform, making a speech. A gang of little Irish boys in the rear starts a disturbance. The audience, unable to hear the speaker, leaves the hall." On numberless occasions, small boys prevented him in his dreams from accomplishing his object, and in particular, disturbed him when he was speaking. Later the small boys became less and less aggressive. On one occasion he lead a group of them through a museum and they listened to his explanations without interrupting him. One night he had the following dream. "I am near Grand Central and thousands of children are lined on both sides of the avenue to welcome a school principal who is landing from the train. He arrives and they all cheer wildly and I have a feeling that I am that school principal." Little boys never disturbed the dreamer after that. He had conquered his regressive tendencies and his speech was improving. His self-confidence grew to such a point that he had the following dream: "I was in a room with John and Lionel Barrymore and I rehearsed them for a Shakespearian play. Lionel forgot his part and stopped. I prompted him and declaimed a few lines myself very eloquently. This was accompanied by the thought: Very egotistical-good." CHAPTER XIII: RECURRENT DREAMS Whenever one and the same motive, with perhaps slight variations, recurs frequently in dreams we may assume that it is the leading motive of the dreamer's waking life. Whenever a person plays a dominant part in our dreaming, we can rest assured that that person dominates and directs our behaviour directly or indirectly. A man of forty-five, suffering from dizziness, was sent to me by his family physician after numberless tests had failed to attribute his illness to a "physical" cause. The patient had been troubled for two years with vertigo, which he insisted on attributing to arteriosclerosis (against the advice of several physicians). His legs had become very weak and unsteady. He had developed a deep sense of worthlessness and was haunted by suicidal ideas. My query as to his most frequent dream elicited the answer: "I dream very frequently of my father." His father had died two years before, from arteriosclerosis, and his main complaint had been dizziness, weakness of the legs and depression. To any one but the patient, the psychological connection between his illness and his father's illness would have been obvious. He, too, saw some connection between the two, only he placed upon that fact a more sinister construction. The heredity bogey was terrifying him. His father had bequeathed his illness to him, and he was to die as his father had died.