Another illustrative detail may be taken almost at random from the record. On one occasion the judge began to enumerate the three principal alternatives which lay before him in deciding a pending case. He remembered two of them but hesitated several seconds before the third came into his mind. This led him to remember that he had often casually noticed that this third possibility seemed to elude him, although on reflection he felt that it deserved as much attention as the other two. He began spontaneously to relax and report everything that crossed his mind, and produced a long string of catch phrases from law and politics like “freedom of contract,” “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” “freedom of speech and assembly.” He presently noted that a picture was forming of one of his old law-school classrooms. He felt that someone was just about to speak to him, and had to resist the temptation to turn around. Then there came across his mind a long series of incidents in which one of his law professors was the principal figure. This teacher was reputed to possess a mastermind and a caustic tongue; and the judge, though he had always wanted to make a great impression on him, had met with no particular success. The professor had a habit of using his most ironic tone of voice when he spoke of “this freedom of contract.” Now it happened that the attorney who was arguing for alternative No. 3 before the court pronounced the word “freedom” with unction. This aroused in the judge’s mind the ironic tone of the old professor’s voice, and this in turn brought back the rather humiliating failure he had been in his efforts to impress the professor. He now exhibited a tendency to repress everything connected with the episode, including the attorney’s argument. The world about us is much richer in meanings than we consciously see. These meanings are continually cutting across our ostensible criteria of judgment, and compulsively distorting the operations of the mind whose quest for an objective view of reality is consciously quite sincere. Good intentions are not enough to widen the sphere of self-mastery. There must be a special technique for the sake of exposing the hidden meanings which operate to bind and cripple the processes of logical thought. With practice one may wield the tool of free-fantasy with such ruthless honesty that relevant material comes very quickly to the focus of attention which we call “waking consciousness.”