In an essay on Hans Christian Andersen published in 1867 George Brandes showed the connection between the unconscious and the nursery tale. Thus he anticipated the discoveries of Abraham, Ricklin and Rank, who noted that folk-lore and fairy tales are, like dreams, realised wishes of the unconscious of early humanity, formulated into endurable form. Brandes objected to the occasional moral tag in Andersen's stories "because the nursery story is the realm of the unconscious. Not only are unconscious beings and objects the leaders of speech in it, but what triumphs and is glorified in the nursery story is this very element of unconsciousness. And the nursery story is right, for the unconscious element is our capital and the source of our strength." Brandes shows how child psychology interests us all because of its unconscious. He distinguished the changes brought in by the nineteenth century where the unconscious is worshipped, while in the critical eighteenth century consciousness alone had been valued. Nietzsche understood that the romantic life of our ancestors and their ways of thinking were repeated by us in our dreams. He wrote in his _Human All Too Human_, Vol. 1, pp. 23-26: "The perfect distinctions of all dreams--representations, which pre-suppose absolute faith in their reality, recall the conditions that appertain to primitive man, in whom hallucination was extraordinarily frequent, and sometime simultaneously seized entire communities, entire nations. Therefore, in sleep and in dreams we once more carry out the task of early humanity.... I hold, that as man now still reasons in dreams, so men reasoned also _when awake_ through thousands of years; the first _cause_ which occurred to the mind to explain anything that required an explanation, was sufficient and stood for truth ... this ancient element in human nature still manifests itself in our dreams, for it is the foundation upon which the higher reason has developed and still develops in every individual; the dream carries us back into the remote conditions of human culture, and provides a ready means of understanding them better. Dream-thinking is now so easy to us because during immense periods of human development we have been so well drilled in this form of fantastic and cheap explanation, by means of the first agreeable notions. In so far, dreaming is a recreation of the brain, which by day has to satisfy the stern demands of thought, as they are laid down by the higher culture." Supernatural phenomena, however, in our contemporary literature savour of imitation and the artificial. Writers do not as a rule believe in the supernatural while the creators of the old fairy tales did. From so fine a poet as Yeats, who is said to believe in fairies, we get literature that is both sincere and artistic. We have a beautiful ideal reconstruction of the world in such a play as _The Land of Heart's Desire_. Here the dream principle is still at work.