One English writer who gave almost complete expression to the views of Freud was William Hazlitt. In his essay "On Dreams" in _The Plain Speaker_, he stated the theory. It may come as a surprise to Freud--probably as a greater surprise than when he learned that Schopenhauer had written about repression--to read the following passage: "There is a sort of profundity in sleep; it may be usefully consulted as an oracle in this way. It may be said that the voluntary power is suspended, and things come upon us as unexpected revelations, which we keep out of our thoughts at other times. We may be aware of a danger that we do not choose, while we have the full command of our faculties, to acknowledge to ourselves; the impending event will then appear to us as a dream and we shall most likely find it verified afterwards. Another thing of no small consequence is, that we may sometimes discover our tacit and almost _unconscious_ sentiments, with respect to persons or things in the same way. We are not hypocrites in our sleep. The curb is taken off from our passions and our imagination wanders at will. When awake, we check these rising thoughts, and fancy we have them not. In dreams when we are off our guard, they return securely and unbidden. We make this use of the infirmity of our sleeping metamorphoses, that we may _repress_ any feelings of this sort that we disapprove in their incipient state, and detect, ere it be too late, an unwarrantable antipathy or fatal passions. Infants cannot disguise their thoughts from others; and in sleep we reveal the secret to ourselves." [The italics are mine.] Freud's work may almost be called a commentary on this extraordinary passage of one of England's greatest critics. Let us examine a few dreams, actual and artificial, in literature, and we will note that they show method in their madness, that they are ways of expressing the person's unconscious desires. In his astonishing essay, "A Chapter on Dreams," Stevenson has shown us how dreams influence authorship. He tells us how the "Brownies," as he calls the powers that make the dreams, constructed his tales; however he often had to reject some of these stories because of their lack of morals. As we remarked above, wicked dreams are dreamt even by virtuous people, since the material is drawn from the psychic life of our infancy and primitive ancestors. Stevenson relates how his famous tale Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was suggested by a dream.