Strangely enough I once actually played the part of Brutus. I presented the scene between Brutus and Cæsar from Schiller’s poems to an audience of children when I was a boy of fourteen years. I did this with my nephew, who was a year older than I, and who had come to us from England—also a _revenant_—for in him I recognised the playmate of my first childish years. Until the end of my third year we had been inseparable, had loved each other and scuffled with each other, and, as I have already intimated, this childish relation has constantly determined my later feelings in my intercourse with persons of my own age. My nephew John has since found many incarnations, which have revivified first one aspect, then another, of this character which is so ineradicably fixed in my unconscious memory. Occasionally he must have treated me very badly and I must have shown courage before my tyrant, for in later years I have often been told of the short speech with which I vindicated myself when my father—his grandfather—called me to account: “I hit him because he hit me.” This childish scene must be the one which causes _non vivit_ to branch off into _non vixit_, for in the language of later childhood striking is called _wichsen_ (German, _wichsen_—to smear with shoe-polish, to tan, _i.e._, to flog); the dream activity does not hesitate to take advantage of such connections. My hostility towards my friend P., which has so little foundation in reality—he was far superior to me, and might therefore have been a new edition of the playmate of my childhood—can certainly be traced to my complicated relations with John during our infancy. I shall, however, return to this dream later. (_f_) _Absurd Dreams—Intellectual Performances in the Dream_ In our interpretation of dreams thus far we have come upon the element of _absurdity_ in the dream-content so often that we must no longer postpone an investigation of its cause and significance. We remember, of course, that the absurdity of dreams has furnished the opponents of dream investigation with their chief argument for considering the dream nothing but the meaningless product of a reduced and fragmentary activity of the mind. I begin with specimens in which the absurdity of the dream-content is only apparent and immediately disappears when the dream is more thoroughly examined. There are a few dreams which—accidentally one is at first inclined to think—are concerned with the dead father of the dreamer. I. Here is the dream of a patient who had lost his father six years before: