To look at one's self is a late endowment. The kitten pursues its own tail but would chase that of its mother with equal ardor. I once saw a monkey searching industriously with eyes and hands upon its own body. The sight was startling. I had never before seen an animal look intelligently at itself. It was long before man distinguished his self from the world without, and longer still before he began to understand himself. Physical and mental phenomena, pain and pleasure, could not be tracked to their sources and so came to be expressed in terms of the world of nature, and for a reason precisely similar that portion of the self functioning in sleep makes use of symbolism. Occasionally the higher thought centers are involved but the typical dream is the product of a restricted, primitive self, lacking the resources of the complete personality and limited in power of expression. In dreams we are deficient in self-consciousness because it is only a partial self that dreams. Our wishes are rarely given clear and definite expression for the reason that the section of the mind then active is incapable of clear, definite and adequate concepts. Symbolism and reasoning by analogy are the resources of the mind until the power of knowledge dawns. Predicating then a dream-self by its nature largely restricted to the use of symbolism and having at its disposal a vast store of images endlessly susceptible to influences which combine and alter their form, we reach the crucial question, what initiates the dream? This is by no means a mere purposeless thronging of visual images as occasionally happens in the period preceding sleep when faces, forms and scenes flit aimlessly before the mind's eye, some bare replicas of stimulations of the eye from without, others the attendant visual images of past thoughts and experiences and their distorted combination. Somewhat closer to actual dreaming is the rise of images accompanying present bodily and mental states. I sometimes see a body in the posture my own body has that moment assumed and one night, when recalling a passage from Wilhelm Meister, I saw a young man seated bareheaded on a doorstep, plainly a picture of Wilhelm at Marianna's threshold. In the last example we come definitely upon a vision induced from within, an idea working downward upon the visual centers. Still nearer dreams, indeed if occurring in sleep they would be classed with them, are the purely imaginative pictures whose cause is as mysterious as that of the actual dream. Fire in the wall near the pantry door, a garden with a woman rising from a clump of bushes, high, rocky mountain tops, a perpendicular wall of rock and against it a man on a ladder reaching for a flower, a long vista ending with a pillared temple on a hill,--these are a few of my visions before sleep. But to return,--why the dream? Are all or most dreams sexual? Can we say with Freud that they express the fulfillment of repressed desires?