It is not my purpose to attempt a complete answer to this question as I am
far from understanding even the majority of my own dreams. Broadly speaking
I should say that considering the amount and complexity of the material on
hand which the mind may use and the probable inconceivable number of dreams
it is unlikely that all are concerned with this matter. This question may
well be allowed to rest for the present. But certain convictions have arisen
in my mind as the result of the study of hundreds of personal dreams,
convictions which do not rest upon the arbitrary interpretation of accepted
symbolism, though I am far from questioning the validity of this procedure.
I venture little beyond the region illuminated by individual insight though
examples are cited far exceeding my power of interpretation.
The sexual theory of dreams has by some authorities been characterized as
greatly over-emphasized, as failing to take account of other factors and
interests of human personality. To those critics let me present the matter
briefly and simply. The very fact of a person's being alive today
presupposes an ancestry stretching backward through uncounted ages, an
ancestry whose chief function, up to very recent times, was sexual and
reproductive. Modern interests, business, social, intellectual, religious,
artistic and philanthropic, which today loom so large, are a recent
innovation, occupying in comparison with the period when they were not but a
moment of time. In a vertical section of man--both racial and individual,
they are seen to constitute but a superficial layer, from a contemporary
standpoint predominant and paramount but in the light of the ages secondary
and unstable. Biologically a woman is only an agent for the reproduction of
her kind; more than this, with mind, all save the conscious, socially and
ethically restricted sections, set toward the same end and toward the means
for its accomplishment. There is no gainsaying this fact and in my dreams
which yielded to analysis it stands paramount. I am inclined to disregard
the theory of a "censor" for the reason that after I had admitted to my
thought and frankly considered certain facts, by a thousand devious hints,
by a thousand subterfuges, my subconsciousness continued to express these
same facts by means of obscure symbolism. As the savage seizes upon one link
in a chain of events expecting thereby to repossess the whole, as the native
of Borneo makes a wax figure of his enemy in the belief that as the image
melts, the enemy's body will waste away, as the women of Sumatra when sowing
rice let the hair hang loose down their backs in order that the rice may
grow luxuriantly and have long stalks, so this woman, this under-self,
ignorant of the true law of cause and effect, and unable to form definite
concepts, instinctively selects from the innumerable memories and visual
images at her disposal those having relation to her unfulfilled function and
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