Using the Freudian premises, we are forced to conclude that the average child’s aversion to the multiplication table is a blind to cover his unconscious but shamefaced eagerness for illegitimate parenthood. The very name, “Multiplication,” gives us the key. Freud has met this objection by saying that he does not permit himself to wander at random over the field of conjecture, but is always guided by a principle. What principle? That dreams come from suppressed erotic desires--the very principle he is trying to prove. No, the court does not admit evidence at random, it measures it by the supposition that the defendant is guilty. The Multiplication Table is quite admissible, for dreams are not the only things which may be subjected to dream-analysis. Waking thoughts are interpreted in the same way. If a patient refuses to dream, the analyst pounces upon his inventions, his replies to questions. The “Œdipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” fall naturally into the dream category. “We are far too much inclined to over-estimate the conscious character of intellectual and artistic productions,” since “from communications of some of the most highly productive persons, such as Goethe and Helmholtz, we learn that the most essential and original parts in their creations came to them in the form of inspirations and reached their preceptions almost finished.”[74] But though a dream can compose a “Hamlet” or an “Œdipus,” it cannot compose a speech. “No matter how many speeches and answers may occur in dreams, analysis always shows ... that the dream has only taken ... fragments of speeches which have been delivered or heard.”[75] What, then, is this dreaming faculty which is at once so competent and incompetent? Is it a gift, or a disease? “A dream,” says Freud, in the Introductory Remarks to the book we have been following, “is the first link in a chain of abnormal psychic structures whose other links [are] the hysterical phobia, the obsession, and the delusion.” Then on page 482 he declares, “The dream is not a pathological phenomenon and does not leave behind [it] an enfeeblement of the mental faculties.”