The dreams of adults are concerned largely with what I have described in a previous chapter as repressions. These repressions are buried in the unconscious, and their efforts to come into consciousness cause our apparently senseless and fantastic dreams. If we dreamed distinctly about these forgotten episodes, and remembered the dream on waking, they would come into consciousness and be recognised, but, being buried and refused admission to the wide-awake world, before entering consciousness they are so distorted as to be unrecognisable. To the mechanism that holds them down or distorts them is given the name of the 'censor', and the interpreter of dreams must seek to evade the censor and resolve the distorted story into its proper elements. This method is of value in that treatment of the war-strained soldier which aims at making him face his memories and grow accustomed to them, for if a memory is repressed it tends to appear in the sufferer's dreams, which give an opportunity for its recovery by dream analysis. The opponents of this method picture the analyst, armed with a dictionary of dream meanings, listening to a patient's account of a dream, then giving him an explanation and persuading him to believe it; but, though a shrewd guess may often be made as to the meaning of a dream, the interpretation, to be of any value, must come from the patient. He is made to close his eyes and, visualising the dream, to describe it carefully. If it is a terrifying dream the telling of it will reproduce the feeling of terror, and appropriate questions will recall the occasion on which the same feeling first occurred. If the real incident is recalled there is an emotional outbreak which often startles the observer, who has the satisfaction of knowing that the greater the outbreak the greater will be the benefit. Here is an example of the practical use of a dream: The patient had lost all memory of his experience in France, and this loss spread to his life before the war so that he failed to recall even his former employment; he slept badly and had terrifying dreams, one of which was as follows:-- 'I was on a pleasure steamer with a lot of cheerful people; it went to sea and then entered a dark cavern. On the floor of the cavern were broken skeletons, and at the far end of the cavern was a hole with light showing through. Two pirates with cocked hats came and led seven of us up the cavern, where we saw some old men with whiskers. The pirates were quite kind and led us through another hole into a small cavern; the wall of the cavern began to fall down, so I picked up a broken sword and began to bore into the wall. Then something like a ball of fire came at me, and I woke up frightened.'