Half-conscious fears or desires are often represented by symbolisms apparent to the analyst but unrecognised by the dreamer. A man told me of a dream in which he met some one whom he had defeated in a business disagreement, and, to his surprise, he shook hands with his old opponent. I told him that he felt the pricking of conscience and was desirous of making amends. This was little more than a guess, but its truth was admitted though the dreamer said that he had hardly realised his feelings before. It is characteristic of dreams, as of the slips of the tongue discussed in Chapter I, that there is an obstacle to the dreamer's unaided understanding of them. A simple dream of my own will illustrate this: When going upstairs at a seaside hotel my wife, noticing a stuffed bird, said to me, 'Is that a sea-gull?' and I answered 'Yes'. The next morning I remembered a dream for which I could trace no cause, and said to my wife, 'I wonder why I dreamed of my old schoolmaster last night?' At this she asked, 'Which one?' and when I answered, 'Mr. Gull', the connection at once became obvious, though something had prevented my seeing the obvious without aid. Since a dream is a product of dissociation, we expect to find in it the same qualities that belong to the product of other dissociations. The world of the dream is pictured as something external to the dreamer and not arising from his own mind, just as the revelations of automatic writing or the movements of the divining-rod are accepted as coming from some one or something other than the agent. The dream taps the unconscious, the stories about poets and musicians who rise in the night-watches to pen their elusive inspirations being paralleled by the poetic imagery in the automatic writings of the Glastonbury archaeologists. Lost memories appear in the dream and the dreamer may deny the incidents, as mentioned in Chapter III. In the same way the apparently honest medium may produce a memory, more or less distorted, as a revelation, and deny that it is a memory.