just disconnected phantasmagoria of ideas—arising nowhere and getting nowhere, as far as I can see—interesting, perhaps, but—still, well, just chaotic."
"Quite the contrary, Walter," he corrected. "If you had kept abreast with the best recent work in psychology, you wouldn't say that."
"Well, what is this wonderful Freud theory, anyhow?" I asked, a bit nettled at his positive tone. "What do we know now that we didn't know before?"
"Very much," he replied, thoughtfully. "There's just this to be said about dreams to-day. A few years ago they were all but inexplicable. The accepted explanations, then, were positively misleading and productive of all sorts of misapprehension and downright charlatanry."
"All right," I argued. "That's just my idea of dreams. Tell me what it is that the modern dream-books have to say about them, then."
"Don't be frivolous, Walter," Craig frowned. "Dreams used to be treated very seriously, it is true, by the ancients. But, as I just said, until recently modern scientists, rejecting the beliefs of the dark ages, as they thought, scouted dreams as senseless jumbles of ideas, uncontrolled, in sleep. That's your class, Walter," he replied, witheringly, "with the scientists who thought that they had the last word, just because it was, to them, the latest."
Though I resented his correction, I said nothing, for I saw that he was serious. Mindful of many previous encounters with Craig in his own fields in which I had come off a bad second, I waited prudently.
"To-day, however," he continued, "we study dreams really scientifically. We believe that whatever is has a reason. Many students had had the idea that dreams meant something in mental life that was not just pure fake and nonsense. But until Freud came along with his theories little progress had been made in the scientific study of dreams."
"Granted," I replied, now rather interested. "Then what is his theory?"
"Not very difficult to explain, if you will listen carefully a moment," Craig went on. "Dreams, says Freud, are very important, instead of being mere nonsense. They give us the most reliable information concerning the individual. But that is possible only if the patient is in entire rapport with the investigator. Later, I may be able to give you a demonstration of what I mean by that. Now, however, I want you to understand just what it is that I am seeking to discover and the method it is my purpose to adopt to attain it."
The farther Kennedy proceeded, the more I found myself interested, in spite of my assumption of skepticism. In fact, I had assumed the part more because I wanted to learn from him than for any other reason.
"But how do you think dreams arise in the first place?" I asked, more sympathetically. "Surely, if they have a meaning that can be discovered by a scientist like yourself, they must come in some logical way—and that is the thing I can't understand, first of all."
"Not so difficult. The dream is not an absurd and senseless jumble, as you seem to think. Really, when it is properly understood, it is a perfect mechanism and has definite meaning in penetrating the mind."
He was drawing thoughtfully on a piece of paper, as he often did when his mind was working actively.
"It is as though we had two streams of thought," he explained, "one of which we allow to flow freely, the other of which we are constantly repressing, pushing back into the subconscious or the unconscious, as you will. This matter of the evolution of our individual mental life is much too long a story for me to go into just at present.
"But the resistances, as they are called, the psychic censors of our ideas, so to speak, are always active, except in sleep. It is then that the repressed material comes to the surface. Yet these resistances never entirely lose their power. The dream, therefore, shows the material distorted.
"Seldom does one recognize his own repressed thoughts or unattained wishes. The dream is really the guardian of sleep, to satisfy the activity of the unconscious and repressed mental processes that would otherwise disturb sleep by keeping the censor busy. That's why we don't recognize the distortions. In the case of a nightmare the watchman, or censor, is aroused, finds himself over-powered, as it were, and calls for help. Consciousness must often come to the rescue—and we wake up."
"Very neat," I admitted, now more than half convinced. "But what sort of dreams are there? I don't see how you can classify them, study them."
"Easily enough. I should say that there are three kinds of dreams—those which represent an unrepressed wish as fulfilled, those that represent the realization of a repressed wish in an entirely concealed form, and those that represent the realization of a repressed wish, but in a form insufficiently or only partially concealed."
"But what about these dream doctors who profess to be able to tell you what is going to happen—the clairvoyants?"
Kennedy shrugged. "Cruel fakers, almost invariably," he replied. "This is something entirely different, on an entirely different plane. Dreams are not really of the future, even though they may seem to be. They are of the past—that is, their roots are in the past. Of course, they are of the future in the sense that they show striving after unfulfilled wishes. Whatever may be denied in reality, we can nevertheless realize in another way—in our dreams. It's a rather pretty thought."
He paused a moment. "Perhaps the dream doctors were not so fundamentally wrong as we think, even about the future," he added, thoughtfully, "though for a different reason than they thought and a natural one. Probably more of our daily life, conduct, moods, beliefs, than we think could be traced to preceding dreams."
I began vaguely now to see what he was driving at and to feel the fascination of the idea.
"Then you think that you will be able to find out from Mrs. Wilford's dreams more than she'll ever tell you or any one else about the case?"
"Exactly."
"Well, that doesn't seem so unreasonable, after all," I admitted, going back in my mind over what we had learned so far. "Why did Doctor Lathrop say he dissented from the theory?"
Kennedy smiled. "Many doctors do that. There's a side of it all that is distasteful to them, I suppose. It grates on minds of a certain type."
"What's that?"
"The sex aspect. Sex life possesses, according to Freud, a far higher significance in our mental household than traditional psychology is willing to admit. And I don't know as I would say I'd go the whole distance with Freud, either." He paused contemplatively. "Yet there is much that is true about his sex theories. Take an example. There's much about married life that can be learned from dreams. Thus, why John Doe doesn't get along with his wife has always been a matter of absorbing interest to the neighborhood. Conversation is taken up by it; yellow journalism is founded on it. Now, psychology—and mainly dream analysis—can solve the question—often right things for both John and Jane Doe and set the neighborhood tongues at rest. Sex and sex relations play a big rôle in life, whether we like to admit it or not."
"I see," I nodded. "Then you think that that's what Lathrop meant when he said he strongly disagreed with the theory?"
"Without a doubt. That is perhaps the part of the theory from which he reacted—or said he did. You see, Freud says that as soon as you enter the intimate life of a patient you begin to find sex in some form. In fact, he says, the best indication of abnormality would be its absence.
"Sex is one of the strongest of human impulses," Craig continued, as impersonally as if he were classifying butterflies, "yet the one impulse subjected to the greatest repression. For that reason it is the weakest point in our cultural development. However, if everything is natural there ought to be no trouble. In a normal life, says Freud, there are no neuroses."
"But how does that all apply in this case?" I asked. "You must mean that we have to deal with a life that is not normal, here in the Wilford case."
He nodded. "I was convinced of it, the moment Leslie called on me here. That was why I was interested. Before that I thought it was just an ordinary case that had stumped him and I was not going to pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him. But what he said put it in a different light. So did what Doyle told me, especially that sonnet