putting first what should come last and last what should come first. If we were able to remember all our dreams, in their cor-rect order, we would look upon dreams with a deeper "liter-ary" appreciation.

The Interpretation of Dreams

Among the problems that have occupied the human mind from its beginnings to this day is the problem of dreams, their explana-tion and their inter-pretation. The ancients regarded their interpre-tation more seriously than we do today, as is shown by the books they left us and which have reached us, chief among them the vari-ous mythologies.

Today we interpret them in the light of what we mentioned above: that every feel-ing must leave in the mind an image possess-ing an activity of its own. If some feeling occurs during sleep, the image resulting from that feeling is compelled to travel to the con-scious mind to register itself there. On its way to it, it gathers up scraps of news from here and there and composes from them a tale which spares the subconscious mind a shock, and so it bears it.

As for the awakening of feeling during sleep, its cause is an unease in

sensation resulting from an abnormal bodily con-dition. Hence we see the sick dream more than the healthy, and the anxious dream more than the tranquil.

By this we explain what they call the prophecies of dreams. If, for example, I dream this evening that my hand will hurt me tomorrow, and my hand actually hurts me tomorrow, I say that I have prophesied! The truth is that I dreamed that dream only because it hurt me during the night and sent an image of the pain to the brain, and the subconscious mind caught it on its way and showed it to me before I felt it.

As for propping up the theory of prophecy on the fact that two or three people have dreamed one and the same dream, it is a flimsy prop, for dreams, as we said, are children of the environment, and if two or three people find themselves in identical or very similar circumstances, it is not strange that they should dream similar dreams. It may happen, for example, that all the newspapers report the news of some airplane's disaster, and millions of people dream, that very night, that they flew in an airplane which caught fire, and that they threw themselves toward the earth, and

then wake while still between earth and sky. Is it not foolishness to attribute that coin-cidence to magic and prophecy, or to explain it, as some have explained it and still do, as a return to the life of our ancestors the birds, according to the theory of evolution? Not to mention that most of our dreams turn upon our senses, and people's senses are alike, so it is natural that their dreams should be alike as well.

The hardest kind of dreams to interpret are the serial dreams: the sick man dreams the same terrifying dream night after night, per-haps because he finds himself in a particular circumstance that dom-inates all the other influences affecting the course of his life. This kind of dream, however, remains the furthest of all from admit-ting the application of the interpretations we have mentioned.

Freud's Theory of Dreams

It is natural that the theory of Freud and his followers concern-ing dreams should be built upon his general theory that individuals live in a constant struggle, night and day, to gain pleasure and to avoid pain. They say that dreams are a satisfaction of desires: of hopes, wishes, and appetites. They add that man, in his waking hours, avoids thinking of his appetites for fear of going too far in loving something he cannot attain; when the mind sleeps, that fear sleeps, and emotion alone stands indepen-dent. Dreams, then, are the expression of suppressed appetites, or of the appetite for

expression itself. And they hold that dreams protect sleep instead of disturbing it, as others claim. Their argument is that the sensations which the subconscious mind catches on their way to the conscious mind, and shows to us as dreams, would wake us if they were able to reach the con-scious mind.

They are right in this respect, for by our own experience we see that we usually wake upon some dream. It is reasonable that the dream itself should have wakened us when it slipped from our subconscious mind and reached our conscious mind. What supports this view is that we usually wake when we reach a danger in our dream. If we dream, for example, that we have fallen from an airplane or an automobile, or that a ravening beast is attacking us, or that an enemy intends to kill us, we wake before we pass through the danger or before it destroys us. That is because the situations which the subconscious mind cannot weave into the thread of its tale reach our conscious mind, and on arriving there they wake us. The subcon-scious mind, then, as Freud and his followers say, protects our sleep.

The Psychology of Dreams

Everything regis-tered in the brain can become a dream, and can also contribute to the forming of a dream, because the dreaming mind has a capacity for collecting scraps of various incidents and reports and binding them into a single story. Most of those incidents are gathered