ing, for I had been neglecting a task that I should have undertaken.

There is what might be called the cheese-and-tripe supper theory of the
dream held by many people.

"There's nothing in dreams," they say, "nothing but the disorders
following late supper."

A cheese-and-tripe supper will cause queer dreams, but the advocates of
this theory cannot explain why a tripe supper should make me dream
of--say--a tiger. Why not a lion or a mouse?

It is an accepted fact now in psychology that the dream is the working
of the unconscious. Some theosophists claim that during sleep your
spirit leaves your body and seeks the astral plane, but I have never
seen anything resembling evidence of this. It may be a fact for all
that.

Concerning the prophetic aspect of dreams I know nothing. I have heard
that the night before the Tay Bridge disaster a woman dreamt that it
was to take place, and she persuaded her husband not to travel by that
ill-fated train, but I cannot vouch for the story. I believe, however,
that the dream is prophetic in that the unconscious during the night is
working out the problems of the next day. The popular saying about
sleeping over a problem shows that there is a real belief in this
aspect. I know a lady who was undergoing analysis. She was suffering
from a father complex, that is, her infantile fixation on the father
had remained with her, and unconsciously she was approving or
disapproving of every man she met according as he did or did not in
some way resemble her father.

For a few weeks after the analysis began she was always dreaming that
she was back in her childhood home, and in her dreams she was always
trying to get away from home and her father was always restraining her
from going. Often the figure in the dream was not the father, but the
associations always showed that the figure was standing for the father.
One night the figure was the King, and her first association was: "The
King's name is George. . . . That's father's name too."

This seems to be a case where the unconscious is striving to find a
solution.

The way the unconscious does things is wonderful. I remember one night
listening to a lecture by Homer Lane. He brought forward a new theory
about education, and it was so deep that I did not quite grasp its
meaning. At the time Alan, Homer Lane's youngest child, was one of the
pupils in the school in which I taught. That night I dreamt that I was
standing before