I had been expecting it, yet the words startled me.  What must they have done to her?  But she kept admirable control of herself.

“Dreams used to be treated very seriously by the ancients, but until recently modern scientists, rejecting the ideas of the dark ages, have scouted dreams.  To-day, however, we study them scientifically, for we believe that whatever is, has a reason.  Dr. Ross, I think, is acquainted with the new and remarkable theories of Dr. Sigmund Freud, of Vienna?”

Dr. Ross nodded.  “I dissent vigorously from some of Freud’s conclusions,” he hastened.

“Let me state them first,” resumed Craig.  “Dreams, says Freud, are very important.  They give us the most reliable information concerning the individual.  But that is only possible”—­Kennedy emphasised the point—­“if the patient is in entire rapport with the doctor.

“Now, the dream is not an absurd and senseless jumble, but a perfect mechanism and has a definite meaning in penetrating the mind.  It is as though we had two streams of thought, one of which we allow to flow freely, the other of which we are constantly repressing, pushing back into the subconscious, or unconscious.  This matter of the evolution of our individual mental life is too long a story to bore you with at such a critical moment.

“But the resistances, the psychic censors of our ideas, are always active, except in sleep.  Then the repressed material comes to the surface.  But the resistances never entirely lose their power, and the dream shows the material distorted.  Seldom does one recognise his own repressed thoughts or unattained wishes.  The dream really is 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.  In the case of a nightmare the watchman or censor is aroused, finds himself overpowered, so to speak, and calls on consciousness for help.

“There are three kinds of dreams—­those which represent an unrepressed wish as fulfilled, those that represent the realisation of a repressed wish in an entirely concealed form, and those that represent the realisation of a repressed wish in a form insufficiently or only partially concealed.

“Dreams are not of the future, but of the past, except as they show striving for unfulfilled wishes.  Whatever may be denied in reality we nevertheless can realise in another way—­in our dreams.  And probably more of our daily life, conduct, moods, beliefs than we think, could be traced to preceding dreams.”

Dr. Ross was listening attentively, as Craig turned to him.  “This is perhaps the part of Freud’s theory from which you dissent most strongly.  Freud says that as soon as you enter the intimate life of a patient you begin to find sex in some form.  In fact, the best indication of abnormality would be its absence.  Sex is one of the strongest of human impulses, yet the one subjected to the greatest repression.  For that reason it is the weakest point in our cultural development.  In a normal life, he says, there are no neuroses.  Let me proceed now with what the Freudists call the psychanalysis, the soul analysis, of Mrs. Maitland.”