articulate thoughts or words for the myriad symbols that crowded his brain with the persistence and regularity of a physical process. Despite their infinite throngs on countless nights in unnumbered brains, many dreams have been preserved and handed down to posterity. We may forget our thoughts of the past, our opinions, the garments that we wore, or even the friends whom we loved, but memory holds our more significant dreams from our very childhood. Herodotus does not tell us what Xerxes wore, nor how he looked, nor whom he loved, yet one of the Persian King's dreams altered the course of history.

Xerxes, bewildered by quarreling counsellors, some of whom advised the campaign against Greece, whilst others opposed it, had fallen into a troubled sleep. A tall, beautiful figure appeared to his dream and urged the continuance of the expedition. Xerxes, however, remained undecided. A second time the admonitory figure appeared. Puzzled, Xerxes summoned Artabanus, a counsellor who had opposed the undertaking. Artabanus sneered at his master's weakness, whereupon Xerxes, whose superstition makes him human through the centuries, became indignant and commanded Artabanus to don the royal robes, place himself upon the kingly couch and await developments. The figure presently appeared to Artabanus, but its respectful demeanor was replaced by a ferocity that frightened Artabanus into withdrawing his opposition to the expedition.

The Venerable Bede of unquestioned veracity describes many dreams, among them that of Edwin, a Saxon king, a maker of English history.

Rollo the Norseman, who lived in the seventh century and whose strength was such that no horse could carry him, had a "supernatural dream" warning him not to land in England, which country was amply protected by Alfred the Great. Instead, he was advised to try France. He accordingly sailed up the Seine to Rouen and laid siege to Paris. Afterwards he married Gisela, daughter of Charles the Simple, became a

Christian, and was transformed from a fierce sea-rover to one of the most humane princes of his time. He was an ancestor of William the Conqueror.

The dream of Theodora, the courtesan, that she would one day become an Empress caused her to abandon her loose mode of life and to try to fit herself for the exalted station promised by her vision. Afterwards she married Justinian and ruled Rome.

The dreams of Catherine de Medici, astrologer and practitioner of various occult arts, not only strengthened her own blood-lust, but induced feeble Francis to consent to the massacre of Saint Bartholomew. This royal lady, herself addicted to magic, protected magicians and sorcerers, while her lord and master, Henry II, and his affinity, Diane de Poitiers, burned them. Queen Catherine was also given to dreams, for while she lay ill at Metz the night before the battle of Jarnac she saw her victory over the Huguenots in a vision.

Whether Cromwell's dream that he should become the greatest man in England had aught to do with his career is a problem for students of psychology.

Madame de Krudener believed her dreams inspired and attained so great an influence over Alexander I of Russia that he is said to have accepted from her the idea of the Holy Alliance, concluded September 5, 1815, in the name of the Holy Trinity, between Russia and Austria.

"I believe men only dream that they may not cease to see. I have fallen asleep in tears, but in my dreams the loveliest figures came to give me comfort and happiness and I awoke the next morning fresh and cheerful."

(Quoted by Havelock Ellis from Goethe's letter to Erckmann.)

Doubtless Goethe's contemporaries shrugged at the poet's vagary, which afterwards was to be accepted as sound psychology, for at that date the therapeutic value of sleep was unappreciated and the purpose of dreams wholly unknown. Men of genius, notably Byron, Poe, and Napoleon, were rather

inclined to boast of being able to dispense with the normal amount of slumber, while many physicians regarded sleep as the result of toxic poisons in the system. The comparative leisure of the world had not at that time been broken by the mad rush that later overwhelmed the nineteenth century and the necessity for sleep as a repairer of wornout nerve tissue and a source of physical endurance and the value of the dream as a respite from the wear and tear of reality had not been revealed to the western world.

The physical side of nightmare was the first phase of the dream to receive investigation from modern students, while happy dreams were regarded as the whims of women, poets and children. Woman was supposed to require a larger proportion of sleep than man, a fact frequently quoted as triumphant proof of her mental inferiority.

The purpose of the dream as the preserver of sleep is a recent discovery, developed primarily through physical channels, and through the investigation of the so-called "typical dream", i.e., one common to every race and condition. For these dreams each cult has its specific explanation, though all agree that sleep is preserved by the mysterious psychic function of certain dreams arising from physical needs. In the "thirst dream," for instance, the sleeper dreams of being thirsty and of enjoying a refreshing draught, thus gratifying in fancy thirst that has an actual, physical existence and that unslaked might interrupt slumber. Whatever their other differences, psychologists agree that dreams do not interfere with sleep, but that they protect it.

In regarding dreams as an index of the character, ultramodernism agrees not only with the ancients but with Artemidorus of the first century and with Paracelsus, the greatest mediævalist. While Kant, the predecessor of ultramoderns, suggests in his "Anthropology" that the dream exists in order to bare to us our hidden selves, and to reveal to us, not what we are, but what we might have been under a different environment.

Although Havelock Ellis quotes Sancto de Sanctis as showing on the basis of long experience that the dreams of criminals are usually peaceful, even beautiful, while the visions of innocent persons are frequently horrifying in the extreme, and while Michelet holds that the dreams of the philosophers of the discovery of a panacea and of Eldorado were alike based upon the misery of the peasants during the middle ages, none of these instances can be held as contradicting the theory of the dream as indexing the subconsciousness. Thus, issuing from the unsounded depths of man's being and forming part of his essential self, dreams describe his character as inevitably as the lines upon his face portray his mode of life and as accurately as his fetishes measure the heights of his ideals. Not the individuality formed by training and environment, the product of social inhibitions and the result of parental pruning, or a carefully instilled creed, but the primal, atavistic self, the self that the dreamer does not suspect, an entity answering the description of a "naked soul."

Bede's quaint story of Saint Augustine portrays Pope Gregory's opinion of dreams. On becoming Bishop of Hippo after rather a wild and fitful youth, the Saint inquired of the Pope as to whether after certain dreams, a man may receive the body of our Lord, and whether, if he be a priest he may, under the circumstances, celebrate the holy mysteries.

The reply leaves no doubt as to the papal opinion. Sinful dreams do prohibit a priest from celebrating the holy mysteries, or from administering the sacrament, unless there should happen to be no other priest to take his place.

The therapeutic value of dreams is the most ancient of rediscovered theories. The priests of Esculapius, the god of medicine whose temple was situated in the ancient Grecian town of Epidaurus, practiced the science of healing by slumber and dreams. On one occasion Euphanes, a child of the town, slept in the temple to be cured of stone. Esculapius himself appeared to him in a dream.

"What will you give me if I cure you?" demanded the god,

"Ten small bones," answered the boy.

Æsculapius laughed and disappeared and the child awakened cured.

Hippocrates secularized the practice of healing by slumber; he admitted, however, that faith combined with sleep was more efficacious as a cure than sleep alone.

Doctors Frank, Freud, Jung, Prince and numerous other physicians attach strong psychotherapeutic significance to the vision of their patients and they frequently induce hypnosis and its attendant dreams to discover the psychic source of the malady. Apart also from the materialistic and physiological interpretation of the function of dreams many students maintain that they hold a higher purpose. Visionaries attach to them a sort of psychic and poetic justice that lifts them above the functions of the body and beyond the work-a-day world generally. In his dream the cripple waxes strong, the beggar's rags become royal robes, the sorrowing find joy, the mystic sees his God. Meanwhile other students regard the dream as guarding that mysterious entity so baffling to psychologists, so elusive to students of brain structure, in that it has never been located physiologically, although it dies physiologically at the withdrawal of blood from the body. Certain schools of thought term this mystery the soul and a belief in its existence is the oldest and most universal creed known to man. Scientists scout the probable existence of this soul, even as they seek it with all the appliances known to modern ingenuity. Meanwhile they are steadily pushing back the boundaries of the seen towards the world of the unseen, and life defined by Spencer as "a continuous adjustment to external relations" is constantly rising towards the attainment of a perfect equilibrium through the acquisition of knowledge. The primary obligation for modern discoveries is due to purely physical science. Medicine and surgery have been and still are of incalculable aid in the attainment of material comfort, of bodily well being and of the attendant capacity for work, mental and physical. They have vastly assisted the material organism of