times appear quite dull, quite uninteresting and entirely unnecessary to
certain patients. For this reason and also for many other reasons, which I
shall not enumerate at this point it is at times well to resort to dream
analysis. And in analyzing dreams it is well to remember a fact, with which
I believe all psychoanalysts will agree, namely, that by a most thorough and
far-reaching analysis of a SINGLE DREAM, we can, by following out to the
ultimate ends the various clues which are given us and the various by-paths
which offer themselves to us in the course of the analysis--we can, I
repeat, should we be so inclined, root up the entire life history of the
dreamer. This may not be necessary in all cases. But, at any rate, if we
desired so to do for scientific purposes, we could arrive at such results.
In such an analysis we would, of course, first take up, individually, every
portion and every element of every portion of the dream, and by means of
each such lesser or greater element of the dream, we could arrive at a mass
of material, a wealth of information concerning the past experiential,
emotional, mental and moral life of the individual whose dream we were at
the moment analyzing. In fact, one could ferret out the full life history in
great detail, thus obtaining a complete autobiography leading far down into
the depths of the dreamer's mental life and into the inner world of his own.
With the material so obtained one could truly reconstruct the complete life
history, piecemeal, until the wonderful and inspiring structure of the
mental world of the dreamer would be reared, reaching far back to early
childhood and perhaps even to infancy, extending so far forward as to give
us a prophecy, based on the dreamer's dynamic trends and emotional trends
and leanings, of the probable future, stretching forth its tentacles in all
directions, and, uncovering the psychic underworld in its every part,
holding up before our eyes the naked mind, in its length, its breadth and
its thickness.

I am not referring here particularly to the employment of the method of