probably nothing but the reasoning of our sleeping ego on the feelings
about what was repressed; with greater right it should rest upon the
incompetency of this disturber of our sleep. In sleep we are now and
then aware of this contempt; the dream content transcends the censorship
rather too much, we think, "It's only a dream," and sleep on.

It is no objection to this view if there are borderlines for the dream
where its function, to preserve sleep from interruption, can no longer
be maintained--as in the dreams of impending dread. It is here changed
for another function--to suspend the sleep at the proper time. It acts
like a conscientious night-watchman, who first does his duty by quelling
disturbances so as not to waken the citizen, but equally does his duty
quite properly when he awakens the street should the causes of the
trouble seem to him serious and himself unable to cope with them alone.

This function of dreams becomes especially well marked when there arises
some incentive for the sense perception. That the senses aroused during
sleep influence the dream is well known, and can be experimentally
verified; it is one of the certain but much overestimated results of the
medical investigation of dreams. Hitherto there has been an insoluble
riddle connected with this discovery. The stimulus to the sense by which
the investigator affects the sleeper is not properly recognized in the
dream, but is intermingled with a number of indefinite interpretations,
whose determination appears left to psychical free-will. There is, of
course, no such psychical free-will. To an external sense-stimulus the
sleeper can react in many ways. Either he awakens or he succeeds in
sleeping on. In the latter case he can make use of the dream to dismiss
the external stimulus, and this, again, in more ways than one. For
instance, he can stay the stimulus by dreaming of a scene which is
absolutely intolerable to him. This was the means used by one who was