or for the doctor's degree—and who has not been faint-hearted in these tests, even though he belonged to the righteous?—whenever we fear that an outcome will punish us because we have not done something, or because we have not accomplished something as we should—in short whenever we feel the weight of responsibility.
I owe the actual explanation of examination dreams to a remark made by a well-informed colleague, who once asserted in a scientific discussion that in his experience the examination dream occurs only to persons who have passed the examination, never to those who have gone to pieces on it. The anxiety dream of the examination, which occurs, as is being more and more corroborated, when the dreamer is looking forward to a responsible action on his part the next day and the possibility of disgrace, has therefore probably selected an occasion in the past where the great anxiety has shown itself to have been without justification and has been contradicted by the result. This would be a very striking example of a misconception of the dream content on the part of the waking instance. The objection to the dream, which is conceived as the indignant protest, "But I am already a doctor," &c., would be in reality a consolation which the dreams offer, and which would therefore be to the following effect: "Do not be afraid of the morrow; think of the fear which you had before the final examination, and yet nothing came of it. You are a doctor this minute," &c. The fear, however, which we attribute to the dream, originates in the remnants of daily experience.
The tests of this explanation which I was able to make in my own case and in that of others, although they were not sufficiently numerous, have been altogether successful. I failed, for example, in the examination for the doctor's degree in legal medicine; never once have I been concerned about this matter in my dreams, while I have often enough been examined in botany, zoology, or chemistry, in which subjects I took the examinations with well-founded anxiety, but escaped punishment through the clemency of fortune or of the examiner. In my dreams of college examination, I am regularly examined in history, a subject which I passed brilliantly at the time, but only, I must admit, because my
