of this dream, "that the last of a long series of dream pictures contained precisely the same thought whose representation had been attempted in the first picture of the series. The censor pushed the complex out of the way as long as possible, through constantly renewed symbolic concealments, displacements, deviations into the harmless, &c." (l.c. p. 87). Scherner58 was well acquainted with the peculiarities of dream disfigurement and describes them at the end of his theory of organic stimulation as a special law, p. 166: "But, finally, the phantasy observes the general law in all nerve stimuli emanating from symbolic dream formations, by representing at the beginning of the dream only the remotest and freest allusions to the stimulating object; but towards the end, when the power of representation becomes exhausted, it presents the stimulus or its concerned organ or its function in unconcealed form, and in the way this dream designates its organic motive and reaches its end."
A new confirmation of Scherner's law has been furnished by Otto Rank106 in his work, A Self Interpretation Dream. This dream of a girl reported by him consisted of two dreams, separated in time of the same night, the second of which ended with pollution. This pollution dream could be interpreted in all its details by disregarding a great many of the ideas contributed by the dreamer, and the profuse relations between the two dream contents indicated that the first dream expressed in bashful language the same thing as the second, so that the latter—the pollution dream—helped to a full explanation of the former. From this example, Rank, with perfect justice, draws conclusions concerning the significance of pollution dreams in general.
But in my experience it is only in rare cases that one is in a position to interpret clearness or confusion in the dream as certainty or doubt in the dream material. Later I shall try to discover the factor in the formation of dreams upon whose influence this scale of qualities essentially depends.
In some dreams, which adhere for a time to a certain situation and scenery, there occur interruptions dsecribed in the following words: "But then it seemed as though it were at the same time another place, and there such and such a thing happened." What thus interrupts the main trend
