I want you to imagine you are in a strange country. How would you get along if you did not know one word of the language, and if no one else knew a word of your own?

Under such circumstances, how do you think that you would manage to explain to the natives the ideas which you had in your mind, or be able to under­stand the ideas that they had in theirs? To some ex­tent you could make yourself understood by making signs, and could interpret some of the signs of the natives.

That would be all very well where only simple wants were involved, but not in other respects. If you wanted to eat, or to have a wound attended to, sim­ple signs would be sufficient to convey your require­ments to the natives; but supposing that you wanted to exchange ideas on some abstract subject such as economics—or, for example, psychoanalysis—what sort of success could you attain by sign talk?

You would be severely handicapped.

Now try to imagine that you have decided to utilize a very pronounced ability for turning your thoughts into pictures, so that you can thereby develop a sort of picture-talk.

You will at once find quite a considerable broad­ening of opportunity for expressing your ideas. Nev­ertheless, no matter how good and resourceful you might happen to be, you would still encounter serious obstacles to expressing yourself; there would still be the abstract ideas to be reckoned with.

You would need to be an extremely good artist to be able to transform into pictorial language a series of complex ideas such as, for example, your religious beliefs, political persuasions, the high cost of living, or cost of high living!

Yet this is the only means available to the uncon­scious for expressing itself to your consciousness. It pictorializes its ideas for the consciousness to read. If you ask why this is the case, I can only answer by asking, in return: In what other possible way except pictorially could the unconscious express itself?

You wouldn't like to think that you have a host of mental mannikins in your unconscious, hunting for this, that, or the other stored memory or idea; hang­ing one up as a sort of bulletin for you to read, pull­ing one down, and almost instantly sticking up an­other, and so on, would you?

On the other hand, you would not like to hear your unconscious ideas spoken out in actual auditory ex­pressions: to have a sort of intelligence down in your unconscious bellowing up its wishes, fears, and re­proaches through a speaking tube. Under some unfor­tunate and abnormal conditions, however, something of this nature actually takes place—that is, ideas from the unconscious become expressed in audible form. Where this phenomenon is pronounced and persistent, extremely undesirable psychopathic symptoms are in evidence.

Even in ordinary dreams audible expressions are sometimes experienced; but in comparison with vis­ualized ones they are rare.

There is no separate intelligence down in your un­conscious mental depths. Intelligence, such as we generally understand by the term, pertains wholly to the consciousness. In dreams we are able to see our ideas—the unconscious ideas become transformed into visible images.

When, in addition to all of this, our unconscious artist makes a composite mental picture by blending one set of ideas with some other set; and then dis­sembles by placing the beard of some memory pic­ture on to the face of some other memory pic­ture, and resorts to a thousand and one other forms of psychical subterfuge, no wonder that the dreamer is mystified as to the exact meaning of his dream-phe­nomena.

There is yet another principle governing the un­conscious that must be understood if we are to de­code to any extent the meaning of dreams—that of figurative expressions or symbolism.

In the first place, when you attempt to decode the pictorialized ideas of the unconscious you must not expect to encounter the conventional, unless you have yourself always thought in conventional chan­nels. You must expect to encounter the vulgar and the cultured, the flippant and the serious: even as we our­selves have at times been vulgar or cultured, flippant or serious in our past mental indulgences. Consequent­ly, all such possible aspects of expressions on the part of the unconscious must be similarly anticipated.

On top of all of which there must be an understand­ing of a general tendency of the unconscious ideas to become expressed figuratively; and one of the most fruitful possibilities for deciphering the dream mes­sages of the unconscious lies in a resourcefulness in understanding the many combinations that may be utilized in this respect.

In our everyday language we are continually re­sorting to figurative expressions in order to exchange ideas; and this being the case we must expect to encounter a similar license when we study the ver­nacular of the unconscious.

In ordinary daily intercourse we speak, for ex­ample, of the finger of scorn, the hand of time, the jaws of death, the lap of luxury, the womb of nature, the bowels of the earth, the bosom of the ocean, a neck of land, a body of water, an arm of the sea, the brow of a hill, the face of a cliff, the foot of a moun­tain, the head of a house, the head or tail of a proces­sion, etc.

We speak of strength of character, breadth of mind, depth of affection, the height of folly, and flights of fancy.

We scent trouble, run away from it, go to meet it, court it, make it, look for it, and sometimes find a sea of it.

We speak of bowing to the inevitable, bracing our­selves for a blow, taking some things lying down, screwing up our courage, treading on each other's toes, of refusing to bend the knee, and sometimes of backing down.

We talk of a dark outlook, a bright prospect, a blinding storm, a biting wind, a stormy time, a peace­ful outlook, a burning question, a dead issue, a dry fact, a brilliant idea, a striking thought, and of being either a howling success or a dismal failure. Some­times we even walk on air.

We speak of the milk of kindness, the bitterness of hate, the light of life, the shafts of criticism, biting sarcasm, and the healing process of time.

Practically speaking, every feature and function of the human body has some figurative association in our ideas; we also pictorialize many of the characteristics of the conditions, influences, and environment with which we are brought into contact. In his resourceful­ness man has managed pretty well to reduce anything and everything to symbolical expression. Therefore when you analyze dream-dramas remember that as the consciousness is, so also is the unconscious.

When we arrive at the solution of a dream, we find that it is never funny; and when we have solved a number of dreams we begin to understand why this is so. Nevertheless, it does not require much imagina­tion to see the possibilities for seemingly funny dream-dramas. Try, for example, to pictorialize the ideas of being puffed up, buried in thought, or carried away by emotion, and try to make such ideas apprehendable to some other mind by means of a satirical drawing.

Or again: imagine yourself trying, by this same pictorial effort, to convey the idea of some one bowing to the inevitable, or screwing up his courage. Only a slight amount of mental pictorialization is necessary to see that the effect would be hilarious.

There is no reason in the unconscious. Everything is taken literally. There is neither intentional humor, logic, nor philosophy in that great unconscious. Its ex­pressions and tendencies are all mechanical.

Let us imagine, for instance, that you have a servant who does not understand a word of English, and of whose native language you are equally ignorant. Suppose now that the servant has discovered that the roof is leaking badly in a room in another part of the house and that she wants to make you understand what has happened. That servant could have touched you on the arm, and then beckoned you to follow her. And it wouldn't take much intelligence on your part to know what that beckoning meant. If you then cast aside all further efforts to understand the dumb language of the servant, and simply fol­lowed her to the room where the trouble existed, one glance would be sufficient to show you what was wrong, and what the ideas were which she had desired to convey to you.

Well, in applying the analytical method, you are following the beckoning of the servant; and if you will simply follow without hesitation, you will find out what was the significance of her beckoning.

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