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It does not seem possible. At one moment a man's entire being is absorbed in his narrow escape from death, in a terrific struggle against the most fearful odds; but the next moment he has completely forgotten the incident and can never recall it again ! Another speaks rapturously of a scene before him as the vision of beauty excelling all that was ever viewed; the next moment it is as something that never entered his mind—he has forgotten it forever! Man displays a routine forgetfulness which is a powerful factor limiting our scant and scattered knowledge of dreams.
Freud's deciphering of a great mass of symbolism, though obscured by his wish-fulfillment and dream-censor theories, is the only considerable later contribution to a body of knowledge recorded 23 centuries ago by Aristotle. That ancient “secretary of nature” left for us the origins of our theories about subconscious thought, subliminal impressions and telepathy.
Approximately 98 per cent of remembered dreams are pictorial equivalents, generally symbolic, of memories, wishes, fears, hopes, intentions and random suppositions such as we entertain while awake. A few are of the kind we then repress. A very small proportion of these dreams cannot be properly classified as equivalents of memories; although they are revived impressions of the dreamer's past, they are beyond recall by the wakeful mind's own efforts. These include symbolisms of the conception and the birth of the dreamer.
The stimulus for a dream equivalent of thought often is some sensation from the body or surroundings, vaguely appreciated during the partial sleep attending awakening or nocturnal interruptions. Ann Radcliffe, who with The Mysteries of Udolpho earned a chapter in the history of the