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Dreams, since Freud, have new meaning. Although we are quite certain that dreams fall within our purview, sleep researchers vigorously contest our sanguine reliance on dynamic concepts. From their point of view, dreams are a function of neurochemical regulation and any psychological value they may have is problematic. If we are to engage their criticism, this once “royal road” needs repair within our discipline.

Thankfully, Leland van den Daele undertakes this challenge. In the third of a series of papers appearing in this Journal, he seeks this much-needed integration of the dynamic and the neuropsychologic, proposing a theory of direct interpretation of dreams. According to van den Daele, dreams potentiate changes in neural nets, thereby affecting adaptive response. The major dream types—endogenous, exogenous, and relational—are linked to specific midbrain networks with feedback links from the cortex. In dream states, it is the nondominant right hemisphere, associated with the configural nonlinear mind, that now becomes dominant. Van den Daele contends that higher-order dreams are not random, despite the contentions of neurophysiologists, but instead integrate, regulate, and potentiate neural pathways that bias ordinary conscious thought and behavior.

From the neuropsychologic infrastructure of dreams we turn to consideration of the transcultural infrastructure of misogyny. Solimar Otero's exploration of the vagina dentata motif through a combined folkloristic and psychoanalytic review yields not only an appreciation of the transcultural symbolizations of fear of women, but a reminder of how much is gained from a vision of psychoanalysis informed by cultural anthropology. Otero organizes the literature and pursues the questions arising from two basic interpretations of the vagina dentata motif. In one, fear of the vagina is primarily comprehended as an elaboration by men, the vaginal teeth arising from polyphallic projection. In the other, fear of the vagina is rega