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Repeated questioning of the presence (or absence) of significant criteria in manifest dream content making possible a differentiation of the dreams of schizophrenics from nonschizophrenics has led to a research project described in this paper. Sample dreams, taken from schizophrenic and nonschizophrenic patients, were randomly scattered and submitted to "diagnostic judgment" by judges, both psychoanalysts and clinical psychiatrists. At first glance it seemed that there was a higher accuracy of diagnosis of nonschizophrenia than schizophrenia, but this turned out to be more apparent than real; i.e., it represented more a reluctance to diagnose schizophrenia. The over-all accuracy of diagnoses was found to be 55.7 per cent, and approximately the same for each group. Though low, it was significantly better than chance probability (phi coefficient < .01). A surprising discovery was that the judges seemed to be arriving independently at identical although often incorrect decisions. A second phase of our study, aimed at investigating this observation, revealed essentially two significant findings. First, the judges' expectation that the schizophrenic dreams would contain much unrepressed sexual and aggressive content was not borne out in fact. Second, the judges advanced the proposition that the schizophrenic dreams might
more often convey a sense of bizarreness, strangeness, or incomprehensibility, an expectation that was borne out in fact.