These are a few thoughts that came to mind on reading Clifford Scott's paper on ‘Repairing broken links between the unconscious, sleep and instinct; and the conscious, waking and instinct’. It is not intended to take up his thoughts, but just to give way to some free associations, perhaps not so free.

Scott wishes to consider the consequences of approaching sleep as an instinct. He discovers after many years of having such preoccupations that the thought had come to Freud in his 82nd year, as expressed in his Outline of Psychoanalysis. What I wish to day-dream about are principally the relations he makes between ‘becoming conscious and waking’, ‘becoming unconscious and going to sleep’, and modern views of ‘partly awake’, ‘partly asleep’.

However, I would like in the first place to consider what kind of ideas come to mind when trying to define sleep as an instinct. There is an admirable summing up, in a few paragraphs, of the