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The following passage from this book will sufficiently characterize it: 'Freud's position is briefly this, that every dream is expressing some sort of desire which the dreamer in his waking life has not been able to attain and, more than that, has not even dared to consider, because somehow horrible, or unnatural or very strongly disapproved of by the neighbourhood. These wishes are centred in the passions and in order to account for children dreaming, Freud has been forced to say that even very small children are subject to the same inclinations and passions as grown persons; it is this theory that has given Freud most ill-fame and frightened away the common-sense man more than ever from the subject, particularly as the Freudian theory soon attracted to Vienna a number of students who liked hastiness for its own sake, so that the work which they did on the lines the Professor laid down often had nastiness as its chief aim; then Freud's heading "the passions", which he intended in a broad sense, became more and more restricted, so that Freud has been perhaps unjustly blamed for the findings of his disciples' (pp. 11-12).
In another place, the author considers that: 'Dr. Rivers has done a great service to science by … putting the whole matter in a more reasonable and attractive form' (p. 19). Throughout the book the author gives rein to his free fancy in the interpretation of dreams. Perhaps the most amusing example is the statement that snakes in dreams are usually 'a symbol of a friend's treachery' (p. 65).
We cannot consider that this mixture of crass ignorance, malice and prejudice makes a very adequate basis for a book of this kind. The only readable part of it, though extremely superficial, is the final chapter on 'Dreams and Poetry'.