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In a carefully documented paper, the author describes his repetition and extension of Poetzl's classical experiment on preconscious perception and the formation of dreams. He was able to confirm Poetzl's essential findings. In general, those portions of the pictures shown by tachistoscope that were excluded from conscious perception made up the manifest content of the subsequent dream. A remarkable process of preconscious perception is employed, characterized by extreme accuracy of registration and great distortion of the percepts. In some instances the preconsciously perceived visual percepts retain the meaning of the object denoted in the dream while in others the percept is treated as a concrete object. This is also true of preconsciously perceived words. The preconscious visual percepts were not available to free association but could be recaptured by confrontation.
The role of suggestion and of transference in the experiments is discussed. The preconscious visual process here is related to similar perceptual processes found in visual agnosias, eidetic images, and alcoholic hallucinosis. Concepts of 'primary' and 'secondary' perception are discussed; primary perception is under the influence of the unconscious wish, the drives, and the primary process, and it plays an important role in normal dream formation and in certain pathological states. It is believed that the process of dream distortion may take place at the same time, or nearly the same time, as the moment of perception, and may involve the first as well as the second stage of the dream process. Evidence supports the theory that perception develops in levels or stages. Probably the dream cannot create a new visual structure any more than it can a new speech. Memory pictures from the past do not appear in dreams unless screened by a recent visual percept. Evidence indicates that a recent visual percept retains a capacity for hallucinatory revival for not longer than several days.