Only a small portion of dreams are recollected by the dreamer and the authors feel that the selectivity of the recollection may depend on the potential audience for the dream. They describe the different versions of the same dream as told to different people and the function of each version. They point out that psychological research on dreams may be dependent on the way in which the experimenter is perceived by the dreamer, and also that a dream cannot be regarded as a datum or a given but must be considered as an element in the dreamer's perception of and communication with the auditor.