Francis Bacon observed that medicine advances not in straight lines but in cycles. This observation seems to hold for general psychiatry which has, in the last century, cycled through dynamic principles back to organic principles, from psychoanalytic to descriptive. If this is the natural course of medical inquiry, it is also the natural course of progress, and there is no sense in arguing with nature. There are, however, pitfalls along the cyclic trail and it is my intention here to cast some light on one of them.

Francis Crick, as codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, helped start a revolution in biology. Ironically, in “The Function of Dream Sleep,” a paper coauthored with Graeme Mitchison (1983), Crick threatens to put down another revolution, that of Sigmund Freud, by asserting that dreams do not have psychical significance and that recalling one's dreams may be, at