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The author of this small monograph is Associate Professor of Psychology in the University of Texas. Through a refinement of technic he has approached some of the problems of the dream mechanisms, by means of hypnosis. In an experimentally controlled situation the subject is hypnotized and then stimulated through the various special senses, in a
specific way. The subject's experience, “dream,” or his interpretation of the processes aroused by the stimulus during the hypnosis is accurately recorded.
Among the results secured by this method one finds that hypnotic dreams can be initiated by a large number of stimuli, including verbal stimuli; that recurrent dreams may be readily aroused; that the duration of dreams may be measured; that this type of dream proved illustrative of Hollingworth's “redintegrative” theory; and that some of the sexual doctrines of Freud were untenable.
This last finding deserves some critical comment. In the text of the monograph one discovers the following statement, “If anything, our list of stimuli was weighted unduly in the direction of the sexual so that on a priori grounds we were justified in expecting a preponderance of sex dreams in our experiments. In strict justice to the Freudians it should be stated that we are using the word sexual in its ordinary and traditional sense and not in the less restricted psychoanalytic sense.” In spite of this admission that “sexual” has here been used in the restricted sense the author has concluded that “The Freudian doctrine of the preponderance of sex dreams was found untenable when subjected to experimental check, our preliminary findings indicating that very likely not more than 10 per cent of dreams may be so classified in any legitimate fashion.”
Apparently the dreams here reported and studied have not been subjected to any analysis other than a superficial examination into their manifest content. The dream symbolism, the latent and the derived contents from which the Freudians derive most of