"Important?" he repeated. "Immensely so—indispensable, as a matter of fact."
I could only stare at him. The mere thought that anything so freakish, so uncontrollable as a dream might have a serious importance in a murder case had never entered my mind.
"If I can get at the truth of the case," he explained, "it must be through these dreams."
"But how are you going to do that?" I asked, voicing the thought that had been forming. "To me, dreams seem to be just disconnected phantasmagoria of ideas—arising nowhere and getting nowhere, as far as I can see—interesting, perhaps, but—still, well, just chaotic."
"Quite the contrary, Walter," he corrected. "If you had kept abreast with the best recent work in psychology, you wouldn't say that."
"Well, what is this wonderful Freud theory, anyhow?" I asked, a bit nettled at his positive tone. "What do we know now that we didn't know before?"
"Very much," he replied, thoughtfully. "There's just this to be said about dreams to-day. A few years ago they were all but inexplicable. The accepted explanations, then, were positively misleading and productive of all sorts of misapprehension and downright charlatanry."
"All right," I argued. "That's just my idea of dreams. Tell me what it is that the modern dream-books have to say about them, then."
"Don't be frivolous, Walter," Craig frowned. "Dreams used to be treated very seriously, it is true, by the ancients. But, as I just said, until recently modern scientists, rejecting the beliefs of the dark ages, as they thought, scouted dreams as senseless jumbles of ideas, uncontrolled, in sleep. That's your class, Walter," he replied, witheringly, "with the scientists who thought that they had the last word, just because it was, to them, the latest."
Though I resented his correction, I said nothing, for I saw that he was serious. Mindful of many previous encounters with Craig in his own fields in which I had come off a bad second, I waited prudently.