"Very neat," I admitted, now more than half convinced. "But what sort of dreams are there? I don't see how you can classify them, study them."
"Easily enough. I should say that there are three kinds of dreams—those which represent an unrepressed wish as fulfilled, those that represent the realization of a repressed wish in an entirely concealed form, and those that represent the realization of a repressed wish, but in a form insufficiently or only partially concealed."
"But what about these dream doctors who profess to be able to tell you what is going to happen—the clairvoyants?"
Kennedy shrugged. "Cruel fakers, almost invariably," he replied. "This is something entirely different, on an entirely different plane. Dreams are not really of the future, even though they may seem to be. They are of the past—that is, their roots are in the past. Of course, they are of the future in the sense that they show striving after unfulfilled wishes. Whatever may be denied in reality, we can nevertheless realize in another way—in our dreams. It's a rather pretty thought."
He paused a moment. "Perhaps the dream doctors were not so fundamentally wrong as we think, even about the future," he added, thoughtfully, "though for a different reason than they thought and a natural one. Probably more of our daily life, conduct, moods, beliefs, than we think could be traced to preceding dreams."
I began vaguely now to see what he was driving at and to feel the fascination of the idea.
"Then you think that you will be able to find out from Mrs. Wilford's dreams more than she'll ever tell you or any one else about the case?"
"Exactly."
"Well, that doesn't seem so unreasonable, after all," I admitted, going back in my mind over what we had learned so far. "Why did Doctor Lathrop say he dissented from the theory?"
Kennedy smiled. "Many doctors do that. There's a side of it all that is distasteful to them, I suppose. It grates on minds of a certain type."