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398 fearlessly upon the scaffold! Or perhaps ambition is the ruling motive of the phantasy—the ambition to put one's self in the place of one of those powerful individuals who merely, by the force of their thinking and their fiery eloquence, rule the city in which the heart of mankind is beating so convulsively, who are impelled by conviction to send thousands of human beings to their death, and who pave the way for the transformation of Europe; who, meanwhile, are not sure of their own heads, and may one day lay them under the knife of the guillotine, perhaps in the rôle of one of the Girondists or of the hero Danton? The feature, "accompanied by an innumerable multitude," which is preserved in the memory, seems to show that Maury's phantasy is an ambitious one of this sort.

But this phantasy, which has for a long time been ready, need not be experienced again in sleep; it suffices if it is, so to speak, "touched off." What I mean is this: If a few notes are struck and someone says, as in Don Juan: "That is from Figaro's Wedding by Mozart," memories suddenly surge up within me, none of which I can in the next moment recall to consciousness. The characteristic phrase serves as an entrance station from which a complete whole is simultaneously put in motion. It need not be different in the case of unconscious thought. The psychic station which opens the way to the whole guillotine phantasy is set in motion by the waking stimulus. This phantasy, however, is not passed in review during sleep, but only afterwards in waking memory. Upon awakening one remembers the details of the phantasy, which in the dream was regarded as a whole. There is, withal, no means of making sure that one really has remembered anything which has been dreamed. The same explanation, namely, that one is dealing with finished phantasies which have been set in motion as wholes by the waking stimulus, may be applied to still other dreams which proceed from a waking stimulus—for instance to the battle dream of Napoleon at the explosion of the bomb. I do not mean to assert that all waking dreams admit of this explanation, or that the problem of the accelerated discharge of ideas in dreams is to be altogether solved in this manner.

We must not neglect the relation of this secondary