Pickled Brains.

This debunking of day-dreams does not stop at love. It extends along the whole front of fantasy from hero-worship to ghosts, from Luck to leprechauns, from Voodoo to visions. Even dreams are put on the spot and the works disclosed. Before I was properly enlightened I regarded dreams as a kind of free entertainment by mythical Marx brothers with a dash of Walt Disney at his dizziest. But research among the back-stage corridors of the bean-pole have divulged the why and the how of what I regarded as vicarious vaudeville. Dreams are now as explainable as ear-ache or onions. They are nothing but “wish fulfilments” if you know what I mean; I don't. On the other hand, they are said to be prophetic peeps through the opera glasses of Morpheus. If the last is correct, I don't like the look of my future as prophesized in a recent night excursion in which I found myself tootling through town in a hip bath, more or less raw. Nor was I surprised when the hip bath turned into a frying pan in which I was being basted by a flounder wearing a fireman's helmet and tartan bed-socks. When he tossed me up I found myself rowing round the town clock in an open umbrella intent on giving the clock's hands a manicure with a scythe. Suddenly the clock gave me a “left” with its minute-hand and lifted off my head just below the ears. I was still canvassing the city trying to sell it for bed and breakfast when I woke. Now, I have never regarded my head as pawnable, nor have I experienced the urge to do the Godiva glide in a bath; as a guide to the future there is only one answer—“Come and get me, doctor!”

This “wish fulfilment” graft is understandable when you dream that you possess the power of pointing your finger at people you don't like and turning them into chemist's jars marked “poison”; or petrifying them into public monuments which you can pelt with explosive cabbages. But what about the “wish fulfilment” in the type of dream in which you are being pursued by ten thousand unreceipted bills dressed as harriers who hurl ink pots which snap savagely with their lids at your “back of beyond.”