"No, gentlemen," the dreamer replies at last, "your reductions and your
constructions are too easy-going, too conjectural, too much dominated by
prepossessions and the 'will to interpret.' The alleged sources or
determinants for this dream may or may not have played the parts you assign
to them; the mystery of the matter must remain inscrutable. But what your
methods, so plausible in effect, certainly do show is how easy it may be to
confabulate an explanation that goes no deeper than a phrenological reading
of cranial bumps or than a seance in the cabinet of a palmist. Let us turn
away from all this and consider what really happened, as by the grace of
luck I can bear witness. Permit me to reconstitute the dream as an actual
event, by the employment of certain clues which I was about to give when the
ready-made symbolism of Dr. Freud was interposed."