In “The Natural History of Morals,” the fifth part of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche discusses the function of dreams. “What we experience in dreams,” says Nietzsche, “provided we experience it often, pertains at last just as much to the general belongings of our soul has anything ‘actually’ experienced… even in the brightest moments of our waking life, we are ruled to some extent by our dreams” (Nietzsche 114). Though certainly not a psychoanalyst (especially when the field of psychology was in its infancy), Nietzsche’s thoughts on dreams can be compared well to Freud’s, which were to appear about 25 years later. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud provides a comprehensive commentary on the nature of dreams, the use of symbolization within them, their meaning, and their overall significance (Barash 110-113). To my knowledge, Freud did not get any specific idea from Nietzsche concerning dreams, so it’s well to see an unrelated concept about dreams that just as well could have been a precursor to Freudian theory.