464 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ance between the higher and lower faculties will not be so great as 

 when the incongruities of the dream are unchecked, and yet the pict- 

 ures and thoughts present to the mind are especially clear and strong 

 in their outline and coloring. Intensity without coherence is, as a 

 rule, worse than an equal amount of vivid dreaming with more con- 

 nectedness of thought. We now know something, though a very lit- 

 tle, in truth, about dreaming, and we may pass to the consideration of 

 our proper subject dreams and the making of dreams. 



Dreams are re-collections, in the strict sense of that word. The 

 pictures which have been put away in the chambers of mental image- 

 ry, the thoughts which have been recorded, as all thoughts are re- 

 corded, by the molecules of the brain in the act of thinking, the im- 

 pressions left by perceptions made by the organs of sense, and by 

 conceptions originated by the faculties of mental sensation, impressions 

 of feeling, together composing the records of experience, are brought 

 out of their holes and corners, and, as it were, thrown crudely before 

 the mind. There is seldom any clear evidence of order in the arrange- 

 ment, but there is no reason why, if the collecting faculty be thor- 

 oughly awake, it should not follow beaten tracks, and arrange the 

 pictures and records it reproduces in their natural sequence. More- 

 over, there is that association of ideas which forms the basis of mem- 

 ory, and this will almost necessitate a certain amount of connection 

 between the elements of the most chaotic dream. All that seems to 

 be original in a dream is due to the kaleidoscopic effect of throwing 

 the materials of which the scene is constituted into new and startling 

 combinations. We know how much of novelty may be produced in 

 the accidental combinations effected by shaking together some dozen 

 particles of colored glass, or other small objects, in a kaleidoscope. 

 The variety will be greater and the new combinations more surprising 

 in the throwing together of memories in a dream, because the natural 

 associations help to give vraisemblanee to the effect, and the imagi- 

 nation, which is seldom wholly asleep, gives finishing touches to the 

 panorama as it proceeds. Much less, however, is due to the interven- 

 tion of fancy in a dream than is commonly supposed. The great ma- 

 jority of the results produced are caused by the overlapping of pict- 

 ures, the entangling of threads of thought, and the distortion of the 

 original connections between ideas, pictures, and records of impressions 

 which have either been received or put away together, or connected in 

 previous dreams. For dreams are often, wholly or in part, reproduc- 

 tions of former dreams, and in process of years a mind may become 

 expert in, or habituated to, the experience of a particular class of night- 

 visions and night-thoughts. Dreams may be roughly divided into 

 four classes : 1. Those of the present ; 2. Those of the past ; 3. Those 

 of the future ; and, 4. Dreams which would appear to be simply heap- 

 ings together of inchoate ideas and mind-pictures, without either time, 

 order, method, or reason. On each of these classes of dreams there 



