722 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



knowledge of the ordinary dream processes, it enables us in advance 

 to deal with many of the extraordinary phenomena of dreaming, some- 

 times presented to us by wonder-loving people as awesomely mysteri- 

 ous, if not indeed supernatural. The careful analysis of mere ordi- 

 nary dreams frequently gives us the key to these abnormal dreams. 



Perhaps the chief and most frequent tendency in the mechanism 

 of dreaming is that by which isolated impressions from waking life 

 flow together in dreams to be welded into a whole. There is then 

 produced, in the strictest sense, a confusion. For instance, a lady, 

 who in the course of the day has admired a fine baby and bought a 

 big fish for dinner, dreams with horror and surprise of finding a 

 fully developed baby in a large codfish. The confusion may be more 

 remote, embodying abstract ideas and without reference to recent 

 impressions. Thus I dreamed that my wife was expounding to me a 

 theory by which the substitution of slates for tiles in roofing had 

 been accompanied by, and intimately associated with, the growing 

 diminution of crime in England. Amid my wife's rather contemptu- 

 ous opposition, I opposed this theory, pointing out the picturesque- 

 ness of tiles, their cheapness, greater comfort both in winter and sum- 

 mer, but at the same time it occurred to me as a peculiar coincidence 

 that tiles should have a sanguinary tinge suggestive of criminal blood- 

 thirstiness. I need scarcely say that this bizarre theory had never 

 suggested itself to my waking thoughts. There was, however, a real 

 connecting link in the confusion — the redness — and it is a noteworthy 

 point, of great significance in the interpretation of dreams, that that 

 link, although clearly active from the first, remained subconscious 

 until the end of the dream, when it presented itself as an entirely 

 novel coincidence. 



The best simile for the mechanism of the most usual type of 

 dream phenomena is the magic lantern. Our dreams are like dis- 

 solving views in which the dissolving process is carried on swiftly 

 or slowly, but always uninterruptedly, so that, at any moment, two 

 (often indeed more) incongruous pictures are presented to conscious- 

 ness which strives to make one whole of them, and sometimes succeeds 

 and is sometimes baffled. Or we may say that the problem presented 

 to dreaming consciousness resembles that experiment in which psy- 

 chologists pronounce three wholly unconnected words, and require 

 the subject to combine them at once in a connected sentence. It is 

 unnecessary to add that such analogies fail to indicate the subtle com- 

 plexity of the apparatus which is at work in the manufacture of 

 dreams. 



It is the presence of the strife I have just referred to between 

 apparently irreconcilable groups of images, in the effort of overcom- 

 ing the critical skepticism of sleeping consciousness — a feeble skepti- 



