THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF. 725 



I expressed my surprise, having never before heard of it. Then, 

 again to my surprise, he poured rather copiously from the bottle on 

 to a plate of food, saying, in explanation, that it was pleasant to 

 take and not dangerous. This was a vivid morning dream, and on 

 awakening I had no difficulty in detecting the source of its various 

 minor details, especially a note received on the previous evening and 

 containing a dubious figure, the precise nature of which I had used 

 my pocket lens to determine. But what was selvdrolla, the most 

 vivid element of the dream? I sought vainly among my recent mem- 

 ories, and had almost renounced the search when I recalled a large 

 bottle of salad oil seen on the supper table the previous evening; not, 

 indeed, resembling the dream bottle, but containing a precisely simi- 

 lar fluid. Selvdrolla was evidently a corruption of " salad oil." I 

 select this dream to illustrate the uncertainty of dream consciousness, 

 because it also illustrates at the same time the element of certainty in 

 dream subconsciousness. Throughout my dream I remained, con- 

 sciously, in entire ignorance as to the real nature of selvdrolla, yet 

 a latent element in consciousness was all the time presenting it to 

 me in ever-clearer imagery. 



While the confusions of dreaming are usually the union of un- 

 connected streams of imagery which have, as it were, come from 

 widely remote parts of the memory system to strike together at the 

 narrow focus of shaping consciousness, in some rarer cases the fused 

 images are really suggested by analogy and are not accidental. 

 Maury records successions of dream imagery strung together by verbal 

 resemblances; I have found such dreams rare, but other forms of 

 association fairly common. Thus I once dreamed that I was with a 

 dentist who was about to extract a tooth from a patient. Before 

 applying the forceps he remarked to me (at the same time setting 

 fire to a perfumed cloth at the end of something like a broomstick 

 in order to dissipate the unpleasant odor) that it was the largest 

 tooth he had ever seen. When extracted I found that it was in- 

 deed enormous, in the shape of a caldron, with walls an inch 

 thick. Taking from my pocket a tape measure (such as I always 

 carry in waking life) I founds the diameter to be not less than 

 twenty-five inches; the interior was like roughly hewn rock, and 

 there were sea-weeds and lichenlike growths within. The size of 

 the tooth seemed to me large, but not extraordinarily so. It is well 

 known that pain in the teeth, or the dentist's manipulations, cause 

 those organs to seem of extravagant extent; in dreams this tendency 

 rules unchecked; thus a friend once dreamed that mice were play- 

 ing about in a cavity in her tooth. But for the dream first quoted 

 there was no known dental origin; it arose solely or chiefly from a 

 walk during the previous afternoon among the rocks of the Cornish 



