THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF. 727 



take up a volume of biographies which I had glanced through care- 

 lessly the day before. I found that it contained, among others, the 

 lives of Lord Peterborough and George Bryan Brummel. I had 

 certainly seen those names the day before; yet before I took up the 

 book once again it would have been impossible for me to recall the 

 exact name of Beau Brummel, and I should have been inclined to say 

 that I had never even heard the name of Bryan. I repeat that I 

 regard this as, psychologically, a most instructive dream. It rarely 

 happens (though I could give one or two more examples from the 

 experience of friends) that we can so clearly and definitely demon- 

 strate the presence of a forgotten memory in a dream; in the case 

 of old memories it is usually impossible. It so happened that the for- 

 gotten memory which in this case re-emerged to sleeping conscious- 

 ness was a fact of no consequence to myself or any one else. But 

 if it had been the whereabouts of a lost deed or a large sum of money, 

 and I had been able to declare, as in this case, that the impression 

 received in my dream had never to my knowledge existed in waking 

 consciousness, and yet were to declare my faith that the dream proba- 

 bly had a simple and natural explanation, on every hand I should 

 be sarcastically told that there is no credulity to match the credulity 

 of the skeptic. 



The profound emotions of waking life, the questions and prob- 

 lems on which we spread our chief voluntary mental energy, are not 

 those which usually present themselves at once to dream conscious- 

 ness. It is, so far as the immediate past is concerned, mostly the 

 trifling, the incidental, the " forgotten " impressions of daily life 

 which reappear in our dreams. The psychic activities that are awake 

 most intensely are those that sleep most profoundly. If we preserve 

 the common image of the " stream of consciousness," we might say 

 that the grave facts of life sink too deeply into the flood to reappear 

 at once in the calm of repose, while the mere light and buoyant 

 trifles of life, flung carelessly in during the day, at once rise to the 

 surface, to dance and mingle and evolve in ways that this familiar 

 image of " the stream of consciousness " will not further help us to 

 picture. 



So far I have been discussing only one of the great groups into 

 which dreams may be divided. Most investigators of dreams agree 

 that there are two such groups, the one having its basis in memories, 

 the other founded on actual physical sensations experienced at the 

 moment of dreaming and interpreted by sleeping consciousness. Vari- 

 ous names have been given to these two groups; Sully, for instance, 

 terms them central and peripheral. Perhaps the best names, how- 

 ever, are those adopted by Miss Calkins, who calls the first group 

 representative, the second group presentative. 



