THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF. 733 



they could scarcely have been found convincing, and possibly could 

 not ever have arisen, among races who were wholly devoid of dream 

 experiences. A large part of all progress in psychological knowl- 

 edge, and, indeed, a large part of civilization itself, lies in realizing 

 that the apparently objective is really subjective, that the angels and 

 demons and geniuses of all sorts that seemed at first to take possession 

 of the feeble and vacant individuality are themselves but modes of 

 action of marvelously rich and varied personalities. But in our 

 dreams we are brought back into the magic circle of early culture, 

 and we shrink and shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms 

 that are built up of our own thoughts and emotions, and are really our 

 own flesh. 



There is one other general characteristic of dreams that is worth 

 noting, because its significance is not usually recognized. In dreams 

 we are always reasoning. It is sometimes imagined that reason is in 

 abeyance during sleep. So far from this being the case, we may 

 almost be said to reason much more during sleep than when we are 

 awake. That our reasoning is bad, even preposterous, that it con- 

 stantly ignores the most elementary facts of waking life, scarcely 

 affects the question. All dreaming is a process of reasoning. That 

 artful confusion of ideas and images which at the outset I referred 

 to as the most constant feature of dream mechanism is nothing but 

 a process of reasoning, a perpetual effort to argue out harmoniously 

 the absurdly limited and incongruous data present to sleeping con- 

 sciousness. Binet, grounding his conclusions on hypnotic experi- 

 ments, has very justly determined that reasoning is the fundamental 

 part of all thinking, the very texture of thought. It is founded on 

 perception itself, which already contains all the elements of the an- 

 cient syllogism. For in all perception, as he shows, there is a suc- 

 cession of three images, of which the first fuses with the second, which 

 in its turn suggests the third. Now this establishment of new associa- 

 tions, this construction of images, which, as we may easily convince 

 ourselves, is precisely what takes place in dreaming, is reasoning itself. 

 Reasoning is a synthesis of images suggested by resemblance and 

 contiguity, indeed a sort of logical vision, more intense even than 

 actual vision, since it produces" hallucinations. To reasoning all 

 forms of mental activity may finally be reduced; mind, as Wundt 

 has said, is a thing that reasons. When we apply these general 

 statements to dreaming, we may see that the whole phenomenon of 

 dreaming is really the same process of image-formation, based on 

 resemblance and contiguity, which is at the basis of reasoning. Every 

 dream is the outcome of this strenuous, wide-ranging instinct to rea- 

 son. The supposed " imaginative faculty," regarded as so highly 

 active during sleep, is simply the inevitable play of this automatic 



