734 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



logic. The characteristic of the reasoning of dreams is that it is 

 unusually bad, and this badness is due chiefly to the absence of mem- 

 ory elements that would be present to waking consciousness, and to 

 the absence of sensory elements to check the false reasoning which 

 without them appears to us conclusive. That is to say — to fall back 

 on the excellent generalization which Parish has elaborately applied 

 to all forms of hallucination — there is a process of dissociation by 

 which ordinary channels of association are temporarily blocked and 

 the conditions prepared for the formation of the hallucination. It 

 is, as Parish has argued, in sleep and in those sleep-resembling states 

 called hypnagogic that a condition of dissociation leading to hal- 

 lucination is most apt to occur. 



The following dream illustrates the part played by dissociation: 

 A lady dreamed that an acquaintance wished to send a small sum 

 of money to a person in Ireland. She rashly offered to take it over to 

 Ireland. On arriving home she began to repent of her promise, as 

 the weather was extremely wild and cold. She began, however, to 

 make preparations for dressing warmly, and went to consult an Irish 

 friend, who said she would have to be floated over to Ireland tightly 

 jammed in a crab basket. On returning home she fully discussed 

 the matter with her husband, who thought it would be folly to under- 

 take such a journey, and she finally relinquished it, with great relief. 

 In this dream — the elements of which could all be accounted for — 

 the association between sending money and postal orders which would 

 at once occur to waking consciousness was closed ; consciousness was a 

 prey to such suggestions as reached it, but on the basis of these sug- 

 gestions it reasoned and concluded quite sagaciously. The phe- 

 nomena of dreaming furnish a delightful illustration of the fact that 

 reasoning, in its rough form, is only the crudest and most elementary 

 form of intellectual operation, and that the finer forms of thinking 

 only become possible when we hold in check this tendency to reason. 

 " All the thinking in the world," as Goethe puts it, " will not lead 

 us to thought." 



It is in such characteristics as these — at once primitive, childlike, 

 and insane — that we may find the charm of dreaming. In our sleep- 

 ins: emotional life we are much more like ourselves than we are in 

 our sleeping intellectual life. It is a mistake to imagine that our 

 moral and aesthetic instincts are abolished in dreams; they are often 

 weakened, but by no means abolished. Such a result is natural when 

 we remember that our emotions and instincts are both more primitive 

 and less under the dominion of the external senses than are our ideas. 

 Yet in both respects we are removed a stage backward in our dreams. 

 The emotional intensity, the absurd logic, the tendency to personi- 

 fication — nearly all the points I have referred to as characterizing 



