52 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



dreams, but his lengthy study on the interpretation of dreams deals 

 exclusively with the dreams of the neurotic. 18 Stekel believes, more- 

 over, that from the structure of the dream life conclusions may be 

 drawn not only as to the life and character of the dreamer, but also as 

 to his neurosis, the hysterical person dreaming differently from the 

 obsessed person, and so on. If that is the case we are certainly justified 

 in doubting whether conclusions drawn from the study of the dreams 

 of neurotic people can be safely held to represent the normal dream- 

 life, even though it may be true that there is no definite frontier be- 

 tween them. 19 Whatever may be the case among the neurotic, in ordi- 

 nary normal sleep the images that drift across the field of consciousness, 

 though they have a logic of their own, seem in a large proportion of 

 cases to be quite explicable without resort to the theory that they stand 

 in vital but concealed relationship to our most intimate self. 



Even in waking life, and at normal moments which are not those 

 of revery, it seems possible to trace the appearance in the field of con- 

 sciousness of images which are evoked neither by any mental or physical 

 circumstance of the moment, or any hidden desire, images that are as 

 disconnected from the immediate claims of desire and even of association 

 as those of dreams seem so largely to be. It sometimes occurs to me — 

 as doubtless it occurs to other people — that at some moment when my 

 thoughts are normally occupied with the work immediately before me, 

 then suddenly appears on the surface of consciousness a totally unre- 

 lated picture. A scene arises, vague but usually recognizable, of some 

 city or landscape — Australian, Russian, Spanish, it matters not what — 

 seen casually long years ago, and possibly never thought of since, and 

 possessing no kind of known association either with the matter in hand 

 or with my personal life generally. It comes to the surface of con- 

 sciousness as softly, as unexpectedly, as disconnectedly, as a minute 

 bubble might arise and break on the surface of an actual stream from 

 ancient organic material silently disintegrating in the depths beneath. 20 



18 The special characteristics of dreaming in the hysterical were studied, 

 before Freud turned his attention to the question, by Sante de Sanctis, " I Sogni 

 e il Sonno nelF Isterismo," 1896. 



19 See also Havelock Ellis, " Studies in the Psychology of Sex," Vol. I., 

 3d ed., 1910, " Autoerotism." 



20 Gissing, the novelist, an acute observer of psychic states, in the most 

 personal of his books, " The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft," has described 

 this phenomenon: "Every one, I suppose, is subject to a trick of mind which 

 often puzzles me. I am reading or thinking, and at a moment, without any 

 association or suggestion that 1 can discover, there rises before me the vision of 

 a place I know. Impossible to explain why that particular spot should show 

 itself to my mind's eye; the cerebral impulse is so subtle that no search may 

 trace its origin." Gissing proceeds to say that a thought, a phrase, an odor, 

 a touch, a posture of the body, may possibly have furnished the link of associa- 

 tion, but lie knows no evidence for this theory. 



