THE SYMBOLISM OF DREAMS 53 



Every one who has traveled much can not fail to possess, hidden in his 

 psychic depths a practically infinite number of such forgotten pictures, 

 devoid of all personal emotion. It is possible to maintain, as a matter 

 of theory, that when they come up to consciousness, they are evoked by 

 some real though untraceable resemblance which they possess with the 

 psychic or physical state existing when they reappear. But that theory 

 can not be demonstrated. Nor, it may be added, is it more plausible 

 than the simple but equally unprovable theory that such scenes do really 

 come to the surface of consciousness, as the result of some slight spon- 

 taneous disintegration in a minute cerebral center and have no more 

 immediately preceding psychic cause than my psychic realization of 

 the emergence of the sun from behind a cloud has any psychic preceding 

 cause. 



Similarly, in insanity, Liepmann in his study " Ueber Ideenflucht " 

 has forcibly argued that ordinary logorrhea — the incontinence of ideas 

 linked together by superficial associations of resemblance or contiguity 

 — is a linking without direction, that is, corresponding to no interest, 

 either practical or theoretical, of the individual. Or, as Claparede puts 

 it, logorrhea is a trouble in the reaction of interest in life. It seems 

 most reasonable to believe that in ordinary sleep the flow of imagery 

 follows, for the most part, the same easy course. That course may to 

 waking consciousness often seem peculiar, but to waking consciousness 

 the conditions of dreaming life are peculiar. Under these conditions, 

 however, we may well believe that the tendency to movement in the 

 direction of least resistance still prevails. And as attention and will 

 are weakened and loosened during sleep, the tense concentration on 

 personal ends must also be relaxed. We become more disinterested. 

 Personal desire tends for the most part rather to fall into the back- 

 ground than to become more prominent. If it were not a period in 

 which desire were ordinarily relaxed sleep would cease to be a period of 

 rest and recuperation. 



Sleeping consciousness is a vast world, a world only less vast than 

 that of waking consciousness. It is futile to imagine that a single 

 formula can cover all its manifold varieties and all its degrees of depth. 

 Those who imagine that all dreaming is a symbolism which a single 

 cypher will serve to interpret must not be surprised if, however un- 

 justly, they are thought to resemble those persons who claim to find 

 on every page of Shakespeare a cypher revealing the authorship of 

 Bacon. In the case of Freud's theory of dream interpretation, I hold 

 the cypher to be real, but I believe that it is impossible to regard so 

 narrow and exclusive an interpretation as adequate to explain the whole 

 world of dreams. It would, a priori, be incomprehensible that sleeping 

 consciousness should exert so extraordinary a selective power among 

 the variegated elements of waking life, and, experientially, there seems 



