54 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



no adequate ground to suppose that it does exert such selective action. 

 On the contrary, it is, for the most part, supremely impartial in bring- 

 ing forward and combining all the manifestations, the most trivial as 

 well as the most intimate, of our waking life. There is a symptom of 

 mental disorder called extrospection in which the patient fastens his 

 attention so minutely on events that he comes to interpret the most 

 trifling signs and incidents as full of hidden significance, and may so 

 build up a systematized delusion. 21 The investigator of dreams must 

 always bear in mind the risk of falling into morbid extrospection. 



Such considerations seem to indicate that it is not true that every 

 dream, every mental image, is " worth while," though at the same time 

 they by no means diminish the validity of special and purposive methods 

 of investigating dream consciousness. Freud and those who are fol- 

 lowing him have shown, by the expenditure of much patience and skill, 

 that his method of dream-interpretation may in many cases yield 

 coherent results which it is not easy to account for by chance. It is 

 quite possible, however, to recognize Freud's service in vindicating the 

 large places of symbolism in dream, and to welcome the application of 

 his psycho-analytic method to dreams, while yet denying that this is the 

 only method of interpreting dreams. Freud argues that all dreaming 

 is purposive and significant and that we must put aside the belief that 

 dreams are the mere trivial outcome of the dissociated activity of brain 

 centers. It remains true, however, that, while reason plays a larger 

 part in dreams than most people realize — the activity of dissociated 

 brain centers furnishes one of the best keys to the explanation of psychic 

 phenomena during sleep. It would be difficult to believe in any case 

 that in the relaxation of sleep our thoughts are still pursuing a delib- 

 erately purposeful direction under the control of our waking impulses. 

 Many facts indicate — though Freud's school may certainly claim that 

 such facts have not been thoroughly interpreted — that, as a matter of 

 fact, this control is often conspicuously lacking. There is, for instance, 

 the well-known fact that our most recent and acute emotional experi- 

 ences — precisely those which might most ardently formulate themselves 

 in a wish — are rarely mirrored in our dreams, though recent occurrences 

 of more trivial nature, as well as older events of more serious import, 

 easily find place there. That is easily accounted for by the supposition 

 — not quite in a line with a generalized wish-theory — that the ex- 

 hausted emotions of the day find rest at night. 



It must also be said that even when we admit that a strong emotion 

 may symbolically construct an elaborate dream edifice which needs 

 analysis to be interpreted, we narrow the process unduly if we assert 

 that the emotion is necessarily a wish. Desire is certainly very funda- 



21 Extrospection has been specially studied by Vaschide and Vurpas in " La 

 Logique Morbide." 



