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 Claparéde 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 go 
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 
