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Any accidental coincidence of events, such as meeting a person at a particular foreign resort, and any insignificant resemblance between objects, sounds, etc., may thus supply a path, so to speak, from fact to dream-fancy.
And the same principle probably explains those dissolving-view effects which are so familiar an accompaniment of dream-scenery. But passing from this exceptional kind of unity in dreams, let us inquire how the heterogeneous elements of our dream-fancy become ordered and arranged when they preserve their separate existence.
When, in this state, our minds are invaded by a motley crowd of unrelated images, there results a disagreeable sense of confusion; and this feeling acts as a motive to the attention to sift out those products of the dream-fancy which may be made to cohere.
Thus Scherner, in his interesting though somewhat fanciful work, Das Leben des Traumes, contends that the various regions of the body regularly disclose themselves to the dream-fancy under the symbol of a building or group of buildings; a pain in the head calling up, for example, the image of spiders on the ceiling, intestinal sensations exciting an image of a narrow alley, and so on.
In this way, though the dream-fancy sets at nought the particular relations of our experience, it respects the general and constant relations. How are we to account for this?
An association will thus be formed between this person and the idea of death. A night or two after, the image of this person somehow recurs to our dream-fancy, and we straightway dream that we are looking at his corpse, watching his funeral, and so on.
The mind does not pass suddenly and at a bound from the condition of dream-fancy to that of waking perception. I have already had occasion to touch on the "hypnagogic state," that condition of somnolence or "sleepiness" in which external impressions cease to act, the internal attention is relaxed, and the weird imagery of sleep begins to unfold itself.
In spite of all that is fitful and grotesque in dream-combination, it still preserves a distant resemblance to our actual experience. Though no dream reproduces a particular incident or chain of incidents in this experience, though the dream-fancy invariably transforms the particular objects, relations, and events of waking life, it still makes the order of our daily experience its prototype.
For example, the exposure of a part of the body through a loss of the bed-clothes is a frequent excitant of distressing dreams. A cold foot suggests that the sleeper is walking over snow or ice. On the other hand, if the cold foot happens to touch a warm part of the body, the dream-fancy constructs images of walking on burning lava, and so on.
Thus, if I were dreaming that I heard some lively music, and at the same time an image of a friend was anyhow excited, my dream-fancy might not improbably represent this person as performing a sequence of rhythmic movements, such as those of riding, dancing, etc.
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