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The many strange human forms which float before our dream-fancy are apt to talk, move, and behave like men and women in general, however little they resemble their actual prototypes, and however little individual consistency of character is preserved by each of them.
That we should expect to do so in every case is unreasonable, since, owing to the numberless fine ramifications which belong to our familiar images, many of the paths of association followed by our dream-fancy cannot be afterwards retraced. To illustrate the odd way in which our images get tumbled together through the action of occult association forces, I will record a dream of my own.
When the infant first steadies his eyes on a human face, it may, for aught we know, experience a feeling akin to that described above, when through a survival of dream-fancy we take some new scene to be already familiar.
It is said by certain philosophers that this superposition of the relations of space, time, causation, etc., on the products of our dream-fancy is due to the fact that all experience arises by a synthesis of mental forms with the chaotic matter of sense-impressions. These philosophers allow, however, that all particular connections are determined by experience.
Now it is a subjective ocular sensation suggesting a bouquet of lovely flowers, and close on its heels comes an impression from the organs of digestion suggesting all manner of obstacles, and so our dream-fancy plunges from a vision of flowers to one of dreadful demons.
M. Maury found that when his lips were tickled, his dream-fancy interpreted the impression as of a pitch plaster being torn off his face. An unusual pressure on any part of the body, as, for example, from contact with a fellow-sleeper, is known to give rise to a well-marked variety of dream.
When once the foundations of a dream-action are laid, new images must to some extent fit in with this; and here there is room for the exercise of a distinct impulse to order the chaotic elements of dream-fancy in certain forms.
Thus, for example, the common construction by the dream-fancy of the experience of flight in mid-air, and the creation of those weird forms which the terror of a nightmare is wont to bring in its train, seem to point to the past action of waking fancy.
A renascent reasoning on the impossibility of such a phenomenon as this being more than a dream-fancy roused him with a start from his heaviness. 'I must have been asleep, he said. Yet she had seemed so real.
In some dreams, again, we may become aware of the process of coalescence, as when persons who at one moment were seen to be distinct appear to our dream-fancy to run together in some third person. A very similar kind of unification takes place between sequent images under the form of transformation.
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