-coloured
interweaving of a picture-world, which nevertheless conceals within itself
some sort of law and order. At first this world seems to have an ebb and
flow, often in confused succession. Man in his dream-life is set free from
the laws of waking consciousness which bind him to sense-perception and
the laws of reason. And yet dreams have some sort of mysterious law,
attractive and fascinating to human speculation, and this is the deeper
reason why the beautiful play of imagination lying at the root of artistic
feeling is always apt to be compared to dreaming. We need only recall a
few characteristic dreams to find this corroborated. A man dreams, for
example, that he is driving off a dog that is attacking him. He wakes, and
finds himself in the act of unconsciously pushing off part of the
bedclothes which had been lying on an unaccustomed part of his body and
which had therefore become oppressive. What is it that dream-life makes,
in this instance, out of an incident perceptible to the senses? In the
first place, it leaves in complete unconsciousness what the senses would
perceive in the waking state. But it holds fast to something
essential--namely, the fact that the man wishes to repel something; and
round about this it weaves a metaphorical occurrence.

The pictures, as such, are echoes of waking life. There is something
arbitrary in the way in which they are drawn from it. Every one feels that
the same external cause may conjure up various dream-pictures. But they
give symbolic expression to the feeling that one has something to ward
off. The dream creates symbols; it is a symbolist. Inner experiences can
also be transformed into such dream-symbols. A man dreams that a fire is
crackling beside him; he sees flames in his dream. He wakes up feeling
that he is too heavily covered and has become too warm. The feeling of too
great warmth expresses itself symbolically in the picture. Quite dramatic
experiences may be enacted in a dream. For example, some one dreams that
he is standing on the edge of a precipice. He sees a child running toward
it. The dream makes him experience all the tortures of the thought--if only
the child will not be heedless and fall over into the abyss! He sees it
fall, and hears the dull thud of the body below. He awakes, and perceives
that an object which had been hanging on the wall of the room has become
unfastened, and made a dull sound by its fall. This simple event is
expressed in dream-