m pressure on the bladder, being dimly connected with the presence of
a fluid, calls up an image of a flood, and so on.

This mode of dream-interpretation has by some writers been erected into
the typical mode, under the name of dream-symbolism. 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. Such theories are clearly an exaggeration of
the fact that the localization of our bodily sensations during sleep is
necessarily imperfect.[90]

In many cases the image called up bears on its objective side no
discoverable resemblance to that of the bodily region or the exciting
cause of the sensation. Here the explanation must be looked for in the
subjective side of the sensation and mental image, that is to say, in
their emotional quality, as pleasurable or painful, distressing,
quieting, etc. It is to be observed, indeed, that in natural sleep, as
in the condition known as hypnotism, while differences of specific
quality in the sense-impressions are lost, the broad difference of the
pleasurable and the painful is never lost. It is, in fact, the
subjective emotional side of the sensation that uniformly forces itself
into consciousness. This being so, it follows that, speaking generally,
the sensations of sleep, both external and internal, or organic, will be
interpreted by what G.H. Lewes has called "an analogy of feeling;" that
is to say, by means of a mental image having some kindred emotional
character or colouring.

Now, the analogy between the higher emotional and the bodily states is a
very close one. A sensation of obstruction in breathing has its exact
analogue in a state of mental embarrassment, a sensation of itching its
counterpart in mental impatience, and so on. And since these emotional
experiences are deeper and fuller than the sensations, the tendency to
exaggerate the nature and causes of these last would naturally lead to
an interpretation of them by help of these experiences. In addition to
this, the predominance of visual imagery in sleep would aid this
transformation of a bodily sensation into an emotional experience, since
visual perceptions have, as their accompaniments