of
dream-experience may be explained, like that of visual imagery, by the
habits of waking life. The speech impulse is one of the most deeply
rooted of all our impulses, and one which has been most frequently
exercised in waking life.

_Combination of Dream-Elements._

It is commonly said that dreams are a grotesque dissolution of all
order, a very chaos and whirl of images without any discoverable
connection. On the other hand, a few writers claim for the mind in sleep
a power of arranging and grouping its incongruous elements in definite
and even life-like pictures. Each of these views is correct within
certain limits; that is to say, there are dreams in which the strangest
disorder seems to prevail, and others in which one detects the action of
a central control. Yet, speaking generally, sequences of dream-images
will be found to be determined by certain circumstances and laws, and so
far not to be haphazard or wholly chaotic. We have now to inquire into
the laws of these successions; and, first of all, we may ask how far the
known laws of association, together with the peculiar conditions of the
sleeping state, are able to account for the various modes of
dream-combination. We have already regarded mental association as
furnishing a large additional store of dream-imagery; we have now to
consider it as explaining the sequences and concatenations of our
dream-elements.

_Incoherence of Dreams._

First of all, then, let us look at the chaotic and apparently lawless
side of dreaming, and see whether any clue is discoverable to the centre
of this labyrinth. In the case of all the less elaborately ordered
dreams, in which sights and sounds appear to succeed one another in the
wildest dance (which class of dreams probably belongs to the deeper
stages of sleep), the mind may with certainty be regarded as purely
passive, and the mode of sequence may be referred to the action of
association complicated by the ever-recurring introduction of new
initial impulses, both peripheral and central. These are the dreams in
which we are conscious of being perfectly passive, either as spectators
of a strange pageant, or as borne away by some apparently extraneous
force through a series of the most diverse experiences. The flux of
images in these dreams is very much the same as that in certain waking
conditions, in which we relax attention, both external and internal, and
yield ourselves wholly to the spontaneous play of memory an