d fancy.

It is plain at a glance that the simultaneous concurrence of wholly
disconnected initial impulses will serve to impress a measure of
disconnectedness on our dream-images. From widely remote parts of the
organism there come impressions which excite each its peculiar visual or
other image according as its local origin or its emotional tone is the
more distinctly present to consciousness. 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.

Let us now look at the way in which the laws of association working on
the incongruous elements thus cast up into our dream-consciousness, will
serve to give a yet greater appearance of disorder and confusion to our
dream-combinations. According to these laws, any idea may, under
certain circumstances, call up another, if the corresponding impressions
have only once occurred together, or if the ideas have any degree of
resemblance, or, finally, if only they stand in marked contrast with one
another. 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.

In our waking states these innumerable paths of association are
practically closed by the supreme energy of the coherent groups of
impressions furnished us from the world without through our organs of
sense, and also by the volitional control of internal thought in
obedience to the pressure of practical needs and desires. In dream-life
both of these influences are withdrawn, so that delicate threads of
association, which have no chance of exerting their pull, so to speak,
in our waking states, now make known their hidden force. Little wonder,
then, that the filaments which bind together these dream-successions
should escape detection, since even in our waking thought we so often
fail to see the connection which makes us pass in recollection from a
name to a visible scene or perhaps to an emotional vibration.

It is worth noting that the origin of an association is often to be
looked for in one of those momentary half-conscious acts of waking
imagination to which reference has already been made. A friend, for
example, has been speaking to us of