ysterious spiritual faculty, under the name of
"creative fancy." Thus Cudworth remarks, in his _Treatise concerning
Eternal and Immutable Morality_: "That dreams are many times begotten by
the phantastical power of the soul itself ... is evident from the
orderly connection and coherence of imaginations which many times are
continued in a long chain or series." One may find a good deal of
mystical writing on the nature and activity of this faculty, especially
in German literature. The explanation of this element of organic unity
in dreams is, it may be safely said, the crux in the science of dreams.
That the laws of psychology help us to understand the sequences of
dream-images, we have seen. What we have now to ask is whether these
laws throw any light on the orderly grouping of the elements so brought
up in consciousness in the form of a connected experience.

It is to be remarked at the outset that a singular kind of unity is
sometimes given to our dream-combinations by a total or partial
coalescence of different images. The conditions of such coalescence have
been referred to already.[93] Simultaneous impressions or images will
always tend to coalesce with a force which varies directly as the degree
of their similarity. Sometimes this coalescence is instantaneous and not
made known to consciousness. Thus, Radestock suggests that if the mind
of the sleeper is simultaneously invaded by an unpleasant sensation
arising out of some disturbance of the functions of the skin, and a
subjective visual sensation, the resulting mental image may be a
combination of the two, under the form of a caterpillar creeping over
the bodily surface. And the coalescence may even be prepared by
sub-conscious operations of waking imagination. Thus, for example, I
once spoke about the cheapness of hares to a member of my family, who
somewhat grimly suggested that they were London cats. I did not dwell on
the idea, but the following night I dreamt that I saw a big hybrid
creature, half hare, half cat, sniffing about a cottage. As it stood on
its hind legs and took a piece of food from a window-ledge, I became
sure that it was a cat. Here it is plain that the cynical observation of
my relative had, at the moment, partially excited an image of this
feline hare. 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 p