erson.

A very similar kind of unification takes place between sequent images
under the form of transformation. When two images follow one another
closely, and have anything in common, they readily assume the form of a
transmutation. There is a sort of overlapping of the mental images, and
so an appearance of continuity produced in some respects analogous to
that which arises in the wheel-of-life (thaumatrope) class of
sense-illusions. This would seem to account for the odd transformations
of personality which not unfrequently occur in dreams, in which a person
appears, by a kind of metempsychosis, to transfer his physical ego to
another, and in which the dreamer's own bodily phantom plays similar
freaks. And the same principle probably explains those dissolving-view
effects which are so familiar an accompaniment of dream-scenery.[94]

But passing from this exceptional kind of unity in dreams, let us
inquire how the heterogeneous elements of our dream-fancy become ordered
and arranged when they preserve their separate existence. If we look
closely at the structure of our more finished dreams, we find that the
appearance of harmony, connectedness, or order, may be given in one of
two ways. There may, first of all, be a subjective harmony, the various
images being held together by an emotional thread. Or there may,
secondly, be an objective harmony, the parts of the dream, though
answering to no particular experiences of waking life, bearing a certain
resemblance to our habitual modes of experience. Let us inquire into the
way in which each kind of order is brought about.

_Lyrical Element in Dreams._

The only unity that belongs to many of our dreams is a subjective
emotional unity. This is the basis of harmony in lyrical poetry, where
the succession of images turns mainly on their emotional colouring.
Thus, the images that float before the mind of the Poet Laureate, in his
_In Memoriam_, clearly have their link of connection in their common
emotional tone, rather than in any logical continuity. Dreaming has been
likened to poetic composition, and certainly many of our dreams are
built upon a groundwork of lyrical feeling. They might be marked off,
perhaps, as our lyrical dreams.

The way in which this emotional force acts in these cases has already
been hinted at. We have seen that the analogy of feeling is a common
link between dream-images. Now, if any shade of feeling becomes fixed
and dominant in the mind, it