will tend to control all the images of the
time, allowing certain congruous ones to enter, and excluding
others.[95] If, for example, a feeling of distress occupies the mind,
distressing images will have the advantage in the struggle for existence
which goes on in the world of mind as well as in that of matter. We may
say that attention, which is here wholly a passive process, is
controlled by the emotion of the time, and bent in the direction of
congruent or harmonious images.

Now, a ground-tone of feeling of a certain complexion, answering to the
sum of sensations arising in connection with the different organic
processes of the time, is a very frequent foundation of our
dream-structure. So frequent is it, indeed, that one might almost say
there is no dream in which it is not one great determining factor. The
analysis of a very large number of dreams has convinced me that traces
of this influence are discoverable in a great majority.

I will give a simple illustration of this lyrical type of dream. A
little girl of about four years and three-quarters went with her parents
to Switzerland. On their way she was taken to the cathedral at
Strasburg, and saw the celebrated clock strike, and the figures of the
Apostles come out, etc. In Switzerland she stayed at Gimmelwald, near
Muerren, opposite a fine mass of snowy mountains. One morning she told
her father that she had had "such a lovely dream." She fancied she was
on the snow-peaks with her nurse, and walked on to the sky. There came
out of the sky "such beautiful things," just like the figures of the
clock. This vision of celestial things was clearly due to the fact that
both the clock and the snow-peaks touching the blue sky had powerfully
excited her imagination, filling her with much the same kind of emotion,
namely, wonder, admiration, and longing to reach an inaccessible height.

Our feelings commonly have a gradual rise and fall, and the organic
sensations which so often constitute the emotional basis of our lyrical
dreams generally have stages of increasing intensity. Moreover, such a
persistent ground-feeling becomes reinforced by the images which it
sustains in consciousness. Hence a certain _crescendo_ character in our
emotional dreams, or a gradual rise to some culminating point or climax.

This phase of dream can be illustrated from the experience of the same
little girl. When just five years old, she was staying at Hampstead,
near a church which struck