th is, every man has, the moment he awakes, a hatred of his
dream, and a great desire to be free of the dream, free of the
persistent mother-image or sister-image of the dream. It is a ghoul,
it haunts his dreams, this image, with its hateful conclusions. And
yet he cannot get free. As long as a man lives he may, in his dreams
of passion or conflict, be haunted by the mother-image or
sister-image, even when he knows that the cause of the disturbing
dream is the wife. But even though the actual subject of the dream is
the wife, still, over and over again, for years, the dream-process
will persist in substituting the mother-image. It haunts and terrifies
a man.

Why does the dream-process act so? For two reasons. First, the reason
of simple automatic continuance. The mother-image was the first great
emotional image to be introduced in the psyche. The dream-process
mechanically reproduces its stock image the moment the intense
sympathy-emotion is aroused. Again, the mother-image refers only to
the upper plane. But the dream-process is mechanical in its logic.
Because the mother-image refers to the great dynamic stress of the
upper plane, therefore it refers to the great dynamic stress of the
lower. This is a piece of sheer automatic logic. The living soul is
_not_ automatic, and automatic logic does not apply to it.

But for our second reason for the image. In becoming the object of
great emotional stress for her son, the mother also becomes an object
of poignancy, of anguish, of arrest, to her son. She arrests him from
finding his proper fulfillment on the sensual plane. Now it is almost
always the object of arrest which becomes impressed, as it were, upon
the psyche. A man very rarely has an image of a person with whom he is
livingly, vitally connected. He only has dream-images of the persons
who, in some way, _oppose_ his life-flow and his soul's freedom, and
so become impressed upon his plasm as objects of resistance. Once a
man is dynamically caught on the upper plane by mother or sister, then
the dream-image of mother or sister will persist until the dynamic
_rapport_ between himself and his mother or sister is finally broken.
And the dream-image from the upper plane will be automatically applied
to the disturbance of the lower plane.

Because--and this is very important--the dream-process _loves_ its own
automatism. It would force everything to an automatic-logical
conclusion in the psyche. But the living, wakefu