O magic sleep! O comfortable bird!

That broodest o'er the troubled sea of the mind

Till it is hush'd and smooth! O unconfined

Restraint! imprisoned liberty! great Key

To golden palaces, strange mintrelsy, Fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves, Echoing grottoes, full of trembling waves And moonlight; ay, to all the mazy world Of silvery enchantment!

- Keats, Endymion.

When we try to define the essential difference between our thoughts and our dreams, the greater incoherence of dreams will probably most often be suggested. I do not myself hold the belief that in-consecutiveness and incoherence are particularly characteristic of dreaming; certainly not that they are essential to it. They are often associated in our minds with the dream state, but chiefly because our memory of dreaming is so imperfect that links of thought which are necessary to make the memory of a dream coherent are often forgotten when we wake. It is these links of thought that make a rational connection between the successive stages of dream ideas, and that suggest various dream adventures that seem to be almost lunatic if these links in the chain are lost. A better system of dream memory would often remedy this, and would show us how orderly and, in a way, how rational are the methods of dream construction. Even by day, if we allow our thoughts to wander for a time at will, and then try to retrace all the byways that they followed, there will probably be some steps that we cannot recall.

This is still more likely to be true in the case of dream consciousness, but the habit of retracing the steps of thought can be acquired as well with regard to our dreams as with regard to the course of our wandering thoughts by day.

I believe that in reality the essential difference between thinking and dreaming lies rather in the greater intensity with which imagination works in the dream state. A stray thought which comes into our mind by day is glanced at, is turned over, as it were, in our mind, and dismissed; and a hundred such thoughts may occur and be considered, without seriously deflecting the direction of the main current of our thought. But in a dream the process is different. When an idea comes to the surface of dream consciousness, the imagination seizes upon it, and not only looks at it but proceeds to embody it into a solid fact; it thus ceases to be simply an idea, and becomes a definite figure in three dimensions - a thing active and gifted with life. This power exercised by the dream imagination alters all the sequence of dreams and makes their course essentially different from that followed by our thoughts by day. This characteristic of dreams is exemplified in the following notes on dream construction, and these notes show also some of the links which connect together and explain the successive stages of a dream.

It will be seen how without the memory of these links the dream falls to pieces and would appear quite incoherent to the waking mind.

"It was a winter's day, and I was looking at the gaily dressed windows of a shop in Oxford Street; its windows, filled with the little orange-trees and flowers of the Mayfair Flower Workers, attracted me and I stayed admiring them, jostled a little by the crowd of people who were continually passing by. The roadway also was thronged with motors and with motor omnibuses and - drawn up near the pavement where I stood I noticed more particularly - a small old-fashioned brougham that was painted dark blue, and that was drawn by a white horse. The next thing that I remember is that my attention was attracted upwards, and I remained for some time spell-bound, watching the curious, rather uncertain, flight of a dragon - a dragon with very short red wings, who was pulling an aerial car at some little height above the rest of the traffic and some way above the heads of the people in the crowded street. 'The dragon isn't nearly strong enough for the car he has got to pull,' I exclaimed; 'his wings are absurd little things, not nearly big enough for the job - why, a good aeroplane would be better than that!' The dragon was certainly rather feeble, but it kept up its jerky flight bravely along Oxford Street, and finally turned down Regent Street, where I lost sight of it".

Now, when I woke up later from this dream I could see no mental link at all between the ordinary sights of the London street that I had been watching and the dragon car. But as I looked back more carefully at the picture film of memory I recalled the white horse that I had noticed just before the coming of the dragon, and that white horse was the clue that I sought To those who dwell in our countryside the link connecting the thought of a white horse with the thought of a dragon is not far to seek. The original "White Horse" of King Alfred, scrawled upon the steep bluff of the Down that overlooks the Vale to which the White Horse gives its name, is indeed not a horse but a dragon shape - a white dragon drawn just as a prehistoric man or child might have drawn it; and carved in the soft turf of the Down it has survived the centuries unchanged. Now it often happens that in the old house under the Wiltshire Downs where this dream was dreamed, my eyes rest on certain little red and blue dragons who sprawl in engaging puppy-like attitudes on the covers and sides of the old Chinese dishes on my mantelpiece.

From these funny dragon puppies with their wide mouths, their innocent kitten-like claws and feeble beginnings of wings, my thoughts have wandered away to other fiercer dragon shapes and dragon stories, to dragon-helmed warriors who came in dragon-keeled ships to our shores, or to Alfred's great Dragon Horse on the Downs.

The dragon of my dreams had the building wings of these baby dragons, absurdly inadequate for a beast of burden, but I have no doubt that from them the dream sprang, and that without them and without the White Horse the dream would have been dreamed quite differently. The building up of many of our long and elaborate dreams comes from such complete visualisation as this of each successive idea as it occurs.