Memory begets Judgment and Fancy: Judgment begets the strength and structure, and Fancy begets the ornaments of a Poem. - Hobbes, Leviathan.

Some of the difficulties that we meet with in remembering our dreams have been described, and the part that memory plays in the process of recalling and recording them. The materials out of which dreams are built up, and the part taken in their building by memory, imagination, and by other mental faculties, must now be considered.

The basis of all our dreams is furnished by memory from things that have been seen, heard and remembered. In the dream state, memory is characterised by greatly increased vigour and often a scene casually glanced at in the course of a journey, and half or quite forgotten as we hurry by in railway or motor, will reproduce itself in our dreams with a wealth of remembered detail and with a precision that was absent from the original fugitive impression, and may remain imprinted on the dream memory for years, a picture unfaded by time. A thousand such impressions, which at the moment hardly seem to make any mark on our minds, reappear in this way with extreme distinctness. "It is a strange but undoubted fact that the memory can be charged with lasting impressions of things seen which pass through the visual sense unnoticed and unknown of it."1

If memory acts as the builder, the provider of the material from which dreams are made, imagination may be looked upon as their architect. Imagination transforms all these remembered facts and impressions, and combines them afresh, using them to create for us totally new surroundings, but it does not, and cannot, act without that basis of experience that is supplied by memory. It makes free use of all that we have gleaned from travel, from books, from things heard; but we do not - at least I certainly do not in my dreams - conceive of a world that is outwardly very unlike our own, or of beings of a new and wholly different order from ourselves. Even the gifts and accomplishments which we acquire only in our dreams, and which may not be ours by day, are possessed by other men and women. Gifts of music, of beautiful motion, of oratory, may be ours only in sleep, and like supermen we may master the hardest of these things with effortless ease, but they are all gifts that belong to men like ourselves, things which men of our own race have done and can do. Our powers of flying, and of overcoming distances of time and space in our dreams, are the exceptions to this rule.

These are powers which belong to no mortal by day, and it is perhaps for that very reason that we hold these dreams so dear. As a general rale we do not in our dreams even invent new trees or new flowers, and although the combinations made by imagination result sometimes in dream scenes that have all the charm of originality and of a certain strange foreignness, still our dream world is on the whole a world resembling in most of its outward characteristics the world we live in, and in the greater number of our dreams even the details of that familiar world are faithfully reproduced.

1 F. Greenwood, "Imagination in Dreams".

No change that takes place in any of the mental faculties during sleep is more remarkable or more certainly attested than the heightening of the faculty of imagination. The great increase of imaginative force that is conferred upon us is what gives our dreams their greatest charm, the vividness of our dream images being in many cases far greater than that of the mental images that we can form by day. I believe that the dream mind has in itself a much more intense power of imaginative vision than our normal mind possesses. It is, moreover, free, as many writers on dreams have noted, to work out its effects without the interference of contrary or irrelevant ideas that hamper the imaginative force of the waking mind. By day the imagination is often distracted by other thoughts, and cannot fully concentrate itself upon a single image; it works in a stricter subjection to the reasoning faculty, and in obedience also to the laws that govern our universe and, only when the memory of these is partly lifted off in sleep, the imagination is free to create new conditions which do not depend upon these laws.

Difficulties, which must seem insuperable to the normal mind, which is obliged to think of things as happening in time, and to regard everything under the conditions of time and space that are familiar to us, are no longer insurmountable in dreams. Men have built up "laws which seem to correspond with the phenomena of succession and slow sequence which are part of our observations of nature."1 In our dreams we pass directly into a condition where our ordinary conceptions of the sequence of time and relative distance are done away with, where these laws no longer exist for us, and where entirely different conditions prevail. Distance is annihilated in our dreams, which take no account of the continents that may intervene between us and the remote spot to which our thoughts may fly, and to which we may be instantly transported as on the Princess Ba-doura's magic carpet. In this respect, at least, the world of dreams differs fundamentally from the world we know by day.

The thought of a certain lake in Kashmir flashes into my dream mind, and instantly I find myself there, lying as I often do, in the reed-thatched house-boat in which I live and voyage on the lake. A fractional part of the journey thither may or may not come into the dream, but the preliminary of travelling is, as often as not, altogether omitted.

1 Bishop Westcott

One has only to think of a place, and one is there. Sir Philip Sidney was perhaps thinking of such dreams as these when he wrote of imagination as the faculty "that flies from one Indies to the other." Just as completely as our conceptions of distances disappear in dreams, so are our conceptions of time swept away. The thought of some historic event may carry us back in a dream across the centuries, and make us live for a little while in another age, the dream imagination accomplishing for us in an instant the task that the historian achieves in many pages. Like the clairvoyant described by M. Maeterlinck, we "do not feel what the future is, or distinguish it from other senses."1