My dreams . . . are of architecture and of buildings - cities abroad, which I have never seen, and hardly hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon - their churches, palaces, market places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight-a map-like distinctness of trace - and a daylight vividness of vision that was all but being awake. - Charles Lamb.

There are a few dreamers who are privileged to revisit often a dream country that becomes as familiar to them as any country that they know by day. In a little book called "Dreams in War-Time," Mr. E. M. Martin has described in detail a countryside to which his dreams give him access. It is, he says, "a country I know well, and that is as real to me, and as dear to me, as any of the fields and woods I knew and loved when a child. In it there are dream woods, where I can lose my way as contentedly as in the New Forest, for dream squirrels, ponies, deer, and dogs follow me in friendly fashion along untrodden paths; dream houses where I am by turns host, by turns guest; dream castles (sometimes in ruins, but more often in all their old state and splendour), where every room is familiar to me; dream rivers, along whose sleepy tide I have floated through lazy summer days; dream villages, in whose inn parlour I am a welcome guest".

Few of us are quite as fortunate as Mr. Martin has been in the matter of dreams, for until the war intruded itself into his pleasant dream country and disturbed its peace, he seems to have had constant access to his favourite dream places; the dreams that he relates are coherent and vivid, and moreover he has learnt the art that must be acquired if dream notes are to be of value, the art of full and accurate recording. But even if we are not so lucky as to have the right of entry into a favourite country every night at will, many of us have some place of dream into which from time to time we find our way; some dream house of which the key is ours. It is always with a certain glad surprise that we recognise rooms that have thus become familiar to us - passages every turn of which we know.

The construction of these dream houses, and the geography of dream places, are good examples of the methods of the dream mind, and of its curious way of handling and altering the memories of which it makes use in the building of dreams. Memory seems by choice to go back for the materials of these dream scenes to a more or less distant past; our actual surroundings at the present moment, the rooms, the streets, the countryside in which we are living, do not occur nearly as often as do the rooms and scenes of past years. In these, as in all its operations, the dream mind seizes upon memories that had almost faded from waking consciousness, and vividly renews them. In much the same way a photograph of a house, faintly remembered, brings back a thousand details which had grown dim in our minds, so that, having looked at it, we almost forget how much we had forgotten.

Of such dream memories of childhood de Quincey wrote: "The minutest incidents of childhood or forgotten scenes of later years were often revived. I could not be said to recollect them, for if I had been told of them when waking I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognised them instantaneously."1

But the dream mind, though it depends upon the materials that memory supplies, hardly ever uses those materials without altering them. It would seem as though the dream imagination cannot rest satisfied simply with re-creating; it must build anew, it must alter, it must add. It will, for instance, select for the dream scene one floor only of a familiar house, or make choice of one remembered room, and will work this into another building, all else being omitted or changed. Or again, one particular garden corner will be used, and the rest neglected by this capricious artist. Just as the dream mind alters the meaning of a sound or other sense impression that reaches the brain, and as it changes the characters of a book that we are reading, so it transforms our recollections of familiar places, and pieces different pictures together in curious and unexpected combinations.

1 De Quincey, "Confessions of an English Opium Eater".

There is a house that I know well in my dreams, in which passages and stairways innumerable lead from attic to attic on many levels. Their floors are old and uneven; the walls are covered with a paper made long ago to resemble blocks of grey granite; I suppose it would be thought hideous nowadays, but in the dream house it seems to me wholly delightful, for it has the charm of memory, the restfulness of something very familiar. When I try to trace the geography of the dream house, I recognise the real attics and passages from which it took its origin. With a thousand other memories the dream house has grown out of the old country home of my childhood. The attics have changed places, rooms belonging to another house have got built into the dream house. In many ways it is altered, but things that matter remain unchanged. I know the very smell of the store-cupboard round the next corner, where the damson cheese and jellies in tiny leaf-shaped moulds are stored. I know that in the further attic the scent of jasmine will come in at the casement window, and the jasmine sprays will tap lightly against the panes just as they used to do; and at the end of the passage wooden steps, worn unevenly into hollows, will lead down into a warm and friendly kitchen.

The literal faithfulness of many of the details recalled in these dreams is as characteristic of the dream mind as the capriciousness with which it makes its selections amongst our memories, which must all, it seems, be transmuted by the alchemy of the imagination.