Just in the same way a place-name often makes the starting-point from which a dream of travel originates.

I had asked in a furniture shop one day the name of a folding tea-table, and had been told that it was a "Sutherland table." "Why Sutherland!" I had idly wondered at the moment. In my sleep the memory of the word recurred, but it was no longer associated with the idea of the table, but with the map of Northern Scotland, and the place of Suth-erland in it, and, as so often happens in a dream, no sooner had I thought of the name than I found myself travelling thither.

I was in a large railway carriage arranged not at all on the plan of our own carriages, but more as I imagine an American car to be arranged. I noted the curious sleeping-berths that looked foreign and unfamiliar to me. It seemed that the journey was taking us to the extreme north of Scotland. An Italian woman of the poorer class was travelling with a party of friends, some of them foreigners, one of whom talked to me in English. He explained to me that their personal luggage and all their household furniture had been sent on by a cheaper conveyance. I saw from their shapes that the bundles that the Italian woman had with her, both on and under the seat, were evidently the cooking utensils from which probably she could not bear to be parted; these were tied up in large handkerchiefs. She had no change of clothes or any travelling comforts with her, and the thought crossed my mind that I too must be rather travel-stained, for the journey had already lasted some days and nights. Being tired, my thoughts flew longingly on to my destination . . . and lo! I had arrived there! ... I found myself sitting on the lawn outside a large house at a tea-table round which my hosts and their numerous guests were gathered and were talking together.

My hostess was describing graphically a long motor-tour that they had lately made, which had taken them to a place in the neighbouring county of Sutherland, to a wonderful castle, in which the owner had collected together a number of priceless Italian pictures, and a library of books that would make the fortune of any European collector. How these extraordinary treasures had been obtained was a mystery which my host and hostess did nothing to solve. My host whispered the word "loot," but evidently did not wish to divulge any more than he could help about either the owner of the collection or the place where it was kept. The names of both person and place were hurriedly mentioned, but in an aside - and so murmured that I could not catch them. I asked for them to be repeated, but again they were so slurred over that I had no better success. I tried various devices to get them repeated afresh more clearly, but in vain. The owner's name, as I caught it imperfectly, sounded like Mor. I asked for an atlas, thinking that a study of the county of Sutherland might enable me to find out approximately the whereabouts of the strange castle and mysterious collection, for I now felt determined that whatever happened I would go there and investigate these treasures for myself.

But whenever I introduced the subject I was quietly put off by my hosts, and whilst I was still making plans an interruption occurred. Alas! I never found the way to the wonderful castle, although the dream of which this was the opening was a very long one.

A fresh impression too easily distracts our attention in a dream, and imagination beguiles us from the track we were following, and leads us down each new path that opens before us.

Although I find that in my own dreams a consecutive story is often pursued fairly steadily to its end, the experience of many people whom I have asked about dreams is that the centre of interest is continually shifting, and that a dream story is therefore very seldom complete or consistent. The power of continued close attention appears in many cases to be missing; and in this respect, at any rate, the imagination seems to work in sleep without the check that keeps it steadily directed on to one line of thought by day.

It is often assumed that in sleep all the mental faculties except imagination are dormant; and that the heightened powers that imagination acquires in dreams is due to the suspension of the other faculties that control it by day. I have tried to show that will-power does not come to a standstill, and that memory acts with increased force, and it should not be difficult to prove that in most dreams, if not in all, the reasoning faculty also operates with varying degrees of power. Indeed, unless we assume such co-operation, the construction and sequence of many dreams could not possibly be accounted for. The making of a coherent story in a dream requires the participation of the same functions of mind as those that enable us to construct such a story by day. The great diversity of dreams is seen in the fact that, whilst some show in a very high degree the powers of reasoning and constructive ability, others would dearly take a very low place in such a scale; but I believe that in all our dreams we make some attempt to reason.

Even in the very incoherent dreams, which are the dreams of more or less disordered sleep, in which the restraint that is generally imposed by the reason upon the imagination seems at first sight to have been lifted off, if we consider the matter attentively we see that reason is not really wholly in abeyance. Our reasoning in such disordered dreams may be very illogical, very perverse, but the reason is nevertheless at work trying hard to synthesise the scattered incoherent expressions that come floating up to the surface of the mind when we sleep. Exactly where the province of reason ends, and that of imagination begins, I do not know: the question must be left to philosophers to settle, for students of dreams are certainly not agreed about it. Whilst one writer looks on dreams as being simply the outcome of man's "strenuous instinct to reason," another sees them as the creation of imagination freed to a great extent from the control of the reasoning faculty. The truth probably is that we judge in this matter, as in so many others, largely according to the nature of our own experience, and see but one side of a shield which has its golden as well as its silver side.

A man whose dream life is very full and imaginative realises chiefly that side of dreaming; dreams are to such men what they were to Keats, a "great key to golden palaces ... ay, to all the mazy world of silvery enchantment." On the other hand, a man of scientific training and habit of thought, whose dream life has perhaps little in common with the visions of the poet, and who has learned to look upon all forms of mental activity as reducible at last to reasoning, will naturally attribute his dreams to the operation of that faculty. But both aspects may surely be true. In dreams, as in waking life, imagination is continually forming in our minds new images which have not been previously experienced, or experienced only partially or in different combinations; and reason is equally busy all the time synthesis-ing into unity these images and concepts of the mind. We do not always recognise it as reason in our dreams, because its results are so illogical, the reasoning that it achieves is so bad, and we are accustomed to judge of reason by its capacity to draw logical inferences.

But that is where waking reason and dream reason differ widely from each other; for many of the facts and memories that help us to arrive at logical conclusions by day are absent from our dream consciousness, and thus reason, working upon insufficient materials, comes to conclusions that are false and absurd.

Seasoning that is logical, as far as the facts in the possession of the dream mind allow it to be so, is a feature of most dreams, and indeed it seems as if, in the production of every dream, reason must take some share. Besides the general offices that it performs in all our dreams, levelling difficulties and explaining away inconsistencies that arise, it appears to be responsible for the curious debates that so often take place in them when some one in the dream advances arguments which we try to meet. We are, I conclude, really furnishing both argument and reply. My notes of dreams are full of such conversations, and often, like Dr. Johnson, in the dream that he described, I have the worst of the argument and have to fall back on admiring the readiness of my dream opponent. Sometimes, but more rarely, I appear to be wiser or more convincing than he is. The logical faculty is not very strongly developed in me, but it does not seem to have quite deserted me in the following odd little dream:

I was sitting by the side of a young man who was explaining to me his serious financial troubles. I did not know him; he was a red-haired, plain but pleasant youth, and was clearly very much worried. He had before him a paper on which there were written columns of figures, at which I looked over his shoulder. These were, it appeared, the sums, at varying rates per cent., that he had arranged to pay to money lenders.

"Can you possibly explain to me how much I've got to pay, and how much I've got left?" asked the youth.

"I don't understand a bit," I said, "but as far as I can make out from this paper you seem to have covenanted to pay a hundred per cent. per annum".

"Yes," he said, "that's about it, I expect. Doesn't it seem to you right and fair?"

I felt dreadfully puzzled (as I always am by figures).

"I don't know," I said, "but I think that seems all right for once, doesn't it? - a hundred per cent. once, but not a hundred per cent. per annum-----"

"Oh," said the young man, "by ------! Is that how it strikes you?"

In dreams of argument such as these, different faculties of the mind seem to be at work behind the scenes, prompting and moving in a life-like manner the puppets that occupy the dream stage.

Confronted by our own wisdom in this way, which makes it seem not our own but another's, we may, when we awake, have the agreeable sense that the best of the argument, the brightest of the replies, have really been ours; a great advantage possessed by the dream over real life, in which the consciousness that ours has only been at best l'esprit de l'escalier, so often effectually keeps in check any tendency to undue satisfaction with ourselves.