1 Cf. Chapter X.

"A mother who sleeps by the side of her child will not stir at the sound of thunder, but the sigh of the child will wake her. Does she really sleep in regard to her child? We do not sleep in regard to what continues to interest us".

It is difficult and unwise to dogmatise about such a point as this, as each of us can speak only from his own limited experience; but judging from my own dream experience I should venture to say that this statement of M. Bergson's is not a convincing state-ment about dreaming sleep. It seems to me a misuse of words to say that we do not really "sleep" unless we cease wholly to be "interested," for the dreams which most often embody the preoccupations of the day are, I find, the deep dreams of the soundest sleeping time, the dreams, that is to say, of the deep night sleep occurring between midnight and about four o'clock in the morning.

The things which have principally absorbed us by day are not, of course, necessarily the things that will occupy the dream mind; but very often they do so occupy it. It happens constantly that some idea that fills our thoughts on one day will determine the course of our dreams either on the following night or, after an interval, a few nights later. For a long time I have very carefully recorded my dreams, and I find that the greater number of them are clearly suggested or modified by whatever has been the dominant thought or chief interest at the time. For instance, in my records of the dreams of deep sleep during the period from August to December, 1914, and also in 1915, 1916 and 1917,1 find that a very large proportion of them were founded on or were modified by the war, which was the natural preoccupation of all minds during those months and years. The anxieties that it involved, the local activities connected with the war, the organisation for the housing and care of war refugees - these thoughts seem to have suggested the greater number of my dreams, or to have worked their way into their fabric.

I did not, in short, to use M. Bergson's phrase, become "disinterested" when I slept; or really "sleep" at all And yet unless the word is used in some very different sense from the ordinary one, this is certainly not true, for my sleep was deep and real. I know that this constant continuance of interest, this carrying of the thought of the day into the dream life, is not an invariable experience. An artist whose life is one of great absorption in his work tells me that very seldom do the problems of his craft or the thought of his pictures enter into his dreams, even when they completely fill all his waking thoughts. Some authors say that when greatly preoccupied with the books that they were writing they have seldom dreamed of these. The experience of other writers is exactly the reverse of this; their books fill their dreams or make, at any rate, the starting-point from which most of them spring.

Besides dreams which arise from the predominant thought of the day, there are others which have their origin in any book that we are reading, especially if it be read late at night The tenor of the book will probably be greatly altered in the dream, for the dream mind will seize upon some problem suggested in its pages and will work it out afresh after its own manner. It may, for instance, take the outline of a story, transforming it completely, and evoking something so different from the original that it is hardly to be recognised.

Other dreams there are which grow out of some remembered word or name - a place-name very often. A name which he may have almost forgotten by day starts into prominence when the control of the normal mind ceases. Such a name or word is often the point of crystallisation from which a dream of adventure will radiate. In such a dream each fresh incident that occurs suggests another, and this in turn suggests some other associated idea or fragment of memory. All these float up from the reserves where thousands of remote, half-forgotten impressions must be stored away. The dream mind connects them all together and strings them into a whole, elaborating each incident and each memory in turn. Our intelligence, which, as M. Bergson says truly, does not surrender its reasoning faculty during sleep, insists all the time on finding explanations for every apparent discrepancy, bridging over the gaps, supplying the missing places in the dream story by calling up other memories. So well, indeed, does the reasoning faculty carry out its work, that I find as a rule little of that incongruity and inconsequence in my dreams, that "anarchy" of "dreaming sleep" that de Quincey speaks of and that many writers describe as being so essential a feature of dreaming.

On the contrary, the dream imagination and reasoning faculty generally fill up the gaps so effectually that the sequence of ideas and events goes forward quite naturally and without a hitch and with few of the absurdities that people lay so much stress upon.

The fact is there are dreams and dreams, and we must get rid of the assumption that each dream resembles all the others. To class them all together into one or two categories is nearly as absurd as to do the same thing with regard to thoughts, each dream being an intensely individual operation of the mind; so that whilst some pass through strange and confused transformations, many others are as logical and consecutive as an ordinary history of travel or adventure. Mr. Greenwood wrote of his own experience in terms that exactly describe such dreams:

"If there are wildly extravagant dreams without sense or order, others take a course as natural and consistent as an episode in real life. The theory that dreams are always occasioned by mental disorder seems to require that they should always be disorderly too, but they are not. Many are not. I cannot suppose that my experience differs from thousands of others; and not rarely, but commonly, I have dreams which are throughout as consistent in scene and circumstance as any story. Sometimes they are romantic and surprising; but none the less they move from point to point on a perfectly rational course. The little drama proceeds quite naturally, with no incursions of the grotesque, no lapse into extravagance, but often with slight Defoe-touches; such as the novelist thinks himself happy in contriving to heighten the similitude of his story. . . Contrivance is the word that would most certainly apply to the whole structure of such dreams were they the written work of the working day. . . . Another noteworthy characteristic of these dreams is that they seem to tale easily from a store of invention distinct from that which we draw upon with more or less effort in our waking hours." "My dreams," he adds elsewhere, "are almost invariably as pleasant as reading in a good book of romance, or listening to strange significant stories of real life."1