It is plain at a glance that the simultaneous concurrence of wholly disconnected initial impulses will serve to impress a measure of disconnectedness on our dream-images.  From widely remote parts of the organism there come impressions which excite each its peculiar visual or other image according as its local origin or its emotional tone is the more distinctly present to consciousness.  Now it is a subjective ocular sensation suggesting a bouquet of lovely flowers, and close on its heels comes an impression from the organs of digestion suggesting all manner of obstacles, and so our dream-fancy plunges from a vision of flowers to one of dreadful demons.

Let us now look at the way in which the laws of association working on the incongruous elements thus cast up into our dream-consciousness, will serve to give a yet greater appearance of disorder and confusion to our dream-combinations.  According to these laws, any idea may, under certain circumstances, call up another, if the corresponding impressions have only once occurred together, or if the ideas have any degree of resemblance, or, finally, if only they stand in marked contrast with one another.  Any accidental coincidence of events, such as meeting a person at a particular foreign resort, and any insignificant resemblance between objects, sounds, etc., may thus supply a path, so to speak, from fact to dream-fancy.

In our waking states these innumerable paths of association are practically closed by the supreme energy of the coherent groups of impressions furnished us from the world without through our organs of sense, and also by the volitional control of internal thought in obedience to the pressure of practical needs and desires.  In dream-life both of these influences are withdrawn, so that delicate threads of association, which have no chance of exerting their pull, so to speak, in our waking states, now make known their hidden force.  Little wonder, then, that the filaments which bind together these dream-successions should escape detection, since even in our waking thought we so often fail to see the connection which makes us pass in recollection from a name to a visible scene or perhaps to an emotional vibration.

It is worth noting that the origin of an association is often to be looked for in one of those momentary half-conscious acts of waking imagination to which reference has already been made.  A friend, for example, has been speaking to us of some common acquaintance, remarking on his poor health.  The language calls up, vaguely, a visual representation of the person sinking in health and dying.  An association will thus be formed between this person and the idea of death.  A night or two after, the image of this person somehow recurs to our dream-fancy, and we straightway dream that we are looking at his corpse, watching his funeral, and so on.  The links of the chain which holds together these dream-images were really forged, in part, in our waking hours, though the process was so rapid as to escape our attention.  It may be added, that in many cases where a juxtaposition of dream-images seems to have no basis in waking life, careful reflection will occasionally bring to light some actual conjunction of impressions so momentary as to have faded from our recollection.