We must remember, further, how great an apparent disorder will invade our imaginative dream-life when the binding force of resemblance has unchecked play.  In waking thought we have to connect things according to their essential resemblances, classifying objects and events for purposes of knowledge or action, according to their widest or their most important points of similarity.  In sleep, on the contrary, the slightest touch of resemblance may engage the mind and affect the direction of fancy.  In a sense we may be said, when dreaming, to discover mental affinities between impressions and feelings, including those subtle links of emotional analogy of which I have already spoken.  This effect is well illustrated in a dream recorded by M. Maury, in which he passed from one set of images to another through some similarity of names, as that between corps and cor.  Such a movement of fancy would, of course, be prevented in full waking consciousness by a predominant attention to the meaning of the sounds.

It will be possible, I think, after a habit of analyzing one’s dreams in the light of preceding experience has been formed, to discover in a good proportion of cases some hidden force of association which draws together the seemingly fortuitous concourse of our dream-atoms.  That we should expect to do so in every case is unreasonable, since, owing to the numberless fine ramifications which belong to our familiar images, many of the paths of association followed by our dream-fancy cannot be afterwards retraced.

To illustrate the odd way in which our images get tumbled together through the action of occult association forces, I will record a dream of my own.  I fancied I was at the house of a distinguished literary acquaintance, at her usual reception hour.  I expected the friends I was in the habit of meeting there.  Instead of this, I saw a number of commonly dressed people having tea.  My hostess came up and apologized for having asked me into this room.  It was, she said, a tea-party which she prepared for poor people at sixpence a head.  After puzzling over this dream, I came to the conclusion that the missing link was a verbal one.  A lady who is a connection of my friend, and bears the same name, assists her sister in a large kind of benevolent scheme.  I may add that I had not, so far as I could recollect, had occasion very recently to think of this benevolent friend, but I had been thinking of my literary friend in connection with her anticipated return to town.

In thus seeking to trace, amid the superficial chaos of dream-fancy, its hidden connections, I make no pretence to explain why in any given case these particular paths of association should be followed, and more particularly why a slender thread of association should exert a pull where a stronger cord fails to do so.  To account for this, it would be necessary to call in the physiological hypothesis that among the nervous elements connected with a particular element, a, already excited, some, as m and n, are at the moment, owing to the state of their nutrition or their surrounding influences, more powerfully predisposed to activity than other elements, as b and c.