The following rather comical dream illustrates quite as clearly the growth of a feeling of irritation and vexation, probably connected with the development of some slightly discomposing organic sensation.  I dreamt I was unexpectedly called on to lecture to a class of young women, on Herder.  I began hesitatingly, with some vague generalities about the Augustan age of German literature, referring to the three well-known names of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe.  Immediately my sister, who suddenly appeared in the class, took me up, and said she thought there was a fourth distinguished name belonging to this period.  I was annoyed at the interruption, but said, with a feeling of triumph, “I suppose you mean Wieland?” and then appealed to the class whether there were not twenty persons who knew the names I had mentioned to one who knew Wieland’s name.  Then the class became generally disorderly.  My feeling of embarrassment gained in depth.  Finally, as a climax, several quite young girls, about ten years and less, came and joined the class.  The dream broke off abruptly as I was in the act of taking these children to the wife of an old college tutor, to protest against their admission.

It is worth noting, perhaps, that in this evolution of feeling in dreaming the quality of the emotion may vary within certain limits.  One shade of feeling may be followed by another and kindred shade, so that the whole dream still preserves a degree, though a less obvious degree, of emotional unity.  Thus, for example, a lady friend of mine once dreamt that she was in church, listening to a well-known novelist of the more earnest sort, preaching.  A wounded soldier was brought in to be shot, because he was mortally wounded, and had distinguished himself by his bravery.  He was then shot, but not killed, and, rolling over in agony, exclaimed, “How long!” The development of an extreme emotion of horror out of the vague feeling of awe which is associated with a church, gives a curious interest to this dream.

Verisimilitude in Dreams.

I must not dwell longer on this emotional basis of dreams, but pass to the consideration of the second and objective kind of unity which characterizes many of our more elaborate dream-performances.  In spite of all that is fitful and grotesque in dream-combination, it still preserves a distant resemblance to our actual experience.  Though no dream reproduces a particular incident or chain of incidents in this experience, though the dream-fancy invariably transforms the particular objects, relations, and events of waking life, it still makes the order of our daily experience its prototype.  It fashions its imaginary world on the model of the real.  Thus, objects group themselves in space, and act on one another conformably to these perceived space-relations; events succeed one another in time, and are often seen to be connected; men act from more or less intelligible motives, and so on.  In this way, though the dream-fancy sets at nought the particular relations of our experience, it respects the general and constant relations.  How are we to account for this?