It is said by certain philosophers that this superposition of the relations of space, time, causation, etc., on the products of our dream-fancy is due to the fact that all experience arises by a synthesis of mental forms with the chaotic matter of sense-impressions.  These philosophers allow, however, that all particular connections are determined by experience.  Accordingly, what we have to do here is to inquire how far this scientific method of explaining mental connections by facts of experience will carry us.  In other words, we have to ask what light can be thrown on these tendencies of dream-imagination by ascertained psychological laws, and more particularly by what are known as the laws of association.

These laws tell us that of two mental phenomena which occur together, each will tend to recall the other whenever it happens to be revived.  On the physiological side, this means that any two parts of the nervous structures which have acted together become in some way connected, so that when one part begins to work the other will tend to work also.  But it is highly probable that a particular structure acts in a great many different ways.  Thus, it may be stimulated by unlike modes of stimuli, or it may enter into very various connections with other structures.  What will follow from this?  One consequence would appear to be that there will be developed an organic connection between the two structures, of such a kind that whenever one is excited the other will be disposed to act somehow and anyhow, even when there is nothing in the present mode of activity of the first structure to determine the second to act in some one definite way, in other words, when this mode of activity is, roughly speaking, novel.

Let me illustrate this effect in one of the simplest cases, that of the visual organ.  If, when walking out on a dark night, a few points in my retina are suddenly stimulated by rays of light, and I recognize some luminous object in a corresponding direction, I am prepared to see something above and below, to the right and to the left of this object.  Why is this?  There may from the first have been a kind of innate understanding among contiguous optic fibres, predisposing them to such concerted action.  But however this be, this disposition would seem to have been largely promoted by the fact that, throughout my experience, the stimulation of any retinal point has been connected with that of adjoining points, either simultaneously by some second object, or successively by the same object as the eye moves over it, or as the object itself moves across the field of vision.

When, therefore, in sleep any part of the optic centres is excited in a particular way, and the images thus arising have their corresponding loci in space assigned to them, there will be a disposition to refer any other visual images which happen at the moment to arise in consciousness to adjacent parts of space.  The character of these other images will be determined by other special conditions of the moment; their locality or position in space will be determined by this organic connection.  We may, perhaps, call these tendencies to concerted action of some kind general associative dispositions.