Nevertheless, I quite agree with Herr Volkelt that association, even in the most extended meaning, cannot explain all in the shaping of our dream-pictures.  The “phantastical power” which Cudworth talks about clearly includes something besides.  It is an erroneous supposition that when we are dreaming there is a complete suspension of the voluntary powers, and consequently an absence of all direction of the intellectual processes.  This supposition, which has been maintained by numerous writers, from Dugald Stewart downwards, seems to be based on the fact that we frequently find ourselves in dreams striving in vain to move the whole body or a limb.  But this only shows, as M. Maury remarks in the work already referred to, that our volitions are frustrated through the inertia of our bodily organs, not that these volitions do not take place.  In point of fact, the dreamer, not to speak of the somnambulist, is often conscious of voluntarily going through a series of actions.  This exercise of volition is shown unmistakably in the well-known instances of extraordinary intellectual achievements in dreams, as Condillac’s composition of a part of his Cours d’Etudes.  No one would maintain that a result of this kind was possible in the total absence of intellectual action carefully directed by the will.  And something of this same control shows itself in all our more fully developed dreams.

One manifestation of this voluntary activity in sleep is to be found in those efforts of attention which not unfrequently occur.  I have remarked that, speaking roughly and in relation to the waking condition, the state of sleep is marked by a subjection of the powers of attention to the force of the mental images present to consciousness.  Yet something resembling an exercise of voluntary attention sometimes happens in sleep.  The intellectual feats just spoken of, unless, indeed, they are referred to some mysterious unconscious mental operations, clearly involve a measure of volitional guidance.  All who dream frequently are occasionally aware on awaking of having greatly exercised their attention on the images presented to them during sleep.  I myself am often able to recall an effort to see beautiful objects, which threatened to disappear from my field of vision, or to catch faint receding tones of preternatural sweetness; and some dreamers allege that they are able to retain a recollection of the feeling of strain connected with such exercise of attention in sleep.

The main function of this voluntary attention in dream-life is seen in the selection of those images which are to pass the threshold of clear consciousness.  I have already spoken of a selective action brought about by the ruling emotion.  In this case, the attention is held captive by the particular feeling of the moment.  Also a selective process goes on in the case of the action of those associative dispositions just referred to.  But in each of these cases the action of selective attention is comparatively