to order the chaotic elements of dream-fancy in certain forms.  The perception of any possible relation between one of the crowd of new images ever surging above the level of obscure consciousness, and the old group at once serves to detain it.  The concentration of attention on it, in obedience to this impulse to seek for an intelligible order, at once intensifies it and fixes it, incorporating it into the series of dream-pictures.

Here is a dream which appears to illustrate this impulse to seek an intelligible order in the confused and disorderly.  After being occupied with correcting the proofs of my volume on Pessimism, I dreamt that my book was handed to me by my publisher, fully illustrated with coloured pictures.  The frontispiece represented the fantastic figure of a man gesticulating in front of a ship, from which he appeared to have just stepped.  My publisher told me it was meant for Hamlet, and I immediately reflected that this character had been selected as a concrete example of the pessimistic tendency.  I may add that, on awaking, I was distinctly aware of having felt puzzled when dreaming, and of having striven to read a meaning into the dream.

The rationale of this dream seems to me to be somewhat as follows.  The image of the completed volume represented, of course, a recurring anticipatory image of waking life.  The coloured plates were due probably to subjective optical sensations simultaneously excited, which were made to fit in (with or without an effort of voluntary attention) with the image of the book under the form of illustrations.  But this stage of coherency did not satisfy the mind, which, still partly confused by the incongruity of coloured plates in a philosophic work, looked for a closer connection.  The image of Hamlet was naturally suggested in connection with pessimism.  The effort to discover a meaning in the pictures led to the fusion of this image with one of the subjective spectra, and in this way the idea of a Hamlet frontispiece probably arose.

The whole process of dream-construction is clearly illustrated in a curious dream recorded by Professor Wundt.[98] Before the house is a funeral procession:  it is the burial of a friend, who has in reality been dead for some time past.  The wife of the deceased bids him and an acquaintance who happens to be with him go to the other side of the street and join the procession.  After she has gone away, his companion remarks to him, “She only said that because the cholera rages over yonder, and she wants to keep this side of the street to herself.”  Then comes an attempt to flee from the region of the cholera.  Returning to his house, he finds the procession gone, but the street strewn with rich nosegays; and he further observes crowds of men who seem to be funeral attendants, and who, like himself, are hastening to join the procession.  These are, oddly enough, dressed in red.  When hurrying on, it occurs to him that he has forgotten to take a wreath for the coffin.  Then he wakes up with beating of the heart.