The sources of this dream are, according to Wundt, as follows. First of all, he had, on the previous day, met the funeral procession of an acquaintance. Again, he had read of cholera breaking out in a certain town. Once more, he had talked about the particular lady with this friend, who had narrated facts which clearly proved her selfishness. The hastening to flee from the infected neighbourhood and to overtake the procession was prompted by the sensation of heart-beating. Finally, the crowd of red bier-followers, and the profusion of nosegays, owed their origin to subjective visual sensations, the “light-chaos” which often appears in the dark.
Let us now see for a moment how these various elements may have become fused into a connected chain of events. First of all, it is clear that this dream is built up on a foundation of a gloomy tone of feeling, arising, as it would seem, from an irregularity of the heart’s action. Secondly, it owes its special structure and its air of a connected sequence of events, to those tendencies, passive and active, to order the chaotic of which I have been speaking. Let us try to trace this out in detail.
To begin with, we may suppose that the image of the procession occupies the dreamer’s mind. From quite another source the image of the lady enters consciousness, bringing with it that of her deceased husband and of the friend who has recently been talking about her. These new elements adapt themselves to the scene, partly by the passive mechanism of associative dispositions, and partly, perhaps, by the activity of voluntary selection. Thus, the idea of the lady’s husband would naturally recall the fact of his death, and this would fall in with the pre-existing scene under the form of the idea that he is the person who is now being buried. The next step is very interesting. The image of the lady is associated with the idea of selfish motives. This would tend to suggest a variety of actions, but the one which becomes a factor of the dream is that which is specially adapted to the pre-existing representations, namely, of the procession on the further side of the street, and the cholera (which last, like the image of the funeral, is, we may suppose, due to an independent central excitation). That is to say, the request of the lady, and its interpretation, are a resultant of a number of adaptative or assimilative actions, under the sway of a strong desire to connect the disconnected, and a lively activity of attention. Once more, the feeling of oppression of the heart, and the subjective stimulation of the optic nerve, might suggest numberless images besides those of anxious flight and of red-clad men and nosegays; they suggest these, and not others, in this particular case, because of the co-operation of the impulse of consistency, which, setting out with the pre-existing mental images, selects from among many tendencies of reproduction those which happen to chime in with the scene.