Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/297

Rh that are at the same time sensible and intelligible; such especially are the dreams of children. The very occurrence of such dreams, in which the mental processes fully resemble those of waking life, although they are never confounded with them, is in itself a strong argument against the view that dreams result from the isolated activity of siugle groups of brain cells. Secondly, there are dreams which are connected and have an evident meaning, but one the content of which is curious and surprising, so that we cannot fit them into the rest of our waking life. A person dreams, for instance, that his brother has been gored to death by a bull; he cannot account for his having come by such a curious notion nor can he relate it to any waking thought. Thirdly, there is the most frequent type of dream, where the mental processes seem disconnected, confused and senseless. These two latter types of dreams have a peculiar quality of strangeness and unreality; they are foreign to the other mental experiences of the subject, and cannot be inserted into any place in his waking thoughts. It is as though the subject has lived through a different range of experience, in another place or in another world, which apparently has no connection with the one to which he is accustomed. Now Freud holds that this sense of foreignness is an illusion, due to very definite causes, and that the mental processes that go to form dreams are in direct continuity with those of waking life.

In tracing the antecedents of dream processes Freud makes use, as has been said, of the psycho-analytic method, which essentially consists in the collecting and ordering of ihzfree associations that occur to the subject when he attends to any given theme and abrogates the selecting control over the incoming thoughts that is instinctively exercised by the conscious mind. If this method is applied to any component part of a dream, however senseless it may appear on the surface, mental processes are reached which are of high personal significance to the subject. The mental processes thus reached Freud terms the "dream thoughts" they constitute the "latent content " of the drea'm in contradistinction to the " manifest content," which is the dream as related by the subject. It is essential to keep distinct these two groups of mental processes, for on the appreciation of the difference between them rests the whole explanation of the puzzling riddles of dreams. The latent content, or dream thought, is a logical and integral part of the subject's mental life, and contains none of the incongruous absurdities and other peculiar features that characterise the manifest content of most dreams. This manifest content is to be regarded as an allegorical expression of the underlying dream thoughts, or latent content. The