Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/507

Rh in addition, not merely a rehearsal of, but an advance upon, the foregoing stages. Those without much new progress or with only slight variations of the theme are clearly more frequent than those that browse in pastures new; and the simplest of these are hardly more than reverberations of neural excitement. After an ocean voyage many persons continue for days to react in their sleep to the sensation of the ship's motion, which enters variously into dream-composition. A young man, having been occupied during the day in hay-making, and another in rolling stones, each continues with the same operation in his dreams; a young lady having spent a weary day in making paper poppies sees rows of these in her dreams; and so on with familiar variations. The whereabouts of articles that have been mislaid and looked for strenuously, but in vain, is clearly revealed in a dream; anticipated examinations are rehearsed, and imaginary but pertinent questions set and answered; missing quotations are referred to their proper source; forgotten lines to complete a stanza are recalled; arguments to defend an actual position are passed in review; and in rarer cases such rational procedures find their way to utterance, the dreamer mumbling or speaking the words that express the onward movement of his thought; and in the rarest of cases the sleeper arises and records them. So various are these operations that it is safe to say that they include the entire range of psychological processes that enter into constructive thought; and likewise do they retain analogy to the intrinsic relations and modes of procedure that characterize them when performed with normal waking attention. Even these most rational achievements of the subconscious bear unmistakably the stamp of the normal habit of thought, and emphasize their conformity in spirit, along a variable divergence in form, to the characteristic traits of human psychology.

This collection of illustrations thus suggests upon what various occasions, with what different tempos, the mind freed of its normal guidance continues to trot with the accustomed gait, stopping, like the horse that draws the milk-cart, at the proper points of call without direction of the driver (who for the moment may be asleep); though, like the horse, content with the mere appearance of a service performed, unappreciative in part of its meaning, subject to lapses and inconsequential wanderings. But horse and driver are endowed with very different psychologies; and the relations that become established between them, however intimate and intelligent, reflect the limitations and divergence of needs and interests of the two. It is quite misleading to think of the subconscious as a veritable, independently organized 'psyche,' or as a subservient understudy, however partially apposite and wholly legitimate such comparisons may be as metaphorical aids. The conscious and the subconscious (if we may clothe these aspects of our mental life in substantive form) are two souls with but a single