Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/59

Rh Every one who has traveled much can not fail to possess, hidden in his psychic depths a practically infinite number of such forgotten pictures, devoid of all personal emotion. It is possible to maintain, as a matter of theory, that when they come up to consciousness, they are evoked by some real though untraceable resemblance which they possess with the psychic or physical state existing when they reappear. But that theory can not be demonstrated. Nor, it may be added, is it more plausible than the simple but equally unprovable theory that such scenes do really come to the surface of consciousness, as the result of some slight spontaneous disintegration in a minute cerebral center and have no more immediately preceding psychic cause than my psychic realization of the emergence of the sun from behind a cloud has any psychic preceding cause.

Similarly, in insanity, Liepmann in his study "Ueber Ideenflucht" has forcibly argued that ordinary logorrhea—the incontinence of ideas linked together by superficial associations of resemblance or contiguity—is a linking without direction, that is, corresponding to no interest, either practical or theoretical, of the individual. Or, as Claparède puts it, logorrhea is a trouble in the reaction of interest in life. It seems most reasonable to believe that in ordinary sleep the flow of imagery follows, for the most part, the same easy course. That course may to waking consciousness often seem peculiar, but to waking consciousness the conditions of dreaming life are peculiar. Under these conditions, however, we may well believe that the tendency to movement in the direction of least resistance still prevails. And as attention and will are weakened and loosened during sleep, the tense concentration on personal ends must also be relaxed. We become more disinterested. Personal desire tends for the most part rather to fall into the background than to become more prominent. If it were not a period in which desire were ordinarily relaxed sleep would cease to be a period of rest and recuperation.

Sleeping consciousness is a vast world, a world only less vast than that of waking consciousness. It is futile to imagine that a single formula can cover all its manifold varieties and all its degrees of depth. Those who imagine that all dreaming is a symbolism which a single cypher will serve to interpret must not be surprised if, however unjustly, they are thought to resemble those persons who claim to find on every page of Shakespeare a cypher revealing the authorship of Bacon. In the case of Freud's theory of dream interpretation, I hold the cypher to be real, but I believe that it is impossible to regard so narrow and exclusive an interpretation as adequate to explain the whole world of dreams. It would, a priori, be incomprehensible that sleeping consciousness should exert so extraordinary a selective power among the variegated elements of waking life, and, experientially, there seems