ly be
analyzed in terms of the instincts.

Day Dreams

Daydreaming is a sort of play, more distinctly imaginative than most
other play. Simply letting the mind run, as in the instances cited
under free association, where A makes you think of B and B of C, and
so on--this is not exactly daydreaming, since there is no "dream", no
castle in the air nor other construction, but simply a passing from
one recalled fact to another. In imaginative daydreaming, facts are
not simply recalled but are rearranged or built together into a story
or "castle" or scheme. A daydream typically looks toward the future,
as a plan for possible doing; only, it is not a serious plan for the
future--which would be controlled imagination--nor necessarily a plan
which could work in real life, but merely play of imagination. If we
ask the same questions here as we did regarding child's play, we find
again that it is easier to define the end-result and the source of
satisfaction in daydreaming than it is to define the stimulus or the
exact nature of the imaginative process.

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Daydreams have some motive force behind them, as can be judged from
the absorption of the dreamer in his dream, and also from an
examination of the end-results of this kind of imagination. Daydreams
usually have a _hero_ and that hero is usually the dreamer's self.
Sometimes one is the conquering hero, and sometimes the suffering
hero, but in both cases the recognized or unrecognized merit of
oneself is the big fact in the story, so that the mastery motive is
evidently finding satisfaction here as well as in other forms of play.
Probably the conquering hero dream is the commoner and healthier
variety. A classical example is that of the milkmaid who was carrying
on her head a pail of milk she had been given. "I'll sell this milk
for so much, and with the money buy a hen. The hen will lay so many
eggs, worth so much, for which I will buy me a dress and cap. Then the
young men will wish to dance with me, but I shall spurn them all with
a toss of the head." Her dream at this point became so absorbing as to
get hold of the motor system and call out the actual toss of the
head--but we are not after the moral just now; we care simply for the
dream as a very true sample of many, many daydreams. Such dreams are a
means of getting for the moment the satisfaction of some desire,
without the trouble of real execution; and the desire gratified is
very often some variety of self