usion is likely to come to the surface in a dream.

Any sort of desire or need, left unsatisfied in the day, may motivate
a dream. Desire for food, warmth, sex gratification, air, money, etc.,
have been exemplified in dreams already cited. Curiosity may be the
motive, as in the case of an individual, who, having just come to live
in Boston, was much interested in its topography, and who saw one day
a street car making off in what seemed to him a queer direction, so
that he wondered where it could be going and tried unsuccessfully to
read its sign. The next night he dreamed of seeing the car near at
hand and reading the sign, which, though really consisting of nonsense
names, satisfied his curiosity during the dream.

The mastery motive, so prominent in daydreams, can be detected also in
many sleep dreams. There are dreams in {503} which we do big
things--tell excruciatingly funny jokes, which turn out when recalled
next day to be utterly flat; or improvise the most beautiful music,
which we never can recall with any precision, but which probably
amounted to nothing; or play the best sort of baseball. The gliding or
flying dream, which many people have had, reminds one of the numerous
toys and sports in which defiance of gravity is the motive; and
certainly it gives you a sense of power and freedom to be able, in a
dream, to glide gracefully up a flight of stairs, or step with ease
from the street upon the second-story balcony. One dream which at
first thought cannot be wish-fulfilling perhaps belongs under the
mastery motive: The dreamer sees people scurrying to cover, looks up
and sees a thunderstorm impending; immediately he is struck by
lightning and knocked down in the street; but he finds he can rise and
walk home, and seems to have suffered no harm except for a black
blotch around one eye. Now, any man who could take lightning that way
would be proud to wear the scar. So the dream was wish-fulfilling, and
the wish involved was, as often, the self-assertive impulse.

This last dream is a good one, however, for pointing another moral. We
need not suppose that the dreamer was aiming at the denouement from
the beginning of the dream. Dreams have no plot in most instances;
they just drift along, as one thing suggests another. The sight of
people running to cover suggested a thunderstorm, and that suggested
that "I might get struck", as it would in the daytime. Now, the dream
mentality, being short on criticism, has n