the
dreamer, instead of appealing to the whole of his recollections for the
interpretation of what his senses perceive, makes use of what he
perceives to give substance to the particular recollection he favours:
thus, according to the mood of the dreamer and the idea that fills his
imagination at the time, a gust of wind blowing down the chimney
becomes the howl of a wild beast or a tuneful melody. Such is the
ordinary mechanism of illusion in dreams.

Now, if comic illusion is similar to dream illusion, if the logic of
the comic is the logic of dreams, we may expect to discover in the
logic of the laughable all the peculiarities of dream logic. Here,
again, we shall find an illustration of the law with which we are well
acquainted: given one form of the laughable, other forms that are
lacking in the same comic essence become laughable from their outward
resemblance to the first. Indeed, it is not difficult to see that any
PLAY OF IDEAS may afford us amusement if only it bring back to mind,
more or less distinctly, the play of dreamland.

We shall first call attention to a certain general relaxation of the
rules of reasoning. The reasonings at which we laugh are those we know
to be false, but which we might accept as true were we to hear them in
a dream. They counterfeit true reasoning just sufficiently to deceive a
mind dropping off to sleep. There is still an element of logic in them,
if you will, but it is a logic lacking in tension and, for that very
reason, affording us relief from intellectual effort. Many "witticisms"
are reasonings of this kind, considerably abridged reasonings, of which
we are given only the beginning and the end. Such play upon ideas
evolves in the direction of a play upon words in proportion as the
relations set up between the ideas become more superficial: gradually
we come to take no account of the meaning of the words we hear, but
only of their sound. It might be instructive to compare with dreams
certain comic scenes in which one of the characters systematically
repeats in a nonsensical fashion what another character whispers in his
ear. If you fall asleep with people talking round you, you sometimes
find that what they say gradually becomes devoid of meaning, that the
sounds get distorted, as it were, and recombine in a haphazard fashion
to form in your mind the strangest of meanings, and that you are
reproducing between yourself and the different speakers the scene
between Petit-Jean