y of that search which has been preserved by
popular tradition: it has grown up and kept pace with the constant
struggle to grasp the unattainable goal of men's desires; and the story
has been constantly growing in complexity, as new incidents were drawn
within its scope and confused with old incidents whose real meaning was
forgotten or distorted. It has passed through all the phases with which
the study of the spreading of rumours or the development of dreams has
familiarized students of psychology. The simple original stories, which
become blended and confused, their meaning distorted and reinterpreted
by the rationalizing of incoherent incidents, are given the dramatic
form with which the human mind invests all stories that make a strong
appeal to its emotions, and then secondarily elaborated with a wealth of
circumstantial detail. This is the history of popular legends and the
development of rumours. But these phenomena are displayed in their most
emphatic form in dreams.[131] In his waking state man restrains his
roving fancies and exercises what Freud has called a "censorship" over
the stream of his thoughts: but when he falls asleep, the "censor" dozes
also; and free rein is given to his unrestrained fancies to make a
hotch-potch of the most varied and unrelated incidents, and to create a
fantastic mosaic built up from fragments of his actual experience, bound
together by the cement of his aspirations and fears. The myth resembles
the dream because it has developed without any consistent and effective
censorship. The individual who tells one particular phase of the story
may exert the controlling influence of his mind over the version he
narrates: but as it is handed on from man to man and generation to
generation the "censorship" also is constantly changing. This lack of
unity of control implies that the development of the myth is not unlike
the building-up of a dream-story. But the dragon-myth is vastly more
complex than any dream, because mankind as a whole has taken a hand in
the process of shaping it; and the number of centuries devoted to this
work of elaboration has been far greater than the years spent by the
average individual in accumulating the stuff of which most of his dreams
have been made. But though the myth is enormously complex, so vast a
mass of detailed evidence concerning every phase and every detail of its
history has been preserved, both in the literature and the folk-lore of
the world, that