of occult association forces, I will record a dream
of my own. I fancied I was at the house of a distinguished literary
acquaintance, at her usual reception hour. I expected the friends I was
in the habit of meeting there. Instead of this, I saw a number of
commonly dressed people having tea. My hostess came up and apologized
for having asked me into this room. It was, she said, a tea-party which
she prepared for poor people at sixpence a head. After puzzling over
this dream, I came to the conclusion that the missing link was a verbal
one. A lady who is a connection of my friend, and bears the same name,
assists her sister in a large kind of benevolent scheme. I may add that
I had not, so far as I could recollect, had occasion very recently to
think of this benevolent friend, but I had been thinking of my literary
friend in connection with her anticipated return to town.

In thus seeking to trace, amid the superficial chaos of dream-fancy,
its hidden connections, I make no pretence to explain why in any given
case these particular paths of association should be followed, and more
particularly why a slender thread of association should exert a pull
where a stronger cord fails to do so. To account for this, it would be
necessary to call in the physiological hypothesis that among the nervous
elements connected with a particular element, _a_, already excited,
some, as _m_ and _n_, are at the moment, owing to the state of their
nutrition or their surrounding influences, more powerfully predisposed
to activity than other elements, as _b_ and _c_.

The subject of association naturally conducts us to the second great
problem in the theory of dreams--the explanation of the order in which
the various images group themselves in all our more elaborate dreams.

_Coherence of Dreams._

A fully developed dream is a complex of many distinct illusory
sense-presentations: in this respect it differs from the illusions of
normal waking life, which are for the most part single and isolated. And
this complex of quasi-presentations appears somehow or other to fall
together into one whole scene or series of events, which, though it may
be very incongruous and absurdly impossible from a waking point of view,
nevertheless makes a single object for the dreamer's internal vision,
and has a certain degree of artistic unity. This plastic force, which
selects and binds together our unconnected dream-images, has frequently
been referred to as a m