of printed paper swept from the gutter would have
some connection with the past day's event. But its significance, the
significance of the words printed upon it is so small, that we
relegate it into the limbo of the accidental and meaningless. There
is no vital connection between the many torn bits of paper--only an
accidental connection. Each bit of paper has reference to some actual
event: a bus-ticket, an envelope, a tract, a pastry-shop bag, a
newspaper, a hand-bill. But take them all together, bus-ticket, torn
envelope, tract, paper-bag, piece of newspaper and hand-bill, and they
have no individual sequence, they belong more to the mechanical
arrangements than to the vital consequence of our existence. And the
same with most dreams. They are the heterogeneous odds and ends of
images swept together accidentally by the besom of the night-current,
and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them.
It is always beneath our dignity to go degrading the integrity of the
individual soul by cringing and scraping among the rag-tag of accident
and of the inferior, mechanic coincidence and automatic event. Only
those events are significant which derive from or apply to the soul in
its full integrity. To go kow-towing before the facts of change, as
gamblers and fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a perverting
of the soul's proud integral priority, a rearing up of idiotic idols
and fetishes.

Most dreams are purely insignificant, and it is the sign of a weak
and paltry nature to pay any attention to them whatever. Only
occasionally they matter. And this is only when something _threatens_
us from the outer mechanical, or accidental _death_-world. When
anything threatens us from the world of death, then a dream may become
so vivid that it arouses the actual soul. And when a dream is so
intense that it arouses the soul--then we must attend to it.

But we may have the most appalling nightmare because we eat pancakes
for supper. Here again, we are threatened with an arrest of the
mechanical flow of the system. This arrest becomes so serious that it
affects the great organs of the heart and lungs, and these organs
affect the primary conscious-centers.

Now we shall see that this is the direct reverse of real living
consciousness. In living consciousness the primary affective centers
control the great organs. But when sleep is on us, the reverse takes place.
The great organs, being obstructed in their spont