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mind continues to exercise itself when we are asleep, and it exercises
itself as we have just seen on elements analogous to those of waking, on
sensations and memories; and also in an analogous manner combines them.
Nevertheless we have on the one hand normal perception, and on the other
the dream. What is the difference, I repeat? What are the psychological
characteristics of the sleeping state?

We must distrust theories. There are a great many of them on this point.
Some say that sleep consists in isolating oneself from the external
world, in closing the senses to outside things. But we have shown that
our senses continue to act during sleep, that they provide us with the
outline, or at least the point of departure, of most of our dreams. Some
say: "To go to sleep is to stop the action of the superior faculties of
the mind," and they talk of a kind of momentary paralysis of the higher
centers. I do not think that this is much more exact. In a dream we
become no doubt _indifferent_ to logic, but not _incapable_ of logic.
There are dreams when we reason with correctness and even with subtlety.
I might almost say, at the risk of seeming paradoxical, that the mistake
of the dreamer is often in reasoning too much. He would avoid the
absurdity if he would remain a simple spectator of the procession of
images which compose his dream. But when he strongly desires to explain
it, his explanation, intended to bind together incoherent images, can be
nothing more than a bizarre reasoning which verges upon absurdity. I
recognize, indeed, that our superior intellectual faculties are relaxed
in sleep, that generally the logic of a dreamer is feeble enough and
often resembles a mere parody of logic. But one might say as much of all
of our faculties during sleep. It is then not by the abolition of
reasoning, any more than by the closing of the senses, that we
characterize dreaming.

Something else is essential. We need something more than theories. We
need an intimate contact with the facts. One must make the decisive
experiment upon oneself. It is necessary that on coming out of a dream,
since we cannot analyze ourselves in the dream itself, we should watch
the transition from sleeping to waking, follow upon the transition as
closely as possible, and try to express by words what we experience in
this passage. This is very difficult, but may be accomplished by forcing
the attention. Permit, then, the writer to take an example from