When we consider that this dream process, with its perpetual dramatization of our own personality, has been going on as long as man has been man--and probably much longer, for it is evident that animals dream--it is impossible to overestimate its immense influence on human belief. Men's primitive conceptions of religion, of morals, of many of the mightiest phenomena of life, especially the more exceptional phenomena, have certainly been influenced by this constant dream experience. It is the universal primitive explanation of abnormal psychic and even physical phenomena that some other person or spirit is working within the subject of the abnormal experience. Certainly dreaming is not the sole source of such conceptions, but they could scarcely have been found convincing, and possibly could not ever have arisen, among races who were wholly devoid of dream experiences. A large part of all progress in psychological knowledge, and, indeed, a large part of civilization itself, lies in realizing that the apparently objective is really subjective, that the angels and demons and geniuses of all sorts that seemed at first to take possession of the feeble and vacant individuality are themselves but modes of action of marvelously rich and varied personalities. But in our dreams we are brought back into the magic circle of early culture, and we shrink and shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms that are built up of our own thoughts and emotions, and are really our own flesh. There is one other general characteristic of dreams that is worth noting, because its significance is not usually recognized. In dreams we are always reasoning. It is sometimes imagined that reason is in abeyance during sleep. So far from this being the case, we may almost be said to reason much more during sleep than when we are awake. That our reasoning is bad, even preposterous, that it constantly ignores the most elementary facts of waking life, scarcely affects the question. All dreaming is a process of reasoning. That artful confusion of ideas and images which at the outset I referred to as the most constant feature of dream mechanism is nothing but a process of reasoning, a perpetual effort to argue out harmoniously the absurdly limited and incongruous data present to sleeping consciousness. Binet, grounding his conclusions on hypnotic experiments, has very justly determined that reasoning is the fundamental part of all thinking, the very texture of thought. It is founded on perception itself, which already contains all the elements of the ancient syllogism. For in all perception, as he shows, there is a succession of three images, of which the first fuses with the second, which in its turn suggests the third. Now this establishment of new associations, this construction of images, which, as we may easily convince ourselves, is precisely what takes place in dreaming, is reasoning itself.