consciousness as the result of some slight spontaneous disintegration in a minute cerebral centre, and have no more immediately preceding psychic cause than my psychic realisation of the emergence of the sun from behind a cloud has any psychic preceding cause. Similarly, in insanity, Liepmann, in his study _Ueber Ideenflucht_, has forcibly argued that ordinary logorrhœa--the incontinence of ideas linked together by superficial associations of resemblance or contiguity--is a linking _without direction_, that is, corresponding to no interest, either practical or theoretical, of the individual. Or, as Claparède puts it, logorrhœa is a trouble in the reaction of _interest_ in life. It seems most reasonable to believe that in ordinary sleep the flow of imagery follows, for the most part, the same easy course. That course may to waking consciousness often seem peculiar, but to waking consciousness the conditions of dreaming life are peculiar. Under these conditions, however, we may well believe that the tendency to movement in the direction of least resistance still prevails. And as attention and will are weakened and loosened during sleep, the tense concentration on personal ends must also be relaxed. We become more disinterested. Personal desire tends for the most part rather to fall into the background than to become more prominent. If it were not a period in which desire were ordinarily relaxed, sleep would cease to be a period of rest and recuperation. Sleeping consciousness is a vast world, a world scarcely less vast than that of waking consciousness. It is futile to imagine that a single formula can cover all its manifold varieties and all its degrees of depth. Those who imagine that all dreaming is a symbolism which a single cypher will serve to interpret must not be surprised if, however unjustly, they are thought to resemble those persons who claim to find on every page of Shakespeare a cypher revealing the authorship of Bacon. In the case of Freud's theory of dream interpretation, I hold the cypher to be real, but I believe that it is impossible to regard so narrow and exclusive an interpretation as adequate to explain the whole world of dreams. It would, _a priori_, be incomprehensible that sleeping consciousness should exert so extraordinary a selective power among the variegated elements of waking life, and, experientially, there seems no adequate ground to suppose that it does exert such selective action. On the contrary, it is, for the most part, supremely impartial in bringing forward and combining all the manifestations, the most trivial as well as the most intimate, of our waking life. There is a symptom of mental disorder called _extrospection_, in which the patient fastens his attention so minutely on events that he comes to interpret the most trifling signs and incidents as full of hidden significance, and may so build up a systematised delusion.[157] The investigator of dreams must always bear in mind the risk of falling into