So far we have been concerned with the tendency in dreams to objectify portions of the body by constructing out of them new personalities. But precisely the same process goes on in sleep with regard to our thoughts and feelings. We split off portions of these also and construct other personalities out of them, and sometimes even endow the persons thus formed with thoughts and feelings more native to our own normal personality than those which we reserve for ourselves. Thus a lady who dreamed that when walking with a friend she discovered a species of animal fruit, a kind of damson containing a snail, expressed her delight at finding a combination so admirably adapted to culinary purposes; it was the friend who, retaining the attitude of her own waking moments, uttered an exclamation of disgust. Most of the dreams in which there is any dramatic element are due to this splitting up of personality; in our dreams we may experience shame or confusion from the rebukes or the arguments of other persons, but the persons who administer the rebuke or apply the argument are still ourselves.[167] Some writers on dreaming have marvelled greatly at this tendency of the sleeping mind to objectify portions of itself, and so to create imaginary personalities and evolve dramatic situations. It has seemed to them quite unaccountable except as the outcome of a special gift of imagination appertaining to sleep. Yet, remarkable as it is, this process is simply the inevitable outcome of the conditions under which psychic life exists during sleep. If we realise that a more or less pronounced degree of dissociation of the contents of the mind occurs during sleep, and if we also realise that, sleeping fully as much as waking, mind is a thing that instinctively reasons, and cannot refrain from building up hypotheses, then we may easily see how the personages and situations of dreams develop. Much the same process might, under some circumstances, occur in waking life. If, for instance, we heard an unknown voice speaking behind a curtain, we could not fail to build up an imaginary person in connection with that voice, the characteristics of the imaginary person being largely determined by the nature of the voice and of the things it uttered: it would, further, be quite easy to enter into conversation with the person we had thus constructed. That is what seems to occur in dreams. We hear a voice behind the curtain of darkness, and to fit that voice and the things it utters we instinctively form a picture which, in virtue of the hallucinatory aptitude of sleep, is thrown against the curtain; it is then quite easy to enter into conversation with the person we have thus constructed. It no more occurs to us during sleep to suppose that the voice we hear is only a voice and nothing more, than it would occur to us awake to suppose that the voice behind the curtain is only a voice and nothing more. The process is the same; the difference is that in dreams we