We set out to study as carefully as possible the small field of dream consciousness belonging to a few persons, not, it may be, abnormal, of whom it was possible to speak with some assurance. The great naturalist, Linnæus, once said that he could spend a lifetime in studying as much of the earth as he could cover with his hand. However small the patch we investigate, it will lead us back to the sun at last. There is nothing too minute or too trivial. I have often remembered with a pang, how, long years ago, I once gave pain by saying, with the arrogance of boyhood, that it was foolish to tell one's dreams. I have done penance for that remark since. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin,' said the wise philosopher of the eighteenth century. I have cultivated, so far as I care to, my garden of dreams, and it scarcely seems to me that it is a large garden. Yet every path of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the universe. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 243: Certain phases of waking psychic life are, however, closely related to dreaming. This is obviously the case as regards day-dreaming or reverie. (See _e.g._ Janet, _Névroses et Idées Fixes_, vol. i. pp. 390-6.) It would also appear that wit is the result of a process analogous to that fusion of incompatible elements which we have found to prevail in dreams. Our dreams are sometimes full of usually ineffective wit; I could easily quote dreams in illustration. (Freud has, from his point of view, studied the analogy between wit and dreaming in _Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten_.)] [Footnote 244: In more recent times Moreau of Tours, especially, argued (_Du Haschich et de l'Aliénation Mentale_, 1845) that _haschisch_-intoxication is insanity, and that insanity is a waking dream.] [Footnote 245: In insane subjects a dream not uncommonly forms the starting point of a delusion, and many illustrative examples could be brought forward.] [Footnote 246: Marro, _La Pubertà_, pp. 286-92.] [Footnote 247: Freud, _Die Traumdeutung_, p. 13. Elsewhere (p. 135) Freud remarks: 'The deeper we go in the analysis of dreams the more frequently we come across traces of childish experience which form a latent source of dreams.' The same point had been previously emphasised by Sully, 'The Dream as a Revelation,' _Fortnightly Review_, March 1893.] [Footnote 248: C. M. Giessler, _Die Physiologischen Beziehungen der Traumvorgänge_, ch. iv.] [Footnote 249: Jewell, who gives illustrations in evidence, concludes (_American Journal of Psychology_, January 1905, pp. 25-8) that 'the confusion of dreams with real life is almost universal with children, and quite common among adolescents and adults.']