By this mechanism of dreaming, isolated impressions, or else impressions which have a resemblance or a connection which is not obvious to the waking intelligence, flow together in dreams to be welded into a whole. There is produced, in the strictest sense, a _confusion_. For instance, a lady, who in the course of the day has admired a fine baby and bought a big fish for dinner, dreams with horror and surprise of finding a fully developed live baby sewed up in a large cod-fish. Again, a lady who had been cooking in the course of the day and in the evening had read a scientific description of the way birds obtain and utilise their food, such as fruit and snails, dreams at night that she has discovered when out walking a kind of animal-fruit, a damson containing a snail within it, which she views with delight as admirably adapted for culinary purposes. Another lady, after carving a duck at dinner, dreams that she is trying to cut off a duck's leg, but seems to realise in her dream at the same time that it is really her husband's neck she is hacking at.[31] In a dream of my own, children's heads took the form and shape of flowers of various shapes and hues, though mainly of the composite order (like chrysanthemums), and their eyes looked out from between the petals. It must be added that in a very considerable proportion of cases the combinations produced in dreams are far more plausible than in any of the instances just narrated; the whole dream may thus easily follow as commonplace and matter-of-fact a course as in real life. Thus, after going to live in a new neighbourhood, I dreamed that I entered a shop belonging to a certain firm, and saw there an employé who, in real life, to my knowledge, had previously left another shop belonging to the same firm; an entirely probable combination was thus effected, and the dream conversation that followed was equally natural and probable. We do not go out of our way in dreams to invent absurdities; we simply accept the data presented to us, dealing with them as rationally as the intellectual instruments at our disposal may permit.