It will be seen that at this point we are brought into contact with another characteristic of dream life: there is often more in dreams than dreaming consciousness is able to realise. On the one hand, the elements of dream life are drawn from a wider field than is normally accessible to waking consciousness; on the other hand, the focus of dream consciousness is narrower than that of waking consciousness, and cannot apperceive all that is going on. There is at once more extension and more contraction than in the psychic life of the waking world. A very large part of the psychic life of sleep is outside our power, and some of it is even beyond our sight. It will be observed that the perpetual movement and the constant fusion of images which constitute the most fundamental character of dream life really combine two characteristics which, abstractly regarded, are distinct. The tendency of the dream image to be ever changing, ever putting forth some new feature which more or less radically alters its nature, is not a phenomenon of precisely the same nature as the tendency for two definite images, well known to waking consciousness, to become fused together, consciously or unconsciously, in dreams. Practically, however, there is no line of demarcation. What happens is that the image is ever spontaneously changing, and that each change is at once recognised by dreaming consciousness as a known object. Thus I dreamed that I was in a drawing-room and saw a beautiful and attractive woman with an unusually low evening dress entirely revealing the breasts; then, between the breasts, three additional nipples appeared, and I realised in my dream that here was a case of supernumerary breasts of sufficient scientific interest to be carefully examined later on; and then, as I gazed, I saw a number of little fleshy nipple-like protuberances on the body, and thereupon I realised that I was really looking at a case of the rare skin disease termed _molluscum fibrosum_. Thus the perpetually wavering and developing image is at the same time a succession of quite different images. On the other hand, when we seem to have a fusion of two definite images, what we really see in most cases is one image melting into the other and gradually losing its earlier character. In either case the process is the same interplay of automatic peripheral imagery and central ideas, whether the new image is brought into focus by, as it were, a current in consciousness, or is merely suggested by a spontaneous change in the previous image. How far the image suggests the idea or the idea the image, it is extremely difficult in most cases to say. The phenomenon we witness is a perpetually dissolving view; the vital process behind that phenomenon we must usually be content to be ignorant of.