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THE INCIDENTAL WISH-FULFILMENT

The dream, viewed as a mere wish-fulfilment, is plainly a successful allegory. While the action of the principal cue or immediate stimulus had served to evoke the apperception-mass or context out of which this wish-phantasy was constructed,

at the same moment, there was an ulterior influence at work, dictating a process of re-arrangement of the secondary images, so as to give expression to my preference for reflexology as against histology. Besides, the ground appears to have already been so well prepared that we can readily explain the absence of evident signs of trial-and-error. For in dreaming that I look away from the microscope and turn with intensive interest to the reflex, I was still only giving effect to a preference which had already attached the emotions of liking and dislike, to these two objects of thought, respectively. The creative fancy in this instance, what Hobbes[34] called the fiction of the mind, has a very simple task to work upon: achieving the imaginary satisfaction of unadjusted feelings regarding the mental conflict between histology and reflexology. The microscope is accordingly reproduced naively with an "endeavor fromward" attached to it, and likewise the reflex, with an "endeavor toward" it.[39] Thus is the expression completed of a wish which had been partially outspoken in the conversation with Dr. X.

While the external physical stimulus (scratching) must be thought of as being represented dynamically somewhere in the arrival platforms of the brain, it is necessary to think of the internal psychic stimulus (or wish) as existing in the form of facilitations, or ready-made connections of ideas and motives, as it were awaiting, in a state of mobilization, the proper signal to discharge into consciousness. The expression of the wish thus became accessory to the apperception of the principal cue. The accessory wish-cue wrought its

effect coetaneously, during the apperceptive delay.

Granted the correctness of this explanation, does it not clearly conform to the statement of Emerson that "dreams are the maturation often of opinions not consciously carried out to statements, but whereof we already possessed the elements."[40]