TRIAL PERCEPTS
Consider the sequence of events: the dream pictures are
all related, at least individually, to the conversation in
question: microscope, slide, reflex and "scratchiness" are all
so many pictures jig-sawed out from this very context or
apperception-mass. The scratching sensation, we must
suppose, evoked these pictures serially, in the order stated.
If these images were what the psychologist calls "trial
percepts," we would expect from them just what we do find,
namely, an increasing degree of correspondence (relevancy)
between the stimulus-idea and the images, as they
appear.[33] Precisely so, the images of microscope, slide, reflex
and scratchy handwriting, as they successively come into
focus, conform more and more to the nature of the stimulus,
until the approximation ends in the idea of an all-absorbing
interest in "scratchy" marks. This visual image hardly
reaches precision before it becomes translated and transposed
to the tactile field of my ear; smoothly, as if it were one magic
lantern view dissolving into another. In fine, the presentation
of each image in the dream amounts to a groping effort
of the dreamer's nervous system to find a proper experiential
equivalent for the arriving stimulus. It is a trial-and-error
method of perceiving or apperceiving a stimulus by marshelling
associated ideas; in this case they are serially evoked;
(what might be called "oniric echelon"); in other cases the
trial apperceptions are blended smoothly (oniric fusion) or
heaped together in rough-and-tumble fashion, a kind of confusion
(conveniently called "oniric entassement") which
testifies sufficiently to the failures of the Unconscious t o
dispose smoothly of arriving excitations, and so emphasizes;
the theory of trial-and-error, as applied to dreams.
