being at its flood-tide, while yesterday another had its turn! Real life has not this freedom of interpretation which dream-life has; it is less poetic, less licentious; but, need I emphasise it, that our cravings, when wake, likewise merely interpret the nervous irritations, and, in correspondence with their requirements, determine their “canses"; that there is no essential difference between waking and dreaming: that even when very different stages of culture are compared, the freedom of conscious interpretation of the one is in no way inferior to the freedom in dreams of the other; that even our moral judgments and valuations are only images and imaginations of a physiological incident unknown to us, a kind of customary language for the designation of certain nervous irritants; that all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastical commentary on an known text, one perhaps not unknowable, yet felt? Take some trifling incident. Suppose some day we noticed in the marketplace a person laughing at us while we are passing: according to the craving which just then predominates in us, this incident will have various meanings to us, —and, according as we are constituted, it will be an altogether different incident. One takes it like a drop of rain; another shakes it off like an insect; a third one will try to pick a quarrel; another examines his garment, whether it may have given rise to derision; another again, in consequence thereof, muses on the ridiculous itself; a third is delighted at having unconsciously added a ray of
