seem like little sheep; the dolls drink, eat and sleep; the child places a letter at the window for the Christ-child; he calls to the stork to bring him a little brother or sister; the cow is the wife of the horse, and the dog the husband of the cat. We know, too, that lower races, like the negroes, look upon the locomotive as an animal, and call the drawers of the table the child of the table.
As we learn through Freud, the dream shows a similar type. Since the dream is unconcerned with the real condition of things, it brings the most heterogeneous matter together, and a world of impossibilities takes the place of realities. Freud finds progression characteristic of thinking when awake; that is to say, the advancement of the thought excitation from the system of the inner or outer perception through the “endopsychic” work of association, conscious and unconscious, to the motor end; that is to say, towards innervation. In the dream he finds the reverse, namely, regression of the thought excitation from the pre-conscious or unconscious to the system of perception, by the means of which the dream receives its ordinary impression of sensuous distinctness, which can rise to an almost hallucinating clearness. The dream thinking moves in a retrograde manner towards the raw material of memory. “The structure of the dream thoughts is dissolved during the progress of regression into its raw material.” The reanimation of the original perception is, however, only one side of regression. The other side is regression to the infantile memory material, which might also be understood as regression to the original perception, but which deserves especial mention
