Each of these views is correct within certain limits; that is to say, there are dreams in which the strangest disorder seems to prevail, and others in which one detects the action of a central control.

Yet, speaking generally, sequences of dream-images will be found to be determined by certain circumstances and laws, and so far not to be haphazard or wholly chaotic.

We have now to inquire into the laws of these successions; and, first of all, we may ask how far the known laws of association, together with the peculiar conditions of the sleeping state, are able to account for the various modes of dream-combination.

We have already regarded mental association as furnishing a large additional store of dream-imagery; we have now to consider it as explaining the sequences and concatenations of our dream-elements.
_Incoherence of Dreams._ First of all, then, let us look at the chaotic and apparently lawless side of dreaming, and see whether any clue is discoverable to the centre of this labyrinth.

In the case of all the less elaborately ordered dreams, in which sights and sounds appear to succeed one another in the wildest dance (which class of dreams probably belongs to the deeper stages of sleep), the mind may with certainty be regarded as purely passive, and the mode of sequence may be referred to the action of association complicated by the ever-recurring introduction of new initial impulses, both peripheral and central.