The careful study of mental life in its intimate union with bodily operations, and the comparison of dream-combinations with other products of the imagination, normal as well as morbid, have gradually helped to dissolve a good part of the mystery which once hung like an opaque mist about the subject.

In this way, our dream-operations have been found to have a much closer connection with our waking experiences than could be supposed on a superficial view.

The materials of our dreams are seen, when closely examined, to be drawn from our waking experience.

Our waking consciousness acts in numberless ways on our dreams, and these again in unsuspected ways influence our waking mental life.[71] Not only so, it is found that the quaint chaotic play of images in dreams illustrates mental processes and laws which are distinctly observable in waking thought.

Thus, for example, the apparent objective reality of these visions has been accounted for, without the need of resorting to any supernatural agency, in the light of a vast assemblage of facts gathered from the by-ways, so to speak, of waking mental life.