After puzzling over this dream, I came to the conclusion that the missing link was a verbal one.

A lady who is a connection of my friend, and bears the same name, assists her sister in a large kind of benevolent scheme.

I may add that I had not, so far as I could recollect, had occasion very recently to think of this benevolent friend, but I had been thinking of my literary friend in connection with her anticipated return to town.
In thus seeking to trace, amid the superficial chaos of dream-fancy, its hidden connections, I make no pretence to explain why in any given case these particular paths of association should be followed, and more particularly why a slender thread of association should exert a pull where a stronger cord fails to do so.

To account for this, it would be necessary to call in the physiological hypothesis that among the nervous elements connected with a particular element, _a_, already excited, some, as _m_ and _n_, are at the moment, owing to the state of their nutrition or their surrounding influences, more powerfully predisposed to activity than other elements, as _b_ and _c_.
The subject of association naturally conducts us to the second great problem in the theory of dreams--the explanation of the order in which the various images group themselves in all our more elaborate dreams.
_Coherence of Dreams._ A fully developed dream is a complex of many distinct illusory sense-presentations: in this respect it differs from the illusions of normal waking life, which are for the most part single and isolated.

And this complex of quasi-presentations appears somehow or other to fall together into one whole scene or series of events, which, though it may be very incongruous and absurdly impossible from a waking point of view, nevertheless makes a single object for the dreamer's internal vision, and has a certain degree of artistic unity.