Just as a child's importunate "Why ?" is often silenced by a ridiculous caricature of an explanation, so the dreamer's intelligence is freed from its distress by the least semblance of a uniting order.
It thus remains true with respect even to our most coherent dreams, that there is a complete suspension, or at least a considerable retardation, of the highest operations of judgment and thought; also a great enfeeblement, to say the least of it, of those sentiments such as the feeling of consistency and the sense of the absurd which are so intimately connected with these higher intellectual operations.
In order to illustrate how oddly our seemingly rational dreams caricature the operations of waking thought, I may, perhaps, be allowed to record two of my own dreams, of which I took careful note at the time.
On the first occasion I went "in my dream" to the "Stores" in August, and found the place empty.

A shopman brought me some large fowls.

I asked their price, and he answered, "Tenpence a pound." I then asked their weight, so as to get an idea of their total cost, and he replied, "Forty pounds." Not in the least surprised, I proceeded to calculate their cost: 40x10=400/12=33-1/3.

But, oddly enough, I took this quotient as pence, just as though I had not already divided by 12, and so made the cost of a fowl to be 2s.9d., which seemed to me a fair enough price.
In my second dream I was at Cambridge, among a lot of undergraduates.

I saw a coach drive up with six horses.