Likewise sleeping thoughts gradually merge with waking thoughts in the moments preceding awakening.
The last dreams of the night or hypnopompic visions generally dramatize our awakening in picturesque, symbolical fashion.
Here are several examples collected by Silberer from observations on himself:
"I return to my home with a party of people, take leave of them at the door and enter."
"After visiting some place, I drive home along the same road which lead me there."
"One morning I woke up and decided to doze off for another half hour: I dreamt then that I was locked up in a house and I woke up saying: 'I must have the lock broken open.'"
In hypnopompic visions we generally enter a house, a forest, a dark valley or take a train or a boat, or we fall (see typical dreams).
To sleep does not mean "perchance to dream," but to dream from the very second when we close our eyes to the time when we open them again.
"But I never dream," some one will surely say.
To which I will answer: Make experiments on yourself or some one else. Have some one wake you up fifty times or a hundred times in one night. Repeat the experiment as many nights as your constitution will allow and every time you wake up, you will wake up with the clear or confused memory of some dream.
Most people forget their dreams as they forget their waking thoughts. Unless some very striking idea came to my mind yesterday afternoon, I am likely to be embarrassed if some one asks me: "What were you thinking of yesterday afternoon?"
We shall see in another chapter that our dream thoughts are not in any way different from our waking thoughts, and that unless they have a special meaning there is no reason why they should obsess us more than our waking thoughts do.
In fact, a remembered dream is as important as an obsessive idea and has the same meaning. Thousands of futile dreams dreamt in one night may not leave a deeper impression on our "mind" than thousands of futile thoughts which flit through our consciousness in one day.
Before considering the origin of dreams I must restate briefly a proposition which I have discussed at length in _Psychoanalysis and Behaviour_, the indivisibility of the human organism.
The words physical and mental are lacking in any real meaning and there is no physical manifestation which it not inseparably linked with some psychic phenomenon. Emotions, secretions and attitudes may be studied separately for the sake of convenience, but in reality there cannot be any emotion which is not unavoidably accompanied by a secretion and betrayed by some attitude, nor can there be any attitude which is not accompanied by a secretion and interpreted by some emotion.