From the letters that I have received I am quite sure that I made rather too much of a specialised class of the "journey" dream - the dream that you are packing and always, by some perversity, put in your newly - blacked boots or your sponge - bag with your clean white shirts, and no wrapping between, or that your cab - horse is struck with a paralysis that makes it almost impossible to catch even a South - Eastern train. The dreams, if they can be classified at all, ought to be classified rather in regard to the sensations and emotions they excite than to the illusory objects that appear as their exciting causes. And I find a like emotion of distress caused by many other fancies than the fancy that we are missing a train. I should, therefore, prefer to alter the title of this class into that of "Dreams of Trivial Inconvenience". It is a class that includes the missing of trains, but I quite see that it is only by an accident, due perhaps to the fact that I happen to travel pretty frequently, that the dream of trivial inconvenience commonly afflicts me under this guise.

Thus a correspondent writes: "The packing dream is the one that pursues me, but then I travel a great deal, and so I often go through the difficulties of not being able to close my trunk because it is too full". Another writes, "The journey dream is rare with me now, but used to take the form of not being able to find part of my dress" (presumably at a moment when time to catch the train was valuable).

A typical instance of the dream of trivial inconvenience is one that seems tolerably common with clergymen. They lose their place, or their memory, while preaching. Thus one writes: "One of my unpleasant dreams (being a clergyman) is that I am in church, and cannot find the Collect or Lessons or Psalms, and I stand for a full half - hour turning over the pages, backwards and forwards, in an agony, and cannot get any further. The strange thing is that the people whom I momentarily expect to get up and leave the church never seem to notice my dilemma" This latter circumstance is very peculiar. It would not be so peculiar if it were the experience of this dreamer only. In that case we might look on it as an accident. But it is in fact typical of what takes place, not in this class of dreams only, but also in the dream of inadequate clothing. As this same correspondent notices: "When going only half - dressed into a room full of people (in my dreams) and dreadfully conscious of the lapse from decency and good manners, nobody notices it in the least". It presents a very curious problem this, that "the people whom I momentarily expect to get up and leave the church never seem to notice my dilemma". It is very curious, because the whole scene is of course an invention of the mind, and yet the "people in the church," although they are only the puppets of the mind that is inventing the whole show, do not act in the manner that the mind expects them to act, neither is this manner of acting one that any previous experience could unconsciously suggest It all seems to raise a psychological problem of as much interest as difficulty.

I am too afraid of my own ignorance to venture even a conjectural explanation. It is true that "one never seems to be surprised" in dreams, as another correspondent notices, but it is hardly to be thought that we endow all the puppets of our dreams with the attitude of nil admirari. At least if we do so, the reason seems far to seek.

One form that the journey dream is apt to take does not concern itself either with packing or with vain endeavour to catch a train starting, but consists of "futile efforts to find the train in the bewildering intricacies of some nightmare railway" - probably Clapham Junction. It does not seem that this dream, in any of its forms, often causes sufficiently poignant discomfort to wake the dreamer, but I find that it sometimes does so (unless indeed the very fact of its waking him ought to put it outside the class of trivial inconvenience). And actually I find this the case in an instance almost exactly similar, except in its denoument, to the dream of the clergyman as narrated above. In this second instance it is the wife who writes of her husband's dream, apparently of no trivial inconvenience with him, as follows: "My husband, who is rector of this parish, is often tormented by a dream that he is reading the services in church - never in the sermon." (Perhaps he has sufficient fervour of extempore preaching to make the loss of his place in the sermon no matter of consequence.) "He fancies he is reading the service as usual, when he happens to lift his eyes from the book for a moment, and when he looks back at the book he cannot find the place He stops short, turns the leaves backwards and forwards, gets into a flurry, fancies the book is upside down, turns it, but still cannot read the right sentence, the congregation are all staring at him in astonishment, and then, in an agony of shame and confusion he awakes." Perhaps we are to conclude that this is a clergyman of a much more sensitive nature than the other, so that what is to the other but matter of trivial inconvenience is to this one very much more.

Certainly the latter is the manner in which it would be viewed in waking life by both; it is what we should expect. But for that very reason it is not nearly as typical as the former of the dreams of trivial inconvenience. Indeed the degree of the distress that it occasions seems to take it right out of that category and exalt it rather to the dignity of a genuine nightmare.

One correspondent writes: "The dream of difficulties in packing for a journey, I have known, but not as often as difficulties in reading, which you do not mention". This is worth a little notice, because there certainly appears a tendency for the dream of trivial inconvenience to repeat itself in the same form with the same person. Thus, the clergyman dreams of losing his place, the frequent traveller of troubles over his journey, but it does not often happen so far as I can learn that the same person will have more than one form of the trivial inconvenience dream at all constantly. He either has trouble with his journey or with his place in church or some other inconvenience of the kind, but one and the same person seldom suffers one at one time one at another. It rather looks as if the same cause, recurring in sleep, produced the same dream of trivial inconvenience pretty constantly. But the above is an instance of a dreamer who has sometimes one form and sometimes another of the dream of trivial inconvenience. I am led to think that such instances are rare.