THE SUBCONSCIOUS: Page 31

If this were to happen, then we would simply not be asleep. While discussing unconscious activity in terms of the dream-process, Freud makes an interesting observation which may explain some aspects of the capacity to learn during sleep. He points out that dreams substitute for many daytime thoughts and once investigated and understood, fit together with logic—indicating that the thoughts originate in normal mental life and that the complicated processes of conscious thinking are repeated in dream thoughts. He saw a continuous process from the first stimulus (often not consciously noted, but occurring during waking hours) to its completion at the onset of sleep. Freud considered this proof that extremely complex mental operations were possible without the cooperation of consciousness. Freud later made clear that the unconscious, precon-scious, and conscious thought development was not a matter of psychic topography. Eventually he concluded that the essential character of a preconscious idea was its connection with the residue of verbal ideas. He asserted that consciousness was overestimated by the psychologists of his day, describing the unconscious as the larger circle which included the smaller circle of the conscious. Further he wrote that everything conscious has a preliminary unconscious stage, although the reverse is not true. The unconscious, he said, is the "true psychic reality; in its inner nature it is just as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just