EXERCISES
1. Outline the chapter.
2. Make a list of hobbies and amusements that you specially enjoy, and try to discover the sources of satisfaction in each.
3. Recall two stories that you specially enjoyed, and try to discover the sources of satisfaction in each.
4. How far does the account of daydreams given in the text square with your own daydreams, and how far does it seem inadequate?
5. An experiment on the speed of revery or of daydreaming. Beginning at a recorded time, by your watch, let your mind wander freely for a few moments, stopping as soon as your stream of thoughts runs dry. Note the time at the close. Now review your daydream (or revery), and tally off the several scenes or happenings that you thought of, so as to count up and see how many distinct thoughts passed through your mind. How many seconds, on the average, were occupied by each successive item?
6. Why do dreams seem real at the time?
7. Analysis of a dream. Take some dream that you recall well, and let your thoughts play about it, and about the separate items of it--about each object, person, speech, and happening in the dream--with the object of seeing whether they remind you of anything personally significant. Push the analysis back to your childhood, by asking whether anything about the dream symbolizes your childish experiences or wishes. To be sure, the psychoanalyst would object that the individual cannot be trusted to make a complete analysis of his own dream--just as the psychologist would object to your accepting the recalled experiences and wishes as necessarily standing in any causal relation to your dream--but, at any rate, the exercise is interesting.
8. Problems in invention. Solve some of these, and compare the mental process with that of reasoning.
(a) Devise a game to be played by children and adults together, to everybody's satisfaction.
(b) Imagine a weird animal, after the analogy of the centaur.
(c) Imagine an interesting incident, bringing in an old man, a little girl, and a waterfall.
(d) Design the street plan for an ideal small town, built on both sides of a small river.
9. Show how empathy might make us prefer a symmetrical building to one that is lop-sided.