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The investigation of the mechanism of 'reconstruction dreams', that is of 'dreams in which a succession of events culminates as if by a marvelous coincidence, in a stimulus coinciding with an external stimulus of like nature which wakes the sleeper', is based on the terminology by Hughlings Jackson of vivid and faint images, a vivid image occurring when we actually see an object, a faint image when we merely think or visualize it. A dreamer may see in his dream what during the day he might only have been thinking. In a vivid image there is activation of all levels of the nervous system from the most primitive to the highest stages of evolutionary growth, whereas a faint image can function independently by 'representation'. The child in contrast to the adult is full of vivid images and relatively incapable of representation (faint images). The same is true in sleep and in psychosis, the highest centers no longer functioning independently of the lower ones.
The stimulus to a 'reconstruction dream' may arouse in the dreamer a faint image thus activating the substrates of the corresponding vivid image. The author offers no conclusive explanation why dream images seemingly antecede the stimulus which ultimately wakes the sleeper. As a partial answer he postulates that vivid images can be experienced only successively ('one can think of two colors simultaneously but not see two colors occupying the same space at the same moment'). Were the sleeper awake at the moment of the stimulus, he would experience faint images.
The author does not mention the dynamic and economic functions of dreams which serve the purpose of protecting the sleeper from disturbance of sleep.