I like dreams of the future. Methods of inner imagery are the utmost valuable. These methods help realease creativity. The inability to allow oneself to relax sufficiently to let fantasy material into awareness seriously restricts the creative imagination. Another content of consciousness are cognitive mental operations. Thinking is such a complex subject that it is entirely out of the question to deal with it systematically here—instead it makes sense to simplify the subject so that we can talk about it in relation to everyday life. What we call thinking is also a process whereby psychic energy get ordered. Emotions focus attention by mobilizing the entire organism in an approach or an avoidance mode. Goals do it by providing images of desired outcomes. Thoughts order attention by producing sequences of images that are related to each other in some meaningful way. For instance, one of the most basic mental operations consist in the linking of cause and effect. How these beings in a person’s life can be easily observed when an infant first discovers that by moving his hand, he can ring the bell hanging over the crib. This simple connection is the paradigm on which much later thinking is based. With time, however, the steps from causes to effects become increasingly more abstract and removed from concrete reality. An electrician, a musical composer, a stockbroker considers simultaneously hundreds of possible connections between the symbols on which they are operating their minds—watts and ohms, notes and beats, the buying and selling prices of stocks.  

By now it is probably apparent that emotions, intentions, and thoughts do not pass through consciousness as separate strands of experience, but that they are constantly interconnected, and modify each other as they go along. A young man falls in love, and experiences all the typical emotions that love implies. He intends to win his lover’s heart, and begins to think how to reach his goal. He figures that getting himself a snazzy new car will win his mate’s attention. So the goal of earning money to buy a new car becomes embedded in the goal of wooing—but having to work more may interfere with going fishing and produce negative emotions, which generate new thoughts, which in turn may bring the boy’s goals in line with his emotions…the stream of experience always carries many such bits of information concurrently.  To pursue mental operations to any depth, a person had to learn to concentrate attention. Without focus, consciousness is in a state of chaos. The normal condition of the mind is one of informational disorder: random thoughts chase one another instead of lining up in logical causal sequences. Unless one learns to concentrate, and is able to invest the effort, thoughts will scatter without reaching any conclusion. Even day dreaming—that is, the linking together of pleasant images to create some sort of mental motion picture—requires the ability to concentrate, and apparently many child(ren) never learn to control their attention sufficiently to be able to daydream. Fantasy is just as much a part of the cognitive process as any other respectable thinking or memory system. Dreams to not confine themselves to the rules of drama.