Emotions can persist in the transition from waking to dreaming mind while the concomitant thoughts, which serve to anchor the feelings in some sort of unmovable reality, melt away and are lost. New thoughts, which are not discursive but the rapid creation and assimilation of whole situations - embryonic thoughts are richer in content and more complex than mature thoughts, the process of thought being one of abstraction and rigidification -  these are participatory states of affairs, which arise to take the place of waking thought in order to work in with the emotions, but they do so in a different way. The emotions become more labile, some of the painful binding is released, and more of the mind is brought to bear on them, while the emotional kernel is largely preserved. There is a functional dream representative of the self which is more fluid, more childlike than the waking self. An emotion having been lived through in a dream can emerge with quite a different colouring and on occasions this change can survive the restoration of the parameters of the waking predicament that initially brought it about. It is as if there was always something more concealed in the emotion than we were first aware of. This is similar to the cathartic function of dramatic art, but it makes a difference when the same mind is audience, actor, playwright, director, stage-manager, orchestra and even the very stage and all the props.