The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.

The image casts consciousness as a brief, illuminated display—visible, structured, and seemingly self-contained—yet continuously fed by, and returning to, a larger hidden reservoir. Read in broadly Freudian terms, it suggests that what we experience as deliberate thought is only a surface manifestation of deeper psychic processes (wishes, memories, conflicts) that remain largely out of awareness but supply the energy and material of mental life. The “falling back” implies that conscious contents do not remain stable; they sink again into nonconscious strata, where they may be transformed and later re-emerge in altered form (as symptoms, dreams, slips, or new ideas).