Chapter X Conclusion
The Fundamental Nature of Dreaming—Insanity and Dreaming—The Child’s Psychic State and the Dream State—Primitive Thought and Dreams—Dreaming and Myth-Making—Genius and Dreams—Dreaming as a Road into the Infinite.
In the preceding chapters we have traced some of the elementary tendencies which prevail in the formation of dreams. These tendencies are in some respects so unlike those that rule in waking life—slight and subtle as their unlikeness often seems—that we are justified in regarding the psychic phenomena of sleeping life as constituting a world of their own.
Yet when we look at the phenomena a little more deeply we realise that, however differentiated they have become, dream life is yet strictly co-ordinated with other forms of psychic life. If we pierce below the surface we seem to reach a primitive fundamental psychic stage in which the dreamer, the madman, the child, and the savage alike have their starting point, and possess a degree of community from which the waking, civilised, sane adult of to-day is shut out, so that he can only comprehend it by an intellectual effort.243 It thus happens that the ways of thinking and feeling of the child and the savage and the lunatic each furnish a road by which we may reach a psychic world which is essentially that of the dreamer.
The resemblance of insanity to dream life has, above all, impressed observers from the time when the nature of insanity was first definitely recognised. It would be outside the limits of the present book to discuss the points at which dreams resemble or differ from insanity, but it is worth while to touch on the question of their affinity. The recognition of this affinity, or at all events analogy, though it was stated by Cabanis to be due to Cullen, is as old as Aristotle, and has constantly been put forward afresh. Thus in the sixteenth century Du Laurens (A. Laurentius), in his treatise on the disease of melancholy, as insanity was then termed, compared it to dreaming.244 The same point is still constantly brought forward by the more philosophic physician. ‘Find out all about dreams,’ Hughlings Jackson has said, ‘and you will have found out all about insanity.’ From the wider standpoint of the psychologist, Jastrow points out that not only insanity, but all the forms of delirium, including the drug-intoxications, are ‘variants of dream consciousness.’
The reality of the affinity of dreaming and insanity is well illustrated by a case, coming under the observation of Marro, in which a dream, formed according to the ordinary rules of dreaming, produced a temporary fit of insanity in an otherwise perfectly sane subject.245 In this case a highly intelligent but somewhat neurotic young man was returning to Italy after pursuing his studies abroad, and reached Turin, on the homeward journey, in a somewhat tired state. In the train he believed that he had detected some cardsharpers, and that they suspected him of finding them out, and bore him ill-will in consequence. This produced a state of general nervous apprehension. At the hotel his room was over the kitchen; it was in consequence very hot, and to a late hour he could still hear voices and catch snatches of conversation, which seemed to him to be directed against himself. His suspicions deepened, he heard noises, in reality due to the kitchen utensils, which seemed preparations for his murder, and he ultimately became convinced that there was a plot to set fire to his room in order to force him to leave it, when he would be seized and murdered. He resolved to escape, got out of the window with his revolver in his hand, found his way to another part of the house, encountered a man who had been awakened by his movements, and shot at him, believing him to be a party to the imaginary conspiracy. He was seized and taken to the asylum, where he speedily regained calm, and realised the delusion into which he had fallen. When questioned by Marro, on reaching the asylum, he was unaware that he had ever fallen asleep during the night; he could not, however, account for all the time that had elapsed before he left the room, and it was probable, Marro concludes, that he was in a state between waking and sleeping, and that his delusion was constituted in a dream. Fatigue, nervous apprehension, an unduly hot bedroom, the close proximity of servants’ voices, and the sound of kitchen utensils, had thus combined, in a state of partial sleep, to produce in an otherwise sane person, a morbid condition in every respect identical with that found in insane persons who are suffering from systematised delusions of persecution.246
The resemblance of the child’s psychic state to the dream state is an observation of less ancient date than that of the analogy between dreaming and insanity, but it has frequently been made by modern psychologists. ‘In dreams,’ says Freud, ‘the child with his impulses lives again,’247 and Giessler has devoted a chapter to the points of resemblance between dream life and the mental activity of children.248
I should be more especially inclined to find the dream-like character of the child’s mind at three points: (1) the abnormally logical tendency of the child’s mind and the daring mental fusions which he effects in forming theories; (2) the greater preponderance of hypnagogic phenomena and hallucinations in childhood, as well as the large element of reverie or day-dreaming in the child’s life, and the facility with which he confuses this waking imagination with reality; and (3) the child’s tendency to mistake, also, the dreams of the night for real events.249 This last tendency is of serious practical import when it leads a child, in all innocence, to make criminal charges against other persons.250 This tendency clearly indicates the close resemblance which there is for children between dream life and waking life; it also shows the great vividness which children’s dreams possess. In imaginative children, it may be added, a rich and vivid dream life is not infrequently the direct source of literary activities which lead to distinction in later life.251
The child, we are often told, is the representative of the modern savage and the primitive man. That is not, in any strict sense, true, nor can we assume without question that early man and modern savages are identical. But we can have very little doubt that in our dreams we are brought near to ways of thought and feeling that are sometimes closer to those of early man, as well as of latter-day savages, than are our psychic modes in civilisation.252 So remote are we to-day from the world of our dreams that we very rarely draw from them the inspiration of our waking lives. For the primitive man the laws of the waking world are not yet widely differentiated from the laws of the sleeping world, and he finds it not unreasonable to seek illumination for the problems of one world in the phenomena of the other. The doctrine of animism, as first formulated by Tylor (more especially in his Primitive Culture) finds in dreams the chief source of primitive religion and philosophy. Of recent years there has been a tendency to reject the theory of animism.253 Certainly it is possible to rely too exclusively on dreams as the inspiration of early man; if the evidence of dreams had not been in a line with the evidence that he derived from other sources, there is no reason why the man of primitive times should have attached any peculiar value to dreams. But if the animistic conception presents too extreme a view of the primitive importance of dreaming, we must beware lest the reaction against it should lead us to fall into the opposite extreme. Durkheim argues that it is unlikely that early man attaches much significance to dreams, for the modern peasant, who is the representative of primitive man, appears to dream very little, and not to attach much importance to his dreams. But it is by no means true that the peasant of civilisation, with his fixed agricultural life, corresponds to early man who was mainly a hunter and often a nomad. Under the conditions of civilisation the peasant is fed regularly and leads a peaceful, stolid, laborious, and equable life, which is altogether unfavourable to psychic activity of any kind, awake or asleep. The savage man, now and ever, as a hunter and fighter, leads a life of comparative idleness, broken by spurts of violent activity; sometimes he can gorge himself with food, sometimes he is on the verge of starvation. He lives under conditions that are more favourable to the psychic side of life, awake or asleep, than is the case with the peasant of civilisation.
Moreover, it must be remembered that all the peoples whom we may fairly regard as in some degree resembling early man possess a specialised caste of exceptional men who artificially cultivate their psychic activities, and thereby exert great influence on their fellows. These are termed, after their very typical representatives in some Siberian tribes, shamans, and combine the functions of priests and sorcerers and medicine men. It is nearly everywhere found that the shaman—who is often, it would appear, at the outset a somewhat abnormal person—cultivates solitude, fasting, and all manner of ascetic practices, thereby acquiring an unusual aptitude to dream, to see visions, to experience hallucinations, and, it may well be, to acquire abnormally clairvoyant powers. The shamans of the Andamanese are called by a word signifying dreamer, and in various parts of the world the shaman finds the first sign of his vocation in a dream. The evocation of dreams is often the chief end of the shaman’s abnormal method of life. Thus, among the Salish Indians of British Columbia, dreams are the proper mode of communication with guardian spirits, and ‘prolonged fasts, bathings, forced vomitings, and other exhausting bodily exercises are the means adopted for inducing the mystic dreams and visions.’254
When we witness the phenomena of Shamanism in all parts of the world it is difficult to dispute the statement of Lucretius that the gods first appeared to men in dreams. This may be said to be literally true; even to-day it often happens that the savage’s totem, who is practically his tutelary deity, first appears to him in a dream.255 An influence which seems likely to have been so persistent may well have had a large plastic power in moulding the myths and legends which everywhere embody the religious impulses of men. This idea was long ago suggested by Hobbes. ‘From this ignorance of how to distinguish dreams and other strong Fancies,’ he wrote, ‘from Vision and Sense, did arise the greatest part of the Religion of the Gentiles in time past, that worshipped Satyrs, Fauns, Nymphs, and the like.’256
Ludwig Laistner, however, appears to have been the first to argue in detail that dreams, and especially nightmares, have played an important part in the evolution of mythological ideas. ‘If we bear in mind,’ he said in the Preface to his great work, ‘how intimately poetry and religion are connected with myth, we encounter the surprising fact that the first germ of these highly important vital manifestations is not to be found in any action of the waking mind, but in sleep, and that the chief and oldest teacher of productive imagination is not to be found in the experiences of life, but in the phantasies of dream.’257 The pictures men formed of the over-world and the under-world have the character of dreams and hypnagogic visions, and this is true even within the sphere of Christianity.258 The invention of Hell, Maudsley has declared, would find an adequate explanation, if such is needed, in the sufferings of some delirious patients, while the apocalyptic vision of Heaven with which our Christian Bible concludes, is, Beaunis remarks, nothing but a long dream.259 And if it is true, as Baudelaire has said, that ‘every well conformed brain carries within it two infinites: Heaven and Hell,’ we may well believe that both Heaven and Hell find their most vivid symbolism in the spontaneous action of dreams.
In migraine and the epileptic aura visions of diminutive creatures sometimes occur, and occasionally micropsic vision in which real objects appear diminished. It has been suggested by Sir Lauder Brunton that we may here have the origin of fairies, at all events for some races of fairies; for fairies, though diminutive in some countries, as in England, are not diminutive in others, as in Ireland. A more normal and frequent channel of intercourse with such creatures is, however, to be found in dreams. This is illustrated by the following dream experienced by a lady: ‘I saw a man wheeling along a cripple. Eventually the cripple became reduced to about the size of a walnut, and the man told me that he had the power of becoming any size and of going anywhere. To my horror he then threw him into the water. In answer to my remonstrances that he would surely be drowned, the man said that it was all right, the little fellow would be home in a few hours. He then shouted out, “What time do you expect to get back?” The tiny creature, who was paddling along in the water, then took out a miniature watch, and replied: “About seven!”’260 In a dream of my own I saw little creatures, a few inches high, moving about and acting on a diminutive stage. Though I regarded them as really living creatures, and not marionettes, the spectacle caused me no surprise.
The dream-like character of myths, legends, and fairy tales is probably, however, not entirely due to direct borrowing from the actual dreams of sleep, or even from the hallucinations connected with insanity, music, or drugs, though all these may have played their part. The greater nearness of the primitive mind to the dream-state involves more than a tendency to embody in waking life conceptions obtained from dreams. It means that the waking psychic life itself is capable of acting in a way resembling that of the sleeping psychic life, and of evolving conceptions similar to dreams.
This point of view has in recent years been especially set forth by Freud and his school, who argue that the laws of the formation of myths and fairy tales are identical with the laws in accordance with which dreams are formed.261 It certainly seems to be true that the resemblances between dreams and legends are not adequately explained by supposing that the latter are moulded out of the former. We have to believe that on the myth-making plane of thought we are really on a plane that is more nearly parallel with that of dreaming than is our ordinary civilised thought. We are in a world of things that are supernormally enormous or delicate, and the emotional vibrations vastly enlarged, a world in which miracles happen on every hand and cause us no surprise. Slaughter and destruction take place on the heroic scale with a minimum expenditure of effort; men are transformed into beasts and beasts into men, so that men and beasts converse with each other.262
Finally, it may be observed that the atmosphere into which genius leads us, and indeed all art, is the atmosphere of the world of dreams. The man of genius, it is often said, has the child within him; he is, according to the ancient dictum, which is still accepted, not without an admixture of insanity, and he is unquestionably related to the primitive myth-maker. All these characteristics, as we see, bring him near to the sphere of dreaming, and we may say that the man of genius is in closer touch with the laws of the dream world than is the ordinary civilised man. ‘It would be no great paradox,’ remarks Maudsley, ‘to say that the creative work of genius was excellent dreaming, and dramatic dreaming distracted genius.’263 This has often been recognised by some of the most typical men of genius. Charles Lamb, in speaking of Spenser, referred to the analogy between dreaming and imagination. Coleridge, one of the most essential of imaginative men, argued that the laws of drama and of dreaming are the same.264 Nietzsche, more recently, has developed the affinity of dreaming to art, and in his Birth of Tragedy argued that the Appollonian or dream-like element is one of the two constituents of tragedy. Mallarmé further believed that symbolism, which we have seen to be fundamental in dreaming, is of the essence of art. ‘To name an object,’ he said, ‘is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment in a poem which is made up of the happiness of gradually divining; to suggest—that is our dream. The perfect usage of this mystery constitutes symbolism: to evoke an object, little by little, in order to exhibit a state of the soul, or, inversely, to choose an object, and to disengage from it a state of the soul by a series of decipherments.’265 It may be added that imaginative and artistic men have always been prone to day-dreaming and reverie, allowing their fancies to wander uncontrolled, and in so doing they have found profit to their work.266 From Socrates onwards, too, men of genius have sometimes been liable to fall into states of trance, or waking dream, in which their mission or their vision has become more clearly manifested;267 the hallucinatory voices which have determined the vocation of many great teachers belong to psychic states allied to these trances.
It is scarcely necessary to refer to the occasional creative activity of men of genius during actual sleep or to the debts which they have acknowledged to suggestions received in dreams.268 This has perhaps, indeed, been more often exaggerated than overlooked. There can be no doubt that a great many writers and thinkers, including some of the highest eminence, have sometimes been indebted to their dreams. We might expect as much, for most people occasionally have more or less vivid or suggestive new ideas in dreams,269 and it is natural that this should occur more often, and to a higher degree, in persons of unusual intellectual force and activity. But it is more doubtful whether the creative activity of normal dreams ever reaches a sufficient perfection to take, as it stands, a very high place in a master’s work. Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ has the most notable claim to be an exception to this rule. This poem was written by Coleridge in 1788, soon after ‘Christabel,’ and at a time when the poet was suffering much from depression, and taking a great deal of laudanum. We are entitled to assume, therefore, that the poem was composed under the influence of opium, and not in normal sleep. It may be added that it is difficult to believe that Coleridge could have recalled the whole poem from either a normal or abnormal dream; as a rule, when we compose verses in sleep we can usually recall only the last two, or at most four, lines.270 Moreover, there is reason to believe that the first draft of ‘Kubla Khan’ was not the poem as we now know it.271
After Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ the most important artistic composition usually assigned to a dream is the Trillo del Diavolo sonata of Tartini, the eighteenth-century composer and violinist, who has been called the prototype of Paganini. Tartini, who was a man of nervous and emotional temperament, seems to have possessed real genius, and this sonata is his principal work. But there is not the slightest ground for stating that it was composed in a dream, and Tartini himself made no such claim.272
The imaginative reality of dreams is perhaps appreciated by none so much as by those who are deprived of some of their external senses. Thus a deaf and dumb writer of ability who has precise and highly emotional dreams—which sometimes remind him of the atmosphere of Poe’s tales, and are occasionally in organised sequence from night to night—writes: ‘The enormous reality and vividness of these dreams is their remarkable point. They leave a mark behind. When I come to consider I believe that much that I have written, and many things that I have said and thought and believed, are directly due to these dream-experiences and my ponderings over how they came. Beneath the superficiality of our conscious mind—prim, smug, self-satisfied, owlishly wise—there lies the vast gulf of a subconscious personality that is dark and obscure, seldom seen or even suspected. It is this, I think, that wells up into my dreams. It is always there—always affecting us and modifying us, and bringing about strange and unforeseen new things in us—but in these dreams I peer over the edge of the conscious world into the giant-house and Utgard of the subconscious, lit by one ray of sunset that shows the weltering deeps of it. And the vivid sense of this is responsible for many things in my life.’273
Dreaming is thus one of our roads into the infinite. And it is interesting to observe how we attain it—by limitation. The circle of our conscious life is narrowed during sleep; it is even by a process of psychic dissociation broken up into fragments. From that narrowed and broken-up consciousness the outlook becomes vaster and more mysterious, full of strange and unsuspected fascination, and the possibilities of new experiences, just as a philosophic mite inhabiting a universe consisting of a Stilton cheese would probably be compelled to regard everything outside the cheese as belonging to the realm of the Infinite. In reality, if we think of it, all our visions of the infinite are similarly conditioned. It is only by emphasising our finiteness that we ever become conscious of the infinite. The infinite can only be that which stretches far beyond the boundaries of our own personality. It is the charm of dreams that they introduce us into a new infinity. Time and space are annihilated, gravity is suspended, and we are joyfully borne up in the air, as it were in the arms of angels; we are brought into a deeper communion with Nature, and in dreams a man listens to the arguments of his dog with as little surprise as Balaam heard the reproaches of his ass. The unexpected limitations of our dream world, the exclusion of so many elements which are present even unconsciously in waking life, impart a splendid freedom and ease to the intellectual operations of the sleeping mind, and an extravagant romance, a poignant tragedy, to our emotions. ‘He has never known happiness,’ said Lamb, speaking out of his own experience, ‘who has never been mad.’ And there are many who taste in dreams a happiness they never know when awake.274 In the waking moments of our complex civilised life we are ever in a state of suspense which makes all great conclusions impossible; the multiplicity of the facts of life, always present to consciousness, restrains the free play of logic (except for that happy dreamer, the mathematician), and surrounds most of our pains and nearly all our pleasures with infinite qualifications; we are tied down to a sober tameness. In our dreams the fetters of civilisation are loosened, and we know the fearful joy of freedom.
In this way the Paradise of dreams has been a reservoir from which men have always drawn consolation and sweet memory and hope, even belief, the imagination and gratification of desires that the world restrained, the promise and proof of the dearest and deepest aspirations.
Yet, while there is thus a real sense in which dreams produce their effect by the retraction of the field of consciousness and the limitation of the psychic activities which mark ordinary life, it remains true that if we take into account the complete psychic life of dreaming, subconscious as well as conscious, it is waking, not sleeping, life which may be said to be limited.275 Thus it is, as we have seen, that the most fundamental and the most primitive forms of psychic life, as well as the rarest and the most abnormal, all seem to have their prototype in the vast world of dreams. Sleep, Vaschide has said, is not, as Homer thought, the brother of Death, but of Life, and, it may be added, the elder brother.
‘We dream, see visions, converse with chimæras,’ said Joseph Glanvill, the seventeenth-century philosopher; ‘the one half of our life is a romance, a fiction.’ And what of the other half? Pepys tells us how another distinguished man of the same century, Sir William Petty, ‘proposed it as a thing that is truly questionable whether there really be any difference between waking and dreaming.’276 Our dreams are said to be delusions, constituted in much the same way as the delusion of the insane. But, says Godfernaux, ‘all life is a series of systematised delusions, more or less durable.’ Men weary of too much living have sometimes found consolation in this likeness of the world of dreams to the world of life. ‘When thou hast roused thyself from sleep thou hast perceived that they were only dreams which troubled thee,’ wrote the Imperial Stoic to himself in his Meditations; ‘now in thy waking hours look at these things about thee as thou didst look at those dreams.’ Dreams are true while they last. Can we, at the best, say more of life?
We set out to study as carefully as possible the small field of dream consciousness belonging to a few persons, not, it may be, abnormal, of whom it was possible to speak with some assurance. The great naturalist, Linnæus, once said that he could spend a lifetime in studying as much of the earth as he could cover with his hand. However small the patch we investigate, it will lead us back to the sun at last. There is nothing too minute or too trivial. I have often remembered with a pang, how, long years ago, I once gave pain by saying, with the arrogance of boyhood, that it was foolish to tell one’s dreams. I have done penance for that remark since. ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin,’ said the wise philosopher of the eighteenth century. I have cultivated, so far as I care to, my garden of dreams, and it scarcely seems to me that it is a large garden. Yet every path of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the universe.
Footnotes
1 The subdued quality of the light in normal dreaming—the usual absence of sunshine and generally even of colour—has long been noted. ‘We never dream of being in the sunshine,’ says Henry Dircks (Lancet, 11th June 1870, p. 863), though too absolutely; ‘light and shade form no requisite elements.... The liveliest and most impressive dream is, in reality, a true night scene, very dubiously lighted up, and in which the nearest objects are those which we principally observe and which most interest us.’
2 As some writers give a rather special meaning to the word ‘consciousness,’ I may say that I simply mean by it (as defined by Baldwin and Stout in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology) ‘the distinctive character of whatever may be called mental life,’ or, as Professor Stratton puts it, in defence of this broad definition (Psychological Bulletin, April 1906), ‘consciousness designates the common and generic feature of our psychic acts.’ Dreaming then becomes, as defined by Baldwin and Stout, ‘conscious process during sleep.’ It should be added that there is much uncertainty about any definition of consciousness. Bode (‘Some Recent Definitions of Consciousness,’ Psychological Review, July 1908) thinks it ‘a matter for legitimate doubt’ whether any definition of consciousness can be adequate, and Mercier (art. ‘Consciousness’ in Tuke’s Dictionary of Psychological Medicine) boldly proclaims—quite justly, I think—that ‘consciousness is not susceptible of definition,’ for we can never go behind it or outside it. That we have to admit various kinds, or at all events various degrees, of consciousness will become clear in our discussion of dreaming.
3 By ‘subconscious’ is meant, as defined by Baldwin and Stout, ‘not clearly recognised in a present state of consciousness, yet entering into the development of subsequent states of consciousness.’ Some psychologists strongly dislike the word ‘subconscious.’ They are even disposed to argue that there is no subconscious mind, and that before and after the stage of ‘awareness,’ psychic facts only exist as ‘dispositions of brain cells.’ The psychologist, however, as such, has no concern with brain cells which belong to the histologist. When we occupy ourselves with dreams we realise at every step that it is possible for psychic states to exist and to affect our ‘awareness,’ while at the same time they are not immediately within the sphere of that ‘awareness.’ Psychic states of this kind seem most properly termed ‘subconscious,’ that is to say slightly, partially, or imperfectly conscious. Any objection to so precise and convenient a term for a real phenomenon seems, indeed, to belong to the sphere of personal idiosyncrasy into which we have perhaps no right to intrude.
4 Foucault, Le Rêve, 1906.
5 Foucault, op. cit., ch. iv.
6 Foucault, op. cit., p. 49.
7 This occasionally retrospective character of dreams has long been known, and was referred to by the writer of an article on ‘Dreams and Dreaming’ in the Lancet for 24th November 1877.
8 The old French case (quoted by Macnish) of a woman, with a portion of her skull removed, whose brain bulged out during dreams but was motionless in dreamless sleep, as well as the more recent similar case known to Hammond (Treatise on Insanity, p. 233), supports the belief that the psychic activity which is not manifested in rememberable dreams is probably at the most of a very shadowy character. Even during waking life psychic activity often falls to a very low ebb; Beaunis, who has investigated this question (‘Comment Fonctionne mon Cerveau,’ Revue Philosophique, January 1909), describes a condition which he names ‘psychic twilight’ and regards as frequently occurring.
9 Lucretius long ago referred to the significance of this fact (lib. iv. vv. 988-994), and he stated that the hallucination persisted for a time even after the dog had awakened. I have never myself been able to see any trace of such hypnagogic hallucination or delusion in dogs who awake from dreams, though I have frequently looked for it; it always seems to me that the dog who seemingly awakes from a dream of hunting grasps the fireside facts of life around him immediately and easily.
10 This classification of the sources of dreams has, however, been generally accepted for little more than a century. At an earlier period it was not usually believed to cover the whole ground. Thus Des Laurens (A. Laurentius) in the sixteenth century, in his treatise on the Disease of Melancholy (insanity), says that there are three kinds of dreams: (1) of Nature (i.e. due to external causes); (2) of the mind (i.e. based on memories); and, above both these classes, (3) dreams from God and the devil.
11 M. W. Calkins, ‘Statistics of Dreams,’ American Journal of Psychology, April 1893.
12 The simile of the kaleidoscope for the most elementary process of dreaming has often suggested itself. Thus in an article on dreaming in the Lancet (24th November 1877) we read: ‘The combinations are new, but the materials are old, some recent, many remote and forgotten.... The turn of the kaleidoscope is instantaneous and any new idea thrown into the field, perhaps in the act of turning, becomes an integral part of the picture.’
13 Foucault, Le Rêve, p. 182.
14 This is in accordance with the view of Wundt, who attributes this multiplication of imagery to the retinal element.
15 Baron Charles Mourre, ‘La Volonté dans le Rêve,’ Revue Philosophique, May 1903.
16 Ribot, Psychologie de l’Attention, 1889, chs. i. and ii.
17 Maine de Biran, perhaps the earliest accurate introspective observer of dreaming, noted the absence of all voluntary active attention. Beaunis regards attention as possible in dreams, but fails to distinguish between different kinds of attention.
18 B. Leroy, ‘Nature des Hallucinations,’ Revue Philosophique, June 1907. As regards the importance of the absence of voluntary attention in the production of visual images, it may be remarked that even the after-image of a bright object in waking life is much more vivid when it occurs in a state of inattention and distraction. I noticed this phenomenon some years ago, especially when studying mescal, and in recent years it has been recorded by J. H. Hyslop (Psychological Review, May 1903).
19 We must be cautious in assuming that such imagery is purely retinal. Scripture (‘Cerebral light,’ Studies from the Yale Psychological Laboratory, vol. v., 1899) argues that even the so-called ‘retinal light’ or ‘eigenlicht’ is cerebral, not retinal at all, since it is single and not double, and differs from after-images, which are displaced by pressure on eyeball. This view is perhaps too extreme in the opposite direction.
20 For a full and interesting study of these, see S. J. Franz, ‘After-images’ (Monograph Supplements to Psychological Review, vol. iii., No. 2, June 1899). He agrees with those who regard after-images as entirely retinal in origin.
21 See Havelock Ellis, ‘A New Artificial Paradise,’ Contemporary Review, January 1898; ib. ‘Mescal: A Study of a Divine Plant,’ Popular Science Monthly, May 1902.
22 G. E. Partridge, however (‘Reverie,’ Pedagogical Seminary, April 1898), has investigated hypnagogic phenomena in 826 children. They were asked to describe what they saw at night with closed eyes before falling asleep. Among these children 58·5 per cent. of those aged from thirteen to sixteen saw things at night in this way; of those aged six the proportion was higher, 64·2 per cent. There seemed to be a maximum at about the age of ten, and probably another maximum at a much earlier age. Stars were most frequently mentioned, being spoken of by 151 children, colours by 145, people and faces 77, animals 31, scenes of the day 21, flowers and fruit 18, pictures 15, God and angels 13. Partridge calls these phenomena hypnagogic; while, however, the hypnagogic visions of adults may well be a relic of children’s visions, the latter have much greater range and vitality, for they are not confined to the moment before sleep, and the child sometimes has a certain amount of control over them. E. Guyon has studied hypnagogic and allied visions in children in his Paris thesis, Sur les Hallucinations Hypnagogiques, 1903. He believes that children always find them terrifying. That, however, is far from being the case and is merely due to a pre-occupation with morbid cases, which naturally attract most attention. (This is also illustrated by the examples given by Stanley Hall, ‘A Study of Fears,’ American Journal of Psychology, 1897, pp. 186 et seq.) The visions of the healthy child are not terrifying, and he accepts them in a completely matter-of-course way. He is no more puzzled or troubled by his waking dreams than by his sleeping dreams.
23 The earliest detailed, though not typical, description of this phenomenon I have met with is by Dr. Simon Forman, the astrologer, in his entertaining Autobiography, written in 1600. He says that, as a child of six, ‘So soon as he was always laid down to sleep he should see in visions always many mighty mountains and hills come rolling against him, as though they would overrun him and fall on him and bruise him, yet he got up always to the top of them and with much ado went over them. Then should he see many great waters like to drown him, boiling and raging against him as though they would swallow him up, yet he thought he did overpass them. And these dreams and visions he had every night continually for three or four years’ space.’ He believed they were sent him by God to signify the troubles of his later years. De Quincey accurately described the phenomenon in 1821, in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: ‘I know not whether my reader is aware, that many children, perhaps most, have a power of painting, as it were, upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms: in some, that power is simply a mechanic affection of the eye; others have a voluntary or a semi-voluntary power to dismiss or to summon them, or, as a child once said to me when I questioned him on this matter, “I can tell them to go and they go; but sometimes they come, when I don’t tell them to come.”’ E. H. Clarke (Visions, 1878, pp. 212-216) discussed the ability of children to see visions, and pointed out the element of will in this ability. It seems unusual for auditory impressions to intrude, though J. A. Symonds (biography by Horatio Brown, vol. i. p. 7), in describing his own night-terrors as a child, speaks of phantasmal voices which blended with the caterwauling of cats on the roof.
24 ‘From being long and vehemently attent upon geometrical figures,’ Hobbes says after referring to the after-images of the sun (Leviathan, part i., ch. 2), ‘a man shall in the dark (though awake) have the images of lines and angles before his eyes: which kind of fancy hath no particular name; as being a thing that doth not commonly fall into men’s discourse.’
25 Baillarger, ‘De l’Influence de l’Etat Intermédiaire à la veille et au sommeil sur la Production et la Marche des Hallucinations,’ Annales Médico-Psychologiques, vol. v., 1845.
26 Maury, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, 1861, pp. 50-77. Good descriptions of hypnagogic imagery are given by Greenwood, Imagination and Dreams, pp. 16-18, and Ladd, ‘The Psychology of Visual Dreams,’ Mind, 1892. See also Sante di Sanctis, I Sogni, pp. 337 et seq.
27 This is the explanation offered by, for example, Delage (Comptes-rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, vol. cxxxvi., No. 12, pp. 731 et seq.). It is accepted by Guyon and others. Delage insists on the retinal element since he finds that hypnagogic images follow the movements of the eye.
28 Similarly, under chloroform, Elmer Jones found that vision is at first stimulated.
29 G. H. Savage, ‘Dreams: Normal and Morbid,’ St. Thomas’s Hospital Gazette, February 1908.
30 British Medical Journal, 11th May 1907. The actual hallucinations of the insane are usually coloured normally. Head, however, finds (Brain, 1901, p. 353) that the waking visual hallucinations sometimes associated with visceral disease are always white, black, or grey, and never coloured or even tinted.
31 The transformation of birds into human beings seems peculiarly common in dreams. I have referred to this point elsewhere (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. i. 3rd ed., p. 193). It is an interesting and doubtless significant fact that the same transformation is accepted in the myths of primitive peoples. Thus, according to H. H. Bancroft (Native Races of the Pacific, vol. i. p. 93), a pantomime dance of the Aleuts represents the transformation of a captive bird into a lovely woman who falls exhausted into the arms of the hunter.
32 It is noteworthy that this marked tendency in dreams to discover analogies, although doubtless a tendency of primitive thought, is also a progressive tendency. ‘The conquests of science,’ says Sageret (‘L’Analogie Scientifique,’ Revue Philosophique, January 1909), ‘are the conquests of analogy.’
33 Maury, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, p. 115.
34 Kraepelin, ‘Ueber Sprachstörungen im Träume,’ Psychologische Arbeiten, Bd. v., 1906, pp. 1-104; cf. Lombard, ‘Glossolalie,’ Archives de Psychologie, July 1907.
35 This is confirmed by the fact that under chloroform anaesthesia hearing is the first sense to be lost and vision the last (Elmer Jones, ‘The Waning of Consciousness under Chloroform,’ Psychological Review, January 1909).
36 It may be recalled as not without significance that the formation of new words is fairly common among young children; see, e.g., an interesting correspondence in Nature, 26th March and 9th April 1891.
37 It can scarcely be derived from the unfamiliar word chalizah, the Hebrew name for the levirate.
38 Thus I have rarely ever attempted parody when awake, but once when at Montserrat, with thoughts far from humorous fields, I dreamed of making a parody (I am not quite clear of what) apparently suggested by the goose-pond in the cloisters of Barcelona Cathedral.
39 This point of view has been specially developed by Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten.
40 It may be noted that somewhat similar doggerel verse is sometimes made by the insane; see, e.g., Journal of Mental Science, April 1907, p. 284.
41 There was no known origin for this dream, and the word bourdon had no conscious associations for my mind; I was not even definitely aware that it is used in a musical sense.
42 Freud brings together (Traumdeutung, pp. 38 et seq.) some of the different opinions regarding reasoning in dreams.
43 ‘Reasoning,’ says Binet (La Psychologie du Raisonnement, 1886, p. 10), speaking without reference to dreaming, but in words that are exactly applicable to it, ’is an organisation of images determined by the properties of the images alone; it suffices for the images to be put in presence and they become organised; reason follows with the certainty of a reflex.’
44 H. R. Marshall, Instinct and Reason; ib. ‘Reason a Mode of Instinct,’ Psychological Review, March 1899.
45 Some of the most methodically absurd examples of dreaming logic cannot be effectively brought forward, as they are so personal that they require much explanation to make them intelligible.
46 Delacroix (‘Sur la Structure Logique du Rêve,’ Revue de Metaphysique, November 1904), in opposition to Leroy and Tobolowska, goes so far as to say that ‘the sense of the dream, the interpretation of the image, is given in the image, before the image, if one may say so; we are not concerned with a mere procession of images without internal connection, but are introduced into a pre-established organisation; wholes are decomposed and not separate elements united.’ We have to remember that in dream life as in waking life the action is twofold; in either world when our psychic activity is of low intensity we combine external images into a fairly objective picture; when psychic activity is intense external images are subdued and controlled by that activity.
47 A somewhat similar mistaken self-detachment may even occur momentarily in the waking condition. Thus Jastrow (The Subconscious, p. 137) refers to the ‘lapse of consciousness’ of a lady student who, while absorbed in her work, heard outside the door the shuffling of rubber heels such as she herself wore, and said ‘There goes——,’ naming herself. That delusion was no doubt due to the eruption of a dream-like state of distraction. As regards the visual phantasm of the self (which has sometimes been seen by men of very distinguished intellectual power) it may be noted that it is favoured by the conditions of dream life. Our dream imagery is all pictural, sometimes even to dream consciousness, and to see oneself in the picture is, therefore, not so very much more remarkable than it is in waking life to come upon oneself among a bundle of photographs.
48 As regards the significance of snakes in dreams, it may be remarked that the followers of Freud regard them as being, in the dreams of women, as they are in the speech and myths of primitive peoples, erotic symbols (e.g. Karl Abraham, Traum und Mythus, 1909, p. 19). It must be remembered, however, that this erotic symbolism is but a small part of the emotional interest aroused by snakes which are an extremely common source of fear, especially in the young. See e.g. Stanley Hall, ‘A Study of Fears,’ American Journal of Psychology, 1897, pp. 205 et seq.
49 It may even occur that a person partly wakes up, perceives what is going on around him, converses about it, falls asleep again, and imagines in the morning that the whole episode was a dream. Hammond, who also denies that we can dream we are dreaming, gives a case in illustration (Treatise on Insanity, p. 190).
50 The vision of the dream world we thus attain corresponds exactly to the philosophy of life set forth by Jules de Gaultier, perhaps the most subtle and original of living thinkers; according to Gaultier the psychic improvisation which has created the spectacle of the world has, as it were, sworn ‘never to recognise itself beneath the masks it has assumed, in order to retain the joy of an unending play of the unforeseen.’
51 Dissociation may be defined as a condition in which, in the words of Tannery (Revue Philosophique, October 1898), ‘the various organisms of the brain which in the waking state accomplish distinct functions with satisfactory agreement are, on the contrary, in a state of semi-independence.’ There is, in Greenwood’s words (Imagination in Dreams, p. 41), a ‘loosening of mental bonds,’ corresponding to the relaxation of muscular tension which also occurs before going to sleep.
52 Edmund Parish, Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of the Fallacies of Perception (Contemporary Science Series), 1897. It is significant to observe that in hysteria, which may be regarded as presenting a condition somewhat analogous to sleep, dissociation also occurs. ‘Hysteria,’ says Janet (The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907, p. 332), one of the greatest authorities, ‘is a form of mental depression characterised by the retraction of the field of personal consciousness and a tendency to the dissociation and emancipation of the system of ideas and functions that constitute personality.’
53 The theories of attention are lucidly and concisely set forth by Nayrac, ‘Le Processus et le Mécanisme de l’Attention,’ Revue Scientifique, 7th April 1906.
54 G. F. Stout, Analytic Psychology, vol. ii. p. 112. In the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, again, Stout and Baldwin define apperception as ‘the process of attention in so far as it involves interaction between the presentation of the object attended to, on the one hand, and the total preceding conscious content, together with pre-formed mental dispositions, on the other hand.’
55 A very similar state of things occurs in some forms of insanity, especially in the less profound states of mental confusion, when, as Bolton remarks (‘Amentia and Dementia,’ Journal of Mental Science, July 1906, p. 445), we find ‘certain associated remnants of former experience combined into a sequence according to the normal laws of mental association.’
56 Although I reached this conclusion independently, as a result of the analysis of dream experiences, I find that it was set forth at a much earlier period by Wundt. ‘Men are accustomed to regard most of the phantasms of dreams as hallucinations,’ he writes (Grundzüge der Physiologischer Psychologie, vol. iii.), ‘but most dream representations are apparently illusions, initiated by the slight sensory impressions which are never extinguished in sleep.’ Weygandt, in his brief but excellent book, Entstehung der Traäme, fully adopts this view, although I scarcely think he is always successful in his attempts to demonstrate it by his own dreams; such demonstration is necessarily often difficult or impossible because, apart from the dream itself, we seldom know what sensory impressions are persisting in our sleep. C. M. Giessler (Die Physiologische Beziehungen der Traumvorgänge, 1896, p. 2), who also proceeds from Wundt, likewise regards dreams as in general the more or less orderly and successive revival of psychic vestiges of waking life, conditioned by inner or outer excitations. Tissié (in Les Rêves, 1898), again, declares that ‘dreams of purely psychic origin do not exist,’ and Beaunis (American Journal of Psychology, July-October 1903) also believes that all dreams need an internal or external stimulus from the organism.
57 Thus W. S. Monroe (‘Mental Elements of Dreams,’ Journal of Philosophy, 23rd November 1905) found that in nearly three hundred dreams of fifty-five women students of the Westfield Normal College (Massachusetts), visual imagery appeared in sixty-seven per cent. dreams, auditory in twenty-six per cent., tactile in eight per cent., motor in five per cent., olfactory in a little over one per cent., and gustatory in rather under one per cent. In the results of observation recorded by Sarah Weed and Florence Hallam (American Journal of Psychology, April 1896) the sensory imagery appears in the same order of frequency and approximately in the same proportions.
58 In another case, a sensation of irritation in the palm led to a dream of being scratched by a cat. Guthrie mentions (Clinical Journal, 7th June 1899) that as a child he used to dream of being tortured by savages by being slowly tickled under the arms when unable to move; he sweated much at night, and considers that the tickling thus caused was the source of the dreams.
59 The corresponding sensation of heat can also, of course, be experienced in sleep, alike whether the stimulus comes from the brain or the skin. Thus I dreamed that, not knowing whether some water was hot or cold, I put my finger into it and felt it to be distinctly hot.
60 The ease with which musical sounds can be applied during sleep and the beneficial results on emotional tone have suggested their therapeutic use. Leonard Corning (‘The Use of Musical Vibrations before and during Sleep,’ Medical Record, 21st January 1899) is regarded as the pioneer in this field.
61 Ch. Ruths, Experimental-Untersuchungen über Musikphantome, 1898.
62 Dauriac, ‘Des Images Suggérées par l’Audition Musicale,’ Revue Philosophique, November 1902.
63 De Rochas has described and reproduced the gestures and dances of his hypnotised subject, Lina, under the influence of music. Ribot (L’Imagination Créatrice, pp. 177 et seq., 291 et seq.) has discussed the imagery suggested by music and points out that it is most pronounced in non-musical subjects. Fatigue and over-excitement are predisposing conditions in the production of this imagery, as is shown by MacDougall (Psychological Review, September 1898) in his own experience.
64 One is tempted to think that this lightning may have been a symbolistic transformation of lancinating neuralgic pains, magnified, as sensations are apt to be, in sleep.
65 In some experiments by Prof. W. S. Monroe on twenty women students at Westfield Normal School a crushed clove was placed on the tongue for ten successive nights on going to bed. Of 254 dreams reported as following there were seventeen taste dreams and eight smell dreams, and three of these dreams actually involved cloves. The clove also influenced dreams of other classes; thus, as a result of the burning sensation in the mouth, one dreamer imagined that the house was on fire (W. S. Monroe, ‘A Study of Taste Dreams,’ American Journal of Psychology, January 1899). It has indeed been found, by Meunier, specially easy to apply olfactory stimuli during sleep and so improve the emotional tone (R. Meunier, ‘A Propos d’onirothérapie,’ Archives de Neurologie, March 1910). Meunier found that in his own case tuberose always called out agreeable dreams full of detail, though in another subject the dreams were always unpleasant. In hysterical subjects essence of geranium provoked various agreeable dreams followed by a pleasant emotional tone during the following day.
66 Titchener (‘Taste Dreams,’ American Journal of Psychology, January 1895) records taste dreams by auto-suggestion, and Ribot (Psychology of the Emotions, p. 142) thinks there can be no doubt dreams of both taste and smell can occur without objective source.
67 Hammond (Treatise on Insanity, p. 229) knew a gentleman who dreamed he was in heaven and surrounded by dazzling brilliance, awaking to find that the smouldering fire had flared up. Weygandt dreamed that he was gazing at ‘living pictures’ illuminated by magnesium light, and awoke to find that the morning sun had just appeared from behind clouds and was flooding the room with light. See also Parish, Hallucinations and Illusions, p. 52.
68 I have discussed erotic dreams in the study of ‘Auto-erotism’ in the first volume of my Studies in the Psychology of Sex (third edition, revised and enlarged, 1910).
69 K. A. Scherner, Das Leben des Traums, 1861, pp. 187 et seq. Volkelt some years later (Die Traum-Phantasie, 1875, p. 74) pointed out the occurrence of somewhat similar vesical symbolisms (including in the case of women a filled knitting-bag) in dream life, though he regarded visions of water as the most usual indication in such dreams. Vesical dreams may, of course, contain other elements; see e.g. an example given by C. J. Jung, ‘L’Analyse des Rêves,’ L’Année Psychologique, 15th year, 1909, p. 165.
70 A typical dream of this kind, of sufficient importance to be embodied in history, occurred several thousand years ago to Astyages, King of the Medes, and has been recorded by Herodotus (Book 1. ch. 107).
71 In the study of Auto-erotism mentioned in a previous note I have brought forward dreams illustrating some of the points in the text, and have also discussed the analogies and contrasts between vesical and erotic dreams. The fact that nocturnal enuresis is associated with vesical dreams, though referred to by Buchan in his Venus sine Concubitu more than a century ago, is still little known, but it is obviously a fact of clinical importance.
72 So, for instance, the asthmatic patient of Max Simon (Le Monde des Rêves, p. 40) who, during an attack, dreamed of sweating horses attempting to draw a heavy waggon uphill.
73 Forbes Winslow also recorded cases (Obscure Diseases, pp. 611 et seq.), and many examples were brought together by Hammond (Treatise on Insanity, pp. 234 et seq.). Vaschide and Piéron discuss the matter and bring forward thirteen cases (La Psychologie du Rêve, pp. 34 et seq.). Féré recorded two cases in which dreams were the precursory symptoms of attacks of migraine (Revue de Médecine, 10th February 1903). Various cases, chiefly from the literature of the subject, are brought together by Paul Meunier and Masselon (Les Rêves et leur Interpretation, 1910).
74 Sante de Sanctis, I Sogni, p. 380.
75 The dependence of sleeping imagination on emotion of organic origin was long ago clearly seen and set forth by the acute introspective psychologist, Maine de Biran (Œuvres Inédites, ‘Fondements de la Psychologie,’ p. 102).
76 Jastrow (The Subconscious, p. 206) relates a similar case observed in a girl student.
77 Herbert Wright, who finds that in children night-terrors are apt to be associated with somnambulism, points out that when the somnambulism replaces the night-terrors it leaves no memory behind (British Medical Journal, 19th August 1899, p. 465). An interesting study of movement in normal and morbid sleep has been contributed by Segre (‘Contributo alla Conoscenza dei Movimenti del Sonno,’ Archivio di Psichiatria, 1907, fasc. 1.).
78 This question is, for instance, asked by F. H. Bradley (‘On the Failure of Movement in Dreams,’ Mind, 1894, p. 373). The explanation he prefers is that the dream vision is out of relation to the very dimly conscious actual position of the body, so that the information necessary to complete the idea of the movement is wanting. Only as regards the less complicated movements of lips, tongue, or finger, when the motor idea is in harmony with the actual position of the body movements, does movement take place. We have no means of distinguishing the real world from the world of our vision; ‘our images thus move naturally to realise themselves in the world of our real limbs. But the world and its arrangement is for the moment out of connection with our ideas, and hence the attempt at motion for the most part must fail.’ It is quite true that this conflict is an important factor in dreaming, but it fails to apply to the large number of movements which we dream of actually doing.
79 The action of some drugs produces a state in this respect resembling that which prevails in dreams. ‘Under the influence of a large dose of haschisch,’ Professor Stout remarks (Analytic Psychology, vol. i. p. 14), ‘I found myself totally unable to distinguish between what I actually did and saw, and what I merely thought about.’ Not only are the motor and sensory activities relatively dormant, but the central activity is perfectly able, and content, to dispense with their services. ‘Thought,’ as Jastrow says (Fact and Fable in Psychology, p. 386), ‘is but more or less successfully suppressed action.’
80 This seems to me to be the answer to the question, asked by Freud, (Die Traumdeutung, p. 227), why we do not always dream of inhibited movement. Freud considers that the idea of inhibited movement, when it occurs in dreams, has no relation to the actual condition of the dreamer’s nervous system, but is simply an ideatory symbol of an erotic wish that is no longer capable of fulfilment. But it is certain that sleep is not always at the same depth and that the various nervous groups are not always equally asleep. A dream arising on the basis of partial and imperfect sleep can scarcely fail to lead to the attempt at actual movement and the more or less complete inhibition of that movement, presenting a struggle which is often visible to the onlooker, and is not purely ideatory.
81 This explanation, based on the depth and kind of the sleep, is entirely distinct from the theory of Aliotta (Il Pensiero e la Personalità nei Sogni, 1905), who believes that dreamers differ according to their nervous type, the person of visual type assisting passively at the spectacle of his dreams, while the person of motor type takes actual part in them. I have no evidence of this, though I believe that dreams differ in accordance with the dreamer’s personal type.
82 Dugald Stewart argued that there is loss of control over the muscular system during sleep, and the body, therefore, is not subject to our command; volition is present but it cannot influence the limbs. Hammond argued, on the contrary, that Stewart was quite wrong; the reason why voluntary movements are not performed during sleep is, he said, that volition is suspended. ‘We do not will our actions when we are asleep. We imagine that we do, and that is all’ (Treatise on Insanity, p. 205). Dugald Stewart and Hammond, though their phraseology may have been too metaphysical, were, from the standpoint I have adopted, both maintaining tenable positions. In one type of dream, we imagine we easily achieve all sorts of difficult and complicated actions, but in reality we make no movement; the ease and rapidity with which the mental machine moves is due to the fact that it is ungeared, and is effecting no work at all. In the other type of dream we make violent but inadequate efforts at movement and only partially succeed; the machine is partially geared, in a state intermediate between deep sleep and the waking condition.
83 Jacques le Lorrain, Revue Philosophique, July 1895.
84 The systematic megalomania of insanity can, however, have its rise in dreams; Régis and Lalanne (International Medical Congress, 1900; Proceedings, Section de Psychiatrie, p. 227) met within a short period with four cases in which this had taken place.
85 This indeed seems to have been recognised by Wundt, who regards a ‘functional rest of the sensory centres and of the apperception centre,’ resulting in heightened latent energy which lends unusual strength to excitations, as a secondary condition of the dream state. Külpe (Outline of Psychology, p. 212) argues that the existence of vivid dreams shows that fatigue with its diminished associability fails to affect the central sensations themselves; this increased excitability resulting from dissociation may itself, however, be regarded as a symptom of fatigue; hyperaesthesia and anaesthesia are alike signs of exhaustion.
86 The exhaustion sometimes felt on awaking from a dream perhaps testifies to its emotional potency. Delboeuf states that a friend of his experienced a dream so terrible in its emotional strain that on awaking his black hair was found to have turned completely white.
87 The fundamental character of emotion in dreams has been more or less clearly recognised by various investigators. Thus C. L. Herrick, who studied his own dreams for many months, found that the essential element is the emotional, and not the ideational, and that, indeed, when recalled at once, with closed eyes and before moving, they were nearly devoid of intellectual content (Journal of Comparative Neurology, vol. iii. p. 17, 1893). R. MacDougall considers that dreaming is ‘a succession of intense states of feeling supported by a minimum of ideational content,’ or, as he says again, more accurately, ‘the feeling is primary; the idea-content is the inferred thing’ (Psychological Review, vol. v. p. 2). Grace Andrews, who kept a record of her dreams (American Journal of Psychology, October 1900), found that dream emotions are often stronger and more vivid than those of waking life; ‘the dream emotion seems to me the most real element of the dream life.’ P. Meunier, again (‘Des Rêves Stéreotypés,’ Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, September-October 1905), states that ‘the substratum of a dream consists of a cœnæsthesia or an emotional state. The intellectual operation which translates to the sleeper’s consciousness, while he is asleep, this cœnæsthesia or emotional state is what we call a dream.’
88 The night-terrors of children have frequently been found to have their origin in gastric or intestinal disturbance. Graham Little brings together the opinions of various authorities on this point, though he is himself inclined to give chief importance to heart disease producing slight disturbances of breathing, since he has found that in nearly two-thirds of his cases (17 out of 30) night-terrors were associated with early heart disease (Graham Little, ‘The Causation of Night-Terrors,’ British Medical Journal, 19th August 1899). It should be added that night-terrors are more usually divided into two classes: (1) idiopathic (purely cerebral in origin), and (2) symptomatic (due to reflex disturbance caused by various local disorders); see e.g. Guthrie, ‘On Night-Terrors,’ Clinical Journal, 7th January 1899. J. A. Symonds has well described his own night-terrors as a child (Horatio Brown, J. A. Symonds, vol. i.). Lafcadio Hearn (in a paper on ‘Nightmare-Touch’ in Shadowings) also gives a vivid account of his own childish night-terrors.
89 It has not, I believe, been pointed out that such dreams might be invoked in support of the James-Lange or physiological theory of emotion, according to which the element of bodily change in emotion is the cause and not the result of the emotion.
90 This physiological symbolism was clearly apprehended long ago by Hobbes: ‘As anger causeth heat in some parts of the body when we are awake; so when we sleep the overheating of the same parts causeth anger, and raiseth up in the brain the imagination of an enemy. In the same manner as natural kindness, when we are awake, causeth desire and desire makes heat in certain other parts of the body; so also, too much heat in those parts, while we sleep, raiseth in the brain an imagination of some kindness shown. In sum, our dreams are the reverse of our waking imaginations; the motion, when we are awake, beginning at one end, and when we dream at another’ (Leviathan, Part 1. ch. 2).
91 ‘The pains of disappointment, of anxiety, of unsuccess, of all displeasing emotions,’ remarks Mercier (art. ‘Consciousness,’ Tuke’s Dictionary of Psychological Medicine), ‘are attended by a definite feeling of misery which is referred in every case to the epigastrium.’ He adds that the pleasures of success and good repute, aesthetic enjoyment, etc., are also attended by a definite feeling in the same region. This fact indicates the extreme vagueness of organic sensation. There is in fact much uncertainty and great difference of opinion as to the nature, and even the existence, of organic sensation; see e.g. a careful summary of the chief views by Dr. Elsie Murray, ‘Organic Sensation,’ American Journal of Psychology, July 1909.
92 More than ten years later, the same dreamer, who had entirely forgotten the circumstances of this dream, again had a vivid dream of murder after eating pheasant at night; this time it was she herself who was to be killed, and she awoke imagining that she was struggling with the would-be murderer.
93 F. Greenwood, Imagination in Dreams, p. 31.
94 Dreams of railway travelling, and especially of losing trains, are not always associated with headache or any other recognisable condition. They constitute a very common type of dream not quite easy to explain. Dr. Savage mentions, for instance, that in his own case scarcely a week passes without such a dream, though in real life he scarcely ever loses a train and never worries about it. Wundt considers that the dreams in which we seek something we cannot find or have left something behind are due to indefinite coenaesthesic disturbances involving feelings of the same emotional tone, such as an uncomfortable position or a slight irregularity of respiration. I have myself independently observed the same connection, though it is not invariably traceable.
95 E. H. Clarke, Visions, p. 294.
96 An amusing, though solemn, interpretation of an ordinary dream of murder, railway travelling, and impending death, as experienced by Anna Kingsford, is furnished by her friend and biographer, Edward Maitland, Anna Kingsford, vol. i. p. 117.
97 Various opinions in regard to morality in dreams are brought together by Freud, Die Traumdeutung, pp. 45 et seq.
98 Head (‘Mental Changes that Accompany Visceral Diseases,’ Brain, 1902, p. 802) refers to the association between visceral pain and the anti-social impulses, and thinks that the viscera, being part of the oldest and most autonomic system of the body, appear in consciousness as ’an intrusion from without, an inexplicable obsession.’
99 ‘In my dreams,’ W. D. Howells remarks, ‘I am always less sorry for my misdeeds than for their possible discovery’ (‘True I talk of Dreams,’ Harper’s Magazine, May 1895).
100 Bk. IV. 1014-15:
‘de montibus altis
Se quasi præcipitent ad terram corpore toto.’
101 ‘It has many times happened to me,’ says the innkeeper’s daughter in Don Quixote (Part I. ch. xvi.), ‘to dream that I was falling down from a tower and never coming to the ground, and when I awoke from the dream to find myself as weak and shaken as if I had really fallen.’
102 Chabaneix, Le Subconscient, p. 43.
103 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed., vol. i. p. 773.
104 L’Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et des Curieux, May 31, 1906.
105 De Rochas describes the phenomenon as ‘a property of the human organism, more or less developed in different individuals, when the soul, disengaging itself from the bonds of the body, enters the domain, still so mysterious, of dreams’ (L’Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et des Curieux, May 10, 1906). In subsequent numbers of the Intermédiaire various correspondents describe their own experiences of such dreams. In Luce e Ombra for June 1906, and in the Echo du Merveilleux for the same date, neither of which I have seen, are given other experiences.
106 Annals of Psychical Research, November 1896.
107 Horace Hutchinson, Dreams and their Meanings, p. 76.
108 American Journal of Psychology, July-October 1903, p. 14.
109 ‘The wish to be able to fly,’ he declares (Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, p. 59), ‘signifies in dreaming nothing else but the desire to be capable of sexual activities. It is a wish of early childhood.’
110 Stanley Hall, American Journal of Psychology, January 1879, p. 158; also F. E. Bolton, ‘Hydro-Psychoses,’ ib., January 1899, p. 183; as regards rudimentary gill-slits, Bland Sutton, Evolution and Disease, pp. 48 et seq. Lafcadio Hearn travels still further along this road in search for an explanation of dreams of flight, and evokes a ‘memory of vanished planets with fainter powers of gravitation,’ but he fails to state when the ancestors of man inhabited these problematical planets.
111 I retain this statement of my explanation in almost the same words as first written down in 1895. I was not then aware that several psychologists had offered very similar explanations. Scherner (Das Leben des Traumes, 1861) seems to have been the first to connect the lungs with dreams of flying, though he put forward the explanation in too fanciful a form and failed to realise that other factors, notably a change in skin pressure, are also involved. Strümpell at a later date recognised this explanation, as well as Wundt.
112 It is the same with chloroform. ‘There are marked sensations in the vicinity of the heart,’ says Elmer Jones (‘The Waning of Consciousness under Chloroform,’ Psychological Review, January 1909). ‘The musculature of that organ seems thoroughly stimulated, and the contractions become violent and accelerated. The palpitations are as strong as would be experienced at the close of some violent bodily exertion.’ It is significant, also, as bearing on the interpretation of the dream of flying, that under chloroform ‘all movements made appeared to be much longer than they actually were. A slight movement of the tongue appeared to be magnified at least ten times. Clinching the fingers and opening them again produced the feeling of their moving through a space of several feet.’
113 See e.g. Marie de Manacéïne, Sleep, p. 7.
114 Horace Hutchinson, who in his Dreams and their Meanings (1901), has independently suggested that ‘this flying dream is caused by some action of the breathing organs,’ mentions the significant fact (p. 128) that the idea of filling the lungs as a help in levitation occurs in the flying dreams of many persons.
115 We have an analogous state of tactile anaesthesia in the early stages of chloroform intoxication. Thus Elmer Jones found that this sense is, after hearing, the first to disappear. ‘With the disappearance of the tactile sense and hearing,’ he remarks, ‘the body has completely lost its orientation. It appears to be nowhere, simply floating in space. It is a most ecstatic feeling.’
116 Lafcadio Hearn describes the fall as coming at the beginning of the dream. Dr. Guthrie (Clinical Journal, June 7, 1899), in his own case, describes the flying sensations as coming first and the falling as coming afterwards, and apparently due to sudden failure of the power of flight; the first part of the dream is agreeable but after the fall the dreamer awakes shaken, shocked, and breathless.
117 The disagreeable nature of falling in dreams may probably be connected with the absence of rhythm usually present in dreams of flying. Most of the psychologists who have occupied themselves with rhythm have insisted on its pleasurable emotional tone, as leading to a state bordering on ecstasy (see e.g. J. B. Miner, ‘Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms,’ Monograph Supplement to Psychological Review, June 1903). The pleasure is especially marked, as MacDougall remarks, when there is ‘a coincidence of subjective and objective change.’ In dreams of flying we have this coincidence, the real subjective rhythm being transformed in consciousness to an objective rhythm.
118 Féré, ‘Note sur les Rêves Epileptiques,’ Revue de Médecine, September 10, 1905.
119 Sir W. R. Gowers has on several occasions (e.g. ‘The Borderland of Epilepsy,’ British Medical Journal, July 21, 1906) argued that dreams of falling have an aural origin, and are caused by contraction of the stapedius muscle, leading to a change in the ampullae which might suggest descent; he has himself suddenly awakened from such a dream and caught the sound of the muscular contraction. The opinion of so acute an investigator deserves consideration.
120 Such sensations are, indeed, a recognised result of morphia. Morphinomaniacs, Goron remarks (Les Parias de l’Amour, p. 125), are apt to feel that they are flying or floating over the world.
121 Jewell states that ‘certain observers, peculiarly liable to dreams of falling or flying, ascribe these distinctly to faulty circulation, and say their physicians, to regulate the heart’s action, have given them medicines which always relieve them and prevent such dreams’ (American Journal of Psychology, January 1905, p. 8).
122 Interesting evidence in favour of the respiratory origin of such visions is furnished by Silberer’s observations on his own symbolic hypnagogic visions which are certainly allied to dream visions. He found (Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Bd. 1., 1909, p. 523) that on drawing a deep breath, and so raising the chest wall, the representation came to him of attempting with another person to raise a table in the air.
123 J. de Goncourt (Journal des Goncourt, vol. iii. p. 3) mentions that after drinking port wine, to which he was unaccustomed, he had a dream in which he observed on his counterpane grotesque images in relief which rose and fell.
124 Chabaneix, Le Subconscient, p. 43.
125 May 30, 1906.
126 L. Binswanger, ‘Versuch einer Hysterieanalyse,’ Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Bd. 1. 1909.
127 Their word has often been accepted. Levitation as experienced by the saints has been studied by Colonel A. de Rochas, Les Frontières de la Science, 1904; also in Annales des Sciences Psychiques, January-February 1901. ‘Levitation is a perfectly real phenomena,’ he concludes, ‘and much more common than we might at first be tempted to believe.’
128 It seems to become less frequent after middle age. Beaunis states that in his case it ceased at the age of fifty. I found it disappear, or become rare, at a somewhat earlier age.
129 H. Piéron, ‘Contribution à la Psychologie des Mourants,’ Revue Philosophique, December 1902.
130 See e.g. Galton, Inquiries (Everyman’s Library edition), pp. 79-112. Among more recent writings on this subject may be mentioned Bleuler, art. ‘Secondary Sensations,’ Tuke’s Dictionary of Psychological Medicine; Suarez de Mendoza, L’Audition Colorée; Jules Millet, Audition Colorée; and especially a useful summary by Clavière, ‘L’Audition Colorée,’ L’Année Psychologique, fifth year, 1899. A case of auditory gustation is recorded by A. M. Pierce, American Journal of Psychology, 1907. It may be noted that Boris Sidis has argued (Psychological Review, January 1904) that all hallucinations are of the nature of secondary sensations.
131 Ferrero, in his Lois Psychologiques du Symbolisme (1895), deals broadly with symbolism in human thought and life.
132 Revue Philosophique, November 1902.
133 ‘Richard Wagner et Tannhauser’ in L’Art Romantique.
134 The motor imagery suggested by music is in some persons profuse and apparently capricious, and may be regarded as an anomaly comparable to a synaesthesia. Heine was an example of this, and he has described in Florentine Nights the visions aroused by the playing of Paganini, and elsewhere the visions evoked in him by the music of Berlioz. Though I do not myself experience this phenomenon, I have found that there is sometimes a tendency for music to arouse ideas of motor imagery; thus some melodies of Handel suggest a giant painting frescoes on a vast wall space. The most elementary motor relationship of music is seen in the tendency of many people to sway portions of their body—to ‘beat time’—in sympathy with the music. (This phenomenon has been experimentally studied by J. B. Miner, ‘Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms,’ Monograph Supplement to the Psychological Review, vol. v., No. 4, June 1903). Music is fundamentally an audible dance, and the most primitive music is dance music.
135 The instinctive nature of this tendency is shown by the fact that it persists even in sleep. Thus Weygandt relates that he once fell asleep in the theatre during one of the last scenes of Cavalleria Rusticana, when the tenor was singing in ever higher and higher tones, and dreamed that in order to reach the notes the performer was climbing up ladders and stairs on the stage.
136 See, especially the attractive book of André Pirro, L’Esthétique de J. S. Bach (1907), and also Albert Schweitzer, J. S. Bach (1908), especially chapters xix.-xxiii. ‘Concrete things,’ says Ernest Newman, summarising some of these results (Nation, December 25, 1909), ‘incessantly suggested abstract ideas or inward moods to Bach, and vice versâ. He would time after time use the same musical formula for the same word or idea. He first suggests the external concepts of “high” and “low,” as other composers have done, by high or low notes, and motion up or down by ascending or descending themes. But Bach correlates with the outward, objective thing a whole series of things that are purely subjective. Thus moods of elation or of depression are to him the mental equivalents of the physical acts of going up or down. So he gives us a whole series of ascending themes to words that express “mounting” states of mind, as it were—such as pride, courage, strength, resolution—and descending themes to words that express “declining” states of mind—such as prostration, adoration, depression, discouragement, grief at sin, humility, poverty, fatigue, and illness. For the two sets of concepts, internal and external, he will use the same musical symbols. To represent the physical concept of “surrounding,” again, he adopts the device of a circling or undulating theme. A crown or a garland suggests the same idea to him, so for this, too, he uses the same kind of theme. But the correspondence goes still further; for when he comes to the word “considering,” he uses the same curving musical symbol once more—his notion of “considering” being that of looking round on all sides. Again, a word of purely external signification that suggests something twisted will have an appropriately twisted theme. Then come the subjective applications of the theme—the same disordered melodic outline is used to express a frame of mind like anxiety or confusion, or to depict the wiles of Satan. Careful study of the vocal works of Bach, and especially of the cantatas, has revealed a host of these curious symbols.’ The whole subject, it may be added, has been briefly and suggestively discussed by Goblot, ‘La Musique Descriptive,’ Revue Philosophique, July 1901.
137 T. Piderit, Mimik und Physiognomik, 1867, p. 73.
138 J. Cleland, Evolution, Expression and Sensation, 1881.
139 Féré, ‘La Physiologie dans les Métaphores,’ Revue Philosophique, October 1895.
140 Maeder discusses symbolism in some of these fields in his ‘Die Symbolik in den Legenden, Märchen, Gebräuchen und Träumen,’ Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, Nos. 6 and 7, May 1908.
141 So Philostratus, and Pliny (Natural History, Bk. X. ch. CCXI.) puts the same point on somewhat more natural grounds.
142 It has been translated by F. S. Krauss, Symbolik der Träume, 1881.
143 A translation of Synesius’s ‘Treatise on Dreams’ is included in Druon’s Œuvres de Synésius, pp. 347 et seq. Synesius is probably best known to modern English readers through Charles Kingsley’s novel, Hypatia. His treatise on dreams has been unduly neglected, though it commended itself mightily to the pioneering mind of Lord Monboddo, who even says (Ancient Metaphysics, vol. ii., 1782, p. 217) in reference to this treatise: ‘Indeed it appears to me that since the days of Plato and Aristotle there has not been a philosopher of greater depth than Synesius.’
144 K. A. Scherner, Das Leben des Traumes, 1861. In France Hervey de Saint-Denis, in a remarkable anonymous work which I have not seen (Les Rêves et les Moyens de les Diriger, p. 356, quoted by Vaschide and Piéron, Psychologie du Rêve, p. 26), tentatively put forward a symbolic theory of dreams, as a possible rival to the theory that permanent associations are set up as the result of a first chance coincidence. ‘Do there exist,’ he asked, ‘bizarre analogies of internal sensations in virtue of which certain vibrations of the nerves, certain instinctive movements of our viscera, correspond to sensations apparently quite different? According to this hypothesis experience would bring to light mysterious affinities, the knowledge of which might become a genuine science;... and a real key to dreams would not be an unrealisable achievement if we could bring together and compare a sufficient number of observations.’
145 It is interesting to note that hallucinations may also be symbolic. Thus the Psychical Research Society’s Committee on Hallucinations recognised a symbolic group, and recorded, for instance, the case of a man who, when his child lies dying, sees a blue flame in the air and hears a voice say, ‘That’s his soul’ (Proceedings Society for Psychical Research, August 1894, p. 125).
146 Maeder states that the tendency to symbolism in dreams and similar modes of psychic activity is due to ‘vague thinking in a condition of diminished attention.’ This is, however, an inadequate statement and misses the central point.
147 In the other spheres in which symbolism most tends to appear, the same or allied conditions exist. In hallucinations, which (as Parish and others have shown) tend to occur in hypnagogic or sleep-like states, the conditions are clearly the same. The symbolism of an art, and notably music, is due to the very conditions of the art, which exclude any appeal to other senses. The primitive mind reaches symbolism through a similar condition of things, coming as the result of ignorance and undeveloped powers of apperception. In insanity these powers are morbidly disturbed or destroyed, with the same result.
148 The magnification we experience in dreams is manifested in their emotional aspects and in the emotional transformation of actual sensory stimuli, from without or from within the organism. The size of objects recalled by dreaming memory usually remains unchanged, and if changed it seems to be more usually diminished. ‘Lilliputian hallucinations,’ as they are termed by Leroy, who has studied them (Revue de Psychiatrie, 1909, No. 8), in which diminutive, and frequently coloured, people are observed, may also occasionally occur in alcoholic and chloral intoxication, in circular insanity, and in various other morbid mental conditions. They are usually agreeable in character.
149 Sollier, ‘L’Autoscopie Interne,’ Revue Philosophique, January 1903. Sollier deals with the objections made to the reality of the phenomenon.
150 ‘Many people,’ writes Dr. Marie de Manacéïne (Sleep, 1897, p. 294), ‘when threatened by a gastric or intestinal attack dream of seeing fish. The late Professor Sergius Botkine told me that he had found this coincidence in his own case, and I have myself several times found it in the case of a young girl who is well known to me. Some have supposed that the sleeping consciousness receives an impression of the elongated shape of the stomach or intestine; but such a supposition is easier to make than to prove.’ Scherner associated dreams of fish with sensations arising from the bladder, and here also it may be said that we are concerned with a fish-like viscus. Greenwood (Imagination in Dreams, p. 195) stated that he had always been subject, at intervals of months or years, to a recurrent dream in which he would see a river swarming with fish that were finally piled in a horrible sweltering mass; this dream always left a feeling of ‘squalid horror,’ but he was never able to ascertain its cause and significance.
151 Freud states (Die Traumdeutung, p. 233) that he knows a case in which (as in the Song of Songs) columns and pillars appear in dreams as symbols of the legs, and doors as symbols of the openings of the body.
152 Freud, Die Traumdeutung, p. 66. This work, published in 1900, is the chief and most extensive statement of Freud’s views. A shorter statement is embodied in a little volume of the ‘Grenzfrägen’ Series, Ueber den Traum, 1901. A brief exposition of Freud’s position is given by Dr. A. Maeder of Zurich in ‘Essai d’Interpretation de Quelques Rêves,’ Archives de Psychologie, April 1907; as also by Ernest Jones (‘Freud’s Theory of Dreams,’ Review of Neurology and Psychiatry, March 1910, and American Journal of Psychology, April 1910). For Freud’s general psychological doctrine, see Brill’s translation of ‘Freud’s Selected Papers on Hysteria,’ 1909. There have been many serious criticisms of Freud’s methods. As an example of such criticism, accompanying an exposition of the methods, reference may be made to Max Isserlin’s ‘Die Psychoanalytische Methode Freuds,’ Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, Bd. 1. Heft i. 1910. A judicious and qualified criticism of Freud’s psychotherapeutic methods is given by Löwenfeld (‘Zum gegenwärtigen Stande der Psychotherapeutie,’ Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift, Nos. 3 and 4, 1910).
153 I have set forth Freud’s views of hysteria, now regarded as almost epoch-making in character, in Studies of the Psychology of Sex, vol. i. 3rd ed. pp. 219 et seq.
154 This is supported by the fact that in waking reverie, or day-dreams, wishes are obviously the motor force in building up visionary structures. Freud attaches great importance to reverie, for he considers that it furnishes the key to the comprehension of dreams (e.g. Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 2nd series, pp. 138 et seq., 197 et seq.). But it must be remembered that day-dreaming is not real dreaming, which takes place under altogether different physiological conditions, although it may quite fairly be claimed that day-dreaming represents a state intermediate between ordinary waking consciousness and consciousness during sleep.
155 The special characteristics of dreaming in the hysterical were studied, before Freud turned his attention to the question, by Sante de Sanctis (I Sogni e il Sonno nell’ Isterismo, 1896). See also Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. i. 3rd ed., 1910, ‘Auto-erotism.’
156 Gissing, the novelist, an acute observer of psychic states, in the most of his books, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, has described this phenomenon: ‘Every one, I suppose, is subject to a trick of mind which often puzzles me. I am reading or thinking, and at a moment, without any association or suggestion that I can discover, there rises before me the vision of a place I know. Impossible to explain why that particular spot should show itself to my mind’s eye; the cerebral impulse is so subtle that no search may trace its origin.’ Gissing proceeds to say that a thought, a phrase, an odour, a touch, a posture of the body, may possibly have furnished the link of association, but he knows no evidence for this theory.
157 Extrospection has been specially studied by Vaschide and Vurpas in La Logique Morbide.
158 On the psychic importance of fears, see G. Stanley Hall, ‘A Study of Fears,’ American Journal of Psychology, 1897, p. 183. Metchnikoff (Essais Optimistes, pp. 247 et seq.) insists on the mingled fear and strength of the anthropoid apes.
159 Foucault has pointed this out, and Morton Prince, and Giessler (who admits that the wish-dream is common in children), and Flournoy (who remarks that not only a fear but any emotion can be equally effective), as well as Claparède. The last remarks that Freud might regard a fear as a suppressed desire, but it may equally be said that a desire involves, on its reverse side, a fear. Freud has indeed himself pointed out (e.g. Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Bd. 1., 1909, p. 362) that fears may be instinctively combined with wishes; he regards the association with a wish of an opposing fear as one of the components of some morbid psychic states. But he holds that the wish is the positive and fundamental element: ‘The unconscious can only wish’ (‘Das Unbewusste kann nichts als wünschen’), a statement that seems somewhat too metaphysical for the psychologist.
160 Thus A. Wiggam (‘A Contribution to the Data of Dream Psychology,’ Pedagogical Seminary, June 1909) records a great many wish-dreams, mostly in the young.
161 Laud, Works, vol. iii. p. 144.
162 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. iii., ‘Love and Pain.’
163 The dramatic element in dreaming was dealt with at length by Carl du Prel (Philosophy of Mysticism, vol. i. ch. iii.), but he threw little light on it.
164 Thus in the Psychical Research Society’s ‘Report on the Census of Hallucinations,’ the case is given of an over-worked and worried man who, a few moments after leaving a tram car, had the vivid feeling that some one touched him on the shoulder, though on turning round he found no one near. He then remembered that on the car he had been leaning against an iron bolt, and that, therefore, what he had experienced was doubtless a spontaneous muscular contraction excited by the pressure (Proceedings, Society for Psychical Research, August 1894, p. 3). Touches felt on awakening, in correspondence with a dream, are not so very uncommon. Thus Wagner, when in love with Mathilde Wesendonk, wrote, in the private diary he kept for her, how, after a dream, ‘as I awoke I distinctly felt a kiss on my brow.’
165 Various pressures lead to dreams of blood. Thus a friend with a weak heart tells me that when he sleeps on his left side he dreams of blood. In some of these cases it is possible that there are retinal sensations of red.
166 In the Census of Hallucinations (chapter ix.) it was pointed out by the Psychical Research Society’s Committee that hallucinations are specially apt to occur on awakening, or in the state between sleeping and waking; and Parish in his very searching study, Hallucinations and Illusions (Contemporary Science Series), has further developed this fact and insisted on its significance.
167 Dr. Johnson’s remark on this point has often been quoted. He dreamed that he had been worsted in a verbal argument, and was thereby much mortified. ‘Had not my judgment failed me,’ he said, ‘I should have seen that the wit of this supposed antagonist, by whose superiority I felt myself depressed, was as much furnished by me as that which I thought I had been uttering in my own character’ (Boswell’s Johnson, ed. by Hill, vol. iv. p. 5).
168 Maury, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, 1861, p. 118.
169 Delbœuf, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, pp. 24, et seq.
170 Foucault, Le Rêve, p. 137.
171 Giessler, ‘Das Ich im Träume,’ Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, 1905, Heft 4 and 5, pp. 300 et seq.
172 See especially Pierre Janet’s works, and also those of Morton Prince, Albert Wilson, etc. Flournoy’s very elaborate study of Mlle. Helène Smith (Des Indes à la Planète Mars, 1900) is noteworthy. A summary of some important cases of multiple personality will be found in Marie de Manacéïne’s Sleep, pp. 127 et seq., and some bibliographical references, ib. p. 151.
173 J. Milne Bramwell argues (‘Secondary and Multiple Personalities,’ Brain, 1900) that such cases are not invariably hysterical.
174 See G. Stanley Hall, ‘The Early Sense of Self,’ American Journal of Psychology, April 1898. Cooley (‘The Early Use of Self-Words by a Child,’ Psychological Review, 1909, p. 94) finds that the child distinguishes between itself as (1) body and as (2) self-assertion united with action; it refers to the former as ‘Baby,’ and to the latter as ‘I.’
175 See, e.g., Havelock Ellis, The Criminal, 4th ed., 1910, p. 367.
176 In the existing traditions of law and police, it is still possible to find many survivals of this tendency to objectify subjective impressions. Thus Mr. Theodore Schroeder has shown (Free Press Anthology, 1909, pp. 171 et seq.) that the prosecutions which have in various so-called civilised countries pursued many estimable and even noble works of literature, science, and art are based on the primitive notion that ‘indecency’ resides in the object and not in the person who experiences the feeling, and who ought, therefore, alone to be suppressed, if suppression is called for. This psychological fallacy continues to subsist, though it was unmasked in the clearest manner even by St. Paul (e.g. Romans xiv. 14). It is somewhat analogous to the mediæval conception of the criminality of animals.
177 I may refer to the very interesting discussion by Professor G. F. Stout (Analytic Psychology, vol. ii. p. 145) of the conflict of systems in apperception, and of the suspense and deadlock which occur when two or more systems come into conflict in such a way that the success of one is the defeat of the other. The discussion is full of interest from its undesigned bearing on the phenomena of dreaming.
178 Foucault, for instance (Le Rêve, p. 25), discusses and illustrates dreams of this type. I am not here concerned with the causation of this type of dream. Perhaps, as Wundt believes, it is due to some physical discomfort of the sleeper, such as a cramped position, expressing itself symbolically.
179 It may be added that dreams of returning to the school scenes of early life are not necessarily always of the type here described, as may be illustrated by the dream already brought forward on p. 83, which, it is worth while noticing, occurred after a day on which I had been thinking over the dreams of this class.
180 I reproduce these two series in the same form as first published (Havelock Ellis, ‘On Dreaming of the Dead,’ Psychological Review, September 1895) since they have formed the starting point of my own and others’ investigation into this type of dream.
181 It is well known, and has often been pointed out (by Weygandt, Sante de Sanctis, Jewell, etc., and perhaps first by T. Beddoes in his Hygeia, 1803, vol. iii. p. 88), that while in childhood all the emotions of the past day are at once echoed in dreams, after adolescence, this is not so in the case of intense emotions, which do not emerge in dreams until after a more or less considerable interval. Marie de Manacéïne and Sante de Sanctis attribute this to exhaustion of the emotion which needs a period of repair and organic synthesis before it can repeat itself. Vaschide believed that we dream of recent events in shallow sleep and of remote events in deep sleep; this sounds plausible, but will scarcely account for all the phenomena.
182 Since the publication of my paper ‘On Dreaming of the Dead,’ several psychologists have returned to the subject. Thus Binet (L’Année Psychologique, 2nd year, issued in 1896, p. 848) gave a dream of his own, very similar to mine of the editor, in which a doctor, dead a month previously, is talking to him in his room. On Binet expressing surprise at seeing him, the doctor explains that he had only sent news of his death in order to see how many people would come to his funeral. Binet has also had two dreams, similar to that described on p. 200, in which he is walking in the country with a dead friend, who seems in good health, though the dreamer knows he will soon die. Foucault (Le Rêve, p. 128), who, in accordance with his own theory, regards my dream of the editor as belonging to the period of awakening, brings forward a dream of his own in which he saw his father, dead six months before, sitting in a chair; at first this seems to him a hallucination, but he finally accepts the vision as real. I have had a number of letters from people who have had dreams of this type. One correspondent, an anthropologist and folk-lorist of note, says that his dreams of dead friends are of the type of Mrs. F.’s. Professor Näcke writes that he has had such dreams (and see also his articles in the Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie, 1903, p. 307, and the Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1910, No. 13). One young lady states that, thirteen years after her mother’s death, she still dreams of her as coming to life again or never having really died. I may add that this type of dream is admirably illustrated in a series of dreams concerning a dead friend, published in a letter from a lady to Borderland, January 1896, p. 51.
183 Gassendi, Syntagma Philosophicum, 1658, pars. 71, lib. viii. (Opéra Omnia, vol. i.).
184 Maury, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, p. 145.
185 American Journal of Psychology, July-October, 1903, p. 18.
186 Chabaneix, Le Subconscient chez les Artistes, les Savants et les Ecrivains, 1897, pp. 45-8. Chabaneix was in touch with various persons of distinction, and one is inclined to identify the poet-philosopher with Sully-Prudhomme, at that time still living. Du Maurier’s remarkable novel, Peter Ibbetson—which records similar serial dreams of union with a beloved woman after death, and seems to be based on real experience—may also be mentioned in this connection.
187 Unconscious dream suggestions of this kind resemble, as R. MacDougall has remarked (Psychological Review, March 1898, p. 167), post-hypnotic suggestions.
188 This type of dream—in which the emotion of the day is inverted in sleep, depressing emotions giving place to exalting emotions, and so on—is by some (Griesinger, Lombroso, Sante de Sanctis, etc.), termed the contrast-dream. The dream is in such a case, Sante de Sanctis remarks, complementary, having the same significance as a complementary after-image and indicating a phase of anabolic repair. Thus A. Wiggam (Pedagogical Seminary, June 1909), gives the case of a girl of twenty, who when tired and restless always has good dreams, while her dreams are bad when she is well and free from care. It should be added that, as understood by Näcke (‘Ueber Kontrast-Träume’ Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie, 1907), a contrast-dream is one that is in striking contrast to the dreamer’s ordinary character. In this type of contrast-dream it is not quite clear that the mechanism is the same, and the contrast may sometimes be accidental. Thus a dream of being a soldier on a battlefield, with shells bursting around me, was merely suggested by a passage of Nietzsche, read in the evening, which contained the words ‘the thunders of the battle of Wörth,’ and the question of contrast or resemblance to my character and habits was irrelevant.
189 Journal of the Anthropological Institute, July-December 1904, p. 339.
190 See Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed., 1885, vol. i. ch. x., especially pp. 140, 182, 201, 772. Spencer believed that Lubbock was the first to point out this factor in primitive beliefs, which has been chiefly developed by Tylor. It is, of course, by no means the only factor. See post, p. 266.
191 Thus Professor Beaunis (loc. cit.) considers that dreams furnish the only rational explanation of the belief in survival after death. Jewell, again (American Journal of Psychology, January 1905), also considers that dreams are responsible for primitive man’s inability to conceive of death as ending our association with our friends; he brings forward evidence, highly significant in this connection, to show that children, on dreaming of the dead as alive, are influenced in waking life to doubt the reality of their death. Ruths, also writing since the publication of my first paper (Experimental-Untersuchungen über Musikphantome, 1898, pp. 438 et seq.), considers that the conception of an under-world is founded on dreams of the dead coming to life.
192 It is as well to bear in mind that this dream occurred when Maury was a student, long before he began to study dreaming, and (as Egger has pointed out) was probably not written down until thirteen years later. On these grounds alone it is not entitled to serious consideration.
193 As Sir Samuel Wilks once remarked (‘On the Nature of Dreams,’ Medical Magazine, Feb. 1894), ‘The dreamer merely forms a mental picture, and the description of it he calls his dream.’
194 Egger, ‘La Durée apparente des Rêves,’ Revue Philosophique, Jan. 1895, pp. 41-59; Clavière, ‘La Rapidité de la Pensée dans le Rêve,’ ib. May 1897, p. 509; Piéron, ‘La Rapidité des Processes Psychiques,’ ib. Jan. 1903, pp. 89-95; Foucault, Le Rêve, pp. 158 et seq.; Tobolowska, Etude sur les Illusions du Temps dans les Rêves du Sommeil Normal: Thèse de Paris, 1900.
195 Thus Freud tells (Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen, vol. i. part ii. p. 387) of a man who was obsessed by the idea that he should never pass money until he had carefully cleaned it, for fear he might be infecting other people, but was quite unaware that this obsession sprang from remorse due to his own sins of sexual impurity. In such a case there is, of course, not only a crumpling of consciousness, but a definite dislocation and transference of the parts.
196 We also see here an interesting dissociation of the motor (speech) centre from the visual centre; it is the latter which is in this instance most closely in touch with facts.
197 The ‘selvdrolla’ dream, recorded in a previous chapter (p. 43), illustrates the same point with the difference that the crumpled up portion of consciousness never became visible in the dream.
198 R. L. Stevenson, ‘A Chapter on Dreams,’ in Across the Plains, 1892.
199 In most cases the missing memory, after making itself felt outside the conscious area, seems to reach that area, not so much by its own spontaneous unconscious movement as by a tentative search for clues. Thus I read one day the words ‘the breaking of a goblet by a little black imp,’ and immediately became conscious that I was reminded of something similar in recent experience, but could not tell what. I asked myself if it could have been in a dream. In a few moments, however, the memory recurred to me that two hours previously I had noticed a broken vase, and casually wondered how it had become broken. Under such circumstances we are for a time thinking of something, and yet have no conscious knowledge as to what we are thinking of.
200 Jastrow remarks, somewhat in the same way (The Subconscious, p. 93), that ‘a letting down of the effort, a focusing of the mind upon a point a little or a good deal to one side of the fixation point, distinctly aids the mental vision.’ The process seems, however, to be most effective when it is automatic, for attention cannot easily relax its own tension. A large number of the discoveries and solutions of difficulties effected in dreams are due to this dispersal of attention over a wider field, so enabling the missing relationship to be detected. See, for instance, some cases recorded by Newbold (Psychological Review, March 1896, p. 132), as of Dr. Hilprecht, the Assyriologist, who discovered in a dream that two fragments of tablets he had vainly been endeavouring to decipher, were really parts of the same tablet.
201 Hypermnesia, or excessive memory, is found in waking life in various abnormal conditions. It is not uncommon in men of genius; Macaulay is a well-known example. It scarcely seems, however, an especially favourable condition for keen intellectual power; the mental machine that is clogged with unnecessary and unimportant facts can scarcely fail to work under difficulties. ‘Hypermnesia,’ remarks Stoddart (‘Early Symptoms of Mental Disease,’ British Medical Journal, 11th May 1907), ‘occurs most frequently in certain cases of idiocy, and in some cases of chronic mania. One such patient could enumerate all the occasions when any given medical officer had played tennis since he entered the institution.’ Hypermnesia in dreams has been dealt with by Carl du Prel, Philosophy of Mysticism, vol. ii. ch. i.
202 This delay is worth mentioning, for it is conceivable that, in the case of a weak recollection, transference to the subconscious sphere of sleep might involve a temporary disappearance from the conscious waking sphere.
203 There is a possible interest in the exact length of the interval. Swoboda (Die Perioden des Menschlichen Organismus in ihrer psychologischen und biologischen Bedeutung, 1904) believes that the recurrence of memories tends to obey a law of periodicity, so that, for instance, a melody heard at a concert may recur at a regular interval. I cannot say that I have myself found evidence of such periodicity, though I have made several observations on the recurrence of such memories.
204 Similarly, Foucault (Le Rêve, p. 79) records the dream of a lady concerning a place called Brétigny, near Dijon, though when awake she was not aware there is such a place there. Elsewhere (p. 214) Foucault also gives examples of sensations, not consciously perceived in the waking state, but revived in dream. Beaunis, in his interesting ‘Contribution à la Psychologie du Rêve’ (American Journal of Psychology, July-Oct. 1903) narrates a dream of his own in which a forgotten or unconscious memory revived. Many such dreams could easily be brought together. An often-quoted dream, apparently of this kind (see e.g., British Medical Journal, 7th April 1900, p. 850), is that of Archbishop Benson who, like his predecessor, Laud, took an interest in his dreams. He dreamed that he was suffering severely in his chest, and that his doctor, on being called in, told him that he had angĭna pectoris. The archbishop in his dream exclaimed with indignation: ‘Angǐna, angǐna!’ The dream made such an impression on him that he looked the matter up, but only found the ordinary pronunciation, angīna, recorded. A week later he was at Cambridge, dining in hall at Trinity, and seated next to Munro, the Professor of Latin, who happened to ask him about the death of Thomas Arnold. ‘He died of angĭna pectoris,’ said Benson. Munro smiled grimly and said softly: ‘Of angǐna, as we now call it.’ There can be no doubt that Benson, who was closely in touch with the academic world, had met with this correction, which is accepted by all modern Latinists, and ‘forgotten’ it.
205 Xenoglossia, as well as the tendency to utter gibberish, are both classed under glossolalia. See e.g. E. Lombard, ‘Phenomènes de Glossolalie,’ Archives de Psychologie, July 1907.
206 In the eighteenth century Lord Monboddo (Ancient Metaphysics, vol. iii., 1782, p. 217) referred to a Countess of Laval who, during the delirium of illness, spoke the Breton tongue which she had known as a child, but long since forgotten.
207 In a somewhat similar manner the muscular contractions of the hysterical may disappear during sleep, as may their paralyses and their anaesthesias, as well as their losses of memory. (These phenomena have been especially observed and studied by Raymond and Janet, Névroses et Idées Fixes, vol. ii.) Such characteristics of the sleep of the hysterical may well be a manifestation of the same tendency which in the sleep of normal people leads to hypermnesia. In this connection reference may be made to the interesting opposition between attention and memory developed by Dr. Marie de Manacéïne (‘De l’antagonisme qui existe entre chaque effort de l’attention et des innervations motrices,’ Atti dell’ XI. Congresso Internazionale Medico, 1894, Rome, vol. ii., ‘Fisiologia,’ p. 48). Concentrated attention, she argues, paralyses memory, and there is an absolute antagonism between motor innervation, or real movement, which favours memory, and the concentrated effort which favours attention. ‘In psychological researches we must always separate the phenomena of memory from the phenomena of attention, for memory is only possible through muscular movement, and attention, on the contrary, is only active through the suppression of movement.’ In sleep, it is true, there may be no actual movement, but there is relaxation of muscular tension and freedom of motor ideas. It should be added that not all investigators confirm Manacéïne’s conclusion as to the antagonism between the conditions for memory and attention. Thus R. MacDougall (‘The Physical Characteristics of Attention,’ Psychological Review, March 1895), while finding that muscular relaxation accompanies the recall of memories, finds also, though not so markedly and constantly, a similar relaxation accompanying both voluntary and spontaneous attention.
208 The term ‘paramnesia’ was devised by Kraepelin, who wrote the first comprehensive study of the subject, though he offered no explanatory theory of it (‘Ueber Erinnerungsfälschungen,’ Archiv für Psychiatrie, Bd. xvii. and xviii.). A very clear and comprehensive account of the subject, up to the date of the article, was given by W. H. Burnham (‘Paramnesia,’ American Journal of Psychology, May 1889). In the following pages, together with much new matter, I have made use of my paper entitled ‘A Note on Hypnagogic Paramnesia,’ published in Mind, vol. vi. No. 22, in 1896.
209 It has long been recognised by psychologists that paramnesia occurs in dreams. Thus Burnham refers to it as frequent, and Kraepelin mentions that he once dreamed of smoking a cigar for the fourth or fifth time, though he had never smoked in his life.
210 In alcoholic insanity, for instance, especially when it leads to the occurrence of Korsakoff’s syndrome, there is a notable degree of mental weakness with a tendency to form false memories, both in the form of confabulation (or the filling by imagination of lacunae in memory) and pseudo-reminiscence. (See e.g. John Turner, ‘Alcoholic Insanity,’ Journal of Mental Science, Jan. 1910, p. 41.)
211 Dr. Marie de Manacéïne, who has studied the phenomena of the hypnagogic state experimentally in much detail (Sleep, pp. 195-220), finds that in its deepest stage it is marked by echolalia, or the tendency to repeat automatically what is said, and in a less deep stage by abnormal suggestibility or the tendency to accept ideas and especially emotions. She considers that the hypnagogic state becomes abnormal when it lasts for more than fifteen seconds. It may last for more than six minutes, and is then of serious import. She shows reason to believe that the hypnagogic state is substantially identical with the hypnotic state, and she regards it as probably due to cerebral anaemia. She finds it especially marked in children under fifteen, the more so if they belong to the working-class, and rather common among adolescent girls and young women, especially if anaemic, but among adults rarer in women than in men, becoming more frequent in both sexes with old age; the phlegmatic are more liable to it than the sanguine or the nervous.
212 Sully, The Human Mind, vol. ii. p. 317. Foucault (Le Rêve, p. 300), briefly notes that he has often had the illusion of seeming to remember a fact which does not exist, and of recollecting a person he has never seen.
213 F. W. Colegrove, ‘Individual Memories,’ American Journal of Psychology, Jan. 1899.
214 See e.g. for such cases in sane persons, Hack Tuke, ‘Hallucinations,’ Brain, vol. xi., 1889. A man with chronic systematised delusions writes: ‘I am obsessed at nights; that is, I am made the recipient of projected thoughts which become translated into dreams, and on several occasions I have found, just after waking, and while still in a very passive state, that some one was speaking to me in the ear.’
215 Hughlings Jackson (Practitioner, May 1874, also Brain, July 1888, and Brain, 1899, p. 534) applied this term to the intellectual aura preceding an epileptic attack and considered that ‘pseudo-reminiscence’ itself might indicate a slight epileptic paroxysm in persons who show other symptoms of epilepsy. Gowers also (Epilepsy, 2nd ed., p. 133) considers ‘dreamy state’ to be closely associated with minor attacks of epilepsy; and Crichton-Browne (Dreamy Mental States) holds the same view. It should be added that ‘dreamy state’ by no means necessarily involves pseudo-reminiscence; see e.g. S. Taylor, ‘A Case of Dreamy State,’ Lancet, 9th Aug. 1890, p. 276, and W. A. Turner, ‘The Problem of Epilepsy,’ British Medical Journal, 2nd April 1910, p. 805. Leroy found that pseudo-reminiscence is usually rare in association with epilepsy.
216 ‘The feeling of pre-existence,’ writes Dr. J. G. Kiernan in a private letter, ‘frequently occurs as a consequence of delusions of memory in epilepsy. The case on which George Sand built her story of Consuelo was one reported of an epileptic who during the epileptic states had delusions of living in a distant historic past of which he retained the memory as facts during the normal state. I know of two epileptic theosophists who base their belief in transmigration on the memories of their epileptic period. In my judgment a large part of Swedenborg’s visions were instances of delusions of memory.’
217 Professor Grasset (‘La Sensation du “Déjà Vu,”’ Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, Nov.-Feb. 1904) considers that a feeling of anguish is the characteristic accompaniment of a true paramnesic manifestation. This statement is too pronounced. There is usually some emotional disturbance, but its degree depends on the temperament of the person experiencing the phenomenon. Sometimes the sensation of pseudo-reminiscence may be accompanied, as a medical man subject to epilepsy (mentioned by Hughlings Jackson) found in his own case, by ‘a slight sense of satisfaction,’ as in the finding of something that had been sought for.
218 Revue Philosophique, November 1893.
219 Revue Philosophique, January 1894.
220 Heymans found that students liable to paramnesia tended to possess an aptitude for languages and an inaptitude for mathematics.
221 Paul Bourget, the novelist, in an interesting letter published by Grasset (loc. cit.) states that this experience has been habitual with him from as long back as he can remember, occurring in regard to things heard or felt more than to things seen, and accompanied by an emotional trouble similar to that experienced in dreams of dead friends who appear as living, though even in his dreams the dreamer knows that they are dead. Bourget adds that he is of emotional temperament, and that the phenomenon was more pronounced in childhood than it is now.
222 Paul Lapie, Revue Philosophique, March 1894; Charles Méré, Mercure de France, July 1903; Sully, Tannery, and Buccola also considered that this is a factor in the explanation of the phenomenon. Freud (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagsleben, 1907, p. 122) brings forward a modification of this theory, and believes that false recognition is a reminiscence of unconscious day-dreams.
223 For a minute and searching criticism of the theory of the duplex brain, see especially four articles by Bonne in the Archives de Neurologie, March-June 1907.
224 ‘Epilepsy’ wrote Binns long ago (Anatomy of Sleep, 1845, p. 431), ‘is a disease which in some of its symptoms strongly resembles abnormal sleep.’ The conditions under which a paramnesic manifestation may really replace an epileptic fit are well described by a literary man with hereditary epilepsy whose case has been recorded by Haskovec of Prague (XIIIe. Congrès International de Médecine: Comptes Rendus, vol. viii., ‘Psychiatrie’ p. 125): ‘One day at the theatre, under the influence of the heat and perhaps the music, I experienced extreme excitement and fatigue. I thought I was about to have an attack, and resisted with all my strength, and it failed to take place. But I found myself in a strange psychic state. On leaving the theatre I seemed to be dreaming. I saw and heard everything and talked as usual. But everything seemed strange. Nothing seemed to reach directly me or to be a real impression, but merely the automatic reproduction of something learnt, only I felt that I had lived it all before and felt it; at that moment I simply seemed to be observing it.’
225 Centralblatt für Nervenheilkunde, April 1886. In some forms of insanity the false recognition of a person may become a fixed delusion. This question has been studied by Albès in his Paris thesis, De I’Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, 1906.
226 E. Maitland, Anna Kingsford, vol. i. p. 3. Lalande (Revue Philosophique, November 1893, p. 487) gives a precisely similar case in a child.
227 As quoted by Jastrow, The Subconscious, p. 248.
228 Leroy, Etude sur l’Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, 1898, with forty-nine new observations. Leroy states, however (in declared opposition to my view), that only a minority of his cases actually mention fatigue.
229 Heymans, ‘Eine Enquête über Depersonnalisation und Fausse Reconnaissance,’ Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, November, 1903; also a further paper in the same journal confirming his conclusions, January 1906.
230 Féré, ‘Deuxième Note sur la Fausse Reconnaissance,’ Journal de Neurologie, 1905.
231 Dromard et Albès, ‘L’Illusion dit de Fausse Reconnaissance,’ Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, May-June 1905.
232 Dugas, ‘Observations sur des Erreurs “Formelles” de la Mémoire,’ Revue Philosophique, July 1908.
233 A friend, liable to this form of paramnesia, wrote to me after the publication of my first paper on the subject: ‘I find, as you foretold, that it is difficult to recall an experience of this kind in all its details. I feel sure, however, that it is not necessarily allied with an enfeebled or overwrought nervous system. It was commonest with me in my youth, at a time when my life was a pleasant one, and my brain not fagged as now. I still [aged 43] have it occasionally, but not so frequently as twenty years ago.’ It may be added that my friend, of Highland family, was a man of keen and emotional nervous temperament, a strenuous mental worker—whence at one time a serious breakdown in health—and had published two volumes of poems in early life. The greater liability to paramnesia in early life, which is generally recognised, is comparable to the special liability of children to hypnagogic visions, both phenomena being probably due to the greater excitability and easier exhaustibility of the youthful brain.
234 For instance, by Allin, ‘Recognition,’ American Journal of Psychology, January 1896.
235 The explanation of paramnesia here set forth received on its first publication the approval of Léon Marillier, who considered it ‘ingenious and seductive,’ and as adequately accounting for the phenomena, provided we bear in mind that the loss of a clear feeling of time is characteristic of hypnagogic and allied states, the perception of each moment being immediately transferred into an ancient memory, and consequently recognised (L’Année Biologique, third year, 1897, p. 772). This necessity for taking into account the co-existence of perception and illusory remembrance has largely moulded several of the theories of paramnesia. Thus Jean de Pury (Archives de Psychologie, December 1902), while affirming that pseudo-reminiscence is due to an anteriorisation of actual perceptions, regards it as of the nature of a double refraction such as that simultaneously produced on two faces of a prism by the same image; under the influence of conditions he is unable to define, an image appears for the moment on the plane both of the past and of the present, and psychically we see double just as physically we see double when the parallelism of our visual rays is disturbed. Piéron, again, taking up a theory at one time favoured by Dugas, and previously suggested in one form or another by Ribot and Fouillée, assumes the formation of two images: one which, owing to distraction or fatigue, reaches consciousness after having traversed subconsciousness, and so takes on a dream-like and effaced character, and almost simultaneously with this a direct perception which has not thus changed its character; the shock of the conflict between these two produces the pseudo-reminiscence (‘Sur l’Interpretation des Faits de Paramnésie,’ Revue Philosophique, August 1902). Albès, in his Paris thesis, criticises this explanation, pointing out that a sequence of this kind very frequently occurs, but produces no pseudo-reminiscence.
236 Michel Léon-Kindberg, ‘Le Sentiment du Déjà Vu,’ Revue de Psychiatrie, April 1903, No. 4.
237 G. Ballet, ‘Un Cas de Fausse Reconnaissance,’ Revue Neurologique, 1904, p. 1221.
238 Dugas, ‘Observations sur des Erreurs “Formelles” de la Mémoire’, Revue Philosophique, July 1908; ib. June 1910. Dugas makes no reference to Janet, nor to my paper on Hypnagogic Paramnesia, but his statement of the matter to some extent combines and harmonises those of the two earlier writers.
239 P. Janet, ‘A Propos du Déjà Vu,’ Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, July-August 1905.
240 H. Bergson, ‘Le Souvenir du Présent et la Fausse Reconnaissance,’ Revue Philosophique, December 1908. It should be remarked that, except in the attempt to explain why paramnesia is not normally habitual, Bergson’s paper is based on the ideas or suggestions of previous writers.
241 Before the appearance of my paper, as already mentioned, Anjel had emphasised the significance of fatigue in the production of paramnesia (Archiv für Psychiatrie, Bd. viii. pp. 57 et seq.). His theory, indeed (only known to me through brief summaries)—according to which the pseudo-reminiscence is due to the tardy apprehension by the fatigued mind of a sensation which is thus degraded to the level of a reproduced impression—seems practically identical with that which I independently reached in the light of hypnagogic phenomena.
242 I disregard those theories which invoke histological explanations, as by some peculiar disposition of the neurons. Such explanations are as much outside the psychologist’s sphere as the old-fashioned explanations by reference to God and the Devil. A known physiological or pathological process may, indeed, quite properly be recognised by the psychologist; such, for instance, as the disturbance of the heart associated with some dreams. Even minute changes in the brain, when they have been properly determined by the histologist, may be effectively invoked by the psychologist if they seem to supply an exact physical correlative to his own findings. But for the psychologist to go outside his own field, and invent a purely fanciful and arbitrary neuronic scheme to suit a psychic process, explains nothing. It is merely child’s play. The stuff that the psychologist works with must be psychical, just as the stuff of the physicist’s work must be physical.
243 Certain phases of waking psychic life are, however, closely related to dreaming. This is obviously the case as regards day-dreaming or reverie. (See e.g. Janet, Névroses et Idées Fixes, vol. i. pp. 390-6.) It would also appear that wit is the result of a process analogous to that fusion of incompatible elements which we have found to prevail in dreams. Our dreams are sometimes full of usually ineffective wit; I could easily quote dreams in illustration. (Freud has, from his point of view, studied the analogy between wit and dreaming in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten.)
244 In more recent times Moreau of Tours, especially, argued (Du Haschich et de l’Aliénation Mentale, 1845) that haschisch-intoxication is insanity, and that insanity is a waking dream.
245 In insane subjects a dream not uncommonly forms the starting point of a delusion, and many illustrative examples could be brought forward.
246 Marro, La Pubertà, pp. 286-92.
247 Freud, Die Traumdeutung, p. 13. Elsewhere (p. 135) Freud remarks: ‘The deeper we go in the analysis of dreams the more frequently we come across traces of childish experience which form a latent source of dreams.’ The same point had been previously emphasised by Sully, ‘The Dream as a Revelation,’ Fortnightly Review, March 1893.
248 C. M. Giessler, Die Physiologischen Beziehungen der Traumvorgänge, ch. iv.
249 Jewell, who gives illustrations in evidence, concludes (American Journal of Psychology, January 1905, pp. 25-8) that ‘the confusion of dreams with real life is almost universal with children, and quite common among adolescents and adults.’
250 Hans Gross, the distinguished criminologist, refers (Kriminalpsychologie, p. 672) to two cases of children who brought criminal charges which were apparently based on dreams. Gross mentions that this may often be suspected when the child says nothing at the time, and shows no excitement or depression until a day or two after the date of the alleged event. For confusion of dream with reality, see also Gross, Gesammelte Kriminalistische Aufsätze, vol. ii. p. 174.
251 Thus Rachilde (Mme. Vallette) writes that as a young girl her dreams were so vivid that ‘I would often ask myself if I had not an existence in two forms: my waking personality and my dreaming personality. Sometimes I was deceived and imagined that my real life was dreams.’ She instinctively began to write at the age of twelve, and it was by completing her dreams that she became a novelist (Chabaneix, Le Subconscient, p. 49). George Sand’s early day-dreams, of which she gives so interesting an account (Histoire de ma Vie, part III. ch. viii), developed around the central figure of Corambé, first seen in a real dream. Corambé was, at the same time, a divine being, to whom she erected an altar. So that of the child it may be said, as Lucretius said of primitive man, that the gods first appear in dreams.
252 ‘In sleep,’ says Sully (Fortnightly Review, March 1893), ‘we have a reversion to a more primitive type of experience.’ ‘Dreaming,’ says Jastrow (The Subconscious, p. 219), ‘may be viewed as a reversion to a more primitive type of thought.’
253 This tendency is notably represented by Durkheim (‘Origines de la Pensée Religieuse,’ Revue Philosophique, January 1909) and Crawley (The Idea of the Soul, 1909).
254 Hill Tout, Journal, Anthropological Institute, January-June 1905, p. 143; Sidney Hartland, in his presidential address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association, in 1906, emphasised the significance of dreams in Shamanism, and Sir Everard im Thurn, in his Among the Indians of Guiana, shows how practically real are dreams to the savage mind.
255 See, e.g., as regards the American Indians, Thornton Parker in the Open Court, May 1901.
256 Leviathan, part I. ch. ii.
257 Laistner, Das Rätsel der Sphinx, 1889, vol. 1. p. xiii. While Laistner was chiefly concerned with the exploration of the religious myths, he pointed out that epics and fairy-tales (Amor and Psyche, the stories of the Nibelung and Baldur, etc.) may be similarly explained. It seems probable that his investigations received a stimulus in the earlier experiments of J. Boerner (Das Alpdrücken, 1855) on the production of nightmare. Laistner has had many followers, notable C. Ruths (Experimental-Untersuchungen über Musikphantome, 1898), who argues (pp. 415-46) that the old Greek myths had their chief root in dream phenomena, in delirium, and in the visions aroused in some persons by hearing music, while he considers that many fabulous monsters and dragons have arisen from the combinations seen in dreams. We know that the Greeks, who were such great myth-makers, much occupied themselves in lying in wait for dreams, and in oneiromancy and necromancy (e.g., Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la Divination dans l’Antiquité, vol. 1. Bk. ii. ch. i. pp. 277-329). In this way alone it is doubtless true that, as Jewell says, ‘dreams have had a great effect upon the history of the world.’
258 For evidence regarding the high esteem in which many of the greatest Greek and Latin Fathers held dreams as divine revelations, see e.g., Sully, Art. ‘Dreams,’ Encyclopædia Britannica.
259 There is still a natural tendency in the uninstructed mind to identify spontaneous visual phenomena with Heaven. ‘When I gets to bed,’ said an aged and superannuated dustman to Vanderkiste (The Dens of London, p. 14), ‘I says my prayers, and I puts my hands afore my eyes—so [covering his face with his hands]; well, I sees such beautiful things, sparkles like, all afloating about, and I wished to ax yer, sir, if that ain’t a something of Heaven, sir.’
260 This was the only traceable element in the dream. The dreamer was accustomed to look at her watch on awaking in the morning, and, if it was seven or later, not to go to sleep again.
261 Freud, ‘Der Dichter und das Phantasieren’ (1908), in second series of his Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre; K. Abraham, Traum und Mythus (1909); and O. Rank, Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (1909), both published in the Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, edited by Freud.
262 Synesius refers to conversations with sheep in dreams, and he was probably the first to suggest that such dream phenomena may be the origin of fables in which animals speak. The dog and the cat, as we should expect, seem most frequently to speak in the dreams of civilised people. Thus I dreamed that I had a conversation with a cat who spoke with fair clearness and sense, though the whole of her sentences were not intelligible. I was not surprised at this relative lack of intelligibility, but neither was I surprised at her speaking at all. I have also encountered a talking parrot whose speech was more relevant than that of most talking parrots; this somewhat surprised me. In legends a wider range of animals are able to speak, no doubt because the primitive legend-makers were familiar with a wider range of animal life. How natural it is to the uninstructed mind to treat animals like human beings is well shown by the experiences of Helen Keller, the blind deaf-mute, who writes (The World I Live in, p. 147): ‘After my education began, the world which came within my reach was all alive.... It was two years before I could be made to believe that my dogs did not understand what I said, and I always apologised to them when I ran into or stepped on them.’
263 Journal of Mental Science, January 1909, p. 16.
264 ‘Images and thoughts,’ he said, ‘possess a power in and of themselves independent of that act of the judgment or understanding by which we affirm or deny the existence of a reality correspondent to them. Such is the ordinary state of the mind in dreams.... Add to this a voluntary lending of the will to this suspension of one of its own operations, and you have the true theory of stage illusion.’
265 Quoted by Paul Delior, Remy de Gourmont et son Œuvre, p. 14.
266 Thus even Leonardo da Vinci (Solmi, Frammenti, p. 285) acknowledged the benefit which he had gained by gazing at clouds or at mud-bespattered walls; and recommended the practice to other artists, for thereby, he says, they will receive suggestions for landscapes, battlepieces, ‘and infinite things,’ which they may bring to perfection. He compared this to the possibility of hearing words in the sounds of bells. Some other distinguished artists have adopted somewhat similar practices which are fundamentally the child’s habit of seeing pictures in the fire.
267 Thus Tennyson (Memoir, by his son, vol. i. p. 320) was subject from boyhood to a kind of waking trance. ‘This has generally come upon me,’ he wrote, ‘through repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently.’ (It thus seems to have been a sort of auto-hypnotisation.) In this state, individuality seemed to dissolve, he said, and he found in it a proof that the extinction of personality by death would not involve loss of life, but rather a fuller life. We are so easily convinced in these matters!
268 See e.g., De Manacéïne, Sleep, p. 314; Arturo Morselli, ‘Dei Sogni nei Genii,’ La Cultura, 1899.
269 Thus I once planned in a dream a paper on the Progress of Psychology, which seemed to me on awakening to present a quite workable though not notably brilliant scheme.
270 Sante de Sanctis, however (I Sogni, p. 369), reproduces a dream poem of twelve lines.
271 See note in J. D. Campbell’s edition of Coleridge’s Poetical Works, p. 592.
272 Tartini composed the sonata—a noble and beautiful work which still survives—at the age of twenty-one. In old age he told Lalande the astronomer (as the latter relates in his Voyage d’un Français en Italie, 1765, vol. ix. p. 55) that he had had a dream in which he sold his soul to the Devil, and it occurred to him in his dream to hand his fiddle to the Devil to see what he could do with it. ‘But how great was my astonishment when I heard him play with consummate skill a sonata of such exquisite beauty as surpassed the boldest flights of my imagination. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted; my breath was taken away, and I awoke. Seizing my violin I tried to retain the sounds I had heard. But it was in vain. The piece I then composed, the “Devil’s Sonata,” was the best I ever wrote, but how far below the one I had heard in my dream!’ The dream, it will be seen, was of a fairly common type, and to Tartini’s excitable temperament it served as a stimulus to his finest energies. But the real ‘Devil’s Sonata’ was hopelessly lost. (See the articles on Tartini in Fetis, Biographic Universelle des Musiciens, and Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians.)
273 Helen Keller, the blind deaf-mute, has written some interesting chapters on her dreams in The World I Live in. For the most part it would seem that the dream life of the blind (which has been studied by, among others, Jastrow, Fact and Fable in Psychology, pp. 337 et seq.) is not usually rich or vivid.
274 See e.g., Marie de Manacéïne, Sleep, p. 313.
275 This aspect of dreaming has been set forth by Bergson (Revue Philosophique, December 1908, p. 574). ‘The dream state,’ he remarks, ‘is the substratum of our normal state. Nothing is added in waking life; on the contrary, waking life is obtained by the limitation, concentration, and tension of that diffuse psychological life which is the life of dreaming. The perception and the memory which we find in dreaming are, in a sense, more natural than those of waking life: consciousness is then amused in perceiving for the sake of perceiving, and in remembering for the sake of remembering, without care for life, that is to say for the accomplishment of actions. To be awake is to eliminate, to choose, to concentrate the totality of the diffused life of dreaming to a point, to a practical problem. To be awake is to will; cease to will, detach yourself from life, become disinterested: in so doing you pass from the waking ego to the dreaming ego, which is less tense, but more extended than the other.’
276 Pepys, Diary, 2nd April 1664.