Part 6

2. When one dreams of a moving limb it always happens that one of the positions occurring in the execution of this movement corresponds to the real position.

3. The position of one’s own limb may be attributed in the dream to another person.

4. One may dream further that the movement in question is impeded.

5. The limb in any particular position may appear in the dream as an animal or monster, in which case a certain analogy between the two is established.

6. The position of a limb may incite in the dream ideas which bear some relation or other to this limb. Thus, e.g., if we are employed with the fingers we dream of numerals.

Such results would lead me to conclude that even the theory of bodily sensation cannot fully extinguish the apparent freedom in the determination of the dream picture to be awakened.

IV. Psychic Exciting Sources.—In treating the relations of the dream to the waking life and the origin of the dream material, we learned that the earliest as well as the latest investigators agreed that men dream of what they are doing in the day-time, and of what they are interested in during the waking state. This interest continuing from waking life into sleep, besides being a psychic tie joining the dream to life, also furnishes us a dream source not to be under-estimated, which, taken with those stimuli which become interesting and active during sleep, suffices to explain the origin of all dream pictures. But we have also heard the opposite of the above assertion, viz. that the dream takes the sleeper away from the interests of the day, and that in most cases we do not dream of things that have occupied our attention during the day until after they have lost for the waking life the stimulus of actuality. Hence in the analysis of the dream life we are reminded at every step that it is inadmissible to frame general rules without making provision for qualifications expressed by such terms as “frequently,” “as a rule,” “in most cases,” and without preparing for the validity of the exceptions.

If the conscious interest, together with the inner and outer sleep stimuli, sufficed to cover the etiology of the dreams, we ought to be in a position to give a satisfactory account of the origin of all the elements of a dream; the riddle of the dream sources would thus be solved, leaving only the task of separating the part played by the psychic and the somatic dream stimuli in individual dreams. But as a matter of fact no such complete solution of a dream has ever been accomplished in any case, and, what is more, every one attempting such solution has found that in most cases there have remained a great many components of the dream, the source of which he was unable to explain. The daily interest as a psychic source of dreams is evidently not far-reaching enough to justify the confident assertions to the effect that we all continue our waking affairs in the dream.

Other psychic sources of dreams are unknown. Hence, with the exception perhaps of the explanation of dreams given by Scherner, which will be referred to later, all explanations found in the literature show a large gap when we come to the derivation of the material for the presentation pictures, which is most characteristic for the dream. In this dilemma the majority of authors have developed a tendency to depreciate as much as possible the psychic factor in the excitations of dreams which is so difficult to approach. To be sure, they distinguish as a main division of dreams the nerve-exciting and the association dreams, and assert that the latter has its source exclusively in reproduction (Wundt, p. 365), but they cannot yet dismiss the doubt whether “they do not appear without being impelled by the psychical stimulus” (Volkelt, p. 127). The characteristic quality of the pure association dream is also found wanting. To quote Volkelt (p. 118): “In the association dreams proper we can no longer speak of such a firm nucleus. Here the loose grouping penetrates also into the centre of the dream. The ideation which is already set free from reason and intellect is here no longer held together by the more important psychical and mental stimuli, but is left to its own aimless shifting and complete confusion.” Wundt, too, attempts to depreciate the psychic factor in the stimulation of dreams by declaring that the “phantasms of the dream certainly are unjustly regarded as pure hallucinations, and that probably most dream presentations are really illusions, inasmuch as they emanate from slight sensory impressions which are never extinguished during sleep” (p. 338, &c.). Weygandt agrees with this view, but generalises it. He asserts that “the first source of all dream presentations is a sensory stimulus to which reproductive associations are then joined” (p. 17). Tissié goes still further in repressing the psychic exciting sources (p. 183): “Les rêves d’origine absolument psychique n’existent pas”; and elsewhere (p. 6), “Les pensées de nos rêves nous viennent de dehors....”

Those authors who, like the influential philosopher Wundt, adopt a middle course do not fail to remark that in most dreams there is a co-operation of the somatic stimuli with the psychic instigators of the dream, the latter being either unknown or recognised as day interests.

We shall learn later that the riddle of the dream formation can be solved by the disclosure of an unsuspected psychic source of excitement. For the present we shall not be surprised at the over-estimation of those stimuli for the formation of the dream which do not originate from psychic life. It is not merely because they alone can easily be found and even confirmed by experiment, but the somatic conception of the origin of dreams thoroughly corresponds to the mode of thinking in vogue nowadays in psychiatry. Indeed, the mastery of the brain over the organism is particularly emphasized; but everything that might prove an independence of the psychic life from the demonstrable organic changes, or a spontaneity in its manifestations, is alarming to the psychiatrist nowadays, as if an acknowledgment of the same were bound to bring back the times of natural philosophy and the metaphysical conception of the psychic essence. The distrust of the psychiatrist has placed the psyche under a guardian, so to speak, and now demands that none of its feelings shall divulge any of its own faculties; but this attitude shows slight confidence in the stability of the causal concatenation which extends between the material and the psychic. Even where on investigation the psychic can be recognised as the primary course of a phenomenon, a more profound penetration will some day succeed in finding a continuation of the path to the organic determination of the psychic. But where the psychic must be taken as the terminus for our present knowledge, it should not be denied on that account.

(d) Why the Dream is Forgotten after Awakening.—That the dream “fades away” in the morning is proverbial. To be sure, it is capable of recollection. For we know the dream only by recalling it after awakening; but very often we believe that we remember it only incompletely, and that during the night there was more of it; we can observe how the memory of a dream which has been still vivid in the morning vanishes in the course of the day, leaving only a few small fragments; we often know that we have been dreaming, but we do not know what; and we are so well used to the fact that the dream is liable to be forgotten that we do not reject as absurd the possibility that one may have been dreaming even when one knows nothing in the morning of either the contents or the fact of dreaming. On the other hand, it happens that dreams manifest an extraordinary retentiveness in the memory. I have had occasion to analyse with my patients dreams which had occurred to them twenty-five years or more previously, and I can remember a dream of my own which is separated from the present day by at least thirty-seven years, and yet has lost nothing of its freshness in my memory. All this is very remarkable, and for the present incomprehensible.

The forgetting of dreams is treated in the most detailed manner by Strümpell. This forgetting is evidently a complex phenomenon; for Strümpell does not explain it by a single reason, but by a considerable number of reasons.

In the first place, all those factors which produce forgetfulness in the waking state are also determinant for the forgetting of dreams. When awake we are wont soon to forget a large number of sensations and perceptions because they are too feeble, and because they are connected with a slight amount of emotional feeling. This is also the case with many dream pictures; they are forgotten because they are too weak, while stronger pictures in proximity will be remembered. Moreover, the factor of intensity in itself is not the only determinant for the preservation of the dream pictures; Strümpell, as well as other authors (Calkins), admits that dream pictures are often rapidly forgotten, although they are known to have been vivid, whereas among those that are retained in memory there are many that are very shadowy and hazy. Besides, in the waking state one is wont to forget easily what happened only once, and to note more easily things of repeated occurrence. But most dream pictures are single experiences, and this peculiarity equally contributes towards the forgetting of all dreams. Of greater significance is a third motive for forgetting. In order that feelings, presentations, thoughts and the like, should attain a certain degree of memory, it is important that they should not remain isolated, but that they should enter into connections and associations of a suitable kind. If the words of a short verse are taken and mixed together, it will be very difficult to remember them. “When well arranged in suitable sequence one word will help another, and the whole remains as sense easily and firmly in the memory for a long time. Contradictions we usually retain with just as much difficulty and rarity as things confused and disarranged.” Now dreams in most cases lack sense and order. Dream compositions are by their very nature incapable of being remembered, and they are forgotten because they usually crumble together the very next moment. To be sure, these conclusions are not in full accord with the observation of Radestock (p. 168), that we retain best just those dreams which are most peculiar.

According to Strümpell, there are still other factors effective in the forgetting of dreams which are derived from the relation of the dream to the waking state. The forgetfulness of the waking consciousness for dreams is evidently only the counterpart of the fact already mentioned, that the dream (almost) never takes over successive memories from the waking state, but only certain details of these memories which it tears away from the habitual psychic connections in which they are recalled while we are awake. The dream composition, therefore, has no place in the company of psychic successions which fill the mind. It lacks all the aids of memory. “In this manner the dream structure rises, as it were, from the soil of our psychic life, and floats in psychic space like a cloud in the sky, which the next breath of air soon dispels” (p. 87). This is also aided by the fact that, upon awakening, the attention is immediately seized by the inrushing sensory world, and only very few dream pictures can withstand this power. They fade away before the impressions of the new day like the glow of the stars before the sunlight.

As a last factor favouring the forgetting of dreams, we may mention the fact that most people generally take little interest in their dreams. One who investigates dreams for a time, and takes a special interest in them, usually dreams more during that time than at any other; that is, he remembers his dreams more easily and more frequently.

Two other reasons for the forgetting of dreams added by Bonatelli (given by Benini) to those of Strümpell have already been included in the latter; namely, (1) that the change of the general feeling between the sleeping and waking states is unfavourable to the mutual reproductions, and (2) that the different arrangement of the presentation material in the dream makes the dream untranslatable, so to speak, for the waking consciousness.

It is the more remarkable, as Strümpell observes, that, in spite of all these reasons for forgetting the dream, so many dreams are retained in memory. The continued efforts of the authors to formulate laws for the remembering of dreams amounts to an admission that here too there is something puzzling and unsolved. Certain peculiarities relating to the memory of dreams have been particularly noticed of late, e.g., that a dream which is considered forgotten in the morning may be recalled in the course of the day through a perception which accidentally touches the forgotten content of the dream (Radestock, Tissié). The entire memory of the dream is open to an objection calculated to depreciate its value very markedly in critical eyes. One may doubt whether our memory, which omits so much from the dream, does not falsify what it retained.

Such doubts relating to the exactness of the reproduction of the dream are expressed by Strümpell when he says: “It therefore easily happens that the active consciousness involuntarily inserts much in recollection of the dream; one imagines one has dreamt all sorts of things which the actual dream did not contain.”

Jessen (p. 547) expresses himself very decidedly: “Moreover we must not lose sight of the fact, hitherto little heeded, that in the investigation and interpretation of orderly and logical dreams we almost always play with the truth when we recall a dream to memory. Unconsciously and unwittingly we fill up the gaps and supplement the dream pictures. Rarely, and perhaps never, has a connected dream been as connected as it appears to us in memory. Even the most truth-loving person can hardly relate a dream without exaggerating and embellishing it. The tendency of the human mind to conceive everything in connection is so great that it unwittingly supplies the deficiencies of connection if the dream is recalled somewhat disconnectedly.”

The observations of V. Eggers, though surely independently conceived, sound almost like a translation of Jessen’s words: “... L’observation des rêves a ses difficultés spéciales et le seul moyen d’éviter toute erreur en pareille matière est de confier au papier sans le moindre retard ce que l’on vient d’éprouver et de remarquer; sinon, l’oubli vient vite ou total ou partiel; l’oubli total est sans gravité; mais l’oubli partiel est perfide; car si l’on se met ensuite à raconter ce que l’on n’a pas oublié, on est exposé à compléter par imagination les fragments incohérents et disjoints fourni par la mémoire ...; on devient artiste à son insu, et le récit, périodiquement répété s’impose à la créance de son auteur, qui, de bonne foi, le présente comme un fait authentique, dûment établi selon les bonnes méthodes....”

Similarly Spitta, who seems to think that it is only in our attempt to reproduce the dream that we put in order the loosely associated dream elements: “To make connection out of disconnection, that is, to add the process of logical connection which is absent in the dream.”

As we do not at present possess any other objective control for the reliability of our memory, and as indeed such a control is impossible in examining the dream which is our own experience, and for which our memory is the only source, it is a question what value we may attach to our recollections of dreams.

(e) The Psychological Peculiarities of Dreams.—In the scientific investigation of the dream we start with the assumption that the dream is an occurrence of our own psychic activity; nevertheless the finished dream appears to us as something strange, the authorship of which we are so little forced to recognise that we can just as easily say “a dream appeared to me,” as “I have dreamt.” Whence this “psychic strangeness” of the dream? According to our discussion of the sources of dreams we may suppose that it does not depend on the material reaching the dream content; because this is for the most part common to the dream life and waking life. One may ask whether in the dream it is not changes in the psychic processes which call forth this impression, and may so put to test a psychological characteristic of the dream.

No one has more strongly emphasized the essential difference between dream and waking life, and utilised this difference for more far-reaching conclusions, than G. Th. Fechner in some observations in his Elements of Psychophysic (p. 520, part 11). He believes that “neither the simple depression of conscious psychic life under the main threshold,” nor the distraction of attention from the influences of the outer world, suffices to explain the peculiarities of the dream life as compared with the waking life. He rather believes that the scene of dreams is laid elsewhere than in the waking presentation life. “If the scene of the psychophysical activity were the same during the sleeping and the waking states, the dream, in my opinion, could only be a continuation of the waking ideation maintaining itself at a lower degree of intensity, and must moreover share with the latter its material and form. But the state of affairs is quite different.”

What Fechner really meant has never been made clear, nor has anybody else, to my knowledge, followed further the road, the clue to which he indicated in this remark. An anatomical interpretation in the sense of physiological brain localisations, or even in reference to histological sections of the cerebral cortex, will surely have to be excluded. The thought may, however, prove ingenious and fruitful if it can be referred to a psychic apparatus which is constructed out of many instances placed one behind another.

Other authors have been content to render prominent one or another of the tangible psychological peculiarities of the dream life, and perhaps to take these as a starting point for more far-reaching attempts at explanation.

It has been justly remarked that one of the main peculiarities of the dream life appears even in the state of falling asleep, and is to be designated as the phenomenon inducing sleep. According to Schleiermacher (p. 351), the characteristic part of the waking state is the fact that the psychic activity occurs in ideas rather than in pictures. But the dream thinks in pictures, and one may observe that with the approach of sleep the voluntary activities become difficult in the same measure as the involuntary appear, the latter belonging wholly to the class of pictures. The inability for such presentation work as we perceive to be intentionally desired, and the appearance of pictures which is regularly connected with this distraction, these are two qualities which are constant in the dream, and which in its psychological analysis we must recognise as essential characters of the dream life. Concerning the pictures—the hypnogogic hallucinations—we have discovered that even in their content they are identical with the dream pictures.