The World of Dreams

CHAPTER II. The Elements of Dream Life

THE ELEMENTS OF DREAM LIFE

The Spontaneous Procession of Dream Imagery--Its Kaleidoscopic Character--Attention in Dreams--Relation of Drug Visions and Hypnagogic Imagery to Dreaming--Colour in Dreams--The Fusion of Dream Imagery--Compared to Dissolving Views--Sources of the Imagery--Various types of Fusion--The Sub-Conscious Element in Dreaming--Verbal Transformations as Links in Dream Imagery--The Reduplication of Visual Imagery in Motor and other Terms, 20

CHAPTER III. The Logic of Dreams

THE LOGIC OF DREAMS

All Dreaming is a Process of Reasoning--The Fundamental Character of Reasoning--Reasoning as a Synthesis of Images--Dream Reasoning Instinctive and Automatic--It is also Consciously carried on--This a result of the Fundamental Split in Intelligence--Dissociation--Dreaming as a Disturbance of Apperception, 56

CHAPTER IV. The Senses in Dreams

THE SENSES IN DREAMS

All Dreams probably contain both Presentative and Representative Elements--The Influence of Tactile Sensations on Dreams--Dreams excited by Auditory Stimuli--Dreams aroused by Odours and Tastes--The Influence of Visual Stimuli--Difficulty of distinguishing between Actual and Imagined Sensory Excitations--The Influence of Internal Visceral Stimuli on Dreaming--Erotic Dreams--Vesical Dreams--Cardiac Dreams and their Symbolism--Prodromic Dreams--Prophetic Dreams, 71

CHAPTER V. Emotion in Dreams

EMOTION IN DREAMS

Emotion and Imagination--How Stimuli are transformed into Emotion--Somnambulism--The Failure of Movement in Dreams--Nightmare--Influence of the approach of Awakening on imagined Dream movements--The Magnification of Imagery--Peripheral and Cerebral Conditions combine to produce this Imaginative Heightening--Emotion in Sleep also Heightened--Dreams formed to explain Heightened Emotions of unknown origin--The fundamental Place of Emotion in Dreams--Visceral and especially Gastric disturbance as a source of Emotion--Symbolism in Dreams--The Dreamer's Moral Attitude--Why Murder so often takes place in Dreams--Moral Feeling not Abolished in Dreams though sometimes Impaired, 94

CHAPTER VI. Aviation in Dreams

AVIATION IN DREAMS

Dreams of Flying and Falling--Their Peculiar Vividness--Dreams of Flying an Alleged Survival of Primeval Experiences--Best explained as based on Respiratory Sensations combined with Cutaneous Anaesthesia--The Explanation of Dreams of Falling--The Sensation of Levitation sometimes experienced by Ecstatic Saints--Also experienced at the Moment of Death, 129

CHAPTER VII. Symbolism in Dreams

SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS

The Dramatisation of Subjective Feelings Based on Dissociation--Analogies in Waking Life--The Synaesthesias and Number-forms--Symbolism in Language--In Music--The Organic Basis of Dream Symbolism--The Omnipotence of Symbolism--Oneiromancy--The Scientific Interpretation of Dreams--Why Symbolism prevails in Dreaming--Freud's Theory of Dreaming--Dreams as Fulfilled Wishes--Why this Theory cannot be applied to all Dreaming--The Complete Form of Symbolism in Dreams--Splitting up of Personality--Self-objectivation in Imaginary Personalities--The Dramatic Element in Dreams--Hallucinations--Multiple Personality--Insanity--Self-objectivation a Primitive Tendency--Its Survival in Civilisation, 148

CHAPTER VIII. Dreams of the Dead

DREAMS OF THE DEAD

Mental Dissociation during sleep--Illustrated by the Dream of Returning to School Life--The Typical Dream of a Dead Friend--Examples--Early Records of this Type of Dream--Analysis of such Dreams--Atypical Forms--The Consolation sometimes afforded by Dreams of the Dead--Ancient Legends of this Dream Type--The Influence of Dreams on the Belief of Primitive Man in the Survival of the Dead, 194

CHAPTER IX. Memory in Dreams

MEMORY IN DREAMS

The Apparent Rapidity of Thought in Dreams--This Phenomenon largely due to the Dream being a Description of a Picture--The Experience of Drowning Persons--The Sense of Time in Dreams--The Crumpling of Consciousness in Dreams--The Recovery of Lost Memories through the Relaxation of Attention--The Emergence in Dreams of Memories not known to Waking Life--The Recollection of Forgotten Languages in Sleep--The Perversions of Memory in Dreams--Paramnesic False Recollections--Hypnagogic Paramnesia--Dreams mistaken for Actual Events--The Phenomenon of Pseudo-Reminiscence--Its Relationship to Epilepsy--Its Prevalence especially among Imaginative and Nervously Exhausted Persons--The Theories put forward to Explain it--A Fatigue Product--Conditioned by Defective Attention and Apperception--Pseudo-Reminiscence a reversed Hallucination, 212

CHAPTER X. Conclusion

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, 261

INDEX, 283

THE WORLD OF DREAMS

CHAPTER I. Introduction

INTRODUCTION

The House of Dreams--Fallacies in the Study of Dreams--Is it Possible to Study Dreams?--How Fallacies may be Avoided--Do we always Dream during Sleep?--The Two Main Sources of Dreams with their Sub-divisions.

When we fall asleep we enter a dim and ancient house of shadow, unillumined by any direct ray from the outer world of waking life. We are borne about through its chambers, without conscious volition of our own; we fall down its mouldy and rotten staircases, we are haunted by strange sounds and odours from its mysterious recesses; we move among phantoms we cannot consciously control. As we emerge into the world of daily life again, for an instant the sunlight seems to flash into the obscure house before the door closes behind us; we catch one vivid glimpse of the chambers we have been wandering in, and a few more or less fragmentary memories come back to us of the life we have led there. But they soon fade away in the light of common day, and if a few hours later we seek to recall the strange experiences we have passed through, it usually happens that the visions of the night have already dissolved in memory into a few shreds of mist we can no longer reconstruct.

For most of us our whole knowledge ends here. Our dreams are real enough while they last, but the interests of waking life absorb us so entirely that we rarely have leisure, and still less inclination, to subject our sleeping adventures, trivial and absurd as they must usually seem, to the careful tests which waking intelligence is accustomed to subject more obviously important matters to. The world of dreams and the mysterious light which prevails there are abandoned entirely to our sleeping activities.

This leading characteristic of dream life--the fact that it takes place in another and more shadowy world and in a different kind of consciousness--has led to the criticism of the study of dreams from the scientific side. We cannot really study our dreams, these objectors say, because we--that is to say, our waking consciousness--cannot come sufficiently closely in contact with them. Dreams, it is argued, are inevitably transformed in our hands; what we are studying is not our dreams, but only our waking, and probably altogether false, impressions of our dreams. There is a certain element of truth in this objection. It is very difficult, indeed impossible, to recall exactly, and in their proper order, even the details of a real adventure which has only just happened to us. It is, obviously, incomparably more difficult to recall an experience which took place, under such shadowy conditions, in a world so remote from the world of waking life. There is, further, the very definite difficulty that we only catch our dreams for a moment by the light, as it were, of the open door as we are emerging from sleep. In other words, our waking consciousness is for a moment observing and interpreting a process in another kind of consciousness, or even if we assert that it is the same consciousness it is still a consciousness that has been working under quite different conditions from waking consciousness, and accepting data which in the waking state it would not accept. For the student of dreams it must ever be a serious question how far the facts become inevitably distorted in this process. Sleeping or waking, it is probable, our consciousness never embraces the whole of the possible psychic field within us. There are, when we are dreaming as well as when we are awake--as will become clearer in the sequel--subconscious, or imperfectly conscious, states just below our consciousness, and exerting an influence upon it. Our latent psychic possessions, among which dreams move, would seem to be by no means always at the same depth; the specific gravity of consciousness, as it were, varies, and these latent elements rise or fall, becoming nearer to the conscious surface or falling further away from it. But the greatest change must take place when the waking surface is reached and the outer world breaks on sleeping consciousness. In that change there is doubtless a process of necessary and automatic transformation and interpretation. We may picture it, perhaps, as somewhat the same process as when a person skilled in both languages takes up a foreign book and reads it out in his own tongue. With practice the reader may become unconscious that he is transforming everything, that the words he utters are different from the words he sees, and that he even transposes their order, sometimes putting in the middle of a sentence the verb he sees at the end.

Yet even if we admit that the passage from sleeping to waking consciousness involves a change as complete as this--and it is probable, as we shall see, that some such change sometimes takes place--for a faithful interpreter the sense still remains the same. It is impossible to believe that the witness of waking consciousness to the nature of the visions it has caught at the threshold between sleeping and waking life is false, and the most convincing evidence of this is the utter unlikeness of these visions to the data of ordinary waking life.

But even this conclusion has been subjected to severe criticism which we have to face before we proceed further. Foucault, an acute investigator of dream psychology--carrying to its extreme point a position more partially and tentatively stated by Delbœuf and Tannery--has denied that our dreams, as they finally present themselves to waking consciousness, at all correspond to the psychic process in sleep upon which they are founded, and he especially insists that the logical connections are superadded. He considers that dreaming is an 'observation of memory' made under such conditions that 'it would be very imprudent to regard the remembrance of the dream as reproducing faithfully the mental state of sleep.' During sleep, he believes, our dream ideas proceed, concurrently, it may be, but separately and independently; at the moment when awakening begins, the mind, as an act of immediate memory, grasps the plurality of separate pictures and applies itself spontaneously to the task of organising them according to the rules of logic and the laws of the real world, making a drama of them as like as possible to the dramas of waking life. He agrees with Goblot that 'the dream we remember is a waking thought,' and with Tannery that 'we do not remember our dreams, but only the reconstructions of them we effected at the moment of waking.' It is after awakening, Foucault concludes, that the dream develops, and its final shape depends on the period at which it is noted down; 'the evolution of the dream after awakening is a logical evolution, dominated and directed by the instinctive need to give a reasonable appearance to the ensemble of images and sensations present to the mind, and to assimilate the representation of the dream to the system of representations which constitutes our knowledge of the real world.'

Continue reading The World of Dreams free in the Wunder reader →