Thousands of explanations have been offered for typical dreams which
almost every one has had at least once, such as dreams of falling or
flying, but none of them should be accepted as covering all cases.
The human mind is compelled to do its thinking along certain lines and to
use certain categories like time, space, etc.
Naturally, dreams, which are in no way different from waking thoughts,
must move along certain definite grooves too; but we must remember that no
symbol has an absolute meaning. Every symbol is likely to have a slightly
different meaning for every individual.
We shall see in the chapter on "Attitudes in Dreams" that it is the type
of dreams rather than their content which is important psychologically.
And it is the type of man who dreams which is important to bear in mind
when we try to ferret out the meaning of a typical dream.
Generally speaking, flying dreams seem to correspond to one of the most
universal cravings of mankind: to liberate itself from the tyranny of the
law of gravity and enjoy the freedom which winged creatures enjoy. All
races have wished to fly and that desire, never gratified in waking life
until recently, was bound to express itself in the dreams of all races at
all periods of history.
Freud has suggested that such dreams repeat memories of childhood games,
rocking, see-sawing; Federn has seen in them a symbol of sexual
excitement, both of which explanations sound unconvincing.
There may be a symbolism of a different sort about flying dreams.
If for some reason or other, our sleep becomes suddenly much deeper, we
may represent our "flight" from reality through a flight through the air.
We soar to the dream level which we feel to be higher than the waking
level, to which on awakening, we fall painfully. Variations in the sleep
depth would thus account for the frequent relation of sequence which is
observable between flying and falling dreams. Flying dreams are never
connected with any fear of anxiety, while falling dreams are almost always
nightmares of usually short duration.
The Freudians see in many falling dreams memories of falls in childhood.
"Nearly all children," Freud writes, "have fallen occasionally and then
been picked up and fondled; if they fell out of bed at night, they were
picked up by their nurse and taken into her bed."
This explanation fits only an insignificant number of cases.
The symbolism of the falling dream is found upon analysis to be much
richer.
In women, dreams of falling are very often symbolical of sexual surrender.
Anxiety or pleasure connected with falling dreams reveals the fear or
pleasure connected with such a thought in the dreamer's mind. Not a few
falling dreams transform themselves after a slight period of anxiety into
flying dreams, thus indicating that the feeling of inferiority connected
with the idea of surrender was very slight and easily replaced by a
feeling of power, freedom and superiority to environment and conventions.
Dreams of falling are sometimes "followed" by a terrified awakening. In
reality it is the awakening due to some physical stimulus, noise, light,
pain, etc., _which is followed by a falling dream_. The dream in that case
is symbolical of the act of awaking.
The anxiety is the natural displeasure felt by the dreamer when suddenly
compelled to pass from dreamland into reality. This symbolism is rather
apt, for the awakening lowers us from the free and irresponsible estate of
the dream creature to the slavery entailed by leading a real life. We fall
from the heights of our dreams to the depths of reality.
At times, the dreamer has the impression of being mangled or killed as a
result of that fall.
Death is again a powerful symbol indicative of the dreamer's attitude. He
feels he is dying when compelled to return to reality. Such a type is more
dangerously attached to his fiction than the one who only resents awaking
as a diminution of his ego and power.
Dreams of falling teeth may be symbolical of unconscious onanistic
tendencies. The slang of many languages has established a connection which
cannot be casual between the pulling of teeth and sexual
self-gratification.
In dreams in which teeth grow again in the dreamer's mouth we may see a
return to childish attitudes and memories of the years when the first
teeth fell out and were replaced by stronger ones. An optimistic attitude,
if somewhat regressive.
When a certain tooth or group of teeth keeps on recurring in dream
pictures, an X-ray examination of the entire denture should be made. I
have observed several cases in which such dreams revealed the presence of
root abscesses causing absolutely no conscious irritation and only felt
unconsciously. Those dreams were both a warning and a wish-fulfilment
(painless extraction).
Dreams of nakedness, like dreams of flying, seem to express one of
mankind's cravings, freedom from clothes. In the Earthly Paradise, Adam
and Eve were naked and unashamed; all the gods and goddesses of the
ancient religions were unclothed; even in our days academic sculptors
represent modern heroes naked. Painters and sculptors of all epochs have
been inclined to glorify the nude in their works.
It is quite unnecessary to construct such dreams as a return to
infantilism, as a regression, as the Freudians generally do.
The attitude of the onlookers in those dreams contains a very obvious form
of wish-fulfilment: whether we sit at a banquet or walk across a drawing
room or appear on a street naked or half unclothed, no one seems to notice
us. We generally try to hide or to drape ourselves in as dignified a
manner as possible in whatever scanty garments we retain, but the anxiety
is all on our side.
Such dreams cannot be dreams of exhibitionism for they are never
accompanied by the wish that people should see us, nor do we ever derive
any pleasure from our exposure. I would be inclined to consider them in
almost every case as symbolic dreams of attitudes. We are labouring under
the burden of some secret which we are afraid of revealing. In spite of
our anxiety, we are comforted by the fact that our secret (our total or
partial nakedness) escapes the beholders. Our danger and our escape are
simply visualized and symbolized.
The symbolism of our exposure is quite obvious. The upper part of our body
is usually covered up and it is the "lower" part of it which is exposed,
and which we awkwardly try to wrap up in our shirt tails or to conceal
under a table cloth or behind furniture or bushes. We are concealing
something shameful, "low." Everybody knows the symbolism of high and low,
right and left, which is expressed by the language of all races.
One form of anxiety dream in which we grope our way through endless narrow
passages, room after room, up and down flights of stairs, has been
considered by some analysts as a memory of the first event of our life,
when we were forced violently, painfully, through a narrow passage and
finally reached the light of day. When the detail of those dreams is
closely analysed it will prove much more valuable and important than a
mere regression to the infantile.
They will generally turn out to be the sort of dreams that coincide with
the solution of a crisis and indicate that an adaptation to life has been
reached, that the subject has been "reborn."
Sleep walking is one variety of typical dream characterized by a greater
motor activity than the usual dream in which we either lie still or only
perform incomplete motions. Sleep walkers, like ordinary dreamers,
performed in their somnambulistic states actions which they have refrained
from performing in their waking states. While the sense of direction and
of orientation seems unimpaired in sleep walkers, their perception of
reality is very rudimentary.
Two cases reported by the Encyclopédie Française and by Krafft-Ebing,
respectively, illustrate that point.
A young man used to get up at night, go to his study and write.
Observers would now and then substitute a sheet of blank paper for the
sheet which he had covered with writing. When he had finished, he would
read over his manuscript aloud and repeat correctly, while holding the
blank sheet before his eyes, the words written on the sheet which had
been taken from him.
One night the prior of a monastery was seated at his desk. A monk entered,
a knife in his hand. He took no notice of the prior but went to the bed
and plunged his knife into it several times; after which he returned to
his cell. The next morning the monk told the prior of a terrible dream he
had had. The prior had killed the monk's mother and the monk had avenged
her by stabbing the prior to death. Thereupon he had awakened, horrified,
and thanking God that the whole affair had only been a dream.
In sleep walking dreams there is an accuracy, a singleness of purpose, a
concentration of attention which has always struck all observers.
The sleeper often wakes up when called by name, but he generally obeys
without waking, all commands of a sensible character, such as to go back
to bed.
The sleeper often finds his way and locates the objects he may need for
the purposes of his dream with his eyes closed, but noises and collisions
with objects often fail to bring him back to waking consciousness.
Sadger has attempted to point a connection between moonlight and sleep
walking, which he calls at times "moon walking."
The conclusions which he reaches at the end of his book on the subject are
as follows:
"Sleep walking, under or without the influence of the moon, represents a
motor outbreak of the unconscious and serves, like the dream, the
fulfilment of secret, forbidden wishes, first of the present, behind
which, however, infantile wishes regularly hide. Both prove themselves _in
all the cases analysed_ more or less completely as of a sexual erotic
nature.
"Also those wishes which present themselves without disguise, are mostly
of the same nature. The leading wish may be claimed to be that the
sleepwalker, male or female, would climb into bed with the loved object as
in childhood. The love object need not belong necessarily to the present;
it can much more likely be one of earliest childhood.
"Not infrequently the sleep walker identifies himself with the beloved
person, sometimes even puts on his clothes, linen or outer garments, or
imitates his manner.
"Sleep walking can also have an infantile prototype, when the child
pretends to be asleep, that it may be able without fear or punishment to
experience all sorts of forbidden things, because it cannot be held
accountable for what it does 'unconsciously in its sleep.' The same cause
works also psychically, when sleep walking occurs mostly in the deepest
sleep, even if organic causes are likewise responsible for it.
"The motor outbreak during sleep, which drives one from rest in bed and
results in sleep walking and wandering under the light of the moon, may be
referred to this, that all sleep walkers exhibit a heightened muscular
irritability and muscle erotic, the endogenous excitement of which can
compensate for the giving up of the rest in bed. In accordance with this,
these phenomena are especially frequent in the offspring of alcoholics,
epileptics, sadists and hysterics, with preponderating involvement of the
motor apparatus.
"Sleep walking and moon walking are in themselves as little symptoms of
hysteria as of epilepsy; yet they are found frequently in conjunction with
the former.
"The moon's light is reminiscent of the light in the hand of a beloved
parent. Fixed gazing upon the planet also has probably an erotic
colouring.
"It seems possible that sleep walking and moon walking may be permanently
cured through the psychoanalytic method."