We do not always need to sleep in order to escape _normally_ from reality.
Some of us manage to do it with their eyes open.
Day dreams are not essentially different from night dreams and would not
be mentioned separately but for the fact that they at times verge on a
neurosis and that in certain cases they are not easily distinguished from
delusions and hallucinations.
Whatever was said of night dreams in the preceding chapters holds true of
day dreams. There are pleasant day dreams, unpleasant day dreams and even
day "nightmares" or anxiety day dreams.
Like the sleep walker, the day dreamer manages at times to take just
enough notice of reality to direct himself through his house or along the
streets, while his mind is elaborating stories of varying complication.
A day dreamer who consulted me during the war would imagine himself, while
walking along the streets, enlisting, taking a tearful farewell from his
relatives and friends and accomplishing deeds of valour which made him
famous; after which he would be so affected by his greatness that tears
would roll down his cheeks. Or the dream would end tragically and he would
die and then again a cascade of tears would be let loose at the thought of
all the grief his demise would cause. The result was that day after day he
would suddenly "wake up" in some public place, his face wet with tears,
annoyed and embarrassed by the attention which his appearance would
attract.
Those day dreams constituted in spite of their sad cast a fulfilment of
his egotistical cravings. Even death was not too high a price to pay for
the importance he acquired in his dream, a psychological fancy which is
often found at the bottom of some sensational forms of suicide.
The anxiety day dream is the form of compensation sought by many
neurotics, weak in body and frequently taken advantage of by more vigorous
and ruthless persons.
It also plays at times the same part as masochistic nightmares, filling as
it does, the body with glycogen and a sense of power.
I have heard patients suffering from a sense of real or imaginary
inferiority tell me of their obsessive anger finding relief in scenes
which they made, while walking along the streets or when sleepless of
nights, to some absent person whom they held responsible for their
troubles.
They would then rehearse some annoying or humiliating incident provoked by
the offensive person and let loose a torrent of abuse leading unavoidably
to a fight in which they would beat, scratch or murder their enemy.
The sound of their own voice or the remarks of passers by would generally
wake them up at the climax; their hearts then would beat wildly, they
would be out of breath, if not bathed in perspiration, but they would
experience withal a certain amount of satisfaction from the victory they
had won and they would feel full of what a patient of mine termed "almost
murderous energy."
This form of "abreaction," when it does not assume the form of a constant
indulgence taking the place of positive action, is rather desirable. The
psychoanalytic treatment consists, in part at least, in the production of
day dreams based on memories which free in the patient a certain amount of
repressed energy. Thus a great deal of unrelated and unconscious material
is made conscious and related. Day dreams, without any definite direction
and unchecked, are likely, however, to be very dangerous and to exert a
paralysing influence on the dreamer.
The concentration and meditation recommended by some Hindoo philosophers
can accomplish valuable results if the subject has a clear, analytical
mind and knows how to correlate the scraps of thoughts which are thus
allowed to rise to consciousness.
For childish people, which are easily caught in the meshes of their
fancies and let their imagination run away with them, that indulgence is
deadly and it has led millions of Orientals into a nirvana-like idleness
and weakness, destructive of energy and life, a negative escape from
reality.
This is one of the reasons why, in many forms of neurosis, a rest cure is
the most dangerous form of treatment. The neurotic's attention is
generally directed away from reality. His energy is too often deflected
toward fictitious goals located outside of the real world. The neurotic
has to be brought back into contact with life and human beings; he has to
be trained to accept them _as they are_ and to enjoy them _for what they
are_, instead of imagining _what they might be_. The idleness and
seclusion of the rest cure may negative all efforts in that direction.
The rest cure from which day dreams cannot be excluded, is simply an
abnormal flight from reality sanctioned and abetted by a physician
ignorant of psychology.
The day dreams which produce happiness, which promote creation, scientific
or artistic, and which lead the individual into the stream of life, are
sound and healthy dreams. Those which only lead to more dreaming and away
from life, are neurotic phenomena, devoid of any redeeming grace.