THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DREAM.
The base of the brain being quite asleep, the central ganglia being
partially asleep, the cerebral hemispheres or some part of them being
awake, we have the physiological condition in which occur the Phenomena
of Dream.
The first coming on of Dream is found at the moment of “falling asleep,”
before actual sleep has begun. _Then_ we _are_ conscious for an instant
that we are dreaming—that the mental impressions are not external
realities. But this consciousness is for a moment only. Either we start
into waking life and the incipient dream is banished, or we fall into
actual sleep and the condition of complete dream is established.
The process is worthy of note. You are engaged in some occupation—say
that you are reading a novel. You “feel sleepy;” your eyes continue to
pass over the page; your mind pictures the persons, actions and emotions
of the story. But by degrees the ideas become dim and shadowy and the
_attention_ flags. Then your mind wanders away to other scenes and
persons, which come into it uncalled for and even against your Will. But
the power of that Will is lessening also. At first it is strong to banish
the intruding thoughts; but as “the attention” relaxes more and more,
so more and more does your Will cease to control the now thick-coming
fancies. In that incipient stage of dream you know that these
dream-pictures are only dreams. Never do you mistake them for realities.
Soon the influence of sleep steals over the mind. The eyelids close and
exclude the impressions of the external world that are made through the
sense of sight. The other senses are paralyzed also. The creations of
the brain take full possession of the mind. You are now _asleep_ and
_dreaming_.
If the condition of dream were not so familiar—if it did not occur to
all of us, but only to some few persons in abnormal conditions, it would
appear to the whole world as very wonderful. Suppose that dreaming were
a faculty possessed only by persons of a certain constitution; that
a Dreamer had told you how, when he was asleep, he saw and conversed
with the dead, beheld distant places, lived another life, walked upon
water, flew through the air, performed impossibilities, felt passions
and sentiments and exercised intellectual powers far exceeding those of
his waking life, should we not say of him that he was a madman or an
impostor? Would he not be prosecuted by the high priests of physical
science as a rogue and vagabond, and sent to prison by the Scientists or
to an asylum by the Doctors?
But because all of us do these things nightly the wonder of them does
not strike us. We do not pause to think how great the marvel is, nor how
it comes _to be_. May I venture to hope that the reader will be induced
to look upon this marvellous mental phenomenon with some curiosity and
hereafter to recognise in the phenomena of dream, not only something to
awaken curiosity, but something to command his serious attention, as
being peculiarly fitted to reveal to the inquirer some of the mysteries
of Mind, its structure, its faculties, the manner of its action. The
phenomena of Dream open to us the path by which we may hope to make the
first advances into the science of Psychology, for they are _facts_
known to all, disputed by none and which even the Materialists cannot
deny. Happily, neither their vocabulary of abuse, nor their weapons
of prosecution and persecution, can be directed against those who
investigate the phenomena of dream. Their existence cannot be denied, nor
can they be explained by attributing them to imposture.
How comes this transformation from sanity to insanity, wrought in a
moment, when Sleep has closed upon the Mind the portals of the senses and
left it almost isolated from the real material external world to revel in
its own imaginary world?
Some rein that held the mind in check when awake has certainly been taken
from it at the instant sleep occurs.
What is that lost rein—that paralyzed power?
It is not _Consciousness_. We do not lose our individuality in dream.
Never does the dreamer suppose himself to be another person. He may dream
that he has assumed other characters, that he is a king, or a beggar, but
still it is _himself_ who has become a king and is _acting_ king.
Nor is _the Will_ absent. The dreaming mind is conscious of the exercise
of its Will and believes that its commands are obeyed. But the Will is
powerless to compel action. Its commands are _not_ obeyed. In dream we
_will_ to speak, to run, to do what the body does freely when in our
waking state we _will_ to do. We _will_ in dream as we _will_ when awake,
but the mechanism of the nerves that move the body refuses to obey the
mandate of the Will however strenuously exerted.
_Imagination_, on the other hand, is even more lively in dream than in
our waking time.
The _Reasoning Faculties_ are not asleep, for we _argue_, often
rightly—only we reason upon wrong premisses. We accept the visions of the
mind—the ideas presented to the Conscious Self—as being real and then we
reason upon them rationally. What Lawyer has not often dreamed that he
was addressing a logical legal argument to an approving Court and, when
wakened, remembering and reviewing that argument, has found it to be
without a flaw?
The _Emotions_ are not extinguished when we dream. The presentation of
imaginary incidents which, if they had been real, would have kindled
the passions in waking life, rouse those self-same passions to equal if
not to greater fury in dream. Nor is the _passion_ fanciful. We do not
merely dream that we are angry. Very real and hot anger is kindled by the
fancy-born picture of the dream, as the reader will readily discover if
he recalls the sensation that attends upon being awakened at the moment
of irritation in a dream. It is with all the other passions and emotions
as with anger. The incidents of a dream excite them as if those incidents
were true. Wherefore? Because they appear to the mind to be true.
Thus by a process of exhaustion we may hope to arrive at some knowledge
of the cause of the special characteristic of dream—that is to say,
the _absolute belief we have in its reality during its enactment_. The
inquiry cannot fail to throw a great light upon mental structure and upon
the relationship of the mind to the body and to the external world.
The first fact we learn from observing the action of the mind, when
thus severed from communication with the external world, is its perfect
independence, its entire unconsciousness of its loss, its capacity
to create a world for itself and live a life of its own. If such a
condition could be imagined as a mind continuing to live in a dead body,
we might find in this phenomenon of sleep how the mind could exist in the
same state of activity as now, feel the same emotions of pleasure and of
pain, and enjoy a life as real to itself, although imaginary in fact, as
is the actual existence of any living man.
But it teaches a lesson yet more important. If the mind can thus live
a life of its own when severed from the influences of the body by the
paralysis of a section of the brain in sleep, is not the presumption
strong that this _something_ that does not sleep with the body, that
preserves an individual consciousness, that has memory and a Will, can
create a world of its own and live and act in it with entire belief in
its reality and which has a perfect sense of pleasure and of pain, is not
the material brain merely, but something other than brain and of which
the brain hemispheres are only the material mechanism? If the Conscious
Self lives and works thus when the body is dead to it in sleep, may it
not well be—(nay, does it not suggest even a probability?)—that when
permanent severance by death is substituted for the temporary severance
by sleep, the same Conscious Self may continue to exist with other
perceptive and receptive powers adapted to its changed conditions of
being?
Why, then, are we in dream so credulous as to believe implicitly that
whatever visions are presented to us by the busy fancy are realities?
Why do we accept impossibilities and incongruities without a question of
their truth and scarcely with a sense of surprise or wonder? We have seen
that it is _not_ because the _reasoning_ faculties are asleep,—for often
they are very active in dream.
Simply, it is because we accept as real and as having been
sense-conveyed, and therefore as representing external objects, the ideas
that are in fact created by the mind itself.
And wherefore do we thus accept them?
The answer throws a flood of light upon the Mechanism of Mind and the
Mechanism of Man.
All our sensations are mental. Whether self-created within or brought
from without by the senses, we are conscious only of the _mental_
impression. That alone is _real_ to us. That alone _exists_ for us.
But by what faculty do we, in the waking state, distinguish between
the self-created and the sense-borne ideas and impressions, so as to
recognise the former as ideal and the latter as real?
For instance; you think of an absent friend, and you have in your mind
a picture of him more or less accurate. You see your friend in person
and then another picture of him is in your mind, brought to it by the
sense of sight. Your perceptions of both are merely mental pictures.
But, nevertheless, you readily distinguish them and call the mind-drawn
image _ideal_ and the sense-brought image _real_—meaning by these phrases
that the former has no objective existence, but the latter is actually
existing without you.
By what process is this result obtained? What enables you so to
distinguish them?
It can only be that you are _conscious_ of the action of the _senses_.
You feel that your eye is employed in the process. You have learned by
_experience_ that the actual presence of an external object is only to
be accepted when the information of it is brought to you by one of your
senses.
Thus it is that, when we are awake, the senses correct the action of the
mind and our capacity to distinguish the real from the ideal is due to
the information given by the senses.
It is plain now why in dream we believe the ideal to be real. The
_senses_ being severed from the Mind by sleep, the Mind has lost the
instrument by which it learns, when awake, what is shadow and what
substance. As the necessary consequence, all ideas appear to it to be
real because they are all alike. Inasmuch, then, as all the pictures that
throng the mind were originally brought to it by the senses, it has no
means, when an idea comes before it, of discerning whether it is a newly
brought idea or only the revival of an idea already existing in itself.
Hence it is that the Mind cannot but accept all its self-creations as
realities and when these are combined in a connected drama, the whole is
viewed by the Conscious Self as an actual adventure of the body, and not,
as in the waking time it would have been viewed, as merely a creation of
the busy fancy.
But the conclusion from this is that there is a Conscious Self, distinct
from the brain action which it contemplates and criticises.
That in fact we _have_ Souls.
Or rather that we _are_ Souls, clothed with a molecular mechanism
necessary for communication with the molecular part of creation, in which
the present stage of being is to be passed.