THE PHENOMENA OF DREAM.
Such being the _Physiology and Psychology of Dream_—that is to say, the
conditions of the bodily and mental mechanism under which the phenomena
of Dream are presented—let us observe those phenomena and from the facts
noted endeavour to learn what light is thrown by them upon Psychology.
A mental state so strange and abnormal cannot fail to assist in the
solution of that great problem of the Mechanism of Man which it is the
vocation of Psychology to solve. Is that Mechanism moved or directed by
any but a self-generated force? Is it compounded of any but the tangible
material structure? Does Soul exist and, if it exists, what is its
relationship to the body?
A Dream is not a confused crowd of disconnected ideas. It is a succession
of associated incidents more or less orderly, even when incongruous,
improbable or even impossible. The mind of the sleeper constructs a
drama, often having many parts played by many persons; but always himself
is one of the actors. As _suggestion_ is the process by which the mind
works in waking life—one idea suggesting another with which it had
been at some past time associated and then another linked with that,
and so forth—so does the unsleeping mind of the sleeper present to the
Conscious Self a succession of suggested pictures which other mental
faculties weave into a story that is enacted before himself with all its
scenery and machinery! And this drama is not performed in dumb show or
in pantomime merely, but it is a drama spoken as well as acted by the
players, men, women, or animal, who appear to the dreamer to play before
him and with him their several parts as perfectly as they would have been
enacted in actual life.
Hence we learn that in dream, as in the waking state, the mind acts in
obedience to the laws of mind. The various mental functions are not
exercised vaguely, but in more or less of orderly relationship to one
another. Thus, imagination presents pictures which are accepted as having
been brought from without by the senses and therefore to the sleeper
are as real as if they had been objects of sight. These ideal pictures,
thus received as real, according to their various characteristics excite
precisely the same emotions as they would have excited had they been
real. But although the picture is imaginary, the emotion is actual. We do
not merely dream that we are angry or fearful; we feel actual anger and
real fear. The reader may remember that often the emotion excited by the
dream has continued to be felt after waking and when the dream itself has
vanished. Indeed we know not how much the mental character of the day is
influenced by the passions and emotions that have been stimulated by the
dreams of the night, the mental excitement continuing after the cause of
it has vanished and is forgotten.
The most wonderful of the many wonders that attend the condition of dream
is the development of the _inventive_ faculty so far beyond its capacity
in the waking state. Reflect for a moment what this performance is. Every
dreamer, however ignorant, however stupid, however young, performs a feat
which few could accomplish in the waking state, when in full command
of all their mental faculties. Every dream is a story. Most dreams
are dramas, having not a story merely, but often many actors, whose
characters are as various as on the stage of real life.
What does the dreaming mind?
Not merely does it invent the ideal story; it invents also all the
characters that play parts in it! Nor this only. It places in the mouth
of each of those characters speech appropriate to the character of each!
Yet are all of these dialogues invented by the mind of the sleeper! In
a restless night many such dream-dramas, each having its own distinct
plot and actors, will be invented by the dreamer, and a dialogue will
be constructed by himself in which each of the actors will play his
proper part. Strange as the assertion may appear, it is _a fact_ which
a moment’s reflection will confirm, that the ignorant ploughboy in his
dreams has made more stories and invented vastly more characters to enact
them and constructed more appropriate dialogues for those characters than
the most copious dramatist or novelist—aye, more than Shakespeare himself!
Another suggestive feature of the phenomena of dream is the _marvellous
speed_ of the mental action. Working untrammelled by the slow motions of
the body, the dreaming mind sets at defiance all the waking conceptions
of time. A dream of a series of adventures which would extend over many
days is, by the mind in dream, enacted in a few minutes; yet it is all
performed—all perfect—all minutely perceived, said and done; proving
that, when the mind is untrammelled by the body, it has other very
different conceptions of time. May it not be that time, as counted by
our waking thoughts, is in truth the ideal time, and that mental time as
measured in dream is the real time?
Not long ago I was enabled to apply some measure to this remarkable
difference between the action of the mind independently of the body and
its action when conducted through the slow moving mechanism of the body.
Called at the usual hour in the morning, I looked at my watch and in
about two minutes fell asleep again. I dreamed a dream of a series of
events that in their performance occupied what the mind conceived to be
a whole day—events in which I was an actor and played a part that would
have occupied a day in actual doing. Waking suddenly with the influence
of the dream upon me and the memory of it full before me, I looked at
my watch again, thinking that I must have been sleeping for an hour and
had lost the train. I found that, in fact, I had been asleep but four
minutes. In four minutes my mind had passed through the history of a
day, had invented that history, and contemplated it as a whole day’s
action, although it was in fact a day’s work done by the mind in four
minutes. This may give us some conception of what is the capacity of the
Soul for perception and action when, if ever, there is a falling away
from it of the cumbrous bodily material mechanism through which alone,
in its present stage of evolution, it is adapted to communicate with the
external material world.
Another phenomenon of Dream is _exaltation of the mental faculties_
generally. Often there is an extraordinary development of special
faculties in special dreams. A proof of this is found in the fact,
already noted, that dream itself is an invention of the mind whose then
capacities far exceed anything of which it is capable when the body
is awake and imposing upon it the conditions of its own slow, because
material—that is molecular—action. Not only do we _invent_ the dream,
but we _act it_ in thought. Not merely do we act in it ourselves, but
we paint the scenery, construct the dresses and decorations, invent the
characters, and put into their mouths the language that would properly
be theirs had they been beings of flesh and blood instead of shadows
summoned by the fancy. Almost every faculty of the mind must be exercised
upon such a work. Even the waking mental condition will not enable us
to do this. If you doubt, try it. Set yourself to invent a dream and
describe it on paper, making each one of the personages with whom you
have peopled it talk in his proper character. Unless you are a skilful
and practised dramatist you will find yourself wholly at fault. Remember
that what you in the full possession of your intellect have failed to do,
the most ignorant and stupid do every night and you will begin to measure
this marvel of the exaltation of the mental powers that attends upon the
condition of dream. If you indulge in the pleasant but dangerous practice
of reading in bed, have you not often, on closing the book, extinguishing
the candle, and turning to sleep, continued in a state of dream to read
on, believing that you were still reading the book. But what was the
fact? Your mind was then composing all you dreamed that you were reading.
It was inventing a continuation of the argument or narrative, or whatever
you may have been perusing when sleep stole upon you and you lapsed
into dream. Have you never dreamed that you were preaching a sermon,
or reading aloud, or composing music, or singing a song? Probably, in
your waking state, you could do neither. In dream, your mind does it all
without a conscious effort. Nor is it, as some have suggested, merely a
fancy that the mind is so acting and not a positive action of the mind.
If wakened while so dreaming, the argument, the speech, the song, will
recur to the waking consciousness and become a positive memory capable
of being subsequently recalled. Sometimes the dream vanishes after an
interval and cannot be recollected by any effort of the Will, although
it may recur in dream long years afterwards. In this manner COLERIDGE
composed that beautiful fragment of a poem, “Kublai Khan.” His mind had
wrought the whole in a dream. Suddenly waking with a vivid impression of
that dream, he grasped a pen and began to write the remembered rhymes of
what had been a long poem, although composed in dream with the speed at
which the mind works when untrammelled by the conditions of its material
mechanism. He seized pen and paper and had set down the beautiful
lines that have been preserved when he was interrupted by some matter
of business. On his return to resume the work, the dream had vanished
and the world to its great loss has received nothing but the exquisite
fragment we read now.
This mental exaltation so frequent in dream is recognised in some
familiar practices, the reason for which is, perhaps, not known to
those who resort to them. In our schooldays, a lesson was best learned
by reading it when going to bed. It was then easily remembered in the
morning. The advice so often given, when a matter of moment is presented,
to “Sleep upon it,” is a recognition of this higher mental action in
sleep. The Mind seems in sleep unconsciously to work upon the idea
presented to it, and we wake with clearer conceptions and larger views
of the _pros_ and _cons_. I have known cases in which a doubting mind
has thus been “made up” without conscious perception of the convincing
argument.
Although in dream the mind works with such wonderful rapidity that the
events of a day may be enacted in a few minutes, it has not quite lost
its consciousness of the measure of external time. A desire to wake at
a particular hour will often be followed by an actual awakening at that
hour. Continued mental consciousness of the desire is unintelligible. But
in what manner does the mind count the flight of a time whose measure is
so different from its own conceptions of time?
Say, that you want to wake at six o’clock. You fall asleep with this
impression upon the mind; but you fall also into the condition of dream
and in that condition your mind is engaged in inventing adventures
that are the business of a long day. Nevertheless, it preserves the
consciousness of the time as it is in the external world and you wake
at the desired hour. I can suggest no other solution of this than that
the brain that dreams, and the Conscious Self that perceives the dream,
are two entities, and that it is the Conscious Self or Soul that notes
the flight of time in the external world, while the dreaming brain is
revelling in its own conception of time as measured by the flow of its
own ideas, and not in hours measured by the motions of the earth and
moon. Another solution suggests itself. May not the duality of the mind,
the action of the double brain, which explains so many other mental
phenomena, account for this also?
But these phenomena of dream are proofs that to the mind “time” is more
ideal than real; that the measure of it may differ in individuals and
still more in races. May it not be that thus lives are equalised and that
to the ephemera its one day of life may appear to be as long as our lives
appear to us? A life is practically as long or short as it _appears_ to
the mind to be.
Dreams are rarely, if ever, without foundation; that is to say, they are
the product of some _suggestion_, although it may be difficult to trace
them to their sources. Very slight suggestions suffice to set the mind in
motion, as is proved by a multitude of recorded cases which the memory of
every reader will present to him. The senses are not wholly paralysed in
ordinary sleep. They carry to the mind impressions of various degrees
of power and act with more or less of force according to the condition
of the recipient ganglion. Sounds are heard and suggest dreams. But the
loudest sounds are not always perceived most readily. The unaccustomed
sound most startles the consciousness. Often a whisper will waken when
the roar of cannon makes no impression upon the sleeper. A dweller in a
noisy street sleeps soundly amid the roar of carts and carriages and is
wakeful in the country by reason of the silence. Habit governs this as so
many others of our sense impressions. We learn _not_ to hear. Hence the
influence of trifling impressions upon the sleeping senses when powerful
ones fail to reach us. Very slight impressions suffice to suggest the
subjects of dreams. The mind having taken the direction given by that
impulse forthwith employs its inventive faculties in the construction of
a story based upon the faint lines of that suggested subject.
Even when awake we are ignorant what impulses set up trains of thought.
We know not why this or that idea “comes into the head.” The suggesting
cause is often so slight as to be imperceptible. The brain is an organ of
inconceivable sensitiveness. Its fibres are so delicate that millions are
packed into the circumference of a sixpence. Yet has each fibre its own
function and each is a musical chord competent to catch and to vibrate to
motions of the ether which the senses cannot perceive. It is probable
(not proved) that in sleep, when not distracted by the claims of the
nerve system and the thronging impressions brought by the senses; these
brain fibres are vastly more sensitive and moved by still slighter action
of the ether than in waking life.
In Dream we never lose the consciousness of our own identity. We retain
our individuality. You dream often that you are _something_ other than
you are, but never that you are some other _person_. Does not this
indicate the existence of an entity, other than the dreaming brain, which
preserves its oneness and its sanity while the material organ with which
it is associated and through which it communicates with the external
world is, as it were, forgetting its reason, its experience and itself,
and so becoming in very truth insane.
And here we touch upon the most perplexing characteristic of dream. We
are conscious of existence, of individuality, and, in a slight degree,
of sense impressions. We have ideas, reflections, emotions, sentiments,
passions. We can invent stories, construct characters, endow them with
dramatic language, paint ideal pictures, make speeches, compose music
and conduct a train of argument. But withal we are not rational. We can
_think_ wise things, but we _are_ the veriest fools of nature. Every
mental faculty is awake and alive—save one—namely, the faculty, whatever
it be, that enables us to distinguish between fancy and fact, between
the possible and the impossible, the congruous and the incongruous; the
faculty, in brief, which separates sanity from insanity.
In dream, with rare exceptions, we are not conscious that we are
dreaming. Fancies are accepted as facts, shadows as substances, the
ideal as the real. And they are so accepted without suspicion or doubt.
We _see_ them, _hear_ them, _feel_ them. Nothing in our actual waking
life is more real to us than are the unrealities of dream at the moment
of dreaming. Probably there are few readers who have not occasionally
dreamed that they were dreaming, and while noting the drama have said
to themselves “this is a dream.” But these are rare exceptions to the
rule that a dream is accepted by the sleeping mind as an event of actual
occurrence and the scenes and persons implicitly believed to be objective
and not subjective; that is to say—as being then actually existing in the
external world.
So believing, what are the materials to which this implicit credence is
given? Here we arrive at the most perplexing of the problems presented by
the phenomena of dream.
We accept without hesitation, or questioning, or even a suspicion of its
unreality, that which in waking life would have been banished instantly
as the baseless fabric of a vision. We believe implicitly in objects and
actions which, when awake, we should have pronounced to be impossible.
Moreover we contemplate the wildest conceptions of the fancy without the
slightest consciousness of their incongruity or folly. Nothing is too
impossible or unreal for acceptance by the dreamer as facts that cause
him neither surprise at their presence nor wonder how they come to be.
What is the change in the mental condition that has wrought this mental
revolution—not slowly and by degrees, but wholly and in a moment? At this
instant, the mind is competent to discern the ideal from the real, the
shadow from the substance, the practical from the impossible. In the next
moment it can distinguish neither—all appears to itself to be equally
possible, probable, real. Starting from sleep, the normal state is
recovered, but not so speedily as it is lost. The dream itself sometimes
continues after the senses are restored. The memory of it remains longer
and its unconscious influence longer still. Passions and emotions which
the dream has kindled do not subside at once and often the agitation
continues to disturb the mind long after the cause of it has vanished
from the memory.
Two answers present themselves.
1. This marvellous character of dream may be consequent upon the
severance of the mind from its communication with the external world by
reason of the partial paralysis of the senses.
2. Some one or more of the mental faculties may be sleeping while others
are awake and active.
The first is the solution commonly accepted. It is contended that
the senses correct the vagaries of the mind; that we are enabled to
distinguish between the creations of the mind and the impressions brought
to it from the external world solely by the consciousness we have, when
we are awake, of the action of the senses and the knowledge we have that
the impressions borne to us by the senses are objective—that is, made by
something existing without ourselves. If, for instance, you close your
eyes and give rein to the imagination, a stream of ideas—pictures of
persons and places—flows before the mind’s eye. You do not mistake these
for realities. You are conscious that they are born of your own brain.
Had you been asleep and dreaming, instead of being awake and using your
senses, you would not have discovered that these mental pictures were
subjective only; you would have accepted them implicitly as objective
impressions brought to you by your senses.
This, however, explains but a portion of the phenomenon. Even if it be
a true solution, it accounts only for the acceptance in dream of the
ideal as real. It leaves wholly unexplained the more remarkable feature
exhibited in the entire unconsciousness by the dreamer of the absurdities
and impossibilities presented in the dream and the absence of surprise
and wonder how such things can be. In the waking state, the mind would
therefore reject them instantly as the illusions they are. Hence the
reasonable conclusion that, in addition to the sleep of the senses and
of the _will_, some part of the material mechanism of the mind is also
sleeping or its activity is suspended during dream.
The investigation is of serious moment, for it raises some other
questions of even greater importance. If the explanation be sufficient,
it determines some moot points in Mental Physiology. It proves that the
mental machine, the brain, is _not_ one and indivisible—that the _whole_
brain is not employed in each mental act, as contended by Dr. CARPENTER.
To what mental faculties are we indebted for our waking consciousness of
incongruity, impracticability, absurdity, irrationality? Obviously these
faculties must be slumbering in dream. To _their_ temporary paralysis
this most remarkable phenomenon of dream is certainly due.
The popular notion is that _reason_ is the slumbering faculty. We talk
of reason as being the special attribute of Man. In fact there is no
such faculty. There is a mental process we call reasoning; but it is
performed by the joint action of various mental faculties. One presents
the things to be reasoned upon; another compares them and presents their
resemblances and differences; a third enables us, by the process we call
_reasoning_, to apply these resemblances and differences to some third
subject and thus from the known to predicate the unknown.
It is familiar to every reader that this process of reasoning is not
always suspended in dream. On the contrary, it is sometimes abnormally
active. We reason rightly often, but on wrong premisses. What we are
unable to discover in dream is the unreality of the subject matter upon
which we are reasoning.
If, for instance, you dream that you are making a speech or preaching a
sermon. In your dream you pursue a logical argument, but you found it
upon imagined facts that are untrue and improbable, which the waking mind
would not entertain for a moment, but which in your dream you accept as
true and implicitly believe to be real.
We shall, perhaps, arrive at the solution of this problem by the process
of exhaustion.
The faculty of imagination, that shapes to the dream ideal pictures
of things, is not sleeping. The faculties that perform the process of
reasoning are not sleeping. _Comparison_—the power to compare the ideal
with the real—alone is wanting. We mistake the shadows of the mind for
substances. We accept the brain-born visions as realities. Why? Because
we are unable to compare them. In brief, Comparison is the faculty,
paralysed in sleep, whose absence causes the credulity of dream.
Of this fact there can be no doubt. But a very formidable difficulty here
presents itself. How and why is it that this faculty alone is found to
slumber when the greater part of the mental mechanism is awake and active?
It has been one of the most perplexing problems of Psychology. A solution
of it has occurred to me which I submit to the consideration of the
reader, but as a suggestion merely. It is too novel to be offered as
anything more than a suggestion.
Each mental faculty can perform only one act at the same instant of time.
It is one of the conditions of existence here that all consciousness
shall be in succession. Hence indeed our conception of time. If any
other being could obtain many perceptions simultaneously, and not in
succession, to that being there would be no _time_, in our sense of the
term. But the process of comparison involves the contemplation together
of the two things (or ideas of things) to be compared. This difficulty
is removed by the double brain. Each brain presents one of the ideas to
be compared and upon these the faculty of comparison employs itself,
discerning their resemblances and differences. If so it be, the cause
of our incapacity to discover the absurdities of dream is the partial
paralysis (or sleep) of one of the two mental faculties that present
the ideas of objects and the consequent incapacity of the faculty of
comparison to discharge its proper function of informing us what of our
mental impressions are real and what illusory.
And this raises a curious question as to the relative functions and
operations of the two brains. In profound slumber, when both brains are
sleeping, there is no consciousness—time is annihilated to such a sleeper
and awakening seems to follow immediately upon falling asleep, although
in reality many hours may have passed. When the brain is sleeping but
partially there is some consciousness of time in sleep and of the lapse
of time upon awaking. Is such partial sleep the slumber of _one brain
only_, and are these phenomena of dream due to the action of that one
brain deprived of the correcting influence of the other brain? Does the
faculty of comparison fail to show us that our mental impressions are
subjective and not objective because it is not assisted by the normal
action of the duplicate faculty of the other brain? Comparison is the
foundation of the process of reasoning. It has been noticed that persons
suffering from hemiplegia—that is, from disease of one brain only—often
lose the power to compare and consequently the capacity for reasoning
readily and correctly. May it not be that a similar condition is produced
by temporary paralysis of the brain in sleep? As already stated, the
power to reason is not absent in dream. We often reason elaborately
and well, taking the ideal pictures as real incidents. We accept as
objective facts what are merely mental impressions and thus build an
argument on an incorrect assumption. The reasoning is right, but the
basis of it is false. Question each mental faculty in turn and it will
appear that but one is at fault in dream—namely, _comparison_. We are
unable to discern the difference between the mental and the sensual
impression—the self-created and the sense-borne idea—because we are
incompetent to compare them and it is by comparison alone that we can
distinguish the false from the true. I throw out this, as a suggestion
merely, to Mental Philosophers and Psychologists.
Indeed, the fact that we have two perfect brains with every mental
faculty in duplicate (as contended by Sir HENRY HOLLAND and now
conclusively established by the experiments of BROWN-SEQUARD and
Professor FERRIER), has opened a new field to the Mental Philosopher and
Psychologist. It must have the most intimate relationship, not to the
phenomena of Sleep and Dream alone but to all the phenomena of Mind. In
this great fact will doubtless be found the obvious solution of many
problems hitherto insoluble. Foremost among those philosophical puzzles
has been the instantaneous lapse of the Mind into _insanity_ in dream,
and the no less marvellous manner in which upon waking we pass almost as
quickly out of that insane condition into sanity.
These are the principal phenomena of Dream and the study of them cannot
fail to throw a flood of light upon mental physiology and psychology.
In them we are enabled to view the operations of the mind and the
relationship of soul and body under conditions that reveal to us parts
of the mechanism of man that are wholly concealed from us in the normal
state of that relationship. The strange neglect of such an obvious means
of knowledge is doubtless due to the fundamental error that has excluded
Mind and Soul from the category of physical sciences and consigned them
to the hopeless region of metaphysics, persisting in their pursuit by
abstractions, argument and conjecture, and refusing to them investigation
by _facts_, as the other sciences are now investigated. If the phenomena
of dream were strange and rare as are those of somnambulism, they would
as much excite our curiosity and strike us with amazement. But they are
not wondered at only because they are so familiar. If dream, instead of
being common to us all, were developed only in a few, the persons subject
to it would certainly be denounced as impostors and prosecuted as rogues
and vagabonds by the High Priests of Science. But the very facility
for examination of the mental condition of dream should induce those
who really desire to promote the most important of all knowledge—the
knowledge of ourselves, our constitution, our mechanism, and our
destiny—to seek where we may most reasonably expect to find it—in the
condition in which the Mind is every night practically severed from its
connection with the body and works by its own impulses, without the aid
or incumbrance of the senses, and without the directing power of the
intelligence and its _Will_.