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 Subconscious Element in
Dreaming--Verbal Transformations as Links in Dream Imagery--The
Reduplication of Visual Imagery in Motor and other Terms.
Perhaps the most elementary fact about dream vision is the perpetual and
unceasing change which it is undergoing at every moment. Sight is for
most of us the chief sensory activity of sleeping as it is of waking
life; the commonest kind of dream is mainly a picture, but it is always
a living and moving picture, however inanimate the objects which appear
in vision before us would be in real life. No man ever gazed at a dream
picture which was at rest to his sleeping eye as are the pictures we gaze
at with our waking eyes. So far as my own experience is concerned, I have
rarely in sleep seen a sentence, a word, a letter written on a sheet of
dream-paper which was not changing beneath the eye of sleep. I dream,
for instance, that I wish to stamp a letter, and look in my pocket-book
for a penny stamp; I am able to find stamps of other values, I am able
to find penny stamps that are torn or defaced or of an antiquated type
disused thirty years ago; all sorts of stamps, as well as little pictures
resembling stamps, develop and multiply beneath my gaze; the stamp I
seek remains unfound, probably because it had appeared at the beginning
of the series and suggested all the rest. That is indicated by another
dream (experienced, it may be noted, during the early stage of a cold in
the head): I have to catch a train; I see my hat hanging on a peg among
other hats, and I move towards it; but as I do so it has vanished; and I
wander among rows of hats, of all shapes and sizes, but not one of them
mine. Sleeping consciousness is a stream in which we never bathe twice,
for it is renewed every second. It is this as much as any characteristic
of the visual dream--for the mainly auditory or motor dream often presents
less difficulty in this respect--which makes it so difficult to recall
and reproduce. We are, as it were, gazing at a constantly revolving
kaleidoscope in which every slightest turn produces a new pattern,
somewhat resembling that which immediately preceded it--so that, if the
kaleidoscope were conscious we should say that each picture had been
suggested by the preceding pattern--but yet definitely novel.[12]
Delbœuf has denied that this process ever involves any real metamorphosis
of images; he regarded it as an illusion due to rapid succession of
distinct images which are afterwards combined in memory. That view is
not, however, tenable; apart from the fact that it makes the illegitimate
assumption that our recollection of a dream is entirely unreliable,
it must be remembered that (as Giessler has pointed out) the shock of
emotional horror or surprise that frequently accompanies such dreams
suffices to prove the reality of the metamorphosis. Thus I once, as a
youth, had a vivid dream of an albatross that became transformed into a
woman, the beautiful eyes of the albatross taking on a womanly expression,
but the bird's beak only being imperfectly changed into a nose as the
bird-woman murmured, 'Do you love me?' In this case the vivid surprise of
the dream was precisely associated with the simultaneous existence of the
two sets of characters.
It is not, however, necessary that there should be any metamorphosis of
dream images, nor even that the procession of dream imagery should be
continuous. And whether or not there is metamorphosis of images, whether
the imagery is continuous or discontinuous, it seems to me that we must
admit the possibility of its spontaneous character. That is, indeed, a
debated, and, it may be admitted, a debateable point. Thus Foucault[13]
accounts for the multiplication of almost similar images sometimes
witnessed in dreams as due to _desire;_ we see a number of things because
we desire to possess a number of these things, and he explains a dream
of Delbœuf's, of a procession of lizards, as due to the fact that Delbœuf
was a collector of lizards, in the same way as he would explain the dreams
of thirsty people who imagine they are drinking repeated glasses of water
or wine. I am quite unable to accept this explanation. The shifting and
multiplication of dream imagery, as in the procession of lizards, is a
fundamental and elementary character of spontaneous mental imagery, and
is constant in some drug visions, notably those occasioned by mescal.[14]
The repetition of imaginary drinks in the dreams of a thirsty man belongs
to another more special class in explanation of which desire may be more
properly invoked; it is merely the expression of the fact that after the
imaginary drink the dreamer remains thirsty, and the suggested image is
therefore repeated.
That in some cases there is what we may call a deliberate subconscious
selection in the imagery presented to consciousness in dreams, there can
be no doubt. But mental imagery is deeper and more elemental than any
of the higher psychic functions even when exerted subconsciously. Just
as the immense procession of continuous and totally unfamiliar imagery
which is evoked by the action of mescal on the visual centres has no more
connection with the subject's volition or desires than the procession
of the starry skies, so likewise, we seem bound to admit, it may be in
the case of a succession of separate images in dreams. It is nearly
always possible to find a link of connection between any two images
chosen at random, and the link is often a real subconscious link, but not
necessarily so. Discontinuous images may arise, it seems probable, from
a psychic basis deeper than choice, their appearance being determined by
their own dynamic condition at the moment. We must, as Baron Mourre[15]
not quite happily puts it, take into account 'the physiological state of
ideas.' If we hold to the belief that dreaming is based on a fundamental
and elementary tendency to the formation of continuous or discontinuous
images, which may or may not be controlled by psychic emotions or
impulses, we shall be delivered from many hazardous speculations.
When we thus start with the recognition of a more or less spontaneous
procession of images as the elemental stuff of dreams, one of the first
problems we encounter is the relation of attention to that imagery. What
is the degree and the nature of the attention we exert in dreams?
'Sleep from the psychological point of view,' says Foucault, 'is a state
of profound distraction or total inattention.' And Mourre shows by dreams
of his own that any exercise of will in dreaming leads to awakening, and
that the deeper the sleep the more absent is volition from dreams. Hence
the involuntary wavering and perpetually mere meaningless change of dream
imagery. Such concentration as is possible during sleep usually reveals
a shifting, oscillating, uncertain movement of the vision before us. We
are, as it were, reading a sign-post in the dusk, or making guesses at the
names of the stations as our express train flashes by the painted letters.
It is this factor in dreams which causes them so often to baffle our
analysis. There is thus a failure of sleeping attention to fix definitely
the final result--a failure which itself may evidently serve to carry
on the dream process by suggesting new images and combinations. It can
scarcely be said, however, that the question of attention in dreams is
thus settled. It would be inconceivable that the terrible occurrences
that may overtake us in dreams and the emotional turmoil aroused should
be accompanied by 'total inattention and distraction.' Nor can it be
said that that supposition agrees with the vivid memory which our dreams
sometimes leave. We can probably account for the phenomena much more
satisfactorily by adopting Ribot's useful distinction between voluntary
attention and spontaneous attention.[16] Voluntary or artificial attention
is a product of education and training. It is directed by extrinsic
force, is the result of deliberation, and is accompanied by some feeling
of effort. It always acts on the muscles and by the muscles; without
muscular tension there can be no voluntary attention. Spontaneous or
natural attention, on the other hand, is that more fundamental kind of
attention which exists anteriorly to any education or training, and is
the only kind of attention which animals and young children are capable
of. It may be weak or strong, but always and everywhere it is based on
emotional states; every creature moved by pleasure and pain is capable
of spontaneous attention under the influence of those stimuli. These two
kinds of attention are at the opposite poles from each other, and are
incompatible with each other. There can be no doubt that, as Ribot himself
pointed out, it is voluntary attention that is defective (though it may
not always be entirely absent) in dreams;[17] the muscular weakness and
inco-ordination of sleep involve this lack of attention which is indeed an
essential condition of the restoration and repose of sleep. But all the
characters of spontaneous attention are present. The attention we exercise
in dreams is mainly of this fundamental, automatic, involuntary character,
conditioned by the emotions we experience, and for the most part escaping
all the efforts of our voluntary attention. Further, it has been ably
argued by Leroy that a similar state of involuntary automatic attention,
with concomitant diminution or disturbance of voluntary attention, is
a necessary condition for the appearance of the visual and auditory
hallucinations abnormally experienced in the waking state.[18]
There is, then, at the basis of dreaming a seemingly spontaneous
procession of dream imagery which is always undergoing transformation
into something different, yet not wholly different, from that which went
before. It seems a mechanical flow of images, regulated by associations
of resemblance, which sleeping consciousness recognises without either
controlling or introducing foreign elements. This is probably the
most elementary form of dreaming, that which is nearest to waking
consciousness, and that in which the peripheral and retinal element of
dreaming plays the largest part.
The fundamental character of this spontaneous self-evolving procession of
imagery is indicated by the significant fact that it tends to take place
whenever the more retinal and peripheral part of the visual apparatus is
affected by the exhaustion of undue stimulation, or even when the organism
generally is disturbed or run down, as in neurasthenic conditions.[19]
The most obtrusive and familiar example of visual imagery is furnished by
the procession of perpetually shifting and changing after-images which
continue to evolve for a considerable time after we have looked at the
sun or other brilliant object.[20] Less striking, but more intimately
akin to the imagery of dreams, are the hypnagogic visions occurring as we
fall asleep, especially after a day during which vision has been unusually
stimulated and fatigued, though they do not seem necessarily dependent
on such fatigue. Most vivid and instructive of all is the procession of
visual imagery evoked by certain drugs. Of these the most remarkable and
potent, as well as the best for study, is probably mescal, which happens
also to be the only one with which I am myself well acquainted.[21] This
substance provokes a constant succession of self-evolving visual imagery
which constantly approaches and constantly eludes the semblance of real
things; in the earlier stages these images closely resemble those produced
by the kaleidoscope, and they change in a somewhat similar manner. Such
spontaneous evolution of imagery is evidently a fundamental aptitude of
the visual apparatus which many very slightly abnormal conditions may
bring into prominence.
The power of opium is somewhat similar, and, as DeQuincey long since
pointed out, such power is simply a revival of a faculty usually possessed
by children, although, judging from my own experiences with mescal, drugs
exert it in a far more vivid and potent degree than that in which it
usually occurs in the child. The psychologists of childhood have not
often investigated this phenomenon,[22] but so far as my own inquiries
go, all or nearly all persons have possessed, when children, the power
of seeing visions in the dark on the curtain of the closed eyelids,
perhaps the representation of fairy tales they had read, perhaps merely
commonplace processions of individuals or events, a tendency sometimes
appearing for the same figure to recur again and again. I think it is
fairly certain that the so-called 'lies' of children, told in good faith,
are in part due to the occasional eruption of this faculty into daylight
life. People who deny that they ever possessed this power have, almost
certainly, only forgotten. I should myself be inclined to deny that I had
ever had any such visionary faculty if it were not that I can recall one
occasion of its presence, at about the age of seven, when sleeping with a
cousin of the same age; we amused ourselves by burying our heads in the
pillows and watching a connected series of pictures which we were both
alike able to see, each announcing any change in the picture as soon as it
took place. This fact of community of vision served to impress on my mind
the existence of a faculty of which otherwise I can recall no trace.[23]
Of these various groups of allied phenomena, that which more especially
concerns us in the investigation of dreams is the group of phenomena most
strictly called hypnagogic, belonging, that is to say, to the ante-chamber
of sleep, when the senses are in repose and waking consciousness is
slipping away, or else when, as we leave the world of dreams, waking
consciousness is flowing back again. This state has been known from
very ancient times. Aristotle referred to it, and in the dawn of modern
scientific thought Hobbes described allied phenomena.[24] The strictly
psychological study of hypnagogic visions seems to have begun with
Baillarger.[25] Then, some years later, Maury, who had a rich personal
experience of such phenomena, devoted a chapter to the hypnagogic state,
and gave it its recognised name.[26]
Hypnagogic imagery, there can be little doubt, is not a purely ocular
phenomenon, even when it is stimulated by ocular fatigue. It is a mixed
phenomenon, partly retinal and partly central. That is to say that the eye
supplies entoptic glimmerings, and the brain, acting on the suggestions
thus received, superposes mental pictures to those glimmerings.[27] They
are thus analogous to the pictures we may see in the fire or in the
clouds. It must be added that the other senses also furnish corresponding
rudiments which are filled in by the central activity; this is notably the
case with faint buzzings and sounds in the ear, and in addition, muscular
twitches and internal visceral sensations, all these becoming more
prominent as the attentive activity of waking life subsides.[28]
What is the relation of hypnagogic imagery to dreams? Johannes Müller,
the great physiologist, long ago identified them, as previously had
Gruithuisen and Burdach, while Maury--who himself possessed, however, a
somewhat abnormal and irritable nervous system--regarded hypnotic imagery
as furnishing the whole of the formative element of dreams, as being 'the
embryogeny of dreams'; he frequently found that images which appeared
to him in this way before going to sleep reappeared in dreams. This is
supported by Mourly Vold, who made experiments on himself, and by fixing
images as he fell asleep dreamed of the same images. Goblot, however,
while regarding hypnagogic imagery as analogous with dream imagery, denies
that it is identical. Since the hypnagogic state is the porch to sleep
and dreams--the praedormitium, as Weir Mitchell terms it--we can scarcely
fail to admit with Maury that hypnagogic imagery presents us with the
germinal stuff of dreams. If it is not identical with the fully formed
dream, it is still the early stage of dreaming. This is certainly the
view suggested by my own experience, even though I have never definitely
recognised a dream as related to a previous hypnagogic image. It has,
however, occasionally happened to me that as I have begun to lose waking
consciousness a procession of images has drifted before my vision, and
suddenly one of the figures I see has spoken. This hallucinatory voice
occurring before I was fully asleep has startled me into full waking
consciousness, and I have realised that, while yet in the hypnagogic
stage, I was assisting at the birth of a dream.
There is one point, it may be noted in passing, at which dreams do not
usually correspond with some of the phenomena with which we may most
naturally compare them. I refer to their presentation of colour. In
the dreams of most people colour is rare. We seem usually, from this
point of view, to remember a dream as we would remember a photograph,
or, if any colour at all is present, a tinted drawing. Judging from my
own experience, I should say that it is difficult to decide whether the
absence of colour is due to its actual absence from the dream imagery,
or merely to its failure to make any impression on memory. Some careful
observers have, however, stated that the colour of their dream imagery is
definitely grey. Thus Beaunis states that his dream imagery is usually
_en grisaille_, like an image recalled in the waking state, though
occasionally the colour is vivid, and Dr. Savage says that in his dreams
colour is rarely or never present. 'I see landscapes of black and white,
and flowers assume their true form, but not their colours.'[29] This
greyness of dream imagery corresponds to the disappearance of colour
under chloroform anaesthesia. 'So long as the eyes could be held open
voluntarily,' says Elmer Jones, 'vision seemed quite normal, save that
the colours of the spectrum faded out into a grey band.' Even in the
early stage of some insanities also, as Stoddart has found, some degree
of colour-blindness is present.[30] Grace Andrews states, indeed, that
in nearly half of her own visual dreams colour sensations were included.
This seems to me exceptional. In my own experience, the emergence of a
single colour, which usually strikes me as beautiful, is not rare. I see,
for instance, a friend drinking wine copiously from a large goblet, and
I judge by the colour of the wine that it is hock, or I am impressed by
the shimmering grey tone of the poplin dresses worn by a group of ladies,
which seems to indicate that the tone of the whole picture was not grey. I
am inclined to think that when colour in a dream becomes more pronounced
than this, the dream is not normal, but is associated with some degree of
cerebral disturbance, and especially the presence of headache. This would
agree with the fact that persons subject to migraine are liable to visual
colour phenomena. As an example of a vivid colour dream associated with
headache, I may bring forward the following: I dreamed that an artist of
note, with whom I am acquainted, was painting my portrait. (The pose of
the portrait was standing, but I was lying down; this, however, caused
me no surprise.) I saw the colours of the picture with great vividness,
and I noted the extreme rapidity with which the artist painted; thus the
red and black pattern of the necktie he had given me was suddenly changed
to a totally different blue pattern, and the whole picture then appeared
as a harmony of blues, the rapidity with which the artist effected these
changes impressing me as very remarkable. In another dream in which I saw
a painter occupied on a picture, a landscape representing sunrise, memory
recalled the effect of light as vivid, but no definite sense of colour
remained. This seems to me the normal condition of things in the ordinary
dreams of most persons, colour, when it occurs, or when it is remembered,
being for the most part confined to a single object or a single tint, and
often being associated with a feeling of aesthetic pleasure.
In ordinary dreaming there is usually something more than a spontaneous
procession of related imagery. There is a more definitely central and
psychic element. There is association, not only by obvious resemblance,
but by contiguity, usually the casual contiguity of images received
during the previous day, which forces together images related to each
other indeed, but by no means obviously. Dreaming consciousness embodies
and actively co-ordinates definite, and not merely random, images. The
passive and spontaneous flow of imagery is thus modified in its course.
The image of the magic lantern well illustrates this character of
dream experiences. The movement of the cinematograph, indeed, scarcely
corresponds to that fusion of heterogeneous images which marks dream
visions. Our dreams are like dissolving views in which the dissolving
process is carried on swiftly or slowly, but always uninterruptedly, so
that at any moment two (often, indeed, more) incongruous pictures are
presented to consciousness, which strives to make one whole of them, and
sometimes succeeds, and is sometimes baffled. Or we may say that the
problem presented to dreaming consciousness resembles that experiment
in which psychologists pronounce three wholly unconnected words and
require the subject to combine them at once in a connected sentence. It
is unnecessary to add that such analogies fail to indicate the subtle
complexity of the apparatus which is at work in the manufacture of dreams.
By this mechanism of dreaming, isolated impressions, or else impressions
which have a resemblance or a connection which is not obvious to the
waking intelligence, flow together in dreams to be welded into a whole.
There is produced, in the strictest sense, a _confusion_. For instance, a
lady, who in the course of the day has admired a fine baby and bought a
big fish for dinner, dreams with horror and surprise of finding a fully
developed live baby sewed up in a large cod-fish. Again, a lady who had
been cooking in the course of the day and in the evening had read a
scientific description of the way birds obtain and utilise their food,
such as fruit and snails, dreams at night that she has discovered when out
walking a kind of animal-fruit, a damson containing a snail within it,
which she views with delight as admirably adapted for culinary purposes.
Another lady, after carving a duck at dinner, dreams that she is trying
to cut off a duck's leg, but seems to realise in her dream at the same
time that it is really her husband's neck she is hacking at.[31] In a
dream of my own, children's heads took the form and shape of flowers
of various shapes and hues, though mainly of the composite order (like
chrysanthemums), and their eyes looked out from between the petals.
It must be added that in a very considerable proportion of cases the
combinations produced in dreams are far more plausible than in any of
the instances just narrated; the whole dream may thus easily follow as
commonplace and matter-of-fact a course as in real life. Thus, after
going to live in a new neighbourhood, I dreamed that I entered a shop
belonging to a certain firm, and saw there an employé who, in real life,
to my knowledge, had previously left another shop belonging to the same
firm; an entirely probable combination was thus effected, and the dream
conversation that followed was equally natural and probable. We do not
go out of our way in dreams to invent absurdities; we simply accept the
data presented to us, dealing with them as rationally as the intellectual
instruments at our disposal may permit.
The dream constituted by the falling together of trivial reminiscences
is not always, however, as commonplace and plausible as in the dream
just narrated. In other cases the falling together of equally trivial
reminiscences may constitute a fantastic and imaginative picture
altogether outside waking experience or waking thought. Thus I dream that
it is my duty to watch beside a great king while he sleeps. He lies on a
huge bed, fully clothed and booted, and with a great crimson mantle thrown
over him. I am permitted to lie on the edge of the bed outside the mantle,
but must on no account close my eyes, for I must be ready to respond at
once to his call. The elements of such a picture are obviously so simple
and commonplace that it is not surprising that I could not find that even
one of them had been specially present to waking consciousness. Yet the
picture that at that particular moment they fell together to compose--like
the broken fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope--is altogether
alien alike to my experience and to my imagination.
The source of the common confusion of dream imagery is to be found in
very varying motives. In a large proportion of cases, what we witness is
merely the flowing together of impressions which have no real resemblance,
but which happen to have been received at nearly the same time, and to
admit of being fused; thus, in one case, occupation during the day partly
in the fowl-yard and partly in the garden, led a lady to the dream project
of breeding chickens by planting fowls' heads. Very frequently, however,
there is a real resemblance in the two objects combined, although it is
not a resemblance which would ever present itself to waking consciousness.
The fowl-yard will supply another instance of this confusion also. I went
to sleep thinking of a friend who was that night to stay at a certain
hotel I had never seen. I dreamed that I saw the hotel in question; its
façade was not unlike that of a common type of hotel, but the roof was
flat and at no very great height from the ground, so that I was able to
overlook the building and see into all the windows, an arrangement that
struck me as bad. My ability to overlook the building was not, however,
accompanied by any perception of its diminutiveness. On awakening I
remembered that my wife had received a chicken incubator the day before,
and we had examined it in the evening. The image of the hotel had fused
with the image of the incubator.
In another dream of the same type I imagined that I was with a dentist
who was about to extract a tooth from a patient. Before applying the
forceps he remarked to me (at the same time setting fire to a perfumed
cloth at the end of something like a broomstick, in order to dissipate
the unpleasant odour) that it was the largest tooth he had ever seen.
When extracted I found that it was indeed enormous, in the shape of a
caldron, with walls an inch thick. Taking from my pocket a tape measure
(such as I carried in waking life), I found the diameter to be not less
than twenty-five inches; the interior was like roughly-hewn rock, and
there were sea-weeds and lichen-like growths within. The size of the tooth
seemed to me large, but not extraordinarily so. It is well known that pain
in the teeth, or the dentist's manipulations, cause those organs to seem
of extravagant extent; in dreams this tendency rules unchecked; thus a
friend once dreamed that mice were playing about in a cavity in her tooth.
But for the dream just quoted, there was no known dental origin; it arose
solely or chiefly from a walk during the previous afternoon among the
rocks of the Cornish coast at low tide, and the fantastic analogy, which
had not occurred to waking consciousness, suggested itself during sleep.
In another dream, illustrating the same kind of confusion of images having
a real resemblance unnoticed in waking life, I seemed to see on a table a
small hand-gong of a common type, struck by a hammer, but on striking it
repeatedly, it produced flashes of light instead of the sounds normally
produced by a gong. I concluded that the instrument must be out of order
and called some one to attend to it, whereupon we proceeded to deal
with it as though it were a diminutive battery of the kind used to work
electric bells. The gong was one familiar to me at the time in daily
life; on the previous day I had casually observed that it was misplaced.
In my dream I discovered a resemblance which actually exists between a
gong of the type in question and the lever-handle for turning on the
electric light, soothing a certain doubt by saying to myself in my dream
that the instrument served both for the production of sound and of light.
This link of connection led to the association of an electric battery with
the hand-gong, as well as to the attribution to the gong of light-giving
properties.[32]
Such a dream serves as a transition to another very common kind of
confusion of imagery in which two altogether unlike images are amalgamated
through each happening to have in the mind a link of connection with some
third idea. I dreamed that my wife's dog--a dog who, in real life, was
constantly getting into trouble--had killed a child in the neighbouring
town. On going thither I entered a butcher's shop, and saw the child lying
on a table, mutilated and bleeding. After a time, however, I learned
that it was not a child, but a pig that had been killed, and what I had
previously taken for a child was now visibly a dead pig. I felt ashamed
of my mistake, and the sympathy I had experienced now seemed excessive,
especially when the butcher remarked that it was all right as he had been
fattening the pig and meant to kill it soon anyhow. Then the pig was cut
open, though it made daring attempts to come to life again, during which
I awoke. It is clear how, in this case, the idea of the butcher's shop
served as a bridge from the image of the child to the image of the pig.
Again, after a day in which I had received a letter from a lady, unknown
to me, living in France, and later on had written out a summary of a
criminal case in which a detective had to go over to France, I dreamed
that some one told me that the lady I had heard from was a detective in
the service of the French Government, and this explanation, though it
seemed somewhat surprising, fully satisfied me. Here, it will be seen,
the idea of France served as a bridge, and was utilised by sleeping
consciousness to supply an answer to a question which had been asked by
waking consciousness.
The confusion of imagery may be more remote, embodying abstract ideas and
without reference to recent impressions. Thus I dreamed that my wife was
expounding to me a theory by which the substitution of slates for tiles
in roofing had been accompanied by, and intimately associated with, the
growing diminution of crime in England. I opposed this theory, pointing
out the picturesqueness of tiles, their cheapness, and greater comfort
both in winter and summer, but at the same time it occurred to me as a
peculiar coincidence that tiles should have a sanguinary tinge suggestive
of criminal bloodthirstiness. I need scarcely say that this bizarre theory
had never suggested itself to my waking thoughts. There was, however, a
real connecting link in the confusion--the redness, and it is a noteworthy
point, of great significance in the interpretation of dreams, that that
link, although clearly active from the first, remained subconscious until
the end of the dream, when it presented itself as an entirely novel
coincidence.
I dreamed once that I was with a doctor in his surgery, and saw in his
hand a note from a patient saying that doctors were fools and did him no
good, but he had lately taken some _selvdrolla_, recommended by a friend,
and it had done him more good than anything, so please send him some
more. I saw the note clearly, not, indeed, being conscious of reading it
word by word, but only of its meaning as I looked at it; the one word I
actually seemed to see, letter by letter, was the name of the drug, and
that changed and fluctuated beneath my vision as I gazed at it, the final
impression being _selvdrolla_. The doctor took from a shelf a bottle
containing a bright yellow oleaginous fluid, and poured a little out,
remarking that it had lately come into favour, especially in uric acid
disorders, but was extremely expensive. I expressed my surprise, having
never before heard of it. Then, again to my surprise, he poured rather
copiously from the bottle on to a plate of food, saying, in explanation,
that it was pleasant to take and not dangerous. This was a vivid morning
dream, and on awakening I had no difficulty in detecting the source of its
various minor details, especially a note received on the previous evening
and containing a dubious figure, the precise nature of which I had used
my pocket lens to determine. But what was _selvdrolla_, the most vivid
element of the dream? I sought vainly among my recent memories, and had
almost renounced the search when I recalled a large bottle of salad oil
seen on the supper table the previous evening; not, indeed, resembling
the dream bottle, but containing a precisely similar fluid. _Selvdrolla_
was evidently a corruption of 'salad oil.' This dream illustrates the
uncertainty of dream consciousness, but it also illustrates at the same
time the element of certainty in dream _subconsciousness_. Throughout my
dream I remained, consciously, in entire ignorance as to the real nature
of _selvdrolla_, yet a latent element in consciousness was all the time
presenting it to me in ever clearer imagery. We see that the subconscious
element of dream life treats the conscious part much as a good-natured
teacher treats a child whose lesson is only half learned, giving repeated
clues and hints which the stupid child understands only at the last
moment, or not at all. It is, indeed, a universal method, the method of
Nature with man, throughout the whole of human evolution.
It will be seen that at this point we are brought into contact with
another characteristic of dream life: there is often more in dreams than
dreaming consciousness is able to realise. On the one hand, the elements
of dream life are drawn from a wider field than is normally accessible to
waking consciousness; on the other hand, the focus of dream consciousness
is narrower than that of waking consciousness, and cannot apperceive all
that is going on. There is at once more extension and more contraction
than in the psychic life of the waking world. A very large part of the
psychic life of sleep is outside our power, and some of it is even beyond
our sight.
It will be observed that the perpetual movement and the constant fusion
of images which constitute the most fundamental character of dream life
really combine two characteristics which, abstractly regarded, are
distinct. The tendency of the dream image to be ever changing, ever
putting forth some new feature which more or less radically alters its
nature, is not a phenomenon of precisely the same nature as the tendency
for two definite images, well known to waking consciousness, to become
fused together, consciously or unconsciously, in dreams. Practically,
however, there is no line of demarcation. What happens is that the image
is ever spontaneously changing, and that each change is at once recognised
by dreaming consciousness as a known object. Thus I dreamed that I was in
a drawing-room and saw a beautiful and attractive woman with an unusually
low evening dress entirely revealing the breasts; then, between the
breasts, three additional nipples appeared, and I realised in my dream
that here was a case of supernumerary breasts of sufficient scientific
interest to be carefully examined later on; and then, as I gazed, I saw
a number of little fleshy nipple-like protuberances on the body, and
thereupon I realised that I was really looking at a case of the rare
skin disease termed _molluscum fibrosum_. Thus the perpetually wavering
and developing image is at the same time a succession of quite different
images. On the other hand, when we seem to have a fusion of two definite
images, what we really see in most cases is one image melting into the
other and gradually losing its earlier character. In either case the
process is the same interplay of automatic peripheral imagery and central
ideas, whether the new image is brought into focus by, as it were, a
current in consciousness, or is merely suggested by a spontaneous change
in the previous image. How far the image suggests the idea or the idea the
image, it is extremely difficult in most cases to say. The phenomenon we
witness is a perpetually dissolving view; the vital process behind that
phenomenon we must usually be content to be ignorant of.
It sometimes happens that the dream image is slowly transformed without
the dreamer realising the transformation. Thus an image of a doll may
take on the character of a human being. In a dream of this kind--possibly
suggested by Villiers de l'Isle Adam's _L'Eve Future_, though that
book had not been recently in my mind--I imagined that a lady of my
acquaintance (whose identity I could not recall on awakening) had taken
a fancy to possess an artificial woman, constructed with vast ingenuity
and at enormous expense. The skin and hair seemed real as I noted with
a certain horror on observing the breasts and armpits, but in places--I
noticed especially one arm--the creature was as defective as an ill-made
doll. It was, however, able to walk with a little support, and, most
remarkable of all, it gave intelligent answers to questions; this alone
it was that caused me a certain surprise. What at the beginning of the
dream had only been an artificial image was evidently becoming a real
human being, and one can readily believe that such stories as that of
Pygmalion's statue may have been suggested by dream experiences.
The dream is mainly a dissolving view, because for most of us it is above
all a visual phenomenon. Those people who, in their dreams, at all events,
if not also in waking life, are largely of auditory type, experience
dreams in which words play exactly the same shifting, developing, and
dissolving part played by images in the persons of more markedly visual
type. In their dreams they resemble those insane people who, in some
feeble and confusional states, manifest echolalia and confabulation, their
ideas drifting along the associational paths of least resistance suggested
by every random word they hear. Maury records successions of dream
imagery strung together in a similar manner by a procession of verbal
transformations; thus in one oft-quoted dream the scenes were connected by
the words, _kilomètre_, _kilos_, _Gilolo_, _Lobelia_, _Lopez_, _loto_.[33]
In such a case the procession of verbal auditory imagery constitutes
the basis of the dream. This is probably rare. In most people the basis
of the dream is furnished by visual imagery, and auditory images only
occasionally form an associative link, being more usually subordinated to
the visual elements.
The speech peculiarities of dreams have been very thoroughly investigated
by Kraepelin,[34] who has brought together two hundred and eighty-one
examples, partly observed in himself, though they are not common, and
Kraepelin considers that the hearing centres fall more deeply asleep
than the visual centres, the eyes being already sufficiently protected
by the lids.[35] Kraepelin classifies the speech disturbances of dreams
into two great groups: (1) _paraphasia_, or disturbance of word-finding,
where the idea is associated with a wrong word, which is sometimes a new
formation[36]; and (2) _disorders of oration_, in which the peculiarity
lies, not in the words, but in their order. The speech disturbances of
dreams, Kraepelin remarks, spring from deep disturbance of thought, such
as occur in sensorial aphasia, and, as in such aphasia, the dreamer thinks
his nonsense is quite clear and reasonable. Much the same may occur in
alcoholic delirium and in _dementia præcox_.
The invention of new words probably occurs frequently in dreams, without
leaving a clear trace in memory, and still more frequently, perhaps, as
in the 'selvdrolla' dream, already recorded, there are seeming new verbal
formations which are really mere corruptions of imperfectly realised
words. An example of a definite and precise new word seems to be furnished
by the following dream, which was at all points vivid and precise. I saw
quite close to me a huge tawny bird, with an orange bill. The creature
got up and moved away, seeming as large as an ostrich. I asked a lady,
standing by, who had some ornithological knowledge, what the bird was,
and she replied that she thought it was a _jaleisa_. Then I asked the
same question of a poor woman who was passing, curious to know what she
would answer; she said, 'Oh, it's a kind of starling.' There was no doubt
in my dream as to the spelling of 'jaleisa,' but I am quite unable to
account for the word.[37] It so happened, however, that before I went to
bed I had been reading one of Calderon's plays, and I imagine that this
pseudo-Spanish word had formed itself in my brain among the echoes of
Calderon's enchanting music. The question arises as to why that ignorant
old woman should have called the jaleisa a starling. It seems just
possible that the more familiar name was suggested by the last syllable
of the strange bird's name, the association being verbal. It is equally
possible, and perhaps more likely, that the association followed by the
more usual visual channel, and that the jaleisa's orange beak suggested
the large orange beaks of newly hatched starlings, which had once, many
years previously, vividly attracted my attention.
A probable illustration of the influence of verbal association in
diverting the current of a dream is seen in the harrowing narrative that
follows: A lady dreamed that she went to an entertainment which turned
out to be a kind of revival meeting, presided over by a lady, and full of
uproar. It was suddenly realised that Hell was underneath the hall, and a
man, supposed to be a slave, was torn to pieces and cast into Hell. A lady
present was so much affected by the scene that she threw herself into a
pool of water, and was drowned, her body being afterwards pulled out by a
working man with a pitchfork. The dreamer was so overcome by these tragic
events that she felt that there was nothing left but to commit suicide.
Resolving to drown herself, she went to a lighthouse (which, however,
somewhat resembled a bathing machine) on a height, in order to throw
herself down into the sea. It was of an exquisite green tint, extremely
lovely and attractive, but she had not the courage to leap in. She thought
it might give her courage if she had a good meal first, so she returned to
the hall and joined the lady who had presided over the meeting. They sat
down to a dish of roast mutton, but, as they were eating, suddenly looked
at each other with mutual understanding; they realised that they were
eating the woman who had been drowned, and, it will be remarked, had been
pulled out of the water by a fork. It was possible to account for every
element of which this dream was made up, but its tragic character was
unsupported by anything in waking life, and entirely native to the dream.
The possibility of any guiding link between 'Hell' and 'hall' had not
presented itself to the dreamer, nor had it occurred to me when I set down
the dream as here reproduced. It must be noted, however, that the revival
meeting would itself tend to suggest the idea of Hell. It seems probable
that verbal associations usually play only a subordinate part.
Sometimes the verbal links of association in dreams, far from introducing
tragedy, lead, by the conjunction of two words of the same sound, to puns.
Thus a dreamer imagined that he and some friends were looking at a house
with its bedroom or bedrooms open to the air, the front wall being gone,
and they were laughing at the comical effect when a mysterious voice came
saying, 'A three-walled bedroom is a side-burst stor(e)y.' As the dreamer
awoke, he found himself laughing at this juxtaposition of the idea of the
storey of a house-side split open, and the idea of a side-splitting story.
The conditions of psychic activity during sleep--when ideas drift together
from widely separated regions along channels of association which are
usually held closed by the higher intellectual processes--seem, indeed,
to be specially favourable to the production of puns and allied forms
of witticism.[38] They may, therefore, be properly regarded as closely
associated with subconscious activity.[39]
A verbal link is seen in the following 'recipe' invented on another
occasion by the same dreamer:--
'Call in the tipcat, cut off its tail;
Fold up some eggs in a saucepan;
Sit on the rest, like an elderly male,
And gulp down the whole as a horse can.'
It is evident that the tipcat suggested a cat's tail, while the suggestion
of a cooking recipe in 'cut off its tail' led on to eggs and saucepan; the
eggs suggested 'sitting,' while 'gulp,' as the dreamer noted, appeared as
'gallop,' and suggested the horse. The ease with which the whole fell into
a completely rhymed doggerel stanza is due to the fact that the dreamer is
a poet.[40]
A more common phenomenon in my experience than association by verbal clues
is a transference from visual terms into the terms of some other sense,
and a repetition in that form. Thus a lady dreams that a large and very
beautiful picture resembling tapestry forms itself before her, and in it
she sees herself, only much more beautiful in shape, standing by a tree,
and on the other side of the tree an old friend is standing, while there
are a crowd of people around. Then she sees her friend touch her on the
arm. At the same time the dreamer feels the touch. The visual image is
reduplicated in a motor form. Such a phenomenon is doubtless a natural
result of the special conditions of dream life. In waking life the senses
are working co-ordinately, and if we see ourselves touched we shall
probably feel ourselves touched. But in dreams the body is a vision, and
not our real body, and when we see it touched, we realise we ought to feel
it touched, and a tactile sensation is thus suggested and experienced.
There are, however, other reduplications to which this explanation
will not apply. Thus I imagined I was sitting at a window, at the top
of a house, writing. As I looked up from my table I saw, with all the
emotions naturally accompanying such a sight, a woman in her nightdress
appear at a lofty window some distance off, and throw herself down. I
went on writing, however, and found that in the course of my literary
employment--I am not clear as to its precise nature--the very next thing I
had to do was to describe exactly such a scene as I had just witnessed. I
was extremely puzzled at such an extraordinary coincidence; it seemed to
me wholly inexplicable. Again I dreamed that I was coming up the Thames
(apparently in a steamboat), reading a novel, written by a friend, which
was the history of some one who arrives in England coming up the Thames
to London, by what I felt to be an extraordinary coincidence, in exactly
the same way as I was at the moment. Then I found myself seemingly at the
end of a London pier, with the river rippling at my feet, and in front
the superb panorama of London; exactly the scene which, in less detail,
was described in the book. Such dreams, reduplicating the imagery in
a new sensory medium, are fairly common, with me at all events. The
association is less that of analogy than of sensory media, as of the
visual image becoming a verbal motor image. In other cases a scene is
first seen as in reality, and then in a picture. Thus I dreamed that I
was witnessing the performance of an orchestra, and observed that all
the players had instruments of ancient pattern which, I understood,
had been in constant use for several hundred years; I could recall the
shapes of many on awaking, and none of them were quite modern; I could
not, however, recall the character of the music, which seemed to make no
impression on me, since I was absorbed in observing the shapes of the
instruments. I specially observed an old framed engraving hanging on the
wall, in my dream, representing precisely one of the instruments played
on, and I understood that it was called a _bourdon_.[41] It is interesting
to observe the profound astonishment with which sleeping consciousness
apperceives such simple reduplication.
In dreams planes of existence that in waking life are fundamentally
distinct are brought together, so that events belonging to different
planes move on the same plane, and even become combined. Acting and life,
the picture and the reality, are no longer absolutely distinct. Art and
life flow in the same channel. The reason, doubtless, is that for the
dreamer the world of waking life, the world of things as they are to the
waking senses, is closed and cannot even be completely recalled. So that
all modes of representation are strictly on the same level, and it is,
therefore, perfectly natural and logical that they should stand side by
side and merge into one another.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: The simile of the kaleidoscope for the most elementary
process of dreaming has often suggested itself. Thus in an article on
dreaming in the _Lancet_ (24th November 1877) we read: 'The combinations
are new, but the materials are old, some recent, many remote and
forgotten.... The turn of the kaleidoscope is instantaneous and any new
idea thrown into the field, perhaps in the act of turning, becomes an
integral part of the picture.']
[Footnote 13: Foucault, _Le Rêve_, p. 182.]
[Footnote 14: This is in accordance with the view of Wundt, who attributes
this multiplication of imagery to the retinal element.]
[Footnote 15: Baron Charles Mourre, 'La Volonté dans le Rêve,' _Revue
Philosophique_, May 1903.]
[Footnote 16: Ribot, _Psychologie de l'Attention_, 1889, chs. i. and ii.]
[Footnote 17: Maine de Biran, perhaps the earliest accurate introspective
observer of dreaming, noted the absence of all voluntary active attention.
Beaunis regards attention as possible in dreams, but fails to distinguish
between different kinds of attention.]
[Footnote 18: B. Leroy, 'Nature des Hallucinations,' _Revue
Philosophique_, June 1907. As regards the importance of the absence of
voluntary attention in the production of visual images, it may be remarked
that even the after-image of a bright object in waking life is much more
vivid when it occurs in a state of inattention and distraction. I noticed
this phenomenon some years ago, especially when studying mescal, and in
recent years it has been recorded by J. H. Hyslop (_Psychological Review_,
May 1903).]
[Footnote 19: We must be cautious in assuming that such imagery is purely
retinal. Scripture ('Cerebral light,' _Studies from the Yale Psychological
Laboratory_, vol. v., 1899) argues that even the so-called 'retinal light'
or '_eigenlicht_' is cerebral, not retinal at all, since it is single and
not double, and differs from after-images, which are displaced by pressure
on eyeball. This view is perhaps too extreme in the opposite direction.]
[Footnote 20: For a full and interesting study of these, see S. J. Franz,
'After-images' (Monograph Supplements to _Psychological Review_, vol.
iii., No. 2, June 1899). He agrees with those who regard after-images as
entirely retinal in origin.]
[Footnote 21: See Havelock Ellis, 'A New Artificial Paradise,'
_Contemporary Review_, January 1898; _ib._ 'Mescal: A Study of a Divine
Plant,' _Popular Science Monthly_, May 1902.]
[Footnote 22: G. E. Partridge, however ('Reverie,' _Pedagogical Seminary_,
April 1898), has investigated hypnagogic phenomena in 826 children. They
were asked to describe what they saw at night with closed eyes before
falling asleep. Among these children 58·5 per cent. of those aged from
thirteen to sixteen saw things at night in this way; of those aged six
the proportion was higher, 64·2 per cent. There seemed to be a maximum at
about the age of ten, and probably another maximum at a much earlier age.
Stars were most frequently mentioned, being spoken of by 151 children,
colours by 145, people and faces 77, animals 31, scenes of the day 21,
flowers and fruit 18, pictures 15, God and angels 13. Partridge calls
these phenomena hypnagogic; while, however, the hypnagogic visions of
adults may well be a relic of children's visions, the latter have much
greater range and vitality, for they are not confined to the moment before
sleep, and the child sometimes has a certain amount of control over them.
E. Guyon has studied hypnagogic and allied visions in children in his
Paris thesis, _Sur les Hallucinations Hypnagogiques_, 1903. He believes
that children always find them terrifying. That, however, is far from
being the case and is merely due to a pre-occupation with morbid cases,
which naturally attract most attention. (This is also illustrated by the
examples given by Stanley Hall, 'A Study of Fears,' _American Journal of
Psychology_, 1897, pp. 186 _et seq._) The visions of the healthy child
are not terrifying, and he accepts them in a completely matter-of-course
way. He is no more puzzled or troubled by his waking dreams than by his
sleeping dreams.]
[Footnote 23: The earliest detailed, though not typical, description of
this phenomenon I have met with is by Dr. Simon Forman, the astrologer,
in his entertaining _Autobiography_, written in 1600. He says that, as a
child of six, 'So soon as he was always laid down to sleep he should see
in visions always many mighty mountains and hills come rolling against
him, as though they would overrun him and fall on him and bruise him, yet
he got up always to the top of them and with much ado went over them. Then
should he see many great waters like to drown him, boiling and raging
against him as though they would swallow him up, yet he thought he did
overpass them. And these dreams and visions he had every night continually
for three or four years' space.' He believed they were sent him by God to
signify the troubles of his later years. De Quincey accurately described
the phenomenon in 1821, in his _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater:_
'I know not whether my reader is aware, that many children, perhaps
most, have a power of painting, as it were, upon the darkness, all sorts
of phantoms: in some, that power is simply a mechanic affection of the
eye; others have a voluntary or a semi-voluntary power to dismiss or to
summon them, or, as a child once said to me when I questioned him on this
matter, "I can tell them to go and they go; but sometimes they come, when
I don't tell them to come."' E. H. Clarke (_Visions_, 1878, pp. 212-216)
discussed the ability of children to see visions, and pointed out the
element of will in this ability. It seems unusual for auditory impressions
to intrude, though J. A. Symonds (biography by Horatio Brown, vol. i. p.
7), in describing his own night-terrors as a child, speaks of phantasmal
voices which blended with the caterwauling of cats on the roof.]
[Footnote 24: 'From being long and vehemently attent upon geometrical
figures,' Hobbes says after referring to the after-images of the sun
(_Leviathan_, part i., ch. 2), 'a man shall in the dark (though awake)
have the images of lines and angles before his eyes: which kind of fancy
hath no particular name; as being a thing that doth not commonly fall into
men's discourse.']
[Footnote 25: Baillarger, 'De l'Influence de l'Etat Intermédiaire à la
veille et au sommeil sur la Production et la Marche des Hallucinations,'
_Annales Médico-Psychologiques_, vol. v., 1845.]
[Footnote 26: Maury, _Le Sommeil et les Rêves_, 1861, pp. 50-77. Good
descriptions of hypnagogic imagery are given by Greenwood, _Imagination
and Dreams_, pp. 16-18, and Ladd, 'The Psychology of Visual Dreams,'
_Mind_, 1892. See also Sante di Sanctis, _I Sogni_, pp. 337 _et seq._]
[Footnote 27: This is the explanation offered by, for example, Delage
(_Comptes-rendus de l'Académie des Sciences_, vol. cxxxvi., No. 12, pp.
731 _et seq._). It is accepted by Guyon and others. Delage insists on the
retinal element since he finds that hypnagogic images follow the movements
of the eye.]
[Footnote 28: Similarly, under chloroform, Elmer Jones found that vision
is at first stimulated.]
[Footnote 29: G. H. Savage, 'Dreams: Normal and Morbid,' _St. Thomas's
Hospital Gazette_, February 1908.]
[Footnote 30: _British Medical Journal_, 11th May 1907. The actual
hallucinations of the insane are usually coloured normally. Head, however,
finds (_Brain_, 1901, p. 353) that the waking visual hallucinations
sometimes associated with visceral disease are always white, black, or
grey, and never coloured or even tinted.]
[Footnote 31: The transformation of birds into human beings seems
peculiarly common in dreams. I have referred to this point elsewhere
(_Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, vol. i. 3rd ed., p. 193). It is an
interesting and doubtless significant fact that the same transformation
is accepted in the myths of primitive peoples. Thus, according to H. H.
Bancroft (_Native Races of the Pacific_, vol. i. p. 93), a pantomime dance
of the Aleuts represents the transformation of a captive bird into a
lovely woman who falls exhausted into the arms of the hunter.]
[Footnote 32: It is noteworthy that this marked tendency in dreams to
discover analogies, although doubtless a tendency of primitive thought,
is also a progressive tendency. 'The conquests of science,' says Sageret
('L'Analogie Scientifique,' _Revue Philosophique_, January 1909), 'are the
conquests of analogy.']
[Footnote 33: Maury, _Le Sommeil et les Rêves_, p. 115.]
[Footnote 34: Kraepelin, 'Ueber Sprachstörungen im Träume,'
_Psychologische Arbeiten_, Bd. v., 1906, pp. 1-104; cf. Lombard,
'Glossolalie,' _Archives de Psychologie_, July 1907.]
[Footnote 35: This is confirmed by the fact that under chloroform
anaesthesia hearing is the first sense to be lost and vision the
last (Elmer Jones, 'The Waning of Consciousness under Chloroform,'
_Psychological Review_, January 1909).]
[Footnote 36: It may be recalled as not without significance that the
formation of new words is fairly common among young children; see, _e.g._,
an interesting correspondence in _Nature_, 26th March and 9th April 1891.]
[Footnote 37: It can scarcely be derived from the unfamiliar word
_chalizah_, the Hebrew name for the levirate.]
[Footnote 38: Thus I have rarely ever attempted parody when awake, but
once when at Montserrat, with thoughts far from humorous fields, I dreamed
of making a parody (I am not quite clear of what) apparently suggested by
the goose-pond in the cloisters of Barcelona Cathedral.]
[Footnote 39: This point of view has been specially developed by Freud,
_Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten_.]
[Footnote 40: It may be noted that somewhat similar doggerel verse is
sometimes made by the insane; see, _e.g._, _Journal of Mental Science_,
April 1907, p. 284.]
[Footnote 41: There was no known origin for this dream, and the word
_bourdon_ had no conscious associations for my mind; I was not even
definitely aware that it is used in a musical sense.]