CHAPTER VII

SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS

The Dramatisation of Subjective Feelings Based on

Dissociation--Analogies in Waking Life--The Synaesthesias and

Number-forms--Symbolism in Language--In Music--The Organic Basis

of Dream Symbolism--The Omnipotence of Symbolism--Oneiromancy--The

Scientific Interpretation of Dreams--Why Symbolism prevails

in Dreaming--Freud's Theory of Dreaming--Dreams as Fulfilled

Wishes--Why this Theory cannot be applied to all Dreaming--The

Complete Form of Symbolism in Dreams--Splitting up of

Personality--Self-objectivation in Imaginary Personalities--The

Dramatic Element in Dreams--Hallucinations--Multiple

Personality--Insanity--Self-objectivation a Primitive Tendency--Its

Survival in Civilisation.

In discussing dreams of flying I have referred to a dream in which a

slight disturbance of the heart's action was transformed by sleeping

consciousness into the image of an athlete manipulating an elastic ball.

This objectivation of what are really the dreamer's subjective sensations,

although he is not conscious of them as subjective, is, indeed, a

phenomenon which we have encountered many times. It is, however, so

important a feature of dream psychology, and probably of such significant

weight in its influence on waking life, that it is worth while to deal

with it separately.

The dramatisation of subjective elements of the personality, which

contributes so largely to render our dreams vivid and interesting, rests

on that dissociation, or falling apart of the constituent groups of

psychic centres, which is so fundamental a fact of dream life. That is to

say, that the usually coherent elements of our mental life are split up,

and some of them--often, it is curious to note, precisely those which are

at that very moment the most prominent and poignant--are reconstituted

into what seems to us an outside and objective world, of which we are the

interested or the merely curious spectators, but in neither case realise

that we are ourselves the origin of.

An elementary source of this tendency to objectivation is to be found,

it may be noted, in the automatic impulse towards symbolism by which all

sorts of feelings experienced by the dreamer become transformed into

concrete visible images. When objectivation is thus attained, dissociation

may be said to be secondary. So far indeed as I am able to dissect the

dream-process, the tendency to symbolism seems nearly always to precede

the dissociation in consciousness, though it may well be that the

dissociation of the mental elements is a necessary subconscious condition

for the symbolism.

Sensory symbolism rests on a very fundamental psychic tendency. On the

abnormal side we find it in the synaesthesias which, since Galton first

drew attention to them in 1883, in his _Inquiries into Human Faculty_,

have become well known, and are found among between six to over twelve per

cent. of people. Galton investigated chiefly those kinds of synaesthesias

which he called 'number-forms' and 'colour associations.' The number-form

is characteristic of those people who almost invariably think of

numerals in some more or less constant form of visual imagery, the

number instantaneously calling up the picture. In persons who experience

colour-associations, or coloured-hearing, there is a similar instantaneous

manifestation of particular colours in connection with particular sounds,

the different vowel sounds, for instance, each constantly and persistently

evolving a definite tint, as _a_ white, _e_ vermilion, _i_ yellow,

etc., no two persons, however, having exactly the same colour scheme of

sounds.[130] These phenomena are not so very rare, and, though they must

be regarded as abnormal, they occur in persons who are perfectly healthy

and sane.

It will be seen that a synaesthesia--which may involve taste, smell,

and other senses besides hearing and sight--causes an impression of one

sensory order to be automatically and involuntarily linked on to an

impression of another totally different order. In other words, we may say

that the one impression becomes the _symbol_ of the other impression, for

a symbol--which is literally a throwing together--means that two things

of different orders have become so associated that one of them may be

regarded as the sign and representative of the other.

There is, however, another still more natural and fundamental form of

symbolism which is entirely normal, and almost, indeed, physiological.

This is the tendency by which qualities of one order become symbols of

qualities of a totally different order, because they instinctively seem

to have a similar effect on us. In this way, things in the physical

order become symbols of things in the spiritual order. This symbolism

penetrates indeed the whole of language; we cannot escape from it. The

sea is _deep_, and so also may thoughts be; ice is _cold_, and we say

the same of some hearts; sugar is _sweet_, as the lover finds also the

presence of the beloved; quinine is _bitter_, and so is remorse. Not only

our adjectives, but our substantives and our verbs are equally symbolical.

To the etymological eye every sentence is full of metaphor, of symbol,

of images that, strictly and originally, express sensory impressions of

one order, but, as we use them to-day, express impressions of a totally

different order. Language is largely the utilisation of symbols. This is a

well-recognised fact which it is unnecessary to elaborate.[131]

An interesting example of the natural tendency to symbolism, which may

be compared to the allied tendency in dreaming, is furnished by another

language, the language of music. Music is a representation of the

world--the internal or the external world--which, except in so far as

it may seek to reproduce the actual sounds of the world, can only be

expressive by its symbolism. And the symbolism of music is so pronounced

that it is even expressed in the elementary fact of musical pitch. Our

minds are so constructed that the bass always seems _deep_ to us and the

treble _high_. We feel it incongruous to speak of a _high_ bass voice or

a _deep_ soprano. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this and

the like associations are fundamentally based, that there are, as an acute

French philosophic student of music, Dauriac (in an essay 'Des Images

Suggérées par l'Audition musicale'[132]), has expressed it, 'sensorial

correspondences,' as, indeed, Baudelaire had long since divined[133]; that

the motor image is that which demands from the listener the minimum of

effort; and that music almost constantly evokes motor imagery.[134]

The association between high notes and physical ascent, between low

notes and physical descent, is certainly in any case very fixed.[135]

In Wagner's _Lohengrin_, the ascent and descent of the angelic chorus

is thus indicated. Even if we go back to the early composers, the same

correspondence is found. In Purcell it is very definite. In Bach--pure and

abstract as his music is generally considered--not only this elementary

association, but an immense amount of motor imagery is to be found; Bach

shows, indeed, a curious pre-occupation in translating the definite sense

of the words he is musically illustrating into corresponding musical

terms; the skill and subtlety with which he accomplishes this, can often,

as Pirro and Schweitzer have shown, be appreciated only by musicians.[136]

It is sometimes said that this is 'realism' in music. That is a mistake.

When the impressions derived from one sense are translated into those of

another sense, there can be no question of realism. A composer may attempt

a realistic representation of thunder, but his representation of lightning

can only be symbolical; audible lightning can never be realistic.

Not only is there an instinctive and direct association between sounds

and motor imagery, but there is an indirect but equally instinctive

association between sounds and visual imagery which, though not itself

motor, has motor associations. Thus Bleuler considers it well established

that among colour-hearers there is a tendency for photisms that are light

in colour (and belonging, we may say, to the 'high' part of the spectrum)

to be produced by sounds of high quality, and dark photisms by sounds

of low quality; and, in the same way, sharply-defined pains or tactile

sensations, as well as pointed forms, produce light photisms. Similarly,

bright lights and pointed forms produce high photisms, whole low photisms

are produced by opposite conditions. Urbantschitsch, again, by examining a

large number of people who were not colour-hearers, found that a high note

of a tuning-fork seems higher when looking at red, yellow, green, or blue,

but lower if looking at violet. Thus two sensory qualities that are both

symbolic of a third quality are symbolic to each other.

This symbolism, we are justified in believing, is based on fundamental

organic tendencies. Piderit, nearly half a century ago, forcibly argued

that there is a real relationship of our most spiritual feelings and

ideas to particular bodily movements and facial expressions. In a similar

manner, he pointed out that bitter tastes and bitter thoughts tend to

produce the same physical expression.[137] He also argued that the

character of a man's looks--his _fixed_ or _dreamy_ eyes, his _lively_

or _stiff_ movements--correspond to real psychic characters. If this

is so we have a physiological, almost anatomical, basis for symbolism.

Cleland,[138] again, in an essay, 'On the Element of Symbolic Correlation

in Expression,' argued that the key to a great part of expression is

the correlation of movements and positions with ideas, so that there

are, for instance, a host of associations in the human mind by which

'upward' represents the good, the great, and the living, while 'downward'

represents the evil and the dead. Such associations are so fundamental

that they are found even in animals, whose gestures are, as Féré[139]

remarked, often metaphorical, so that a cat, for instance, will shake its

paw, as if in contact with water, after any disagreeable experiences.

The symbolism that to-day interpenetrates our language, and indeed our

life generally, has mostly been inherited by us, with the traditions of

civilisation, from an antiquity so primitive that we usually fail to

interpret it. The rare additions we make to it in our ordinary normal

life are for the most part deliberately conscious. But so soon as we

fall below, or rise above, that ordinary normal level--to insanity and

hallucination, to childhood, to savagery, to folk-lore and legend, to

poetry and religion--we are at once plunged into a sea of symbolism.[140]

There is even a normal sphere in which symbolism has free scope, and that

is in the world of dreams.

Oneiromancy, the symbolical interpretation of dreams, more especially as

a method of divining the future, is a widespread art in early stages of

culture. The discerning of dreams is represented in the Old Testament as

a very serious and anxious matter (as in regard to Pharaoh's dream of the

fat and lean cattle), and, nearer to our time, the dreams of great heroes,

especially Charlemagne, are represented as highly important events in the

mediæval European epics. Little manuals on the interpretation of dreams

have always been much valued by the uncultured classes, and among our

current popular sayings there are many dicta concerning the significance,

or the good or ill luck, of particular kinds of dreams.

Oneiromancy has thus slowly degenerated to folk-lore and superstition.

But at the outset it possessed something of the combined dignities of

religion and of science. Not only were the old dream interpreters careful

of the significance and results of individual dreams, in order to build

up a body of doctrine, but they held that not every dream contained

in it a divine message; thus they would not condescend to interpret

dreams following on the drinking of wine, for only to the temperate,

they declared, do the gods reveal their secrets.[141] The serious and

elaborate way in which the interpretation of dreams was dealt with is well

seen in the treatise on this subject by Artemidorus of Daldi, a native

of Ephesus, and contemporary of Marcus Aurelius.[142] He divided dreams

into two classes: _theorematic_ dreams, which come literally true, and

_allegorical_ dreams. The first group may be said to correspond to the

modern groups of prophetic and proleptic or prodromic dreams, while the

second group includes the symbolical dreams which have of recent years

again attracted attention. Synesius, who lived in the fourth century,

and eventually became a Christian bishop without altogether ceasing to

be a Greek pagan, wrote a very notable treatise on dreaming, in which,

with a genuinely Greek alertness of mind, he contrived to rationalise and

almost to modernise the ancient doctrine of dream symbolism. He admits

that it is in their obscurity that the truth of dreams resides, and that

we must not expect to find any general rules in regard to dreams; no two

people are alike, so that the same dream cannot have the same significance

for every one, and we have to find out the rules of our own dreams. He

had himself (like Galen) often been aided in his writings by his dreams,

in this way getting his ideas into order, improving his style, and

receiving criticisms of extravagant phrases. Once, too, in the days when

he hunted, he invented a trap as a result of a dream. Synesius declares

that attention to divination by dreams is good on moral grounds alone. For

he who makes his bed a Delphian tripod will be careful to live a pure and

noble life. In that way he will reach an end higher than that he aimed

at.[143]

It seems to-day by no means improbable that, amid the absurdities of

this popular oneiromancy, there are some items of real significance.

Until recent years, however, the absurdities have frightened away the

scientific investigator. Almost the only investigator of the psychology

of dreaming who ventured to admit a real symbolism in the dream world was

Scherner,[144] and his arguments were not usually accepted nor even easy

to accept. When we are faced by the question of definite and constant

symbols it still remains true that scepticism is often called for. But

there can be no manner of doubt that our dreams are full of symbolism.[145]

The conditions of dream life, indeed, lend themselves with a peculiar

facility to the formation of symbolism, that is to say, of images

which, while evoked by a definite stimulus, are themselves of a totally

different order from that stimulus. The very fact that we _sleep_, that

is to say, that the avenues of sense which would normally supply the real

image of corresponding order to the stimulus are more or less closed,

renders symbolism inevitable.[146] The direct channels being thus largely

choked, other allied and parallel associations come into play, and since

the control of attention and apperception is diminished, such play is

often unimpeded. Symbolism is the natural and inevitable result of these

conditions.[147]

It might still be asked why we do not in dreams more often recognise the

actual source of the stimuli applied to us. If a dreamer's feet are in

contact with something hot, it might seem more natural that he should

think of the actual hot-water bottle, rather than of an imaginary Etna,

and that, if he hears a singing in his ears, he should argue the presence

of the real bird he has often heard rather than a performance of Haydn's

_Creation_, which he has never heard. Here, however, we have to remember

the tendency to magnification in dream imagery, a tendency which rests

on the emotionality of dreams. Emotion is normally heightened in dreams.

Every impression reaches sleeping consciousness through this emotional

atmosphere, in an enlarged form, vaguer it may be, but more massive. The

sleeping brain is thus not dealing with actual impressions--if we are

justified in speaking of the impressions of waking life as 'actual'--even

when actual impressions are being made upon it, but with transformed

impressions. The problem before it is to find an adequate cause, not for

the actual impression, but for the transformed and enlarged impression.

Under these circumstances symbolism is quite inevitable. Even when the

nature of an excitation is rightly perceived its quality cannot be

rightly perceived. The dreamer may be able to perceive that he is being

bitten, but the massive and profound impression of a bite which reaches

his dreaming consciousness would not be adequately accounted for by

the supposition of the real mosquito that is the cause of it; the only

adequate explanation of the transformed impression received is to be found

(as in a dream already narrated) in a creature as large as a lobster.

This creature is the symbol of the real mosquito.[148] We have the same

phenomenon under somewhat similar conditions in the intoxication of

chloroform and nitrous oxide.

The obscuration during sleep of the external sensory channels, with

the checks on false conclusions they furnish, is not alone sufficient

to explain the symbolism of dreams. The dissociation of thought during

sleep, with the diminished attention and apperception involved, is also

a factor. The magnification of special isolated sensory impressions in

dreaming consciousness is associated with a general bluntness, even an

absolute quiescence, of the external sensory mechanism. One part of the

organism, and it seems usually a visceral part, is thus apt to magnify its

place in consciousness at the expense of the rest. As Vaschide and Piéron

say, during sleep 'the internal sensations develop at the expense of the

peripheral sensations.' That indeed seems to be the secret of the immense

emotional turmoil of our dreams. Yet it is very rare for these internal

sensations to reach the sleeping brain as what they are. They become

conscious, not as literal messages, but as symbolical transformations.

The excited or labouring heart recalls to the brain no memory of itself,

but some symbolical image of excitement or labour. There is association,

indeed, but it is association not along the matter-of-fact lines of our

ordinary waking civilised life, but along much more fundamental and

primitive channels, which in waking life we have now abandoned or never

knew.

There is another consideration which may be put forward to account for

one group of dream-symbolisms. It has been found that certain hysterical

subjects of old standing when in the hypnotic state are able to receive

mental pictures of their own viscera, even though they may be quite

ignorant of any knowledge of the shape of these viscera. This _autoscopy_,

as it has been called, has been specially studied by Féré, Comar, and

Sollier.[149] Hysteria is a condition which is in many respects closely

allied to sleep, and if it is to be accepted as a real fact that autoscopy

occasionally occurs in the abnormal psychic state of hypnotic sleep in

hysterical persons, it is possible to ask whether it may not sometimes

occur normally in the allied state of sleep. In the hypnotic state it

is known that parts of the organism normally involuntary may become

subject to the will; it is not incredible that similarly parts normally

insensitive may become sufficiently sensitive to reveal their own shape

or condition. We may thus, indeed, the more easily understand those

premonitory dreams in which the dreamer becomes conscious of morbid

conditions which are not perceptible to waking consciousness until they

have attained a greater degree of intensity.[150]

The recognition of the transformation in dream life of internal

sensations into symbolic motor imagery is ancient. Hippocrates said that

to dream, for instance, of springs and wells denoted some disturbance of

the bladder. In such a case a disturbed bladder sends to the brain, not

the naked message of its own needs, but a symbolic message of those needs

in motor imagery, as (in one case known to me) of a large cistern with

a stream of water flowing from it.[151] Sometimes the symbolism aroused

by visceral processes remains physiological; thus indigestion frequently

leads to dreams of eating, as of chewing all sorts of inedible and

repulsive substances, and occasionally--it would seem more abnormally--to

agreeable dreams of food.

It is due to the genius of Professor Sigmund Freud, of Vienna--to-day

the most daring and original psychologist in the field of morbid psychic

phenomena--that we owe the long-neglected recognition of the large place

of symbolism in dreaming. Scherner had argued in favour of this aspect of

dreams, but he was an undistinguished and unreliable psychologist, and

his arguments failed to be influential. Freud avows himself a partisan of

Scherner's theory of dreaming and opponent of all other theories,[152] but

his treatment of the matter is incomparably more searching and profound.

Freud, however, goes far beyond the fundamental--and, as I believe,

undeniable--proposition that dream-imagery is largely symbolic. He holds

that behind the symbolism of dreams there lies ultimately a _wish;_ he

believes, moreover, that this wish tends to be really of more or less

sexual character, and, further, that it is tinged by elements that go back

to the dreamer's infantile days. As Freud views the mechanism of dreams,

it is far from exhibiting mere disordered mental activity, but is (much

as he has also argued hysteria to be[153]) the outcome of a desire, which

is driven back by a kind of inhibition or censure (_i.e._, that kind

of moral check which is still more alert in the waking state), and is

seeking new forms of expression. There is first in the dream the process

of what Freud calls condensation (_Verdichtung_), a process which is that

fusion of separate elements which must be recognised at the outset of

every discussion of dreaming, but Freud maintains that in this fusion all

the elements have a point in common, and overlie one another like the

pictures in a Galtonian composite photograph. Then there comes the process

of displacement or transference (_Verschiebung_), a process by which the

really central and emotional basis of the dream is concealed beneath

trifles. Then there is the process of dramatisation or transformation

into a concrete situation of which the elements have a symbolic value.

Thus, as Maeder puts it, summarising Freud's views, 'behind the apparently

insignificant events of the day utilised in the dream there is always an

important idea or event hidden. We only dream of things that are worth

while. What at first sight seems to be a trifle is a grey wall which

hides a great palace. The significance of the dream is not so much held

in the dream itself as in that substratum of it which has not passed the

threshold and which analysis alone can bring to light.'

'We only dream of things that are worth while.' That is the point at

which many of us are no longer able to follow Freud. That dreams of the

type studied by Freud do actually occur may be accepted; it may even be

considered proved. But to assert that all dreams must be made to fit

into this one formula is to make far too large a demand. As regards the

presentative element in dreams--the element that is based on actual

sensory stimulation--it is in most cases unreasonable to invoke Freud's

formula at all. If, when I am asleep, the actual song of a bird causes me

to dream that I am at a concert, that picture may be regarded as a natural

symbol of the actual sensation, and it is unreasonable to expect that

psycho-analysis could reveal any hidden personal reason why the symbol

should take the form of a concert. And, if so, then Freud's formula fails

to hold good for phenomena which cover one of the two main divisions of

dreams, even on a superficial classification, and perhaps enter into all

dreams.

But even if we take dreams of the remaining or representative class--the

dreams made up of images not directly dependent on actual sensation--we

still have to maintain a cautious attitude. A very large proportion of the

dreams in this class seem to be, so far as the personal life is concerned,

in no sense 'worth while.' It would, indeed, be surprising if they were.

It seems to be fairly clear that in sleep, as certainly in the hypnagogic

state, attention is diminished, and apperceptive power weakened. That

alone seems to involve a relaxation of the tension by which we will and

desire our personal ends. At the same time, by no longer concentrating our

psychic activities at the focus of desire it enables indifferent images to

enter more easily the field of sleeping consciousness. It might even be

argued that the activity of desire, when it manifests itself in sleep and

follows the course indicated by Freud, corresponds to a special form of

sleep in which attention and apperception, though in modified forms, are

more active than in ordinary sleep.[154] Such dreams seem to occur with

special frequency, or in more definitely marked forms, in the neurotic and

especially the hysterical, and if it is true that the hysterical are to

some extent asleep even when they are awake, it may also be said that they

are to some extent awake even when they are asleep. Freud certainly holds,

probably with truth, that there is no fundamental distinction between

normal people and psychoneurotic people, and that there is, for instance,

as Ferenczi says, emphasising this point, 'a streak of hysterical

disposition in everybody.' Freud has, indeed, made interesting analytic

studies of his own dreams, but the great body of material accumulated

by him and his school is derived from the dreams of the neurotic. Thus

Stekel states that he has analysed many thousand dreams, but his lengthy

study on the interpretation of dreams deals exclusively with the dreams

of the neurotic.[155] Stekel believes, moreover, that from the structure

of the dream life conclusions may be drawn, not only as to the life and

character of the dreamer, but also as to his neurosis, the hysterical

person dreaming differently from the obsessed person, and so on. If that

is the case we are certainly justified in doubting whether conclusions

drawn from the study of the dreams of neurotic people can be safely held

to represent the normal dream life, even though it may be true that there

is no definite frontier between them. Whatever may be the case among the

neurotic, in ordinary normal sleep the images that drift across the field

of consciousness, though they have a logic of their own, seem in a large

proportion of cases to be quite explicable without resort to the theory

that they stand in vital but concealed relationship to our most intimate

self.

Even in waking life, and at normal moments which are not those of

reverie, it seems possible to trace the appearance in the field of

consciousness of images which are evoked neither by any known mental or

physical circumstance of the moment, or any hidden desire, images that

are as disconnected from the immediate claims of desire and even of

association as those of dreams seem so largely to be. It sometimes occurs

to me--as doubtless it occurs to other people--that at some moment when

my thoughts are normally occupied with the work immediately before me,

there suddenly appears on the surface of consciousness a totally unrelated

picture. A scene arises, vague but usually recognisable, of some city

or landscape--Australian, Russian, Spanish, it matters not what--seen

casually long years ago, and possibly never thought of since, and

possessing no kind of known association either with the matter in hand or

with my personal life generally. It comes to the surface of consciousness

as softly, as unexpectedly, as disconnectedly, as a minute bubble might

arise and break on the surface of an actual stream from ancient organic

material silently disintegrating in the depths beneath.[156] Every one who

has travelled much cannot fail to possess, hidden in his psychic depths,

a practically infinite number of such forgotten pictures, devoid of all

personal emotion. It is possible to maintain, as a matter of theory, that

when they come up to consciousness, they are evoked by some real, though

untraceable, resemblance which they possess to the psychic or physical

state existing when they reappear. But that theory cannot be demonstrated.

Nor, it may be added, is it more plausible than the simple but equally

unprovable theory that such scenes do really come to the surface of

consciousness as the result of some slight spontaneous disintegration in

a minute cerebral centre, and have no more immediately preceding psychic

cause than my psychic realisation of the emergence of the sun from behind

a cloud has any psychic preceding cause.

Similarly, in insanity, Liepmann, in his study _Ueber Ideenflucht_, has

forcibly argued that ordinary logorrhœa--the incontinence of ideas linked

together by superficial associations of resemblance or contiguity--is a

linking _without direction_, that is, corresponding to no interest, either

practical or theoretical, of the individual. Or, as Claparède puts it,

logorrhœa is a trouble in the reaction of _interest_ in life. It seems

most reasonable to believe that in ordinary sleep the flow of imagery

follows, for the most part, the same easy course. That course may to

waking consciousness often seem peculiar, but to waking consciousness the

conditions of dreaming life are peculiar. Under these conditions, however,

we may well believe that the tendency to movement in the direction of

least resistance still prevails. And as attention and will are weakened

and loosened during sleep, the tense concentration on personal ends must

also be relaxed. We become more disinterested. Personal desire tends

for the most part rather to fall into the background than to become

more prominent. If it were not a period in which desire were ordinarily

relaxed, sleep would cease to be a period of rest and recuperation.

Sleeping consciousness is a vast world, a world scarcely less vast than

that of waking consciousness. It is futile to imagine that a single

formula can cover all its manifold varieties and all its degrees of depth.

Those who imagine that all dreaming is a symbolism which a single cypher

will serve to interpret must not be surprised if, however unjustly, they

are thought to resemble those persons who claim to find on every page of

Shakespeare a cypher revealing the authorship of Bacon. In the case of

Freud's theory of dream interpretation, I hold the cypher to be real, but

I believe that it is impossible to regard so narrow and exclusive an

interpretation as adequate to explain the whole world of dreams. It would,

_a priori_, be incomprehensible that sleeping consciousness should exert

so extraordinary a selective power among the variegated elements of waking

life, and, experientially, there seems no adequate ground to suppose that

it does exert such selective action. On the contrary, it is, for the

most part, supremely impartial in bringing forward and combining all the

manifestations, the most trivial as well as the most intimate, of our

waking life. There is a symptom of mental disorder called _extrospection_,

in which the patient fastens his attention so minutely on events that

he comes to interpret the most trifling signs and incidents as full of

hidden significance, and may so build up a systematised delusion.[157] The

investigator of dreams must always bear in mind the risk of falling into

morbid extrospection.

Such considerations seem to indicate that it is not true that every

dream, every mental image, is 'worth while,' though at the same time they

by no means diminish the validity of special and purposive methods of

investigating dream consciousness. Freud and those who are following him

have shown, by the expenditure of much patience and skill, that his method

of dream-interpretation may in many cases yield coherent results which it

is not easy to account for by chance. It is quite possible, however, to

recognise Freud's service in vindicating the large place of symbolism in

dreams, and to welcome the application of his psycho-analytic method to

dreams, while yet denying that this is the only method of interpreting

dreams. Freud argues that all dreaming is purposive and significant,

and that we must put aside the belief that dreams are the mere trivial

outcome of the dissociated activity of brain centres. It remains true,

however, that, while reason plays a larger part in dreams than most

people realise, the activity of dissociated brain centres furnishes one

of the best keys to the explanation of psychic phenomena during sleep.

It would be difficult to believe in any case that in the relaxation of

sleep our thoughts are still pursuing a deliberately purposeful direction

under the control of our waking impulses. Many facts indicate--though

Freud's school may certainly claim that such facts have not been

thoroughly interpreted--that, as a matter of fact, this control is often

conspicuously lacking. There is, for instance, the well-known fact that

our most recent and acute emotional experiences--precisely those which

might most ardently formulate themselves in a wish--are rarely mirrored

in our dreams, though recent occurrences of more trivial nature, as well

as older events of more serious import, easily find place there. That

is easily accounted for by the supposition--not quite in a line with a

generalised wish-theory--that the exhausted emotions of the day find rest

at night.

It must also be said that even when we admit that a strong emotion may

symbolically construct an elaborate dream edifice which needs analysis to

be interpreted, we narrow the process unduly if we assert that the emotion

is necessarily a wish. Desire is certainly very fundamental in life and

very primitive. But there is another equally fundamental and primitive

emotion--fear.[158] We may very well expect to find this emotion, as well

as desire, subjacent to dream phenomena.[159]

The infantile form of the wish-dream, alike in adults and children, is

thus, there can be little doubt, extremely common, and, even in its

symbolic forms, it is a real and not rare phenomenon. But it is impossible

to follow Freud when he declares that all dreams fall into the group of

wish-dreams. The world of psychic life during sleep is, like the waking

world, rich and varied; it cannot be covered by a single formula. Freud's

subtle and searching analytic genius has greatly contributed to enlarge

our knowledge of this world of sleep. We may recognise the value of his

contribution to the psychology of dreams while refusing to accept a

premature and narrow generalisation.

The wish-dream of the kind elaborately investigated by Freud may be

accepted as one type of dreaming, and a very interesting type, but it

seems evident that it is only one type. There are even other types which

seem closely related to it, and yet are quite distinct. This is, for

instance, the case with the contrast-dream. The contrast-dream of Näcke's

type represents the emergence of characteristics which are distinctly

opposed to the dreamer's character and habits. Thus, in the course of four

consecutive nights, I have dreamed in much detail that (1) I was the mayor

of a large northern city about to take the chair at a local meeting of the

Bible Society; (2) that I was a soldier in the heat of battle; and (3)

that I was meditating the step of going on the stage as a comedian--the

only rôle of the three which seemed to cause me any nervousness or

misgiving. In contrast-dreams of this type we are not concerned with

the eruption of concealed and repressed wishes. They are merely based

on vestigial possibilities, entirely alien to our temperament as it has

developed in life, and only a part of our complex personalities in the

sense that, as Schopenhauer said, whatever path we take in life there

are latent germs within us which could only have developed in an exactly

opposite path. Even the very same dream may be due to quite different

causes. To take a very simple dream, for we may best argue on the simplest

facts: the dream of eating. We dream of eating when we are hungry, but

sometimes we also dream of eating when the stomach is suffering from

repletion. The dream is the same, but the psychological mechanism is

entirely different, in the one case emotional, in the other intellectual.

In the first case the picture of eating is built up in response to an

organic visceral craving, and we have an elementary wish-dream of what

Freud would call infantile type; in the second case the same dream is a

theory, embodied in a concrete picture, to account for the existence of

the repletion experienced.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that the wish-dream, in its simple or

what Freud calls its infantile form, represents an extremely common type

of dream.[160] A large number of the dreams of children are concerned with

wishes and their fulfilments. Those dreams of adults which are aroused by

actual organic sensations also tend to fall, though not invariably, into

the same form. Again, we chance to want a thing when we are awake; when

we are asleep we dream we have found it. It may also be said, almost with

certainty, that in some cases our dreams are the fulfilment of unexpressed

and unconscious waking wishes. Even the best people, it is probable, may

occasionally dream of events which represent the fulfilment of wishes they

have never consciously formulated. Archbishop Laud was accustomed to note

down his dreams in his Diary. On one occasion we find him setting down

a disturbing dream, in which he saw the Lord Keeper dead, and 'rotten

already.' A little later we find that Laud is 'much concerned at the

envy and undeserved hatred borne to me by the Lord Keeper.'[161] It is

not difficult to see in the Archbishop's relations to the Lord Keeper an

explanation of his dream.

If, however, wishes, conscious or unconscious, are often fulfilled

in dreams, and if, as we have seen reason to conclude, symbolism is

a fundamental tendency of dreaming activity, it is inevitable that

wish-dreams should sometimes take on a symbolic form. It is thus, for

instance, that I interpret my dream of being in an English cathedral and

seeing on the wall a notice to the effect that at evensong on such a day

the edifice will not be illuminated, in order to avoid attracting moths;

I awake with a slight headache, and the unilluminated cathedral was

the symbol of the coolness and absence of glare which one desires when

suffering from headache.

There cannot, also, be any doubt that erotic wishes frequently make

themselves felt as dreams, both in the infantile and the symbolic form.

It is sufficient to bring forward one illustration. It is furnished

by a young lady of somewhat neurotic tendencies and heredity, aged

twenty-three, musical and intelligent, who was in love with her

music-master, the organist at her church. The dream was written down at

the time. 'I was at the school of my childhood, and I was told that I

was St. Agnes Virgin and Martyr, and in five minutes' time I was to be

beheaded with a large knife. The sheen of the blade frightened me so much

that I asked if instead I might be strangled by the man I was in love

with. Permission was given if I could induce him to come in time. I ran

to our church (saying to myself that I knew it was a dream, but that I

_must_ see what he would say) over huge stones that cut my bare feet, and

wondered what age I was living in, longing to meet some women in order to

find out. When I did, they all wore crinolines. I rushed up the central

aisle, which was full of people, thinking that, as I was going to be

killed, nothing could matter. Mr. T. (the organist) was giving a choir

practice in the vestry. I ran up to him and said: "Come at once, I am

going to be killed." He became very angry, and said: "Do go away; you are

always interrupting my choir practice." I said: "Don't you understand? I

am going to be killed at once; there is a knife hanging over my head, but

I would rather be strangled by you, and they said I could if I fetched you

in time." As soon as he understood that he came at once. Then it seemed

in the dream that we were married, and had a son, who was to be a musical

composer. I said I must say goodbye to this son first, and told the nurse

to bring him to me. When he came I said: "Good-bye, I am going to be

killed." He said, "Mother, am I a boy or a girl? When I am with boys I

don't seem like them, and they call me a girl, and yet I don't look like

a girl." I replied: "You are both in one, because you are going to be a

perfect musical genius."' In this dream, which represents the fulfilment

in sleep of an affection unsatisfied in life, we see side by side the

infantile and the symbolic fulfilments of the erotic wish, culminating in

a gifted musical child. The wish to be strangled is an undoubted erotic

symbol,[162] and it is significant that in the course of the dream the

accepted death by strangulation became fused with marriage, although the

idea of death still inconsistently survives, doubtless because dream

consciousness failed to realise that the accepted form of death was a

subconsciously furnished symbol of the consummation of marriage.

The wish-dream of Freud's type has presented itself for consideration

here, because it is a special and elaborate illustration of symbolism

in dreaming. The important place of symbols in dreaming is by no means

dependent on the validity of this particular type of dream, and we may now

proceed to continue the discussion of the significance of the symbolic

tendency during sleep in its most important form.

The symbols we have so far been mainly concerned with have been the

result of a tendency of dreaming consciousness to objectify feelings and

affections within the organism in concrete objects or processes outside

the organism. In its complete form this symbolic tendency becomes the

objectivation of part of the dreamer's feelings or personality in a

distinct imaginary personality. A process of dramatisation occurs, and

the dreamer finds himself in action and reaction, friendly or hostile or

indifferent, with seemingly external personalities which, by the light

of the analysis possible on awakening, are demonstrably created out of

split-off portions of his own personality.[163] A common and simple form

of such objectivation, closely allied to some of the symbolisms already

brought forward, occurs when the dreamer sees the image of a person

suffering from some affection of a part of the body and finds on awakening

that he is himself experiencing pain or discomfort in that part. Thus a

medical man dreams he is examining a tumour in a patient's groin, and on

awakening finds slight irritation in the same region of his own body. And

similarly, just as our bodily needs, when experienced during sleep, may

be symbolised by inanimate natural objects and processes, so they may

also become objective in the image of another person who is occupied in

gratifying the need which we are ourselves unconsciously experiencing.

An interesting and significant group of cases is furnished by those

dreams in which--as the result of some compression or effort--the tactile

and muscular sensations of our own limbs are split off from sleeping

consciousness and built up into an imaginary personality. Thus a medical

friend, shortly after an attack of influenza, dreamed that in conversation

with a lady patient his hand rested on her knee; she requested him to

remove it, but his efforts to do so were fruitless, and he awoke in horror

from this unprofessional situation to find that his hand was firmly

clasped between his own knees. His body had thus been divided in dreaming

consciousness between himself and an imaginary other person; the knee

had become the other person's, while the hand remained his own, the hand

being claimed in preference to the knee no doubt on account of its greater

tactile sensibility and more complexly intimate association with the

brain. In the hypnagogic (or hypnopompic) state such dream sensations may

almost reach the intensity of hallucination. Thus, after an indigestible

supper, I awake with the vivid feeling that some one is lying on me

and attempting to drag off the bedclothes, and I find myself violently

attempting, but apparently in vain, to articulate: 'Who is there?' In a

dream of similar type, which occurred when lying on my back (and possibly

with slight indigestion due to an unusually late dinner), I awoke making

a kind of inarticulate exclamation which awakened my wife. I had dreamed

that I was lying in bed, and that some unseen creature--more supernatural

than human, it seemed--was violently dragging the bedclothes off me, while

I shouted to it, very distinctly it seemed to me, 'Avaunt, avaunt!'

It is evident that my own sense of oppression, my own unconscious and

involuntary movements in disturbing the bedclothes, were reconstructed by

sleeping consciousness as the actions of an external person, in the second

case, a supernatural creature, which, it is interesting to note, I duly

accepted as such and addressed in the conventionally appropriate manner

of old romance. The illusion may persist for some moments after waking. A

lady, after breathing rather loudly and convulsively for a few seconds,

wakes up, saying 'There is a rat or a mouse on the bed, shaking it up

and down.' 'You were asleep,' her husband replied, 'as I knew by your

breathing.' 'Oh, I was breathing like that,' she said, 'to make it jump

off.' Here we see that, somewhat as in the previous cases, the dreamer's

own muscular activity is, during sleep, reconstructed into the image of an

external force; but when she is in the semi-waking hypnagogic stage, she

recognises that the activity was her own, though still unable to dismiss

the delusion based on the theory formed during sleep.

At this point we reach the threshold of hallucination, and the next

case to be brought forward may be said to lie on the threshold, for an

impression received in the hypnagogic (or hypnopompic) stage is accepted

in its illusional form, even when the dreamer is fully awake. A farmer's

daughter--a bright girl of twenty-one, with quick nervous reactions,

but untrained mind--dreamed that she saw her brother (dead some years

previously) with blood streaming from his fingers. She awoke in a fright,

and was comforting herself with the thought that it was only a dream when

she felt a hand grip her shoulder three times in succession. There was no

one in the room, the door was locked, and no explanation seemed possible

to her. She was very frightened, got up at once, dressed, and spent

the rest of the night downstairs working. She was so convinced that a

real hand had touched her that, although it seemed impossible, she asked

her brothers if they had not been playing a trick on her. The nervous

shock was considerable, and she was unable to sleep well for some weeks

afterwards. She naturally knew nothing about abnormal psychic phenomena,

and was utterly puzzled to explain the experience, except by supposing

that it may have been a ghost. The explanation is really very simple. It

is well recognised that involuntary muscular twitches may occur in the

shoulder, especially after it has been subjected to pressure, and that in

some cases such contractions may simulate a touch.[164] The dream of a

bleeding hand indicates, when we bear in mind the tendency to objectify

sensations symbolically, now familiar to us in dreaming, that the

dreamer's arm was probably pressed beneath her in a cramped position.[165]

This pressure would account, not only for the dream, but for the muscular

twitches occurring on awakening. The nature of the dream, the terrified

emotional state it produced, and the mental obscurity of the hypnagogic

state, naturally combined, in a subject unaccustomed to self-analysis, to

create an illusion which reflection is unable to dispel, though in the

normal waking state she would probably have given no attention at all

to such muscular twitches. Strictly speaking, such an experience is an

illusion--that is to say, a misinterpretation of a real sensation--and

not a hallucination--or perception without known objective causation--but

there is no clear line of demarcation. In any case it may now be taken as

proved that hallucinations tend to occur in the neighbourhood of sleep,

and therefore to partake of the nature of dreams.[166]

So far we have been concerned with the tendency in dreams to objectify

portions of the body by constructing out of them new personalities.

But precisely the same process goes on in sleep with regard to our

thoughts and feelings. We split off portions of these also and construct

other personalities out of them, and sometimes even endow the persons

thus formed with thoughts and feelings more native to our own normal

personality than those which we reserve for ourselves. Thus a lady who

dreamed that when walking with a friend she discovered a species of

animal fruit, a kind of damson containing a snail, expressed her delight

at finding a combination so admirably adapted to culinary purposes; it

was the friend who, retaining the attitude of her own waking moments,

uttered an exclamation of disgust. Most of the dreams in which there is

any dramatic element are due to this splitting up of personality; in

our dreams we may experience shame or confusion from the rebukes or the

arguments of other persons, but the persons who administer the rebuke or

apply the argument are still ourselves.[167]

Some writers on dreaming have marvelled greatly at this tendency of

the sleeping mind to objectify portions of itself, and so to create

imaginary personalities and evolve dramatic situations. It has seemed

to them quite unaccountable except as the outcome of a special gift of

imagination appertaining to sleep. Yet, remarkable as it is, this process

is simply the inevitable outcome of the conditions under which psychic

life exists during sleep. If we realise that a more or less pronounced

degree of dissociation of the contents of the mind occurs during sleep,

and if we also realise that, sleeping fully as much as waking, mind is

a thing that instinctively reasons, and cannot refrain from building up

hypotheses, then we may easily see how the personages and situations of

dreams develop. Much the same process might, under some circumstances,

occur in waking life. If, for instance, we heard an unknown voice speaking

behind a curtain, we could not fail to build up an imaginary person in

connection with that voice, the characteristics of the imaginary person

being largely determined by the nature of the voice and of the things it

uttered: it would, further, be quite easy to enter into conversation with

the person we had thus constructed. That is what seems to occur in dreams.

We hear a voice behind the curtain of darkness, and to fit that voice and

the things it utters we instinctively form a picture which, in virtue of

the hallucinatory aptitude of sleep, is thrown against the curtain; it is

then quite easy to enter into conversation with the person we have thus

constructed. It no more occurs to us during sleep to suppose that the

voice we hear is only a voice and nothing more, than it would occur to us

awake to suppose that the voice behind the curtain is only a voice and

nothing more. The process is the same; the difference is that in dreams we

are, without knowing it, living among what from the waking point of view

are called hallucinations.

This process by which dreams are formed in sleeping consciousness

through the splitting of the dreamer's personality for the construction

of other personalities has been recognised ever since dreams began to

be seriously studied. Maury referred to the scission of personality in

dreams.[168] Delboeuf dealt with what he termed the altruising by the

dreamer of part of his representations.[169] Foucault terms the same

process personalisation.[170] Giessler attempts elaborately to explain

the enigma of self-diremption--the formation of a secondary self--in

dreams; if, he argues, a touch or other sensation exceeds the dream-body's

capacity of adaptation--_i.e._, if the state of stimulus is above the

apperceptive threshold--only one part of the perception is referred to the

dream-body and the other is transferred to a secondary self.[171] This

explanation, while it very fairly covers the presentative class of dreams,

directly connected with sensory stimuli, cannot so easily be applied to

the dramatisation of our representative dreams, which are not obviously

traceable to direct bodily stimulation.

The splitting up of personality is indeed a very pronounced and widely

extended tendency of the mind, and has, during recent years, been

elaborately studied. We thus have the basis of that psychic phenomenon

which is variously termed secondary personality, double personality,

duplex personality, multiple personality, alternation of personality,

etc.,[172] and in earlier ages was regarded as due to possession by

demons. Such conditions seem to be usually associated with hysteria.

The essential fact about hysteria is, according to Janet, its lack of

synthetising power, which is at the same time a lack of attention and

of apperception, and has as its result a disintegration of the field of

consciousness into mutually exclusive parts; that is to say, there is a

process of dissociation. Now that is a condition resembling, as we have

seen, the condition found in dreaming. It is not, therefore, difficult to

accept the view of Sollier and others, that hysteria is a condition allied

to sleep, a condition of vigilambulism in which the patients are often

unable to obtain normal sleep, simply because they are all the time in a

state of abnormal sleep; as one said to Sollier: 'I cannot sleep because I

am asleep all the time.' It may thus be the case that hysterical multiple

personalities[173] furnish a pathological analogue of that tendency to the

dramatic objectivation of portions of our personality which is normal and

healthy in dreams.

Similarly in insanity we have an even more constant and pronounced

tendency for the subject to attribute his own sensations to imaginary

individuals, and to create personalities out of portions of the real

personality. All the illusions, delusions, and hallucinations of the

insane are merely the manifold manifestations of this tendency. Without it

the insanity would not exist. It is not because he is subjected to unusual

sensations--visionary, auditory, tactile, olfactory, visceral, etc.--that

a man is insane. It is because he creates imaginary personalities to

account for these sensations; if his food tastes strange some one has

given him poison if he hears a strange voice it is some one communicating

with him by telephones or microphones or hypnotism; if he feels a strange

internal sensation it is perhaps because he has another person inside

him. The case has even been recorded of a man who attributed any feeling

he experienced, even the most normal sensations of hunger and thirst, to

the people around him. It is exactly the same process as goes on in our

dreams. The sane man, the normal waking man, may experience all these

strange sensations, but he recognises that they are the spontaneous

outcome of his own organisation.

We may, however, advance a step beyond this position. This

self-objectivation, this dramatisation of our experiences, is not

confined to sleep and to pathological conditions which resemble sleep.

It is natural and primitive in a far wider sense. The infant will gaze

inquisitively at its own feet, watch their movements, play with them,

'punish' them; consciousness has not absorbed them as part of the

self.[174] The infant really acts and feels towards the remote parts of

his own body as the adult acts and feels in dreaming. We are reminded of

the generalisation of Giessler that dream consciousness corresponds to

the normal psychic state in childhood, while sleeping subconsciousness

corresponds to the embryonic psychic state; so that the dream state

represents the renascence of the ego disentangling itself from the

impersonal sensations and indistinct images of the embryonic stage of

life. That sleeping consciousness is the primitive embryonic consciousness

is, indeed, indicated, it has often seemed to me, by the fact that in

many animals the embryonic position is the position of rest and sleep.

Ducklings and chicks in the shell have their heads beneath their wing. The

dog lies with his feet together, head flexed, and hind-quarters drawn up.

Man, alike in the womb and asleep, tends to be curled up, with the flexors

predominating over the extensors.

The savage has gone beyond the infant in ability to assimilate the

impressions of his own limbs, but on the psychic side he still

constantly tends to objectify his own feelings and ideas, re-creating

them as external beings. Primitive man has done so from the first, and

this impulse has struck its roots into all our most fundamental human

traditions even as they survive in civilisation to-day. The man of

the early world moves, like the dreamer, among a sea of emotions and

ideas which he cannot recognise the origin of, and, like the dreamer,

he instinctively dramatises them. But, unlike the dreamer, he gives

stability to the images he has thus created and in good faith mistaken

for independent beings. Thus we have the animistic stages of culture, and

early man peoples his world with gods and spirits and demons and fairies

and ghosts which enter into the traditions of his race, and are more or

less accepted even by a later race which no longer creates them for itself.

In our more advanced civilisations we are still struggling with later

forms of that Protean tendency to objectify the self and to animate the

things and even the people around us with our own spirit. The impatient

and imperfectly bred child, or even man, kicks viciously the object he

stumbles against, animate or inanimate, in order to revenge a wrong which

exists only in himself. On a slightly higher plane, the men of mediæval

times brought actions in the law courts against offending animals and

solemnly pronounced sentence against them as 'criminals,'[175] while

even to-day society still 'punishes' the human criminal because it has

imaginatively re-created him in the image of an ordinary normal person,

and lacks the intelligence to perceive that he has been moulded by the

laws of his nature and environment into a creature which we do well to

protect ourselves against, but have no right to 'punish.'[176] Everywhere

we still see around us the surviving relics of this primitive tendency

of men to project their own personalities into external objects. A fine

civilisation lies largely in the due subordination of this tendency, in

the realisation and control of our own emotional possibilities, and in the

resultant growth of personal responsibility.

It is thus impossible to over-estimate the immense importance of the

primitive symbolic tendency to objectify the subjective. Men have taken

out of their own hearts their best feelings and their worst feelings,

and have personalised and dramatised them, bowed down to them or stamped

on them, unable to hear the voice with which each of their images spoke:

'I am thyself.' Our conceptions of religion, of morals, of many of the

mightiest phenomena of life, especially the more exceptional phenomena,

have grown up under this influence, which still serves to support many

movements of to-day by some people imagined to be modern.

Dreaming, as we have seen, is not the sole source of such conceptions.

But they could scarcely have been found convincing, and possibly could

not even have arisen, among races which were wholly devoid of dream

experiences. A large part of all progress in psychological knowledge,

and, indeed, a large part of civilisation itself, lies in realising that

the apparently objective is really subjective, that the angels and demons

and geniuses of all sorts that once seemed to be external forces taking

possession of feeble and vacant individualities are themselves but modes

of action of marvellously rich and varied personalities. In our dreams we

are brought back into the magic circle of early culture, and we shrink and

shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms that are built up of our

own thoughts and emotions, and are really our own flesh.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 130: See _e.g._ Galton, _Inquiries_ (Everyman's Library

edition), pp. 79-112. Among more recent writings on this subject may

be mentioned Bleuler, art. 'Secondary Sensations,' Tuke's _Dictionary

of Psychological Medicine;_ Suarez de Mendoza, _L'Audition Colorée;_

Jules Millet, _Audition Colorée;_ and especially a useful summary by

Clavière, 'L'Audition Colorée,' _L'Année Psychologique_, fifth year,

1899. A case of auditory gustation is recorded by A. M. Pierce, _American

Journal of Psychology_, 1907. It may be noted that Boris Sidis has argued

(_Psychological Review_, January 1904) that all hallucinations are of the

nature of secondary sensations.]

[Footnote 131: Ferrero, in his _Lois Psychologiques du Symbolisme_ (1895),

deals broadly with symbolism in human thought and life.]

[Footnote 132: _Revue Philosophique_, November 1902.]

[Footnote 133: 'Richard Wagner et Tannhauser' in _L'Art Romantique_.]

[Footnote 134: The motor imagery suggested by music is in some persons

profuse and apparently capricious, and may be regarded as an anomaly

comparable to a synaesthesia. Heine was an example of this, and he has

described in _Florentine Nights_ the visions aroused by the playing of

Paganini, and elsewhere the visions evoked in him by the music of Berlioz.

Though I do not myself experience this phenomenon, I have found that there

is sometimes a tendency for music to arouse ideas of motor imagery; thus

some melodies of Handel suggest a giant painting frescoes on a vast wall

space. The most elementary motor relationship of music is seen in the

tendency of many people to sway portions of their body--to 'beat time'--in

sympathy with the music. (This phenomenon has been experimentally studied

by J. B. Miner, 'Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms,' Monograph Supplement

to the _Psychological Review_, vol. v., No. 4, June 1903). Music is

fundamentally an audible dance, and the most primitive music is dance

music.]

[Footnote 135: The instinctive nature of this tendency is shown by the

fact that it persists even in sleep. Thus Weygandt relates that he once

fell asleep in the theatre during one of the last scenes of _Cavalleria

Rusticana_, when the tenor was singing in ever higher and higher tones,

and dreamed that in order to reach the notes the performer was climbing up

ladders and stairs on the stage.]

[Footnote 136: See, especially the attractive book of André Pirro,

_L'Esthétique de J. S. Bach_ (1907), and also Albert Schweitzer, _J. S.

Bach_ (1908), especially chapters xix.-xxiii. 'Concrete things,' says

Ernest Newman, summarising some of these results (_Nation_, December 25,

1909), 'incessantly suggested abstract ideas or inward moods to Bach, and

_vice versâ_. He would time after time use the same musical formula for

the same word or idea. He first suggests the external concepts of "high"

and "low," as other composers have done, by high or low notes, and motion

up or down by ascending or descending themes. But Bach correlates with

the outward, objective thing a whole series of things that are purely

subjective. Thus moods of elation or of depression are to him the mental

equivalents of the physical acts of going up or down. So he gives us a

whole series of ascending themes to words that express "mounting" states

of mind, as it were--such as pride, courage, strength, resolution--and

descending themes to words that express "declining" states of mind--such

as prostration, adoration, depression, discouragement, grief at sin,

humility, poverty, fatigue, and illness. For the two sets of concepts,

internal and external, he will use the same musical symbols. To represent

the physical concept of "surrounding," again, he adopts the device of

a circling or undulating theme. A crown or a garland suggests the same

idea to him, so for this, too, he uses the same kind of theme. But

the correspondence goes still further; for when he comes to the word

"considering," he uses the same curving musical symbol once more--his

notion of "considering" being that of looking round on all sides. Again, a

word of purely external signification that suggests something twisted will

have an appropriately twisted theme. Then come the subjective applications

of the theme--the same disordered melodic outline is used to express a

frame of mind like anxiety or confusion, or to depict the wiles of Satan.

Careful study of the vocal works of Bach, and especially of the cantatas,

has revealed a host of these curious symbols.' The whole subject, it may

be added, has been briefly and suggestively discussed by Goblot, 'La

Musique Descriptive,' _Revue Philosophique_, July 1901.]

[Footnote 137: T. Piderit, _Mimik und Physiognomik_, 1867, p. 73.]

[Footnote 138: J. Cleland, _Evolution, Expression and Sensation_, 1881.]

[Footnote 139: Féré, 'La Physiologie dans les Métaphores,' _Revue

Philosophique_, October 1895.]

[Footnote 140: Maeder discusses symbolism in some of these fields in

his 'Die Symbolik in den Legenden, Märchen, Gebräuchen und Träumen,'

_Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift_, Nos. 6 and 7, May 1908.]

[Footnote 141: So Philostratus, and Pliny (_Natural History_, Bk. X. ch.

CCXI.) puts the same point on somewhat more natural grounds.]

[Footnote 142: It has been translated by F. S. Krauss, _Symbolik der

Träume_, 1881.]

[Footnote 143: A translation of Synesius's 'Treatise on Dreams' is

included in Druon's _Œuvres de Synésius_, pp. 347 _et seq._ Synesius is

probably best known to modern English readers through Charles Kingsley's

novel, _Hypatia_. His treatise on dreams has been unduly neglected, though

it commended itself mightily to the pioneering mind of Lord Monboddo, who

even says (_Ancient Metaphysics_, vol. ii., 1782, p. 217) in reference

to this treatise: 'Indeed it appears to me that since the days of Plato

and Aristotle there has not been a philosopher of greater depth than

Synesius.']

[Footnote 144: K. A. Scherner, _Das Leben des Traumes_, 1861. In France

Hervey de Saint-Denis, in a remarkable anonymous work which I have

not seen (_Les Rêves et les Moyens de les Diriger_, p. 356, quoted by

Vaschide and Piéron, _Psychologie du Rêve_, p. 26), tentatively put

forward a symbolic theory of dreams, as a possible rival to the theory

that permanent associations are set up as the result of a first chance

coincidence. 'Do there exist,' he asked, 'bizarre analogies of internal

sensations in virtue of which certain vibrations of the nerves, certain

instinctive movements of our viscera, correspond to sensations apparently

quite different? According to this hypothesis experience would bring

to light mysterious affinities, the knowledge of which might become a

genuine science;... and a real key to dreams would not be an unrealisable

achievement if we could bring together and compare a sufficient number of

observations.']

[Footnote 145: It is interesting to note that hallucinations may

also be symbolic. Thus the Psychical Research Society's Committee on

Hallucinations recognised a symbolic group, and recorded, for instance,

the case of a man who, when his child lies dying, sees a blue flame in the

air and hears a voice say, 'That's his soul' (_Proceedings Society for

Psychical Research_, August 1894, p. 125).]

[Footnote 146: Maeder states that the tendency to symbolism in dreams and

similar modes of psychic activity is due to 'vague thinking in a condition

of diminished attention.' This is, however, an inadequate statement and

misses the central point.]

[Footnote 147: In the other spheres in which symbolism most tends to

appear, the same or allied conditions exist. In hallucinations, which (as

Parish and others have shown) tend to occur in hypnagogic or sleep-like

states, the conditions are clearly the same. The symbolism of an art, and

notably music, is due to the very conditions of the art, which exclude

any appeal to other senses. The primitive mind reaches symbolism through

a similar condition of things, coming as the result of ignorance and

undeveloped powers of apperception. In insanity these powers are morbidly

disturbed or destroyed, with the same result.]

[Footnote 148: The magnification we experience in dreams is manifested

in their emotional aspects and in the emotional transformation of

actual sensory stimuli, from without or from within the organism. The

size of objects recalled by dreaming memory usually remains unchanged,

and if changed it seems to be more usually diminished. 'Lilliputian

hallucinations,' as they are termed by Leroy, who has studied them (_Revue

de Psychiatrie_, 1909, No. 8), in which diminutive, and frequently

coloured, people are observed, may also occasionally occur in alcoholic

and chloral intoxication, in circular insanity, and in various other

morbid mental conditions. They are usually agreeable in character.]

[Footnote 149: Sollier, 'L'Autoscopie Interne,' _Revue Philosophique_,

January 1903. Sollier deals with the objections made to the reality of the

phenomenon.]

[Footnote 150: 'Many people,' writes Dr. Marie de Manacéïne (_Sleep_,

1897, p. 294), 'when threatened by a gastric or intestinal attack dream

of seeing fish. The late Professor Sergius Botkine told me that he had

found this coincidence in his own case, and I have myself several times

found it in the case of a young girl who is well known to me. Some have

supposed that the sleeping consciousness receives an impression of the

elongated shape of the stomach or intestine; but such a supposition is

easier to make than to prove.' Scherner associated dreams of fish with

sensations arising from the bladder, and here also it may be said that we

are concerned with a fish-like viscus. Greenwood (_Imagination in Dreams_,

p. 195) stated that he had always been subject, at intervals of months

or years, to a recurrent dream in which he would see a river swarming

with fish that were finally piled in a horrible sweltering mass; this

dream always left a feeling of 'squalid horror,' but he was never able to

ascertain its cause and significance.]

[Footnote 151: Freud states (_Die Traumdeutung_, p. 233) that he knows a

case in which (as in the _Song of Songs_) columns and pillars appear in

dreams as symbols of the legs, and doors as symbols of the openings of the

body.]

[Footnote 152: Freud, _Die Traumdeutung_, p. 66. This work, published

in 1900, is the chief and most extensive statement of Freud's views. A

shorter statement is embodied in a little volume of the 'Grenzfrägen'

Series, _Ueber den Traum_, 1901. A brief exposition of Freud's position

is given by Dr. A. Maeder of Zurich in 'Essai d'Interpretation de

Quelques Rêves,' _Archives de Psychologie_, April 1907; as also by

Ernest Jones ('Freud's Theory of Dreams,' _Review of Neurology and

Psychiatry_, March 1910, and _American Journal of Psychology_, April

1910). For Freud's general psychological doctrine, see Brill's translation

of 'Freud's Selected Papers on Hysteria,' 1909. There have been many

serious criticisms of Freud's methods. As an example of such criticism,

accompanying an exposition of the methods, reference may be made to Max

Isserlin's 'Die Psychoanalytische Methode Freuds,' _Zeitschrift für die

Gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie_, Bd. 1. Heft i. 1910. A judicious

and qualified criticism of Freud's psychotherapeutic methods is given by

Löwenfeld ('Zum gegenwärtigen Stande der Psychotherapeutie,' _Münchener

medizinische Wochenschrift_, Nos. 3 and 4, 1910).]

[Footnote 153: I have set forth Freud's views of hysteria, now regarded as

almost epoch-making in character, in _Studies of the Psychology of Sex_,

vol. i. 3rd ed. pp. 219 _et seq._]

[Footnote 154: This is supported by the fact that in waking reverie, or

day-dreams, wishes are obviously the motor force in building up visionary

structures. Freud attaches great importance to reverie, for he considers

that it furnishes the key to the comprehension of dreams (_e.g._ _Sammlung

Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre_, 2nd series, pp. 138 _et seq._,

197 _et seq._). But it must be remembered that day-dreaming is not real

dreaming, which takes place under altogether different physiological

conditions, although it may quite fairly be claimed that day-dreaming

represents a state intermediate between ordinary waking consciousness and

consciousness during sleep.]

[Footnote 155: The special characteristics of dreaming in the hysterical

were studied, before Freud turned his attention to the question, by

Sante de Sanctis (_I Sogni e il Sonno nell' Isterismo_, 1896). See also

Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, vol. i. 3rd ed., 1910,

'Auto-erotism.']

[Footnote 156: Gissing, the novelist, an acute observer of psychic states,

in the most of his books, _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_, has

described this phenomenon: 'Every one, I suppose, is subject to a trick of

mind which often puzzles me. I am reading or thinking, and at a moment,

without any association or suggestion that I can discover, there rises

before me the vision of a place I know. Impossible to explain why that

particular spot should show itself to my mind's eye; the cerebral impulse

is so subtle that no search may trace its origin.' Gissing proceeds to say

that a thought, a phrase, an odour, a touch, a posture of the body, may

possibly have furnished the link of association, but he knows no evidence

for this theory.]

[Footnote 157: Extrospection has been specially studied by Vaschide and

Vurpas in _La Logique Morbide_.]

[Footnote 158: On the psychic importance of fears, see G. Stanley Hall,

'A Study of Fears,' _American Journal of Psychology_, 1897, p. 183.

Metchnikoff (_Essais Optimistes_, pp. 247 _et seq._) insists on the

mingled fear and strength of the anthropoid apes.]

[Footnote 159: Foucault has pointed this out, and Morton Prince, and

Giessler (who admits that the wish-dream is common in children), and

Flournoy (who remarks that not only a fear but any emotion can be equally

effective), as well as Claparède. The last remarks that Freud might regard

a fear as a suppressed desire, but it may equally be said that a desire

involves, on its reverse side, a fear. Freud has indeed himself pointed

out (_e.g._ _Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen_, Bd. 1., 1909, p.

362) that fears may be instinctively combined with wishes; he regards the

association with a wish of an opposing fear as one of the components of

some morbid psychic states. But he holds that the wish is the positive and

fundamental element: 'The unconscious can only wish' ('Das Unbewusste kann

nichts als wünschen'), a statement that seems somewhat too metaphysical

for the psychologist.]

[Footnote 160: Thus A. Wiggam ('A Contribution to the Data of Dream

Psychology,' _Pedagogical Seminary_, June 1909) records a great many

wish-dreams, mostly in the young.]

[Footnote 161: Laud, _Works_, vol. iii. p. 144.]

[Footnote 162: Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, vol.

iii., 'Love and Pain.']

[Footnote 163: The dramatic element in dreaming was dealt with at length

by Carl du Prel (_Philosophy of Mysticism_, vol. i. ch. iii.), but he

threw little light on it.]

[Footnote 164: Thus in the Psychical Research Society's 'Report on the

_Census of Hallucinations_,' the case is given of an over-worked and

worried man who, a few moments after leaving a tram car, had the vivid

feeling that some one touched him on the shoulder, though on turning round

he found no one near. He then remembered that on the car he had been

leaning against an iron bolt, and that, therefore, what he had experienced

was doubtless a spontaneous muscular contraction excited by the pressure

(_Proceedings, Society for Psychical Research_, August 1894, p. 3).

Touches felt on awakening, in correspondence with a dream, are not so

very uncommon. Thus Wagner, when in love with Mathilde Wesendonk, wrote,

in the private diary he kept for her, how, after a dream, 'as I awoke I

distinctly felt a kiss on my brow.']

[Footnote 165: Various pressures lead to dreams of blood. Thus a friend

with a weak heart tells me that when he sleeps on his left side he dreams

of blood. In some of these cases it is possible that there are retinal

sensations of red.]

[Footnote 166: In the _Census of Hallucinations_ (chapter ix.) it

was pointed out by the Psychical Research Society's Committee that

hallucinations are specially apt to occur on awakening, or in the state

between sleeping and waking; and Parish in his very searching study,

_Hallucinations and Illusions_ (Contemporary Science Series), has further

developed this fact and insisted on its significance.]

[Footnote 167: Dr. Johnson's remark on this point has often been quoted.

He dreamed that he had been worsted in a verbal argument, and was thereby

much mortified. 'Had not my judgment failed me,' he said, 'I should have

seen that the wit of this supposed antagonist, by whose superiority I felt

myself depressed, was as much furnished by me as that which I thought I

had been uttering in my own character' (Boswell's _Johnson_, ed. by Hill,

vol. iv. p. 5).]

[Footnote 168: Maury, _Le Sommeil et les Rêves_, 1861, p. 118.]

[Footnote 169: Delbœuf, _Le Sommeil et les Rêves_, pp. 24, _et seq_.]

[Footnote 170: Foucault, _Le Rêve_, p. 137.]

[Footnote 171: Giessler, 'Das Ich im Träume,' _Zeitschrift für Psychologie

und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane_, 1905, Heft 4 and 5, pp. 300 _et seq._]

[Footnote 172: See especially Pierre Janet's works, and also those of

Morton Prince, Albert Wilson, etc. Flournoy's very elaborate study of

Mlle. Helène Smith (_Des Indes à la Planète Mars_, 1900) is noteworthy. A

summary of some important cases of multiple personality will be found in

Marie de Manacéïne's _Sleep_, pp. 127 _et seq._, and some bibliographical

references, _ib._ p. 151.]

[Footnote 173: J. Milne Bramwell argues ('Secondary and Multiple

Personalities,' _Brain_, 1900) that such cases are not invariably

hysterical.]

[Footnote 174: See G. Stanley Hall, 'The Early Sense of Self,' _American

Journal of Psychology_, April 1898. Cooley ('The Early Use of Self-Words

by a Child,' _Psychological Review_, 1909, p. 94) finds that the child

distinguishes between itself as (1) body and as (2) self-assertion united

with action; it refers to the former as 'Baby,' and to the latter as 'I.']

[Footnote 175: See, _e.g._, Havelock Ellis, _The Criminal_, 4th ed., 1910,

p. 367.]

[Footnote 176: In the existing traditions of law and police, it is

still possible to find many survivals of this tendency to objectify

subjective impressions. Thus Mr. Theodore Schroeder has shown (_Free Press

Anthology_, 1909, pp. 171 _et seq._) that the prosecutions which have in

various so-called civilised countries pursued many estimable and even

noble works of literature, science, and art are based on the primitive

notion that 'indecency' resides in the object and not in the person who

experiences the feeling, and who ought, therefore, alone to be suppressed,

if suppression is called for. This psychological fallacy continues to

subsist, though it was unmasked in the clearest manner even by St.

Paul (_e.g._ Romans xiv. 14). It is somewhat analogous to the mediæval

conception of the criminality of animals.]