MEMORY IN DREAMS
The Apparent Rapidity of Thought in Dreams--This Phenomenon largely
due to the Dream being a Description of a Picture--The Experience
of Drowning Persons--The Sense of Time in Dreams--The Crumpling
of Consciousness in Dreams--The Recovery of Lost Memories through
the Relaxation of Attention--The Emergence in Dreams of Memories
not known to Waking Life--The Recollection of Forgotten Languages
in Sleep--The Perversions of Memory in Dreams--Paramnesic False
Recollections--Hypnagogic Paramnesia--Dreams mistaken for Actual
Events--The Phenomenon of Pseudo-Reminiscence--Its Relationship
to Epilepsy--Its Prevalence especially among Imaginative and
Nervously Exhausted Persons--The Theories put forward to Explain
it--A Fatigue Product--Conditioned by Defective Attention and
Apperception--Pseudo-Reminiscence a reversed Hallucination.
The peculiarities of memory in dreams--its defects, its aberrations, its
excesses--have attracted attention ever since dreams began to be studied
at all. It is not enough to assure ourselves that on awakening from a
dream our memory of that dream may fairly be regarded as trustworthy so
far as it extends. The characteristics of memory revealed within the
reproduced dream have sometimes seemed so extraordinary as to be only
explicable by the theory of supernatural intervention.
A problem which at one time greatly puzzled the scientific students of
dreaming is furnished at the outset by the apparent abnormal rapidity
of the dream process, the piling together in a brief space of time of
a great number of combined memories. Stories were told of people who,
when awakened by sounds or contacts which must have aroused them almost
immediately, had yet experienced elaborate visions which could only have
been excited by the stimulus which caused the awakening. The dream of
Maury--who, when awakened by a portion of the bed cornice falling on his
neck, imagined that he was living in the days of the Reign of Terror, and,
after many adventures, was being guillotined--has become famous.[192]
It is unquestionably true that dreams are sometimes evoked by sensory
stimuli which almost immediately awake the dreamer. But the supposition
that this fairly common fact involves an extraordinary acceleration of
the rapidity with which mental images are formed is due to a failure to
comprehend the conditions under which psychic activity in sleep takes
place. If the sleeper were wide awake, and were suddenly startled by a
mysterious voice at the window or the door, he would arrive at a theory of
the sound, and even form a plan of action, with at least as much rapidity
as when the stimulus occurs during sleep. The difference is that in sleep
the ordinary mental associations are more or less in abeyance, and the way
is therefore easily open to new associations. These new associations, when
we look back at them from the standpoint of waking life, seem to us so
bizarre, so far-fetched, that we think it must have required a long time
to imagine them. We fail to realise that, under the conditions of dream
thought, they have come about as automatically and as instantaneously as
the ordinary psychic concomitants of external stimulation in waking life.
It must also be remembered that in all the cases in which the rapidity
of the dream process has seemed so extraordinary, it has merely been a
question of visual imagery, and it is obviously quite easy to see in an
instant an elaborate picture or series of pictures which would take a long
time to describe.[193] At the most the dreamer has merely seen a kind of
cinematographic drama which has been condensed and run together in very
much the way practised by the cinematographic artist, so that although the
whole story seems to be shown in constant movement, in reality the action
of hours is condensed into moments. Further, it has always to be borne in
mind that, asleep as well as awake, intense emotion involves a loss of
the sense of time. We say in a terrible crisis that moments seemed years,
and when sleeping consciousness magnifies a trivial stimulation into the
occasion of a great crisis the same effect is necessarily produced.
Exactly the same illusion is experienced by persons who are rescued from
drowning, or other dangerous situations. It sometimes seems to them
that their whole life has passed before them in vision during those
brief moments. But careful investigation of some of these cases, notably
by Piéron, has shown that what really happened was that a scene from
childhood, perhaps of some rather similar accident, came before the
drowning man's mind and was followed by five, six, perhaps even ten or
twelve momentary scenes from later life. When the time during which these
scenes flashed through the mind was taken into account it was found that
there had by no means been any remarkable mental rapidity.
Such considerations have now led most scientific investigators of
dreaming to regard these problems of dream memory as settled. Woodworth's
observations on the hypnagogic or half-waking state revealed no remarkable
rapidity of mental processes. Clavière showed by experiments with an
alarm clock which struck twice with an interval of twenty-two seconds
that speech dreams at all events take place merely with normal rapidity,
or are even slightly slower than under waking conditions. The imagery of
sleep, Clavière concluded, is not more rapid than the imagery of waking
life, though to the dreamer it may seem to last for hours or days. It is
often slackened rather than accelerated, says Piéron, who refers to the
corresponding illusion under the influence of drugs like hashish, though
in some cases he finds that there is really a slight acceleration. The
illusion is simply due, Foucault thinks, to the dreamer's belief that the
events of his dream occupy the same time as real events. This illusion
of time, concludes Dr. Justine Tobolowska, in her Paris thesis on this
subject, is simply the necessary and constant result of the form assumed
by psychic life during sleep.[194]
If this peculiarity of memory in dreaming is not difficult to explain as
a natural illusion, there are other and rarer characteristics of dream
memory which are much more puzzling.
In attempting to unravel these, it is probable that, as in explaining
the illusion of rapidity, we must always bear in mind the tendency
of memory-groups in dreams to fall apart from their waking links of
association, so well as the complementary tendency to form associations
which in waking life would only be attained by a strained effort.
Apperception, with the power it involves of combining and bringing to a
focus all the various groups of memories bearing on the point in hand,
is defective. The focus of conscious attention is contracted, and there
is the curious and significant phenomenon that sleeping consciousness is
occasionally unconscious of psychic elements which yet are present just
outside it and thrusting imagery into its focus. The imagery becomes
conscious, but its relation to the existing focus of consciousness is
not consciously perceived. Such a psychic mechanism, as Freud and his
disciples have shown, quite commonly appears in hysteria and obsessional
neuroses when healthy normal consciousness is degraded to a pathological
level resembling that which is normal in dreams.[195] In such a case the
surface of sleeping consciousness is, as it were, crumpled up, and the
concealed portion appears only at the end of the dream or not at all. A
simple example may make this clear. In a dream I ask a lady if she knows
the work of the poet Bau; she replies that she does not; then I see before
me a paper having on it the name Baudelaire, clearly the name which should
have been contained in my query.[196] In such a dream the crumpling
and breaking of consciousness, at its very focus, is shown in the most
unmistakable manner.[197] But many of the most remarkable dreams of
dramatic dreamers are due to the same phenomenon, which in an intellectual
form is exactly the phenomenon which always makes a dramatic situation
effective. Robert Louis Stevenson was an abnormally vivid dreamer, and
found the germ of some of the plots of his stories in his dreams; he
has described one of his dreams in which the dreamer imagines he has
committed a murder; the crime becomes known to a woman who, however, never
denounces it; the murderer lives in terror, and cannot conceive why the
woman prolongs his torture by this delay in giving him up to justice; only
at the end of the dream comes the clue to the mystery, and the explanation
of the woman's attitude, as she falls on her knees and cries: 'Do you not
understand? I love you.'[198]
There is another and very interesting class of dreams in which we find
not merely that some memory-groups disappear from consciousness or become
merely latent, but also that other memory-groups, latent or even lost to
waking consciousness, float into the focus of sleeping consciousness. In
other words, we can remember in sleep what we have forgotten awake. We
then have what is called the _hypermnesia_, the excessive or abnormal
memory, of sleep.
There can be little doubt that the two processes--the sinking of some
memory-groups and the emergence on the surface of other memory-groups
which, so far as waking life is concerned, had apparently fallen to the
depths and been drowned--are complementarily related to one another. We
remember what we have forgotten because we forget what we remembered.
The order of our waking impressions involves a certain tension, that is
to say a certain attention, which holds them in our consciousness, and
excludes any other order which might serve to bring lost memory-groups to
sight. Sometimes we are conscious of a lost memory which is just outside
consciousness, but which, with the existing order of our memory-groups,
we cannot bring into consciousness. We have the missing name, the missing
memory, at the tip of our tongue, we say, but we cannot quite catch
it.[199] In dreams apperception is defective, the strain of conscious
attention is relaxed, and the conditions are furnished under which
new clues and strains may come into action and the missing name glide
spontaneously into consciousness. Even the mere approach of sleep, with
its accompanying relaxation of attention, may effect this end. Thus I
was trying one day to recall the name of the unpleasant Chinese scent,
patchouli. The name, though not usually unfamiliar, escaped me. At night,
however, just before falling asleep, it spontaneously occurred to me. In
the morning, when fully awake, I was again unable to recall it.
In such a case we see how waking consciousness is tense in a certain
direction, which happens not to be that in which the desired thing is to
be found. Attention under such circumstances impedes rather than aids
recollection. In this particular case, I felt convinced that the name I
wanted began with _h_, and thus my mind was intently directed towards a
wrong quarter. But on the approach of sleep attention is automatically
relaxed, and it is then possible for the forgotten word to slip in from
its unexpected quarter. On these occasions it is by indirection that
direction is found.[200]
It is interesting to observe that this same process of discovery due to
the wider outlook of relaxed attention can take place, not only in sleep
and the hypnagogic state, but also, subconsciously, in the fully waking
state when the mind is occupied with some other subject. Thus in reading
a MS., I came upon an illegible word which I was unable to identify,
notwithstanding several guesses and careful scrutiny through a magnifying
glass. I passed on, dismissing the subject from my mind. A quarter of an
hour afterwards, when walking, and thinking of quite a different subject,
I became conscious that the word 'ceremonial' had floated into the field
of mental vision, and I at once realised that this was the unidentified
word. The instance may be trivial, but no example could better show how
the mind may continue to work subconsciously in one direction while
consciously working in an entirely different direction.
In dreams, however, we can effect more than a mere recovery of memories
which have temporarily escaped us, or the discovery of relationships
which have eluded us. The dissociation of familiar memory-groups becomes
so complete, the appearance of unfamiliar groups so eruptive, that we
can remember things that have entirely and permanently sunk below the
surface of waking consciousness, or even things which are so insignificant
that they have never made any mark on waking consciousness at all. In
this way, we may be said, in a certain sense, to remember things we
never knew. The first dream which enabled me, some twenty years ago, to
realise this hypermnesia of the mind in dreams[201] was the following
unimportant but instructive case. I woke up recalling the chief items
of a rather vivid dream: I had imagined myself in a large old house,
where the furniture, though of good quality, was ancient, and the chairs
threatened to give way as one sat on them. The place belonged to one Sir
Peter Bryan, a hale old gentleman, who was accompanied by his son and
grandson. There was a question of my buying the place from him, and I was
very complimentary to the old gentleman's appearance of youthfulness,
absurdly affecting not to know which was the grandfather and which the
grandson. On awaking I said to myself that here was a purely imaginative
dream, quite unsuggested by any definite experiences. But when I began
to recall the trifling incidents of the previous day, and the things I
had seen and read, I realised that that was far from being the case. So
far from the dream having been a pure effort of imagination, I found that
every minute item could be traced to some separate source, though none
of them had the slightest resemblance to the dream as a whole. The name
of Sir Peter Bryan alone completely baffled me; I could not even recall
that I had at that time ever heard of any one called Bryan. I abandoned
the search and made my notes of the dream and its sources. I had scarcely
done so when I chanced to take up a volume of biographies of eccentric
personages, which I had glanced through carelessly the day before. I found
that it contained, among others, the lives of Lord _Peter_borough and
George _Bryan_ Brummel. I had certainly seen those names the day before;
yet before I took up the book once again it would have been impossible
for me to recall the exact name of Beau Brummel. It so happened that the
forgotten memory which in this case re-emerged to sleeping consciousness,
was a fact of no consequence to myself or any one else. But it furnishes
the key to many dreams which have been of more serious import to the
dreamers.
Since then I have been able to observe among my friends several instances
of dreams containing veracious though often trivial circumstances unknown
to the dreamer when awake, though on consideration it was found to be in
the highest degree probable that they had come under his notice, and been
forgotten, or not consciously observed. Thus a musical correspondent tells
me he once dreamed of playing a piece of Rubinstein's in the presence of
a friend who told him he had made a mistake in re-striking a tied note.
In the morning he found the dream friend was correct. But up to then he
had always repeated the note. Usually when the forgotten or unnoticed
circumstance is trivial, it is of quite recent date. That it is not
always very recent may be illustrated by a dream of my own. I dreamed
that I was in Spain and about to rejoin some friends at a place which was
called, I thought, Daraus, but on reaching the booking-office I could not
remember whether the place I wanted to go to was called Daraus, Varaus,
or Zaraus, all which places, it seemed to me, really existed. On awaking,
I made a note of the dream, exactly as reproduced here, but was unable to
recall any place, in Spain or elsewhere, corresponding to any of these
names. The dream seemed merely to illustrate the familiar way in which a
dream image perpetually shifts in a meaningless fashion at the focus of
sleeping consciousness. The note was put away, and a few months later
taken out again.[202] It was still equally impossible to me to recall
any real name corresponding to the dream names. But on consulting the
Spanish guide-books and railway time-tables, I found that, on the line
between San Sebastian and Bilbao, there really is a little seaside resort,
in a beautiful situation, called Zarauz, and I realised, moreover, that
I had actually passed that station in the train two hundred and fifty
days before the date of my dream.[203] I had no associations with this
place, though I may have admired it at the time; in any case it vanished
permanently from conscious memory, perhaps aided by the fatigue of a long
night journey before entering Spain. Even sleeping memory, I may remark,
only recovered it with an effort, for it is notable that the name was
gradually approached by three successive attempts.[204]
A special form of lost or unconscious memories recurring in sleep
is constituted by the cases in which people when asleep, or in a
somnambulistic state, can speak languages which they have forgotten, or
never consciously known, when awake. A simple instance, known to me,
is furnished by a servant who had been taken to Paris for a few weeks
six months before, but had never learned to speak a word of French, and
whose mistress overheard her talking in her sleep, and repeating various
French phrases, like 'Je ne sais pas, Monsieur'; she had certainly heard
these phrases, though she maintained, when awake, that she was ignorant
of them. Speaking in a language not consciously known, or xenoglossia,
as it is now termed, occurs under various abnormal conditions, as well
as in sleep, and is sometimes classed with the tendency which is found,
especially under great religious excitement, to 'speak with tongues,' or
to utter gibberish.[205] But in various sleep-like states it occurs as a
true revival of forgotten memories, sometimes of memories which belong to
childhood and in normal consciousness have been long overlaid and lost.
On one occasion, by the bedside of a lady who was kept for a considerable
period in a light condition of chloroform anaesthesia, the patient began
to talk in an unfamiliar language which one of us recognised as Welsh; as
a child, she afterwards owned, she had known Welsh, but had long since
forgotten it.[206] A similar reproduction of lost memories occurs in the
hypnotic state.
This psychic process, by which unconscious memories become conscious
in dreams, is of considerable interest and importance because it lends
itself to many delusions. Not only the ignorant and uncultured, but
even well-trained and acute minds, are often so unskilled in mental
analysis that they are quite unable to pierce beneath the phenomenon of
conscious ignorance to the deeper fact of unconscious memory; they are
completely baffled, or else they resort to the wildest hypotheses. This
is illustrated by the following narrative received twelve years ago from
a medical correspondent in Baltimore. 'Several years ago,' he writes, 'a
friend made a social call at my house and in the course of conversation
spoke very enthusiastically of Mascagni's _Cavalleria Rusticana_, the
first performance of which in the United States he had attended a few
nights previously. I had never even heard of the opera before, but that
night I dreamed that I heard it performed. The dream was a very vivid one,
so vivid that several times during the next day I found myself humming
airs from the dream opera. Several evenings later I went to the theatre to
see a comedy, and before the curtain rose the orchestra played a selection
which I instantly recognised as part of my dream opera. I exclaimed to a
lady who was with me: "That selection is from _Cavalleria Rusticana_."
On inquiring of the leader of the orchestra such proved to be the case.'
Now, at that period, shortly after the first appearance of _Cavalleria
Rusticana_, portions of it had become extremely popular and were heard
everywhere, by no means merely on the operatic stage. It was difficult not
to have heard something of it. There cannot be the slightest doubt that my
correspondent had heard not only the name but the music, though, writing
at an interval of some years, he probably exaggerated the extent of his
unconscious recollections. This seems the simple explanation of what to
my correspondent was an inexplicable mystery. Other people, like the late
Frederick Greenwood, not content to remain baffled, go further and regard
such dreams as 'dreams of revelation,' as they also consider that class of
dreams in which the dreamer works out the solution of a difficulty which
he had vainly grappled with when awake.
This is a kind of dream which has occurred in all ages, and has at times
been put down to divine interposition. Sixteen centuries ago Bishop
Synesius of Ptolemais wrote that in his hunting days a dream revealed
to him an idea for a trap which he successfully employed in snaring
animals, and at the present time inventions made in dreams have been
successfully patented. The Rev. Nehemiah Curnock, who lately succeeded in
deciphering Wesley's _Journal_, has stated that an important missing clue
to the cypher came to him in a dream. A friend of my own, an expert in
chemistry, was not long since in frequent communication with a practical
manufacturer, assisting him in his inventions by scientific advice.
One day the manufacturer wrote to my friend asking if the latter had
been thinking of him during the night, for he had been much puzzled by
a difficulty, and during the night had seen a vision of my friend who
explained the solution of the difficulty; in the morning the proposed
solution proved successful. There was, however, no telepathic element in
the case; the dreamer's solution was his own.
An interesting group of cases in this class is furnished by the dreams
in which the dreamer, in opposition to his waking judgment, sees an
acquaintance in whom he reposes trust acting in a manner unworthy of that
trust, subsequent events proving that the estimate formed during sleep was
sounder than that of waking life. Hawthorne (in his _American Notebooks_),
Greenwood, Jewell, and others have recorded cases of this kind.
Various as these phenomena are, they fall into the same scheme. They all
help to illustrate the fact that though on one side mental life in sleep
is feeble and defective, on the other side it shows a tendency to vigorous
excess. Sleep, as we know, involves a relaxation of tension, both physical
and psychic; attention is no longer focused at a deliberately selected
spot.[207] The voluntary field becomes narrower, but the involuntary field
becomes extended. Thus it happens that the contents of our minds fall into
a new order, an order which is often fantastic but, on the other hand,
is sometimes a more natural and even a more rational order than that we
attain in waking life. Our eyes close, our muscles grow slack, the reins
fall from our hands. But it sometimes happens that the horse knows the
road home even better than we know it ourselves.
Hypermnesia, or abnormally wide range of recollection, is not the only
or the most common modification of memory during sleep. We find much
more commonly, and indeed as one of the chief characteristics of sleep,
an abnormally narrow range of recollection. We find, also, and perhaps
as a result of that narrow range, paramnesia or perversion of memory.
The best known form of paramnesia is that in which we have the illusion
that the event which is at the moment happening to us has happened to us
before.[208]
This form of paramnesia is common in dreams, though it is often so
slightly pronounced that we either fail to recall it on awakening or
attach no significance to it.[209] I dream, for instance, that I am
walking along a path, along which, it seems to me, I have often walked
before, and that the path skirts the lawn of a house by which stands a
policeman whom, also, it seems to me, I have often seen there before; the
policeman approaches me and says, 'You have come to see Mr. So-and-so,
sir?' and thereupon I suddenly recollect, with some confusion, that I
have come to see Mr. So-and-so, and I walk up to the door. Again, an
author dreams that he sees a list of his own books with, at the head of
them, one entitled 'The Book of Glory.' He could not recall writing it
(and to waking consciousness the name was entirely unknown), but the only
reflection he made in his dream was 'How stupid to have forgotten!' In
this case there was evidently some resistance to the suggestion, which
yet was quickly accepted. In all such dreams it seems that we are in a
state of mental weakness associated with defective apperceptual control
and undue suggestibility, very similar to the state found in some forms of
confusional insanity or of precocious dementia.[210] Consciousness feebly
slides down the path of least resistance; it accepts every suggestion; the
objects presented to it seem things that it knew before, the things that
are suggested to it to do seem things that it already wanted to do before.
Paramnesia, thus regarded, seems simply a natural outcome of a state of
consciousness temporarily depressed below its normal standard of vigour.
It must be remembered that the suggestibility of sleeping consciousness
varies in degree, and in the face of serious improbabilities there is
often a considerable amount of resistance, just as the hypnotised person
seriously resists the suggestions that fundamentally outrage his nature.
But some degree of suggestibility, some tendency to regard the things
that come before us in dreams as familiar--in other words, as things that
have happened to us before--is not merely a natural result of defective
apperception, but one of the very conditions of dreaming. It enables us to
carry on our dreams; without it their progress would be fatally inhibited
by doubt, uncertainty, and struggle. So it is, perhaps, that in all
dreaming, or at all events in certain stages of sleeping consciousness, we
are liable to fall into a state of pseudo-reminiscence.
It is an interesting and highly significant fact that this paramnesic
delusion of our dreams--the feeling that the thing that is happening
to us is the thing that has happened to us before or that might happen
to us again--tends to persist in the hypnagogic (or hypnopompic) stage
immediately following sleep. When we have half awakened from a dream and
are just able to realise that it was a dream, that dream constantly tends
to appear in a more plausible or probable light than is possible a few
moments later when we are fully awake.[211]
The first experience which enabled me clearly to realise this phenomenon,
and its probable explanation, occurred many years ago. About the middle
of the night I had a very vivid dream, in which I imagined that two
friends--a gentleman and his daughter--with a certain Lord Chesterfield (I
had lately been reading the _Letters_ of the famous Lord Chesterfield),
were together at a hotel, that they were playing with weapons, that the
lady accidentally killed or wounded Lord Chesterfield, and that she
then changed clothes with him with the object of escaping, and avoiding
discovery which would somehow be dangerous. I was informed of the matter,
and was much concerned. I awoke, and my first thought was that I had just
had a curious dream which I must not forget in the morning. But then I
seemed to remember that it was a real and familiar event. This second
thought lulled my mental activity, and I went to sleep again. In the
morning I was able to recall the main points in my dream, and my thoughts
on awaking from it.
Since then I have given attention to the point, and I have found on
recalling my half-waking consciousness after dreams that, while it is
doubtless rare to catch the assertion 'That really occurred,' it is less
rare to catch the vague assertion, 'That is the kind of thing that does
occur.' I find that this latter impression appears, like the former,
after vivid dreams which contain no physical impossibility, but which
the full waking consciousness refuses to recognise as among the things
that are probable. As an example quite unlike that just recorded, I may
mention a dream in which I imagined that I was proving the frequency
of local intermarriage by noting in directories the frequency of the
presence of people of the same name in neighbouring towns and villages.
On half-awaking I still believed that I had actually been engaged in such
a task--that is, either that the dream was real or that it referred to a
real event--and it was not until I was sufficiently awake to recognise
the fallacy of such a method of investigation that I realised that it was
purely a dream.
This phenomenon has long been known, although its significance has not
been perceived. Brierre de Boismont pointed out that certain vivid dreams
are not recognised as dreams, but are mistaken for reality after waking,
though he scarcely recognised the normal limitation of this mistake to the
hypnagogic state. Moll compared such dreams, thus continued into waking
life, to continuative post-hypnotic suggestions. Sully mentioned awaking
from dreams which 'still wear the aspect of old acquaintances, so that
for the moment I think they are waking realities.'[212] Colegrove, in his
study of memory, recorded many cases in which young people mistook their
dreams for actual events.[213]
This persistence of the memory illusion of sleep into the subsequent
hypnagogic state is obviously related to the allied persistence,
more occasionally found, of the visual, auditory, and other sensory
hallucinations of sleep into the hypnagogic state.[214] Visions thus seen
persisting from dreams for a few moments into waking life are often very
baffling and disturbing, as has already been pointed out, to ignorant
and untrained people. Such visions may occur in the hypnagogic state,
even when there has been no conscious precedent dream, and it is indeed
probable, as Parish has argued, that it is precisely in the hypnagogic
state, the narthex of the church of dreams, as I may term it, that
hallucinations are most liable to occur. That illusions may momentarily
occur in this state is obvious; thus falling asleep for a few minutes
when seated before a black hollow smouldering fire, with red ashes at the
bottom, I awake with the illusion that I see a curtain on fire, and have
already leaned forward to snatch it away before I realise my mistake.
Under normal conditions, the liability of a dream memory to be mistaken
for an actual event seems to be greater when an interval has elapsed
before the dream is remembered, such an interval making it difficult to
distinguish one class of memories from the other, provided the dream has
been of a plausible character. Thus Professor Näcke has recorded that his
wife dreamed that an acquaintance, an old lady, had called at the house;
this dream was apparently forgotten until forty or fifty hours afterwards
when, on passing the old lady's house, it was recalled, and the dreamer
was only with much difficulty convinced that the dream was not an actual
occurrence. When we are concerned with memories of childhood, it not
infrequently happens that we cannot distinguish with absolute certainty
between real occurrences and what may possibly have been dreams.
In normal physical and mental health, however, it seems rare for the
hallucinatory influence of dreams to extend beyond the hypnagogic state,
but any impairment of the bodily health generally, and of the brain in
particular, may extend this confusion. Thus in a case of heart disease
terminating fatally, the patient, though in health he was by no means
visionary or impressionable, became liable during sleep in the day-time to
dreams of an entirely reasonable character which he had great difficulty
in distinguishing from the real facts of life, never feeling sure what had
actually happened, and what had been only a dream. In disordered cerebral
and nervous conditions the same illusion becomes still more marked. This
is notably the case in hysteria. In some forms of insanity, as many
alienists have shown, this mistake is sometimes permanent and the dream
may become an integral and persistent part of waking life. At this point,
however, we leave the normal world of dreams and enter the sphere of
pathology.
In the normal persistence of the dream illusion into the hypnagogic
state with which we are here concerned, the dream usually presents a
possible, though, it may be, highly improbable event. The half-waking or
hypnagogic intelligence seems to be deceived by this element of life-like
possibility. Consequently a fallacy of perception takes place strictly
comparable to the fallacious perception which, in the case of an external
sensation, we call an illusion. In the ordinary illusion an externally
excited sensation of one kind is mistaken for an externally excited
sensation of another kind. In this case a centrally excited sensation of
one order (dream image) is mistaken for a centrally excited sensation of
another order (memory). The phenomenon is, therefore, a mental illusion
belonging to the group of false memories, and it may be termed hypnagogic
paramnesia.
The process seems to have a certain interest, and it may throw light on
some rather obscure phenomena. When we are able to recall a vivid dream,
usually a fairly probable dream, with no idea as to when it was dreamed,
and thus find ourselves in possession of experiences of which we cannot
certainly say that they happened in waking life or in dream life, it
seems probable that this hypnagogic paramnesia has come into action; the
half-waking consciousness dismisses the vivid and life-like dream as an
old and familiar experience, shunting it off into temporary forgetfulness,
unless some accident again brings it into consciousness with, as it were,
a fragment of that wrong label still sticking to it. Such a paramnesic
process may thus also help to account for the mighty part which, as so
many thinkers from Lucretius onwards have seen, dreams have played in
moulding human action and human belief. It is a means whereby waking life
and dream life are brought to an apparently common level.
By hypnagogic paramnesia I mean a false memory occurring in the
ante-chamber of sleep, but not necessarily before sleep. Myers's invention
of the word 'hypnopompic' seems scarcely necessary even for pedantic
reasons. I take the condition of consciousness to be almost the same
whether the sleep is coming on or passing away. In the Chesterfield dream
it is indeed impossible to say whether the phenomenon is 'hypnagogic'
or 'hypnopompic'; in such a case the twilight consciousness is as much
conditioned by the sleep that is passing away as by the sleep that is
coming on.
If this memory illusion of the half-waking state may be regarded as a
variety of paramnesia, a new horizon is opened out to us. May not the
hypnagogic variety throw light on the general phenomenon of paramnesia
which has led to so many strange and complicated theories? I think it may.
Paramnesia, as we have seen, is the psychologist's name for a
hallucination of memory which is sometimes called 'pseudo-reminiscence,'
and by medical writers (who especially associate it with epilepsy)
regarded as a symptom of 'dreamy state,'[215] while by French authors it
is often termed 'false recognition' or 'sensation du déjà vu.' Dickens,
who seems himself to have experienced it, thus describes it in _David
Copperfield:_ 'We have all some experience of a feeling that comes over
us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said or done
before, in a remote time, of having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the
same faces, objects, and circumstances, of our knowing perfectly what
will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it.' Sometimes it seems
that this previous occurrence can only have taken place in a previous
existence,[216] whence we probably have, as St. Augustine seems first
to have suggested, the origin of the idea of metempsychosis, of the
transmigration of souls; sometimes it seems to have happened before in a
dream; sometimes the subject of the experience is totally baffled in the
attempt to account for the feeling of familiarity which has overtaken
him. In any case he is liable to an emotion of distress which would
scarcely be caused by the coincidence of resemblance with a real previous
experience.[217]
Paramnesia of this kind is known, according to the observations of
Lalande,[218] to thirty people in a hundred, and Heymans found it in a
considerable proportion of students of both sexes. Such estimates are
probably too high if we take into consideration the general population.
This experience seems, as Dugas and others have noted,[219] to affect
educated people, and notably people of more than average intellect,
who use their brains much, especially in artistic and emotional work,
to a very much greater degree than the ignorant and phlegmatic manual
worker.[220] Dickens has already been mentioned; many other notable
writers have referred to this or some allied feeling, stating that they
had experienced it, and Sir James Crichton-Browne brings forward a number
of passages from the poets in evidence of their familiarity with such
phenomena.[221] Shelley (who appears on at least two occasions to have
experienced hallucinations also) underwent what may be regarded as an
experience of paramnesia (described in his _Speculations on Metaphysics_)
which is of interest in the present connection because it brings this
phenomenon into relation with dreams. He was walking with a friend in the
neighbourhood of Oxford, when he suddenly turned the corner of a country
lane and saw 'a common scene' of a windmill, etc., which, it immediately
seemed to him, he recollected having seen before in a dream of long ago.
Five years afterwards he was so agitated in writing this down that he
could not finish the account. The real resemblance of 'a common scene'
with a similar dream scene, even supposing it could be recollected when
the two experiences were separated by a long interval, would scarcely be a
coincidence likely to cause agitation. The emotion aroused seems to mark
the experience as belonging to the class of paramnesic illusions which so
often make a peculiarly vivid impression on those to whom they occur.
A great many theories have been put forward by psychologists and others to
account for this paramnesic phenomenon. The most ancient explanation, long
anterior to the beginnings of scientific psychology, was the theory that
the occurrence which, as it now happens, strikes us as so overwhelmingly
familiar had actually occurred to us in a previous existence long ages
before; thus Pythagoras, according to the ancient story, when he visited
the temple of Juno at Argos recognised the shield he had worn ages before
when he was Euphorbus and fought with Menelaus in the Trojan war. A much
more recent theory runs to the opposite extreme and claims that all
or nearly all these cases of recognition indicate a real but confused
reminiscence of past events in our present life, dim recollections which
the subject is unable definitely to locate. This is the explanation
largely relied on by Ribot, Jessen, Sander, Sully, Burnham, and many
others. It was perhaps largely due to ignorance of the phenomenon;
Ribot, when he wrote his book on the diseases of memory, considered that
only three or four cases had been recorded, for an abnormal phenomenon
always seems rare until it is recognised and definitely searched for.
Undoubtedly, this theory will explain a considerable proportion of cases,
but not really typical cases in which the subject has an overwhelming
conviction that even the minute details of the present experience have
been experienced before. We may read a new poem with a vague sense of
familiarity, but such an experience never puts on a really paramnesic
character, for we quickly realise that it is explainable by the fact
that the writer of the poem has fallen under the influence of some
greater master. The only experience I can personally speak of as at all
approaching true paramnesia occurred on visiting the ruins of Pevensey
Castle many years ago. On going up the slope towards the ivy-covered
ruins, bathed in bright sunlight, I experienced a strange and abiding
sense of familiarity with the scene. Three theories might account for
this experience (for I refrain from including the Pythagorean theory that
I experienced a reminiscence of the experience of a possible ancestor
coming from across the Thames to the assistance of Harold against William
the Conqueror at this spot): (1) that it was a case of true paramnesia;
(2) that I had been taken to the spot as a child; (3) that the view was
included among a series of coloured stereoscopic pictures with which I
was familiar as a child, and which certainly contained similar scenes. I
incline to this last explanation. Here, as elsewhere, there are no keys
which will unlock all doors.
A modification of the theory that the pseudo-reminiscence is an
unrecognised real reminiscence is furnished by Grasset, who considers that
the phenomenon is due to a subconscious impression previously received,
but only reaching consciousness under the influence of the new similar
impression. This theory would include the revival of dream images, and
is therefore related to the theory of Lapie and Méré, according to which
the feeling of many of these subjects that what they now experience
had happened before in a dream is the correct explanation of the
phenomenon.[222]
We enter on a different class of explanations with the early theory
of Wigan that such cases are due to the duality of the brain, the two
hemispheres not acting quite simultaneously. This is a somewhat crude
conception, though it may seem approximately on the lines of more recent
theories. The theory of the duplex brain, each hemisphere being supposed
capable of acting independently, was at one time invoked to explain many
phenomena, but it is no longer regarded as tenable.[223]
We may dismiss these theories, which have been effectively criticised by
others, and revert to our clue in the sleeping and hypnagogic state. The
hypnagogic state is a transition between waking and sleeping. It is thus
a condition of mental feebleness and suggestibility doubtless correlated
with a condition of irregular brain anaemia. A plausible suggestion
under such conditions is too readily accepted. Does ordinary paramnesia
occur under similar conditions of mental feebleness and suggestibility?
It is rare to find descriptions of paramnesic experiences by scientific
observers who are alive to the importance of accurately recording all
the conditions, but there is some reason to think that paramnesia does
occur in states produced by excitement, exhaustion, and allied causes.
The earliest case of paramnesia recorded in detail by a trained observer
is that described by Wigan as occurring to himself at the funeral of
the Princess Charlotte. He had passed several disturbed nights previous
to the ceremony, with almost complete deprivation of rest on the night
immediately preceding; he was suffering from grief as well as from
exhaustion from want of food; he had been standing for four hours, and
would have fainted on taking his place by the coffin if it had not been
for the excitement of the occasion. When the music ceased the coffin
slowly sank in absolute silence, broken by an outburst of grief from the
bereaved husband. 'In an instant,' Wigan proceeds, 'I felt not merely an
_impression_, but a _conviction_, that I had seen the whole scene before
on some former occasion.' Such a condition may fairly be regarded as an
artificial reproduction, by means of emotion, excitement, and exhaustion,
of the condition which occurs simply and naturally in sleep or on its
hypnagogic borderland.
The frequency--if it may be taken to be a fact--of the occurrence of
pseudo-reminiscence in epileptics, noted by various medical observers,
whether at the onset of the fit or independently of any obvious muscular
convulsion, may be significant in this connection. There is no good reason
to suppose that pseudo-reminiscence has a true relation to epilepsy, and
still less that it necessarily constitutes a minor epileptic paroxysm.
But the special sleep-like condition of contracted cerebral circulation in
epilepsy renders it favourable to paramnesia as well as to hallucinatory
phenomena.[224]
Independently of epilepsy, any condition of temporary and perhaps chronic
nervous exhaustion may produce, or at all events predispose to, the
paramnesic delusion of recognising present experiences as familiar. Thus
Rosenbach has recorded the case of a sane and healthy man, who, after
severe mental labour, followed by sleeplessness, seemed to know all the
people he met in the street, though on close examination he found he was
mistaken.[225] Such a condition may even be almost congenital. Thus of
Anna Kingsford, who was of highly strung and neurotic disposition, we are
told that, as a child, 'all that she read struck her as already familiar
to her, so that she seemed to herself to be recovering old recollections
rather than acquiring fresh knowledge.'[226]
It is noteworthy that artificial anaesthesia by drugs which produce an
abnormal sleep also favours paramnesia. Thus Sir William Ramsay[227] has
stated that when, under an anaesthetic, he heard a slight noise in the
street, 'I not merely knew that it had happened before, but I could have
predicted that it would happen at that very moment.'
In all these conditions we appear to be in the presence of an enfeebled,
excited, and impaired state of consciousness approximating to the true
confusion of dream consciousness. It seems as if externally aroused
sensations in such cases are received by the exhausted cerebral centres in
so blurred a form that an illusion takes place, and they are mistaken for
internally excited sensations, for memories.
That paramnesia is a fatigue product--even though often a product of
nervous hyperaesthesia--is indicated by the statements of many who have
described it. Anjel long ago emphasised this fatigue, and Bonatelli,
also at an early period, found that illusions of memory were specially
liable to occur in states of unusual nervous irritability. During recent
years this characteristic of paramnesia has been more and more frequently
recognised. Bernard Leroy, who devoted a lengthy and important Paris
thesis to pseudo-reminiscence,[228] showed that a certain proportion of
cases indicated the presence of fatigue or distraction. Heymans found that
it was in the evening, when his subjects were in a passive condition,
tired, exhausted, or engaged in uncongenial work, that they were most
liable to the experience.[229] Féré brought forward a case in which, as
he pointed out, pseudo-reminiscence in a healthy man, convalescent from
influenza, was associated with fatigue and disappeared with it.[230]
Dromard and Albès declare that pseudo-reminiscence is 'a phenomenon of
exhaustion,' and one of them makes the significant statement: 'I become
more easily the prey of this illusion when, by chance and without thinking
of it, I simultaneously apply my attention to an external object and an
internal thought.'[231] Dugas, again, considers that all the various forms
of paramnesia have 'one common character, which is that they occur as the
result of prolonged or intense fatigue';[232] he adds that most of the
cases of paramnesia he has noted in young people during fifteen years
coincided with periods of anaemia and nervous weakness.
It is not, however, necessary to believe that fatigue, in the ordinary
sense of the word, whether physical or mental, is the invariable
accompaniment of paramnesia. If it is the presence of a condition
resembling that of sleep or the hypnagogic state which predisposes to
the experience, that condition may be produced by other circumstances.
Distraction, excited hyperaesthesia simulating increased power, and
various chronic psychic states due to a highly-strung or over-strained
nervous system may all tend in the same direction, even though no sense of
exhaustion is felt.[233] This is doubtless why it is that so many poets,
novelists, and other men of strenuous intellectual aptitude are liable to
this experience.
It has been argued by some who admit that there is often an element of
fatigue in paramnesia,[234] that the real cause of the false memory is an
abnormal celerity of perception, perhaps due to hyperaesthesia. The scene
would thus be perceived so quickly that the subject concludes that he
must have had this experience before. That the subject often has a feeling
of unusual rapidity of perception may very well be admitted. But there is
no reason whatever to suppose that the perception actually is received
with any such unusual rapidity. The probabilities are in the other
direction. We know that many influences (such as drugs like alcohol) which
produce a feeling of heightened and quickened perceptions really have a
slowing and dulling effect, in the same way as the wise and beautiful
things we utter in dreams are usually found on awaking to be commonplace,
if not meaningless. There is no evidence to show that paramnesia is
accompanied by a real heightening of perception, while, as we have seen,
a broad survey of the facts makes it more reasonable to suppose that we
have, on the contrary, a sudden fall towards the dream state, a state in
which, as Tissié and others have pointed out, there are many stages.
It must be remembered in this connection that in the hypnagogic and other
states related to sleep we are not able to estimate time conditions
consciously, though, as the frequent ability to wake at fixed moments
indicates, we may do so subconsciously. Time is long, short, or
non-existent in dream-like states. This is always true of the onset of
the hypnagogic state. When I am suddenly awakened at night by a voice or
a bell or other stimulus, I often find it very difficult to say whether
I was or was not already awake, and have frequently replied, when so
awakened, that I was already awake. That is an illusion, as is shown by
the frequency with which elderly people who fall asleep in the day time,
will declare, though they may have been snoring a moment before, that
they have never been asleep. By a somewhat similar paramnesic illusion we
can never fix the exact moment when we awake. When we become conscious
that we are awake it always seems to us that we are already awake, awake
for an indefinite time, and not that we have just awakened. If I had to
register the exact moment I awake in the morning I should usually feel
that I was considerably late in making the observation. It seems that the
imperfect hypnagogic consciousness projects itself behind. At the first
onset, consciousness is not sufficiently developed to be able to realise
that it is beginning, and when it becomes sufficiently developed to make
such a statement the moment when it can be correctly made is already past.
Consciousness is only able to assert that it has been continuing for an
indefinite time. And that assertion involves a paramnesic illusion of
putting back a present experience into the past, analogous to the illusion
of pseudo-reminiscence.[235]
If we realise these characteristics of paramnesia we can scarcely fail
to conclude that we are concerned here with illusions which, while
they fall within the sphere of memory, are largely conditioned by the
whole psychic condition. As in dreams, it is inattention, failure of
apperception, defective association of the mental contents, which make
the paramnesia possible. Paramnesia is, as Fouillée has said, a kind of
diplopia or seeing double in the mental field. 'I have the impression,'
says one of the writers on this subject who himself experiences the
sensation, 'that the present reality has a _double_.' Actual double
vision is due to the failure of that muscular co-ordination which, as
Ribot and others have insisted, is of the very essence of attention.
This wider psychic basis on which paramnesia rests has of late been
recognised by several psychologists. Thus Léon-Kindberg states that in
paramnesia there is an absence of mental attention, of the effort of
synthesis necessary to grasp an actual occurrence, which is, therefore,
perceived with the same facility as a memory not requiring synthesis,
with the resulting illusion that it is a memory.[236] Ballet, again,
regards paramnesia as a transitory or permanent psychasthenic state, due
to dissociation.[237] Dugas, also, who has repeatedly returned to this
subject during many years, in his latest contributions attaches primary
importance to this broader factor of paramnesia. In analysing memory, he
says, there is an element which, though often overlooked, is capital:
the recognition of a state of consciousness not merely as passed, but as
bound up with our own personal past; when that synthetic function ceases
to be accomplished, or is only accomplished defectively, then memory is
lacking or perverted. Nervous weakness, he proceeds, produces failure of
attention, the inhibitory power of attention being no longer exerted, and
the psychic elements fall back to anarchy. Now many psychic states, such
as sensations, recollections, and images, differ from each other less
by their substance than by the way in which the mind takes hold of and
apprehends them. The mind seizes a sensation with a stronger grasp than
a recollection, and a recollection with a stronger grasp than an image.
When attention is relaxed the line of demarcation between these psychic
states tends to be effaced; the sensation becomes vague and floating
like the recollection and the image, while the recollection and the
image, on the contrary, become objective and acquire something of the
brilliance and relief of the sensation. The very same cause--enfeeblement
of attention--thus produces opposite effects, on the one side raising
the tone, on the other lowering it, so that states of mind which are
ordinarily distinct tend to be approximated and confused, as we may
observe in the hypnagogic condition.[238]
Although Dugas makes no reference to Janet, it is not difficult to
see that he has assimilated some of the views of that distinguished
investigator of psychic mysteries. Janet, as we know, in various morbid
psychic conditions, attaches great explanatory force to the individual's
loss of hold, through psychic weakness, of his own personality, and
to the diminished sense of reality and even depersonalisation thence
ensuing. It so happens that Janet himself has set forth a theory of
pseudo-reminiscence which is characteristic of his own attitude, and also
harmonises with the wider outlook which now marks the attempts to explain
these perversions of memory. Janet declares that pseudo-reminiscence is a
negative phenomenon and belongs to a group in which various other feelings
of diminished sense of reality belong. These people all say in effect:
'It seems to me that these things are not real; it seems to me that these
events are not actual or present.' The essence of this form of paramnesia
is thus more a negation of the present than an affirmation of the past.
'The function of adaptation to the present moment,' Janet remarks, 'is
the most complicated and the most recent of all. The function of the real
is the most elevated and the most difficult of all cerebral functions.'
Under various influences there is a diminution of nervous and psychic
tension, and such suppression of the high tension of the mind leaves only
the lower functions subsisting. When that fall of tension is rapid, there
may be a crisis of which pseudo-reminiscence is one of the symptoms.[239]
Janet would thus place pseudo-reminiscence among the manifestations of
psychasthenia, though he leaves untouched the difficult question of its
precise mechanism.
The most comprehensive attempt to explain the mystery of paramnesia in
recent years is certainly that made in an elaborately eclectic study
by one of the most distinguished of living French thinkers, Professor
Bergson.[240] He first casts a glance over what he considers the two
main groups of explanations of this puzzling phenomenon: (1) those,
advocated by Ribot, Fouillée, Lalande, Arnaud, Piéron, Myers, etc.,
which involve the more or less simultaneous existence in consciousness
of two images, of which one is the reproduction of the other; (2) those
advocated by Janet, Heymans, Léon-Kindberg, Dromard and Albès, etc.,
which insist on the lower mental tone, the diminished attention, the
lack of synthetising power, which mark the condition in which paramnesia
occurs. Bergson is quite ready to accept the principles of both these
groups of explanations, and to combine them. But, he argues, to understand
the phenomenon adequately, we must go deeper; we must analyse the normal
mechanism of memory. And he finds, if we do this, that not merely the
moment of a paramnesic illusion, but every moment of our life, offers two
aspects, actual and virtual, perception on one side, and memory on the
other. The moment itself, indeed, consists of such a scission, for it
is always moving, always a fleeting boundary between the immediate past
and the immediate future, and would be a mere abstraction if it were not
'precisely the mobile mirror which ceaselessly reflects perception in
recollection.' When the matter is thus regarded a recollection is seen
to be, in reality, not something which has been, but something which
is, proceeding _pari passu_ with the perception it reproduces. It is a
recollection of the moment taking place at that moment. Belonging to the
past as regards its form, it belongs to the present as regards its matter.
It is recollection of the present. Now this is exactly the state in which
the paramnesic person consciously finds himself, and the only problem
before us, therefore, is to ascertain why every one at every moment is not
conscious of the same experience. Bergson replies that nothing is more
useless for present action than the recollection of the present. It has
nothing to tell us; we hold the real object, and to give up that for its
recollection would be to sacrifice the substance to the shadow. Therefore
we obstinately and persistently turn away from the recollection of the
present. It emerges consciously only under the influence of some abnormal
or pathological disturbance of attention. Paramnesia is an anomaly of this
kind, and it is due to a temporary enfeeblement of the general attention
to life, a momentary arrest of the forward movement of consciousness.
'False recognition,' Bergson concludes, 'may thus be regarded as the most
inoffensive form of inattention to life. It seems to result from the
combined play of perception and memory given up to their own energy. It
would take place at every moment if it were not that will, ceaselessly
directed towards action, prevents the present from folding in on itself by
pushing it indefinitely into the future.'
So far as my own explanation is concerned, it will be seen that I still
place weight on the general condition of temporary or chronic nervous
fatigue as the soil on which paramnesia arises--a belief now accepted by
most psychologists[241]--and that I think we must search for the clue to
the mechanism of the illusion in those dreaming and hypnagogic states
in which it most often occurs. As regards a definite explanation of the
mechanism we must, in the face of so many ingenious and complicated
theories, perhaps still await more general agreement.[242] What I have
suggested, and am still inclined to maintain, is that the psychic
enfeeblement, temporary or chronic, which is the general preliminary
condition of paramnesia, whether or not there is any subjective sensation
of increased power, may account for the paramnesia by bringing an
externally aroused perception down to a lower and fainter stage on which
it is on a level with an internally aroused perception--a memory. Just
as in hypnagogic paramnesia the vivid and life-like dream, or internal
impression, is raised to the class of memories, and becomes the shadow
of a real experience, so in waking paramnesia the external impression
is lowered to the same class. Perception is alike dulled in each case,
and the immediate experience follows the line of least resistance--this
time too carelessly or too prematurely--to join the great bulk of our
experiences.
We thus realise how it is that that doubling of experience occurs. The
mind has for the moment become flaccid and enfeebled; its loosened texture
has, as it were, abnormally enlarged the meshes in which sensations are
caught and sifted, so that they run through too easily. In other words,
they are not properly _apperceived_. To use a crude simile, it is as
though we poured water into a sieve. The impressions of the world which
are actual sensations as they strike the relaxed psychic meshwork are
instantaneously passed through to become memories, and we see them in both
forms at the same moment, and are unable to distinguish one from the other.
In sleep, and in the hypnagogic state, as in hypnosis, we accept a
suggestion, with or without a struggle. In the waking paramnesic state
we seem to find, in a slighter stage of a like condition, _the same
process in a reversed form_. Instead of accepting a representation as
an actual present fact, we accept the actual present fact as merely
a representation. The centres of perception are in such a state of
exhaustion and disorder that they receive an actual external sensation
in the feebler shape of a representation. The actual fact becomes merely
a suggestion of far distant things. It reaches consciousness in the
enfeebled shape of an old memory--
'... like to something I remember
A great while since, a long, long time ago.'
Paramnesia is thus an internal hallucination, a reversed hallucination,
it is true, but while so reversed, the stream of consciousness is still
following the line of least resistance.
It is along some such lines as these, it seems to me, that we may best
attempt to explain the phenomena of paramnesia, phenomena which are of no
little interest since, in earlier stages of culture, they may well have
had a real influence on belief, suggesting to primitive man that he had
somehow had wider experiences than he knew of, and that, as Wordsworth put
it, he trailed clouds of glory behind him.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 192: It is as well to bear in mind that this dream occurred when
Maury was a student, long before he began to study dreaming, and (as Egger
has pointed out) was probably not written down until thirteen years later.
On these grounds alone it is not entitled to serious consideration.]
[Footnote 193: As Sir Samuel Wilks once remarked ('On the Nature of
Dreams,' _Medical Magazine_, Feb. 1894), 'The dreamer merely forms a
mental picture, and the _description_ of it he calls his dream.']
[Footnote 194: Egger, 'La Durée apparente des Rêves,' _Revue
Philosophique_, Jan. 1895, pp. 41-59; Clavière, 'La Rapidité de la Pensée
dans le Rêve,' _ib._ May 1897, p. 509; Piéron, 'La Rapidité des Processes
Psychiques,' _ib._ Jan. 1903, pp. 89-95; Foucault, _Le Rêve_, pp. 158 _et
seq.;_ Tobolowska, _Etude sur les Illusions du Temps dans les Rêves du
Sommeil Normal:_ Thèse de Paris, 1900.]
[Footnote 195: Thus Freud tells (_Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische
Forschungen_, vol. i. part ii. p. 387) of a man who was obsessed by the
idea that he should never pass money until he had carefully cleaned it,
for fear he might be infecting other people, but was quite unaware that
this obsession sprang from remorse due to his own sins of sexual impurity.
In such a case there is, of course, not only a crumpling of consciousness,
but a definite dislocation and transference of the parts.]
[Footnote 196: We also see here an interesting dissociation of the motor
(speech) centre from the visual centre; it is the latter which is in this
instance most closely in touch with facts.]
[Footnote 197: The 'selvdrolla' dream, recorded in a previous chapter (p.
43), illustrates the same point with the difference that the crumpled up
portion of consciousness never became visible in the dream.]
[Footnote 198: R. L. Stevenson, 'A Chapter on Dreams,' in _Across the
Plains_, 1892.]
[Footnote 199: In most cases the missing memory, after making itself felt
outside the conscious area, seems to reach that area, not so much by its
own spontaneous unconscious movement as by a tentative search for clues.
Thus I read one day the words 'the breaking of a goblet by a little black
imp,' and immediately became conscious that I was reminded of something
similar in recent experience, but could not tell what. I asked myself
if it could have been in a dream. In a few moments, however, the memory
recurred to me that two hours previously I had noticed a broken vase, and
casually wondered how it had become broken. Under such circumstances we
are for a time thinking of something, and yet have no conscious knowledge
as to what we are thinking of.]
[Footnote 200: Jastrow remarks, somewhat in the same way (_The
Subconscious_, p. 93), that 'a letting down of the effort, a focusing of
the mind upon a point a little or a good deal to one side of the fixation
point, distinctly aids the mental vision.' The process seems, however,
to be most effective when it is automatic, for attention cannot easily
relax its own tension. A large number of the discoveries and solutions of
difficulties effected in dreams are due to this dispersal of attention
over a wider field, so enabling the missing relationship to be detected.
See, for instance, some cases recorded by Newbold (_Psychological
Review_, March 1896, p. 132), as of Dr. Hilprecht, the Assyriologist, who
discovered in a dream that two fragments of tablets he had vainly been
endeavouring to decipher, were really parts of the same tablet.]
[Footnote 201: Hypermnesia, or excessive memory, is found in waking
life in various abnormal conditions. It is not uncommon in men of
genius; Macaulay is a well-known example. It scarcely seems, however,
an especially favourable condition for keen intellectual power; the
mental machine that is clogged with unnecessary and unimportant facts can
scarcely fail to work under difficulties. 'Hypermnesia,' remarks Stoddart
('Early Symptoms of Mental Disease,' _British Medical Journal_, 11th May
1907), 'occurs most frequently in certain cases of idiocy, and in some
cases of chronic mania. One such patient could enumerate all the occasions
when any given medical officer had played tennis since he entered the
institution.' Hypermnesia in dreams has been dealt with by Carl du Prel,
_Philosophy of Mysticism_, vol. ii. ch. i.]
[Footnote 202: This delay is worth mentioning, for it is conceivable that,
in the case of a weak recollection, transference to the subconscious
sphere of sleep might involve a temporary disappearance from the conscious
waking sphere.]
[Footnote 203: There is a possible interest in the exact length of the
interval. Swoboda (_Die Perioden des Menschlichen Organismus in ihrer
psychologischen und biologischen Bedeutung_, 1904) believes that the
recurrence of memories tends to obey a law of periodicity, so that, for
instance, a melody heard at a concert may recur at a regular interval. I
cannot say that I have myself found evidence of such periodicity, though I
have made several observations on the recurrence of such memories.]
[Footnote 204: Similarly, Foucault (_Le Rêve_, p. 79) records the dream
of a lady concerning a place called Brétigny, near Dijon, though when
awake she was not aware there is such a place there. Elsewhere (p. 214)
Foucault also gives examples of sensations, not consciously perceived
in the waking state, but revived in dream. Beaunis, in his interesting
'Contribution à la Psychologie du Rêve' (_American Journal of Psychology_,
July-Oct. 1903) narrates a dream of his own in which a forgotten or
unconscious memory revived. Many such dreams could easily be brought
together. An often-quoted dream, apparently of this kind (see _e.g._,
_British Medical Journal_, 7th April 1900, p. 850), is that of Archbishop
Benson who, like his predecessor, Laud, took an interest in his dreams.
He dreamed that he was suffering severely in his chest, and that his
doctor, on being called in, told him that he had angĭna pectoris. The
archbishop in his dream exclaimed with indignation: 'Angǐna, angǐna!' The
dream made such an impression on him that he looked the matter up, but
only found the ordinary pronunciation, angīna, recorded. A week later he
was at Cambridge, dining in hall at Trinity, and seated next to Munro,
the Professor of Latin, who happened to ask him about the death of Thomas
Arnold. 'He died of angĭna pectoris,' said Benson. Munro smiled grimly
and said softly: 'Of angǐna, as we now call it.' There can be no doubt
that Benson, who was closely in touch with the academic world, had met
with this correction, which is accepted by all modern Latinists, and
'forgotten' it.]
[Footnote 205: Xenoglossia, as well as the tendency to utter gibberish,
are both classed under glossolalia. See _e.g._ E. Lombard, 'Phenomènes de
Glossolalie,' _Archives de Psychologie_, July 1907.]
[Footnote 206: In the eighteenth century Lord Monboddo (_Ancient
Metaphysics_, vol. iii., 1782, p. 217) referred to a Countess of Laval
who, during the delirium of illness, spoke the Breton tongue which she had
known as a child, but long since forgotten.]
[Footnote 207: In a somewhat similar manner the muscular contractions of
the hysterical may disappear during sleep, as may their paralyses and
their anaesthesias, as well as their losses of memory. (These phenomena
have been especially observed and studied by Raymond and Janet, _Névroses
et Idées Fixes_, vol. ii.) Such characteristics of the sleep of the
hysterical may well be a manifestation of the same tendency which in the
sleep of normal people leads to hypermnesia. In this connection reference
may be made to the interesting opposition between attention and memory
developed by Dr. Marie de Manacéïne ('De l'antagonisme qui existe entre
chaque effort de l'attention et des innervations motrices,' _Atti dell'
XI. Congresso Internazionale Medico_, 1894, Rome, vol. ii., 'Fisiologia,'
p. 48). Concentrated attention, she argues, paralyses memory, and there is
an absolute antagonism between motor innervation, or real movement, which
favours memory, and the concentrated effort which favours attention. 'In
psychological researches we must always separate the phenomena of memory
from the phenomena of attention, for memory is only possible through
muscular movement, and attention, on the contrary, is only active through
the suppression of movement.' In sleep, it is true, there may be no
actual movement, but there is relaxation of muscular tension and freedom
of motor ideas. It should be added that not all investigators confirm
Manacéïne's conclusion as to the antagonism between the conditions for
memory and attention. Thus R. MacDougall ('The Physical Characteristics
of Attention,' _Psychological Review_, March 1895), while finding that
muscular relaxation accompanies the recall of memories, finds also, though
not so markedly and constantly, a similar relaxation accompanying both
voluntary and spontaneous attention.]
[Footnote 208: The term 'paramnesia' was devised by Kraepelin, who
wrote the first comprehensive study of the subject, though he offered
no explanatory theory of it ('Ueber Erinnerungsfälschungen,' _Archiv
für Psychiatrie_, Bd. xvii. and xviii.). A very clear and comprehensive
account of the subject, up to the date of the article, was given by W. H.
Burnham ('Paramnesia,' _American Journal of Psychology_, May 1889). In
the following pages, together with much new matter, I have made use of my
paper entitled 'A Note on Hypnagogic Paramnesia,' published in _Mind_,
vol. vi. No. 22, in 1896.]
[Footnote 209: It has long been recognised by psychologists that
paramnesia occurs in dreams. Thus Burnham refers to it as frequent, and
Kraepelin mentions that he once dreamed of smoking a cigar for the fourth
or fifth time, though he had never smoked in his life.]
[Footnote 210: In alcoholic insanity, for instance, especially when it
leads to the occurrence of Korsakoff's syndrome, there is a notable degree
of mental weakness with a tendency to form false memories, both in the
form of confabulation (or the filling by imagination of lacunae in memory)
and pseudo-reminiscence. (See _e.g._ John Turner, 'Alcoholic Insanity,'
_Journal of Mental Science_, Jan. 1910, p. 41.)]
[Footnote 211: Dr. Marie de Manacéïne, who has studied the phenomena of
the hypnagogic state experimentally in much detail (_Sleep_, pp. 195-220),
finds that in its deepest stage it is marked by echolalia, or the tendency
to repeat automatically what is said, and in a less deep stage by abnormal
suggestibility or the tendency to accept ideas and especially emotions.
She considers that the hypnagogic state becomes abnormal when it lasts for
more than fifteen seconds. It may last for more than six minutes, and is
then of serious import. She shows reason to believe that the hypnagogic
state is substantially identical with the hypnotic state, and she regards
it as probably due to cerebral anaemia. She finds it especially marked in
children under fifteen, the more so if they belong to the working-class,
and rather common among adolescent girls and young women, especially
if anaemic, but among adults rarer in women than in men, becoming more
frequent in both sexes with old age; the phlegmatic are more liable to it
than the sanguine or the nervous.]
[Footnote 212: Sully, _The Human Mind_, vol. ii. p. 317. Foucault (_Le
Rêve_, p. 300), briefly notes that he has often had the illusion of
seeming to remember a fact which does not exist, and of recollecting a
person he has never seen.]
[Footnote 213: F. W. Colegrove, 'Individual Memories,' _American Journal
of Psychology_, Jan. 1899.]
[Footnote 214: See _e.g._ for such cases in sane persons, Hack Tuke,
'Hallucinations,' _Brain_, vol. xi., 1889. A man with chronic systematised
delusions writes: 'I am obsessed at nights; that is, I am made the
recipient of projected thoughts which become translated into dreams, and
on several occasions I have found, just after waking, and while still in a
very passive state, that some one was speaking to me in the ear.']
[Footnote 215: Hughlings Jackson (_Practitioner_, May 1874, also
_Brain_, July 1888, and _Brain_, 1899, p. 534) applied this term to the
intellectual aura preceding an epileptic attack and considered that
'pseudo-reminiscence' itself might indicate a slight epileptic paroxysm
in persons who show other symptoms of epilepsy. Gowers also (_Epilepsy_,
2nd ed., p. 133) considers 'dreamy state' to be closely associated with
minor attacks of epilepsy; and Crichton-Browne (_Dreamy Mental States_)
holds the same view. It should be added that 'dreamy state' by no means
necessarily involves pseudo-reminiscence; see _e.g._ S. Taylor, 'A Case
of Dreamy State,' _Lancet_, 9th Aug. 1890, p. 276, and W. A. Turner, 'The
Problem of Epilepsy,' _British Medical Journal_, 2nd April 1910, p. 805.
Leroy found that pseudo-reminiscence is usually rare in association with
epilepsy.]
[Footnote 216: 'The feeling of pre-existence,' writes Dr. J. G. Kiernan
in a private letter, 'frequently occurs as a consequence of delusions
of memory in epilepsy. The case on which George Sand built her story of
_Consuelo_ was one reported of an epileptic who during the epileptic
states had delusions of living in a distant historic past of which he
retained the memory as facts during the normal state. I know of two
epileptic theosophists who base their belief in transmigration on the
memories of their epileptic period. In my judgment a large part of
Swedenborg's visions were instances of delusions of memory.']
[Footnote 217: Professor Grasset ('La Sensation du "Déjà Vu,"' _Journal
de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique_, Nov.-Feb. 1904) considers
that a feeling of anguish is the characteristic accompaniment of a
true paramnesic manifestation. This statement is too pronounced. There
is usually some emotional disturbance, but its degree depends on the
temperament of the person experiencing the phenomenon. Sometimes the
sensation of pseudo-reminiscence may be accompanied, as a medical man
subject to epilepsy (mentioned by Hughlings Jackson) found in his own
case, by 'a slight sense of satisfaction,' as in the finding of something
that had been sought for.]
[Footnote 218: _Revue Philosophique_, November 1893.]
[Footnote 219: _Revue Philosophique_, January 1894.]
[Footnote 220: Heymans found that students liable to paramnesia tended to
possess an aptitude for languages and an inaptitude for mathematics.]
[Footnote 221: Paul Bourget, the novelist, in an interesting letter
published by Grasset (_loc. cit._) states that this experience has been
habitual with him from as long back as he can remember, occurring in
regard to things heard or felt more than to things seen, and accompanied
by an emotional trouble similar to that experienced in dreams of dead
friends who appear as living, though even in his dreams the dreamer knows
that they are dead. Bourget adds that he is of emotional temperament, and
that the phenomenon was more pronounced in childhood than it is now.]
[Footnote 222: Paul Lapie, _Revue Philosophique_, March 1894; Charles
_Méré, Mercure de France_, July 1903; Sully, Tannery, and Buccola also
considered that this is a factor in the explanation of the phenomenon.
Freud (_Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagsleben_, 1907, p. 122) brings
forward a modification of this theory, and believes that false recognition
is a reminiscence of unconscious day-dreams.]
[Footnote 223: For a minute and searching criticism of the theory of the
duplex brain, see especially four articles by Bonne in the _Archives de
Neurologie_, March-June 1907.]
[Footnote 224: 'Epilepsy' wrote Binns long ago (_Anatomy of Sleep_, 1845,
p. 431), 'is a disease which in some of its symptoms strongly resembles
abnormal sleep.' The conditions under which a paramnesic manifestation
may really replace an epileptic fit are well described by a literary man
with hereditary epilepsy whose case has been recorded by Haskovec of
Prague (_XIIIe. Congrès International de Médecine: Comptes Rendus_, vol.
viii., 'Psychiatrie' p. 125): 'One day at the theatre, under the influence
of the heat and perhaps the music, I experienced extreme excitement and
fatigue. I thought I was about to have an attack, and resisted with all
my strength, and it failed to take place. But I found myself in a strange
psychic state. On leaving the theatre I seemed to be dreaming. I saw and
heard everything and talked as usual. But everything seemed strange.
Nothing seemed to reach directly _me_ or to be a real impression, but
merely the automatic reproduction of something learnt, only I felt that I
had lived it all before and felt it; at that moment I simply seemed to be
observing it.']
[Footnote 225: _Centralblatt für Nervenheilkunde_, April 1886. In some
forms of insanity the false recognition of a person may become a fixed
delusion. This question has been studied by Albès in his Paris thesis, _De
I'Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance_, 1906.]
[Footnote 226: E. Maitland, _Anna Kingsford_, vol. i. p. 3. Lalande
(_Revue Philosophique_, November 1893, p. 487) gives a precisely similar
case in a child.]
[Footnote 227: As quoted by Jastrow, _The Subconscious_, p. 248.]
[Footnote 228: Leroy, _Etude sur l'Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance_,
1898, with forty-nine new observations. Leroy states, however (in declared
opposition to my view), that only a minority of his cases actually mention
fatigue.]
[Footnote 229: Heymans, 'Eine Enquête über Depersonnalisation und Fausse
Reconnaissance,' _Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der
Sinnesorgane_, November, 1903; also a further paper in the same journal
confirming his conclusions, January 1906.]
[Footnote 230: Féré, 'Deuxième Note sur la Fausse Reconnaissance,'
_Journal de Neurologie_, 1905.]
[Footnote 231: Dromard et Albès, 'L'Illusion dit de Fausse
Reconnaissance,' _Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique_,
May-June 1905.]
[Footnote 232: Dugas, 'Observations sur des Erreurs "Formelles" de la
Mémoire,' _Revue Philosophique_, July 1908.]
[Footnote 233: A friend, liable to this form of paramnesia, wrote to me
after the publication of my first paper on the subject: 'I find, as you
foretold, that it is difficult to recall an experience of this kind in all
its details. I feel sure, however, that it is not necessarily allied with
an enfeebled or overwrought nervous system. It was commonest with me in my
youth, at a time when my life was a pleasant one, and my brain not fagged
as now. I still [aged 43] have it occasionally, but not so frequently as
twenty years ago.' It may be added that my friend, of Highland family,
was a man of keen and emotional nervous temperament, a strenuous mental
worker--whence at one time a serious breakdown in health--and had
published two volumes of poems in early life. The greater liability to
paramnesia in early life, which is generally recognised, is comparable to
the special liability of children to hypnagogic visions, both phenomena
being probably due to the greater excitability and easier exhaustibility
of the youthful brain.]
[Footnote 234: For instance, by Allin, 'Recognition,' _American Journal of
Psychology_, January 1896.]
[Footnote 235: The explanation of paramnesia here set forth received on
its first publication the approval of Léon Marillier, who considered
it 'ingenious and seductive,' and as adequately accounting for the
phenomena, provided we bear in mind that the loss of a clear feeling of
time is characteristic of hypnagogic and allied states, the perception
of each moment being immediately transferred into an ancient memory, and
consequently recognised (_L'Année Biologique_, third year, 1897, p. 772).
This necessity for taking into account the co-existence of perception
and illusory remembrance has largely moulded several of the theories of
paramnesia. Thus Jean de Pury (_Archives de Psychologie_, December 1902),
while affirming that pseudo-reminiscence is due to an _anteriorisation_
of actual perceptions, regards it as of the nature of a double refraction
such as that simultaneously produced on two faces of a prism by the same
image; under the influence of conditions he is unable to define, an image
appears for the moment on the plane both of the past and of the present,
and psychically we see double just as physically we see double when the
parallelism of our visual rays is disturbed. Piéron, again, taking up a
theory at one time favoured by Dugas, and previously suggested in one form
or another by Ribot and Fouillée, assumes the formation of two images: one
which, owing to distraction or fatigue, reaches consciousness after having
traversed subconsciousness, and so takes on a dream-like and effaced
character, and almost simultaneously with this a direct perception which
has not thus changed its character; the shock of the conflict between
these two produces the pseudo-reminiscence ('Sur l'Interpretation des
Faits de Paramnésie,' _Revue Philosophique_, August 1902). Albès, in his
Paris thesis, criticises this explanation, pointing out that a sequence of
this kind very frequently occurs, but produces no pseudo-reminiscence.]
[Footnote 236: Michel Léon-Kindberg, 'Le Sentiment du Déjà Vu,' _Revue de
Psychiatrie_, April 1903, No. 4.]
[Footnote 237: G. Ballet, 'Un Cas de Fausse Reconnaissance,' _Revue
Neurologique_, 1904, p. 1221.]
[Footnote 238: Dugas, 'Observations sur des Erreurs "Formelles" de la
Mémoire', _Revue Philosophique_, July 1908; _ib._ June 1910. Dugas makes
no reference to Janet, nor to my paper on Hypnagogic Paramnesia, but his
statement of the matter to some extent combines and harmonises those of
the two earlier writers.]
[Footnote 239: P. Janet, 'A Propos du Déjà Vu,' _Journal de Psychologie
Normale et Pathologique_, July-August 1905.]
[Footnote 240: H. Bergson, 'Le Souvenir du Présent et la Fausse
Reconnaissance,' _Revue Philosophique_, December 1908. It should be
remarked that, except in the attempt to explain why paramnesia is not
normally habitual, Bergson's paper is based on the ideas or suggestions of
previous writers.]
[Footnote 241: Before the appearance of my paper, as already mentioned,
Anjel had emphasised the significance of fatigue in the production of
paramnesia (_Archiv für Psychiatrie_, Bd. viii. pp. 57 _et seq._). His
theory, indeed (only known to me through brief summaries)--according to
which the pseudo-reminiscence is due to the tardy apprehension by the
fatigued mind of a sensation which is thus degraded to the level of a
reproduced impression--seems practically identical with that which I
independently reached in the light of hypnagogic phenomena.]
[Footnote 242: I disregard those theories which invoke histological
explanations, as by some peculiar disposition of the neurons. Such
explanations are as much outside the psychologist's sphere as the
old-fashioned explanations by reference to God and the Devil. A known
physiological or pathological process may, indeed, quite properly be
recognised by the psychologist; such, for instance, as the disturbance
of the heart associated with some dreams. Even minute changes in the
brain, when they have been properly determined by the histologist, may be
effectively invoked by the psychologist if they seem to supply an exact
physical correlative to his own findings. But for the psychologist to go
outside his own field, and invent a purely fanciful and arbitrary neuronic
scheme to suit a psychic process, explains nothing. It is merely child's
play. The stuff that the psychologist works with must be psychical, just
as the stuff of the physicist's work must be physical.]