DREAMS
The mystery of dreams and their interpretation has occupied men's
thoughts in all ages. The Jews paid great attention to them, as the Old
Testament shows, and there is evidence that the prophet Daniel had a
shrewd knowledge, based upon psychological facts, concerning dream
meanings.
There are probably 'Dream Books' still sold which purport to provide
interpretations for the enquiring dreamer, but it is only in recent
years that the scientific study of dreams has produced useful results.
Freud laid the foundations of our modern knowledge, but unfortunately
certain parts of his theories have raised so much antagonism that the
sound work he has done is still scorned and dream interpretation is
regarded as fanciful; nevertheless I propose to show that in dreams we
have a key to the unconscious of the dreamer.
Before attempting an explanation of dreams we must first consider sleep,
which is an interruption of consciousness, so that whatever mind work is
carried on in sleep is a product of dissociation. The interruption of
consciousness is more or less complete, the light sleeper reacting to
external stimuli, turning away from a touch or making movements to
protect himself from heat or cold, whilst the heavy sleeper fails to
react to these minor disturbances. The memory of occurrences in the
outside world during sleep may be vaguely present in the waking stage,
and some sleepers will answer questions or obey orders without waking
and have little or no recollection of them afterwards. Such observations
point to a resemblance between sleep and that form of dissociation
called hypnosis.
In hypnosis the memories and emotions in the unconscious may be brought
to the surface, and in sleep the unconscious, escaping from the control
of the consciousness, sends up thoughts and feelings which manifest
themselves in dreams. How far external stimuli cause or influence dreams
is uncertain, but the more one investigates the less importance does one
attach to physical stimuli.
The dreams of adults are concerned largely with what I have described in
a previous chapter as repressions. These repressions are buried in the
unconscious, and their efforts to come into consciousness cause our
apparently senseless and fantastic dreams. If we dreamed distinctly
about these forgotten episodes, and remembered the dream on waking, they
would come into consciousness and be recognised, but, being buried and
refused admission to the wide-awake world, before entering consciousness
they are so distorted as to be unrecognisable. To the mechanism that
holds them down or distorts them is given the name of the 'censor', and
the interpreter of dreams must seek to evade the censor and resolve the
distorted story into its proper elements.
This method is of value in that treatment of the war-strained soldier
which aims at making him face his memories and grow accustomed to them,
for if a memory is repressed it tends to appear in the sufferer's
dreams, which give an opportunity for its recovery by dream analysis.
The opponents of this method picture the analyst, armed with a
dictionary of dream meanings, listening to a patient's account of a
dream, then giving him an explanation and persuading him to believe it;
but, though a shrewd guess may often be made as to the meaning of a
dream, the interpretation, to be of any value, must come from the
patient. He is made to close his eyes and, visualising the dream, to
describe it carefully. If it is a terrifying dream the telling of it
will reproduce the feeling of terror, and appropriate questions will
recall the occasion on which the same feeling first occurred. If the
real incident is recalled there is an emotional outbreak which often
startles the observer, who has the satisfaction of knowing that the
greater the outbreak the greater will be the benefit.
Here is an example of the practical use of a dream: The patient had lost
all memory of his experience in France, and this loss spread to his life
before the war so that he failed to recall even his former employment;
he slept badly and had terrifying dreams, one of which was as follows:--
'I was on a pleasure steamer with a lot of cheerful people; it went
to sea and then entered a dark cavern. On the floor of the cavern
were broken skeletons, and at the far end of the cavern was a hole
with light showing through. Two pirates with cocked hats came and
led seven of us up the cavern, where we saw some old men with
whiskers. The pirates were quite kind and led us through another
hole into a small cavern; the wall of the cavern began to fall
down, so I picked up a broken sword and began to bore into the
wall. Then something like a ball of fire came at me, and I woke up
frightened.'
Though the reader could probably guess what the dream was about yet the
man had no idea of the meaning, for the censor was still at work. He was
made to close his eyes and visualise the ball of fire till he became
frightened again, so frightened, indeed, that he was in a state of
dissociation, his stream of consciousness being filled by the feeling of
terror and only in relation to the outside world by means of the voice
of the questioner. (The fact that memories restored by this method are
often forgotten again as soon as the patient opens his eyes is proof of
a dissociation.) At this stage he was told, 'You felt like that in
France, what was it?' The normal stream of consciousness being cut off,
the censor was now out of action, and the man, putting his hands to his
head, cried, 'It's a Minnewerfer', and when he became calmer told of a
dug-out being blown in and several of his mates being killed. Then he
was taken over the dream and made to look at the various parts and tell
what they 'turned to'. The pleasure steamer was the boat in which he
went to France, the cheery people on board being other soldiers; he now
recognised the place from which the boat started and the port where he
landed. The cavern was a tunnel up which a captain and a sergeant-major
(the pirates) had led seven men; the cocked hats resolved into the
sergeant-major having a piece torn from the cloth cover of his helmet
which flapped in the wind; the broken skeletons were the bodies of his
slain comrades; the second cavern was the dug-out; the broken sword a
bayonet which broke when he tried to dig his way out with it; the old
men were German prisoners, and the ball of fire was the flash of the
explosion.
All this was explained by the patient. If he had been told the probable
meaning of the dream he might have believed it; but the result would
have been valueless--it was necessary that he should bring up the
memories himself. The dream is unusually coherent, but serves as a good
example of the modern methods of dream interpretation.
Half-conscious fears or desires are often represented by symbolisms
apparent to the analyst but unrecognised by the dreamer. A man told me
of a dream in which he met some one whom he had defeated in a business
disagreement, and, to his surprise, he shook hands with his old
opponent. I told him that he felt the pricking of conscience and was
desirous of making amends. This was little more than a guess, but its
truth was admitted though the dreamer said that he had hardly realised
his feelings before. It is characteristic of dreams, as of the slips of
the tongue discussed in Chapter I, that there is an obstacle to the
dreamer's unaided understanding of them. A simple dream of my own will
illustrate this: When going upstairs at a seaside hotel my wife,
noticing a stuffed bird, said to me, 'Is that a sea-gull?' and I
answered 'Yes'. The next morning I remembered a dream for which I could
trace no cause, and said to my wife, 'I wonder why I dreamed of my old
schoolmaster last night?' At this she asked, 'Which one?' and when I
answered, 'Mr. Gull', the connection at once became obvious, though
something had prevented my seeing the obvious without aid.
Since a dream is a product of dissociation, we expect to find in it the
same qualities that belong to the product of other dissociations. The
world of the dream is pictured as something external to the dreamer and
not arising from his own mind, just as the revelations of automatic
writing or the movements of the divining-rod are accepted as coming from
some one or something other than the agent.
The dream taps the unconscious, the stories about poets and musicians
who rise in the night-watches to pen their elusive inspirations being
paralleled by the poetic imagery in the automatic writings of the
Glastonbury archaeologists.
Lost memories appear in the dream and the dreamer may deny the
incidents, as mentioned in Chapter III. In the same way the apparently
honest medium may produce a memory, more or less distorted, as a
revelation, and deny that it is a memory.
The dissociated stream is hypersensitive and makes use of hints and
fears that have passed unperceived by the consciousness. This use
accounts for prophetic dreams, which are, like intuitions, the result of
unconscious processes. In my own experience I have known but two
circumstantial accounts of dream prophecies which were claimed to be
fulfilled: One concerned a railway accident, and the other the
destruction by fire of a distant house. Both the dreamers, who were of
the male sex, had suffered from gross hysterical manifestations, or, in
other words, had been woefully led astray by the unconscious concerning
something other than prophecy. Accounts of prophetic dreams must always
be suspect because of their origin in the unconscious and the inability
of the dreamer either to interpret them or trace their origin. It is to
be noted that psychologists who work at dream analysis make no mention
of dream prophecies, although the fact that 'the wish is father to the
thought' explains why a dream sometimes expresses an unconscious desire
that later attains fulfilment in reality.
The Biblical account of Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the idol with feet of
clay bears the stamp of genuine history. The king, like the neurotic
sufferer of to-day, 'dreamed dreams, wherewith his spirit was troubled,
and his sleep brake from him.' The magicians, called upon to interpret,
asked that the king should first tell his dream; but the king answered,
'The thing is gone from me; if ye will not make known unto me the dream,
with the interpretation thereof, ye shall be cut in pieces and your
houses shall be made a dunghill.' The magicians and astrologers, the
sorcerers and the Chaldeans, failed, but the prophet Daniel took up the
task and told the king his forgotten dream. We can only imagine his
method, but it is possible to revive a dream by using the emotion felt
on waking, and such a method, or even direct hypnosis, may have been
available to Daniel; and if we regard the interpretation, not as
prophetic, but as revealing to the king his forebodings of future
disaster, then the chapter accords with modern conceptions of dream
analysis. Nebuchadnezzar was already a psycho-neurotic on the borderline
of insanity, as his subsequent history shows, and would easily come to
rely upon and reward a psychologist like Daniel, who convincingly laid
bare to him the working of his unconscious. By tradition the old
civilisations of the East were the sources of occult knowledge, and this
view of a scrap of Old Testament history gives a hint how the tradition
arose. If there existed an esoteric knowledge of psychological technique
such as I ascribe to Daniel, then its possessors would easily obtain
reputations for more than worldly wisdom.