suspicions. The arguments brought against the dream as an object of
scientific research are clearly extreme. We have met with the objection
of triviality already in “errors,” and have told ourselves that great
things may be revealed even by small indications. As to the
indistinctness of dreams, that is a characteristic like any other—we
cannot dictate to things their characteristics; besides, there are also
dreams which are clear and well defined. Further, there are other
objects of psychiatric investigation which suffer in the same way from
the quality of indefiniteness, e.g. the obsessive ideas of many cases,
with which nevertheless many psychiatrists of repute and standing have
occupied themselves. I will recall the last case of the kind which came
before me in medical practice. The patient, a woman, presented her case
in these words: “I have a certain feeling, as if I had injured, or had
meant to injure, some living creature—perhaps a child—no, no, a dog
rather, as if perhaps I had pushed it off a bridge—or done something
else.” Any disadvantage resulting from the uncertain recollection of
dreams may be remedied by deciding that exactly what the dreamer tells
is to count as the dream, and by ignoring all that he may have forgotten
or altered in the process of recollection. Finally, one cannot maintain
in so sweeping a fashion that dreams are unimportant things. We know
from our own experience that the mood in which we awake from a dream may
last throughout the day, and cases have been observed by medical men in
which mental disorder began with a dream, the delusion which had its
source in this dream persisting; further, it is told of historical
persons that impulses to momentous deeds sprang from their dreams. We
may therefore ask: what is the real cause of the disdain in which dreams
are held in scientific circles? In my opinion it is the reaction from
the overestimation of them in earlier times. It is well known that it is
no easy matter to reconstruct the past, but we may assume with certainty
(you will forgive my jest) that as early as three thousand years ago and
more our ancestors dreamt in the same way as we do. So far as we know,
all ancient peoples attached great significance to dreams and regarded
them as of practical value; they obtained from them auguries of the
future and looked for portents in them. For the Greeks and other
Orientals, it was at times as unthinkable to undertake a campaign
without a dream-interpreter as it would be to-day without air-scouts for
intelligence. When Alexander the Great set out on his campaign of
conquest the most famous interpreters of dreams were in his following.
The city of Tyre, still at that time on an island, offered so stout a
resistance to the king that he entertained the idea of abandoning the
siege; then one night he dreamed of a satyr dancing in triumph, and when
he related this dream to his interpreters they informed him that it
foretold his victory over the city; he gave the order to attack and took
Tyre by storm. Among the Etruscans and Romans other methods of
foretelling the future were employed, but during the whole of the
Græco-Roman period the interpretation of dreams was practised and held
in high esteem. Of the literature on this subject the principal work at
any rate has come down to us, namely, the book of Artemidorus of Daldis,
who is said to have lived at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. How it
happened that the art of dream-interpretation declined later and dreams
fell into disrepute, I cannot tell you. The progress of learning cannot
have had very much to do with it, for in the darkness of the middle ages
things far more absurd than the ancient practice of the interpretation
of dreams were faithfully retained. The fact remains that the interest
in dreams gradually sank to the level of superstition and could hold its
own only amongst the uneducated. In our day, there survive, as a final
degradation of the art of dream-interpretation, the attempts to find out
from dreams numbers destined to draw prizes in games of chance. On the
other hand, exact science of the present day has repeatedly concerned
itself with the dream, but always with the sole object of illustrating
_physiological_ theories. By medical men, naturally, a dream was never
regarded as a mental process but as the mental expression of physical
stimuli. Binz in 1876 pronounced the dream to be “a physical process,
always useless and in many cases actually morbid, a process above which
the conception of the world-soul and of immortality stands as high as
does the blue sky above the most low-lying, weed-grown stretch of sand.”
Maury compares dreams with the spasmodic jerkings of St. Vitus’ dance,
contrasted with the co-ordinated movements of the normal human being; in
an old comparison a parallel is drawn between the content of a dream and
the sounds which would be produced if “someone ignorant of music let his
ten fingers wander over the keys of an instrument.”
‘Interpretation’ means discovering a hidden meaning, but there can be no
question of attempting this while such an attitude is maintained towards
the dream-performance. Look up the description of dreams given in the
writings of Wundt, Jodl and other recent philosophers: they are content
with the bare enumeration of the divergences of the dream-life from
waking thought with a view to depreciating the dreams; they emphasize
the lack of connection in the associations, the suspended exercise of
the critical faculty, the elimination of all knowledge, and other
indications of diminished functioning. The single valuable contribution
to our knowledge about dreams for which we are indebted to exact science
relates to the influence upon the dream-content of physical stimuli
operating during sleep. We have the work of a Norwegian author who died
recently—J. Mourly Vold—two large volumes on experimental investigation
of dreams (translated into German in 1910 and 1912), which are concerned
almost entirely with the results obtained by change in the position of
the limbs. These investigations have been held up to us as models of
exact research in the subject of dreams. Now can you imagine what would
be the comment of exact science on learning that we intend to try to
find out the _meaning_ of dreams? The comment that has perhaps been made
already! However, we will not allow ourselves to be appalled at the
thought. If it was possible for errors to have an underlying meaning, it
is possible that dreams have one too; and errors have, in very many
cases, a meaning which has eluded the researches of exact science. Let
us adopt the assumption of the ancients and of simple folk, and follow
in the footsteps of the dream-interpreters of old.
First of all, we must take our bearings in this enterprise, and make a
survey of the field of dreams. What exactly is a dream? It is difficult
to define it in a single phrase. Yet we need not seek after a
definition, when all we need is to refer to something familiar to
everyone. Still we ought to pick out the essential features in dreams.
How are we to discover these features? The boundaries of the region we
are entering comprise such vast differences, differences whichever way
we turn. That which we can show to be common to all dreams is probably
what is essential.
Well then—the first common characteristic of all dreams would be that we
are asleep at the time. Obviously, the dream is the life of the mind
during sleep, a life bearing certain resemblances to our waking life
and, at the same time, differing from it widely. That, indeed, was
Aristotle’s definition. Perhaps dream and sleep stand in yet closer
relationship to each other. We can be waked by a dream; we often have a
dream when we wake spontaneously or when we are forcibly roused from
sleep. Dreams seem thus to be an intermediate condition between sleeping
and waking. Hence, our attention is directed to sleep itself: what then
is sleep?
That is a physiological or biological problem concerning which much is
still in dispute. We can come to no decisive answer, but I think we may
attempt to define one psychological characteristic of sleep. Sleep is a
condition in which I refuse to have anything to do with the outer world
and have withdrawn my interest from it. I go to sleep by retreating from
the outside world and warding off the stimuli proceeding from it. Again,
when I am tired by that world I go to sleep. I say to it as I fall
asleep: “Leave me in peace, for I want to sleep.” The child says just
the opposite: “I won’t go to sleep yet; I’m not tired, I want more
things to happen to me!” Thus the biological object of sleep seems to be
recuperation, its psychological characteristic the suspension of
interest in the outer world. Our relationship with the world which we
entered so unwillingly seems to be endurable only with intermission;
hence we withdraw again periodically into the condition prior to our
entrance into the world: that is to say, into intra-uterine existence.
At any rate, we try to bring about quite similar conditions—warmth,
darkness and absence of stimulus—characteristic of that state. Some of
us still roll ourselves tightly up into a ball resembling the
intra-uterine position. It looks as if we grown-ups do not belong wholly
to the world, but only by two-thirds; one-third of us has never yet been
born at all. Every time we wake in the morning it is as if we were newly
born. We do, in fact, speak of the condition of waking from sleep in
these very words: we feel “as if we were newly born,”—and in this we are
probably quite mistaken in our idea of the general sensations of the
new-born infant; it may be assumed on the contrary that it feels
extremely uncomfortable. Again, in speaking of birth we speak of “seeing
the light of day.”
If this is the nature of sleep, then dreams do not come into its scheme
at all, but seem rather to be an unwelcome supplement to it; and we do
indeed believe that dreamless sleep is the best, the only proper sleep.
There should be no mental activity during sleep; if any such activity
bestirs itself, then in so far have we failed to reach the true
pre-natal condition of peace; we have not been able to avoid altogether
some remnants of mental activity, and the act of dreaming would
represent these remnants. In that event it really does seem that dreams
do not need to have meaning. With errors it was different, for they were
at least activities manifested in waking life; but if I sleep and have
altogether suspended mental activity, with the exception of certain
remnants which I have not been able to suppress, there is no necessity
whatever that they should have any meaning. In fact, I cannot even make
use of any such meaning, seeing that the rest of my mind is asleep. It
can really then be a matter of spasmodic reactions only, of such mental
phenomena only as have their origin in physical stimulation. Hence,
dreams must be remnants of the mental activity of waking life disturbing
sleep, and we might as well make up our minds forthwith to abandon a
theme so unsuited to the purposes of psycho-analysis.
Superfluous as dreams may be, however, they do exist nevertheless, and
we can try to account for their existence to ourselves. Why does not
mental life go off to sleep? Probably because there is something that
will not leave the mind in peace; stimuli are acting upon it and to
these it is bound to react. Dreams therefore are the mode of reaction of
the mind to stimuli acting upon it during sleep. We note here a
possibility of access to comprehension of dreams. We can now endeavour
to find out, in various dreams, what are the stimuli seeking to disturb
sleep, the reaction to which takes the form of dreams. By doing this we
should have worked out the first characteristic common to all dreams.
Is there any other common characteristic? Yes, there is another,
unmistakable, and yet much harder to lay hold of and describe. The
character of mental processes during sleep is quite different from that
of waking processes. In dreams we go through many experiences, which we
fully believe in, whereas in reality we are perhaps only experiencing
the single disturbing stimulus. For the most part our experiences take
the form of visual images; there may be feeling as well, thoughts, too,
mixed up with them, and the other senses may be drawn in; but for the
most part dreams consist of visual images. Part of the difficulty of
reciting a dream comes from the fact that we have to translate these
images into words. “I could draw it,” the dreamer often says to us, “but
I do not know how to put it into words.” Now this is not exactly a
diminution in the mental capacity, as seen in a contrast between a
feeble-minded person and a man of genius. The difference is rather a
qualitative one, but it is difficult to say precisely wherein it lies.
G. T. Fechner once suggested that the stage whereon the drama of the
dream (within the mind) is played out is other than that of the life of
waking ideas. That is a saying which we really do not understand, nor do
we know what it is meant to convey to us, but it does actually reproduce
the impression of strangeness which most dreams make upon us. Again, the
comparison of the act of dreaming with the performances of an unskilled
hand in music breaks down here, for the piano will certainly respond
with the same notes, though not with melodies, to a chance touch on its
keys. We will keep this second common characteristic of dreams carefully
in view, even though we may not understand it.
Are there any other qualities common to all dreams? I can think of none,
but can see differences only, whichever way I look, differences too in
every respect—in apparent duration, definiteness, the part played by
affects, persistence in the mind, and so forth. This is really not what
we should naturally expect in the case of a compulsive attempt, at once
meagre and convulsive, to ward off a stimulus. As regards the length of
dreams, some are very short, containing only one image, or very few, or
a single thought, possibly even a single word; others are peculiarly
rich in content, enact entire romances and seem to last a very long
time. There are dreams as distinct as actual experiences, so distinct
that for some time after waking we do not realize that they were dreams
at all; others, which are ineffably faint, shadowy and blurred; in one
and the same dream, even, there may be some parts of extraordinary
vividness alternating with others so indistinct as to be almost wholly
elusive. Again, dreams may be quite consistent or at any rate coherent,
or even witty or fantastically beautiful; others again are confused,
apparently imbecile, absurd or often absolutely mad. There are dreams
which leave us quite cold, others in which every affect makes itself
felt, pain to the point of tears, terror so intense as to wake us,
amazement, delight, and so on. Most dreams are forgotten soon after
waking; or they persist throughout the day, the recollection becoming
fainter and more imperfect as the day goes on; others remain so vivid
(as, for example, the dreams of childhood) that thirty years later we
remember them as clearly as though they were part of a recent
experience. Dreams, like people, may make their appearance once and
never come back; or the same person may dream the same thing repeatedly,
either in the same form or with slight alterations. In short, these
scraps of mental activity at night-time have at command an immense
repertory, can in fact create everything that by day the mind is capable
of—only, it is never the same.
One might attempt to account for these diversities in dreams by assuming
that they correspond to different intermediate states between sleeping
and waking, different levels of imperfect sleep. Very well; but then in
proportion as the mind approached the waking state there should be not
merely an increase in the value, content, and distinctness of the
dream-performance, but also a growing perception that it _is_ a dream;
and it ought not to happen that side by side with a clear and sensible
element in the dream there is one which is nonsensical or indistinct,
followed again by a good piece of work. It is certain that the mind
could not vary its depth of sleep so rapidly as that. This explanation
therefore does not help; there is in fact no short cut to an answer.
For the present we will leave the ‘meaning’ of the dream out of
question, and try instead, by starting from the common element in
dreams, to clear a path to a better understanding of their nature. From
the relationship of dreams to sleep we have drawn the conclusion that
dreams are the reaction to a stimulus disturbing sleep. As we have
heard, this is also the single point at which exact experimental
psychology can come to our aid; it affords proof of the fact that
stimuli brought to bear during sleep make their appearance in dreams.
Many investigations have been made on these lines, culminating in those
of Mourly Vold whom I mentioned earlier; we have all, too, been in a
position to confirm their results by occasional observations of our own.
I will choose some of the earlier experiments to tell you. Maury had
tests of this kind carried out upon himself. Whilst dreaming, he was
made to smell some eau de Cologne, whereupon he dreamt he was in Cairo,
in the shop of Johann Maria Farina, and this was followed by further
crazy adventures. Again, someone gave his neck a gentle pinch, and he
dreamt of the application of a blister and of a doctor who had treated
him when he was a child. Again, they let a drop of water fall on his
forehead and he was immediately in Italy, perspiring freely and drinking
the white wine of Orvieto.
The striking feature about these dreams produced under experimental
conditions will perhaps become still clearer to us in another series of
“stimulus”-dreams. These are three dreams of which we have an account by
a clever observer, Hildebrandt, and all three are reactions to the sound
of an alarum-clock:
“I am going for a walk on a spring morning, and I saunter through fields
just beginning to grow green, till I come to a neighbouring village,
where I see the inhabitants in holiday attire making their way in large
numbers to the church, their hymn-books in their hands. Of course! it is
Sunday and the morning service is just about to begin. I decide to take
part in it, but first as I am rather overheated I think I will cool down
in the churchyard which surrounds the church. Whilst reading some of the
epitaphs there I hear the bell-ringer go up into the tower, where I now
notice, high up, the little village bell which will give the signal for
the beginning of the service. For some time yet it remains motionless,
then it begins to swing, and suddenly the strokes ring out, clear and
piercing—so clear and piercing that they put an end to my sleep. But the
sound of the bell comes from the alarum-clock.”
Here is another combination of images. “It is a bright winter day, and
the roads are deep in snow. I have promised to take part in a sleighing
expedition, but I have to wait a long time before I am told that the
sleigh is at the door. Now follow the preparations for getting in, the
fur rug is spread out and the foot-muff fetched and finally I am in my
place. But there is still a delay while the horses wait for the signal
to start. Then the reins are jerked and the little bells, shaken
violently, begin their familiar janizary music, so loudly that in a
moment the web of the dream is rent. Again it is nothing but the shrill
sound of the alarum-clock.”
Now for the third example! “I see a kitchen-maid with dozens of piled-up
plates going along the passage to the dining-room. It seems to me that
the pyramid of china in her arms is in danger of overbalancing. I call
out a warning: ‘Take care, your whole load will fall to the ground.’ Of
course I receive the usual answer: that they are accustomed to carrying
china in that way, and so on; meanwhile I follow her as she goes with
anxious looks. I thought so—the next thing is a stumble on the
threshold, the crockery falls, crashing and clattering in a hundred
pieces on the ground. But—I soon become aware that that interminably
prolonged sound is no real crash, but a regular ringing—and this ringing
is due merely to the alarum-clock, as I realize at last on awakening.”
These dreams are very pretty, perfectly sensible, and by no means so
incoherent as dreams usually are. We have no quarrel with them on those
grounds. The thing common to them all is that in each case the situation
arises from a noise, which the dreamer on waking recognizes as that of
the alarum-clock. Hence we see here how a dream is produced, but we find
out something more. In the dream there is no recognition of the clock,
which does not even appear in it, but for the noise of the clock another
noise is substituted; the stimulus which disturbs sleep is interpreted,
but interpreted differently in each instance. Now why is this? There is
no answer; it appears to be mere caprice. But to understand the dream we
should be able to account for its choice of just this noise and no other
to interpret the stimulus given by the alarum-clock. In analogous
fashion we must object to Maury’s experiments that, although it is clear
that the stimulus brought to bear on the sleeper does appear in the
dream, yet his experiments don’t explain why it appears exactly in that
form, which is one that does not seem explicable by the nature of the
stimulus disturbing sleep. And further, in Maury’s experiments there was
mostly a mass of other dream-material attached to the direct result of
the stimulus, for example, the crazy adventures in the eau de Cologne
dream, for which we are at a loss to account.
Now will you reflect that the class of dreams which wake one up affords
the best opportunity for establishing the influence of external
disturbing stimuli. In most other cases it will be more difficult. We do
not wake up out of all dreams, and if in the morning we remember a dream
of the night before, how are we to assign it to a disturbing stimulus
operating perhaps during the night? I once succeeded in subsequently
establishing the occurrence of a sound-stimulus of this sort, but only,
of course, because of peculiar circumstances. I woke up one morning at a
place in the Tyrolese mountains knowing that I had dreamt that the Pope
was dead. I could not explain the dream to myself, but later my wife
asked me: “Did you hear quite early this morning the dreadful noise of
bells breaking out in all the churches and chapels?” No, I had heard
nothing, my sleep is too sound, but thanks to her telling me this I
understood my dream. How often may such causes of stimulus as this
induce dreams in the sleeper without his ever hearing of them
afterwards? Possibly very often: and possibly not. If we can get no
information of any stimulus we cannot be convinced on the point. And
apart from this we have given up trying to arrive at an estimation of
the sleep-disturbing external stimuli, since we know that they only
explain a fragment of the dream and not the whole dream-reaction.