THE WORLD OF DREAMS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE SOUL OF SPAIN.

AFFIRMATIONS. Second Edition.

IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS.

IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS. Second Series.

THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE.

PREFACE

Then there is the experimental method, which, not content with mere objective study of the phenomena, endeavours to interfere with them and to find out the results of interference. This method may be combined with other methods of studying dreams. In its pure form it has in recent years been especially practised by the late Mourly Vold. Its results are not without interest, but they do not cover a large part of the field, and they are not altogether reliable. Dreaming activity is so fluid and suggestible—and this is notably so when experimenter and subject are the same person—that interference with the phenomena deforms them, and we cannot be sure that by experiment we have really learned much about the life of dreams.

There is, finally, the introspective method. This may be said to be the earliest of the more scientific methods of studying dreams. Maine de Biran was here a pioneer, and Maury, in his famous book, Le Sommeil et les Rêves (1861), which inaugurated the modern study of dreams, adopted a mainly introspective method, though he was not always quite successful in avoiding the fallacies of that method. It is in France that this method has been most frequently and most successfully cultivated.

Professor Sigmund Freud's Die Traumdeutung (first edition, 1900), may be said to belong to the introspective class, though to a special division which Freud himself terms psycho-analytic. This is undoubtedly the most original, the most daring, the most challenging of recent books on dreams, and is now the text-book of a whole school of investigators. It is not a book to be neglected, for it is written by one of the profoundest of living investigators into the obscure depths of the human soul. Even if one rejects Freud's methods as unsatisfactory and his facts as unproved, the work of one so bold and so sincere cannot fail to be helpful and stimulating in the highest degree. If it is not the truth it will at least help us to reach the truth.

The little book now presented to the reader belongs mainly to the introspective group of dream studies, though not to the psycho-analytic variety. It is based on data which have accumulated beneath my hands during more than twenty years, and some of the ideas developed in it were put forward in a paper 'On Dreaming of the Dead,' Psychological Review, Sept. 1895; in 'A Note on Hypnagogic Paramnesia,' Mind, No. 22, 1896; and in 'The Stuff that Dreams are made of,' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899. The book is not the outcome of experiment or of any deliberate concentration of thought on dreaming. I have simply noted down dream experiences,—most often in myself, less often in immediate friends,—directly they have occurred, usually on awakening in the morning. The few unimportant exceptions to the rule are duly noted. By maintaining this rule I have been able to satisfy myself that everything I have set down is reasonably accurate. Such a method certainly tends towards the exclusion of peculiar and exceptional dreams. This I do not greatly regret. I am chiefly interested in the problems of normal dreaming; they are sufficiently puzzling and mysterious and they properly present themselves for explanation first. I do not wish it to be understood that I question the existence of telepathic and other abnormal dream experiences. That is not the case. But it so happens that under the conditions I have laid down I have not met with any dreams that clearly and decisively belong to this abnormal class. Such few possible examples as have come under my immediate observation (in no case as personal experiences) are slight, and, moreover, sometimes of too intimate a character for full exposition.

Thus my contribution to the psychology of dreaming is simple and unpretentious; it deals only with the fundamental elements of the subject. I do not make this statement entirely in a spirit of humility. It seems to me that in the past the literature of dreaming has often been overweighted by bad observation and reckless theory. By learning to observe and to understand the ordinary nightly experience of dream life we shall best be laying the foundation of future superstructures. For, rightly understood, dreams may furnish us with clues to the whole of life.

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

PAGE

The House of Dreams—Fallacies in the Study of Dreams—Is it possible to Study Dreams?—How Fallacies may be Avoided—Do we always Dream during Sleep?—The Two Main Sources of Dreams with their Sub-divisions, 1

CHAPTER II

THE ELEMENTS OF DREAM LIFE

The Spontaneous Procession of Dream Imagery—Its Kaleidoscopic Character—Attention in Dreams—Relation of Drug Visions and Hypnagogic Imagery to Dreaming—Colour in Dreams—The Fusion of Dream Imagery—Compared to Dissolving Views—Sources of the Imagery—Various types of Fusion—The Sub-Conscious Element in Dreaming—Verbal Transformations as Links in Dream Imagery—The Reduplication of Visual Imagery in Motor and other Terms, 20

CHAPTER III

THE LOGIC OF DREAMS

All Dreaming is a Process of Reasoning—The Fundamental Character of Reasoning—Reasoning as a Synthesis of Images—Dream Reasoning Instinctive and Automatic—It is also Consciously carried on—This a result of the Fundamental Split in Intelligence—Dissociation—Dreaming as a Disturbance of Apperception, 56

CHAPTER IV

THE SENSES IN DREAMS

All Dreams probably contain both Presentative and Representative Elements—The Influence of Tactile Sensations on Dreams—Dreams excited by Auditory Stimuli—Dreams aroused by Odours and Tastes—The Influence of Visual Stimuli—Difficulty of distinguishing between Actual and Imagined Sensory Excitations—The Influence of Internal Visceral Stimuli on Dreaming—Erotic Dreams—Vesical Dreams—Cardiac Dreams and their Symbolism—Prodromic Dreams—Prophetic Dreams, 71

CHAPTER V

EMOTION IN DREAMS

Emotion and Imagination—How Stimuli are transformed into Emotion—Somnambulism—The Failure of Movement in Dreams—Nightmare—Influence of the approach of Awakening on imagined Dream movements—The Magnification of Imagery—Peripheral and Cerebral Conditions combine to produce this Imaginative Heightening—Emotion in Sleep also Heightened—Dreams formed to explain Heightened Emotions of unknown origin—The fundamental Place of Emotion in Dreams—Visceral and especially Gastric disturbance as a source of Emotion—Symbolism in Dreams—The Dreamer's Moral Attitude—Why Murder so often takes place in Dreams—Moral Feeling not Abolished in Dreams though sometimes Impaired, 94

CHAPTER VI

AVIATION IN DREAMS

Dreams of Flying and Falling—Their Peculiar Vividness—Dreams of Flying an Alleged Survival of Primeval Experiences—Best explained as based on Respiratory Sensations combined with Cutaneous Anaesthesia—The Explanation of Dreams of Falling—The Sensation of Levitation sometimes experienced by Ecstatic Saints—Also experienced at the Moment of Death, 129

CHAPTER VII

SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS

The Dramatisation of Subjective Feelings Based on Dissociation—Analogies in Waking Life—The Synaesthesias and Number-forms—Symbolism in Language—In Music—The Organic Basis of Dream Symbolism—The Omnipotence of Symbolism—Oneiromancy—The Scientific Interpretation of Dreams—Why Symbolism prevails in Dreaming—Freud's Theory of Dreaming—Dreams as Fulfilled Wishes—Why this Theory cannot be applied to all Dreaming—The Complete Form of Symbolism in Dreams—Splitting up of Personality—Self-objectivation in Imaginary Personalities—The Dramatic Element in Dreams—Hallucinations—Multiple Personality—Insanity—Self-objectivation a Primitive Tendency—Its Survival in Civilisation, 148

CHAPTER VIII

DREAMS OF THE DEAD

Mental Dissociation during sleep—Illustrated by the Dream of Returning to School Life—The Typical Dream of a Dead Friend—Examples—Early Records of this Type of Dream—Analysis of such Dreams—Atypical Forms—The Consolation sometimes afforded by Dreams of the Dead—Ancient Legends of this Dream Type—The Influence of Dreams on the Belief of Primitive Man in the Survival of the Dead, 194

CHAPTER IX

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, 212

CHAPTER X

CONCLUSION

The Fundamental Nature of Dreaming—Insanity and Dreaming—The Child's Psychic State and the Dream State—Primitive Thought and Dreams—Dreaming and Myth-Making—Genius and Dreams—Dreaming as a Road into the Infinite, 261

INDEX, 283

THE WORLD OF DREAMS

CHAPTER I

For most of us our whole knowledge ends here. Our dreams are real enough while they last, but the interests of waking life absorb us so entirely that we rarely have leisure, and still less inclination, to subject our sleeping adventures, trivial and absurd as they must usually seem, to the careful tests which waking intelligence is accustomed to subject more obviously important matters to. The world of dreams and the mysterious light which prevails there[1] are abandoned entirely to our sleeping activities.

This leading characteristic of dream life—the fact that it takes place in another and more shadowy world and in a different kind of consciousness[2]—has led to the criticism of the study of dreams from the scientific side. We cannot really study our dreams, these objectors say, because we—that is to say, our waking consciousness—cannot come sufficiently closely in contact with them. Dreams, it is argued, are inevitably transformed in our hands; what we are studying is not our dreams, but only our waking, and probably altogether false, impressions of our dreams. There is a certain element of truth in this objection. It is very difficult, indeed impossible, to recall exactly, and in their proper order, even the details of a real adventure which has only just happened to us. It is, obviously, incomparably more difficult to recall an experience which took place, under such shadowy conditions, in a world so remote from the world of waking life. There is, further, the very definite difficulty that we only catch our dreams for a moment by the light, as it were, of the open door as we are emerging from sleep. In other words, our waking consciousness is for a moment observing and interpreting a process in another kind of consciousness, or even if we assert that it is the same consciousness it is still a consciousness that has been working under quite different conditions from waking consciousness, and accepting data which in the waking state it would not accept. For the student of dreams it must ever be a serious question how far the facts become inevitably distorted in this process. Sleeping or waking, it is probable, our consciousness never embraces the whole of the possible psychic field within us. There are, when we are dreaming as well as when we are awake—as will become clearer in the sequel—subconscious, or imperfectly conscious, states just below our consciousness, and exerting an influence upon it.[3] Our latent psychic possessions, among which dreams move, would seem to be by no means always at the same depth; the specific gravity of consciousness, as it were, varies, and these latent elements rise or fall, becoming nearer to the conscious surface or falling further away from it. But the greatest change must take place when the waking surface is reached and the outer world breaks on sleeping consciousness. In that change there is doubtless a process of necessary and automatic transformation and interpretation. We may picture it, perhaps, as somewhat the same process as when a person skilled in both languages takes up a foreign book and reads it out in his own tongue. With practice the reader may become unconscious that he is transforming everything, that the words he utters are different from the words he sees, and that he even transposes their order, sometimes putting in the middle of a sentence the verb he sees at the end.

Yet even if we admit that the passage from sleeping to waking consciousness involves a change as complete as this—and it is probable, as we shall see, that some such change sometimes takes place—for a faithful interpreter the sense still remains the same. It is impossible to believe that the witness of waking consciousness to the nature of the visions it has caught at the threshold between sleeping and waking life is false, and the most convincing evidence of this is the utter unlikeness of these visions to the data of ordinary waking life.

But even this conclusion has been subjected to severe criticism which we have to face before we proceed further. Foucault, an acute investigator of dream psychology—carrying to its extreme point a position more partially and tentatively stated by Delbœuf and Tannery—has denied that our dreams, as they finally present themselves to waking consciousness, at all correspond to the psychic process in sleep upon which they are founded, and he especially insists that the logical connections are superadded.[4] He considers that dreaming is an 'observation of memory' made under such conditions that 'it would be very imprudent to regard the remembrance of the dream as reproducing faithfully the mental state of sleep.' During sleep, he believes, our dream ideas proceed, concurrently, it may be, but separately and independently; at the moment when awakening begins, the mind, as an act of immediate memory, grasps the plurality of separate pictures and applies itself spontaneously to the task of organising them according to the rules of logic and the laws of the real world, making a drama of them as like as possible to the dramas of waking life.[5] He agrees with Goblot that 'the dream we remember is a waking thought,' and with Tannery that 'we do not remember our dreams, but only the reconstructions of them we effected at the moment of waking.' It is after awakening, Foucault concludes, that the dream develops, and its final shape depends on the period at which it is noted down; 'the evolution of the dream after awakening is a logical evolution, dominated and directed by the instinctive need to give a reasonable appearance to the ensemble of images and sensations present to the mind, and to assimilate the representation of the dream to the system of representations which constitutes our knowledge of the real world.'[6]

In arguing his thesis, Foucault makes much of the modifications which can be proved to take place if any one is asked to repeat a dream at intervals of months. Under the influence of time and repetition a dream becomes more coherent and more conformed to reality. In illustration Foucault presents two versions of an insignificant dream in which a lady imagines that she is out with her husband for a drive, and in the course of it experiences a natural need which she seeks an opportunity to satisfy; the details of the first version were highly improbable; some months later they had become much more like what might have occurred in real life. Such a process, Foucault thinks, is taking place from the first in the making of dreams as we know them awake.

There are, undoubtedly, facts which may seem to support Foucault's argument that the logic of the dream, as we know it, is not in the original dream, but is introduced afterwards. Thus I once dreamed in the morning that I asked my wife if she had been into a certain room, and that she replied, 'Can't get in.' I immediately awoke and realised that my wife had actually spoken these words, not to me, but to an approaching servant, in anticipation of a message about entering a neighbouring room of which the door was locked. It is thus evident that although it seemed to me in my dream that the question came first and the answer followed in the ordinary course, in reality the answer came first. The question was a theory, supplied automatically by sleeping intelligence and prefixed to the answer, in which order they both appeared to sleeping consciousness, that is to say, in the only way in which sleeping consciousness can ever be known, as translated into waking consciousness.[7]

It must be borne in mind that such a dream as I have recorded—in which an actual sensory experience is introduced, untransformed, as a foreign body into sleeping consciousness—is not a typical dream. Dreams are, however, without doubt of various kinds, and we may well admit that there is a class of dreams formed in this way. That supposition will, indeed, be helpful in explaining several dreams I shall have to record. The process is much the same as when a nervous person receives a telegram, and at once assumes that some dreaded accident has occurred, and that the telegram is the announcement of it. The craving for reasons is instinctive, and the dreamer's sense of logic even dominates his sense of time.

But Foucault's argument is that waking consciousness effects this logical construction of the dream. Here his position is weak and incapable of proof. It is, indeed, contrary to all the tests we are able to apply to it. If it is the object of the logic of our dreams to make them conformable to our waking experience, that end, we must admit, is in most cases very far from being attained. In their original form, as Foucault views the matter, our dreams are simple dissociated images. In that shape they would present nothing whatever to shock the consciousness of waking life. The logic, hypothetically introduced solely to make them conformable to real life, is frequently a preposterous logic such as the consciousness of waking life could not accept or even conceive. This fact alone serves to throw serious doubt upon the theory that it is waking consciousness which impresses its logic upon our dreams.

Nor, again, is there any analogy, and still less identity, between the process whereby we grasp a dream when we awake, and the process whereby the memory of a dream is transformed during months of waking life. The latter is part of a general process affecting all our memories in greater or less degree. I visit, for instance, a foreign cathedral, and take careful note of the character and arrangement of buttresses and piers; a few months later, if I have failed to set the facts down, my memory of them will become uncertain, confused, and incorrect. But I need not, therefore, lose faith in the tolerable exactitude of my original impressions. In the same way, we cannot argue that the shifting memory of a dream during a long period of time throws the slightest doubt on the accuracy of our original impression of it. We never catch a dream in course of formation. As it presents itself to consciousness on awakening there may be doubtful points and there may be missing links, but the dream is, once for all, completed, and if there are doubtful points or missing links we recognise them as such. We make no attempt to supply a logic that is not there, and we never see any such process going on involuntarily. I should, indeed, myself be inclined to say that there is always a kind of gap between sleeping consciousness and waking consciousness; the change from the one to the other kind of consciousness seems to be effected by a slight shock, and the perception of the already completed dream is the first effort of waking consciousness. The existence of such a shock is indicated by the fact that, even at the first moment of waking consciousness, we never realise that a moment ago we were asleep. As soon as we realise that we are awake it seems to us that we have already been awake for an uncertain but distinct period of time; some people, indeed, especially old people, on awaking, feel this so strongly that they deny they have been asleep. It once happened to me to be in the neighbourhood of a dynamite factory at the moment when a very disastrous explosion occurred; at the time my back was to the factory, and I am quite unable to say how long an interval occurred between the shock of the explosion and my own action in turning round to observe the straight shaft of smoke and solid material high in the air; there was a gap in consciousness, an interval of unknown and seemingly considerable length, caused by the deafening shock of the explosion, although it is probable that my action in turning round was almost or quite instantaneous. It seems to me that the transition from sleeping consciousness to waking consciousness occurs in a similar manner on a smaller scale.

Although the view of Foucault that the dream is logically organised after sleep has ended seems, when we examine the evidence in its favour, to be unacceptable, we may still admit that, in some cases at all events, the dream only assumes final shape at the moment when sleeping consciousness is breaking up, that the dream, as we know it, is a final synthetic attempt of sleeping consciousness as it dissolves on the approach of waking consciousness. Sleeping consciousness, we may even imagine as saying to itself in effect: 'Here comes our master, Waking Consciousness, who attaches such mighty importance to reason and logic and so forth. Quick! gather things up, put them in order—any order will do—before he enters to take possession.' That is to say, in other words, that as sleeping consciousness comes nearer to the threshold of waking consciousness it is possible that the need for the same kind of causation or sequence which is manifested in waking consciousness may begin to make itself felt even to sleeping consciousness. Even this assumption seems, however, as regards most dreams, to be extravagant. In any case, and at whatever stage the dream is finally constituted, we are not entitled, it seems to me, to believe that any stage of its constitution falls outside the frontiers of sleep. It is satisfactory to be able to feel justified in reaching this conclusion. For if dreams were chiefly or mainly the product of waking consciousness they would certainly lose a considerable part of their significance and interest.

Even, however, when we have reached this conclusion the path of the student is still far from easy. The undoubted fact that in any case the difficulties of observing and recording dreams are very great cannot fail to make us extremely careful. Although the dreams of some persons, who may be regarded as themselves of vivid and dramatic temperament, seem to be habitually vivid and dramatic to an extent which, in my own case, is extremely rare, one is usually justified in feeling a certain amount of suspicion in regard to dream-narratives which are at every point clear, coherent, connected, and intelligible. Dreams, as I know them on awaking from sleep, occasionally present episodes to which these epithets may be applied, but on the whole they are full of obscurities, of uncertainties, of inexplicable lacunae. The memory of dream events is lost so rapidly that one is constantly obliged to leave the exact nature of a detail in doubt. One seems to be recalling a landscape seen by a lightning flash. It is for this reason that I have made it a rule only to admit dreams which are noted very shortly, and if possible immediately, after the moment of awakening. It is further of importance in recording one's dreams, to note the emotional attitude experienced during the dream as well as any physical sensations felt on awakening. The attitude of dream consciousness towards dream visions usually varies from that of waking consciousness, although the normal extent of the difference is a disputable point. When I read dream narratives of landscapes which, as described, appear at every point as beautiful and impressive to waking consciousness as they appeared to dreaming consciousness, I usually suspect that, granting the good faith and accuracy of the narrator, we are really concerned, not with dreams in the proper sense, but with visions experienced under more abnormal conditions, and especially with drug visions. In the present inquiry I am only concerned to ascertain the most elementary and fundamental laws of the dream world, as they occur in fairly ordinary and normal persons, and therefore it becomes necessary to be very strict as to the conditions under which they were recorded. It is the most ordinary dreams that are most likely to reveal the ordinary laws of dream life, but for this end it is necessary that they should be recorded with the greatest accuracy attainable.

I am myself neither a constant nor, usually, a very vivid dreamer, and in these respects I am probably a fairly ordinary and normal person; the personal material which I have accumulated, though it spreads over twenty years, is not notably copious. Nor have I ever directed my attention in any systematic and concentrated manner to my dream life. To do so would be, I believe, to distort the phenomena. I have merely recorded any significant phenomena as they occurred.

To remark that one is not a constant dreamer is not to assert that dreaming is rare, but merely that one's recollection of it is rare. Though we may only catch a glimpse of our latest vision of the night as we leave the house of sleep, it may well be that there were many earlier adventures of the night which are beyond the reach of waking consciousness. Sometimes, it is curious to note, we become vaguely conscious, during the day, for the first time, of a dream we have had during the night. Many psychologists, as well as metaphysicians—fearful to admit that the activity of the soul could ever cease—believe that we dream during the whole period of sleep; this has of recent years been the opinion of Vaschide, Foucault, Näcke, and Sir Arthur Mitchell, as it formerly was of Sir Benjamin Brodie, Sir Henry Holland, and Schaaffhausen. In earlier days Hippocrates, Descartes, Leibnitz, and Cabanis seem to have been of the same opinion. On the other hand, Locke, Macnish, and Carpenter held that deep sleep is dreamless; this is also the opinion of Wundt, Beaunis, Strümpell, Weygandt, Hammond, and Jastrow. Moreover, there are some people, like Lessing, who, so far as they know, never dream at all. My own personal experience scarcely inclines me to accept without qualification the belief that we are always dreaming during sleep. I find that my remembered dreams tend to be correlated with some slight mental or physical disturbance, and therefore it seems to me probable that, if dreams are continuous during sleep, they must, during completely undisturbed sleep, be of an extremely faint and shadowy character. To return to a metaphor I have before used, we may say that sleeping consciousness in its descent from the surface of the waking life may fall to a point at which its specific gravity being practically the same as that of its environment, a state approaching complete repose is attained.[8] It cannot of course be said that the failure to remember dreams is any argument against their occurrence. It is well known that when the psychic activity of sleep assumes a definitely motor shape, as in talking in sleep and in somnambulism, it is very rare for any recollection to remain on awakening, though we cannot doubt that psychic activity has been present. In the same way the dream that we remember when awakened from sound sleep by another person is by no means always due to that awakening. This is shown by the fact that if we were turning round or making other movements just before being thus awakened, the dream we remember—in one such case a dream of making one's way with difficulty between a sofa and a chair—may have no relation to the circumstance of the awakening, but clearly be suggested by the movements made during sleep, though these movements themselves remain unknown to waking consciousness. The movements of dogs during sound sleep—the rhythmical lifting of the paws, the wagging of the tail—point in the same direction.[9]

The fact that failure of memory by no means proves the absence of dreaming may be illustrated, not only by the forgetfulness of what takes place during hypnotic sleep, but by what we sometimes witness during partial anaesthesia maintained by drugs. This was well shown in a case I was once concerned with, where it was necessary to administer chloroform (preceded by the alcohol-chloroform-ether mixture) for a prolonged period during a difficult first confinement. The drug was not given to the point of causing complete abolition of mental activity, and the patient talked, and occasionally sang, throughout, referring to various events in her life, from childhood onwards. The sensation and the expression of pain were not altogether abolished, for slight cries and remarks about the discomfort and constraint imposed upon her were sometimes mingled in the same sentence with quite irrelevant remarks concerning, for instance, trivial details of housekeeping. Confusions of incompatible ideas also took place, as during ordinary dreaming. 'Where is the three-cornered nurse,' she thus asked, 'who does not mind what she does?' There was also the abnormal suggestibility of dream consciousness. The questions of bystanders were answered but always with a tendency to agree with everything that was said, this tendency even displaying itself with a certain ingenuity as when in reply to the playful random query: 'Were you drunk or sleeping last night?' she answered, with some hesitation: 'A little of both, I think.' To the casual observer, it might seem that there was a state of full consciousness on the basis of which a partial delirium had established itself. Yet on recovery from the drug there was no recollection of anything whatever that had taken place during its administration, and no sense of the lapse of time.

Fantastic and marvellous as our dreams may sometimes be, they are in practically all cases made up of very simple elements. It is desirable that we should at the outset have a provisional notion as to the sources of these simple elements. Most writers on dreams hold that there are two great sources from which these elements are drawn: the vast reservoir of memories and the actual physical sensations experienced at the moment of dreaming, and interpreted by sleeping consciousness. Various names have been given to these two groups, the recognition of which is at least as old as Aristotle.[10] Thus Sully calls them central and peripheral, Tissié, psychic and sensorial, Foucault, imaginative and perceptive. Fairly convenient names are those adopted by Miss Calkins, who calls the first group representative, the second group presentative, meaning by representative 'connected through the fact of association with the waking life of the past,' and by presentative 'connected through sense excitation with the immediate present.'[11]

The representative group falls into two subdivisions, according as the memories are of old or of recent date; these subdivisions are often quite distinct, recent dream memories belonging—probably with most people—to the previous day, while old dream memories are usually drawn from the experience of many years past, and frequently from early life. In the same way presentative impressions fall into two subdivisions, according as they refer to external stimuli present to the senses, or to internal disturbances within the organism. It is scarcely necessary to observe that any or all of these four sub-groups, into which the whole of our dream life may be analysed, may become woven together in the same dream.

I have called the classification 'provisional' because, though it is convenient to adopt it for the sake of orderly arrangement, when we come to consider the matter it will be found that the material of dreams is in reality all of the same order, and purely psychic, though it may be differentiated in accordance with the character of the stimulus which evokes the psychic material of which it is made. Strictly speaking, the source of the dream as a dream can only be central, and a truly presentative dream is impossible. If our senses receive an impression, external or internal, and we recognise and accept that impression for what we should recognise and accept it when awake, then we cannot be said to be dreaming. The internal and external stimuli which act upon sleeping consciousness are not a part of that consciousness, nor in any real sense its source or its cause. The ray of sunlight that falls on the dreamer, the falling off of his bedclothes, the indigestible supper he ate last night—these things can no more 'account' for his dream than the postman's knock can account for the contents of the letter he delivers. Whatever the stimuli from the physical world that may knock at the door of dreaming consciousness, that consciousness is apart from them, and stimuli can only reach it by undergoing transformation. They must put off the character which they wear as phenomena of the waking world; they must put on the character of phenomena of another world, the world of dreams.

CHAPTER II

PERHAPS the most elementary fact about dream vision is the perpetual and unceasing change which it is undergoing at every moment. Sight is for most of us the chief sensory activity of sleeping as it is of waking life; the commonest kind of dream is mainly a picture, but it is always a living and moving picture, however inanimate the objects which appear in vision before us would be in real life. No man ever gazed at a dream picture which was at rest to his sleeping eye as are the pictures we gaze at with our waking eyes. So far as my own experience is concerned, I have rarely in sleep seen a sentence, a word, a letter written on a sheet of dream-paper which was not changing beneath the eye of sleep. I dream, for instance, that I wish to stamp a letter, and look in my pocket-book for a penny stamp; I am able to find stamps of other values, I am able to find penny stamps that are torn or defaced or of an antiquated type disused thirty years ago; all sorts of stamps, as well as little pictures resembling stamps, develop and multiply beneath my gaze; the stamp I seek remains unfound, probably because it had appeared at the beginning of the series and suggested all the rest. That is indicated by another dream (experienced, it may be noted, during the early stage of a cold in the head): I have to catch a train; I see my hat hanging on a peg among other hats, and I move towards it; but as I do so it has vanished; and I wander among rows of hats, of all shapes and sizes, but not one of them mine. Sleeping consciousness is a stream in which we never bathe twice, for it is renewed every second. It is this as much as any characteristic of the visual dream—for the mainly auditory or motor dream often presents less difficulty in this respect—which makes it so difficult to recall and reproduce. We are, as it were, gazing at a constantly revolving kaleidoscope in which every slightest turn produces a new pattern, somewhat resembling that which immediately preceded it—so that, if the kaleidoscope were conscious we should say that each picture had been suggested by the preceding pattern—but yet definitely novel.[12]

Delbœuf has denied that this process ever involves any real metamorphosis of images; he regarded it as an illusion due to rapid succession of distinct images which are afterwards combined in memory. That view is not, however, tenable; apart from the fact that it makes the illegitimate assumption that our recollection of a dream is entirely unreliable, it must be remembered that (as Giessler has pointed out) the shock of emotional horror or surprise that frequently accompanies such dreams suffices to prove the reality of the metamorphosis. Thus I once, as a youth, had a vivid dream of an albatross that became transformed into a woman, the beautiful eyes of the albatross taking on a womanly expression, but the bird's beak only being imperfectly changed into a nose as the bird-woman murmured, 'Do you love me?' In this case the vivid surprise of the dream was precisely associated with the simultaneous existence of the two sets of characters.

It is not, however, necessary that there should be any metamorphosis of dream images, nor even that the procession of dream imagery should be continuous. And whether or not there is metamorphosis of images, whether the imagery is continuous or discontinuous, it seems to me that we must admit the possibility of its spontaneous character. That is, indeed, a debated, and, it may be admitted, a debateable point. Thus Foucault[13] accounts for the multiplication of almost similar images sometimes witnessed in dreams as due to desire; we see a number of things because we desire to possess a number of these things, and he explains a dream of Delbœuf's, of a procession of lizards, as due to the fact that Delbœuf was a collector of lizards, in the same way as he would explain the dreams of thirsty people who imagine they are drinking repeated glasses of water or wine. I am quite unable to accept this explanation. The shifting and multiplication of dream imagery, as in the procession of lizards, is a fundamental and elementary character of spontaneous mental imagery, and is constant in some drug visions, notably those occasioned by mescal.[14] The repetition of imaginary drinks in the dreams of a thirsty man belongs to another more special class in explanation of which desire may be more properly invoked; it is merely the expression of the fact that after the imaginary drink the dreamer remains thirsty, and the suggested image is therefore repeated.

That in some cases there is what we may call a deliberate subconscious selection in the imagery presented to consciousness in dreams, there can be no doubt. But mental imagery is deeper and more elemental than any of the higher psychic functions even when exerted subconsciously. Just as the immense procession of continuous and totally unfamiliar imagery which is evoked by the action of mescal on the visual centres has no more connection with the subject's volition or desires than the procession of the starry skies, so likewise, we seem bound to admit, it may be in the case of a succession of separate images in dreams. It is nearly always possible to find a link of connection between any two images chosen at random, and the link is often a real subconscious link, but not necessarily so. Discontinuous images may arise, it seems probable, from a psychic basis deeper than choice, their appearance being determined by their own dynamic condition at the moment. We must, as Baron Mourre[15] not quite happily puts it, take into account 'the physiological state of ideas.' If we hold to the belief that dreaming is based on a fundamental and elementary tendency to the formation of continuous or discontinuous images, which may or may not be controlled by psychic emotions or impulses, we shall be delivered from many hazardous speculations.

When we thus start with the recognition of a more or less spontaneous procession of images as the elemental stuff of dreams, one of the first problems we encounter is the relation of attention to that imagery. What is the degree and the nature of the attention we exert in dreams?

'Sleep from the psychological point of view,' says Foucault, 'is a state of profound distraction or total inattention.' And Mourre shows by dreams of his own that any exercise of will in dreaming leads to awakening, and that the deeper the sleep the more absent is volition from dreams. Hence the involuntary wavering and perpetually mere meaningless change of dream imagery. Such concentration as is possible during sleep usually reveals a shifting, oscillating, uncertain movement of the vision before us. We are, as it were, reading a sign-post in the dusk, or making guesses at the names of the stations as our express train flashes by the painted letters. It is this factor in dreams which causes them so often to baffle our analysis. There is thus a failure of sleeping attention to fix definitely the final result—a failure which itself may evidently serve to carry on the dream process by suggesting new images and combinations. It can scarcely be said, however, that the question of attention in dreams is thus settled. It would be inconceivable that the terrible occurrences that may overtake us in dreams and the emotional turmoil aroused should be accompanied by 'total inattention and distraction.' Nor can it be said that that supposition agrees with the vivid memory which our dreams sometimes leave. We can probably account for the phenomena much more satisfactorily by adopting Ribot's useful distinction between voluntary attention and spontaneous attention.[16] Voluntary or artificial attention is a product of education and training. It is directed by extrinsic force, is the result of deliberation, and is accompanied by some feeling of effort. It always acts on the muscles and by the muscles; without muscular tension there can be no voluntary attention. Spontaneous or natural attention, on the other hand, is that more fundamental kind of attention which exists anteriorly to any education or training, and is the only kind of attention which animals and young children are capable of. It may be weak or strong, but always and everywhere it is based on emotional states; every creature moved by pleasure and pain is capable of spontaneous attention under the influence of those stimuli. These two kinds of attention are at the opposite poles from each other, and are incompatible with each other. There can be no doubt that, as Ribot himself pointed out, it is voluntary attention that is defective (though it may not always be entirely absent) in dreams;[17] the muscular weakness and inco-ordination of sleep involve this lack of attention which is indeed an essential condition of the restoration and repose of sleep. But all the characters of spontaneous attention are present. The attention we exercise in dreams is mainly of this fundamental, automatic, involuntary character, conditioned by the emotions we experience, and for the most part escaping all the efforts of our voluntary attention. Further, it has been ably argued by Leroy that a similar state of involuntary automatic attention, with concomitant diminution or disturbance of voluntary attention, is a necessary condition for the appearance of the visual and auditory hallucinations abnormally experienced in the waking state.[18]

There is, then, at the basis of dreaming a seemingly spontaneous procession of dream imagery which is always undergoing transformation into something different, yet not wholly different, from that which went before. It seems a mechanical flow of images, regulated by associations of resemblance, which sleeping consciousness recognises without either controlling or introducing foreign elements. This is probably the most elementary form of dreaming, that which is nearest to waking consciousness, and that in which the peripheral and retinal element of dreaming plays the largest part.

The fundamental character of this spontaneous self-evolving procession of imagery is indicated by the significant fact that it tends to take place whenever the more retinal and peripheral part of the visual apparatus is affected by the exhaustion of undue stimulation, or even when the organism generally is disturbed or run down, as in neurasthenic conditions.[19] The most obtrusive and familiar example of visual imagery is furnished by the procession of perpetually shifting and changing after-images which continue to evolve for a considerable time after we have looked at the sun or other brilliant object.[20] Less striking, but more intimately akin to the imagery of dreams, are the hypnagogic visions occurring as we fall asleep, especially after a day during which vision has been unusually stimulated and fatigued, though they do not seem necessarily dependent on such fatigue. Most vivid and instructive of all is the procession of visual imagery evoked by certain drugs. Of these the most remarkable and potent, as well as the best for study, is probably mescal, which happens also to be the only one with which I am myself well acquainted.[21] This substance provokes a constant succession of self-evolving visual imagery which constantly approaches and constantly eludes the semblance of real things; in the earlier stages these images closely resemble those produced by the kaleidoscope, and they change in a somewhat similar manner. Such spontaneous evolution of imagery is evidently a fundamental aptitude of the visual apparatus which many very slightly abnormal conditions may bring into prominence.

The power of opium is somewhat similar, and, as DeQuincey long since pointed out, such power is simply a revival of a faculty usually possessed by children, although, judging from my own experiences with mescal, drugs exert it in a far more vivid and potent degree than that in which it usually occurs in the child. The psychologists of childhood have not often investigated this phenomenon,[22] but so far as my own inquiries go, all or nearly all persons have possessed, when children, the power of seeing visions in the dark on the curtain of the closed eyelids, perhaps the representation of fairy tales they had read, perhaps merely commonplace processions of individuals or events, a tendency sometimes appearing for the same figure to recur again and again. I think it is fairly certain that the so-called 'lies' of children, told in good faith, are in part due to the occasional eruption of this faculty into daylight life. People who deny that they ever possessed this power have, almost certainly, only forgotten. I should myself be inclined to deny that I had ever had any such visionary faculty if it were not that I can recall one occasion of its presence, at about the age of seven, when sleeping with a cousin of the same age; we amused ourselves by burying our heads in the pillows and watching a connected series of pictures which we were both alike able to see, each announcing any change in the picture as soon as it took place. This fact of community of vision served to impress on my mind the existence of a faculty of which otherwise I can recall no trace.[23]

Of these various groups of allied phenomena, that which more especially concerns us in the investigation of dreams is the group of phenomena most strictly called hypnagogic, belonging, that is to say, to the ante-chamber of sleep, when the senses are in repose and waking consciousness is slipping away, or else when, as we leave the world of dreams, waking consciousness is flowing back again. This state has been known from very ancient times. Aristotle referred to it, and in the dawn of modern scientific thought Hobbes described allied phenomena.[24] The strictly psychological study of hypnagogic visions seems to have begun with Baillarger.[25] Then, some years later, Maury, who had a rich personal experience of such phenomena, devoted a chapter to the hypnagogic state, and gave it its recognised name.[26]

Hypnagogic imagery, there can be little doubt, is not a purely ocular phenomenon, even when it is stimulated by ocular fatigue. It is a mixed phenomenon, partly retinal and partly central. That is to say that the eye supplies entoptic glimmerings, and the brain, acting on the suggestions thus received, superposes mental pictures to those glimmerings.[27] They are thus analogous to the pictures we may see in the fire or in the clouds. It must be added that the other senses also furnish corresponding rudiments which are filled in by the central activity; this is notably the case with faint buzzings and sounds in the ear, and in addition, muscular twitches and internal visceral sensations, all these becoming more prominent as the attentive activity of waking life subsides.[28]

What is the relation of hypnagogic imagery to dreams? Johannes Müller, the great physiologist, long ago identified them, as previously had Gruithuisen and Burdach, while Maury—who himself possessed, however, a somewhat abnormal and irritable nervous system—regarded hypnotic imagery as furnishing the whole of the formative element of dreams, as being 'the embryogeny of dreams'; he frequently found that images which appeared to him in this way before going to sleep reappeared in dreams. This is supported by Mourly Vold, who made experiments on himself, and by fixing images as he fell asleep dreamed of the same images. Goblot, however, while regarding hypnagogic imagery as analogous with dream imagery, denies that it is identical. Since the hypnagogic state is the porch to sleep and dreams—the praedormitium, as Weir Mitchell terms it—we can scarcely fail to admit with Maury that hypnagogic imagery presents us with the germinal stuff of dreams. If it is not identical with the fully formed dream, it is still the early stage of dreaming. This is certainly the view suggested by my own experience, even though I have never definitely recognised a dream as related to a previous hypnagogic image. It has, however, occasionally happened to me that as I have begun to lose waking consciousness a procession of images has drifted before my vision, and suddenly one of the figures I see has spoken. This hallucinatory voice occurring before I was fully asleep has startled me into full waking consciousness, and I have realised that, while yet in the hypnagogic stage, I was assisting at the birth of a dream.

There is one point, it may be noted in passing, at which dreams do not usually correspond with some of the phenomena with which we may most naturally compare them. I refer to their presentation of colour. In the dreams of most people colour is rare. We seem usually, from this point of view, to remember a dream as we would remember a photograph, or, if any colour at all is present, a tinted drawing. Judging from my own experience, I should say that it is difficult to decide whether the absence of colour is due to its actual absence from the dream imagery, or merely to its failure to make any impression on memory. Some careful observers have, however, stated that the colour of their dream imagery is definitely grey. Thus Beaunis states that his dream imagery is usually en grisaille, like an image recalled in the waking state, though occasionally the colour is vivid, and Dr. Savage says that in his dreams colour is rarely or never present. 'I see landscapes of black and white, and flowers assume their true form, but not their colours.'[29] This greyness of dream imagery corresponds to the disappearance of colour under chloroform anaesthesia. 'So long as the eyes could be held open voluntarily,' says Elmer Jones, 'vision seemed quite normal, save that the colours of the spectrum faded out into a grey band.' Even in the early stage of some insanities also, as Stoddart has found, some degree of colour-blindness is present.[30] Grace Andrews states, indeed, that in nearly half of her own visual dreams colour sensations were included. This seems to me exceptional. In my own experience, the emergence of a single colour, which usually strikes me as beautiful, is not rare. I see, for instance, a friend drinking wine copiously from a large goblet, and I judge by the colour of the wine that it is hock, or I am impressed by the shimmering grey tone of the poplin dresses worn by a group of ladies, which seems to indicate that the tone of the whole picture was not grey. I am inclined to think that when colour in a dream becomes more pronounced than this, the dream is not normal, but is associated with some degree of cerebral disturbance, and especially the presence of headache. This would agree with the fact that persons subject to migraine are liable to visual colour phenomena. As an example of a vivid colour dream associated with headache, I may bring forward the following: I dreamed that an artist of note, with whom I am acquainted, was painting my portrait. (The pose of the portrait was standing, but I was lying down; this, however, caused me no surprise.) I saw the colours of the picture with great vividness, and I noted the extreme rapidity with which the artist painted; thus the red and black pattern of the necktie he had given me was suddenly changed to a totally different blue pattern, and the whole picture then appeared as a harmony of blues, the rapidity with which the artist effected these changes impressing me as very remarkable. In another dream in which I saw a painter occupied on a picture, a landscape representing sunrise, memory recalled the effect of light as vivid, but no definite sense of colour remained. This seems to me the normal condition of things in the ordinary dreams of most persons, colour, when it occurs, or when it is remembered, being for the most part confined to a single object or a single tint, and often being associated with a feeling of aesthetic pleasure.

In ordinary dreaming there is usually something more than a spontaneous procession of related imagery. There is a more definitely central and psychic element. There is association, not only by obvious resemblance, but by contiguity, usually the casual contiguity of images received during the previous day, which forces together images related to each other indeed, but by no means obviously. Dreaming consciousness embodies and actively co-ordinates definite, and not merely random, images. The passive and spontaneous flow of imagery is thus modified in its course.

The image of the magic lantern well illustrates this character of dream experiences. The movement of the cinematograph, indeed, scarcely corresponds to that fusion of heterogeneous images which marks dream visions. Our dreams are like dissolving views in which the dissolving process is carried on swiftly or slowly, but always uninterruptedly, so that at any moment two (often, indeed, more) incongruous pictures are presented to consciousness, which strives to make one whole of them, and sometimes succeeds, and is sometimes baffled. Or we may say that the problem presented to dreaming consciousness resembles that experiment in which psychologists pronounce three wholly unconnected words and require the subject to combine them at once in a connected sentence. It is unnecessary to add that such analogies fail to indicate the subtle complexity of the apparatus which is at work in the manufacture of dreams.

By this mechanism of dreaming, isolated impressions, or else impressions which have a resemblance or a connection which is not obvious to the waking intelligence, flow together in dreams to be welded into a whole. There is produced, in the strictest sense, a confusion. For instance, a lady, who in the course of the day has admired a fine baby and bought a big fish for dinner, dreams with horror and surprise of finding a fully developed live baby sewed up in a large cod-fish. Again, a lady who had been cooking in the course of the day and in the evening had read a scientific description of the way birds obtain and utilise their food, such as fruit and snails, dreams at night that she has discovered when out walking a kind of animal-fruit, a damson containing a snail within it, which she views with delight as admirably adapted for culinary purposes. Another lady, after carving a duck at dinner, dreams that she is trying to cut off a duck's leg, but seems to realise in her dream at the same time that it is really her husband's neck she is hacking at.[31] In a dream of my own, children's heads took the form and shape of flowers of various shapes and hues, though mainly of the composite order (like chrysanthemums), and their eyes looked out from between the petals.

It must be added that in a very considerable proportion of cases the combinations produced in dreams are far more plausible than in any of the instances just narrated; the whole dream may thus easily follow as commonplace and matter-of-fact a course as in real life. Thus, after going to live in a new neighbourhood, I dreamed that I entered a shop belonging to a certain firm, and saw there an employé who, in real life, to my knowledge, had previously left another shop belonging to the same firm; an entirely probable combination was thus effected, and the dream conversation that followed was equally natural and probable. We do not go out of our way in dreams to invent absurdities; we simply accept the data presented to us, dealing with them as rationally as the intellectual instruments at our disposal may permit.

The dream constituted by the falling together of trivial reminiscences is not always, however, as commonplace and plausible as in the dream just narrated. In other cases the falling together of equally trivial reminiscences may constitute a fantastic and imaginative picture altogether outside waking experience or waking thought. Thus I dream that it is my duty to watch beside a great king while he sleeps. He lies on a huge bed, fully clothed and booted, and with a great crimson mantle thrown over him. I am permitted to lie on the edge of the bed outside the mantle, but must on no account close my eyes, for I must be ready to respond at once to his call. The elements of such a picture are obviously so simple and commonplace that it is not surprising that I could not find that even one of them had been specially present to waking consciousness. Yet the picture that at that particular moment they fell together to compose—like the broken fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope—is altogether alien alike to my experience and to my imagination.