CHAPTER VII.THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DREAM.
The base of the brain being quite asleep, the central ganglia being partially asleep, the cerebral hemispheres or some part of them being awake, we have the physiological condition in which occur the Phenomena of Dream.
The first coming on of Dream is found at the moment of “falling asleep,” before actual sleep has begun.Thenweareconscious for an instant that we are dreaming—that the mental impressions are not external realities. But this consciousness is for a moment only. Either we start into waking life and the incipient dream is banished, or we fall into actual sleep and the condition of complete dream is established.
The process is worthy of note. You are engaged in some occupation—say that you are reading a novel. You “feel sleepy;” your eyes continue to pass over the page; your mind pictures the persons, actions and emotions of the story. But by degrees the ideas become dim and shadowy and theattentionflags. Then your mind wanders away toother scenes and persons, which come into it uncalled for and even against your Will. But the power of that Will is lessening also. At first it is strong to banish the intruding thoughts; but as “the attention” relaxes more and more, so more and more does your Will cease to control the now thick-coming fancies. In that incipient stage of dream you know that these dream-pictures are only dreams. Never do you mistake them for realities. Soon the influence of sleep steals over the mind. The eyelids close and exclude the impressions of the external world that are made through the sense of sight. The other senses are paralyzed also. The creations of the brain take full possession of the mind. You are nowasleepanddreaming.
If the condition of dream were not so familiar—if it did not occur to all of us, but only to some few persons in abnormal conditions, it would appear to the whole world as very wonderful. Suppose that dreaming were a faculty possessed only by persons of a certain constitution; that a Dreamer had told you how, when he was asleep, he saw and conversed with the dead, beheld distant places, lived another life, walked upon water, flew through the air, performed impossibilities, felt passions and sentiments and exercised intellectual powers far exceeding those of his waking life, should we not say of him that he was a madman or an impostor? Would he not be prosecuted by the high priests ofphysical science as a rogue and vagabond, and sent to prison by the Scientists or to an asylum by the Doctors?
But because all of us do these things nightly the wonder of them does not strike us. We do not pause to think how great the marvel is, nor how it comesto be. May I venture to hope that the reader will be induced to look upon this marvellous mental phenomenon with some curiosity and hereafter to recognise in the phenomena of dream, not only something to awaken curiosity, but something to command his serious attention, as being peculiarly fitted to reveal to the inquirer some of the mysteries of Mind, its structure, its faculties, the manner of its action. The phenomena of Dream open to us the path by which we may hope to make the first advances into the science of Psychology, for they arefactsknown to all, disputed by none and which even the Materialists cannot deny. Happily, neither their vocabulary of abuse, nor their weapons of prosecution and persecution, can be directed against those who investigate the phenomena of dream. Their existence cannot be denied, nor can they be explained by attributing them to imposture.
How comes this transformation from sanity to insanity, wrought in a moment, when Sleep has closed upon the Mind the portals of the senses and left it almost isolated from the real material external world to revel in its own imaginary world?
Some rein that held the mind in check when awake has certainly been taken from it at the instant sleep occurs.
What is that lost rein—that paralyzed power?
It is notConsciousness. We do not lose our individuality in dream. Never does the dreamer suppose himself to be another person. He may dream that he has assumed other characters, that he is a king, or a beggar, but still it ishimselfwho has become a king and isactingking.
Nor isthe Willabsent. The dreaming mind is conscious of the exercise of its Will and believes that its commands are obeyed. But the Will is powerless to compel action. Its commands arenotobeyed. In dream wewillto speak, to run, to do what the body does freely when in our waking state wewillto do. Wewillin dream as wewillwhen awake, but the mechanism of the nerves that move the body refuses to obey the mandate of the Will however strenuously exerted.
Imagination, on the other hand, is even more lively in dream than in our waking time.
TheReasoning Facultiesare not asleep, for weargue, often rightly—only we reason upon wrong premisses. We accept the visions of the mind—the ideas presented to the Conscious Self—as being real and then we reason upon them rationally. What Lawyer has not often dreamed that he was addressing a logical legal argument to an approving Court and, when wakened, rememberingand reviewing that argument, has found it to be without a flaw?
TheEmotionsare not extinguished when we dream. The presentation of imaginary incidents which, if they had been real, would have kindled the passions in waking life, rouse those self-same passions to equal if not to greater fury in dream. Nor is thepassionfanciful. We do not merely dream that we are angry. Very real and hot anger is kindled by the fancy-born picture of the dream, as the reader will readily discover if he recalls the sensation that attends upon being awakened at the moment of irritation in a dream. It is with all the other passions and emotions as with anger. The incidents of a dream excite them as if those incidents were true. Wherefore? Because they appear to the mind to be true.
Thus by a process of exhaustion we may hope to arrive at some knowledge of the cause of the special characteristic of dream—that is to say, theabsolute belief we have in its reality during its enactment. The inquiry cannot fail to throw a great light upon mental structure and upon the relationship of the mind to the body and to the external world.
The first fact we learn from observing the action of the mind, when thus severed from communication with the external world, is its perfect independence, its entire unconsciousness of its loss, its capacity to create a world for itself and live alife of its own. If such a condition could be imagined as a mind continuing to live in a dead body, we might find in this phenomenon of sleep how the mind could exist in the same state of activity as now, feel the same emotions of pleasure and of pain, and enjoy a life as real to itself, although imaginary in fact, as is the actual existence of any living man.
But it teaches a lesson yet more important. If the mind can thus live a life of its own when severed from the influences of the body by the paralysis of a section of the brain in sleep, is not the presumption strong that thissomethingthat does not sleep with the body, that preserves an individual consciousness, that has memory and a Will, can create a world of its own and live and act in it with entire belief in its reality and which has a perfect sense of pleasure and of pain, is not the material brain merely, but something other than brain and of which the brain hemispheres are only the material mechanism? If the Conscious Self lives and works thus when the body is dead to it in sleep, may it not well be—(nay, does it not suggest even a probability?)—that when permanent severance by death is substituted for the temporary severance by sleep, the same Conscious Self may continue to exist with other perceptive and receptive powers adapted to its changed conditions of being?
Why, then, are we in dream so credulous asto believe implicitly that whatever visions are presented to us by the busy fancy are realities? Why do we accept impossibilities and incongruities without a question of their truth and scarcely with a sense of surprise or wonder? We have seen that it isnotbecause thereasoningfaculties are asleep,—for often they are very active in dream.
Simply, it is because we accept as real and as having been sense-conveyed, and therefore as representing external objects, the ideas that are in fact created by the mind itself.
And wherefore do we thus accept them?
The answer throws a flood of light upon the Mechanism of Mind and the Mechanism of Man.
All our sensations are mental. Whether self-created within or brought from without by the senses, we are conscious only of thementalimpression. That alone isrealto us. That aloneexistsfor us.
But by what faculty do we, in the waking state, distinguish between the self-created and the sense-borne ideas and impressions, so as to recognise the former as ideal and the latter as real?
For instance; you think of an absent friend, and you have in your mind a picture of him more or less accurate. You see your friend in person and then another picture of him is in your mind, brought to it by the sense of sight. Your perceptions of both are merely mental pictures. But, nevertheless, you readily distinguish themand call the mind-drawn imageidealand the sense-brought imagereal—meaning by these phrases that the former has no objective existence, but the latter is actually existing without you.
By what process is this result obtained? What enables you so to distinguish them?
It can only be that you areconsciousof the action of thesenses. You feel that your eye is employed in the process. You have learned byexperiencethat the actual presence of an external object is only to be accepted when the information of it is brought to you by one of your senses.
Thus it is that, when we are awake, the senses correct the action of the mind and our capacity to distinguish the real from the ideal is due to the information given by the senses.
It is plain now why in dream we believe the ideal to be real. Thesensesbeing severed from the Mind by sleep, the Mind has lost the instrument by which it learns, when awake, what is shadow and what substance. As the necessary consequence, all ideas appear to it to be real because they are all alike. Inasmuch, then, as all the pictures that throng the mind were originally brought to it by the senses, it has no means, when an idea comes before it, of discerning whether it is a newly brought idea or only the revival of an idea already existing in itself. Hence it is that the Mind cannot but accept all its self-creationsas realities and when these are combined in a connected drama, the whole is viewed by the Conscious Self as an actual adventure of the body, and not, as in the waking time it would have been viewed, as merely a creation of the busy fancy.
But the conclusion from this is that there is a Conscious Self, distinct from the brain action which it contemplates and criticises.
That in fact wehaveSouls.
Or rather that weareSouls, clothed with a molecular mechanism necessary for communication with the molecular part of creation, in which the present stage of being is to be passed.