CHAPTER VIII.THE PHENOMENA OF DREAM.
Such being thePhysiology and Psychology of Dream—that is to say, the conditions of the bodily and mental mechanism under which the phenomena of Dream are presented—let us observe those phenomena and from the facts noted endeavour to learn what light is thrown by them upon Psychology. A mental state so strange and abnormal cannot fail to assist in the solution of that great problem of the Mechanism of Man which it is the vocation of Psychology to solve. Is that Mechanism moved or directed by any but a self-generated force? Is it compounded of any but the tangible material structure? Does Soul exist and, if it exists, what is its relationship to the body?
A Dream is not a confused crowd of disconnected ideas. It is a succession of associated incidents more or less orderly, even when incongruous, improbable or even impossible. The mind of the sleeper constructs a drama, often having many parts played by many persons; but always himself is one of the actors. Assuggestionis the process bywhich the mind works in waking life—one idea suggesting another with which it had been at some past time associated and then another linked with that, and so forth—so does the unsleeping mind of the sleeper present to the Conscious Self a succession of suggested pictures which other mental faculties weave into a story that is enacted before himself with all its scenery and machinery! And this drama is not performed in dumb show or in pantomime merely, but it is a drama spoken as well as acted by the players, men, women, or animal, who appear to the dreamer to play before him and with him their several parts as perfectly as they would have been enacted in actual life.
Hence we learn that in dream, as in the waking state, the mind acts in obedience to the laws of mind. The various mental functions are not exercised vaguely, but in more or less of orderly relationship to one another. Thus, imagination presents pictures which are accepted as having been brought from without by the senses and therefore to the sleeper are as real as if they had been objects of sight. These ideal pictures, thus received as real, according to their various characteristics excite precisely the same emotions as they would have excited had they been real. But although the picture is imaginary, the emotion is actual. We do not merely dream that we are angry or fearful; we feel actual anger and real fear. The reader may remember that often theemotion excited by the dream has continued to be felt after waking and when the dream itself has vanished. Indeed we know not how much the mental character of the day is influenced by the passions and emotions that have been stimulated by the dreams of the night, the mental excitement continuing after the cause of it has vanished and is forgotten.
The most wonderful of the many wonders that attend the condition of dream is the development of theinventivefaculty so far beyond its capacity in the waking state. Reflect for a moment what this performance is. Every dreamer, however ignorant, however stupid, however young, performs a feat which few could accomplish in the waking state, when in full command of all their mental faculties. Every dream is a story. Most dreams are dramas, having not a story merely, but often many actors, whose characters are as various as on the stage of real life.
What does the dreaming mind?
Not merely does it invent the ideal story; it invents also all the characters that play parts in it! Nor this only. It places in the mouth of each of those characters speech appropriate to the character of each! Yet are all of these dialogues invented by the mind of the sleeper! In a restless night many such dream-dramas, each having its own distinct plot and actors, will be invented by the dreamer, and a dialogue will be constructed by himself inwhich each of the actors will play his proper part. Strange as the assertion may appear, it isa factwhich a moment’s reflection will confirm, that the ignorant ploughboy in his dreams has made more stories and invented vastly more characters to enact them and constructed more appropriate dialogues for those characters than the most copious dramatist or novelist—aye, more than Shakespeare himself!
Another suggestive feature of the phenomena of dream is themarvellous speedof the mental action. Working untrammelled by the slow motions of the body, the dreaming mind sets at defiance all the waking conceptions of time. A dream of a series of adventures which would extend over many days is, by the mind in dream, enacted in a few minutes; yet it is all performed—all perfect—all minutely perceived, said and done; proving that, when the mind is untrammelled by the body, it has other very different conceptions of time. May it not be that time, as counted by our waking thoughts, is in truth the ideal time, and that mental time as measured in dream is the real time?
Not long ago I was enabled to apply some measure to this remarkable difference between the action of the mind independently of the body and its action when conducted through the slow moving mechanism of the body. Called at the usual hour in the morning, I looked at my watch and in about two minutes fell asleep again. I dreamed a dream of a series of events that in their performanceoccupied what the mind conceived to be a whole day—events in which I was an actor and played a part that would have occupied a day in actual doing. Waking suddenly with the influence of the dream upon me and the memory of it full before me, I looked at my watch again, thinking that I must have been sleeping for an hour and had lost the train. I found that, in fact, I had been asleep but four minutes. In four minutes my mind had passed through the history of a day, had invented that history, and contemplated it as a whole day’s action, although it was in fact a day’s work done by the mind in four minutes. This may give us some conception of what is the capacity of the Soul for perception and action when, if ever, there is a falling away from it of the cumbrous bodily material mechanism through which alone, in its present stage of evolution, it is adapted to communicate with the external material world.
Another phenomenon of Dream isexaltation of the mental facultiesgenerally. Often there is an extraordinary development of special faculties in special dreams. A proof of this is found in the fact, already noted, that dream itself is an invention of the mind whose then capacities far exceed anything of which it is capable when the body is awake and imposing upon it the conditions of its own slow, because material—that is molecular—action. Not only do weinventthe dream, but weact itin thought. Not merely do we act in itourselves, but we paint the scenery, construct the dresses and decorations, invent the characters, and put into their mouths the language that would properly be theirs had they been beings of flesh and blood instead of shadows summoned by the fancy. Almost every faculty of the mind must be exercised upon such a work. Even the waking mental condition will not enable us to do this. If you doubt, try it. Set yourself to invent a dream and describe it on paper, making each one of the personages with whom you have peopled it talk in his proper character. Unless you are a skilful and practised dramatist you will find yourself wholly at fault. Remember that what you in the full possession of your intellect have failed to do, the most ignorant and stupid do every night and you will begin to measure this marvel of the exaltation of the mental powers that attends upon the condition of dream. If you indulge in the pleasant but dangerous practice of reading in bed, have you not often, on closing the book, extinguishing the candle, and turning to sleep, continued in a state of dream to read on, believing that you were still reading the book. But what was the fact? Your mind was then composing all you dreamed that you were reading. It was inventing a continuation of the argument or narrative, or whatever you may have been perusing when sleep stole upon you and you lapsed into dream. Have you neverdreamed that you were preaching a sermon, or reading aloud, or composing music, or singing a song? Probably, in your waking state, you could do neither. In dream, your mind does it all without a conscious effort. Nor is it, as some have suggested, merely a fancy that the mind is so acting and not a positive action of the mind. If wakened while so dreaming, the argument, the speech, the song, will recur to the waking consciousness and become a positive memory capable of being subsequently recalled. Sometimes the dream vanishes after an interval and cannot be recollected by any effort of the Will, although it may recur in dream long years afterwards. In this mannerColeridgecomposed that beautiful fragment of a poem, “Kublai Khan.†His mind had wrought the whole in a dream. Suddenly waking with a vivid impression of that dream, he grasped a pen and began to write the remembered rhymes of what had been a long poem, although composed in dream with the speed at which the mind works when untrammelled by the conditions of its material mechanism. He seized pen and paper and had set down the beautiful lines that have been preserved when he was interrupted by some matter of business. On his return to resume the work, the dream had vanished and the world to its great loss has received nothing but the exquisite fragment we read now.
This mental exaltation so frequent in dream isrecognised in some familiar practices, the reason for which is, perhaps, not known to those who resort to them. In our schooldays, a lesson was best learned by reading it when going to bed. It was then easily remembered in the morning. The advice so often given, when a matter of moment is presented, to “Sleep upon it,†is a recognition of this higher mental action in sleep. The Mind seems in sleep unconsciously to work upon the idea presented to it, and we wake with clearer conceptions and larger views of theprosandcons. I have known cases in which a doubting mind has thus been “made up†without conscious perception of the convincing argument.
Although in dream the mind works with such wonderful rapidity that the events of a day may be enacted in a few minutes, it has not quite lost its consciousness of the measure of external time. A desire to wake at a particular hour will often be followed by an actual awakening at that hour. Continued mental consciousness of the desire is unintelligible. But in what manner does the mind count the flight of a time whose measure is so different from its own conceptions of time?
Say, that you want to wake at six o’clock. You fall asleep with this impression upon the mind; but you fall also into the condition of dream and in that condition your mind is engaged in inventing adventures that are the business of a long day. Nevertheless, it preserves the consciousness of thetime as it is in the external world and you wake at the desired hour. I can suggest no other solution of this than that the brain that dreams, and the Conscious Self that perceives the dream, are two entities, and that it is the Conscious Self or Soul that notes the flight of time in the external world, while the dreaming brain is revelling in its own conception of time as measured by the flow of its own ideas, and not in hours measured by the motions of the earth and moon. Another solution suggests itself. May not the duality of the mind, the action of the double brain, which explains so many other mental phenomena, account for this also?
But these phenomena of dream are proofs that to the mind “time†is more ideal than real; that the measure of it may differ in individuals and still more in races. May it not be that thus lives are equalised and that to the ephemera its one day of life may appear to be as long as our lives appear to us? A life is practically as long or short as itappearsto the mind to be.
Dreams are rarely, if ever, without foundation; that is to say, they are the product of somesuggestion, although it may be difficult to trace them to their sources. Very slight suggestions suffice to set the mind in motion, as is proved by a multitude of recorded cases which the memory of every reader will present to him. The senses are not wholly paralysed in ordinary sleep. They carryto the mind impressions of various degrees of power and act with more or less of force according to the condition of the recipient ganglion. Sounds are heard and suggest dreams. But the loudest sounds are not always perceived most readily. The unaccustomed sound most startles the consciousness. Often a whisper will waken when the roar of cannon makes no impression upon the sleeper. A dweller in a noisy street sleeps soundly amid the roar of carts and carriages and is wakeful in the country by reason of the silence. Habit governs this as so many others of our sense impressions. We learnnotto hear. Hence the influence of trifling impressions upon the sleeping senses when powerful ones fail to reach us. Very slight impressions suffice to suggest the subjects of dreams. The mind having taken the direction given by that impulse forthwith employs its inventive faculties in the construction of a story based upon the faint lines of that suggested subject.
Even when awake we are ignorant what impulses set up trains of thought. We know not why this or that idea “comes into the head.†The suggesting cause is often so slight as to be imperceptible. The brain is an organ of inconceivable sensitiveness. Its fibres are so delicate that millions are packed into the circumference of a sixpence. Yet has each fibre its own function and each is a musical chord competent to catch and to vibrate to motionsof the ether which the senses cannot perceive. It is probable (not proved) that in sleep, when not distracted by the claims of the nerve system and the thronging impressions brought by the senses; these brain fibres are vastly more sensitive and moved by still slighter action of the ether than in waking life.
In Dream we never lose the consciousness of our own identity. We retain our individuality. You dream often that you aresomethingother than you are, but never that you are some otherperson. Does not this indicate the existence of an entity, other than the dreaming brain, which preserves its oneness and its sanity while the material organ with which it is associated and through which it communicates with the external world is, as it were, forgetting its reason, its experience and itself, and so becoming in very truth insane.
And here we touch upon the most perplexing characteristic of dream. We are conscious of existence, of individuality, and, in a slight degree, of sense impressions. We have ideas, reflections, emotions, sentiments, passions. We can invent stories, construct characters, endow them with dramatic language, paint ideal pictures, make speeches, compose music and conduct a train of argument. But withal we are not rational. We canthinkwise things, but wearethe veriest fools of nature. Every mental faculty is awake and alive—save one—namely, the faculty, whateverit be, that enables us to distinguish between fancy and fact, between the possible and the impossible, the congruous and the incongruous; the faculty, in brief, which separates sanity from insanity.
In dream, with rare exceptions, we are not conscious that we are dreaming. Fancies are accepted as facts, shadows as substances, the ideal as the real. And they are so accepted without suspicion or doubt. Weseethem,hearthem,feelthem. Nothing in our actual waking life is more real to us than are the unrealities of dream at the moment of dreaming. Probably there are few readers who have not occasionally dreamed that they were dreaming, and while noting the drama have said to themselves “this is a dream.†But these are rare exceptions to the rule that a dream is accepted by the sleeping mind as an event of actual occurrence and the scenes and persons implicitly believed to be objective and not subjective; that is to say—as being then actually existing in the external world.
So believing, what are the materials to which this implicit credence is given? Here we arrive at the most perplexing of the problems presented by the phenomena of dream.
We accept without hesitation, or questioning, or even a suspicion of its unreality, that which in waking life would have been banished instantly as the baseless fabric of a vision. We believe implicitlyin objects and actions which, when awake, we should have pronounced to be impossible. Moreover we contemplate the wildest conceptions of the fancy without the slightest consciousness of their incongruity or folly. Nothing is too impossible or unreal for acceptance by the dreamer as facts that cause him neither surprise at their presence nor wonder how they come to be.
What is the change in the mental condition that has wrought this mental revolution—not slowly and by degrees, but wholly and in a moment? At this instant, the mind is competent to discern the ideal from the real, the shadow from the substance, the practical from the impossible. In the next moment it can distinguish neither—all appears to itself to be equally possible, probable, real. Starting from sleep, the normal state is recovered, but not so speedily as it is lost. The dream itself sometimes continues after the senses are restored. The memory of it remains longer and its unconscious influence longer still. Passions and emotions which the dream has kindled do not subside at once and often the agitation continues to disturb the mind long after the cause of it has vanished from the memory.
Two answers present themselves.
1. This marvellous character of dream may be consequent upon the severance of the mind from its communication with the external world by reason of the partial paralysis of the senses.
2. Some one or more of the mental faculties may be sleeping while others are awake and active.
The first is the solution commonly accepted. It is contended that the senses correct the vagaries of the mind; that we are enabled to distinguish between the creations of the mind and the impressions brought to it from the external world solely by the consciousness we have, when we are awake, of the action of the senses and the knowledge we have that the impressions borne to us by the senses are objective—that is, made by something existing without ourselves. If, for instance, you close your eyes and give rein to the imagination, a stream of ideas—pictures of persons and places—flows before the mind’s eye. You do not mistake these for realities. You are conscious that they are born of your own brain. Had you been asleep and dreaming, instead of being awake and using your senses, you would not have discovered that these mental pictures were subjective only; you would have accepted them implicitly as objective impressions brought to you by your senses.
This, however, explains but a portion of the phenomenon. Even if it be a true solution, it accounts only for the acceptance in dream of the ideal as real. It leaves wholly unexplained the more remarkable feature exhibited in the entire unconsciousness by the dreamer of the absurdities and impossibilities presented in the dream and theabsence of surprise and wonder how such things can be. In the waking state, the mind would therefore reject them instantly as the illusions they are. Hence the reasonable conclusion that, in addition to the sleep of the senses and of thewill, some part of the material mechanism of the mind is also sleeping or its activity is suspended during dream.
The investigation is of serious moment, for it raises some other questions of even greater importance. If the explanation be sufficient, it determines some moot points in Mental Physiology. It proves that the mental machine, the brain, isnotone and indivisible—that thewholebrain is not employed in each mental act, as contended by Dr.Carpenter.
To what mental faculties are we indebted for our waking consciousness of incongruity, impracticability, absurdity, irrationality? Obviously these faculties must be slumbering in dream. Totheirtemporary paralysis this most remarkable phenomenon of dream is certainly due.
The popular notion is thatreasonis the slumbering faculty. We talk of reason as being the special attribute of Man. In fact there is no such faculty. There is a mental process we call reasoning; but it is performed by the joint action of various mental faculties. One presents the things to be reasoned upon; another compares them and presents their resemblances and differences;a third enables us, by the process we callreasoning, to apply these resemblances and differences to some third subject and thus from the known to predicate the unknown.
It is familiar to every reader that this process of reasoning is not always suspended in dream. On the contrary, it is sometimes abnormally active. We reason rightly often, but on wrong premisses. What we are unable to discover in dream is the unreality of the subject matter upon which we are reasoning.
If, for instance, you dream that you are making a speech or preaching a sermon. In your dream you pursue a logical argument, but you found it upon imagined facts that are untrue and improbable, which the waking mind would not entertain for a moment, but which in your dream you accept as true and implicitly believe to be real.
We shall, perhaps, arrive at the solution of this problem by the process of exhaustion.
The faculty of imagination, that shapes to the dream ideal pictures of things, is not sleeping. The faculties that perform the process of reasoning are not sleeping.Comparison—the power to compare the ideal with the real—alone is wanting. We mistake the shadows of the mind for substances. We accept the brain-born visions as realities. Why? Because we are unable to compare them. In brief, Comparison is the faculty, paralysedin sleep, whose absence causes the credulity of dream.
Of this fact there can be no doubt. But a very formidable difficulty here presents itself. How and why is it that this faculty alone is found to slumber when the greater part of the mental mechanism is awake and active?
It has been one of the most perplexing problems of Psychology. A solution of it has occurred to me which I submit to the consideration of the reader, but as a suggestion merely. It is too novel to be offered as anything more than a suggestion.
Each mental faculty can perform only one act at the same instant of time. It is one of the conditions of existence here that all consciousness shall be in succession. Hence indeed our conception of time. If any other being could obtain many perceptions simultaneously, and not in succession, to that being there would be notime, in our sense of the term. But the process of comparison involves the contemplation together of the two things (or ideas of things) to be compared. This difficulty is removed by the double brain. Each brain presents one of the ideas to be compared and upon these the faculty of comparison employs itself, discerning their resemblances and differences. If so it be, the cause of our incapacity to discover the absurdities of dream is the partial paralysis (or sleep) of one of the two mental faculties that present the ideas of objects and the consequent incapacityof the faculty of comparison to discharge its proper function of informing us what of our mental impressions are real and what illusory.
And this raises a curious question as to the relative functions and operations of the two brains. In profound slumber, when both brains are sleeping, there is no consciousness—time is annihilated to such a sleeper and awakening seems to follow immediately upon falling asleep, although in reality many hours may have passed. When the brain is sleeping but partially there is some consciousness of time in sleep and of the lapse of time upon awaking. Is such partial sleep the slumber ofone brain only, and are these phenomena of dream due to the action of that one brain deprived of the correcting influence of the other brain? Does the faculty of comparison fail to show us that our mental impressions are subjective and not objective because it is not assisted by the normal action of the duplicate faculty of the other brain? Comparison is the foundation of the process of reasoning. It has been noticed that persons suffering from hemiplegia—that is, from disease of one brain only—often lose the power to compare and consequently the capacity for reasoning readily and correctly. May it not be that a similar condition is produced by temporary paralysis of the brain in sleep? As already stated, the power to reason is not absent in dream. We often reason elaborately and well, taking the ideal pictures as real incidents.We accept as objective facts what are merely mental impressions and thus build an argument on an incorrect assumption. The reasoning is right, but the basis of it is false. Question each mental faculty in turn and it will appear that but one is at fault in dream—namely,comparison. We are unable to discern the difference between the mental and the sensual impression—the self-created and the sense-borne idea—because we are incompetent to compare them and it is by comparison alone that we can distinguish the false from the true. I throw out this, as a suggestion merely, to Mental Philosophers and Psychologists.
Indeed, the fact that we have two perfect brains with every mental faculty in duplicate (as contended by SirHenry Hollandand now conclusively established by the experiments ofBrown-Sequardand ProfessorFerrier), has opened a new field to the Mental Philosopher and Psychologist. It must have the most intimate relationship, not to the phenomena of Sleep and Dream alone but to all the phenomena of Mind. In this great fact will doubtless be found the obvious solution of many problems hitherto insoluble. Foremost among those philosophical puzzles has been the instantaneous lapse of the Mind intoinsanityin dream, and the no less marvellous manner in which upon waking we pass almost as quickly out of that insane condition into sanity.
These are the principal phenomena of Dream and the study of them cannot fail to throw a flood of light upon mental physiology and psychology. In them we are enabled to view the operations of the mind and the relationship of soul and body under conditions that reveal to us parts of the mechanism of man that are wholly concealed from us in the normal state of that relationship. The strange neglect of such an obvious means of knowledge is doubtless due to the fundamental error that has excluded Mind and Soul from the category of physical sciences and consigned them to the hopeless region of metaphysics, persisting in their pursuit by abstractions, argument and conjecture, and refusing to them investigation byfacts, as the other sciences are now investigated. If the phenomena of dream were strange and rare as are those of somnambulism, they would as much excite our curiosity and strike us with amazement. But they are not wondered at only because they are so familiar. If dream, instead of being common to us all, were developed only in a few, the persons subject to it would certainly be denounced as impostors and prosecuted as rogues and vagabonds by the High Priests of Science. But the very facility for examination of the mental condition of dream should induce those who really desire to promote the most important of all knowledge—the knowledge of ourselves, our constitution, our mechanism,and our destiny—to seek where we may most reasonably expect to find it—in the condition in which the Mind is every night practically severed from its connection with the body and works by its own impulses, without the aid or incumbrance of the senses, and without the directing power of the intelligence and itsWill.