The source of the common confusion of dream imagery is to be found in very varying motives. In alarge proportion of cases, what we witness is merely the flowing together of impressions which have no real resemblance, but which happen to have been received at nearly the same time, and to admit of being fused; thus, in one case, occupation during the day partly in the fowl-yard and partly in the garden, led a lady to the dream project of breeding chickens by planting fowls' heads. Very frequently, however, there is a real resemblance in the two objects combined, although it is not a resemblance which would ever present itself to waking consciousness. The fowl-yard will supply another instance of this confusion also. I went to sleep thinking of a friend who was that night to stay at a certain hotel I had never seen. I dreamed that I saw the hotel in question; its façade was not unlike that of a common type of hotel, but the roof was flat and at no very great height from the ground, so that I was able to overlook the building and see into all the windows, an arrangement that struck me as bad. My ability to overlook the building was not, however, accompanied by any perception of its diminutiveness. On awakening I remembered that my wife had received a chicken incubator the day before, and we had examined it in the evening. The image of the hotel had fused with the image of the incubator.
In another dream of the same type I imagined that I was with a dentist who was about to extract a tooth from a patient. Before applying the forceps he remarked to me (at the same time setting fire to a perfumed cloth at the end of something like a broomstick,in order to dissipate the unpleasant odour) that it was the largest tooth he had ever seen. When extracted I found that it was indeed enormous, in the shape of a caldron, with walls an inch thick. Taking from my pocket a tape measure (such as I carried in waking life), I found the diameter to be not less than twenty-five inches; the interior was like roughly-hewn rock, and there were sea-weeds and lichen-like growths within. The size of the tooth seemed to me large, but not extraordinarily so. It is well known that pain in the teeth, or the dentist's manipulations, cause those organs to seem of extravagant extent; in dreams this tendency rules unchecked; thus a friend once dreamed that mice were playing about in a cavity in her tooth. But for the dream just quoted, there was no known dental origin; it arose solely or chiefly from a walk during the previous afternoon among the rocks of the Cornish coast at low tide, and the fantastic analogy, which had not occurred to waking consciousness, suggested itself during sleep.
In another dream, illustrating the same kind of confusion of images having a real resemblance unnoticed in waking life, I seemed to see on a table a small hand-gong of a common type, struck by a hammer, but on striking it repeatedly, it produced flashes of light instead of the sounds normally produced by a gong. I concluded that the instrument must be out of order and called some one to attend to it, whereupon we proceeded to deal with it as though it were a diminutive battery of the kind used to work electric bells. Thegong was one familiar to me at the time in daily life; on the previous day I had casually observed that it was misplaced. In my dream I discovered a resemblance which actually exists between a gong of the type in question and the lever-handle for turning on the electric light, soothing a certain doubt by saying to myself in my dream that the instrument served both for the production of sound and of light. This link of connection led to the association of an electric battery with the hand-gong, as well as to the attribution to the gong of light-giving properties.[32]
Such a dream serves as a transition to another very common kind of confusion of imagery in which two altogether unlike images are amalgamated through each happening to have in the mind a link of connection with some third idea. I dreamed that my wife's dog—a dog who, in real life, was constantly getting into trouble—had killed a child in the neighbouring town. On going thither I entered a butcher's shop, and saw the child lying on a table, mutilated and bleeding. After a time, however, I learned that it was not a child, but a pig that had been killed, and what I had previously taken for a child was now visibly a dead pig. I felt ashamed of my mistake, and the sympathy I had experienced now seemed excessive, especially when the butcher remarked that it was all right as he had beenfattening the pig and meant to kill it soon anyhow. Then the pig was cut open, though it made daring attempts to come to life again, during which I awoke. It is clear how, in this case, the idea of the butcher's shop served as a bridge from the image of the child to the image of the pig. Again, after a day in which I had received a letter from a lady, unknown to me, living in France, and later on had written out a summary of a criminal case in which a detective had to go over to France, I dreamed that some one told me that the lady I had heard from was a detective in the service of the French Government, and this explanation, though it seemed somewhat surprising, fully satisfied me. Here, it will be seen, the idea of France served as a bridge, and was utilised by sleeping consciousness to supply an answer to a question which had been asked by waking consciousness.
The confusion of imagery may be more remote, embodying abstract ideas and without reference to recent impressions. Thus I dreamed that my wife was expounding to me a theory by which the substitution of slates for tiles in roofing had been accompanied by, and intimately associated with, the growing diminution of crime in England. I opposed this theory, pointing out the picturesqueness of tiles, their cheapness, and greater comfort both in winter and summer, but at the same time it occurred to me as a peculiar coincidence that tiles should have a sanguinary tinge suggestive of criminal bloodthirstiness. I need scarcely say that this bizarre theory had neversuggested itself to my waking thoughts. There was, however, a real connecting link in the confusion—the redness, and it is a noteworthy point, of great significance in the interpretation of dreams, that that link, although clearly active from the first, remained subconscious until the end of the dream, when it presented itself as an entirely novel coincidence.
I dreamed once that I was with a doctor in his surgery, and saw in his hand a note from a patient saying that doctors were fools and did him no good, but he had lately taken someselvdrolla, recommended by a friend, and it had done him more good than anything, so please send him some more. I saw the note clearly, not, indeed, being conscious of reading it word by word, but only of its meaning as I looked at it; the one word I actually seemed to see, letter by letter, was the name of the drug, and that changed and fluctuated beneath my vision as I gazed at it, the final impression beingselvdrolla. The doctor took from a shelf a bottle containing a bright yellow oleaginous fluid, and poured a little out, remarking that it had lately come into favour, especially in uric acid disorders, but was extremely expensive. I expressed my surprise, having never before heard of it. Then, again to my surprise, he poured rather copiously from the bottle on to a plate of food, saying, in explanation, that it was pleasant to take and not dangerous. This was a vivid morning dream, and on awakening I had no difficulty in detecting the source of its various minor details, especially a note received on the previous evening and containinga dubious figure, the precise nature of which I had used my pocket lens to determine. But what wasselvdrolla, the most vivid element of the dream? I sought vainly among my recent memories, and had almost renounced the search when I recalled a large bottle of salad oil seen on the supper table the previous evening; not, indeed, resembling the dream bottle, but containing a precisely similar fluid.Selvdrollawas evidently a corruption of 'salad oil.' This dream illustrates the uncertainty of dream consciousness, but it also illustrates at the same time the element of certainty in dreamsubconsciousness. Throughout my dream I remained, consciously, in entire ignorance as to the real nature ofselvdrolla, yet a latent element in consciousness was all the time presenting it to me in ever clearer imagery. We see that the subconscious element of dream life treats the conscious part much as a good-natured teacher treats a child whose lesson is only half learned, giving repeated clues and hints which the stupid child understands only at the last moment, or not at all. It is, indeed, a universal method, the method of Nature with man, throughout the whole of human evolution.
It will be seen that at this point we are brought into contact with another characteristic of dream life: there is often more in dreams than dreaming consciousness is able to realise. On the one hand, the elements of dream life are drawn from a wider field than is normally accessible to waking consciousness; on the other hand, the focus of dream consciousness isnarrower than that of waking consciousness, and cannot apperceive all that is going on. There is at once more extension and more contraction than in the psychic life of the waking world. A very large part of the psychic life of sleep is outside our power, and some of it is even beyond our sight.
It will be observed that the perpetual movement and the constant fusion of images which constitute the most fundamental character of dream life really combine two characteristics which, abstractly regarded, are distinct. The tendency of the dream image to be ever changing, ever putting forth some new feature which more or less radically alters its nature, is not a phenomenon of precisely the same nature as the tendency for two definite images, well known to waking consciousness, to become fused together, consciously or unconsciously, in dreams. Practically, however, there is no line of demarcation. What happens is that the image is ever spontaneously changing, and that each change is at once recognised by dreaming consciousness as a known object. Thus I dreamed that I was in a drawing-room and saw a beautiful and attractive woman with an unusually low evening dress entirely revealing the breasts; then, between the breasts, three additional nipples appeared, and I realised in my dream that here was a case of supernumerary breasts of sufficient scientific interest to be carefully examined later on; and then, as I gazed, I saw a number of little fleshy nipple-like protuberances on the body, and thereupon I realised that I was reallylooking at a case of the rare skin disease termedmolluscum fibrosum. Thus the perpetually wavering and developing image is at the same time a succession of quite different images. On the other hand, when we seem to have a fusion of two definite images, what we really see in most cases is one image melting into the other and gradually losing its earlier character. In either case the process is the same interplay of automatic peripheral imagery and central ideas, whether the new image is brought into focus by, as it were, a current in consciousness, or is merely suggested by a spontaneous change in the previous image. How far the image suggests the idea or the idea the image, it is extremely difficult in most cases to say. The phenomenon we witness is a perpetually dissolving view; the vital process behind that phenomenon we must usually be content to be ignorant of.
It sometimes happens that the dream image is slowly transformed without the dreamer realising the transformation. Thus an image of a doll may take on the character of a human being. In a dream of this kind—possibly suggested by Villiers de l'Isle Adam'sL'Eve Future, though that book had not been recently in my mind—I imagined that a lady of my acquaintance (whose identity I could not recall on awakening) had taken a fancy to possess an artificial woman, constructed with vast ingenuity and at enormous expense. The skin and hair seemed real as I noted with a certain horror on observing the breasts and armpits, but in places—I noticed especially one arm—thecreature was as defective as an ill-made doll. It was, however, able to walk with a little support, and, most remarkable of all, it gave intelligent answers to questions; this alone it was that caused me a certain surprise. What at the beginning of the dream had only been an artificial image was evidently becoming a real human being, and one can readily believe that such stories as that of Pygmalion's statue may have been suggested by dream experiences.
The dream is mainly a dissolving view, because for most of us it is above all a visual phenomenon. Those people who, in their dreams, at all events, if not also in waking life, are largely of auditory type, experience dreams in which words play exactly the same shifting, developing, and dissolving part played by images in the persons of more markedly visual type. In their dreams they resemble those insane people who, in some feeble and confusional states, manifest echolalia and confabulation, their ideas drifting along the associational paths of least resistance suggested by every random word they hear. Maury records successions of dream imagery strung together in a similar manner by a procession of verbal transformations; thus in one oft-quoted dream the scenes were connected by the words,kilomètre,kilos,Gilolo,Lobelia,Lopez,loto.[33]In such a case the procession of verbal auditory imagery constitutes the basis of the dream. This is probably rare. In most people the basis of the dream is furnished by visual imagery, and auditory images only occasionallyform an associative link, being more usually subordinated to the visual elements.
The speech peculiarities of dreams have been very thoroughly investigated by Kraepelin,[34]who has brought together two hundred and eighty-one examples, partly observed in himself, though they are not common, and Kraepelin considers that the hearing centres fall more deeply asleep than the visual centres, the eyes being already sufficiently protected by the lids.[35]Kraepelin classifies the speech disturbances of dreams into two great groups: (1)paraphasia, or disturbance of word-finding, where the idea is associated with a wrong word, which is sometimes a new formation[36]; and (2)disorders of oration, in which the peculiarity lies, not in the words, but in their order. The speech disturbances of dreams, Kraepelin remarks, spring from deep disturbance of thought, such as occur in sensorial aphasia, and, as in such aphasia, the dreamer thinks his nonsense is quite clear and reasonable. Much the same may occur in alcoholic delirium and indementia præcox.
The invention of new words probably occurs frequently in dreams, without leaving a clear trace inmemory, and still more frequently, perhaps, as in the 'selvdrolla' dream, already recorded, there are seeming new verbal formations which are really mere corruptions of imperfectly realised words. An example of a definite and precise new word seems to be furnished by the following dream, which was at all points vivid and precise. I saw quite close to me a huge tawny bird, with an orange bill. The creature got up and moved away, seeming as large as an ostrich. I asked a lady, standing by, who had some ornithological knowledge, what the bird was, and she replied that she thought it was ajaleisa. Then I asked the same question of a poor woman who was passing, curious to know what she would answer; she said, 'Oh, it's a kind of starling.' There was no doubt in my dream as to the spelling of 'jaleisa,' but I am quite unable to account for the word.[37]It so happened, however, that before I went to bed I had been reading one of Calderon's plays, and I imagine that this pseudo-Spanish word had formed itself in my brain among the echoes of Calderon's enchanting music. The question arises as to why that ignorant old woman should have called the jaleisa a starling. It seems just possible that the more familiar name was suggested by the last syllable of the strange bird's name, the association being verbal. It is equally possible, and perhaps more likely, that the association followed by the more usual visual channel, and that the jaleisa's orange beak suggested the large orange beaks of newly hatchedstarlings, which had once, many years previously, vividly attracted my attention.
A probable illustration of the influence of verbal association in diverting the current of a dream is seen in the harrowing narrative that follows: A lady dreamed that she went to an entertainment which turned out to be a kind of revival meeting, presided over by a lady, and full of uproar. It was suddenly realised that Hell was underneath the hall, and a man, supposed to be a slave, was torn to pieces and cast into Hell. A lady present was so much affected by the scene that she threw herself into a pool of water, and was drowned, her body being afterwards pulled out by a working man with a pitchfork. The dreamer was so overcome by these tragic events that she felt that there was nothing left but to commit suicide. Resolving to drown herself, she went to a lighthouse (which, however, somewhat resembled a bathing machine) on a height, in order to throw herself down into the sea. It was of an exquisite green tint, extremely lovely and attractive, but she had not the courage to leap in. She thought it might give her courage if she had a good meal first, so she returned to the hall and joined the lady who had presided over the meeting. They sat down to a dish of roast mutton, but, as they were eating, suddenly looked at each other with mutual understanding; they realised that they were eating the woman who had been drowned, and, it will be remarked, had been pulled out of the water by a fork. It was possible to account for every element of which this dream was made up, butits tragic character was unsupported by anything in waking life, and entirely native to the dream. The possibility of any guiding link between 'Hell' and 'hall' had not presented itself to the dreamer, nor had it occurred to me when I set down the dream as here reproduced. It must be noted, however, that the revival meeting would itself tend to suggest the idea of Hell. It seems probable that verbal associations usually play only a subordinate part.
Sometimes the verbal links of association in dreams, far from introducing tragedy, lead, by the conjunction of two words of the same sound, to puns. Thus a dreamer imagined that he and some friends were looking at a house with its bedroom or bedrooms open to the air, the front wall being gone, and they were laughing at the comical effect when a mysterious voice came saying, 'A three-walled bedroom is a side-burst stor(e)y.' As the dreamer awoke, he found himself laughing at this juxtaposition of the idea of the storey of a house-side split open, and the idea of a side-splitting story. The conditions of psychic activity during sleep—when ideas drift together from widely separated regions along channels of association which are usually held closed by the higher intellectual processes—seem, indeed, to be specially favourable to the production of puns and allied forms of witticism.[38]They may, therefore,be properly regarded as closely associated with subconscious activity.[39]
A verbal link is seen in the following 'recipe' invented on another occasion by the same dreamer:—
'Call in the tipcat, cut off its tail;Fold up some eggs in a saucepan;Sit on the rest, like an elderly male,And gulp down the whole as a horse can.'
'Call in the tipcat, cut off its tail;Fold up some eggs in a saucepan;Sit on the rest, like an elderly male,And gulp down the whole as a horse can.'
'Call in the tipcat, cut off its tail;Fold up some eggs in a saucepan;Sit on the rest, like an elderly male,And gulp down the whole as a horse can.'
'Call in the tipcat, cut off its tail;
Fold up some eggs in a saucepan;
Sit on the rest, like an elderly male,
And gulp down the whole as a horse can.'
It is evident that the tipcat suggested a cat's tail, while the suggestion of a cooking recipe in 'cut off its tail' led on to eggs and saucepan; the eggs suggested 'sitting,' while 'gulp,' as the dreamer noted, appeared as 'gallop,' and suggested the horse. The ease with which the whole fell into a completely rhymed doggerel stanza is due to the fact that the dreamer is a poet.[40]
A more common phenomenon in my experience than association by verbal clues is a transference from visual terms into the terms of some other sense, and a repetition in that form. Thus a lady dreams that a large and very beautiful picture resembling tapestry forms itself before her, and in it she sees herself, only much more beautiful in shape, standing by a tree, and on the other side of the tree an old friend is standing, while there are a crowd of people around. Then she sees her friend touch her on the arm. At the same time the dreamer feels the touch. The visual image is reduplicated in a motor form. Such a phenomenon is doubtlessa natural result of the special conditions of dream life. In waking life the senses are working co-ordinately, and if we see ourselves touched we shall probably feel ourselves touched. But in dreams the body is a vision, and not our real body, and when we see it touched, we realise we ought to feel it touched, and a tactile sensation is thus suggested and experienced.
There are, however, other reduplications to which this explanation will not apply. Thus I imagined I was sitting at a window, at the top of a house, writing. As I looked up from my table I saw, with all the emotions naturally accompanying such a sight, a woman in her nightdress appear at a lofty window some distance off, and throw herself down. I went on writing, however, and found that in the course of my literary employment—I am not clear as to its precise nature—the very next thing I had to do was to describe exactly such a scene as I had just witnessed. I was extremely puzzled at such an extraordinary coincidence; it seemed to me wholly inexplicable. Again I dreamed that I was coming up the Thames (apparently in a steamboat), reading a novel, written by a friend, which was the history of some one who arrives in England coming up the Thames to London, by what I felt to be an extraordinary coincidence, in exactly the same way as I was at the moment. Then I found myself seemingly at the end of a London pier, with the river rippling at my feet, and in front the superb panorama of London; exactly the scene which, in less detail, was described in the book. Such dreams, reduplicating the imageryin a new sensory medium, are fairly common, with me at all events. The association is less that of analogy than of sensory media, as of the visual image becoming a verbal motor image. In other cases a scene is first seen as in reality, and then in a picture. Thus I dreamed that I was witnessing the performance of an orchestra, and observed that all the players had instruments of ancient pattern which, I understood, had been in constant use for several hundred years; I could recall the shapes of many on awaking, and none of them were quite modern; I could not, however, recall the character of the music, which seemed to make no impression on me, since I was absorbed in observing the shapes of the instruments. I specially observed an old framed engraving hanging on the wall, in my dream, representing precisely one of the instruments played on, and I understood that it was called abourdon.[41]It is interesting to observe the profound astonishment with which sleeping consciousness apperceives such simple reduplication.
In dreams planes of existence that in waking life are fundamentally distinct are brought together, so that events belonging to different planes move on the same plane, and even become combined. Acting and life, the picture and the reality, are no longer absolutely distinct. Art and life flow in the same channel. The reason, doubtless, is that for the dreamer the world of waking life, the world of things as they are to thewaking senses, is closed and cannot even be completely recalled. So that all modes of representation are strictly on the same level, and it is, therefore, perfectly natural and logical that they should stand side by side and merge into one another.
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.
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.
INdreams we are always reasoning. That is a general characteristic of dreams which is worth noting, because its significance is not usually recognised. It is sometimes imagined that reason is in abeyance during sleep.[42]So far from this being the case, we may almost be said to reason much more during sleep than when we are awake. That our reasoning is bad, often even preposterous, that it constantly ignores the most elementary facts of waking life, scarcely affects the question. All dreaming is a process of reasoning. That artful confusion of ideas and images which, at the outset, I referred to as the most constant feature of dream mechanism is nothing but a process of reasoning, a perpetual effort to argue out harmoniously the absurdly limited and incongruous data present to sleeping consciousness. Binet, grounding his conclusions on hypnotic experiments, finds that reasoning is the fundamentalpart of all thinking, the very texture of thought.[43]It is founded on perception itself, which already contains all the elements of the ancient syllogism. For in all perception, as Binet plausibly argues, there is a succession of three images, of which the first fuses with the second, which, in its turn, suggests the third. Now this establishment of new associations, this construction of images, which, as we may easily convince ourselves, is precisely what takes place in dreaming, is reasoning itself.
Reasoning may thus be regarded as a synthesis of images suggested by resemblance and contiguity, indeed a sort of logical vision, more intense even than actual vision, since it is capable of producing hallucinations. To reasoning all forms of mental activity may finally be reduced; mind, as Wundt has said, is a thing that reasons. Or, as H. R. Marshall puts it, 'reason is a mode of instinct.'[44]When we apply these general statements to dreaming, we may see that the whole phenomenon of dreaming is really the same process of image formation, based on resemblance and contiguity. Every dream is the outcome of this strenuous, wide-ranging instinct to reason. The supposed 'imaginative faculty,' regarded as so highly active during sleep, is the inevitable play of this automatic logic.
The syllogistic arrangement of dream imagery is carried on in an absolutely automatic manner; it is spontaneous, involuntary, without effort. Sleeping consciousness, though all the time it is weaving the data that reach it into some pattern of reason with immense ingenuity, is quite unaware that it is itself responsible for the arguments thus presented. In the evening, before going to bed, I glance casually through a newspaper; I see the usual kind of news, revolutionists in Russia, Irish affairs, crimes, etc.; I see also a caricature of the Liberal Party as a headless horseman on a barren plain. During sleep these unconnected impressions revive, float into dream consciousness, and spontaneously fall into as reasonable a whole as could be expected. I dream that by some chemical or mechanical device a man has succeeded in conveying the impression that he is headless, and is preparing to gallop across some district in Russia, with the idea of making so mysterious an impression upon the credulous population that he will be accepted as a great religious prophet. I distinctly see him careering across sands like those of the seashore, but I avoid going near him. Then I see figures approaching him in the far distance, and his progress ceases. I learn subsequently that he has been arrested and found to be an Irish criminal. A coherent story is thus formed out of a few random impressions.
All such typical dreams are syllogistic. There is, that is to say, as Binet expresses it, the establishment of an association between two states of consciousnessby means of an intermediate state which resembles the first, is associated with the second, and by fusing with the first associates it with the second. In this dream, for instance, we have the three terms of (1) headless horseman, (2) revolutionary crime, and (3) Russia and Ireland. The intermediate term, by the fact that it resembles the first, and is contiguous in the mind with the third, seems to fuse the first and the third terms, so that the headless horseman becomes an Irish criminal in Russia. In dreaming life, as in waking life, our minds are always moving by the construction of similar syllogisms, marked by more or less freedom and audacity.
It is unnecessary to multiply examples of the instinctive and persistent efforts on the part of the sleeping mind to construct a coherent whole out of the incongruous elements that come before it; nearly every dream furnishes some proof of this profoundly rooted impulse.[45]It is instructive, however, to consider the nature and the limitations of dreaming reason.
This rationalisation and logical construction of imagery, it is necessary to realise, occurs at the very threshold of sleeping consciousness. The dreamer makes no effort to arrange isolated imagery; the arrangement has already occurred when the imagery comes to the focus of sleeping consciousness; so that this reasoning and arranging process is so fundamental and instinctive that it occurs in a region which may besaid to be subconscious to dreaming consciousness. If it were not so our dreams would never be real to us, for even dreaming consciousness could not accept as real a hallucination which it had itself arranged. In this sense it is true that, to some extent, our dreams are often based on an ultimate personal and emotional foundation.[46]
But this ingeniously guided and rationalised confusion of imagery by no means covers the whole of the reasoning process in dreams. This is a double process. It is first manifested subconsciously in the formation of dream imagery, and then it is manifested consciously in the dreamer's reaction to the imagery presented to him. Every dream is made up of action and reaction between a pseudo-universe and a freely responding individual. On the one side there is the irresistibly imposed imagery—really, though we know it not, conditioned and instinctively moulded by our own organism—which stands for what in our waking hours we may term God and Nature; on the other side is the Soul struggling with all its might, and very inefficient means, against the awful powers that oppose it. The problem of the waking world is presented over againin this battle between the dreaming protagonist and his dreamed fate. Both of these elements are instinctively reasoned out, consciously or subconsciously; both are imperfect fragments from the rich reservoir of human personality.
The things that happen to us in dreams, the pseudo-external world that is presented to sleeping consciousness—the imagery, that is, that floats before the mental eye of sleep—are a perpetual source of astonishment and argument to the dreamer. A large part of dreaming activity is concerned with the attempt to explain and reason out the phenomena we thus encounter, to construct a theory of them, or to determine the attitude which we ought to take up with regard to them. Most dreams will furnish evidence of this reasoning process.
Thus a lady dreamed that an acquaintance wished to send a small sum of money to a person in Ireland. She rashly offered to take it over to Ireland. On arriving home she began to repent of her promise, as the weather was extremely wild and cold. She proceeded, however, to make preparations for dressing warmly, and went to consult an Irish friend, who said she would have to be floated over to Ireland tightly jammed in a crab basket. On returning home she fully discussed the matter with her husband, who thought it would be folly to undertake such a journey, and she finally relinquished it, with great relief. In this dream—the elements of which could all be accounted for—the association between sending money and the post-office, which would at once occur to waking consciousness, was closed; consciousnesswas a prey to such suggestions as reached it, but on the basis of those suggestions it reasoned and concluded quite sagaciously.
Again (after looking at photographs of paintings and statuary, and also reading about the theatre), I dreamed that I was at the theatre, and that the performers were acting and dancing in a more or less, in some cases completely, nude state, but with admirable propriety and grace, and very charming effect. At first I was extremely surprised at so remarkable an innovation; but then I reflected that the beginnings of such a movement must have long been in progress on the stage unknown to me; and I proceeded to rehearse the reasons which made such a movement desirable. On another occasion, I dreamed that I was in the largeplazaof a Spanish city (Pamplona possibly furnishing the elements of the picture), and that the governor emerged from his residence facing the square and began talking in English to the subordinate officials who were waiting to receive him. The real reason why he talked English was, of course, the simple one that he spoke the language native to the dreamer. But in my dream I was extremely puzzled why he should speak English. I looked carefully into his face to assure myself that he was not really English, and I finally concluded that he was speaking English in order not to be understood by the bystanders. Once more, I dreamed that I was looking at an architectural drawing of a steeple, of quite original design, somewhat in the shape of a cross, but very elongated. I attempted inmy dream to account for this elongation, and concluded that it was intended to neutralise the foreshortening caused when the steeple would be looked at from below.
There is, we here see afresh, a fundamental split in dreaming intelligence. On the one side there is the subconscious, yet often highly intelligent, combination of imagery along rational although often bizarre lines. On the other side is concentrated the conscious intelligence of the dreamer, struggling to comprehend and explain the problems offered by the pseudo-external imagery thus presented to it. One might almost say that in dreams subconscious intelligence is playing a game with conscious intelligence. In a dream previously narrated (p. 43) subconscious intelligence offered to my dreaming consciousness the mysterious substanceselvdrolla, and bid me guess what it was; I could not guess. And subconscious intelligence presented the drawing of the elongated steeple, and I was able to offer an explanation which seems fairly satisfactory. So that, in the world of dreams, it may be said, we see over again the process which, James Hinton was accustomed to say, we see in the universe of our waking life; God or Nature playing with man, compelling him to join in a game of hide-and-seek, and setting him problems which he must solve as best he can. It may well be, one may add, that the dream process furnishes the key to the metaphysical and even, indeed, the physical problems of our waking thoughts, and that the puzzles of the universe are questions that we ourselves unconsciously invent for ourselves to solve.
We can never go behind the fantastic universe of our dreams. The validity of that universe is for dreaming consciousness unassailable. We may try to understand it and explain it, but we can never deny it, any more than we can deny the universe of our waking life, however we may attempt to analyse it. Dreaming consciousness never realises that the universe that confronts it springs from the same source as itself springs. I dreamed that a man was looking at his own house from a distance, and on the balcony he saw his daughter and a man by her side. 'Who is that man flirting with my daughter?' he asked. He produced a field-glass, and, on looking through it, he exclaimed: 'Good Heavens, it's myself!' Dreaming consciousness accepted this situation with perfect equanimity and solemnity. In the dream world there is, indeed, nothing else to do. We may puzzle over the facts presented to us; we may try to explain them; but it would be futile to deny them, even when they involve the possibility of a man being in two places at the same time.[47]
Only to a few people there comes occasionally in dreams a dim realisation of the unreality of the experience:'After all, it does not matter,' they are able to say to themselves with more or less conviction, 'this is only a dream.' Thus one lady, dreaming that she is trying to kill three large snakes by stamping on them, wonders, while still dreaming, what it signifies to dream of snakes,[48]and another lady, when she dreams that she is in any unpleasant position—about to be shot, for instance—often says to herself: 'Never mind, I shall wake before it happens.'
I have never detected in my own dreams any recognition that they are dreams. I may say, indeed, that I do not consider that such a thing is really possible, though it has been borne witness to by many philosophers and others from Aristotle and Synesius and Gassendi onwards. The phenomenon occurs; the person who says to himself that he is dreaming believes that he is still dreaming, but one may be permitted to doubt that he is. It seems far more probable that he has for a moment, without realising it, emerged at the waking surface of consciousness.[49]The only approach to a recognition of dreaming as dreaming that I haveexperienced, is connected with the reduplication that may sometimes occur, and the sense of a fatalistic predetermination. Thus I dreamed (with nothing that could suggest the dream) that I was one of a group of people who, as I realised, were carrying out a drama in which by force of circumstance I was destined to be the villain, having, by bad treatment, been driven to revenge. I knew at the outset how events would turn out, and yet, though it seemed real life, I felt vaguely that it was all a play that was merely being rehearsed. I had attained in the world of dreams to the Shakespearian feeling that it was all a stage, and I merely a player. So we may become the Prosperos of the life of dreams.[50]
This quality of dreaming consciousness is a manifestation, and the chief one, of what is calleddissociation.[51]In dissociation we have a phenomenon which runs through the whole of the dreaming life, and is scarcely less fundamental than the process of fusion by which the imagery is built up. The fact that thereasoning of dreams is usually bad, is due partly to the absence of memory elements that would be present to waking consciousness, and partly to the absence of sensory elements to check the false reasoning which, without them, appears to us conclusive. That is to say, that there is a process of dissociation by which ordinary channels of association are temporarily blocked, perhaps by exhaustion of their conductive elements, and the conditions are prepared for the formation of the hallucination. It is, as Parish has argued, in sleep and in those sleep-resembling states called hypnagogic that a condition of dissociation leading to hallucination is most apt to occur.[52]
Thus it is that though the psychic frontier of the sleeping state is more extended than that of the normal waking state, the focus of sleeping consciousness is more contracted than that of waking consciousness. In other words, while facts are liable to drift from a very wide psychic distance under our dreaming attention, we cannot direct the searchlight of that attention at will over so wide a field as when we are awake. We deal with fewer psychic elements, though those elements are drawn from a wider field.
The psychology of 'attention' is, indeed, a verydisputed matter.[53]There is no agreement as to whether it is central or peripheral, motor or sensory. As we have seen in the previous chapter, it seems reasonable to conclude, according to a convenient distinction established by Ribot, that spontaneous attention is persistent during sleep, but voluntary attention is at a minimum. In some such way, it seems, whatever theory of attention we adopt, we have to recognise that in dreams the attention is limited.
Such a position is fortified by the conclusion of those who look at the problem, not so much in terms of attention as in terms of apperception. Apperception, according to Wundt, differs from perception in that while the latter is the appearance of a content in consciousness, the former is its reception into the state of attention. Or, as Stout defines it, apperception is 'the process by which a mental system appropriates a new element, or otherwise receives a fresh determination.'[54]Apperception is, therefore, the final stage of attention, and ultimately, as Wundt remarks, it is one with will. Apperception and will, as most psychologists consider, like attention, are enfeebled and diminished, if not abolished, in sleep.
In dreams, it thus comes about, we accept the factspresented to us—that is the fundamental assumption of dream life—and we argue about those 'facts' with the help of all the mental resources which are at our disposal, only those resources are frequently inadequate. Sometimes they are startlingly inadequate, to such an extent, indeed, that we are unaware of possibilities which would be the very first to suggest themselves to waking consciousness. Thus the lady who wished to send a small sum of money to Ireland is not aware of the existence of postal orders, and when she decides to convey the money herself, she is not aware of the existence of boat-trains, or even of boats; she might have been living in palaeolithic times. She discusses the question in a clear and logical manner with the resources at her disposal, and reaches a rational conclusion, but considerations which would be the first to occur to waking consciousness are at the moment absent from sleeping consciousness; whole mental tracts have been dissociated, switched off from communication with consciousness; they are 'asleep,' even to sleeping consciousness.[55]
The result is that we are not only dominated by the suggestion of our visions, but we are unable adequately to appreciate and criticise the situations which are presented to us. We instinctively continue to reason, and to reason clearly and logically with the material atour disposal, but our reasoning is hopelessly absurd. We perceive in dreams, but we do not apperceive; we cannot, that is to say, test and sift the new experience, and co-ordinate it adequately with the whole body of our acquired mental possessions. The phenomena of dreaming furnish a delightful illustration of the fact that reasoning, in its rough form, is only the crudest and most elementary form of intellectual operation, and that the finer forms of thinking involve much more than logic. 'All the thinking in the world,' as Goethe puts it, 'will not lead us to thought.'
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.
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.
At the outset I adopted provisionally the usual classification of dreams into two classes: the peripheral or presentative group, excited by a stimulus from without, and the central or representative group, having its elements in memories. If, however, we look carefully at the matter, in the light of the experiences which we have encountered, it will be found that this classification, however superficially convenient it may be, fails to correspond to any radical duality of dream phenomena. When we closely question our dream experiences, it ceases to be clear that they really fall into two groups at all.
On the one hand, it would appear that most, perhaps, indeed, all dreams that are sufficiently vivid to be clearly remembered on awakening, have received an initial stimulus from some external, or at all events,peripheral source.[56]There is something unusual or uncomfortable in the sleeper's position, or he has been subjected to some slight unusual strain which has modified his nervous condition, or there has been some deviation from his usual diet, or a physiological stress of some kind is making itself felt within him—careful self-questioning constantly reveals the actual or probable existence of some external or certainly peripheral stimulus of this kind. So that we seem entitled to say that in all dreams there is probably a presentative element.
On the other hand, an even more cursory investigation of our dream life suffices to show that in every dream there is also a representative element. No dream can be said to be strictly and literally presentative. If, when I am seemingly asleep, a person speaks to me, and I become conscious that he is present and speaking,I am not entitled to say that I 'dream' it. A consciousness which perceives facts in the same way as they may be perceived by waking consciousness is not a dreaming consciousness. So that there are, in the literal sense, no presentative dreams. What happens is that the stimulus, instead of being presented directly to consciousness, and recognised for what it is to waking consciousness, serves to arouse old memories and ideas which dream consciousness accepts as a reasonable explanation of the external or peripheral stimulus. The stimulus may be said to be, in a sense, the cause of the dream, but the dream itself remains central, and as truly a combined picture of mental images as though there were no known peripheral stimulus at all.
Thus, while it is true that the division of dreams into two classes corresponds to a recognisable distinction, it is yet a superficial and unimportant distinction. It is likely that all dreams have a peripheral or presentative element, and certain that they all have a central or representative element. This will become clearer if we now proceed to discuss those dreams which have, demonstrably, their exciting cause in some external or internal organic stimulus.
The world which we enter through the portal of sleep presents such obvious and serious limitations that we are apt to under-estimate its real richness and variety. In some respects, indeed, we can accomplish in sleep what is beyond our reach awake. Thus it sometimes happens that we reason better in sleep than when awake, that we may find in dreams the solutions of difficultieswhich escape us awake, and that we may remember things which, when awake, we had forgotten. But even within the ordinary range of experience, it is interesting to note that our dreams contain the same elements as our waking life. The sensory activities which stir us during the day are equally active, though in strange transformations, in the world of dreams.
It is probable that all the senses may furnish the medium through which stimuli may reach sleeping consciousness; though touch and hearing are doubtless the main channels to dream life. The eyes are closed, so that while the chief parts of our dream life are in terms of vision, direct visual stimuli can only be a very dim and uncertain influence. But no sense is absolutely excluded from activity in dreams.[57]
Heat or cold sensations and pressure sensations, as well as their anaesthetic absence, undoubtedly play an important part in explaining various kinds of dreams. They do not necessarily result in rememberable dreams, even although it is possible that they still affect the current of sleeping consciousness. It is possible to press and massage the body of a sleeper all over, gently but firmly, without interrupting sleep. When the pressurereaches a considerable degree of vigour, the sleeper may move a muscle, perhaps the lips, even an arm, may go so far as to half wake and move the whole body. All these movements suggest that they have accompaniments on the psychic side, yet, on finally awakening, the sleeper may be unable to recall any memory of the occurrence, or any vestige of a dream.
In a certain proportion of cases, however, a dream results. Thus a lady dreams that, with a number of other people, she is on board a ship which is rocking heavily, and on awakening she finds that her large dog is on the bed, vigorously scratching himself. The ship has clearly been the theory invented by sleeping consciousness to account for the unfamiliar sensations of movement.
When living in the south of Spain, I awoke early one morning, and heard a mosquito buzzing. I fell asleep again and dreamed that a huge insect—as large as a lobster, but flat like a cockroach, and scarlet in colour—had alighted on my hand. The creature had two long horns, and from each of these proceeded numerous very long and delicate filaments which were inserted into my hand to a considerable depth. I had to cut the creature in half, and draw away the forepart, which was attached to my hand, with great care lest I should leave portions of the filaments in the flesh. This animal seemed all the more unpleasant because it was noiseless, and its attacks, I thought, imperceptible. I appeared to be attacked by a succession of them. On awakening, there was irritation of the left wrist, as though themosquito had bitten me, although I had long ceased to be bitten by mosquitoes. This dream, it will be seen, corresponds in an unusually close way to the idea of a presentative dream; imagination followed reality in presenting an insect as the cause of the sensation experienced (possibly because I had actually heard the mosquito when awake), but still, as in all dreams, the process was mainly central, and imagination was freely exercised in creating a creature adequate to explain the doubtless vague and massive cutaneous sensations transmitted to sleeping consciousness.[58]
Perhaps one of the commonest skin sensations to excite dream formation is that of cold due to disturbance of the bed coverings. The following example may serve as an illustration of this class. I dreamed that I was in an hotel, mounting many flights of stairs, until I entered a room where the chambermaid was making the bed; the white bedclothes were scattered over everything, and looked to me like snow; then I became conscious that I was very cold, and it appeared to me that I really was surrounded by snow, for the chambermaid remarked that I was very courageous to come up so high in the hotel, very few people venturing to do so on account of the great cold at this height. I awoke to find that it was a cold night, and that I was entangled in the sheets, and partly uncovered. Nothing elsehad occurred to suggest this dream which sleeping consciousness had elaborated out of the two associated ideas of altitude and snow in order to explain the actual sensations experienced. It is noteworthy that, as in the dream just before narrated, there was here also a link with reality, this time furnished by the disarranged bedclothes.[59]
The auditory experiences of dreams, to a greater extent perhaps than those involving the sense of touch, may be based on spontaneous disturbances within the sensory mechanism. This is notably also the case with visual experiences, and in many respects the conditions in the ear are analogous. Apart from increased resonance of the ear, or hyperaesthesia of the auditory nerve, producing special sensitiveness to sounds, an increased flow of blood through the ear, as well as muscular contractions and mucous plugs in the external ear, furnish the faint rudimentary noises which, in sleep, may constitute the nucleus around which hallucinations crystallise. Disease of the ear may obviously act in the same way, but, even apart from actual disease, various nervous disturbances favour the production of auditory hallucinations during sleep, and, in marked cases, even awake.
We may dream of listening to music in the absence of all external sounds having any musical character. In such cases, no doubt, the actual conditionswithin the auditory mechanism are suggesting music to the brain, but the resulting music seems usually to be less definite, less rememberable, than when it forms around the nucleus of an external series of sounds. In many of these cases it is probable that we do not hear music in our dream; we are simply under conditions in which we imagine that we hear music. Thus, on going to bed soon after supper, but not perceptibly suffering from indigestion, I dreamed that I was present at a public meeting combined with an orchestral concert. A speech was to be made by a man who looked like an old sailor or soldier, and meanwhile the orchestra was playing. The speaker—unaccustomed, I gathered, to the etiquette of such a meeting—suddenly interrupted the orchestra by a remark, and the surprised conductor stopped the performance for a moment and then continued, subsequent remarks by the speaker failing to affect the music, which continued to the end, becoming more lively and vigorous in character. But what the music was, I knew not at the time, nor could I recall any fragment of it on awakening. It is even possible that such a dream is mainly visual, and that no hallucinatory music is heard, its occurrence being merely deduced from the nature of the vision.
If the dreams evoked by sounds within the ear are usually difficult to trace in normal persons under ordinary circumstances, this is not the case with dreams suggested by sounds which strike the ear from without. These constitute one of the most interesting groups of dreams as well as one of the easiest to explain, andthey are very frequent.[60]Their mechanism may, indeed, be observed under some circumstances even in the waking state. In some persons, music, a voice, a bird's song, even a word, a comment, arouse phantoms of colour and form, light and shade, coloured clouds, streams, waves, etc. The phenomena are especially rich when produced by an orchestra. Such 'music-phantoms,' as they are termed, are a special and freer development of the narrow and rigid phenomena of 'colour-hearing.' They have been studied by Dr. Ruths.[61]We have to remember that music possesses a fundamental motor basis. As Dauriac remarks, music may be defined as 'movement clothed with sound.'[62]It tends to produce movement, or, failing movement, to produce motor imagery.[63]
Dreams excited by definite external auditory stimuli may be of various character. A not uncommon source—especially for those who live on a wind-swept coast—is the occurrence of storms. A lady dreams, for instance, that her little dog has fallen off a high cliff and that shehears his shrieks; it was an extremely windy night, and her window was open. The dream has some resemblance to one which Burdach recorded that he shared with a companion in an hotel during a storm; they both dreamed they were wandering at night among high precipices.
On one occasion I awoke in the middle of a windy night imagining I had been listening to an opera of Gluck's (which in reality I had never heard), and experiencing all the sense of delicious waves of melody which one actually experiences in listening to such operas asAlceste. A fragment of a melody I had heard in the dream still persisted in my memory on awaking, so that I could mentally repeat it, when it seemed as agreeable as in the dream, though unfamiliar.
The following dream had also a similar origin. I imagined that I was assisting at a spectacle of somewhat dubious erotic character, in company with other persons who, out of modesty, covered their faces with their hands with the decorous gesture which recalled (as dream consciousness evidently realised) that of people during prayer in church. Thereupon a beautiful voice was heard in the background loudly chanting a versicle of the Te Deum. This awoke me, and I seemed to realise when half awake that the voice I had heard in the dream was a real voice. There had, however, been no real voice, only the loud howling of the wind and the beating of the rain on the window panes.
Once, on a very windy night, and when, perhaps, suffering a trifling disturbance of health—for there was slight pleurodynic pain the next morning—I dreamedI was quietly at home with friends, when suddenly the sky became illuminated. We found that this was due to steady and continuous lightning, a state of things which remained throughout the dream, the sky presenting the appearance of a cracked and crushed sheet of melting ice.[64]By and by, fragments of buildings and similar debris were whirled past in the air, and I caught sight of a woman driven above me by her skirts. We now realised the imminent approach of a terrific cyclone which, at any moment, might carry the house and ourselves away. I remembered no more.
Yet another dream may be mentioned as likewise directly due to a violent storm and the rattling of a window near my bed. The latter sound evidently recalled to sleeping consciousness the sound of the rattling window of a railway train, and I dreamed that I was travelling to Berlin with a medical friend. There were the accompaniments, not unfamiliar in dreams, of rushing along interminable platforms, and up and down endless stairs, finding myself in a carriage of the wrong class, with, in consequence, more wandering along corridors, and finally finding that my friend had been left behind. The character of the dream may have been influenced by slight indigestion. In this dream, unlike those already recorded as due to external stimuli, the elements of the dream were not the pure invention of dreaming imagination, but compacted entirely of ideas that had been recently familiar.
The following dream was due to an auditory stimulus of different character. I dreamed that I was listening to a performance of Haydn'sCreation, the orchestral part of the performance seeming to consist chiefly of the very realistic representation of the song of birds, though I could not identify the note of any particular bird. Then followed solos by male singers, whom I saw, especially one who attracted my attention by singing at the close in a scarcely audible voice. On awakening, the source of the dream was not immediately obvious, but I soon realised that it was the song of a canary in another room. I had never heard Haydn'sCreation, except in fragments, nor thought of it at any recent period; its reputation as regards the realistic representation of natural sounds had evidently caused it to be put forward by sleeping consciousness as a plausible explanation of the sounds heard, and the visual centres had accepted the theory.
However far-fetched and improbable our dreams may seem to the waking mind, they are, from the point of view of the sleeping mind, serious and careful attempts to construct an adequate theory of the phenomena. The imagery is sought from far afield only to fit the facts more accurately. Thus a lady dreamed that her dog was being crushed out flat in a large old-fashioned box-mangle. She awoke to find that water from a burst pipe was falling from the ceiling on to the floor on the landing outside her door, close to where the dog had his bed. She had never seen a mangle of this kind since she was a child, or had any occasion to think of it, butthe rhythm and sound of it somewhat resembled that of the falling water.
One more example of an auditory dream may be given. I dreamed that I was back in a schoolroom of my boyhood, with two or three of the present masters. The room had been entirely changed, and it contained much new school apparatus and, notably, on a table, several miniature engines, of different character, actually working. I said to the masters that I wished all these apparatus had been there twenty years ago (a considerable under-estimate of the actual interval since I left that schoolroom), so that I might have enjoyed the benefit of them. 'All life is made up of machinery,' I found myself uttering aloud as I awoke, 'and unless you understand machinery you can't understand life.' It was not till some moments later that I became conscious of a faint whirring sound which puzzled me till I realised that it was the sound of distant machinery entering through the open window. This had, undoubtedly, suggested the engines of the dream, though I had not been conscious in my dream of hearing any sounds, and the small size of the dream engines corresponded to the faintness of the actual sounds.
Dreams aroused by odours do not usually seem to occur except on the experimental application of them to the sleeper's nostrils, and experiments in this direction are not usually successful.[65]Occasionally, however,smell dreams occur without any traceable sensory source, and Grace Andrews, for instance, records a dream of the sea, accompanied by the seashore odour, 'a pure and rich sensation of smell.' In my own case olfactory dreams have been rare and insignificant.
Taste, as we usually understand it, really involves, as is well known, an element of smell, and taste dreams of this kind seem to occur from time to time under the influence of any slight disturbance of the mucous membrane of the mouth or slight indigestion. It is possible that the latter element was present in the following dream: I imagined that, following the example of a friend, I gave some cigarettes to a tramp we had casually met, and that, in return, we felt compelled to drink some raw gin he carried. I did so with some misgiving as to the possible results of drinking from a tramp's flask, but although in real life I had not tasted gin for many years, the hot burning taste of the spirit was very distinct. On awakening, my lips seemed hot and dry, and it was doubtless this labial sensation which led dream consciousness to seek a plausible explanation in cigarettes and spirits. Although the spirit seemed tohave the specific flavour of gin, it is always difficult, if not impossible, in dream sensations, to distinguish between what one feels and what one merely concludes that one feels. In such a case, that is to say, it remains doubtful whether the labial sensation evokes the specific hallucination of gin, or whether it merely suggests to sleeping consciousness that the gin has been tasted, much as it is possible to suggest to the hypnotised person that the substance he is tasting is a quite different substance, that salt is sugar, or that water is wine.
As with dreams of smell, it is not always possible to detect any external stimulation as the cause for a taste or pseudo-taste dream.[66]This may be illustrated by a dream which belongs strictly to the tactile class; I dreamed that I called upon a medical acquaintance whose assistant I found in a dark surgery. I absently took up a broken medicine bottle and put it to my mouth, when my friend came in. I spoke to him on some medical topic, but he entered his carriage, and was driven off before he had time to answer me. I then found that my mouth was full of fragments of broken colourless glass, which I carefully removed. This dream was constructed, in the manner which has been often illustrated in the previous pages, of small separate incidents which had occurred during the immediately preceding days. One of the incidentswas the fact that I had myself smashed a little coloured (not colourless) glass and carefully picked up the fragments. But the vividest part of the dream was the sensation of broken glass in the mouth, and on awaking no sensation could be detected in the mouth. So that though the most plausible explanation of such a dream would be the theory that the recent experience with broken glass had suggested to sleeping consciousness the explanation of an unpleasant sensation actually experienced in the mouth, there was nothing whatever to support that theory.
The falling of light on the closed eyes, or the half opening of the eyes, has been found to serve as a visual stimulus to dreams, but I have myself no decisive evidence on this point.[67]In the case of a lady who dreamed that a lover was in her room, and that suddenly the door opened, and she saw her mother standing before her with a bright light, which awoke her, she could find nothing in the room, no light, to account for the dream. It is, of course, unnecessary for a dream of a bright light to be actually produced by an external visual stimulus accompanying the dream, for the spontaneous retino-cerebral activity itself produces sensations of light. Thus, on the night after a pleasant walk in a country lane through which the setting sunshone, I dreamed that I was walking along a lane in which I saw a bright light and my own vast shadow in front of me. It would seem that, on the whole, the curtain of the eyelids effectually shuts out light from the eye during sleep, and that the sense which is more active during the day than any other is the most carefully guarded of all during the night. The peculiarly delicate and unstable nature of the chemical basis of vision makes up for this protection from external stimulation, and by its spontaneous activity ensures that even in dreams vision is the predominant sense.
What we find as regards the part played in dreams by excitations arising from the external specific senses holds good also for excitations arising from internal organic sensations. The main difference is that the stimuli which reach sleeping consciousness from the organs within the body—the stomach, heart, lungs, sexual apparatus, bladder, etc.—are usually more vague and massive, more difficult to recognise and identify, than are the more specific sensory stimuli which reach us from without. These visceral excitations may be transformed within the brain into imagery so unlike themselves that we may refuse to recognise them, and must frequently experience some amount of hesitation. Evidence of this fact will come before us in due course later on. I only wish to refer here to the more obvious part played in dreams by sensations arising within the body.
We should expect that the visceral processes to betranslated most clearly and directly into dreaming consciousness would be, not those which are regular and continuous, but those which assert themselves, more or less imperiously, at intervals. This is actually the case. The heart, for instance, probably plays a part in dreams only when disturbed in its action, and even then nearly always a very transformed part. On the other hand, when the impulses of the generative system arise in sleep to manifest themselves in erotic dreams, the resulting imagery is usually very clear, and with very definite and recognisable sexual associations. Erotic dreams are, indeed, in both men and women, among the most vivid of all dreams, and the most emotionally potent.[68]