Similarly in insanity we have an even more constant and pronounced tendency for the subject to attribute his own sensations to imaginary individuals, and to create personalities out of portions of the real personality. All the illusions, delusions, and hallucinations of the insane are merely the manifold manifestations of this tendency. Without it the insanity would not exist. It is not because he is subjected to unusual sensations—visionary, auditory, tactile, olfactory, visceral, etc.—that a man is insane. It is because hecreates imaginary personalities to account for these sensations; if his food tastes strange some one has given himpoisonif he hears a strange voice it is some one communicating with him by telephones or microphones or hypnotism; if he feels a strange internal sensation it is perhaps because he has another person inside him. The case has even been recorded of a man who attributed any feeling he experienced, even the most normal sensations of hunger and thirst, to the people around him. It is exactly the same process as goes on in our dreams. The sane man, the normal waking man, may experience all these strange sensations, but he recognises that they are the spontaneous outcome of his own organisation.
We may, however, advance a step beyond this position. This self-objectivation, this dramatisation of our experiences, is not confined to sleep and to pathological conditions which resemble sleep. It is natural and primitive in a far wider sense. The infant will gaze inquisitively at its own feet, watch their movements, play with them, 'punish' them; consciousness has not absorbed them as part of the self.[174]The infant really acts and feels towards the remote parts of his own body as the adult acts and feels in dreaming. We are reminded of the generalisation of Giessler that dream consciousness corresponds to thenormal psychic state in childhood, while sleeping subconsciousness corresponds to the embryonic psychic state; so that the dream state represents the renascence of the ego disentangling itself from the impersonal sensations and indistinct images of the embryonic stage of life. That sleeping consciousness is the primitive embryonic consciousness is, indeed, indicated, it has often seemed to me, by the fact that in many animals the embryonic position is the position of rest and sleep. Ducklings and chicks in the shell have their heads beneath their wing. The dog lies with his feet together, head flexed, and hind-quarters drawn up. Man, alike in the womb and asleep, tends to be curled up, with the flexors predominating over the extensors.
The savage has gone beyond the infant in ability to assimilate the impressions of his own limbs, but on the psychic side he still constantly tends to objectify his own feelings and ideas, re-creating them as external beings. Primitive man has done so from the first, and this impulse has struck its roots into all our most fundamental human traditions even as they survive in civilisation to-day. The man of the early world moves, like the dreamer, among a sea of emotions and ideas which he cannot recognise the origin of, and, like the dreamer, he instinctively dramatises them. But, unlike the dreamer, he gives stability to the images he has thus created and in good faith mistaken for independent beings. Thus we have the animistic stages of culture, and early man peoples his world with gods and spirits and demons and fairies and ghostswhich enter into the traditions of his race, and are more or less accepted even by a later race which no longer creates them for itself.
In our more advanced civilisations we are still struggling with later forms of that Protean tendency to objectify the self and to animate the things and even the people around us with our own spirit. The impatient and imperfectly bred child, or even man, kicks viciously the object he stumbles against, animate or inanimate, in order to revenge a wrong which exists only in himself. On a slightly higher plane, the men of mediæval times brought actions in the law courts against offending animals and solemnly pronounced sentence against them as 'criminals,'[175]while even to-day society still 'punishes' the human criminal because it has imaginatively re-created him in the image of an ordinary normal person, and lacks the intelligence to perceive that he has been moulded by the laws of his nature and environment into a creature which we do well to protect ourselves against, but have no right to 'punish.'[176]Everywhere we still see around us thesurviving relics of this primitive tendency of men to project their own personalities into external objects. A fine civilisation lies largely in the due subordination of this tendency, in the realisation and control of our own emotional possibilities, and in the resultant growth of personal responsibility.
It is thus impossible to over-estimate the immense importance of the primitive symbolic tendency to objectify the subjective. Men have taken out of their own hearts their best feelings and their worst feelings, and have personalised and dramatised them, bowed down to them or stamped on them, unable to hear the voice with which each of their images spoke: 'I am thyself.' Our conceptions of religion, of morals, of many of the mightiest phenomena of life, especially the more exceptional phenomena, have grown up under this influence, which still serves to support many movements of to-day by some people imagined to be modern.
Dreaming, as we have seen, is not the sole source of such conceptions. But they could scarcely have been found convincing, and possibly could not even have arisen, among races which were wholly devoid of dream experiences. A large part of all progress in psychological knowledge, and, indeed, a large part of civilisation itself, lies in realising that the apparently objective is really subjective, that the angels and demons and geniuses of all sorts that once seemed to be external forces taking possession of feeble and vacant individualities are themselves but modes of action of marvellouslyrich and varied personalities. In our dreams we are brought back into the magic circle of early culture, and we shrink and shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms that are built up of our own thoughts and emotions, and are really our own flesh.
DREAMS OF THE DEAD
Mental Dissociation during Sleep—Illustrated by the Dream of Returning to School Life—The Typical Dream of a Dead Friend—Examples—Early Records of this Type of Dream—Analysis of such Dreams—Atypical Forms—The Consolation sometimes afforded by Dreams of the Dead—Ancient Legends of this Dream Type—The Influence of Dreams on the Belief of Primitive Man in the Survival of the Dead.
Mental Dissociation during Sleep—Illustrated by the Dream of Returning to School Life—The Typical Dream of a Dead Friend—Examples—Early Records of this Type of Dream—Analysis of such Dreams—Atypical Forms—The Consolation sometimes afforded by Dreams of the Dead—Ancient Legends of this Dream Type—The Influence of Dreams on the Belief of Primitive Man in the Survival of the Dead.
Our memories tend to fall into groups or systems. We all possess a great number of such systematised groups of impressions. Every period of life, every subject we have occupied ourselves with, every intimate friend we have had, each represents a more or less separate mass of ideas and feelings. Within each system one idea or feeling easily calls up another belonging to the same system. Moreover, in full and alert waking life, each system is in touch with the systems related to it. If there crowd into the field of consciousness the memories belonging to one period of life, or one country we have lived in, we can control and criticise those memories by reference to others belonging to another period or another country. If we are overwhelmed by the thoughts and emotions associated with the memory of one friend we can restore our mental balance by evoking the thoughts and emotions associated withanother friend. The various systems are in this way co-ordinated in apperception.[177]
In sleep, however, these groups are not usually so firmly held together by the cords along which we can move in our waking moments from one to the other. They are, as it were, loosened from their moorings, and on the sea of sleeping consciousness they drift apart or jostle together in new and what seem to be random associations. This is that process of dissociation which we find so marked in dreaming, and in all those psychic phenomena—hallucinations, hysteria, multiple personality, insanity—which are allied to dreaming.
A simple illustration of the clash and confusion of two opposing systems of memories in dreams, when due apperceptive control is lacking, is supplied by a common and well-recognised type of dream, the dream of returning to the school of youth.[178]Many people are occasionally liable to this dream, which is often vivid and disturbing. We may have left the schoolroom thirty years or more ago, and never seen it since; it may have vanished from our waking thoughts. Yet from time to time we find ourselves there in our dreams,and called upon to take our old place, always with a sense of conflict, a vague discomfort, a feeling of something incongruous and humiliating, for we realise that we are now too old. Here is a dream in illustration: I find myself back at my old school, but my old schoolmaster is not there; he is away ill, as I am told by his substitute, whose face somehow seems familiar, though I cannot recall where I have seen it. I do not know any of the boys; I am returning after an absence of some months. I realise that I am to take my old place again, and yet I feel a profound repulsion to do so, a sense that it is somehow incongruous. This latter feeling seems to prevail, for I finally assume the part of a visitor, and remark, insincerely, to the master that it is pleasant to see the old place again.
In such a case as this it seems that a picture from an ancient system of memories floats across the field of sleeping consciousness, and the dreamer is naturally drawn into that system and begins to adapt himself to its demands. But, as he does so, the influence of other later and incompatible systems of memories begins unconsciously to affect the dreamer.[179]The cords of connection, however, which when awake would enable him to adjust critically the opposing systems, are not acting; apperception is defective. Yet the opposing systems are there, outside the immediatefield of consciousness, and jostling the ancient system which has come into the central focus. Finally this jostling of the ancient system by more recent systems causes a harmonising modification in consciousness. The dreamer ceases to be a boy in his old school, and assumes the part of a visitor.
Dreams of our recently dead friends furnish a type of dream which is formed in exactly the same way as these dreams of a return to school life. The only difference is that they often present it in a more vivid, pronounced, and poignantly emotional shape. This is so, partly from the very subject of such dreams, and partly because the fact of death definitely divides our impressions of our dead friends into two groups, which are intimately allied to each other by their subject, and yet absolutely opposed by the fact that in the one group the friend is alive, and in the other dead.
I proceed to present two series of dreams—one in a man, the other in a woman—illustrating this type of dream.[180]
Observation I.—Mr. C., age about twenty-eight, a man of scientific training and aptitudes. Shortly after his mother's death he repeatedly dreamed that she had come to life again. She had been buried, but it was somehow found out that she was not really dead. Mr. C. describes the painful intellectual struggles that went on in these dreams, the arguments in favour ofdeath from the impossibility of prolonged life in the grave, and how these doubts were finally swallowed up in a sense of wonder and joy because his mother was actually there, alive, in his dream.
These dreams became less frequent as time went on, but some years later occurred an isolated dream which clearly shows a further stage in the same process. Mr. C. dreamed that his father had just returned home, and that he (the dreamer) was puzzled to make out where his mother was. After puzzling a long time he asked his sister, but at the very moment he asked it flashed upon him—more, he thinks, with a feeling of relief at the solution of a painful difficulty than with grief—that his mother was dead.
Observation II.—Mrs. F., age about thirty, highly intelligent but of somewhat emotional temperament. A week after the death of a lifelong friend to whom she was greatly attached, Mrs. F. dreamed for the first time of her friend, finding that she was alive, and then in the course of the dream discovering that she had been buried alive.
A second dream occurred on the following night. Mrs. F. imagined that she went to see her friend, whom she found in bed, and to whom she told the strange things that she had heard (i.e., that the friend was dead). Her friend then gave Mrs. F. a few things as souvenirs. But on leaving the room Mrs. F. was told that her friend was really dead, and had spoken to her after death.
In a fourth dream, at a subsequent date, Mrs. F. imagined that her friend came to her, saying that shehad returned to earth for a few minutes to give her messages and to assure her that she was happy in another world and in the enjoyment of the fullest life.
Another dream occurred more than a year later. Some one brought to Mrs. F., in her dream, the news that her friend was still alive; she was taken to her and found her as in life. The friend said she had been away, but did not explain where or why she had been supposed dead. Mrs. F. asked no questions and felt no curiosity, being absorbed in the joy of finding her friend still alive, and they proceeded to talk over the things that had happened since they last met. It was a very vivid, natural, and detailed dream, and on awaking Mrs. F. felt somewhat exhausted. Although not superstitious, the dream gave her a feeling of consolation.
The next series has been observed more recently. I include all the dreams and the intervals at which they occurred. The somewhat unexpected news reached me of the death of a near and lifelong friend when I was myself recovering from an attack of influenza. No dream which could be connected with this event occurred until about a fortnight later[181](16th January).I then dreamed that I was with my friend and asking him (he had been a clergyman and Biblical scholar) whether, in his opinion, Jesus had been able to speak Greek. I awoke before I received his answer, but no sort of doubt, hesitation, or surprise was aroused by his appearance alive.
Nineteen days later (4th February) occurred the next dream. This time I dreamed that my friend was just dead, and that I was gazing at a postcard of good wishes, written partly in Latin, which he had sent me a few days before (on the actual date of my birthday), and regretting that I had not answered it. There was no doubt in my mind as to the fact of his death. (I may remark that the last letter I had written to my friend was on his birthday, and he had been unable to reply, so that there was here one of those reversals which Freud and others have noted as not uncommon in dreams.)
The next dream occurred thirty-four days later (10th March). I thought that I met my friend, and at once realised that it was not he but his wife who had died, and I clasped his hand sympathetically.
Some months later (27th July) I again dreamed that I was walking with my friend and talking, as we might have talked, on topics of common interest. But at the same time I knew, and he knew that I knew, that he was to die on the morrow.
Once more, a fortnight later (10th August), I dreamed that I had an appointment to meet my friend in a certain road, but he failed to appear. I began to wonderwhether he had forgotten the appointment, or I had made a mistake, and I was seeking for the letter making the appointment when I awoke.
It would appear that the dreams of this type are less pronounced in the ratio of the less pronounced affectional intensity of the relationship which unites the friends. The next dream concerned a man for whom I had the highest esteem and regard, but had not been intimately associated with. I dreamed that I saw this friend, who was the editor of a psychological journal, alive and well in his room, together with two foreign psychologists also known to me, who had apparently succeeded him in the editorship of the journal, for I saw their names on the title-page of a number of it which was put in my hands. It surprised me that, though alive and well, he should have ceased to edit the journal; the theory by which I satisfactorily accounted to myself for his appearance was that, though he had been so near death that his life was despaired of, he had not actually died; his death had been prematurely reported. It flashed across my dream consciousness, indeed, that I had read obituaries of my friend in the papers, but this reminiscence merely suggested the reflection that some one had been guilty of a grave indiscretion.[182]
Although no attempt had been made to analyse this type of dream before 1895, the dream itself had often been noted down, as from its poignant and affecting character it could not fail to be. An early example is furnished by the philosopher Gassendi, who states that he dreamed he met a friend, that he greeted him as one returned from the dead, and that then, saying to himself in his dream that this was impossible, he concluded that he must be dreaming.[183]Pepys, again, in hisDiary, on the 29th June 1667, a few months after his mother's death, dreamed that 'my mother told me she lacked a pair of gloves, and I remembered a pair of my wife's in my chamber, and resolved she should have them, but then recollected [reflected] how my mother came to be here when I was in mourning for her, and so thinking it to be a mistake in our thinking her all this while dead, I did contrive that it should be said to any that inquiredthat it was my mother-in-law, my wife's mother, that was dead, and we in mourning for.' This dream, Pepys adds, 'did trouble me mightily.' Edmond de Goncourt, in hisJournal(27th July 1870), well describes how in the first dream of the dead brother to whom he was so tenderly attached, the two streams of memories appeared. He dreamed he was walking with his brother, but at the same time he knew he was in mourning for him, and friends were coming up to offer condolences; the emotions caused by the conflict of these two certainties—his brother's life affirmed by his presence and his death affirmed by all the other circumstances of the dream—was profoundly distressing. A few years earlier Renan, when his dearly loved sister Henrietta died by his side in the Lebanon, also had dreams of this type, which deeply affected even his cautious and sceptical nature. She had died of Syrian fever, from which he also was suffering, and shortly afterwards he wrote in a letter that 'in feverish dreams a terrible doubt has risen up before me; I have fancied I heard her voice calling to me from the vault where she was laid.' He comforted himself, however, with the thought that this horrible supposition was unjustified, since French doctors had been present at her death. Maury[184]also mentions that he had often had dreams of this type in which the dead appeared as living, though the sight of them always produced astonishment and doubt which the sleeping brain endeavoured to allay by some kind of explanation. Beaunis also describeshow he has dreamed with surprise of meeting a friend whom even in his dream he knew to be dead.[185]
It is not difficult, in the light of all that we have been able to learn regarding the psychology of the world of dreams, to account for the process here described, for its frequency, and for its poignant emotional effects. This dream type is only a special variety of the commonest species of dream, in which two or more groups of reminiscences flow together and form a single bizarre congruity, aconfusionin the strict sense of the word. The death of a friend sets up a barrier which cuts into two the stream of impressions concerning that friend. Thus, two streams of images flow into sleeping consciousness, one representing the friend as alive, the other as dead. The first stream comes from older and richer sources; the second is more poignant, but also more recent and more easily exhausted. The two streams break against each other in restless conflict, both, from the inevitable conditions of dream life, being accepted as true, and they eventually mix to form an absurd harmony, in which the older and stronger images (in accordance with that recognised tendency for old psychic impressions generally to be most stable) predominate over those that are more recent. Thus, in the first observation the dreamer seems to have begun his dream by imagining that his mother was alive as of old; then his more recent experiences interfered with the assertion of her death. This resulted in a struggle between the old-establishedimages representing her as alive and the later ones representing her as dead. The idea that she had come to life again was evidently a theory that had arisen in his brain to harmonise these two opposing currents. The theory was not accepted easily; all sorts of scientific objections arose to oppose it, but there could be no doubt, for his mother was there. The dreamer is in the same position as a paranoiac who constantly seems to hear threatening voices; henceforth he is absorbed in inventing a theory (electricity, hypnotism, or whatever it may be) to account for his hallucinations, and his whole view of life is modified accordingly. The dreamer, in the cases I am here concerned with, sees an image of the dead person as alive, and is therefore compelled to invent a theory to account for this image; the theories that most easily suggest themselves are either that the dead person has never really died, or else that he has come back from the dead for a brief space. The mental and emotional conflict which such dreams involve renders them very vivid. They make a profound impression even after awakening, and for some sensitive persons are almost too sacred to speak of.
When a series of these dreams occurs concerning the same dead friend the tendency seems to be, on the whole—though there are certainly many exceptions—for the living reality of the vision of the dead friend to be more and more positively affirmed. Whether awake or asleep, it is very difficult for us to resist the evidence of our senses. It is even more difficult asleep than awake, for, as we have seen reason to believe,apperception, with the critical control it involves, is weakened. Just as the savage or the child accepts as a reality the illusion of the sun traversing the sky, just as the paranoiac accepts the reality of the hallucinations he is subjected to, and gradually weaves them into a more or less plausible theory, so the dreamer seems to employ all the acutest powers of sleeping reason available to construct a theory in support of the reality of the visions of his dead friend.
Sometimes atypical dreams of the dead occur in which even from the first there appears little clash or doubt. When the vision can thus easily be accepted, it is sometimes a source of consolation, joy, and even religious faith which may still persist in the waking state. Chabaneix has, for instance, recorded the dream experiences of a poet and philosopher who had been deeply attached to a woman with whom his relations were both passionate and intellectual. From the night after her death onwards, at intervals, he had dreams of the beloved woman, at first appearing as a floating vision, later as a vividly seen and tangible person; these dreams caused refreshment and mental invigoration, and seemed to bring the dreamer into renewed communication with his dead friend.[186]
I am indebted to a clergyman for the record of asomewhat similar experience. 'A close friendship,' he writes, 'once existed between myself and a lady, somewhat older, and of a religious temperament. We often discussed the life beyond the grave, and agreed that if she died first, and this appeared more than probable, as she was the victim of a mortal disease, she would appear to me. I may add that she was of a highly-strung and nervous nature, and though purely English had many of the psychic characteristics of the Celt. After her death, I looked for some appearance or manifestation, and about three days after dreamed that she had come back to me, and was discussing with me a matter which I much wished to speak about before her death, but was unable to, owing to her weakness and the presence of strangers. In the dream it was perfectly clear to me that she was a dead woman back from another sphere of existence. For some weeks after this I had similar experiences. They were never dreams of the old life and friendship before death, but always reappearances from the other world. Of course it may be said of this experience of mine, that it was merely the result of expectation. But I have found that the things most on my mind are rarely the subject of my dreams. Moreover, these dreams formed a series, lasting for weeks, and all of the same character, though the conversations differed.'
When a dreamer awakes in an emotional state which corresponds to a dream he has just experienced, it is usually a safe assumption that the dream was the result, and not the cause, of the emotional state. That is byno means always the case, however, and in the type of dream we are here concerned with it is rarely the case. Even though it may be quite true that an emotional state evoked the dream, it is equally true that in its turn the dream itself may arouse an emotional state. The dream of encountering a celestial visitant, especially if the visitant is a beloved friend, cannot fail to produce an especial effect of this kind. It is noteworthy that the emotional influence may be present even when the fact of dreaming has not been recalled. Thus a lady who, on waking in the morning could not remember having dreamed, realised during the day that she was feeling as she was accustomed to feel after dreaming of a beloved friend, and was ultimately able to recall fragments of the dream.[187]A man of so great an intellect as Goethe has borne witness to the consoling influence of dreams. 'I have had times in my life,' he said, in old age, to Eckermann, 'when I have fallen asleep in tears, but in my dreams the loveliest figures come to give me comfort and happiness, and I awake next morning once more fresh and cheerful.'[188]
If we take a wide sweep we shall find in many parts of the world stories and legends concerning the relationship of the living with the dead which have a singular resemblance with the typical dream of the dead here investigated. Thus, in Japan, it appears that stories of the returning of the dead are very common. Lafcadio Hearn reproduces one, as told by a Japanese, which closely resembles some of the dreams we have met with. 'A lover resolved to commit suicide on the grave of his sweetheart. He found her tomb and knelt before it, and prayed and wept, and whispered to her that which he was about to do. And suddenly he heard her voice cry to him "Anata!" and felt her hand upon his hand: and he turned and saw her kneeling beside him, smiling and beautiful as he remembered her, only a little pale. Then his heart leaped so that he could not speak for the wonder and the doubt and the joy of that moment. But she said, "Do not doubt; it is really I. I am not dead. It was all a mistake. I was buried because my parents thought me dead—buried too soon. Yet you see I am not dead, not a ghost. It is I; do not doubt it!"' It is perhaps worth mentioning that the incident told in the Fourth Gospel (xx. 11-18) asoccurring to Mary Magdalene when at the tomb of Jesus, recalls the dream process of fusion of images. She turns and sees, as she thinks, the gardener, but in the course of conversation it flashes on her that he is Jesus, risen from the tomb. In quite another part of the world the Salish Indians of British Columbia have a story of a man who goes back to the spirit-world to reclaim his lost wife; this can only be done under special conditions, and for some time refraining to touch her; if he breaks these conditions she vanishes in his arms, and he is left alone.[189]That story, again, cannot fail to remind us of the almost identical Greek legend of the return of Orpheus to the under-world to reclaim his dead wife Eurydice. If these myths and legends were not directly based on the dream-process, it can only be on the ground, alleged with some force by Freud's school, that myths and legends themselves develop by means of the same mechanism as dreams.
The probable influence of dreams in originating or confirming the primitive belief of men in a spirit world has often been set forth. Herbert Spencer attached great importance to this factor in the constitution of the belief in another world, in spirits and in gods.[190]Wundt even considers that such dreams furnish the whole origin of animism. Other writers, less closely associatedwith anthropological psychology, have argued in the same sense.[191]
But while these thinkers have in some cases specifically referred to dreams of the dead, and not merely to the widespread belief of savages that in sleep the soul leaves the body to wander over the earth, they have never realised that there is a special mechanism in the typical dream of a dead friend, due to mental dissociation during sleep, which powerfully suggests to us that death sets up no fatal barrier to the return of the dead. In dreams the dead are thus rendered indestructible; they cannot be finally killed, but rather tend to reappear in ever more clearly affirmed vitality. Dreams of this sort must certainly have come to men ever since men began to be. If their emotional effects are great to-day, we can well believe that they were much greater in the early days when dream life and what we call real life were less easily distinguished. The repercussion of this kind of dream through unmeasured ages cannot fail to have told at last on the traditions of the race.
MEMORY IN DREAMS
The Apparent Rapidity of Thought in Dreams—This Phenomenon largely due to the Dream being a Description of a Picture—The Experience of Drowning Persons—The Sense of Time in Dreams—The Crumpling of Consciousness in Dreams—The Recovery of Lost Memories through the Relaxation of Attention—The Emergence in Dreams of Memories not known to Waking Life—The Recollection of Forgotten Languages in Sleep—The Perversions of Memory in Dreams—Paramnesic False Recollections—Hypnagogic Paramnesia—Dreams mistaken for Actual Events—The Phenomenon of Pseudo-Reminiscence—Its Relationship to Epilepsy—Its Prevalence especially among Imaginative and Nervously Exhausted Persons—The Theories put forward to Explain it—A Fatigue Product—Conditioned by Defective Attention and Apperception—Pseudo-Reminiscence a reversed Hallucination.
The Apparent Rapidity of Thought in Dreams—This Phenomenon largely due to the Dream being a Description of a Picture—The Experience of Drowning Persons—The Sense of Time in Dreams—The Crumpling of Consciousness in Dreams—The Recovery of Lost Memories through the Relaxation of Attention—The Emergence in Dreams of Memories not known to Waking Life—The Recollection of Forgotten Languages in Sleep—The Perversions of Memory in Dreams—Paramnesic False Recollections—Hypnagogic Paramnesia—Dreams mistaken for Actual Events—The Phenomenon of Pseudo-Reminiscence—Its Relationship to Epilepsy—Its Prevalence especially among Imaginative and Nervously Exhausted Persons—The Theories put forward to Explain it—A Fatigue Product—Conditioned by Defective Attention and Apperception—Pseudo-Reminiscence a reversed Hallucination.
The peculiarities of memory in dreams—its defects, its aberrations, its excesses—have attracted attention ever since dreams began to be studied at all. It is not enough to assure ourselves that on awakening from a dream our memory of that dream may fairly be regarded as trustworthy so far as it extends. The characteristics of memory revealed within the reproduced dream have sometimes seemed so extraordinary as to be only explicable by the theory of supernatural intervention.
A problem which at one time greatly puzzled the scientific students of dreaming is furnished at the outsetby the apparent abnormal rapidity of the dream process, the piling together in a brief space of time of a great number of combined memories. Stories were told of people who, when awakened by sounds or contacts which must have aroused them almost immediately, had yet experienced elaborate visions which could only have been excited by the stimulus which caused the awakening. The dream of Maury—who, when awakened by a portion of the bed cornice falling on his neck, imagined that he was living in the days of the Reign of Terror, and, after many adventures, was being guillotined—has become famous.[192]
It is unquestionably true that dreams are sometimes evoked by sensory stimuli which almost immediately awake the dreamer. But the supposition that this fairly common fact involves an extraordinary acceleration of the rapidity with which mental images are formed is due to a failure to comprehend the conditions under which psychic activity in sleep takes place. If the sleeper were wide awake, and were suddenly startled by a mysterious voice at the window or the door, he would arrive at a theory of the sound, and even form a plan of action, with at least as much rapidity as when the stimulus occurs during sleep. The difference is that in sleep the ordinary mental associations are more or less in abeyance, and the way is therefore easily open to new associations. These new associations, when welook back at them from the standpoint of waking life, seem to us so bizarre, so far-fetched, that we think it must have required a long time to imagine them. We fail to realise that, under the conditions of dream thought, they have come about as automatically and as instantaneously as the ordinary psychicconcomitantsof external stimulation in waking life. It must also be remembered that in all the cases in which the rapidity of the dream process has seemed so extraordinary, it has merely been a question of visual imagery, and it is obviously quite easy to see in an instant an elaborate picture or series of pictures which would take a long time to describe.[193]At the most the dreamer has merely seen a kind of cinematographic drama which has been condensed and run together in very much the way practised by the cinematographic artist, so that although the whole story seems to be shown in constant movement, in reality the action of hours is condensed into moments. Further, it has always to be borne in mind that, asleep as well as awake, intense emotion involves a loss of the sense of time. We say in a terrible crisis that moments seemed years, and when sleeping consciousness magnifies a trivial stimulation into the occasion of a great crisis the same effect is necessarily produced.
Exactly the same illusion is experienced by persons who are rescued from drowning, or other dangeroussituations. It sometimes seems to them that their whole life has passed before them in vision during those brief moments. But careful investigation of some of these cases, notably by Piéron, has shown that what really happened was that a scene from childhood, perhaps of some rather similar accident, came before the drowning man's mind and was followed by five, six, perhaps even ten or twelve momentary scenes from later life. When the time during which these scenes flashed through the mind was taken into account it was found that there had by no means been any remarkable mental rapidity.
Such considerations have now led most scientific investigators of dreaming to regard these problems of dream memory as settled. Woodworth's observations on the hypnagogic or half-waking state revealed no remarkable rapidity of mental processes. Clavière showed by experiments with analarmclock which struck twice with an interval of twenty-two seconds that speech dreams at all events take place merely with normal rapidity, or are even slightly slower than under waking conditions. The imagery of sleep, Clavière concluded, is not more rapid than the imagery of waking life, though to the dreamer it may seem to last for hours or days. It is often slackened rather than accelerated, says Piéron, who refers to the corresponding illusion under the influence of drugs likehashish, though in some cases he finds that there is really a slight acceleration. The illusion is simply due, Foucault thinks, to the dreamer's belief that the events of his dream occupythe same time as real events. This illusion of time, concludes Dr. Justine Tobolowska, in her Paris thesis on this subject, is simply the necessary and constant result of the form assumed by psychic life during sleep.[194]
If this peculiarity of memory in dreaming is not difficult to explain as a natural illusion, there are other and rarer characteristics of dream memory which are much more puzzling.
In attempting to unravel these, it is probable that, as in explaining the illusion of rapidity, we must always bear in mind the tendency of memory-groups in dreams to fall apart from their waking links of association, so well as the complementary tendency to form associations which in waking life would only be attained by a strained effort. Apperception, with the power it involves of combining and bringing to a focus all the various groups of memories bearing on the point in hand, is defective. The focus of conscious attention is contracted, and there is the curious and significant phenomenon that sleeping consciousness is occasionally unconscious of psychic elements which yet are present just outside it and thrusting imagery into its focus. The imagery becomes conscious, but its relation to the existing focus of consciousness is not consciously perceived. Such a psychic mechanism, as Freud and hisdisciples have shown, quite commonly appears in hysteria and obsessional neuroses when healthy normal consciousness is degraded to a pathological level resembling that which is normal in dreams.[195]In such a case the surface of sleeping consciousness is, as it were, crumpled up, and the concealed portion appears only at the end of the dream or not at all. A simple example may make this clear. In a dream I ask a lady if she knows the work of the poet Bau; she replies that she does not; then I see before me a paper having on it the name Baudelaire, clearly the name which should have been contained in my query.[196]In such a dream the crumpling and breaking of consciousness, at its very focus, is shown in the most unmistakable manner.[197]But many of the most remarkable dreams of dramatic dreamers are due to the same phenomenon, which in an intellectual form is exactly the phenomenon which always makes a dramatic situation effective. Robert Louis Stevenson was an abnormally vivid dreamer, and found the germ of some of the plots of his stories in his dreams; he has described one of his dreams inwhich the dreamer imagines he has committed a murder; the crime becomes known to a woman who, however, never denounces it; the murderer lives in terror, and cannot conceive why the woman prolongs his torture by this delay in giving him up to justice; only at the end of the dream comes the clue to the mystery, and the explanation of the woman's attitude, as she falls on her knees and cries: 'Do you not understand? I love you.'[198]
There is another and very interesting class of dreams in which we find not merely that some memory-groups disappear from consciousness or become merely latent, but also that other memory-groups, latent or even lost to waking consciousness, float into the focus of sleeping consciousness. In other words, we can remember in sleep what we have forgotten awake. We then have what is called thehypermnesia, the excessive or abnormal memory, of sleep.
There can be little doubt that the two processes—the sinking of some memory-groups and the emergence on the surface of other memory-groups which, so far as waking life is concerned, had apparently fallen to the depths and been drowned—are complementarily related to one another. We remember what we have forgotten because we forget what we remembered. The order of our waking impressions involves a certain tension, that is to say a certain attention, which holds them in our consciousness, and excludes any other order which might serve to bring lost memory-groupsto sight. Sometimes we are conscious of a lost memory which is just outside consciousness, but which, with the existing order of our memory-groups, we cannot bring into consciousness. We have the missing name, the missing memory, at the tip of our tongue, we say, but we cannot quite catch it.[199]In dreams apperception is defective, the strain of conscious attention is relaxed, and the conditions are furnished under which new clues and strains may come into action and the missing name glide spontaneously into consciousness. Even the mere approach of sleep, with its accompanying relaxation of attention, may effect this end. Thus I was trying one day to recall the name of the unpleasant Chinese scent, patchouli. The name, though not usually unfamiliar, escaped me. At night, however, just before falling asleep, it spontaneously occurred to me. In the morning, when fully awake, I was again unable to recall it.
In such a case we see how waking consciousness is tense in a certain direction, which happens not to be that in which the desired thing is to be found. Attention under such circumstances impedes rather than aids recollection. In this particular case, I felt convincedthat the name I wanted began withh, and thus my mind was intently directed towards a wrong quarter. But on the approach of sleep attention is automatically relaxed, and it is then possible for the forgotten word to slip in from its unexpected quarter. On these occasions it is by indirection that direction is found.[200]
It is interesting to observe that this same process of discovery due to the wider outlook of relaxed attention can take place, not only in sleep and the hypnagogic state, but also, subconsciously, in the fully waking state when the mind is occupied with some other subject. Thus in reading a MS., I came upon an illegible word which I was unable to identify, notwithstanding several guesses and careful scrutiny through a magnifying glass. I passed on, dismissing the subject from my mind. A quarter of an hour afterwards, when walking, and thinking of quite a different subject, I became conscious that the word 'ceremonial' had floated into the field of mental vision, and I at once realised that this was the unidentified word. The instance may be trivial, but no example could better show how themind may continue to work subconsciously in one direction while consciously working in an entirely different direction.
In dreams, however, we can effect more than a mere recovery of memories which have temporarily escaped us, or the discovery of relationships which have eluded us. The dissociation of familiar memory-groups becomes so complete, the appearance of unfamiliar groups so eruptive, that we can remember things that have entirely and permanently sunk below the surface of waking consciousness, or even things which are so insignificant that they have never made any mark on waking consciousness at all. In this way, we may be said, in a certain sense, to remember things we never knew. The first dream which enabled me, some twenty years ago, to realise this hypermnesia of the mind in dreams[201]was the following unimportant but instructive case. I woke up recalling the chief items of a rather vivid dream: I had imagined myself in a large old house, where the furniture, though of good quality, was ancient, and the chairs threatened to give way as one sat on them. The place belonged to one SirPeter Bryan, a hale old gentleman, who was accompanied by his son and grandson. There was a question of my buying the place from him, and I was very complimentary to the old gentleman's appearance of youthfulness, absurdly affecting not to know which was the grandfather and which the grandson. On awaking I said to myself that here was a purely imaginative dream, quite unsuggested by any definite experiences. But when I began to recall the trifling incidents of the previous day, and the things I had seen and read, I realised that that was far from being the case. So far from the dream having been a pure effort of imagination, I found that every minute item could be traced to some separate source, though none of them had the slightest resemblance to the dream as a whole. The name of Sir Peter Bryan alone completely baffled me; I could not even recall that I had at that time ever heard of any one called Bryan. I abandoned the search and made my notes of the dream and its sources. I had scarcely done so when I chanced to take up a volume of biographies of eccentric personages, which I had glanced through carelessly the day before. I found that it contained, among others, the lives of LordPeterborough and GeorgeBryanBrummel. I had certainly seen those names the day before; yet before I took up the book once again it would have been impossible for me to recall the exact name of Beau Brummel. It so happened that the forgotten memory which in this case re-emerged to sleeping consciousness, was a fact of no consequence to myself orany one else. But it furnishes the key to many dreams which have been of more serious import to the dreamers.
Since then I have been able to observe among my friends several instances of dreams containing veracious though often trivial circumstances unknown to the dreamer when awake, though on consideration it was found to be in the highest degree probable that they had come under his notice, and been forgotten, or not consciously observed. Thus a musical correspondent tells me he once dreamed of playing a piece of Rubinstein's in the presence of a friend who told him he had made a mistake in re-striking a tied note. In the morning he found the dream friend was correct. But up to then he had always repeated the note. Usually when the forgotten or unnoticed circumstance is trivial, it is of quite recent date. That it is not always very recent may be illustrated by a dream of my own. I dreamed that I was in Spain and about to rejoin some friends at a place which was called, I thought, Daraus, but on reaching the booking-office I could not remember whether the place I wanted to go to was called Daraus, Varaus, or Zaraus, all which places, it seemed to me, really existed. On awaking, I made a note of the dream, exactly as reproduced here, but was unable to recall any place, in Spain or elsewhere, corresponding to any of these names. The dream seemed merely to illustrate the familiar way in which a dream image perpetually shifts in a meaningless fashion at the focus of sleeping consciousness. The note was put away, and a fewmonths later taken out again.[202]It was still equally impossible to me to recall any real name corresponding to the dream names. But on consulting the Spanish guide-books and railway time-tables, I found that, on the line between San Sebastian and Bilbao, there really is a little seaside resort, in a beautiful situation, called Zarauz, and I realised, moreover, that I had actually passed that station in the train two hundred and fifty days before the date of my dream.[203]I had no associations with this place, though I may have admired it at the time; in any case it vanished permanently from conscious memory, perhaps aided by the fatigue of a long night journey before entering Spain. Even sleeping memory, I may remark, only recovered it with an effort, for it is notable that the name was gradually approached by three successive attempts.[204]
A special form of lost or unconscious memories recurring in sleep is constituted by the cases in which people when asleep, or in a somnambulistic state, can speak languages which they have forgotten, or never consciously known, when awake. A simple instance, known to me, is furnished by a servant who had been taken to Paris for a few weeks six months before, but had never learned to speak a word of French, and whose mistress overheard her talking in her sleep, and repeating various French phrases, like 'Je ne sais pas, Monsieur'; she had certainly heard these phrases, though she maintained, when awake, that she was ignorant of them. Speaking in a language not consciously known, or xenoglossia, as it is now termed, occurs under various abnormal conditions, as well as in sleep, and is sometimes classed with the tendency which is found, especially under great religious excitement, to 'speak with tongues,' or to utter gibberish.[205]But in various sleep-like states it occurs as a true revival of forgottenmemories, sometimes of memories which belong to childhood and in normal consciousness have been long overlaid and lost. On one occasion, by the bedside of a lady who was kept for a considerable period in a light condition of chloroform anaesthesia, the patient began to talk in an unfamiliar language which one of us recognised as Welsh; as a child, she afterwards owned, she had known Welsh, but had long since forgotten it.[206]A similar reproduction of lost memories occurs in the hypnotic state.
This psychic process, by which unconscious memories become conscious in dreams, is of considerable interest and importance because it lends itself to many delusions. Not only the ignorant and uncultured, but even well-trained and acute minds, are often so unskilled in mental analysis that they are quite unable to pierce beneath the phenomenon of conscious ignorance to the deeper fact of unconscious memory; they are completely baffled, or else they resort to the wildest hypotheses. This is illustrated by the following narrative received twelve years ago from a medical correspondent in Baltimore. 'Several years ago,' he writes, 'a friend made a social call at my house and in the course of conversation spoke very enthusiastically of Mascagni'sCavalleria Rusticana, the first performance of which in the United States he had attended a few nights previously. I had never even heard ofthe opera before, but that night I dreamed that I heard it performed. The dream was a very vivid one, so vivid that several times during the next day I found myself humming airs from the dream opera. Several evenings later I went to the theatre to see a comedy, and before the curtain rose the orchestra played a selection which I instantly recognised as part of my dream opera. I exclaimed to a lady who was with me: "That selection is fromCavalleria Rusticana." On inquiring of the leader of the orchestra such proved to be the case.' Now, at that period, shortly after the first appearance ofCavalleria Rusticana, portions of it had become extremely popular and were heard everywhere, by no means merely on the operatic stage. It was difficult not to have heard something of it. There cannot be the slightest doubt that my correspondent had heard not only the name but the music, though, writing at an interval of some years, he probably exaggerated the extent of his unconscious recollections. This seems the simple explanation of what to my correspondent was an inexplicable mystery. Other people, like the late Frederick Greenwood, not content to remain baffled, go further and regard such dreams as 'dreams of revelation,' as they also consider that class of dreams in which the dreamer works out the solution of a difficulty which he had vainly grappled with when awake.
This is a kind of dream which has occurred in all ages, and has at times been put down to divine interposition. Sixteen centuries ago Bishop Synesiusof Ptolemais wrote that in his hunting days a dream revealed to him an idea for a trap which he successfully employed in snaring animals, and at the present time inventions made in dreams have been successfully patented. The Rev. Nehemiah Curnock, who lately succeeded in deciphering Wesley'sJournal, has stated that an important missing clue to the cypher came to him in a dream. A friend of my own, an expert in chemistry, was not long since in frequent communication with a practical manufacturer, assisting him in his inventions by scientific advice. One day the manufacturer wrote to my friend asking if the latter had been thinking of him during the night, for he had been much puzzled by a difficulty, and during the night had seen a vision of my friend who explained the solution of the difficulty; in the morning the proposed solution proved successful. There was, however, no telepathic element in the case; the dreamer's solution was his own.
An interesting group of cases in this class is furnished by the dreams in which the dreamer, in opposition to his waking judgment, sees an acquaintance in whom he reposes trust acting in a manner unworthy of that trust, subsequent events proving that the estimate formed during sleep was sounder than that of waking life. Hawthorne (in hisAmerican Notebooks), Greenwood, Jewell, and others have recorded cases of this kind.
Various as these phenomena are, they fall into the same scheme. They all help to illustrate the fact thatthough on one side mental life in sleep is feeble and defective, on the other side it shows a tendency to vigorous excess. Sleep, as we know, involves a relaxation of tension, both physical and psychic; attention is no longer focused at a deliberately selected spot.[207]The voluntary field becomes narrower, but the involuntary field becomes extended. Thus it happens that the contents of our minds fall into a new order, an order which is often fantastic but, on the other hand, is sometimes a more natural and even a more rational order than that we attain in waking life. Our eyes close, our muscles grow slack, the reins fall from our hands. But it sometimes happens that thehorse knows the road home even better than we know it ourselves.
Hypermnesia, or abnormally wide range of recollection, is not the only or the most common modification of memory during sleep. We find much more commonly, and indeed as one of the chief characteristics of sleep, an abnormally narrow range of recollection. We find, also, and perhaps as a result of that narrow range, paramnesia or perversion of memory. The best known form of paramnesia is that in which we have the illusion that the event which is at the moment happening to us has happened to us before.[208]
This form of paramnesia is common in dreams, though it is often so slightly pronounced that we either fail to recall it on awakening or attach no significance to it.[209]I dream, for instance, that I am walking along a path, along which, it seems to me, I have often walked before, and that the path skirts the lawn of a house by which stands a policeman whom, also, it seems to me, I have often seen there before; the policeman approaches me and says, 'You have come to see Mr. So-and-so, sir?'and thereupon I suddenly recollect, with some confusion, that I have come to see Mr. So-and-so, and I walk up to the door. Again, an author dreams that he sees a list of his own books with, at the head of them, one entitled 'The Book of Glory.' He could not recall writing it (and to waking consciousness the name was entirely unknown), but the only reflection he made in his dream was 'How stupid to have forgotten!' In this case there was evidently some resistance to the suggestion, which yet was quickly accepted. In all such dreams it seems that we are in a state of mental weakness associated with defective apperceptual control and undue suggestibility, very similar to the state found in some forms of confusional insanity or of precocious dementia.[210]Consciousness feebly slides down the path of least resistance; it accepts every suggestion; the objects presented to it seem things that it knew before, the things that are suggested to it to do seem things that it already wanted to do before. Paramnesia, thus regarded, seems simply a natural outcome of a state of consciousness temporarily depressed below its normal standard of vigour.
It must be remembered that the suggestibility of sleeping consciousness varies in degree, and in the face of serious improbabilities there is often a considerable amount of resistance, just as the hypnotised personseriously resists the suggestions that fundamentally outrage his nature. But some degree of suggestibility, some tendency to regard the things that come before us in dreams as familiar—in other words, as things that have happened to us before—is not merely a natural result of defective apperception, but one of the very conditions of dreaming. It enables us to carry on our dreams; without it their progress would be fatally inhibited by doubt, uncertainty, and struggle. So it is, perhaps, that in all dreaming, or at all events in certain stages of sleeping consciousness, we are liable to fall into a state of pseudo-reminiscence.
It is an interesting and highly significant fact that this paramnesic delusion of our dreams—the feeling that the thing that is happening to us is the thing that has happened to us before or that might happen to us again—tends to persist in the hypnagogic (or hypnopompic) stage immediately following sleep. When we have half awakened from a dream and are just able to realise that it was a dream, that dream constantly tends to appear in a more plausible or probable light than is possible a few moments later when we are fully awake.[211]
The first experience which enabled me clearly torealise this phenomenon, and its probable explanation, occurred many years ago. About the middle of the night I had a very vivid dream, in which I imagined that two friends—a gentleman and his daughter—with a certain Lord Chesterfield (I had lately been reading theLettersof the famous Lord Chesterfield), were together at a hotel, that they were playing with weapons, that the lady accidentally killed or wounded Lord Chesterfield, and that she then changed clothes with him with the object of escaping, and avoiding discovery which would somehow be dangerous. I was informed of the matter, and was much concerned. I awoke, and my first thought was that I had just had a curious dream which I must not forget in the morning. But then I seemed to remember that it was a real and familiar event. This second thought lulled my mental activity, and I went to sleep again. In the morning I was able to recall the main points in my dream, and my thoughts on awaking from it.
Since then I have given attention to the point, and I have found on recalling my half-waking consciousness after dreams that, while it is doubtless rare to catch the assertion 'That really occurred,' it is less rare to catch the vague assertion, 'That is the kind of thing that does occur.' I find that this latter impressionappears, like the former, after vivid dreams which contain no physical impossibility, but which the full waking consciousness refuses to recognise as among the things that are probable. As an example quite unlike that just recorded, I may mention a dream in which I imagined that I was proving the frequency of local intermarriage by noting in directories the frequency of the presence of people of the same name in neighbouring towns and villages. On half-awaking I still believed that I had actually been engaged in such a task—that is, either that the dream was real or that it referred to a real event—and it was not until I was sufficiently awake to recognise the fallacy of such a method of investigation that I realised that it was purely a dream.
This phenomenon has long been known, although its significance has not been perceived. Brierre de Boismont pointed out that certain vivid dreams are not recognised as dreams, but are mistaken for reality after waking, though he scarcely recognised the normal limitation of this mistake to the hypnagogic state. Moll compared such dreams, thus continued into waking life, to continuative post-hypnotic suggestions. Sully mentioned awaking from dreams which 'still wear the aspect of old acquaintances, so that for the moment I think they are waking realities.'[212]Colegrove, in his study of memory, recorded many casesin which young people mistook their dreams for actual events.[213]
This persistence of the memory illusion of sleep into the subsequent hypnagogic state is obviously related to the allied persistence, more occasionally found, of the visual, auditory, and other sensory hallucinations of sleep into the hypnagogic state.[214]Visions thus seen persisting from dreams for a few moments into waking life are often very baffling and disturbing, as has already been pointed out, to ignorant and untrained people. Such visions may occur in the hypnagogic state, even when there has been no conscious precedent dream, and it is indeed probable, as Parish has argued, that it is precisely in the hypnagogic state, the narthex of the church of dreams, as I may term it, that hallucinations are most liable to occur. That illusions may momentarily occur in this state is obvious; thus falling asleep for a few minutes when seated before a black hollow smouldering fire, with red ashes at the bottom, I awake with the illusion that I see a curtain on fire, and have already leaned forward to snatch it away before I realise my mistake.
Under normal conditions, the liability of a dream memory to be mistaken for an actual event seems to begreater when an interval has elapsed before the dream is remembered, such an interval making it difficult to distinguish one class of memories from the other, provided the dream has been of a plausible character. Thus Professor Näcke has recorded that his wife dreamed that an acquaintance, an old lady, had called at the house; this dream was apparently forgotten until forty or fifty hours afterwards when, on passing the old lady's house, it was recalled, and the dreamer was only with much difficulty convinced that the dream was not an actual occurrence. When we are concerned with memories of childhood, it not infrequently happens that we cannot distinguish with absolute certainty between real occurrences and what may possibly have been dreams.
In normal physical and mental health, however, it seems rare for the hallucinatory influence of dreams to extend beyond the hypnagogic state, but any impairment of the bodily health generally, and of the brain in particular, may extend this confusion. Thus in a case of heart disease terminating fatally, the patient, though in health he was by no means visionary or impressionable, became liable during sleep in the day-time to dreams of an entirely reasonable character which he had great difficulty in distinguishing from the real facts of life, never feeling sure what had actually happened, and what had been only a dream. In disordered cerebral and nervous conditions the same illusion becomes still more marked. This is notably the case in hysteria. In some forms of insanity, asmany alienists have shown, this mistake is sometimes permanent and the dream may become an integral and persistent part of waking life. At this point, however, we leave the normal world of dreams and enter the sphere of pathology.
In the normal persistence of the dream illusion into the hypnagogic state with which we are here concerned, the dream usually presents a possible, though, it may be, highly improbable event. The half-waking or hypnagogic intelligence seems to be deceived by this element of life-like possibility. Consequently a fallacy of perception takes place strictly comparable to the fallacious perception which, in the case of an external sensation, we call an illusion. In the ordinary illusion an externally excited sensation of one kind is mistaken for an externally excited sensation of another kind. In this case a centrally excited sensation of one order (dream image) is mistaken for a centrally excited sensation of another order (memory). The phenomenon is, therefore, a mental illusion belonging to the group of false memories, and it may be termed hypnagogic paramnesia.
The process seems to have a certain interest, and it may throw light on some rather obscure phenomena. When we are able to recall a vivid dream, usually a fairly probable dream, with no idea as to when it was dreamed, and thus find ourselves in possession of experiences of which we cannot certainly say that they happened in waking life or in dream life, it seems probable that this hypnagogic paramnesia has come intoaction; the half-waking consciousness dismisses the vivid and life-like dream as an old and familiar experience, shunting it off into temporary forgetfulness, unless some accident again brings it into consciousness with, as it were, a fragment of that wrong label still sticking to it. Such a paramnesic process may thus also help to account for the mighty part which, as so many thinkers from Lucretius onwards have seen, dreams have played in moulding human action and human belief. It is a means whereby waking life and dream life are brought to an apparently common level.
By hypnagogic paramnesia I mean a false memory occurring in the ante-chamber of sleep, but not necessarily before sleep. Myers's invention of the word 'hypnopompic' seems scarcely necessary even for pedantic reasons. I take the condition of consciousness to be almost the same whether the sleep is coming on or passing away. In the Chesterfield dream it is indeed impossible to say whether the phenomenon is 'hypnagogic' or 'hypnopompic'; in such a case the twilight consciousness is as much conditioned by the sleep that is passing away as by the sleep that is coming on.
If this memory illusion of the half-waking state may be regarded as a variety of paramnesia, a new horizon is opened out to us. May not the hypnagogic variety throw light on the general phenomenon of paramnesia which has led to so many strange and complicated theories? I think it may.
Paramnesia, as we have seen, is the psychologist'sname for a hallucination of memory which is sometimes called 'pseudo-reminiscence,' and by medical writers (who especially associate it with epilepsy) regarded as a symptom of 'dreamy state,'[215]while by French authors it is often termed 'false recognition' or 'sensation du déjà vu.' Dickens, who seems himself to have experienced it, thus describes it inDavid Copperfield:'We have all some experience of a feeling that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said or done before, in a remote time, of having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances, of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it.' Sometimes it seems that this previous occurrence can only have taken place in a previous existence,[216]whence we probably have, as St. Augustineseems first to have suggested, the origin of the idea of metempsychosis, of the transmigration of souls; sometimes it seems to have happened before in a dream; sometimes the subject of the experience is totally baffled in the attempt to account for the feeling of familiarity which has overtaken him. In any case he is liable to an emotion of distress which would scarcely be caused by the coincidence of resemblance with a real previous experience.[217]