Paramnesia of this kind is known, according to the observations of Lalande,[218]to thirty people in a hundred, and Heymans found it in a considerable proportion of students of both sexes. Such estimates are probably too high if we take into consideration the general population. This experience seems, as Dugas and others have noted,[219]to affect educated people, and notably people of more than average intellect, who use their brains much, especially in artistic and emotional work, to a very much greater degree than the ignorant and phlegmatic manual worker.[220]Dickens has already been mentioned; many other notablewriters have referred to this or some allied feeling, stating that they had experienced it, and Sir James Crichton-Browne brings forward a number of passages from the poets in evidence of their familiarity with such phenomena.[221]Shelley (who appears on at least two occasions to have experienced hallucinations also) underwent what may be regarded as an experience of paramnesia (described in hisSpeculations on Metaphysics) which is of interest in the present connection because it brings this phenomenon into relation with dreams. He was walking with a friend in the neighbourhood of Oxford, when he suddenly turned the corner of a country lane and saw 'a common scene' of a windmill, etc., which, it immediately seemed to him, he recollected having seen before in a dream of long ago. Five years afterwards he was so agitated in writing this down that he could not finish the account. The real resemblance of 'a common scene' with a similar dream scene, even supposing it could be recollected when the two experiences were separated by a long interval, would scarcely be a coincidence likely to cause agitation. The emotion aroused seems to mark the experience as belonging to the class of paramnesic illusions which so often make a peculiarly vivid impression on those to whom they occur.
A great many theories have been put forward by psychologists and others to account for this paramnesic phenomenon. The most ancient explanation, long anterior to the beginnings of scientific psychology, was the theory that the occurrence which, as it now happens, strikes us as so overwhelmingly familiar had actually occurred to us in a previous existence long ages before; thus Pythagoras, according to the ancient story, when he visited the temple of Juno at Argos recognised the shield he had worn ages before when he was Euphorbus and fought with Menelaus in the Trojan war. A much more recent theory runs to the opposite extreme and claims that all or nearly all these cases of recognition indicate a real but confused reminiscence of past events in our present life, dim recollections which the subject is unable definitely to locate. This is the explanation largely relied on by Ribot, Jessen, Sander, Sully, Burnham, and many others. It was perhaps largely due to ignorance of the phenomenon; Ribot, when he wrote his book on the diseases of memory, considered that only three or four cases had been recorded, for an abnormal phenomenon always seems rare until it is recognised and definitely searched for. Undoubtedly, this theory will explain a considerable proportion of cases, but not really typical cases in which the subject has an overwhelming conviction that even the minute details of the present experience have been experienced before. We may read a new poem with a vague sense of familiarity, but such an experience never puts on a reallyparamnesic character, for we quickly realise that it is explainable by the fact that the writer of the poem has fallen under the influence of some greater master. The only experience I can personally speak of as at all approaching true paramnesia occurred on visiting the ruins of Pevensey Castle many years ago. On going up the slope towards the ivy-covered ruins, bathed in bright sunlight, I experienced a strange and abiding sense of familiarity with the scene. Three theories might account for this experience (for I refrain from including the Pythagorean theory that I experienced a reminiscence of the experience of a possible ancestor coming from across the Thames to the assistance of Harold against William the Conqueror at this spot): (1) that it was a case of true paramnesia; (2) that I had been taken to the spot as a child; (3) that the view was included among a series of coloured stereoscopic pictures with which I was familiar as a child, and which certainly contained similar scenes. I incline to this last explanation. Here, as elsewhere, there are no keys which will unlock all doors.
A modification of the theory that the pseudo-reminiscence is an unrecognised real reminiscence is furnished by Grasset, who considers that the phenomenon is due to a subconscious impression previously received, but only reaching consciousness under the influence of the new similar impression. This theory would include the revival of dream images, and is therefore related to the theory of Lapie and Méré, according to which the feeling of many of these subjects thatwhat they now experience had happened before in a dream is the correct explanation of the phenomenon.[222]
We enter on a different class of explanations with the early theory of Wigan that such cases are due to the duality of the brain, the two hemispheres not acting quite simultaneously. This is a somewhat crude conception, though it may seem approximately on the lines of more recent theories. The theory of the duplex brain, each hemisphere being supposed capable of acting independently, was at one time invoked to explain many phenomena, but it is no longer regarded as tenable.[223]
We may dismiss these theories, which have been effectively criticised by others, and revert to our clue in the sleeping and hypnagogic state. The hypnagogic state is a transition between waking and sleeping. It is thus a condition of mental feebleness and suggestibility doubtless correlated with a condition of irregular brain anaemia. A plausible suggestion under such conditions is too readily accepted. Does ordinary paramnesia occur under similar conditions of mental feebleness and suggestibility? It is rare to find descriptions of paramnesic experiences by scientific observers who are alive to the importance of accuratelyrecording all the conditions, but there is some reason to think that paramnesia does occur in states produced by excitement, exhaustion, and allied causes. The earliest case of paramnesia recorded in detail by a trained observer is that described by Wigan as occurring to himself at the funeral of the Princess Charlotte. He had passed several disturbed nights previous to the ceremony, with almost complete deprivation of rest on the night immediately preceding; he was suffering from grief as well as from exhaustion from want of food; he had been standing for four hours, and would have fainted on taking his place by the coffin if it had not been for the excitement of the occasion. When the music ceased the coffin slowly sank in absolute silence, broken by an outburst of grief from the bereaved husband. 'In an instant,' Wigan proceeds, 'I felt not merely animpression, but aconviction, that I had seen the whole scene before on some former occasion.' Such a condition may fairly be regarded as an artificial reproduction, by means of emotion, excitement, and exhaustion, of the condition which occurs simply and naturally in sleep or on its hypnagogic borderland.
The frequency—if it may be taken to be a fact—of the occurrence of pseudo-reminiscence in epileptics, noted by various medical observers, whether at the onset of the fit or independently of any obvious muscular convulsion, may be significant in this connection. There is no good reason to suppose that pseudo-reminiscence has a true relation to epilepsy, and still less that it necessarily constitutes a minor epilepticparoxysm. But the special sleep-like condition of contracted cerebral circulation in epilepsy renders it favourable to paramnesia as well as to hallucinatory phenomena.[224]
Independently of epilepsy, any condition of temporary and perhaps chronic nervous exhaustion may produce, or at all events predispose to, the paramnesic delusion of recognising present experiences as familiar. Thus Rosenbach has recorded the case of a sane and healthy man, who, after severe mental labour, followed by sleeplessness, seemed to know all the people he met in the street, though on close examination he found he was mistaken.[225]Such a condition may even be almost congenital. Thus of Anna Kingsford, who was of highly strung and neurotic disposition, we are told that, as a child, 'all that she read struck her as already familiar to her, so that she seemed to herself to be recoveringold recollections rather than acquiring fresh knowledge.'[226]
It is noteworthy that artificial anaesthesia by drugs which produce an abnormal sleep also favours paramnesia. Thus Sir William Ramsay[227]has stated that when, under an anaesthetic, he heard a slight noise in the street, 'I not merely knew that it had happened before, but I could have predicted that it would happen at that very moment.'
In all these conditions we appear to be in the presence of an enfeebled, excited, and impaired state of consciousness approximating to the true confusion of dream consciousness. It seems as if externally aroused sensations in such cases are received by the exhausted cerebral centres in so blurred a form that an illusion takes place, and they are mistaken for internally excited sensations, for memories.
That paramnesia is a fatigue product—even though often a product of nervous hyperaesthesia—is indicated by the statements of many who have described it. Anjel long ago emphasised this fatigue, and Bonatelli, also at an early period, found that illusions of memory were specially liable to occur in states of unusual nervous irritability. During recent years this characteristic of paramnesia has been more and more frequently recognised. Bernard Leroy, who devoted a lengthy and important Paris thesis topseudo-reminiscence,[228]showed that a certain proportion of cases indicated the presence of fatigue or distraction. Heymans found that it was in the evening, when his subjects were in a passive condition, tired, exhausted, or engaged in uncongenial work, that they were most liable to the experience.[229]Féré brought forward a case in which, as he pointed out, pseudo-reminiscence in a healthy man, convalescent from influenza, was associated with fatigue and disappeared with it.[230]Dromard and Albès declare that pseudo-reminiscence is 'a phenomenon of exhaustion,' and one of them makes the significant statement: 'I become more easily the prey of this illusion when, by chance and without thinking of it, I simultaneously apply my attention to an external object and an internal thought.'[231]Dugas, again, considers that all the various forms of paramnesia have 'one common character, which is that they occur as the result of prolonged or intense fatigue';[232]he adds that most of the cases of paramnesia he has noted in young people during fifteen years coincided with periods of anaemia and nervous weakness.
It is not, however, necessary to believe that fatigue, in the ordinary sense of the word, whether physical or mental, is the invariable accompaniment of paramnesia. If it is the presence of a condition resembling that of sleep or the hypnagogic state which predisposes to the experience, that condition may be produced by other circumstances. Distraction, excited hyperaesthesia simulating increased power, and various chronic psychic statesdueto a highly-strung or over-strained nervous system may all tend in the same direction, even though no sense of exhaustion is felt.[233]This is doubtless why it is that so many poets, novelists, and other men of strenuous intellectual aptitude are liable to this experience.
It has been argued by some who admit that there is often an element of fatigue in paramnesia,[234]that the real cause of the false memory is an abnormal celerity of perception, perhaps due to hyperaesthesia. The scene would thus be perceived so quickly that the subjectconcludes that he must have had this experience before. That the subject often has a feeling of unusual rapidity of perception may very well be admitted. But there is no reason whatever to suppose that the perception actually is received with any such unusual rapidity. The probabilities are in the other direction. We know that many influences (such as drugs like alcohol) which produce a feeling of heightened and quickened perceptions really have a slowing and dulling effect, in the same way as the wise and beautiful things we utter in dreams are usually found on awaking to be commonplace, if not meaningless. There is no evidence to show that paramnesia is accompanied by a real heightening of perception, while, as we have seen, a broad survey of the facts makes it more reasonable to suppose that we have, on the contrary, a sudden fall towards the dream state, a state in which, as Tissié and others have pointed out, there are many stages.
It must be remembered in this connection that in the hypnagogic and other states related to sleep we are not able to estimate time conditions consciously, though, as the frequent ability to wake at fixed moments indicates, we may do so subconsciously. Time is long, short, or non-existent in dream-like states. This is always true of the onset of the hypnagogic state. When I am suddenly awakened at night by a voice or a bell or other stimulus, I often find it very difficult to say whether I was or was not already awake, and have frequently replied, when so awakened, that I was already awake. That is an illusion, as is shown by the frequencywith which elderly people who fall asleep in the day time, will declare, though they may have been snoring a moment before, that they have never been asleep. By a somewhat similar paramnesic illusion we can never fix the exact moment when we awake. When we become conscious that we are awake it always seems to us that we are already awake, awake for an indefinite time, and not that we have just awakened. If I had to register the exact moment I awake in the morning I should usually feel that I was considerably late in making the observation. It seems that the imperfect hypnagogic consciousness projects itself behind. At the first onset, consciousness is not sufficiently developed to be able to realise that it is beginning, and when it becomes sufficiently developed to make such a statement the moment when it can be correctly made is already past. Consciousness is only able to assert that it has been continuing for an indefinite time. And that assertion involves a paramnesic illusion of putting back a present experience into the past, analogous to the illusion of pseudo-reminiscence.[235]
If we realise these characteristics of paramnesia we can scarcely fail to conclude that we are concerned here with illusions which, while they fall within the sphere of memory, are largely conditioned by the whole psychic condition. As in dreams, it is inattention, failure of apperception, defective association of the mental contents, which make the paramnesia possible. Paramnesia is, as Fouillée has said, a kind of diplopia or seeing double in the mental field. 'I have the impression,' says one of the writers on this subject who himself experiences the sensation, 'that the present reality has adouble.' Actual double vision is due to the failure of that muscular co-ordination which, as Ribot and others have insisted, is of the very essence of attention. This wider psychic basis on which paramnesia rests has of late been recognised by several psychologists. Thus Léon-Kindberg states that in paramnesia there is an absence of mental attention, of the effort of synthesis necessary to grasp an actual occurrence, which is, therefore, perceived with the samefacility as a memory not requiring synthesis, with the resulting illusion that it is a memory.[236]Ballet, again, regards paramnesia as a transitory or permanent psychasthenic state, due to dissociation.[237]Dugas, also, who has repeatedly returned to this subject during many years, in his latest contributions attaches primary importance to this broader factor of paramnesia. In analysing memory, he says, there is an element which, though often overlooked, is capital: the recognition of a state of consciousness not merely as passed, but as bound up with our own personal past; when that synthetic function ceases to be accomplished, or is only accomplished defectively, then memory is lacking or perverted. Nervous weakness, he proceeds, produces failure of attention, the inhibitory power of attention being no longer exerted, and the psychic elements fall back to anarchy. Now many psychic states, such as sensations, recollections, and images, differ from each other less by their substance than by the way in which the mind takes hold of and apprehends them. The mind seizes a sensation with a stronger grasp than a recollection, and a recollection with a stronger grasp than an image. When attention is relaxed the line of demarcation between these psychic states tends to be effaced; the sensation becomes vague and floating like the recollection and the image, while the recollection and the image, on the contrary,become objective and acquire something of the brilliance and relief of the sensation. The very same cause—enfeeblement of attention—thus produces opposite effects, on the one side raising the tone, on the other lowering it, so that states of mind which are ordinarily distinct tend to be approximated and confused, as we may observe in the hypnagogic condition.[238]
Although Dugas makes no reference to Janet, it is not difficult to see that he has assimilated some of the views of that distinguished investigator of psychic mysteries. Janet, as we know, in various morbid psychic conditions, attaches great explanatory force to the individual's loss of hold, through psychic weakness, of his own personality, and to the diminished sense of reality and even depersonalisation thence ensuing. It so happens that Janet himself has set forth a theory of pseudo-reminiscence which is characteristic of his own attitude, and also harmonises with the wider outlook which now marks the attempts to explain these perversions of memory. Janet declares that pseudo-reminiscence is a negative phenomenon and belongs to a group in which various other feelings of diminished sense of reality belong. These people all say in effect: 'It seems to me that these things are not real; it seems to me that these events are not actual or present.' The essence of this form of paramnesiais thus more a negation of the present than an affirmation of the past. 'The function of adaptation to the present moment,' Janet remarks, 'is the most complicated and the most recent of all. The function of the real is the most elevated and the most difficult of all cerebral functions.' Under various influences there is a diminution of nervous and psychic tension, and such suppression of the high tension of the mind leaves only the lower functions subsisting. When that fall of tension is rapid, there may be a crisis of which pseudo-reminiscence is one of the symptoms.[239]Janet would thus place pseudo-reminiscence among the manifestations of psychasthenia, though he leaves untouched the difficult question of its precise mechanism.
The most comprehensive attempt to explain the mystery of paramnesia in recent years is certainly that made in an elaborately eclectic study by one of the most distinguished of living French thinkers, Professor Bergson.[240]He first casts a glance over what he considers the two main groups of explanations of this puzzling phenomenon: (1) those, advocated by Ribot, Fouillée, Lalande, Arnaud, Piéron, Myers, etc., which involve the more or less simultaneous existence in consciousness of two images, of which one is the reproduction of the other; (2) those advocated by Janet, Heymans, Léon-Kindberg, Dromard andAlbès, etc., which insist on the lower mental tone, the diminished attention, the lack of synthetising power, which mark the condition in which paramnesia occurs. Bergson is quite ready to accept the principles of both these groups of explanations, and to combine them. But, he argues, to understand the phenomenon adequately, we must go deeper; we must analyse the normal mechanism of memory. And he finds, if we do this, that not merely the moment of a paramnesic illusion, but every moment of our life, offers two aspects, actual and virtual, perception on one side, and memory on the other. The moment itself, indeed, consists of such a scission, for it is always moving, always a fleeting boundary between the immediate past and the immediate future, and would be a mere abstraction if it were not 'precisely the mobile mirror which ceaselessly reflects perception in recollection.' When the matter is thus regarded a recollection is seen to be, in reality, not something which has been, but something which is, proceedingpari passuwith the perception it reproduces. It is a recollection of the moment taking place at that moment. Belonging to the past as regards its form, it belongs to the present as regards its matter. It is recollection of the present. Now this is exactly the state in which the paramnesic person consciously finds himself, and the only problem before us, therefore, is to ascertain why every one at every moment is not conscious of the same experience. Bergson replies that nothing is more useless for present action than the recollection of the present. It hasnothing to tell us; we hold the real object, and to give up that for its recollection would be to sacrifice the substance to the shadow. Therefore we obstinately and persistently turn away from the recollection of the present. It emerges consciously only under the influence of some abnormal or pathological disturbance of attention. Paramnesia is an anomaly of this kind, and it is due to a temporary enfeeblement of the general attention to life, a momentary arrest of the forward movement of consciousness. 'False recognition,' Bergson concludes, 'may thus be regarded as the most inoffensive form of inattention to life. It seems to result from the combined play of perception and memory given up to their own energy. It would take place at every moment if it were not that will, ceaselessly directed towards action, prevents the present from folding in on itself by pushing it indefinitely into the future.'
So far as my own explanation is concerned, it will be seen that I still place weight on the general condition of temporary or chronic nervous fatigue as the soil on which paramnesia arises—a belief now accepted by most psychologists[241]—and that I think we must search for the clue to the mechanism of the illusion inthose dreaming and hypnagogic states in which it most often occurs. As regards a definite explanation of the mechanism we must, in the face of so many ingenious and complicated theories, perhaps still await more general agreement.[242]What I have suggested, and am still inclined to maintain, is that the psychic enfeeblement, temporary or chronic, which is the general preliminary condition of paramnesia, whether or not there is any subjective sensation of increased power, may account for the paramnesia by bringing an externally aroused perception down to a lower and fainter stage on which it is on a level with an internally aroused perception—a memory. Just as in hypnagogic paramnesia the vivid and life-like dream, or internal impression, is raised to the class of memories, and becomes the shadow of a real experience, so in waking paramnesia the external impression is lowered to the same class. Perception is alike dulled in each case, and the immediate experience follows the line of least resistance—this time too carelessly or too prematurely—to join the great bulk of our experiences.
We thus realise how it is that that doubling of experience occurs. The mind has for the moment become flaccid and enfeebled; its loosened texture has, as it were, abnormally enlarged the meshes in which sensations are caught and sifted, so that they run through too easily. In other words, they are not properlyapperceived. To use a crude simile, it is as though we poured water into a sieve. The impressions of the world which are actual sensations as they strike the relaxed psychic meshwork are instantaneously passed through to become memories, and we see them in both forms at the same moment, and are unable to distinguish one from the other.
In sleep, and in the hypnagogic state, as in hypnosis, we accept a suggestion, with or without a struggle. In the waking paramnesic state we seem to find, in a slighter stage of a like condition,the same process in a reversed form. Instead of accepting a representation as an actual present fact, we accept the actual present fact as merely a representation. The centres of perception are in such a state of exhaustion and disorder that they receive an actual external sensation in the feebler shape of a representation. The actual fact becomes merely a suggestion of far distant things. It reaches consciousness in the enfeebled shape of an old memory—
'... like to something I rememberA great while since, a long, long time ago.'
'... like to something I rememberA great while since, a long, long time ago.'
'... like to something I rememberA great while since, a long, long time ago.'
'... like to something I remember
A great while since, a long, long time ago.'
Paramnesia is thus an internal hallucination, a reversed hallucination, it is true, but while so reversed, thestream of consciousness is still following the line of least resistance.
It is along some such lines as these, it seems to me, that we may best attempt to explain the phenomena of paramnesia, phenomena which are of no little interest since, in earlier stages of culture, they may well have had a real influence on belief, suggesting to primitive man that he had somehow had wider experiences than he knew of, and that, as Wordsworth put it, he trailed clouds of glory behind him.
CONCLUSION
The Fundamental Nature of Dreaming—Insanity and Dreaming—The Child's Psychic State and the Dream State—Primitive Thought and Dreams—Dreaming and Myth-Making—Genius and Dreams—Dreaming as a Road into the Infinite.
The Fundamental Nature of Dreaming—Insanity and Dreaming—The Child's Psychic State and the Dream State—Primitive Thought and Dreams—Dreaming and Myth-Making—Genius and Dreams—Dreaming as a Road into the Infinite.
In the preceding chapters we have traced some of the elementary tendencies which prevail in the formation of dreams. These tendencies are in some respects so unlike those that rule in waking life—slight and subtle as their unlikeness often seems—that we are justified in regarding the psychic phenomena of sleeping life as constituting a world of their own.
Yet when we look at the phenomena a little more deeply we realise that, however differentiated they have become, dream life is yet strictly co-ordinated with other forms of psychic life. If we pierce below the surface we seem to reach a primitive fundamental psychic stage in which the dreamer, the madman, the child, and the savage alike have their starting point, and possess a degree of community from which the waking, civilised, sane adult of to-day is shut out, so that he can only comprehend it by an intellectual effort.[243]It thus happens that the ways of thinking andfeeling of the child and the savage and the lunatic each furnish a road by which we may reach a psychic world which is essentially that of the dreamer.
The resemblance of insanity to dream life has, above all, impressed observers from the time when the nature of insanity was first definitely recognised. It would be outside the limits of the present book to discuss the points at which dreams resemble or differ from insanity, but it is worth while to touch on the question of their affinity. The recognition of this affinity, or at all events analogy, though it was stated by Cabanis to be due to Cullen, is as old as Aristotle, and has constantly been put forward afresh. Thus in the sixteenth century Du Laurens (A. Laurentius), in his treatise on the disease of melancholy, as insanity was then termed, compared it to dreaming.[244]The same point is still constantly brought forward by the more philosophic physician. 'Find out all about dreams,' Hughlings Jackson has said, 'and you will have found out all about insanity.' From the wider standpoint of the psychologist, Jastrow points out that not only insanity, but all the forms of delirium, including the drug-intoxications, are 'variants of dream consciousness.'
The reality of the affinity of dreaming and insanityis well illustrated by a case, coming under the observation of Marro, in which a dream, formed according to the ordinary rules of dreaming, produced a temporary fit of insanity in an otherwise perfectly sane subject.[245]In this case a highly intelligent but somewhat neurotic young man was returning to Italy after pursuing his studies abroad, and reached Turin, on the homeward journey, in a somewhat tired state. In the train he believed that he had detected some cardsharpers, and that they suspected him of finding them out, and bore him ill-will in consequence. This produced a state of general nervous apprehension. At the hotel his room was over the kitchen; it was in consequence very hot, and to a late hour he could still hear voices and catch snatches of conversation, which seemed to him to be directed against himself. His suspicions deepened, he heard noises, in reality due to the kitchen utensils, which seemed preparations for his murder, and he ultimately became convinced that there was a plot to set fire to his room in order to force him to leave it, when he would be seized and murdered. He resolved to escape, got out of the window with his revolver in his hand, found his way to another part of the house, encountered a man who had been awakened by his movements, and shot at him, believing him to be a party to the imaginary conspiracy. He was seized and taken to the asylum, where he speedily regained calm, and realised the delusion into which he had fallen.When questioned by Marro, on reaching the asylum, he was unaware that he had ever fallen asleep during the night; he could not, however, account for all the time that had elapsed before he left the room, and it was probable, Marro concludes, that he was in a state between waking and sleeping, and that his delusion was constituted in a dream. Fatigue, nervous apprehension, an unduly hot bedroom, the close proximity of servants' voices, and the sound of kitchen utensils, had thus combined, in a state of partial sleep, to produce in an otherwise sane person, a morbid condition in every respect identical with that found in insane persons who are suffering from systematised delusions of persecution.[246]
The resemblance of the child's psychic state to the dream state is an observation of less ancient date than that of the analogy between dreaming and insanity, but it has frequently been made by modern psychologists. 'In dreams,' says Freud, 'the child with his impulses lives again,'[247]and Giessler has devoted a chapter to the points of resemblance between dream life and the mental activity of children.[248]
I should be more especially inclined to find the dream-like character of the child's mind at three points: (1) the abnormally logical tendency of the child's mindand the daring mental fusions which he effects in forming theories; (2) the greater preponderance of hypnagogic phenomena and hallucinations in childhood, as well as the large element of reverie or day-dreaming in the child's life, and the facility with which he confuses this waking imagination with reality; and (3) the child's tendency to mistake, also, the dreams of the night for real events.[249]This last tendency is of serious practical import when it leads a child, in all innocence, to make criminal charges against other persons.[250]This tendency clearly indicates the close resemblance which there is for children between dream life and waking life; it also shows the great vividness which children's dreams possess. In imaginative children, it may be added, a rich and vivid dream life is not infrequently the direct source of literary activities which lead to distinction in later life.[251]
The child, we are often told, is the representative of the modern savage and the primitive man. That is not, in any strict sense, true, nor can we assume without question that early man and modern savages are identical. But we can have very little doubt that in our dreams we are brought near to ways of thought and feeling that are sometimes closer to those of early man, as well as of latter-day savages, than are our psychic modes in civilisation.[252]So remote are we to-day from the world of our dreams that we very rarely draw from them the inspiration of our waking lives. For the primitive man the laws of the waking world are not yet widely differentiated from the laws of the sleeping world, and he finds it not unreasonable to seek illumination for the problems of one world in the phenomena of the other. The doctrine of animism, as first formulated by Tylor (more especially in hisPrimitive Culture) finds in dreams the chief source of primitive religion and philosophy. Of recent years there has been a tendency to reject the theory of animism.[253]Certainly it is possible to rely too exclusively on dreams as the inspiration of early man; if the evidence of dreams hadnot been in a line with the evidence that he derived from other sources, there is no reason why the man of primitive times should have attached any peculiar value to dreams. But if the animistic conception presents too extreme a view of the primitive importance of dreaming, we must beware lest the reaction against it should lead us to fall into the opposite extreme. Durkheim argues that it is unlikely that early man attaches much significance to dreams, for the modern peasant, who is the representative of primitive man, appears to dream very little, and not to attach much importance to his dreams. But it is by no means true that the peasant of civilisation, with his fixed agricultural life, corresponds to early man who was mainly a hunter and often a nomad. Under the conditions of civilisation the peasant is fed regularly and leads a peaceful, stolid, laborious, and equable life, which is altogether unfavourable to psychic activity of any kind, awake or asleep. The savage man, now and ever, as a hunter and fighter, leads a life of comparative idleness, broken by spurts of violent activity; sometimes he can gorge himself with food, sometimes he is on the verge of starvation. He lives under conditions that are more favourable to the psychic side of life, awake or asleep, than is the case with the peasant of civilisation.
Moreover, it must be remembered that all the peoples whom we may fairly regard as in some degree resembling early man possess a specialised caste of exceptional men who artificially cultivate their psychic activities,and thereby exert great influence on their fellows. These are termed, after their very typical representatives in some Siberian tribes,shamans, and combine the functions of priests and sorcerers and medicine men. It is nearly everywhere found that the shaman—who is often, it would appear, at the outset a somewhat abnormal person—cultivates solitude, fasting, and all manner of ascetic practices, thereby acquiring an unusual aptitude to dream, to see visions, to experience hallucinations, and, it may well be, to acquire abnormally clairvoyant powers. The shamans of the Andamanese are called by a word signifying dreamer, and in various parts of the world the shaman finds the first sign of his vocation in a dream. The evocation of dreams is often the chief end of the shaman's abnormal method of life. Thus, among the Salish Indians of British Columbia, dreams are the proper mode of communication with guardian spirits, and 'prolonged fasts, bathings, forced vomitings, and other exhausting bodily exercises are the means adopted for inducing the mystic dreams and visions.'[254]
When we witness the phenomena of Shamanism in all parts of the world it is difficult to dispute the statement of Lucretius that the gods first appeared to men in dreams. This may be said to be literally true; even to-day it often happens that the savage's totem, who ispractically his tutelary deity, first appears to him in a dream.[255]An influence which seems likely to have been so persistent may well have had a large plastic power in moulding the myths and legends which everywhere embody the religious impulses of men. This idea was long ago suggested by Hobbes. 'From this ignorance of how to distinguish dreams and other strong Fancies,' he wrote, 'from Vision and Sense, did arise the greatest part of the Religion of the Gentiles in time past, that worshipped Satyrs, Fauns, Nymphs, and the like.'[256]
Ludwig Laistner, however, appears to have been the first to argue in detail that dreams, and especially nightmares, have played an important part in the evolution of mythological ideas. 'If we bear in mind,' he said in the Preface to his great work, 'how intimately poetry and religion are connected with myth, we encounter the surprising fact that the first germ of these highly important vital manifestations is not to be found in any action of the waking mind, but in sleep, and that the chief and oldest teacher of productive imagination is not to be found in the experiences of life, but in the phantasies of dream.'[257]The pictures men formed ofthe over-world and the under-world have the character of dreams and hypnagogic visions, and this is true even within the sphere of Christianity.[258]The invention of Hell, Maudsley has declared, would find an adequate explanation, if such is needed, in the sufferings of some delirious patients, while the apocalyptic vision of Heaven with which our Christian Bible concludes, is, Beaunis remarks, nothing but a long dream.[259]And if it is true, as Baudelaire has said, that 'every well conformed brain carries within it two infinites: Heaven and Hell,' we may well believe that both Heaven and Hell find their most vivid symbolism in the spontaneous action of dreams.
In migraine and the epileptic aura visions of diminutive creatures sometimes occur, and occasionally micropsic vision in which real objects appear diminished. It has been suggested by Sir Lauder Brunton that we may here have the origin of fairies, at all events forsome races of fairies; for fairies, though diminutive in some countries, as in England, are not diminutive in others, as in Ireland. A more normal and frequent channel of intercourse with such creatures is, however, to be found in dreams. This is illustrated by the following dream experienced by a lady: 'I saw a man wheeling along a cripple. Eventually the cripple became reduced to about the size of a walnut, and the man told me that he had the power of becoming any size and of going anywhere. To my horror he then threw him into the water. In answer to my remonstrances that he would surely be drowned, the man said that it was all right, the little fellow would be home in a few hours. He then shouted out, "What time do you expect to get back?" The tiny creature, who was paddling along in the water, then took out a miniature watch, and replied: "About seven!"'[260]In a dream of my own I saw little creatures, a few inches high, moving about and acting on a diminutive stage. Though I regarded them as really living creatures, and not marionettes, the spectacle caused me no surprise.
The dream-like character of myths, legends, and fairy tales is probably, however, not entirely due to direct borrowing from the actual dreams of sleep, or even from the hallucinations connected with insanity, music, or drugs, though all these may have played their part. The greater nearness of the primitivemind to the dream-state involves more than a tendency to embody in waking life conceptions obtained from dreams. It means that the waking psychic life itself is capable of acting in a way resembling that of the sleeping psychic life, and of evolving conceptions similar to dreams.
This point of view has in recent years been especially set forth by Freud and his school, who argue that the laws of the formation of myths and fairy tales are identical with the laws in accordance with which dreams are formed.[261]It certainly seems to be true that the resemblances between dreams and legends are not adequately explained by supposing that the latter are moulded out of the former. We have to believe that on the myth-making plane of thought we are really on a plane that is more nearly parallel with that of dreaming than is our ordinary civilised thought. We are in a world of things that are supernormally enormous or delicate, and the emotional vibrations vastly enlarged, a world in which miracles happen on every hand and cause us no surprise. Slaughter and destruction take place on the heroic scale with a minimum expenditure of effort; men are transformed into beasts and beasts into men, so that men and beasts converse with each other.[262]
Finally, it may be observed that the atmosphere into which genius leads us, and indeed all art, is the atmosphere of the world of dreams. The man of genius, it is often said, has the child within him; he is, according to the ancient dictum, which is still accepted, not without an admixture of insanity, and he is unquestionably related to the primitive myth-maker. All these characteristics, as we see, bring him near to the sphere of dreaming, and we may say that the man of genius is in closer touch with the laws of the dream world than is the ordinary civilised man. 'It would be no great paradox,' remarks Maudsley, 'to say that the creative work of genius was excellent dreaming, and dramatic dreaming distracted genius.'[263]This has often been recognised by some of the most typical men of genius. Charles Lamb, in speaking of Spenser, referred to the analogy between dreaming and imagination. Coleridge, one of the most essential of imaginativemen, argued that the laws of drama and of dreaming are the same.[264]Nietzsche, more recently, has developed the affinity of dreaming to art, and in hisBirth of Tragedyargued that the Appollonian or dream-like element is one of the two constituents of tragedy. Mallarmé further believed that symbolism, which we have seen to be fundamental in dreaming, is of the essence of art. 'To name an object,' he said, 'is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment in a poem which is made up of the happiness of gradually divining; to suggest—that is our dream. The perfect usage of this mystery constitutes symbolism: to evoke an object, little by little, in order to exhibit a state of the soul, or, inversely, to choose an object, and to disengage from it a state of the soul by a series of decipherments.'[265]It may be added that imaginative and artistic men have always been prone to day-dreaming and reverie, allowing their fancies to wander uncontrolled, and in so doing they have found profit to their work.[266]From Socrates onwards, too, men of genius have sometimesbeen liable to fall into states of trance, or waking dream, in which their mission or their vision has become more clearly manifested;[267]the hallucinatory voices which have determined the vocation of many great teachers belong to psychic states allied to these trances.
It is scarcely necessary to refer to the occasional creative activity of men of genius during actual sleep or to the debts which they have acknowledged to suggestions received in dreams.[268]This has perhaps, indeed, been more often exaggerated than overlooked. There can be no doubt that a great many writers and thinkers, including some of the highest eminence, have sometimes been indebted to their dreams. We might expect as much, for most people occasionally have more or less vivid or suggestive new ideas in dreams,[269]and it is natural that this should occur more often, and to a higher degree, in persons of unusual intellectual force and activity. But it is more doubtful whether the creative activity of normal dreams ever reaches a sufficient perfection to take, as it stands, a very high place in a master's work. Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' has the most notable claim to be an exception to thisrule. This poem was written by Coleridge in 1788, soon after 'Christabel,' and at a time when the poet was suffering much from depression, and taking a great deal of laudanum. We are entitled to assume, therefore, that the poem was composed under the influence of opium, and not in normal sleep. It may be added that it is difficult to believe that Coleridge could have recalled the whole poem from either a normal or abnormal dream; as a rule, when we compose verses in sleep we can usually recall only the last two, or at most four, lines.[270]Moreover, there is reason to believe that the first draft of 'Kubla Khan' was not the poem as we now know it.[271]
After Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' the most important artistic composition usually assigned to a dream is theTrillo del Diavolosonata of Tartini, the eighteenth-century composer and violinist, who has been called the prototype of Paganini. Tartini, who was a man of nervous and emotional temperament, seems to have possessed real genius, and this sonata is his principal work. But there is not the slightest ground for stating that it was composed in a dream, and Tartini himself made no such claim.[272]
The imaginative reality of dreams is perhaps appreciated by none so much as by those who are deprived of some of their external senses. Thus a deaf and dumb writer of ability who has precise and highly emotional dreams—which sometimes remind him of the atmosphere of Poe's tales, and are occasionally in organised sequence from night to night—writes: 'The enormous reality and vividness of these dreams is their remarkable point. They leave a mark behind. When I come to consider I believe that much that I have written, and many things that I have said and thought and believed, are directly due to these dream-experiences and my ponderings over how they came. Beneath the superficiality of our conscious mind—prim, smug, self-satisfied, owlishly wise—there lies the vast gulf of a subconscious personality that is dark and obscure, seldom seen or even suspected. It is this, I think, that wells up into my dreams. It is always there—always affecting us and modifying us, and bringing about strange and unforeseen new things in us—but in these dreams I peer over the edge of the conscious world into the giant-house and Utgard of the subconscious, lit by one ray of sunset that shows the weltering deepsof it. And the vivid sense of this is responsible for many things in my life.'[273]
Dreaming is thus one of our roads into the infinite. And it is interesting to observe how we attain it—by limitation. The circle of our conscious life is narrowed during sleep; it is even by a process of psychic dissociation broken up into fragments. From that narrowed and broken-up consciousness the outlook becomes vaster and more mysterious, full of strange and unsuspected fascination, and the possibilities of new experiences, just as a philosophic mite inhabiting a universe consisting of a Stilton cheese would probably be compelled to regard everything outside the cheese as belonging to the realm of the Infinite. In reality, if we think of it, all our visions of the infinite are similarly conditioned. It is only by emphasising our finiteness that we ever become conscious of the infinite. The infinite can only be that which stretches far beyond the boundaries of our own personality. It is the charm of dreams that they introduce us into a new infinity. Time and space are annihilated, gravity is suspended, and we are joyfully borne up in the air, as it were in the arms of angels; we are brought into a deeper communion with Nature, and in dreams a man listens to the arguments of his dog with as little surprise as Balaam heard the reproaches of his ass. The unexpectedlimitations of our dream world, the exclusion of so many elements which are present even unconsciously in waking life, impart a splendid freedom and ease to the intellectual operations of the sleeping mind, and an extravagant romance, a poignant tragedy, to our emotions. 'He has never known happiness,' said Lamb, speaking out of his own experience, 'who has never been mad.' And there are many who taste in dreams a happiness they never know when awake.[274]In the waking moments of our complex civilised life we are ever in a state of suspense which makes all great conclusions impossible; the multiplicity of the facts of life, always present to consciousness, restrains the free play of logic (except for that happy dreamer, the mathematician), and surrounds most of our pains and nearly all our pleasures with infinite qualifications; we are tied down to a sober tameness. In our dreams the fetters of civilisation are loosened, and we know the fearful joy of freedom.
In this way the Paradise of dreams has been a reservoir from which men have always drawn consolation and sweet memory and hope, even belief, the imagination and gratification of desires that the world restrained, the promise and proof of the dearest and deepest aspirations.
Yet, while there is thus a real sense in which dreams produce their effect by the retraction of the field of consciousness and the limitation of the psychic activities which mark ordinary life, it remains true that ifwe take into account the complete psychic life of dreaming, subconscious as well as conscious, it is waking, not sleeping, life which may be said to be limited.[275]Thus it is, as we have seen, that the most fundamental and the most primitive forms of psychic life, as well as the rarest and the most abnormal, all seem to have their prototype in the vast world of dreams. Sleep, Vaschide has said, is not, as Homer thought, the brother of Death, but of Life, and, it may be added, the elder brother.
'We dream, see visions, converse with chimæras,' said Joseph Glanvill, the seventeenth-century philosopher; 'the one half of our life is a romance, a fiction.' And what of the other half? Pepys tells us how another distinguished man of the same century, Sir William Petty, 'proposed it as a thing that is truly questionable whether there really be any difference between waking and dreaming.'[276]Our dreams are said to be delusions, constituted in much the same way as the delusion of the insane. But, says Godfernaux, 'all life is a series of systematised delusions, more orless durable.' Men weary of too much living have sometimes found consolation in this likeness of the world of dreams to the world of life. 'When thou hast roused thyself from sleep thou hast perceived that they were only dreams which troubled thee,' wrote the Imperial Stoic to himself in hisMeditations;'now in thy waking hours look at these things about thee as thou didst look at those dreams.' Dreams are true while they last. Can we, at the best, say more of life?
We set out to study as carefully as possible the small field of dream consciousness belonging to a few persons, not, it may be, abnormal, of whom it was possible to speak with some assurance. The great naturalist, Linnæus, once said that he could spend a lifetime in studying as much of the earth as he could cover with his hand. However small the patch we investigate, it will lead us back to the sun at last. There is nothing too minute or too trivial. I have often remembered with a pang, how, long years ago, I once gave pain by saying, with the arrogance of boyhood, that it was foolish to tell one's dreams. I have done penance for that remark since. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin,' said the wise philosopher of the eighteenth century. I have cultivated, so far as I care to, my garden of dreams, and it scarcely seems to me that it is a large garden. Yet every path of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the universe.