Chapter 9

[81]This explanation, based on the depth and kind of the sleep, is entirely distinct from the theory of Aliotta (Il Pensiero e la Personalità nei Sogni, 1905), who believes that dreamers differ according to their nervous type, the person of visual type assisting passively at the spectacle of his dreams, while the person of motor type takes actual part in them. I have no evidence of this, though I believe that dreams differ in accordance with the dreamer's personal type.[82]Dugald Stewart argued that there is loss of control over the muscular system during sleep, and the body, therefore, is not subject to our command; volition is present but it cannot influence the limbs. Hammond argued, on the contrary, that Stewart was quite wrong; the reason why voluntary movements are not performed during sleep is, he said, that volition is suspended. 'We do not will our actions when we are asleep. We imagine that we do, and that is all' (Treatise on Insanity, p. 205). Dugald Stewart and Hammond, though their phraseology may have been too metaphysical, were, from the standpoint I have adopted, both maintaining tenable positions. In one type of dream, we imagine we easily achieve all sorts of difficult and complicated actions, but in reality we make no movement; the ease and rapidity with which the mental machine moves is due to the fact that it is ungeared, and is effecting no work at all. In the other type of dream we make violent but inadequate efforts at movement and only partially succeed; the machine is partially geared, in a state intermediate between deep sleep and the waking condition.[83]Jacques le Lorrain,Revue Philosophique, July 1895.[84]The systematic megalomania of insanity can, however, have its rise in dreams; Régis and Lalanne (International Medical Congress, 1900;Proceedings, Section de Psychiatrie, p. 227) met within a short period with four cases in which this had taken place.[85]This indeed seems to have been recognised by Wundt, who regards a 'functional rest of the sensory centres and of the apperception centre,' resulting in heightened latent energy which lends unusual strength to excitations, as a secondary condition of the dream state. Külpe (Outline of Psychology, p. 212) argues that the existence of vivid dreams shows that fatigue with its diminished associability fails to affect the central sensations themselves; this increased excitability resulting from dissociation may itself, however, be regarded as a symptom of fatigue; hyperaesthesia and anaesthesia are alike signs of exhaustion.[86]The exhaustion sometimes felt on awaking from a dream perhaps testifies to its emotional potency. Delboeuf states that a friend of his experienced a dream so terrible in its emotional strain that on awaking his black hair was found to have turned completely white.[87]The fundamental character of emotion in dreams has been more or less clearly recognised by various investigators. Thus C. L. Herrick, who studied his own dreams for many months, found that the essential element is the emotional, and not the ideational, and that, indeed, when recalledat once, with closed eyes and before moving, they were nearly devoid of intellectual content (Journal of Comparative Neurology, vol. iii. p. 17, 1893). R. MacDougall considers that dreaming is 'a succession of intense states of feeling supported by a minimum of ideational content,' or, as he says again, more accurately, 'the feeling is primary; the idea-content is the inferred thing' (Psychological Review, vol. v. p. 2). Grace Andrews, who kept a record of her dreams (American Journal of Psychology, October 1900), found that dream emotions are often stronger and more vivid than those of waking life; 'the dream emotion seems to me the most real element of the dream life.' P. Meunier, again ('Des Rêves Stéreotypés,'Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, September-October 1905), states that 'the substratum of a dream consists of a cœnæsthesia or an emotional state. The intellectual operation which translates to the sleeper's consciousness, while he is asleep, this cœnæsthesia or emotional state is what we call a dream.'[88]The night-terrors of children have frequently been found to have their origin in gastric or intestinal disturbance. Graham Little brings together the opinions of various authorities on this point, though he is himself inclined to give chief importance to heart disease producing slight disturbances of breathing, since he has found that in nearly two-thirds of his cases (17 out of 30) night-terrors were associated with early heart disease (Graham Little, 'The Causation of Night-Terrors,'British Medical Journal, 19th August 1899). It should be added that night-terrors are more usually divided into two classes: (1) idiopathic (purely cerebral in origin), and (2) symptomatic (due to reflex disturbance caused by various local disorders); seee.g.Guthrie, 'On Night-Terrors,'Clinical Journal, 7th January 1899. J. A. Symonds has well described his own night-terrors as a child (Horatio Brown,J. A. Symonds, vol. i.). Lafcadio Hearn (in a paper on 'Nightmare-Touch' inShadowings) also gives a vivid account of his own childish night-terrors.[89]It has not, I believe, been pointed out that such dreams might be invoked in support of the James-Lange or physiological theory of emotion, according to which the element of bodily change in emotion is the cause and not the result of the emotion.[90]This physiological symbolism was clearly apprehended long ago by Hobbes: 'As anger causeth heat in some parts of the body when we are awake; so when we sleep the overheating of the same parts causeth anger, and raiseth up in the brain the imagination of an enemy. In the same manner as natural kindness, when we are awake, causeth desire and desire makes heat in certain other parts of the body; so also, too much heat in those parts, while we sleep, raiseth in the brain an imagination of some kindness shown. In sum, our dreams are the reverse of our waking imaginations; the motion, when we are awake, beginning at one end, and when we dream at another' (Leviathan, Part 1. ch. 2).[91]'The pains of disappointment, of anxiety, of unsuccess, of all displeasing emotions,' remarks Mercier (art. 'Consciousness,' Tuke'sDictionary of Psychological Medicine), 'are attended by a definite feeling of misery which is referred in every case to the epigastrium.' He adds that the pleasures of success and good repute, aesthetic enjoyment, etc., are also attended by a definite feeling in the same region. This fact indicates the extreme vagueness of organic sensation. There is in fact much uncertainty and great difference of opinion as to the nature, and even the existence, of organic sensation; seee.g.a careful summary of the chief views by Dr. Elsie Murray, 'Organic Sensation,'American Journal of Psychology, July 1909.[92]More than ten years later, the same dreamer, who had entirely forgotten the circumstances of this dream, again had a vivid dream of murder after eating pheasant at night; this time it was she herself who was to be killed, and she awoke imagining that she was struggling with the would-be murderer.[93]F. Greenwood,Imagination in Dreams, p. 31.[94]Dreams of railway travelling, and especially of losing trains, are not always associated with headache or any other recognisable condition. They constitute a very common type of dream not quite easy to explain. Dr. Savage mentions, for instance, that in his own case scarcely a week passes without such a dream, though in real life he scarcely ever loses a train and never worries about it. Wundt considers that the dreams in which we seek something we cannot find or have left something behind are due to indefinite coenaesthesic disturbances involving feelings of the same emotional tone, such as an uncomfortable position or a slight irregularity of respiration. I have myself independently observed the same connection, though it is not invariably traceable.[95]E. H. Clarke,Visions, p. 294.[96]An amusing, though solemn, interpretation of an ordinary dream of murder, railway travelling, and impending death, as experienced by Anna Kingsford, is furnished by her friend and biographer, Edward Maitland,Anna Kingsford, vol. i. p. 117.[97]Various opinions in regard to morality in dreams are brought together by Freud,Die Traumdeutung, pp. 45et seq.[98]Head ('Mental Changes that Accompany Visceral Diseases,'Brain, 1902, p. 802) refers to the association between visceral pain and the anti-social impulses, and thinks that the viscera, being part of the oldest and most autonomic system of the body, appear in consciousness as 'an intrusion from without, an inexplicable obsession.'[99]'In my dreams,' W. D. Howells remarks, 'I am always less sorry for my misdeeds than for their possible discovery' ('True I talk of Dreams,'Harper's Magazine, May 1895).[100]Bk. IV. 1014-15:'de montibus altisSe quasi præcipitent ad terram corpore toto.'[101]'It has many times happened to me,' says the innkeeper's daughter inDon Quixote(Part I. ch. xvi.), 'to dream that I was falling down from a tower and never coming to the ground, and when I awoke from the dream to find myself as weak and shaken as if I had really fallen.'[102]Chabaneix,Le Subconscient, p. 43.[103]Herbert Spencer,Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed., vol. i. p. 773.[104]L'Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et des Curieux, May 31, 1906.[105]De Rochas describes the phenomenon as 'a property of the human organism, more or less developed in different individuals, when the soul, disengaging itself from the bonds of the body, enters the domain, still so mysterious, of dreams' (L'Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et des Curieux, May 10, 1906). In subsequent numbers of theIntermédiairevarious correspondents describe their own experiences of such dreams. InLuce e Ombrafor June 1906, and in theEcho du Merveilleuxfor the same date, neither of which I have seen, are given other experiences.[106]Annals of Psychical Research, November 1896.[107]Horace Hutchinson,Dreams and their Meanings, p. 76.[108]American Journal of Psychology, July-October 1903, p. 14.[109]'The wish to be able to fly,' he declares (Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, p. 59), 'signifies in dreaming nothing else but the desire to be capable of sexual activities. It is a wish of early childhood.'[110]Stanley Hall,American Journal of Psychology, January 1879, p. 158; also F. E. Bolton, 'Hydro-Psychoses,'ib., January 1899, p. 183; as regards rudimentary gill-slits, Bland Sutton,Evolution and Disease, pp. 48et seq.Lafcadio Hearn travels still further along this road in search for an explanation of dreams of flight, and evokes a 'memory of vanished planets with fainter powers of gravitation,' but he fails to state when the ancestors of man inhabited these problematical planets.[111]I retain this statement of my explanation in almost the same words as first written down in 1895. I was not then aware that several psychologists had offered very similar explanations. Scherner (Das Leben des Traumes, 1861) seems to have been the first to connect the lungs with dreams of flying, though he put forward the explanation in too fanciful a form and failed to realise that other factors, notably a change in skin pressure, are also involved. Strümpell at a later date recognised this explanation, as well as Wundt.[112]It is the same with chloroform. 'There are marked sensations in the vicinity of the heart,' says Elmer Jones ('The Waning of Consciousness under Chloroform,'Psychological Review, January 1909). 'The musculature of that organ seems thoroughly stimulated, and the contractions become violent and accelerated. The palpitations are as strong as would be experienced at the close of some violent bodily exertion.' It is significant, also, as bearing on the interpretation of the dream of flying, that under chloroform 'all movements made appeared to be much longer than they actually were. A slight movement of the tongue appeared to be magnified at least ten times. Clinching the fingers and opening them again produced the feeling of their moving through a space of several feet.'[113]Seee.g.Marie de Manacéïne,Sleep, p. 7.[114]Horace Hutchinson, who in hisDreams and their Meanings(1901), has independently suggested that 'this flying dream is caused by some action of the breathing organs,' mentions the significant fact (p. 128) that the idea of filling the lungs as a help in levitation occurs in the flying dreams of many persons.[115]We have an analogous state of tactile anaesthesia in the early stages of chloroform intoxication. Thus Elmer Jones found that this sense is, after hearing, the first to disappear. 'With the disappearance of the tactile sense and hearing,' he remarks, 'the body has completely lost its orientation. It appears to be nowhere, simply floating in space. It is a most ecstatic feeling.'[116]Lafcadio Hearn describes the fall as coming at the beginning of the dream. Dr. Guthrie (Clinical Journal, June 7, 1899), in his own case, describes the flying sensations as coming first and the falling as coming afterwards, and apparently due to sudden failure of the power of flight; the first part of the dream is agreeable but after the fall the dreamer awakes shaken, shocked, and breathless.[117]The disagreeable nature of falling in dreams may probably be connected with the absence of rhythm usually present in dreams of flying. Most of the psychologists who have occupied themselves with rhythm have insisted on its pleasurable emotional tone, as leading to a state bordering on ecstasy (seee.g.J. B. Miner, 'Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms,' Monograph Supplement toPsychological Review, June 1903). The pleasure is especially marked, as MacDougall remarks, when there is 'a coincidence of subjective and objective change.' In dreams of flying we have this coincidence, the real subjective rhythm being transformed in consciousness to an objective rhythm.[118]Féré, 'Note sur les Rêves Epileptiques,'Revue de Médecine, September 10, 1905.[119]Sir W. R. Gowers has on several occasions (e.g.'The Borderland of Epilepsy,'British Medical Journal, July 21, 1906) argued that dreams of falling have an aural origin, and are caused by contraction of the stapedius muscle, leading to a change in the ampullae which might suggest descent; he has himself suddenly awakened from such a dream and caught the sound of the muscular contraction. The opinion of so acute an investigator deserves consideration.[120]Such sensations are, indeed, a recognised result of morphia. Morphinomaniacs, Goron remarks (Les Parias de l'Amour, p. 125), are apt to feel that they are flying or floating over the world.[121]Jewell states that 'certain observers, peculiarly liable to dreams of falling or flying, ascribe these distinctly to faulty circulation, and say their physicians, to regulate the heart's action, have given them medicines which always relieve them and prevent such dreams' (American Journal of Psychology, January 1905, p. 8).[122]Interesting evidence in favour of the respiratory origin of such visions is furnished by Silberer's observations on his own symbolic hypnagogic visions which are certainly allied to dream visions. He found (Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Bd. 1., 1909, p. 523) that on drawing a deep breath, and so raising the chest wall, the representation came to him of attempting with another person to raise a table in the air.[123]J. de Goncourt (Journal des Goncourt, vol. iii. p. 3) mentions that after drinking port wine, to which he was unaccustomed, he had a dream in which he observed on his counterpane grotesque images in relief which rose and fell.[124]Chabaneix,Le Subconscient, p. 43.[125]May 30, 1906.[126]L. Binswanger, 'Versuch einer Hysterieanalyse,'Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Bd. 1. 1909.[127]Their word has often been accepted. Levitation as experienced by the saints has been studied by Colonel A. de Rochas,Les Frontières de la Science, 1904; also inAnnales des Sciences Psychiques, January-February 1901. 'Levitation is a perfectly real phenomena,' he concludes, 'and much more common than we might at first be tempted to believe.'[128]It seems to become less frequent after middle age. Beaunis states that in his case it ceased at the age of fifty. I found it disappear, or become rare, at a somewhat earlier age.[129]H. Piéron, 'Contribution à la Psychologie des Mourants,'Revue Philosophique, December 1902.[130]Seee.g.Galton,Inquiries(Everyman's Library edition), pp. 79-112. Among more recent writings on this subject may be mentioned Bleuler, art. 'Secondary Sensations,' Tuke'sDictionary of Psychological Medicine;Suarez de Mendoza,L'Audition Colorée;Jules Millet,Audition Colorée;and especially a useful summary by Clavière, 'L'Audition Colorée,'L'Année Psychologique, fifth year, 1899. A case of auditory gustation is recorded by A. M. Pierce,American Journal of Psychology, 1907. It may be noted that Boris Sidis has argued (Psychological Review, January 1904) that all hallucinations are of the nature of secondary sensations.[131]Ferrero, in hisLois Psychologiques du Symbolisme(1895), deals broadly with symbolism in human thought and life.[132]Revue Philosophique, November 1902.[133]'Richard Wagner et Tannhauser' inL'Art Romantique.[134]The motor imagery suggested by music is in some persons profuse and apparently capricious, and may be regarded as an anomaly comparable to a synaesthesia. Heine was an example of this, and he has described inFlorentine Nightsthe visions aroused by the playing of Paganini, and elsewhere the visions evoked in him by the music of Berlioz. Though I do not myself experience this phenomenon, I have found that there is sometimes a tendency for music to arouse ideas of motor imagery; thus some melodies of Handel suggest a giant painting frescoes on a vast wall space. The most elementary motor relationship of music is seen in the tendency of many people to sway portions of their body—to 'beat time'—in sympathy with the music. (This phenomenon has been experimentally studied by J. B. Miner, 'Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms,' Monograph Supplement to thePsychological Review, vol. v., No. 4, June 1903). Music is fundamentally an audible dance, and the most primitive music is dance music.[135]The instinctive nature of this tendency is shown by the fact that it persists even in sleep. Thus Weygandt relates that he once fell asleep in the theatre during one of the last scenes ofCavalleria Rusticana, when the tenor was singing in ever higher and higher tones, and dreamed that in order to reach the notes the performer was climbing up ladders and stairs on the stage.[136]See, especially the attractive book of André Pirro,L'Esthétique de J. S. Bach(1907), and also Albert Schweitzer,J. S. Bach(1908), especially chapters xix.-xxiii. 'Concrete things,' says Ernest Newman, summarising some of these results (Nation, December 25, 1909), 'incessantly suggested abstract ideas or inward moods to Bach, andvice versâ. He would time after time use the same musical formula for the same word or idea. He first suggests the external concepts of "high" and "low," as other composers have done, by high or low notes, and motion up or down by ascending or descending themes. But Bach correlates with the outward, objective thing a whole series of things that are purely subjective. Thus moods of elation or of depression are to him the mental equivalents of the physical acts of going up or down. So he gives us a whole series of ascending themes to words that express "mounting" states of mind, as it were—such as pride, courage, strength, resolution—and descending themes to words that express "declining" states of mind—such as prostration, adoration, depression, discouragement, grief at sin, humility, poverty, fatigue, and illness. For the two sets of concepts, internal and external, he will use the same musical symbols. To represent the physical concept of "surrounding," again, he adopts the device of a circling or undulating theme. A crown or a garland suggests the same idea to him, so for this, too, he uses the same kind of theme. But the correspondence goes still further; for when he comes to the word "considering," he uses the same curving musical symbol once more—his notion of "considering" being that of looking round on all sides. Again, a word of purely external signification that suggests something twisted will have an appropriately twisted theme. Then come the subjective applications of the theme—the same disordered melodic outline is used to express a frame of mind like anxiety or confusion, or to depict the wiles of Satan. Careful study of the vocal works of Bach, and especially of the cantatas, has revealed a host of these curious symbols.' The whole subject, it may be added, has been briefly and suggestively discussed by Goblot, 'La Musique Descriptive,'Revue Philosophique, July 1901.[137]T. Piderit,Mimik und Physiognomik, 1867, p. 73.[138]J. Cleland,Evolution, Expression and Sensation, 1881.[139]Féré, 'La Physiologie dans les Métaphores,'Revue Philosophique, October 1895.[140]Maeder discusses symbolism in some of these fields in his 'Die Symbolik in den Legenden, Märchen, Gebräuchen und Träumen,'Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, Nos. 6 and 7, May 1908.[141]So Philostratus, and Pliny (Natural History, Bk. X. ch. CCXI.) puts the same point on somewhat more natural grounds.[142]It has been translated by F. S. Krauss,Symbolik der Träume, 1881.[143]A translation of Synesius's 'Treatise on Dreams' is included in Druon'sŒuvres de Synésius, pp. 347et seq.Synesius is probably best known to modern English readers through Charles Kingsley's novel,Hypatia. His treatise on dreams has been unduly neglected, though it commended itself mightily to the pioneering mind of Lord Monboddo, who even says (Ancient Metaphysics, vol. ii., 1782, p. 217) in reference to this treatise: 'Indeed it appears to me that since the days of Plato and Aristotle there has not been a philosopher of greater depth than Synesius.'[144]K. A. Scherner,Das Leben des Traumes, 1861. In France Hervey de Saint-Denis, in a remarkable anonymous work which I have not seen (Les Rêves et les Moyens de les Diriger, p. 356, quoted by Vaschide and Piéron,Psychologie du Rêve, p. 26), tentatively put forward a symbolic theory of dreams, as a possible rival to the theory that permanent associations are set up as the result of a first chance coincidence. 'Do there exist,' he asked, 'bizarre analogies of internal sensations in virtue of which certain vibrations of the nerves, certain instinctive movements of our viscera, correspond to sensations apparently quite different? According to this hypothesis experience would bring to light mysterious affinities, the knowledge of which might become a genuine science;... and a real key to dreams would not be an unrealisable achievement if we could bring together and compare a sufficient number of observations.'[145]It is interesting to note that hallucinations may also be symbolic. Thus the Psychical Research Society's Committee on Hallucinations recognised a symbolic group, and recorded, for instance, the case of a man who, when his child lies dying, sees a blue flame in the air and hears a voice say, 'That's his soul' (Proceedings Society for Psychical Research, August 1894, p. 125).[146]Maeder states that the tendency to symbolism in dreams and similar modes of psychic activity is due to 'vague thinking in a condition of diminished attention.' This is, however, an inadequate statement and misses the central point.[147]In the other spheres in which symbolism most tends to appear, the same or allied conditions exist. In hallucinations, which (as Parish and others have shown) tend to occur in hypnagogic or sleep-like states, the conditions are clearly the same. The symbolism of an art, and notably music, is due to the very conditions of the art, which exclude any appeal to other senses. The primitive mind reaches symbolism through a similar condition of things, coming as the result of ignorance and undeveloped powers of apperception. In insanity these powers are morbidly disturbed or destroyed, with the same result.[148]The magnification we experience in dreams is manifested in their emotional aspects and in the emotional transformation of actual sensory stimuli, from without or from within the organism. The size of objects recalled by dreaming memory usually remains unchanged, and if changed it seems to be more usually diminished. 'Lilliputian hallucinations,' as they are termed by Leroy, who has studied them (Revue de Psychiatrie, 1909, No. 8), in which diminutive, and frequently coloured, people are observed, may also occasionally occur in alcoholic and chloral intoxication, in circular insanity, and in various other morbid mental conditions. They are usually agreeable in character.[149]Sollier, 'L'Autoscopie Interne,'Revue Philosophique, January 1903. Sollier deals with the objections made to the reality of the phenomenon.[150]'Many people,' writes Dr. Marie de Manacéïne (Sleep, 1897, p. 294), 'when threatened by a gastric or intestinal attack dream of seeing fish. The late Professor Sergius Botkine told me that he had found this coincidence in his own case, and I have myself several times found it in the case of a young girl who is well known to me. Some have supposed that the sleeping consciousness receives an impression of the elongated shape of the stomach or intestine; but such a supposition is easier to make than to prove.' Scherner associated dreams of fish with sensations arising from the bladder, and here also it may be said that we are concerned with a fish-like viscus. Greenwood (Imagination in Dreams, p. 195) stated that he had always been subject, at intervals of months or years, to a recurrent dream in which he would see a river swarming with fish that were finally piled in a horrible sweltering mass; this dream always left a feeling of 'squalid horror,' but he was never able to ascertain its cause and significance.[151]Freud states (Die Traumdeutung, p. 233) that he knows a case in which (as in theSong of Songs) columns and pillars appear in dreams as symbols of the legs, and doors as symbols of the openings of the body.[152]Freud,Die Traumdeutung, p. 66. This work, published in 1900, is the chief and most extensive statement of Freud's views. A shorter statement is embodied in a little volume of the 'Grenzfrägen' Series,Ueber den Traum, 1901. A brief exposition of Freud's position is given by Dr. A. Maeder of Zurich in 'Essai d'Interpretation de Quelques Rêves,'Archives de Psychologie, April 1907; as also by Ernest Jones ('Freud's Theory of Dreams,'Review of Neurology and Psychiatry, March 1910, andAmerican Journal of Psychology, April 1910). For Freud's general psychological doctrine, see Brill's translation of 'Freud's Selected Papers on Hysteria,' 1909. There have been many serious criticisms of Freud's methods. As an example of such criticism, accompanying an exposition of the methods, reference may be made to Max Isserlin's 'Die Psychoanalytische Methode Freuds,'Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, Bd. 1. Heft i. 1910. A judicious and qualified criticism of Freud's psychotherapeutic methods is given by Löwenfeld ('Zum gegenwärtigen Stande der Psychotherapeutie,'Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift, Nos. 3 and 4, 1910).[153]I have set forth Freud's views of hysteria, now regarded as almost epoch-making in character, inStudies of the Psychology of Sex, vol. i. 3rd ed. pp. 219et seq.[154]This is supported by the fact that in waking reverie, or day-dreams, wishes are obviously the motor force in building up visionary structures. Freud attaches great importance to reverie, for he considers that it furnishes the key to the comprehension of dreams (e.g.Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 2nd series, pp. 138et seq., 197et seq.). But it must be remembered that day-dreaming is not real dreaming, which takes place under altogether different physiological conditions, although it may quite fairly be claimed that day-dreaming represents a state intermediate between ordinary waking consciousness and consciousness during sleep.[155]The special characteristics of dreaming in the hysterical were studied, before Freud turned his attention to the question, by Sante de Sanctis (I Sogni e il Sonno nell' Isterismo, 1896). See also Havelock Ellis,Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. i. 3rd ed., 1910, 'Auto-erotism.'[156]Gissing, the novelist, an acute observer of psychic states, in the most of his books,The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, has described this phenomenon: 'Every one, I suppose, is subject to a trick of mind which often puzzles me. I am reading or thinking, and at a moment, without any association or suggestion that I can discover, there rises before me the vision of a place I know. Impossible to explain why that particular spot should show itself to my mind's eye; the cerebral impulse is so subtle that no search may trace its origin.' Gissing proceeds to say that a thought, a phrase, an odour, a touch, a posture of the body, may possibly have furnished the link of association, but he knows no evidence for this theory.[157]Extrospection has been specially studied by Vaschide and Vurpas inLa Logique Morbide.[158]On the psychic importance of fears, see G. Stanley Hall, 'A Study of Fears,'American Journal of Psychology, 1897, p. 183. Metchnikoff (Essais Optimistes, pp. 247et seq.) insists on the mingled fear and strength of the anthropoid apes.[159]Foucault has pointed this out, and Morton Prince, and Giessler (who admits that the wish-dream is common in children), and Flournoy (who remarks that not only a fear but any emotion can be equally effective), as well as Claparède. The last remarks that Freud might regard a fear as a suppressed desire, but it may equally be said that a desire involves, on its reverse side, a fear. Freud has indeed himself pointed out (e.g.Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Bd. 1., 1909, p. 362) that fears may be instinctively combined with wishes; he regards the association with a wish of an opposing fear as one of the components of some morbid psychic states. But he holds that the wish is the positive and fundamental element: 'The unconscious can only wish' ('Das Unbewusste kann nichts als wünschen'), a statement that seems somewhat too metaphysical for the psychologist.

[82]Dugald Stewart argued that there is loss of control over the muscular system during sleep, and the body, therefore, is not subject to our command; volition is present but it cannot influence the limbs. Hammond argued, on the contrary, that Stewart was quite wrong; the reason why voluntary movements are not performed during sleep is, he said, that volition is suspended. 'We do not will our actions when we are asleep. We imagine that we do, and that is all' (Treatise on Insanity, p. 205). Dugald Stewart and Hammond, though their phraseology may have been too metaphysical, were, from the standpoint I have adopted, both maintaining tenable positions. In one type of dream, we imagine we easily achieve all sorts of difficult and complicated actions, but in reality we make no movement; the ease and rapidity with which the mental machine moves is due to the fact that it is ungeared, and is effecting no work at all. In the other type of dream we make violent but inadequate efforts at movement and only partially succeed; the machine is partially geared, in a state intermediate between deep sleep and the waking condition.

[83]Jacques le Lorrain,Revue Philosophique, July 1895.

[84]The systematic megalomania of insanity can, however, have its rise in dreams; Régis and Lalanne (International Medical Congress, 1900;Proceedings, Section de Psychiatrie, p. 227) met within a short period with four cases in which this had taken place.

[85]This indeed seems to have been recognised by Wundt, who regards a 'functional rest of the sensory centres and of the apperception centre,' resulting in heightened latent energy which lends unusual strength to excitations, as a secondary condition of the dream state. Külpe (Outline of Psychology, p. 212) argues that the existence of vivid dreams shows that fatigue with its diminished associability fails to affect the central sensations themselves; this increased excitability resulting from dissociation may itself, however, be regarded as a symptom of fatigue; hyperaesthesia and anaesthesia are alike signs of exhaustion.

[86]The exhaustion sometimes felt on awaking from a dream perhaps testifies to its emotional potency. Delboeuf states that a friend of his experienced a dream so terrible in its emotional strain that on awaking his black hair was found to have turned completely white.

[87]The fundamental character of emotion in dreams has been more or less clearly recognised by various investigators. Thus C. L. Herrick, who studied his own dreams for many months, found that the essential element is the emotional, and not the ideational, and that, indeed, when recalledat once, with closed eyes and before moving, they were nearly devoid of intellectual content (Journal of Comparative Neurology, vol. iii. p. 17, 1893). R. MacDougall considers that dreaming is 'a succession of intense states of feeling supported by a minimum of ideational content,' or, as he says again, more accurately, 'the feeling is primary; the idea-content is the inferred thing' (Psychological Review, vol. v. p. 2). Grace Andrews, who kept a record of her dreams (American Journal of Psychology, October 1900), found that dream emotions are often stronger and more vivid than those of waking life; 'the dream emotion seems to me the most real element of the dream life.' P. Meunier, again ('Des Rêves Stéreotypés,'Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, September-October 1905), states that 'the substratum of a dream consists of a cœnæsthesia or an emotional state. The intellectual operation which translates to the sleeper's consciousness, while he is asleep, this cœnæsthesia or emotional state is what we call a dream.'

[88]The night-terrors of children have frequently been found to have their origin in gastric or intestinal disturbance. Graham Little brings together the opinions of various authorities on this point, though he is himself inclined to give chief importance to heart disease producing slight disturbances of breathing, since he has found that in nearly two-thirds of his cases (17 out of 30) night-terrors were associated with early heart disease (Graham Little, 'The Causation of Night-Terrors,'British Medical Journal, 19th August 1899). It should be added that night-terrors are more usually divided into two classes: (1) idiopathic (purely cerebral in origin), and (2) symptomatic (due to reflex disturbance caused by various local disorders); seee.g.Guthrie, 'On Night-Terrors,'Clinical Journal, 7th January 1899. J. A. Symonds has well described his own night-terrors as a child (Horatio Brown,J. A. Symonds, vol. i.). Lafcadio Hearn (in a paper on 'Nightmare-Touch' inShadowings) also gives a vivid account of his own childish night-terrors.

[89]It has not, I believe, been pointed out that such dreams might be invoked in support of the James-Lange or physiological theory of emotion, according to which the element of bodily change in emotion is the cause and not the result of the emotion.

[90]This physiological symbolism was clearly apprehended long ago by Hobbes: 'As anger causeth heat in some parts of the body when we are awake; so when we sleep the overheating of the same parts causeth anger, and raiseth up in the brain the imagination of an enemy. In the same manner as natural kindness, when we are awake, causeth desire and desire makes heat in certain other parts of the body; so also, too much heat in those parts, while we sleep, raiseth in the brain an imagination of some kindness shown. In sum, our dreams are the reverse of our waking imaginations; the motion, when we are awake, beginning at one end, and when we dream at another' (Leviathan, Part 1. ch. 2).

[91]'The pains of disappointment, of anxiety, of unsuccess, of all displeasing emotions,' remarks Mercier (art. 'Consciousness,' Tuke'sDictionary of Psychological Medicine), 'are attended by a definite feeling of misery which is referred in every case to the epigastrium.' He adds that the pleasures of success and good repute, aesthetic enjoyment, etc., are also attended by a definite feeling in the same region. This fact indicates the extreme vagueness of organic sensation. There is in fact much uncertainty and great difference of opinion as to the nature, and even the existence, of organic sensation; seee.g.a careful summary of the chief views by Dr. Elsie Murray, 'Organic Sensation,'American Journal of Psychology, July 1909.

[92]More than ten years later, the same dreamer, who had entirely forgotten the circumstances of this dream, again had a vivid dream of murder after eating pheasant at night; this time it was she herself who was to be killed, and she awoke imagining that she was struggling with the would-be murderer.

[93]F. Greenwood,Imagination in Dreams, p. 31.

[94]Dreams of railway travelling, and especially of losing trains, are not always associated with headache or any other recognisable condition. They constitute a very common type of dream not quite easy to explain. Dr. Savage mentions, for instance, that in his own case scarcely a week passes without such a dream, though in real life he scarcely ever loses a train and never worries about it. Wundt considers that the dreams in which we seek something we cannot find or have left something behind are due to indefinite coenaesthesic disturbances involving feelings of the same emotional tone, such as an uncomfortable position or a slight irregularity of respiration. I have myself independently observed the same connection, though it is not invariably traceable.

[95]E. H. Clarke,Visions, p. 294.

[96]An amusing, though solemn, interpretation of an ordinary dream of murder, railway travelling, and impending death, as experienced by Anna Kingsford, is furnished by her friend and biographer, Edward Maitland,Anna Kingsford, vol. i. p. 117.

[97]Various opinions in regard to morality in dreams are brought together by Freud,Die Traumdeutung, pp. 45et seq.

[98]Head ('Mental Changes that Accompany Visceral Diseases,'Brain, 1902, p. 802) refers to the association between visceral pain and the anti-social impulses, and thinks that the viscera, being part of the oldest and most autonomic system of the body, appear in consciousness as 'an intrusion from without, an inexplicable obsession.'

[99]'In my dreams,' W. D. Howells remarks, 'I am always less sorry for my misdeeds than for their possible discovery' ('True I talk of Dreams,'Harper's Magazine, May 1895).

[100]Bk. IV. 1014-15:'de montibus altisSe quasi præcipitent ad terram corpore toto.'

[100]Bk. IV. 1014-15:

'de montibus altisSe quasi præcipitent ad terram corpore toto.'

'de montibus altis

Se quasi præcipitent ad terram corpore toto.'

[101]'It has many times happened to me,' says the innkeeper's daughter inDon Quixote(Part I. ch. xvi.), 'to dream that I was falling down from a tower and never coming to the ground, and when I awoke from the dream to find myself as weak and shaken as if I had really fallen.'

[102]Chabaneix,Le Subconscient, p. 43.

[103]Herbert Spencer,Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed., vol. i. p. 773.

[104]L'Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et des Curieux, May 31, 1906.

[105]De Rochas describes the phenomenon as 'a property of the human organism, more or less developed in different individuals, when the soul, disengaging itself from the bonds of the body, enters the domain, still so mysterious, of dreams' (L'Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et des Curieux, May 10, 1906). In subsequent numbers of theIntermédiairevarious correspondents describe their own experiences of such dreams. InLuce e Ombrafor June 1906, and in theEcho du Merveilleuxfor the same date, neither of which I have seen, are given other experiences.

[106]Annals of Psychical Research, November 1896.

[107]Horace Hutchinson,Dreams and their Meanings, p. 76.

[108]American Journal of Psychology, July-October 1903, p. 14.

[109]'The wish to be able to fly,' he declares (Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, p. 59), 'signifies in dreaming nothing else but the desire to be capable of sexual activities. It is a wish of early childhood.'

[110]Stanley Hall,American Journal of Psychology, January 1879, p. 158; also F. E. Bolton, 'Hydro-Psychoses,'ib., January 1899, p. 183; as regards rudimentary gill-slits, Bland Sutton,Evolution and Disease, pp. 48et seq.Lafcadio Hearn travels still further along this road in search for an explanation of dreams of flight, and evokes a 'memory of vanished planets with fainter powers of gravitation,' but he fails to state when the ancestors of man inhabited these problematical planets.

[111]I retain this statement of my explanation in almost the same words as first written down in 1895. I was not then aware that several psychologists had offered very similar explanations. Scherner (Das Leben des Traumes, 1861) seems to have been the first to connect the lungs with dreams of flying, though he put forward the explanation in too fanciful a form and failed to realise that other factors, notably a change in skin pressure, are also involved. Strümpell at a later date recognised this explanation, as well as Wundt.

[112]It is the same with chloroform. 'There are marked sensations in the vicinity of the heart,' says Elmer Jones ('The Waning of Consciousness under Chloroform,'Psychological Review, January 1909). 'The musculature of that organ seems thoroughly stimulated, and the contractions become violent and accelerated. The palpitations are as strong as would be experienced at the close of some violent bodily exertion.' It is significant, also, as bearing on the interpretation of the dream of flying, that under chloroform 'all movements made appeared to be much longer than they actually were. A slight movement of the tongue appeared to be magnified at least ten times. Clinching the fingers and opening them again produced the feeling of their moving through a space of several feet.'

[113]Seee.g.Marie de Manacéïne,Sleep, p. 7.

[114]Horace Hutchinson, who in hisDreams and their Meanings(1901), has independently suggested that 'this flying dream is caused by some action of the breathing organs,' mentions the significant fact (p. 128) that the idea of filling the lungs as a help in levitation occurs in the flying dreams of many persons.

[115]We have an analogous state of tactile anaesthesia in the early stages of chloroform intoxication. Thus Elmer Jones found that this sense is, after hearing, the first to disappear. 'With the disappearance of the tactile sense and hearing,' he remarks, 'the body has completely lost its orientation. It appears to be nowhere, simply floating in space. It is a most ecstatic feeling.'

[116]Lafcadio Hearn describes the fall as coming at the beginning of the dream. Dr. Guthrie (Clinical Journal, June 7, 1899), in his own case, describes the flying sensations as coming first and the falling as coming afterwards, and apparently due to sudden failure of the power of flight; the first part of the dream is agreeable but after the fall the dreamer awakes shaken, shocked, and breathless.

[117]The disagreeable nature of falling in dreams may probably be connected with the absence of rhythm usually present in dreams of flying. Most of the psychologists who have occupied themselves with rhythm have insisted on its pleasurable emotional tone, as leading to a state bordering on ecstasy (seee.g.J. B. Miner, 'Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms,' Monograph Supplement toPsychological Review, June 1903). The pleasure is especially marked, as MacDougall remarks, when there is 'a coincidence of subjective and objective change.' In dreams of flying we have this coincidence, the real subjective rhythm being transformed in consciousness to an objective rhythm.

[118]Féré, 'Note sur les Rêves Epileptiques,'Revue de Médecine, September 10, 1905.

[119]Sir W. R. Gowers has on several occasions (e.g.'The Borderland of Epilepsy,'British Medical Journal, July 21, 1906) argued that dreams of falling have an aural origin, and are caused by contraction of the stapedius muscle, leading to a change in the ampullae which might suggest descent; he has himself suddenly awakened from such a dream and caught the sound of the muscular contraction. The opinion of so acute an investigator deserves consideration.

[120]Such sensations are, indeed, a recognised result of morphia. Morphinomaniacs, Goron remarks (Les Parias de l'Amour, p. 125), are apt to feel that they are flying or floating over the world.

[121]Jewell states that 'certain observers, peculiarly liable to dreams of falling or flying, ascribe these distinctly to faulty circulation, and say their physicians, to regulate the heart's action, have given them medicines which always relieve them and prevent such dreams' (American Journal of Psychology, January 1905, p. 8).

[122]Interesting evidence in favour of the respiratory origin of such visions is furnished by Silberer's observations on his own symbolic hypnagogic visions which are certainly allied to dream visions. He found (Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Bd. 1., 1909, p. 523) that on drawing a deep breath, and so raising the chest wall, the representation came to him of attempting with another person to raise a table in the air.

[123]J. de Goncourt (Journal des Goncourt, vol. iii. p. 3) mentions that after drinking port wine, to which he was unaccustomed, he had a dream in which he observed on his counterpane grotesque images in relief which rose and fell.

[124]Chabaneix,Le Subconscient, p. 43.

[125]May 30, 1906.

[126]L. Binswanger, 'Versuch einer Hysterieanalyse,'Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Bd. 1. 1909.

[127]Their word has often been accepted. Levitation as experienced by the saints has been studied by Colonel A. de Rochas,Les Frontières de la Science, 1904; also inAnnales des Sciences Psychiques, January-February 1901. 'Levitation is a perfectly real phenomena,' he concludes, 'and much more common than we might at first be tempted to believe.'

[128]It seems to become less frequent after middle age. Beaunis states that in his case it ceased at the age of fifty. I found it disappear, or become rare, at a somewhat earlier age.

[129]H. Piéron, 'Contribution à la Psychologie des Mourants,'Revue Philosophique, December 1902.

[130]Seee.g.Galton,Inquiries(Everyman's Library edition), pp. 79-112. Among more recent writings on this subject may be mentioned Bleuler, art. 'Secondary Sensations,' Tuke'sDictionary of Psychological Medicine;Suarez de Mendoza,L'Audition Colorée;Jules Millet,Audition Colorée;and especially a useful summary by Clavière, 'L'Audition Colorée,'L'Année Psychologique, fifth year, 1899. A case of auditory gustation is recorded by A. M. Pierce,American Journal of Psychology, 1907. It may be noted that Boris Sidis has argued (Psychological Review, January 1904) that all hallucinations are of the nature of secondary sensations.

[131]Ferrero, in hisLois Psychologiques du Symbolisme(1895), deals broadly with symbolism in human thought and life.

[132]Revue Philosophique, November 1902.

[133]'Richard Wagner et Tannhauser' inL'Art Romantique.

[134]The motor imagery suggested by music is in some persons profuse and apparently capricious, and may be regarded as an anomaly comparable to a synaesthesia. Heine was an example of this, and he has described inFlorentine Nightsthe visions aroused by the playing of Paganini, and elsewhere the visions evoked in him by the music of Berlioz. Though I do not myself experience this phenomenon, I have found that there is sometimes a tendency for music to arouse ideas of motor imagery; thus some melodies of Handel suggest a giant painting frescoes on a vast wall space. The most elementary motor relationship of music is seen in the tendency of many people to sway portions of their body—to 'beat time'—in sympathy with the music. (This phenomenon has been experimentally studied by J. B. Miner, 'Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms,' Monograph Supplement to thePsychological Review, vol. v., No. 4, June 1903). Music is fundamentally an audible dance, and the most primitive music is dance music.

[135]The instinctive nature of this tendency is shown by the fact that it persists even in sleep. Thus Weygandt relates that he once fell asleep in the theatre during one of the last scenes ofCavalleria Rusticana, when the tenor was singing in ever higher and higher tones, and dreamed that in order to reach the notes the performer was climbing up ladders and stairs on the stage.

[136]See, especially the attractive book of André Pirro,L'Esthétique de J. S. Bach(1907), and also Albert Schweitzer,J. S. Bach(1908), especially chapters xix.-xxiii. 'Concrete things,' says Ernest Newman, summarising some of these results (Nation, December 25, 1909), 'incessantly suggested abstract ideas or inward moods to Bach, andvice versâ. He would time after time use the same musical formula for the same word or idea. He first suggests the external concepts of "high" and "low," as other composers have done, by high or low notes, and motion up or down by ascending or descending themes. But Bach correlates with the outward, objective thing a whole series of things that are purely subjective. Thus moods of elation or of depression are to him the mental equivalents of the physical acts of going up or down. So he gives us a whole series of ascending themes to words that express "mounting" states of mind, as it were—such as pride, courage, strength, resolution—and descending themes to words that express "declining" states of mind—such as prostration, adoration, depression, discouragement, grief at sin, humility, poverty, fatigue, and illness. For the two sets of concepts, internal and external, he will use the same musical symbols. To represent the physical concept of "surrounding," again, he adopts the device of a circling or undulating theme. A crown or a garland suggests the same idea to him, so for this, too, he uses the same kind of theme. But the correspondence goes still further; for when he comes to the word "considering," he uses the same curving musical symbol once more—his notion of "considering" being that of looking round on all sides. Again, a word of purely external signification that suggests something twisted will have an appropriately twisted theme. Then come the subjective applications of the theme—the same disordered melodic outline is used to express a frame of mind like anxiety or confusion, or to depict the wiles of Satan. Careful study of the vocal works of Bach, and especially of the cantatas, has revealed a host of these curious symbols.' The whole subject, it may be added, has been briefly and suggestively discussed by Goblot, 'La Musique Descriptive,'Revue Philosophique, July 1901.

[137]T. Piderit,Mimik und Physiognomik, 1867, p. 73.

[138]J. Cleland,Evolution, Expression and Sensation, 1881.

[139]Féré, 'La Physiologie dans les Métaphores,'Revue Philosophique, October 1895.

[140]Maeder discusses symbolism in some of these fields in his 'Die Symbolik in den Legenden, Märchen, Gebräuchen und Träumen,'Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, Nos. 6 and 7, May 1908.

[141]So Philostratus, and Pliny (Natural History, Bk. X. ch. CCXI.) puts the same point on somewhat more natural grounds.

[142]It has been translated by F. S. Krauss,Symbolik der Träume, 1881.

[143]A translation of Synesius's 'Treatise on Dreams' is included in Druon'sŒuvres de Synésius, pp. 347et seq.Synesius is probably best known to modern English readers through Charles Kingsley's novel,Hypatia. His treatise on dreams has been unduly neglected, though it commended itself mightily to the pioneering mind of Lord Monboddo, who even says (Ancient Metaphysics, vol. ii., 1782, p. 217) in reference to this treatise: 'Indeed it appears to me that since the days of Plato and Aristotle there has not been a philosopher of greater depth than Synesius.'

[144]K. A. Scherner,Das Leben des Traumes, 1861. In France Hervey de Saint-Denis, in a remarkable anonymous work which I have not seen (Les Rêves et les Moyens de les Diriger, p. 356, quoted by Vaschide and Piéron,Psychologie du Rêve, p. 26), tentatively put forward a symbolic theory of dreams, as a possible rival to the theory that permanent associations are set up as the result of a first chance coincidence. 'Do there exist,' he asked, 'bizarre analogies of internal sensations in virtue of which certain vibrations of the nerves, certain instinctive movements of our viscera, correspond to sensations apparently quite different? According to this hypothesis experience would bring to light mysterious affinities, the knowledge of which might become a genuine science;... and a real key to dreams would not be an unrealisable achievement if we could bring together and compare a sufficient number of observations.'

[145]It is interesting to note that hallucinations may also be symbolic. Thus the Psychical Research Society's Committee on Hallucinations recognised a symbolic group, and recorded, for instance, the case of a man who, when his child lies dying, sees a blue flame in the air and hears a voice say, 'That's his soul' (Proceedings Society for Psychical Research, August 1894, p. 125).

[146]Maeder states that the tendency to symbolism in dreams and similar modes of psychic activity is due to 'vague thinking in a condition of diminished attention.' This is, however, an inadequate statement and misses the central point.

[147]In the other spheres in which symbolism most tends to appear, the same or allied conditions exist. In hallucinations, which (as Parish and others have shown) tend to occur in hypnagogic or sleep-like states, the conditions are clearly the same. The symbolism of an art, and notably music, is due to the very conditions of the art, which exclude any appeal to other senses. The primitive mind reaches symbolism through a similar condition of things, coming as the result of ignorance and undeveloped powers of apperception. In insanity these powers are morbidly disturbed or destroyed, with the same result.

[148]The magnification we experience in dreams is manifested in their emotional aspects and in the emotional transformation of actual sensory stimuli, from without or from within the organism. The size of objects recalled by dreaming memory usually remains unchanged, and if changed it seems to be more usually diminished. 'Lilliputian hallucinations,' as they are termed by Leroy, who has studied them (Revue de Psychiatrie, 1909, No. 8), in which diminutive, and frequently coloured, people are observed, may also occasionally occur in alcoholic and chloral intoxication, in circular insanity, and in various other morbid mental conditions. They are usually agreeable in character.

[149]Sollier, 'L'Autoscopie Interne,'Revue Philosophique, January 1903. Sollier deals with the objections made to the reality of the phenomenon.

[150]'Many people,' writes Dr. Marie de Manacéïne (Sleep, 1897, p. 294), 'when threatened by a gastric or intestinal attack dream of seeing fish. The late Professor Sergius Botkine told me that he had found this coincidence in his own case, and I have myself several times found it in the case of a young girl who is well known to me. Some have supposed that the sleeping consciousness receives an impression of the elongated shape of the stomach or intestine; but such a supposition is easier to make than to prove.' Scherner associated dreams of fish with sensations arising from the bladder, and here also it may be said that we are concerned with a fish-like viscus. Greenwood (Imagination in Dreams, p. 195) stated that he had always been subject, at intervals of months or years, to a recurrent dream in which he would see a river swarming with fish that were finally piled in a horrible sweltering mass; this dream always left a feeling of 'squalid horror,' but he was never able to ascertain its cause and significance.

[151]Freud states (Die Traumdeutung, p. 233) that he knows a case in which (as in theSong of Songs) columns and pillars appear in dreams as symbols of the legs, and doors as symbols of the openings of the body.

[152]Freud,Die Traumdeutung, p. 66. This work, published in 1900, is the chief and most extensive statement of Freud's views. A shorter statement is embodied in a little volume of the 'Grenzfrägen' Series,Ueber den Traum, 1901. A brief exposition of Freud's position is given by Dr. A. Maeder of Zurich in 'Essai d'Interpretation de Quelques Rêves,'Archives de Psychologie, April 1907; as also by Ernest Jones ('Freud's Theory of Dreams,'Review of Neurology and Psychiatry, March 1910, andAmerican Journal of Psychology, April 1910). For Freud's general psychological doctrine, see Brill's translation of 'Freud's Selected Papers on Hysteria,' 1909. There have been many serious criticisms of Freud's methods. As an example of such criticism, accompanying an exposition of the methods, reference may be made to Max Isserlin's 'Die Psychoanalytische Methode Freuds,'Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, Bd. 1. Heft i. 1910. A judicious and qualified criticism of Freud's psychotherapeutic methods is given by Löwenfeld ('Zum gegenwärtigen Stande der Psychotherapeutie,'Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift, Nos. 3 and 4, 1910).

[153]I have set forth Freud's views of hysteria, now regarded as almost epoch-making in character, inStudies of the Psychology of Sex, vol. i. 3rd ed. pp. 219et seq.

[154]This is supported by the fact that in waking reverie, or day-dreams, wishes are obviously the motor force in building up visionary structures. Freud attaches great importance to reverie, for he considers that it furnishes the key to the comprehension of dreams (e.g.Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 2nd series, pp. 138et seq., 197et seq.). But it must be remembered that day-dreaming is not real dreaming, which takes place under altogether different physiological conditions, although it may quite fairly be claimed that day-dreaming represents a state intermediate between ordinary waking consciousness and consciousness during sleep.

[155]The special characteristics of dreaming in the hysterical were studied, before Freud turned his attention to the question, by Sante de Sanctis (I Sogni e il Sonno nell' Isterismo, 1896). See also Havelock Ellis,Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. i. 3rd ed., 1910, 'Auto-erotism.'

[156]Gissing, the novelist, an acute observer of psychic states, in the most of his books,The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, has described this phenomenon: 'Every one, I suppose, is subject to a trick of mind which often puzzles me. I am reading or thinking, and at a moment, without any association or suggestion that I can discover, there rises before me the vision of a place I know. Impossible to explain why that particular spot should show itself to my mind's eye; the cerebral impulse is so subtle that no search may trace its origin.' Gissing proceeds to say that a thought, a phrase, an odour, a touch, a posture of the body, may possibly have furnished the link of association, but he knows no evidence for this theory.

[157]Extrospection has been specially studied by Vaschide and Vurpas inLa Logique Morbide.

[158]On the psychic importance of fears, see G. Stanley Hall, 'A Study of Fears,'American Journal of Psychology, 1897, p. 183. Metchnikoff (Essais Optimistes, pp. 247et seq.) insists on the mingled fear and strength of the anthropoid apes.

[159]Foucault has pointed this out, and Morton Prince, and Giessler (who admits that the wish-dream is common in children), and Flournoy (who remarks that not only a fear but any emotion can be equally effective), as well as Claparède. The last remarks that Freud might regard a fear as a suppressed desire, but it may equally be said that a desire involves, on its reverse side, a fear. Freud has indeed himself pointed out (e.g.Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Bd. 1., 1909, p. 362) that fears may be instinctively combined with wishes; he regards the association with a wish of an opposing fear as one of the components of some morbid psychic states. But he holds that the wish is the positive and fundamental element: 'The unconscious can only wish' ('Das Unbewusste kann nichts als wünschen'), a statement that seems somewhat too metaphysical for the psychologist.

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