Prevail in the formation of dreams

The World of Dreams by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. CONCLUSION

X. 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.

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. It thus happens that the ways of thinking and feeling 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 insanity[263] is 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.[264] 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 mind[265] and 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]

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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 his Primitive 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 had[267] not 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,[268] 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 is[269] practically 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 of[270] the 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 for[271] some 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 primitive[272] mind 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]

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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 imaginative[274] men, 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 his Birth of Tragedy argued 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 sometimes[275] been 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 this[276] rule. 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 the Trillo del Diavolo sonata 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]

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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 deeps[278] of 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 unexpected[279] limitations 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 if[280] we 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 or[281] less 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 his Meditations; '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.

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