THE ELEMENTS OF DREAM LIFE

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

II. THE ELEMENTS OF DREAM LIFE

The Spontaneous Procession of Dream Imagery—Its Kaleidoscopic Character—Attention in Dreams—Relation of Drug Visions and Hypnagogic Imagery to Dreaming—Colour in Dreams—The Fusion of Dream Imagery—Compared to Dissolving Views—Sources of the Imagery—Various types of Fusion—The Subconscious Element in Dreaming—Verbal Transformations as Links in Dream Imagery—The Reduplication of Visual Imagery in Motor and other Terms.

PERHAPS the most elementary fact about dream vision is the perpetual and unceasing change which it is undergoing at every moment. Sight is for most of us the chief sensory activity of sleeping as it is of waking life; the commonest kind of dream is mainly a picture, but it is always a living and moving picture, however inanimate the objects which appear in vision before us would be in real life. No man ever gazed at a dream picture which was at rest to his sleeping eye as are the pictures we gaze at with our waking eyes. So far as my own experience is concerned, I have rarely in sleep seen a sentence, a word, a letter written on a sheet of dream-paper which was not changing beneath the eye of sleep. I dream, for instance, that I wish to stamp a letter, and look in my pocket-book for a penny stamp; I am able to find stamps of other values, I am able to find penny stamps that are torn or defaced or of an antiquated type disused thirty years ago; all sorts of stamps, as well as little pictures resembling stamps, develop and multiply beneath my gaze; the stamp I seek remains unfound, probably because it had appeared at the beginning of the series and suggested all the rest. That is indicated by another dream (experienced, it may be noted, during the early stage of a cold in the head): I have to catch a train; I see my hat hanging on a peg among other hats, and I move towards it; but as I do so it has vanished; and I wander among rows of hats, of all shapes and sizes, but not one of them mine. Sleeping consciousness is a stream in which we never bathe twice, for it is renewed every second. It is this as much as any characteristic of the visual dream—for the mainly auditory or motor dream often presents less difficulty in this respect—which makes it so difficult to recall and reproduce. We are, as it were, gazing at a constantly revolving kaleidoscope in which every slightest turn produces a new pattern, somewhat resembling that which immediately preceded it—so that, if the kaleidoscope were conscious we should say that each picture had been suggested by the preceding pattern—but yet definitely novel.

Delbœuf has denied that this process ever involves any real metamorphosis of images; he regarded it as an illusion due to rapid succession of distinct images which are afterwards combined in memory. That view is not, however, tenable; apart from the fact that it makes the illegitimate assumption that our recollection of a dream is entirely unreliable, it must be remembered that (as Giessler has pointed out) the shock of emotional horror or surprise that frequently accompanies such dreams suffices to prove the reality of the metamorphosis. Thus I once, as a youth, had a vivid dream of an albatross that became transformed into a woman, the beautiful eyes of the albatross taking on a womanly expression, but the bird's beak only being imperfectly changed into a nose as the bird-woman murmured, 'Do you love me?' In this case the vivid surprise of the dream was precisely associated with the simultaneous existence of the two sets of characters.

It is not, however, necessary that there should be any metamorphosis of dream images, nor even that the procession of dream imagery should be continuous. And whether or not there is metamorphosis of images, whether the imagery is continuous or discontinuous, it seems to me that we must admit the possibility of its spontaneous character. That is, indeed, a debated, and, it may be admitted, a debateable point. Thus Foucault accounts for the multiplication of almost similar images sometimes witnessed in dreams as due to desire; we see a number of things because we desire to possess a number of these things, and he explains a dream of Delbœuf's, of a procession of lizards, as due to the fact that Delbœuf was a collector of lizards, in the same way as he would explain the dreams of thirsty people who imagine they are drinking repeated glasses of water or wine. I am quite unable to accept this explanation. The shifting and multiplication of dream imagery, as in the procession of lizards, is a fundamental and elementary character of spontaneous mental imagery, and is constant in some drug visions, notably those occasioned by mescal. The repetition of imaginary drinks in the dreams of a thirsty man belongs to another more special class in explanation of which desire may be more properly invoked; it is merely the expression of the fact that after the imaginary drink the dreamer remains thirsty, and the suggested image is therefore repeated.

That in some cases there is what we may call a deliberate subconscious selection in the imagery presented to consciousness in dreams, there can be no doubt. But mental imagery is deeper and more elemental than any of the higher psychic functions even when exerted subconsciously. Just as the immense procession of continuous and totally unfamiliar imagery which is evoked by the action of mescal on the visual centres has no more connection with the subject's volition or desires than the procession of the starry skies, so likewise, we seem bound to admit, it may be in the case of a succession of separate images in dreams. It is nearly always possible to find a link of connection between any two images chosen at random, and the link is often a real subconscious link, but not necessarily so. Discontinuous images may arise, it seems probable, from a psychic basis deeper than choice, their appearance being determined by their own dynamic condition at the moment. We must, as Baron Mourre not quite happily puts it, take into account 'the physiological state of ideas.' If we hold to the belief that dreaming is based on a fundamental and elementary tendency to the formation of continuous or discontinuous images, which may or may not be controlled by psychic emotions or impulses, we shall be delivered from many hazardous speculations.

When we thus start with the recognition of a more or less spontaneous procession of images as the elemental stuff of dreams, one of the first problems we encounter is the relation of attention to that imagery. What is the degree and the nature of the attention we exert in dreams?

'Sleep from the psychological point of view,' says Foucault, 'is a state of profound distraction or total inattention.' And Mourre shows by dreams of his own that any exercise of will in dreaming leads to awakening, and that the deeper the sleep the more absent is volition from dreams. Hence the involuntary wavering and perpetually mere meaningless change of dream imagery. Such concentration as is possible during sleep usually reveals a shifting, oscillating, uncertain movement of the vision before us. We are, as it were, reading a sign-post in the dusk, or making guesses at the names of the stations as our express train flashes by the painted letters. It is this factor in dreams which causes them so often to baffle our analysis. There is thus a failure of sleeping attention to fix definitely the final result—a failure which itself may evidently serve to carry on the dream process by suggesting new images and combinations. It can scarcely be said, however, that the question of attention in dreams is thus settled. It would be inconceivable that the terrible occurrences that may overtake us in dreams and the emotional turmoil aroused should be accompanied by 'total inattention and distraction.' Nor can it be said that that supposition agrees with the vivid memory which our dreams sometimes leave. We can probably account for the phenomena much more satisfactorily by adopting Ribot's useful distinction between voluntary attention and spontaneous attention.Voluntary or artificial attention is a product of education and training. It is directed by extrinsic force, is the result of deliberation, and is accompanied by some feeling of effort. It always acts on the muscles and by the muscles; without muscular tension there can be no voluntary attention. Spontaneous or natural attention, on the other hand, is that more fundamental kind of attention which exists anteriorly to any education or training, and is the only kind of attention which animals and young children are capable of. It may be weak or strong, but always and everywhere it is based on emotional states; every creature moved by pleasure and pain is capable of spontaneous attention under the influence of those stimuli. These two kinds of attention are at the opposite poles from each other, and are incompatible with each other. There can be no doubt that, as Ribot himself pointed out, it is voluntary attention that is defective (though it may not always be entirely absent) in dreams; the muscular weakness and inco-ordination of sleep involve this lack of attention which is indeed an essential condition of the restoration and repose of sleep. But all the characters of spontaneous attention are present. The attention we exercise in dreams is mainly of this fundamental, automatic, involuntary character, conditioned by the emotions we experience, and for the most part escaping all the efforts of our voluntary attention. Further, it has been ably argued by Leroy that a similar state of involuntary automatic attention, with concomitant diminution or disturbance of voluntary attention, is a necessary condition for the appearance of the visual and auditory hallucinations abnormally experienced in the waking state.

There is, then, at the basis of dreaming a seemingly spontaneous procession of dream imagery which is always undergoing transformation into something different, yet not wholly different, from that which went before. It seems a mechanical flow of images, regulated by associations of resemblance, which sleeping consciousness recognises without either controlling or introducing foreign elements. This is probably the most elementary form of dreaming, that which is nearest to waking consciousness, and that in which the peripheral and retinal element of dreaming plays the largest part.

The fundamental character of this spontaneous self-evolving procession of imagery is indicated by the significant fact that it tends to take place whenever the more retinal and peripheral part of the visual apparatus is affected by the exhaustion of undue stimulation, or even when the organism generally is disturbed or run down, as in neurasthenic conditions. The most obtrusive and familiar example of visual imagery is furnished by the procession of perpetually shifting and changing after-images which continue to evolve for a considerable time after we have looked at the sun or other brilliant object. Less striking, but more intimately akin to the imagery of dreams, are the hypnagogic visions occurring as we fall asleep, especially after a day during which vision has been unusually stimulated and fatigued, though they do not seem necessarily dependent on such fatigue. Most vivid and instructive of all is the procession of visual imagery evoked by certain drugs. Of these the most remarkable and potent, as well as the best for study, is probably mescal, which happens also to be the only one with which I am myself well acquainted. This substance provokes a constant succession of self-evolving visual imagery which constantly approaches and constantly eludes the semblance of real things; in the earlier stages these images closely resemble those produced by the kaleidoscope, and they change in a somewhat similar manner. Such spontaneous evolution of imagery is evidently a fundamental aptitude of the visual apparatus which many very slightly abnormal conditions may bring into prominence.

The power of opium is somewhat similar, and, as DeQuincey long since pointed out, such power is simply a revival of a faculty usually possessed by children, although, judging from my own experiences with mescal, drugs exert it in a far more vivid and potent degree than that in which it usually occurs in the child. The psychologists of childhood have not often investigated this phenomenon, but so far as my own inquiries go, all or nearly all persons have possessed, when children, the power of seeing visions in the dark on the curtain of the closed eyelids, perhaps the representation of fairy tales they had read, perhaps merely commonplace processions of individuals or events, a tendency sometimes appearing for the same figure to recur again and again. I think it is fairly certain that the so-called 'lies' of children, told in good faith, are in part due to the occasional eruption of this faculty into daylight life. People who deny that they ever possessed this power have, almost certainly, only forgotten. I should myself be inclined to deny that I had ever had any such visionary faculty if it were not that I can recall one occasion of its presence, at about the age of seven, when sleeping with a cousin of the same age; we amused ourselves by burying our heads in the pillows and watching a connected series of pictures which we were both alike able to see, each announcing any change in the picture as soon as it took place. This fact of community of vision served to impress on my mind the existence of a faculty of which otherwise I can recall no trace.

Of these various groups of allied phenomena, that which more especially concerns us in the investigation of dreams is the group of phenomena most strictly called hypnagogic, belonging, that is to say, to the ante-chamber of sleep, when the senses are in repose and waking consciousness is slipping away, or else when, as we leave the world of dreams, waking consciousness is flowing back again. This state has been known from very ancient times. Aristotle referred to it, and in the dawn of modern scientific thought Hobbes described allied phenomena. The strictly psychological study of hypnagogic visions seems to have begun with Baillarger. Then, some years later, Maury, who had a rich personal experience of such phenomena, devoted a chapter to the hypnagogic state, and gave it its recognised name.

Hypnagogic imagery, there can be little doubt, is not a purely ocular phenomenon, even when it is stimulated by ocular fatigue. It is a mixed phenomenon, partly retinal and partly central. That is to say that the eye supplies entoptic glimmerings, and the brain, acting on the suggestions thus received, superposes mental pictures to those glimmerings. They are thus analogous to the pictures we may see in the fire or in the clouds. It must be added that the other senses also furnish corresponding rudiments which are filled in by the central activity; this is notably the case with faint buzzings and sounds in the ear, and in addition, muscular twitches and internal visceral sensations, all these becoming more prominent as the attentive activity of waking life subsides.

What is the relation of hypnagogic imagery to dreams? Johannes Müller, the great physiologist, long ago identified them, as previously had Gruithuisen and Burdach, while Maury—who himself possessed, however, a somewhat abnormal and irritable nervous system—regarded hypnotic imagery as furnishing the whole of the formative element of dreams, as being 'the embryogeny of dreams'; he frequently found that images which appeared to him in this way before going to sleep reappeared in dreams. This is supported by Mourly Vold, who made experiments on himself, and by fixing images as he fell asleep dreamed of the same images. Goblot, however, while regarding hypnagogic imagery as analogous with dream imagery, denies that it is identical. Since the hypnagogic state is the porch to sleep and dreams—the praedormitium, as Weir Mitchell terms it—we can scarcely fail to admit with Maury that hypnagogic imagery presents us with the germinal stuff of dreams. If it is not identical with the fully formed dream, it is still the early stage of dreaming. This is certainly the view suggested by my own experience, even though I have never definitely recognised a dream as related to a previous hypnagogic image. It has, however, occasionally happened to me that as I have begun to lose waking consciousness a procession of images has drifted before my vision, and suddenly one of the figures I see has spoken. This hallucinatory voice occurring before I was fully asleep has startled me into full waking consciousness, and I have realised that, while yet in the hypnagogic stage, I was assisting at the birth of a dream.

There is one point, it may be noted in passing, at which dreams do not usually correspond with some of the phenomena with which we may most naturally compare them. I refer to their presentation of colour. In the dreams of most people colour is rare. We seem usually, from this point of view, to remember a dream as we would remember a photograph, or, if any colour at all is present, a tinted drawing. Judging from my own experience, I should say that it is difficult to decide whether the absence of colour is due to its actual absence from the dream imagery, or merely to its failure to make any impression on memory. Some careful observers have, however, stated that the colour of their dream imagery is definitely grey. Thus Beaunis states that his dream imagery is usually en grisaille, like an image recalled in the waking state, though occasionally the colour is vivid, and Dr. Savage says that in his dreams colour is rarely or never present. 'I see landscapes of black and white, and flowers assume their true form, but not their colours.' This greyness of dream imagery corresponds to the disappearance of colour under chloroform anaesthesia. 'So long as the eyes could be held open voluntarily,' says Elmer Jones, 'vision seemed quite normal, save that the colours of the spectrum faded out into a grey band.' Even in the early stage of some insanities also, as Stoddart has found, some degree of colour-blindness is present. Grace Andrews states, indeed, that in nearly half of her own visual dreams colour sensations were included. This seems to me exceptional. In my own experience, the emergence of a single colour, which usually strikes me as beautiful, is not rare. I see, for instance, a friend drinking wine copiously from a large goblet, and I judge by the colour of the wine that it is hock, or I am impressed by the shimmering grey tone of the poplin dresses worn by a group of ladies, which seems to indicate that the tone of the whole picture was not grey. I am inclined to think that when colour in a dream becomes more pronounced than this, the dream is not normal, but is associated with some degree of cerebral disturbance, and especially the presence of headache. This would agree with the fact that persons subject to migraine are liable to visual colour phenomena. As an example of a vivid colour dream associated with headache, I may bring forward the following: I dreamed that an artist of note, with whom I am acquainted, was painting my portrait. (The pose of the portrait was standing, but I was lying down; this, however, caused me no surprise.) I saw the colours of the picture with great vividness, and I noted the extreme rapidity with which the artist painted; thus the red and black pattern of the necktie he had given me was suddenly changed to a totally different blue pattern, and the whole picture then appeared as a harmony of blues, the rapidity with which the artist effected these changes impressing me as very remarkable. In another dream in which I saw a painter occupied on a picture, a landscape representing sunrise, memory recalled the effect of light as vivid, but no definite sense of colour remained. This seems to me the normal condition of things in the ordinary dreams of most persons, colour, when it occurs, or when it is remembered, being for the most part confined to a single object or a single tint, and often being associated with a feeling of aesthetic pleasure.

In ordinary dreaming there is usually something more than a spontaneous procession of related imagery. There is a more definitely central and psychic element. There is association, not only by obvious resemblance, but by contiguity, usually the casual contiguity of images received during the previous day, which forces together images related to each other indeed, but by no means obviously. Dreaming consciousness embodies and actively co-ordinates definite, and not merely random, images. The passive and spontaneous flow of imagery is thus modified in its course.

The image of the magic lantern well illustrates this character of dream experiences. The movement of the cinematograph, indeed, scarcely corresponds to that fusion of heterogeneous images which marks dream visions. Our dreams are like dissolving views in which the dissolving process is carried on swiftly or slowly, but always uninterruptedly, so that at any moment two (often, indeed, more) incongruous pictures are presented to consciousness, which strives to make one whole of them, and sometimes succeeds, and is sometimes baffled. Or we may say that the problem presented to dreaming consciousness resembles that experiment in which psychologists pronounce three wholly unconnected words and require the subject to combine them at once in a connected sentence. It is unnecessary to add that such analogies fail to indicate the subtle complexity of the apparatus which is at work in the manufacture of dreams.

By this mechanism of dreaming, isolated impressions, or else impressions which have a resemblance or a connection which is not obvious to the waking intelligence, flow together in dreams to be welded into a whole. There is produced, in the strictest sense, a confusion. For instance, a lady, who in the course of the day has admired a fine baby and bought a big fish for dinner, dreams with horror and surprise of finding a fully developed live baby sewed up in a large cod-fish. Again, a lady who had been cooking in the course of the day and in the evening had read a scientific description of the way birds obtain and utilise their food, such as fruit and snails, dreams at night that she has discovered when out walking a kind of animal-fruit, a damson containing a snail within it, which she views with delight as admirably adapted for culinary purposes. Another lady, after carving a duck at dinner, dreams that she is trying to cut off a duck's leg, but seems to realise in her dream at the same time that it is really her husband's neck she is hacking at. In a dream of my own, children's heads took the form and shape of flowers of various shapes and hues, though mainly of the composite order (like chrysanthemums), and their eyes looked out from between the petals.

It must be added that in a very considerable proportion of cases the combinations produced in dreams are far more plausible than in any of the instances just narrated; the whole dream may thus easily follow as commonplace and matter-of-fact a course as in real life. Thus, after going to live in a new neighbourhood, I dreamed that I entered a shop belonging to a certain firm, and saw there an employé who, in real life, to my knowledge, had previously left another shop belonging to the same firm; an entirely probable combination was thus effected, and the dream conversation that followed was equally natural and probable. We do not go out of our way in dreams to invent absurdities; we simply accept the data presented to us, dealing with them as rationally as the intellectual instruments at our disposal may permit.

The dream constituted by the falling together of trivial reminiscences is not always, however, as commonplace and plausible as in the dream just narrated. In other cases the falling together of equally trivial reminiscences may constitute a fantastic and imaginative picture altogether outside waking experience or waking thought. Thus I dream that it is my duty to watch beside a great king while he sleeps. He lies on a huge bed, fully clothed and booted, and with a great crimson mantle thrown over him. I am permitted to lie on the edge of the bed outside the mantle, but must on no account close my eyes, for I must be ready to respond at once to his call. The elements of such a picture are obviously so simple and commonplace that it is not surprising that I could not find that even one of them had been specially present to waking consciousness. Yet the picture that at that particular moment they fell together to compose—like the broken fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope—is altogether alien alike to my experience and to my imagination.

The source of the common confusion of dream imagery is to be found in very varying motives. In a large proportion of cases, what we witness is merely the flowing together of impressions which have no real resemblance, but which happen to have been received at nearly the same time, and to admit of being fused; thus, in one case, occupation during the day partly in the fowl-yard and partly in the garden, led a lady to the dream project of breeding chickens by planting fowls' heads. Very frequently, however, there is a real resemblance in the two objects combined, although it is not a resemblance which would ever present itself to waking consciousness. The fowl-yard will supply another instance of this confusion also. I went to sleep thinking of a friend who was that night to stay at a certain hotel I had never seen. I dreamed that I saw the hotel in question; its façade was not unlike that of a common type of hotel, but the roof was flat and at no very great height from the ground, so that I was able to overlook the building and see into all the windows, an arrangement that struck me as bad. My ability to overlook the building was not, however, accompanied by any perception of its diminutiveness. On awakening I remembered that my wife had received a chicken incubator the day before, and we had examined it in the evening. The image of the hotel had fused with the image of the incubator.

In another dream of the same type I imagined that I was with a dentist who was about to extract a tooth from a patient. Before applying the forceps he remarked to me (at the same time setting fire to a perfumed cloth at the end of something like a broomstick, in order to dissipate the unpleasant odour) that it was the largest tooth he had ever seen. When extracted I found that it was indeed enormous, in the shape of a caldron, with walls an inch thick. Taking from my pocket a tape measure (such as I carried in waking life), I found the diameter to be not less than twenty-five inches; the interior was like roughly-hewn rock, and there were sea-weeds and lichen-like growths within. The size of the tooth seemed to me large, but not extraordinarily so. It is well known that pain in the teeth, or the dentist's manipulations, cause those organs to seem of extravagant extent; in dreams this tendency rules unchecked; thus a friend once dreamed that mice were playing about in a cavity in her tooth. But for the dream just quoted, there was no known dental origin; it arose solely or chiefly from a walk during the previous afternoon among the rocks of the Cornish coast at low tide, and the fantastic analogy, which had not occurred to waking consciousness, suggested itself during sleep.

In another dream, illustrating the same kind of confusion of images having a real resemblance unnoticed in waking life, I seemed to see on a table a small hand-gong of a common type, struck by a hammer, but on striking it repeatedly, it produced flashes of light instead of the sounds normally produced by a gong. I concluded that the instrument must be out of order and called some one to attend to it, whereupon we proceeded to deal with it as though it were a diminutive battery of the kind used to work electric bells. The gong was one familiar to me at the time in daily life; on the previous day I had casually observed that it was misplaced. In my dream I discovered a resemblance which actually exists between a gong of the type in question and the lever-handle for turning on the electric light, soothing a certain doubt by saying to myself in my dream that the instrument served both for the production of sound and of light. This link of connection led to the association of an electric battery with the hand-gong, as well as to the attribution to the gong of light-giving properties.

Such a dream serves as a transition to another very common kind of confusion of imagery in which two altogether unlike images are amalgamated through each happening to have in the mind a link of connection with some third idea. I dreamed that my wife's dog—a dog who, in real life, was constantly getting into trouble—had killed a child in the neighbouring town. On going thither I entered a butcher's shop, and saw the child lying on a table, mutilated and bleeding. After a time, however, I learned that it was not a child, but a pig that had been killed, and what I had previously taken for a child was now visibly a dead pig. I felt ashamed of my mistake, and the sympathy I had experienced now seemed excessive, especially when the butcher remarked that it was all right as he had been fattening the pig and meant to kill it soon anyhow. Then the pig was cut open, though it made daring attempts to come to life again, during which I awoke. It is clear how, in this case, the idea of the butcher's shop served as a bridge from the image of the child to the image of the pig. Again, after a day in which I had received a letter from a lady, unknown to me, living in France, and later on had written out a summary of a criminal case in which a detective had to go over to France, I dreamed that some one told me that the lady I had heard from was a detective in the service of the French Government, and this explanation, though it seemed somewhat surprising, fully satisfied me. Here, it will be seen, the idea of France served as a bridge, and was utilised by sleeping consciousness to supply an answer to a question which had been asked by waking consciousness.

The confusion of imagery may be more remote, embodying abstract ideas and without reference to recent impressions. Thus I dreamed that my wife was expounding to me a theory by which the substitution of slates for tiles in roofing had been accompanied by, and intimately associated with, the growing diminution of crime in England. I opposed this theory, pointing out the picturesqueness of tiles, their cheapness, and greater comfort both in winter and summer, but at the same time it occurred to me as a peculiar coincidence that tiles should have a sanguinary tinge suggestive of criminal bloodthirstiness. I need scarcely say that this bizarre theory had never suggested itself to my waking thoughts. There was, however, a real connecting link in the confusion—the redness, and it is a noteworthy point, of great significance in the interpretation of dreams, that that link, although clearly active from the first, remained subconscious until the end of the dream, when it presented itself as an entirely novel coincidence.

I dreamed once that I was with a doctor in his surgery, and saw in his hand a note from a patient saying that doctors were fools and did him no good, but he had lately taken some selvdrolla, recommended by a friend, and it had done him more good than anything, so please send him some more. I saw the note clearly, not, indeed, being conscious of reading it word by word, but only of its meaning as I looked at it; the one word I actually seemed to see, letter by letter, was the name of the drug, and that changed and fluctuated beneath my vision as I gazed at it, the final impression being selvdrolla. The doctor took from a shelf a bottle containing a bright yellow oleaginous fluid, and poured a little out, remarking that it had lately come into favour, especially in uric acid disorders, but was extremely expensive. I expressed my surprise, having never before heard of it. Then, again to my surprise, he poured rather copiously from the bottle on to a plate of food, saying, in explanation, that it was pleasant to take and not dangerous. This was a vivid morning dream, and on awakening I had no difficulty in detecting the source of its various minor details, especially a note received on the previous evening and containing a dubious figure, the precise nature of which I had used my pocket lens to determine. But what was selvdrolla, the most vivid element of the dream? I sought vainly among my recent memories, and had almost renounced the search when I recalled a large bottle of salad oil seen on the supper table the previous evening; not, indeed, resembling the dream bottle, but containing a precisely similar fluid. Selvdrolla was evidently a corruption of 'salad oil.' This dream illustrates the uncertainty of dream consciousness, but it also illustrates at the same time the element of certainty in dream subconsciousness. Throughout my dream I remained, consciously, in entire ignorance as to the real nature of selvdrolla, yet a latent element in consciousness was all the time presenting it to me in ever clearer imagery. We see that the subconscious element of dream life treats the conscious part much as a good-natured teacher treats a child whose lesson is only half learned, giving repeated clues and hints which the stupid child understands only at the last moment, or not at all. It is, indeed, a universal method, the method of Nature with man, throughout the whole of human evolution.

It will be seen that at this point we are brought into contact with another characteristic of dream life: there is often more in dreams than dreaming consciousness is able to realise. On the one hand, the elements of dream life are drawn from a wider field than is normally accessible to waking consciousness; on the other hand, the focus of dream consciousness is narrower than that of waking consciousness, and cannot apperceive all that is going on. There is at once more extension and more contraction than in the psychic life of the waking world. A very large part of the psychic life of sleep is outside our power, and some of it is even beyond our sight.

It will be observed that the perpetual movement and the constant fusion of images which constitute the most fundamental character of dream life really combine two characteristics which, abstractly regarded, are distinct. The tendency of the dream image to be ever changing, ever putting forth some new feature which more or less radically alters its nature, is not a phenomenon of precisely the same nature as the tendency for two definite images, well known to waking consciousness, to become fused together, consciously or unconsciously, in dreams. Practically, however, there is no line of demarcation. What happens is that the image is ever spontaneously changing, and that each change is at once recognised by dreaming consciousness as a known object. Thus I dreamed that I was in a drawing-room and saw a beautiful and attractive woman with an unusually low evening dress entirely revealing the breasts; then, between the breasts, three additional nipples appeared, and I realised in my dream that here was a case of supernumerary breasts of sufficient scientific interest to be carefully examined later on; and then, as I gazed, I saw a number of little fleshy nipple-like protuberances on the body, and thereupon I realised that I was really looking at a case of the rare skin disease termed molluscum fibrosum. Thus the perpetually wavering and developing image is at the same time a succession of quite different images. On the other hand, when we seem to have a fusion of two definite images, what we really see in most cases is one image melting into the other and gradually losing its earlier character. In either case the process is the same interplay of automatic peripheral imagery and central ideas, whether the new image is brought into focus by, as it were, a current in consciousness, or is merely suggested by a spontaneous change in the previous image. How far the image suggests the idea or the idea the image, it is extremely difficult in most cases to say. The phenomenon we witness is a perpetually dissolving view; the vital process behind that phenomenon we must usually be content to be ignorant of.

It sometimes happens that the dream image is slowly transformed without the dreamer realising the transformation. Thus an image of a doll may take on the character of a human being. In a dream of this kind—possibly suggested by Villiers de l'Isle Adam's L'Eve Future, though that book had not been recently in my mind—I imagined that a lady of my acquaintance (whose identity I could not recall on awakening) had taken a fancy to possess an artificial woman, constructed with vast ingenuity and at enormous expense. The skin and hair seemed real as I noted with a certain horror on observing the breasts and armpits, but in places—I noticed especially one arm—the creature was as defective as an ill-made doll. It was, however, able to walk with a little support, and, most remarkable of all, it gave intelligent answers to questions; this alone it was that caused me a certain surprise. What at the beginning of the dream had only been an artificial image was evidently becoming a real human being, and one can readily believe that such stories as that of Pygmalion's statue may have been suggested by dream experiences.

The dream is mainly a dissolving view, because for most of us it is above all a visual phenomenon. Those people who, in their dreams, at all events, if not also in waking life, are largely of auditory type, experience dreams in which words play exactly the same shifting, developing, and dissolving part played by images in the persons of more markedly visual type. In their dreams they resemble those insane people who, in some feeble and confusional states, manifest echolalia and confabulation, their ideas drifting along the associational paths of least resistance suggested by every random word they hear. Maury records successions of dream imagery strung together in a similar manner by a procession of verbal transformations; thus in one oft-quoted dream the scenes were connected by the words, kilomètre, kilos, Gilolo, Lobelia, Lopez, loto. In such a case the procession of verbal auditory imagery constitutes the basis of the dream. This is probably rare. In most people the basis of the dream is furnished by visual imagery, and auditory images only occasionally form an associative link, being more usually subordinated to the visual elements.

The speech peculiarities of dreams have been very thoroughly investigated by Kraepelin, who has brought together two hundred and eighty-one examples, partly observed in himself, though they are not common, and Kraepelin considers that the hearing centres fall more deeply asleep than the visual centres, the eyes being already sufficiently protected by the lids. Kraepelin classifies the speech disturbances of dreams into two great groups: (1) paraphasia, or disturbance of word-finding, where the idea is associated with a wrong word, which is sometimes a new formation; and (2) disorders of oration, in which the peculiarity lies, not in the words, but in their order. The speech disturbances of dreams, Kraepelin remarks, spring from deep disturbance of thought, such as occur in sensorial aphasia, and, as in such aphasia, the dreamer thinks his nonsense is quite clear and reasonable. Much the same may occur in alcoholic delirium and in dementia præcox.

The invention of new words probably occurs frequently in dreams, without leaving a clear trace in memory, and still more frequently, perhaps, as in the 'selvdrolla' dream, already recorded, there are seeming new verbal formations which are really mere corruptions of imperfectly realised words. An example of a definite and precise new word seems to be furnished by the following dream, which was at all points vivid and precise. I saw quite close to me a huge tawny bird, with an orange bill. The creature got up and moved away, seeming as large as an ostrich. I asked a lady, standing by, who had some ornithological knowledge, what the bird was, and she replied that she thought it was a jaleisa. Then I asked the same question of a poor woman who was passing, curious to know what she would answer; she said, 'Oh, it's a kind of starling.' There was no doubt in my dream as to the spelling of 'jaleisa,' but I am quite unable to account for the word. It so happened, however, that before I went to bed I had been reading one of Calderon's plays, and I imagine that this pseudo-Spanish word had formed itself in my brain among the echoes of Calderon's enchanting music. The question arises as to why that ignorant old woman should have called the jaleisa a starling. It seems just possible that the more familiar name was suggested by the last syllable of the strange bird's name, the association being verbal. It is equally possible, and perhaps more likely, that the association followed by the more usual visual channel, and that the jaleisa's orange beak suggested the large orange beaks of newly hatched starlings, which had once, many years previously, vividly attracted my attention.

A probable illustration of the influence of verbal association in diverting the current of a dream is seen in the harrowing narrative that follows: A lady dreamed that she went to an entertainment which turned out to be a kind of revival meeting, presided over by a lady, and full of uproar. It was suddenly realised that Hell was underneath the hall, and a man, supposed to be a slave, was torn to pieces and cast into Hell. A lady present was so much affected by the scene that she threw herself into a pool of water, and was drowned, her body being afterwards pulled out by a working man with a pitchfork. The dreamer was so overcome by these tragic events that she felt that there was nothing left but to commit suicide. Resolving to drown herself, she went to a lighthouse (which, however, somewhat resembled a bathing machine) on a height, in order to throw herself down into the sea. It was of an exquisite green tint, extremely lovely and attractive, but she had not the courage to leap in. She thought it might give her courage if she had a good meal first, so she returned to the hall and joined the lady who had presided over the meeting. They sat down to a dish of roast mutton, but, as they were eating, suddenly looked at each other with mutual understanding; they realised that they were eating the woman who had been drowned, and, it will be remarked, had been pulled out of the water by a fork. It was possible to account for every element of which this dream was made up, but its tragic character was unsupported by anything in waking life, and entirely native to the dream. The possibility of any guiding link between 'Hell' and 'hall' had not presented itself to the dreamer, nor had it occurred to me when I set down the dream as here reproduced. It must be noted, however, that the revival meeting would itself tend to suggest the idea of Hell. It seems probable that verbal associations usually play only a subordinate part.

Sometimes the verbal links of association in dreams, far from introducing tragedy, lead, by the conjunction of two words of the same sound, to puns. Thus a dreamer imagined that he and some friends were looking at a house with its bedroom or bedrooms open to the air, the front wall being gone, and they were laughing at the comical effect when a mysterious voice came saying, 'A three-walled bedroom is a side-burst stor(e)y.' As the dreamer awoke, he found himself laughing at this juxtaposition of the idea of the storey of a house-side split open, and the idea of a side-splitting story. The conditions of psychic activity during sleep—when ideas drift together from widely separated regions along channels of association which are usually held closed by the higher intellectual processes—seem, indeed, to be specially favourable to the production of puns and allied forms of witticism. They may, therefore, be properly regarded as closely associated with subconscious activity.

A verbal link is seen in the following 'recipe' invented on another occasion by the same dreamer:—

'Call in the tipcat, cut off its tail;Fold up some eggs in a saucepan;Sit on the rest, like an elderly male,And gulp down the whole as a horse can.'

It is evident that the tipcat suggested a cat's tail, while the suggestion of a cooking recipe in 'cut off its tail' led on to eggs and saucepan; the eggs suggested 'sitting,' while 'gulp,' as the dreamer noted, appeared as 'gallop,' and suggested the horse. The ease with which the whole fell into a completely rhymed doggerel stanza is due to the fact that the dreamer is a poet.

A more common phenomenon in my experience than association by verbal clues is a transference from visual terms into the terms of some other sense, and a repetition in that form. Thus a lady dreams that a large and very beautiful picture resembling tapestry forms itself before her, and in it she sees herself, only much more beautiful in shape, standing by a tree, and on the other side of the tree an old friend is standing, while there are a crowd of people around. Then she sees her friend touch her on the arm. At the same time the dreamer feels the touch. The visual image is reduplicated in a motor form. Such a phenomenon is doubtless a natural result of the special conditions of dream life. In waking life the senses are working co-ordinately, and if we see ourselves touched we shall probably feel ourselves touched. But in dreams the body is a vision, and not our real body, and when we see it touched, we realise we ought to feel it touched, and a tactile sensation is thus suggested and experienced.

There are, however, other reduplications to which this explanation will not apply. Thus I imagined I was sitting at a window, at the top of a house, writing. As I looked up from my table I saw, with all the emotions naturally accompanying such a sight, a woman in her nightdress appear at a lofty window some distance off, and throw herself down. I went on writing, however, and found that in the course of my literary employment—I am not clear as to its precise nature—the very next thing I had to do was to describe exactly such a scene as I had just witnessed. I was extremely puzzled at such an extraordinary coincidence; it seemed to me wholly inexplicable. Again I dreamed that I was coming up the Thames (apparently in a steamboat), reading a novel, written by a friend, which was the history of some one who arrives in England coming up the Thames to London, by what I felt to be an extraordinary coincidence, in exactly the same way as I was at the moment. Then I found myself seemingly at the end of a London pier, with the river rippling at my feet, and in front the superb panorama of London; exactly the scene which, in less detail, was described in the book. Such dreams, reduplicating the imagery in a new sensory medium, are fairly common, with me at all events. The association is less that of analogy than of sensory media, as of the visual image becoming a verbal motor image. In other cases a scene is first seen as in reality, and then in a picture. Thus I dreamed that I was witnessing the performance of an orchestra, and observed that all the players had instruments of ancient pattern which, I understood, had been in constant use for several hundred years; I could recall the shapes of many on awaking, and none of them were quite modern; I could not, however, recall the character of the music, which seemed to make no impression on me, since I was absorbed in observing the shapes of the instruments. I specially observed an old framed engraving hanging on the wall, in my dream, representing precisely one of the instruments played on, and I understood that it was called a bourdon. It is interesting to observe the profound astonishment with which sleeping consciousness apperceives such simple reduplication.

In dreams planes of existence that in waking life are fundamentally distinct are brought together, so that events belonging to different planes move on the same plane, and even become combined. Acting and life, the picture and the reality, are no longer absolutely distinct. Art and life flow in the same channel. The reason, doubtless, is that for the dreamer the world of waking life, the world of things as they are to the waking senses, is closed and cannot even be completely recalled. So that all modes of representation are strictly on the same level, and it is, therefore, perfectly natural and logical that they should stand side by side and merge into one another.

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This book is part of the public domain. Havelock Ellis (2019). The World of Dreams. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59214/pg59214-images.html

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