SYMBOLISM IN 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. SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS

VII. SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS

The Dramatisation of Subjective Feelings Based on Dissociation—Analogies in Waking Life—The Synaesthesias and Number-forms—Symbolism in Language—In Music—The Organic Basis of Dream Symbolism—The Omnipotence of Symbolism—Oneiromancy—The Scientific Interpretation of Dreams—Why Symbolism prevails in Dreaming—Freud's Theory of Dreaming—Dreams as Fulfilled Wishes—Why this Theory cannot be applied to all Dreaming—The Complete Form of Symbolism in Dreams—Splitting up of Personality—Self-objectivation in Imaginary Personalities—The Dramatic Element in Dreams—Hallucinations—Multiple Personality—Insanity—Self-objectivation a Primitive Tendency—Its Survival in Civilisation.

In discussing dreams of flying I have referred to a dream in which a slight disturbance of the heart's action was transformed by sleeping consciousness into the image of an athlete manipulating an elastic ball. This objectivation of what are really the dreamer's subjective sensations, although he is not conscious of them as subjective, is, indeed, a phenomenon which we have encountered many times. It is, however, so important a feature of dream psychology, and probably of such significant weight in its influence on waking life, that it is worth while to deal with it separately.

The dramatisation of subjective elements of the personality, which contributes so largely to render our dreams vivid and interesting, rests on that dissociation,[149] or falling apart of the constituent groups of psychic centres, which is so fundamental a fact of dream life. That is to say, that the usually coherent elements of our mental life are split up, and some of them—often, it is curious to note, precisely those which are at that very moment the most prominent and poignant—are reconstituted into what seems to us an outside and objective world, of which we are the interested or the merely curious spectators, but in neither case realise that we are ourselves the origin of.

An elementary source of this tendency to objectivation is to be found, it may be noted, in the automatic impulse towards symbolism by which all sorts of feelings experienced by the dreamer become transformed into concrete visible images. When objectivation is thus attained, dissociation may be said to be secondary. So far indeed as I am able to dissect the dream-process, the tendency to symbolism seems nearly always to precede the dissociation in consciousness, though it may well be that the dissociation of the mental elements is a necessary subconscious condition for the symbolism.

Sensory symbolism rests on a very fundamental psychic tendency. On the abnormal side we find it in the synaesthesias which, since Galton first drew attention to them in 1883, in his Inquiries into Human Faculty, have become well known, and are found among between six to over twelve per cent. of people. Galton investigated chiefly those kinds of synaesthesias which he called 'number-forms' and 'colour associations.' The number-form is characteristic of those people who[150] almost invariably think of numerals in some more or less constant form of visual imagery, the number instantaneously calling up the picture. In persons who experience colour-associations, or coloured-hearing, there is a similar instantaneous manifestation of particular colours in connection with particular sounds, the different vowel sounds, for instance, each constantly and persistently evolving a definite tint, as a white, e vermilion, i yellow, etc., no two persons, however, having exactly the same colour scheme of sounds.[130] These phenomena are not so very rare, and, though they must be regarded as abnormal, they occur in persons who are perfectly healthy and sane.

It will be seen that a synaesthesia—which may involve taste, smell, and other senses besides hearing and sight—causes an impression of one sensory order to be automatically and involuntarily linked on to an impression of another totally different order. In other words, we may say that the one impression becomes the symbol of the other impression, for a symbol—which is literally a throwing together—means that two things of different orders have become so associated that one[151] of them may be regarded as the sign and representative of the other.

There is, however, another still more natural and fundamental form of symbolism which is entirely normal, and almost, indeed, physiological. This is the tendency by which qualities of one order become symbols of qualities of a totally different order, because they instinctively seem to have a similar effect on us. In this way, things in the physical order become symbols of things in the spiritual order. This symbolism penetrates indeed the whole of language; we cannot escape from it. The sea is deep, and so also may thoughts be; ice is cold, and we say the same of some hearts; sugar is sweet, as the lover finds also the presence of the beloved; quinine is bitter, and so is remorse. Not only our adjectives, but our substantives and our verbs are equally symbolical. To the etymological eye every sentence is full of metaphor, of symbol, of images that, strictly and originally, express sensory impressions of one order, but, as we use them to-day, express impressions of a totally different order. Language is largely the utilisation of symbols. This is a well-recognised fact which it is unnecessary to elaborate.[131]

An interesting example of the natural tendency to symbolism, which may be compared to the allied tendency in dreaming, is furnished by another language, the language of music. Music is a representation of[152] the world—the internal or the external world—which, except in so far as it may seek to reproduce the actual sounds of the world, can only be expressive by its symbolism. And the symbolism of music is so pronounced that it is even expressed in the elementary fact of musical pitch. Our minds are so constructed that the bass always seems deep to us and the treble high. We feel it incongruous to speak of a high bass voice or a deep soprano. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this and the like associations are fundamentally based, that there are, as an acute French philosophic student of music, Dauriac (in an essay 'Des Images Suggérées par l'Audition musicale'[132]), has expressed it, 'sensorial correspondences,' as, indeed, Baudelaire had long since divined[133]; that the motor image is that which demands from the listener the minimum of effort; and that music almost constantly evokes motor imagery.[134]

The association between high notes and physical ascent, between low notes and physical descent, is certainly in any case very fixed.[135] In Wagner's Lohengrin, the ascent and descent of the angelic chorus is thus indicated. Even if we go back to the early composers, the same correspondence is found. In Purcell it is very definite. In Bach—pure and abstract as his music is generally considered—not only this elementary association, but an immense amount of motor imagery is to be found; Bach shows, indeed, a curious pre-occupation in translating the definite sense of the words he is musically illustrating into corresponding musical terms; the skill and subtlety with which he accomplishes this, can often, as Pirro and Schweitzer have shown, be appreciated only by musicians.[136] It is[154] sometimes said that this is 'realism' in music. That is a mistake. When the impressions derived from one sense are translated into those of another sense, there can be no question of realism. A composer may attempt a realistic representation of thunder, but his representation of lightning can only be symbolical; audible lightning can never be realistic.

Not only is there an instinctive and direct association between sounds and motor imagery, but there is an indirect but equally instinctive association between sounds and visual imagery which, though not itself motor, has motor associations. Thus Bleuler considers it well established that among colour-hearers there is a tendency for photisms that are light in colour (and belonging, we may say, to the 'high' part of the spectrum) to be produced by sounds of high quality, and dark photisms by sounds of low quality; and, in the same way, sharply-defined pains or tactile sensations, as well as pointed forms, produce light photisms. Similarly,[155] bright lights and pointed forms produce high photisms, whole low photisms are produced by opposite conditions. Urbantschitsch, again, by examining a large number of people who were not colour-hearers, found that a high note of a tuning-fork seems higher when looking at red, yellow, green, or blue, but lower if looking at violet. Thus two sensory qualities that are both symbolic of a third quality are symbolic to each other.

This symbolism, we are justified in believing, is based on fundamental organic tendencies. Piderit, nearly half a century ago, forcibly argued that there is a real relationship of our most spiritual feelings and ideas to particular bodily movements and facial expressions. In a similar manner, he pointed out that bitter tastes and bitter thoughts tend to produce the same physical expression.[137] He also argued that the character of a man's looks—his fixed or dreamy eyes, his lively or stiff movements—correspond to real psychic characters. If this is so we have a physiological, almost anatomical, basis for symbolism. Cleland,[138] again, in an essay, 'On the Element of Symbolic Correlation in Expression,' argued that the key to a great part of expression is the correlation of movements and positions with ideas, so that there are, for instance, a host of associations in the human mind by which 'upward' represents the good, the great, and the living, while 'downward' represents the evil and the dead. Such[156] associations are so fundamental that they are found even in animals, whose gestures are, as Féré[139] remarked, often metaphorical, so that a cat, for instance, will shake its paw, as if in contact with water, after any disagreeable experiences.

The symbolism that to-day interpenetrates our language, and indeed our life generally, has mostly been inherited by us, with the traditions of civilisation, from an antiquity so primitive that we usually fail to interpret it. The rare additions we make to it in our ordinary normal life are for the most part deliberately conscious. But so soon as we fall below, or rise above, that ordinary normal level—to insanity and hallucination, to childhood, to savagery, to folk-lore and legend, to poetry and religion—we are at once plunged into a sea of symbolism.[140] There is even a normal sphere in which symbolism has free scope, and that is in the world of dreams.

Oneiromancy, the symbolical interpretation of dreams, more especially as a method of divining the future, is a widespread art in early stages of culture. The discerning of dreams is represented in the Old Testament as a very serious and anxious matter (as in regard to Pharaoh's dream of the fat and lean cattle), and, nearer to our time, the dreams of great heroes, especially Charlemagne, are represented as highly important[157] events in the mediæval European epics. Little manuals on the interpretation of dreams have always been much valued by the uncultured classes, and among our current popular sayings there are many dicta concerning the significance, or the good or ill luck, of particular kinds of dreams.

Oneiromancy has thus slowly degenerated to folk-lore and superstition. But at the outset it possessed something of the combined dignities of religion and of science. Not only were the old dream interpreters careful of the significance and results of individual dreams, in order to build up a body of doctrine, but they held that not every dream contained in it a divine message; thus they would not condescend to interpret dreams following on the drinking of wine, for only to the temperate, they declared, do the gods reveal their secrets.[141] The serious and elaborate way in which the interpretation of dreams was dealt with is well seen in the treatise on this subject by Artemidorus of Daldi, a native of Ephesus, and contemporary of Marcus Aurelius.[142] He divided dreams into two classes: theorematic dreams, which come literally true, and allegorical dreams. The first group may be said to correspond to the modern groups of prophetic and proleptic or prodromic dreams, while the second group includes the symbolical dreams which have of recent years again attracted attention. Synesius, who lived[158] in the fourth century, and eventually became a Christian bishop without altogether ceasing to be a Greek pagan, wrote a very notable treatise on dreaming, in which, with a genuinely Greek alertness of mind, he contrived to rationalise and almost to modernise the ancient doctrine of dream symbolism. He admits that it is in their obscurity that the truth of dreams resides, and that we must not expect to find any general rules in regard to dreams; no two people are alike, so that the same dream cannot have the same significance for every one, and we have to find out the rules of our own dreams. He had himself (like Galen) often been aided in his writings by his dreams, in this way getting his ideas into order, improving his style, and receiving criticisms of extravagant phrases. Once, too, in the days when he hunted, he invented a trap as a result of a dream. Synesius declares that attention to divination by dreams is good on moral grounds alone. For he who makes his bed a Delphian tripod will be careful to live a pure and noble life. In that way he will reach an end higher than that he aimed at.[143]

It seems to-day by no means improbable that, amid the absurdities of this popular oneiromancy, there are some items of real significance. Until recent years,[159] however, the absurdities have frightened away the scientific investigator. Almost the only investigator of the psychology of dreaming who ventured to admit a real symbolism in the dream world was Scherner,[144] and his arguments were not usually accepted nor even easy to accept. When we are faced by the question of definite and constant symbols it still remains true that scepticism is often called for. But there can be no manner of doubt that our dreams are full of symbolism.[145]

The conditions of dream life, indeed, lend themselves with a peculiar facility to the formation of symbolism, that is to say, of images which, while evoked by a definite stimulus, are themselves of a totally different order from that stimulus. The very fact that we sleep, that is to say, that the avenues of sense which would normally supply the real image of corresponding[160] order to the stimulus are more or less closed, renders symbolism inevitable.[146] The direct channels being thus largely choked, other allied and parallel associations come into play, and since the control of attention and apperception is diminished, such play is often unimpeded. Symbolism is the natural and inevitable result of these conditions.[147]

It might still be asked why we do not in dreams more often recognise the actual source of the stimuli applied to us. If a dreamer's feet are in contact with something hot, it might seem more natural that he should think of the actual hot-water bottle, rather than of an imaginary Etna, and that, if he hears a singing in his ears, he should argue the presence of the real bird he has often heard rather than a performance of Haydn's Creation, which he has never heard. Here, however, we have to remember the tendency to magnification in dream imagery, a tendency which rests on the emotionality of dreams. Emotion is normally heightened in dreams. Every impression reaches sleeping consciousness through this emotional atmosphere, in an[161] enlarged form, vaguer it may be, but more massive. The sleeping brain is thus not dealing with actual impressions—if we are justified in speaking of the impressions of waking life as 'actual'—even when actual impressions are being made upon it, but with transformed impressions. The problem before it is to find an adequate cause, not for the actual impression, but for the transformed and enlarged impression. Under these circumstances symbolism is quite inevitable. Even when the nature of an excitation is rightly perceived its quality cannot be rightly perceived. The dreamer may be able to perceive that he is being bitten, but the massive and profound impression of a bite which reaches his dreaming consciousness would not be adequately accounted for by the supposition of the real mosquito that is the cause of it; the only adequate explanation of the transformed impression received is to be found (as in a dream already narrated) in a creature as large as a lobster. This creature is the symbol of the real mosquito.[148] We have the same phenomenon under somewhat similar conditions in the intoxication of chloroform and nitrous oxide.

The obscuration during sleep of the external sensory[162] channels, with the checks on false conclusions they furnish, is not alone sufficient to explain the symbolism of dreams. The dissociation of thought during sleep, with the diminished attention and apperception involved, is also a factor. The magnification of special isolated sensory impressions in dreaming consciousness is associated with a general bluntness, even an absolute quiescence, of the external sensory mechanism. One part of the organism, and it seems usually a visceral part, is thus apt to magnify its place in consciousness at the expense of the rest. As Vaschide and Piéron say, during sleep 'the internal sensations develop at the expense of the peripheral sensations.' That indeed seems to be the secret of the immense emotional turmoil of our dreams. Yet it is very rare for these internal sensations to reach the sleeping brain as what they are. They become conscious, not as literal messages, but as symbolical transformations. The excited or labouring heart recalls to the brain no memory of itself, but some symbolical image of excitement or labour. There is association, indeed, but it is association not along the matter-of-fact lines of our ordinary waking civilised life, but along much more fundamental and primitive channels, which in waking life we have now abandoned or never knew.

There is another consideration which may be put forward to account for one group of dream-symbolisms. It has been found that certain hysterical subjects of old standing when in the hypnotic state are able to receive mental pictures of their own viscera, even though they[163] may be quite ignorant of any knowledge of the shape of these viscera. This autoscopy, as it has been called, has been specially studied by Féré, Comar, and Sollier.[149] Hysteria is a condition which is in many respects closely allied to sleep, and if it is to be accepted as a real fact that autoscopy occasionally occurs in the abnormal psychic state of hypnotic sleep in hysterical persons, it is possible to ask whether it may not sometimes occur normally in the allied state of sleep. In the hypnotic state it is known that parts of the organism normally involuntary may become subject to the will; it is not incredible that similarly parts normally insensitive may become sufficiently sensitive to reveal their own shape or condition. We may thus, indeed, the more easily understand those premonitory dreams in which the dreamer becomes conscious of morbid conditions which are not perceptible to waking consciousness until they have attained a greater degree of intensity.[150]

[164]

The recognition of the transformation in dream life of internal sensations into symbolic motor imagery is ancient. Hippocrates said that to dream, for instance, of springs and wells denoted some disturbance of the bladder. In such a case a disturbed bladder sends to the brain, not the naked message of its own needs, but a symbolic message of those needs in motor imagery, as (in one case known to me) of a large cistern with a stream of water flowing from it.[151] Sometimes the symbolism aroused by visceral processes remains physiological; thus indigestion frequently leads to dreams of eating, as of chewing all sorts of inedible and repulsive substances, and occasionally—it would seem more abnormally—to agreeable dreams of food.

It is due to the genius of Professor Sigmund Freud, of Vienna—to-day the most daring and original psychologist in the field of morbid psychic phenomena—that we owe the long-neglected recognition of the large place of symbolism in dreaming. Scherner had argued in favour of this aspect of dreams, but he was an undistinguished and unreliable psychologist, and his arguments failed to be influential. Freud avows himself a partisan of Scherner's theory of dreaming and opponent of all other theories,[152] but his treatment of[165] the matter is incomparably more searching and profound. Freud, however, goes far beyond the fundamental—and, as I believe, undeniable—proposition that dream-imagery is largely symbolic. He holds that behind the symbolism of dreams there lies ultimately a wish; he believes, moreover, that this wish tends to be really of more or less sexual character, and, further, that it is tinged by elements that go back to the dreamer's infantile days. As Freud views the mechanism of dreams, it is far from exhibiting mere disordered mental activity, but is (much as he has also argued hysteria to be[153]) the outcome of a desire, which is driven back by a kind of inhibition or censure (i.e., that kind of moral check which is still more alert in the waking state), and is seeking new forms of expression. There is first in the dream the process of what Freud calls condensation (Verdichtung), a process which is that fusion of separate elements which must be recognised at the outset of every discussion of dreaming, but Freud maintains that in this fusion all the elements have a point in common,[166] and overlie one another like the pictures in a Galtonian composite photograph. Then there comes the process of displacement or transference (Verschiebung), a process by which the really central and emotional basis of the dream is concealed beneath trifles. Then there is the process of dramatisation or transformation into a concrete situation of which the elements have a symbolic value. Thus, as Maeder puts it, summarising Freud's views, 'behind the apparently insignificant events of the day utilised in the dream there is always an important idea or event hidden. We only dream of things that are worth while. What at first sight seems to be a trifle is a grey wall which hides a great palace. The significance of the dream is not so much held in the dream itself as in that substratum of it which has not passed the threshold and which analysis alone can bring to light.'

'We only dream of things that are worth while.' That is the point at which many of us are no longer able to follow Freud. That dreams of the type studied by Freud do actually occur may be accepted; it may even be considered proved. But to assert that all dreams must be made to fit into this one formula is to make far too large a demand. As regards the presentative element in dreams—the element that is based on actual sensory stimulation—it is in most cases unreasonable to invoke Freud's formula at all. If, when I am asleep, the actual song of a bird causes me to dream that I am at a concert, that picture may be regarded as a natural symbol of the actual sensation, and it is[167] unreasonable to expect that psycho-analysis could reveal any hidden personal reason why the symbol should take the form of a concert. And, if so, then Freud's formula fails to hold good for phenomena which cover one of the two main divisions of dreams, even on a superficial classification, and perhaps enter into all dreams.

But even if we take dreams of the remaining or representative class—the dreams made up of images not directly dependent on actual sensation—we still have to maintain a cautious attitude. A very large proportion of the dreams in this class seem to be, so far as the personal life is concerned, in no sense 'worth while.' It would, indeed, be surprising if they were. It seems to be fairly clear that in sleep, as certainly in the hypnagogic state, attention is diminished, and apperceptive power weakened. That alone seems to involve a relaxation of the tension by which we will and desire our personal ends. At the same time, by no longer concentrating our psychic activities at the focus of desire it enables indifferent images to enter more easily the field of sleeping consciousness. It might even be argued that the activity of desire, when it manifests itself in sleep and follows the course indicated by Freud, corresponds to a special form of sleep in which attention and apperception, though in modified forms, are more active than in ordinary sleep.[154] Such dreams[168] seem to occur with special frequency, or in more definitely marked forms, in the neurotic and especially the hysterical, and if it is true that the hysterical are to some extent asleep even when they are awake, it may also be said that they are to some extent awake even when they are asleep. Freud certainly holds, probably with truth, that there is no fundamental distinction between normal people and psychoneurotic people, and that there is, for instance, as Ferenczi says, emphasising this point, 'a streak of hysterical disposition in everybody.' Freud has, indeed, made interesting analytic studies of his own dreams, but the great body of material accumulated by him and his school is derived from the dreams of the neurotic. Thus Stekel states that he has analysed many thousand dreams, but his lengthy study on the interpretation of dreams deals exclusively with the dreams of the neurotic.[155] Stekel believes, moreover, that from the structure of the dream life conclusions may be drawn, not only as to the life and character of the dreamer, but also as to his neurosis, the hysterical person dreaming differently from the obsessed person, and so on. If that is the case we are certainly justified in doubting whether conclusions[169] drawn from the study of the dreams of neurotic people can be safely held to represent the normal dream life, even though it may be true that there is no definite frontier between them. Whatever may be the case among the neurotic, in ordinary normal sleep the images that drift across the field of consciousness, though they have a logic of their own, seem in a large proportion of cases to be quite explicable without resort to the theory that they stand in vital but concealed relationship to our most intimate self.

Even in waking life, and at normal moments which are not those of reverie, it seems possible to trace the appearance in the field of consciousness of images which are evoked neither by any known mental or physical circumstance of the moment, or any hidden desire, images that are as disconnected from the immediate claims of desire and even of association as those of dreams seem so largely to be. It sometimes occurs to me—as doubtless it occurs to other people—that at some moment when my thoughts are normally occupied with the work immediately before me, there suddenly appears on the surface of consciousness a totally unrelated picture. A scene arises, vague but usually recognisable, of some city or landscape—Australian, Russian, Spanish, it matters not what—seen casually long years ago, and possibly never thought of since, and possessing no kind of known association either with the matter in hand or with my personal life generally. It comes to the surface of consciousness as softly, as unexpectedly, as disconnectedly, as a minute bubble[170] might arise and break on the surface of an actual stream from ancient organic material silently disintegrating in the depths beneath.[156] Every one who has travelled much cannot fail to possess, hidden in his psychic depths, a practically infinite number of such forgotten pictures, devoid of all personal emotion. It is possible to maintain, as a matter of theory, that when they come up to consciousness, they are evoked by some real, though untraceable, resemblance which they possess to the psychic or physical state existing when they reappear. But that theory cannot be demonstrated. Nor, it may be added, is it more plausible than the simple but equally unprovable theory that such scenes do really come to the surface of consciousness as the result of some slight spontaneous disintegration in a minute cerebral centre, and have no more immediately preceding psychic cause than my psychic realisation of the emergence of the sun from behind a cloud has any psychic preceding cause.

Similarly, in insanity, Liepmann, in his study Ueber Ideenflucht, has forcibly argued that ordinary logorrhœa—the incontinence of ideas linked together by superficial[171] associations of resemblance or contiguity—is a linking without direction, that is, corresponding to no interest, either practical or theoretical, of the individual. Or, as Claparède puts it, logorrhœa is a trouble in the reaction of interest in life. It seems most reasonable to believe that in ordinary sleep the flow of imagery follows, for the most part, the same easy course. That course may to waking consciousness often seem peculiar, but to waking consciousness the conditions of dreaming life are peculiar. Under these conditions, however, we may well believe that the tendency to movement in the direction of least resistance still prevails. And as attention and will are weakened and loosened during sleep, the tense concentration on personal ends must also be relaxed. We become more disinterested. Personal desire tends for the most part rather to fall into the background than to become more prominent. If it were not a period in which desire were ordinarily relaxed, sleep would cease to be a period of rest and recuperation.

Sleeping consciousness is a vast world, a world scarcely less vast than that of waking consciousness. It is futile to imagine that a single formula can cover all its manifold varieties and all its degrees of depth. Those who imagine that all dreaming is a symbolism which a single cypher will serve to interpret must not be surprised if, however unjustly, they are thought to resemble those persons who claim to find on every page of Shakespeare a cypher revealing the authorship of Bacon. In the case of Freud's theory of dream interpretation, I hold the cypher to be real, but I believe that it is[172] impossible to regard so narrow and exclusive an interpretation as adequate to explain the whole world of dreams. It would, a priori, be incomprehensible that sleeping consciousness should exert so extraordinary a selective power among the variegated elements of waking life, and, experientially, there seems no adequate ground to suppose that it does exert such selective action. On the contrary, it is, for the most part, supremely impartial in bringing forward and combining all the manifestations, the most trivial as well as the most intimate, of our waking life. There is a symptom of mental disorder called extrospection, in which the patient fastens his attention so minutely on events that he comes to interpret the most trifling signs and incidents as full of hidden significance, and may so build up a systematised delusion.[157] The investigator of dreams must always bear in mind the risk of falling into morbid extrospection.

Such considerations seem to indicate that it is not true that every dream, every mental image, is 'worth while,' though at the same time they by no means diminish the validity of special and purposive methods of investigating dream consciousness. Freud and those who are following him have shown, by the expenditure of much patience and skill, that his method of dream-interpretation may in many cases yield coherent results which it is not easy to account for by chance. It is quite possible, however, to recognise Freud's service[173] in vindicating the large place of symbolism in dreams, and to welcome the application of his psycho-analytic method to dreams, while yet denying that this is the only method of interpreting dreams. Freud argues that all dreaming is purposive and significant, and that we must put aside the belief that dreams are the mere trivial outcome of the dissociated activity of brain centres. It remains true, however, that, while reason plays a larger part in dreams than most people realise, the activity of dissociated brain centres furnishes one of the best keys to the explanation of psychic phenomena during sleep. It would be difficult to believe in any case that in the relaxation of sleep our thoughts are still pursuing a deliberately purposeful direction under the control of our waking impulses. Many facts indicate—though Freud's school may certainly claim that such facts have not been thoroughly interpreted—that, as a matter of fact, this control is often conspicuously lacking. There is, for instance, the well-known fact that our most recent and acute emotional experiences—precisely those which might most ardently formulate themselves in a wish—are rarely mirrored in our dreams, though recent occurrences of more trivial nature, as well as older events of more serious import, easily find place there. That is easily accounted for by the supposition—not quite in a line with a generalised wish-theory—that the exhausted emotions of the day find rest at night.

It must also be said that even when we admit that a strong emotion may symbolically construct an elaborate[174] dream edifice which needs analysis to be interpreted, we narrow the process unduly if we assert that the emotion is necessarily a wish. Desire is certainly very fundamental in life and very primitive. But there is another equally fundamental and primitive emotion—fear.[158] We may very well expect to find this emotion, as well as desire, subjacent to dream phenomena.[159]

The infantile form of the wish-dream, alike in adults and children, is thus, there can be little doubt, extremely common, and, even in its symbolic forms, it is a real and not rare phenomenon. But it is impossible to follow Freud when he declares that all dreams fall into the group of wish-dreams. The world of psychic life during sleep is, like the waking world, rich and varied; it cannot be covered by a single formula. Freud's subtle and searching analytic genius has greatly contributed to enlarge our knowledge of this world of sleep. We may recognise the value of[175] his contribution to the psychology of dreams while refusing to accept a premature and narrow generalisation.

The wish-dream of the kind elaborately investigated by Freud may be accepted as one type of dreaming, and a very interesting type, but it seems evident that it is only one type. There are even other types which seem closely related to it, and yet are quite distinct. This is, for instance, the case with the contrast-dream. The contrast-dream of Näcke's type represents the emergence of characteristics which are distinctly opposed to the dreamer's character and habits. Thus, in the course of four consecutive nights, I have dreamed in much detail that (1) I was the mayor of a large northern city about to take the chair at a local meeting of the Bible Society; (2) that I was a soldier in the heat of battle; and (3) that I was meditating the step of going on the stage as a comedian—the only rôle of the three which seemed to cause me any nervousness or misgiving. In contrast-dreams of this type we are not concerned with the eruption of concealed and repressed wishes. They are merely based on vestigial possibilities, entirely alien to our temperament as it has developed in life, and only a part of our complex personalities in the sense that, as Schopenhauer said, whatever path we take in life there are latent germs within us which could only have developed in an exactly opposite path. Even the very same dream may be due to quite different causes. To take a very simple dream, for we may best argue on the simplest facts: the dream[176] of eating. We dream of eating when we are hungry, but sometimes we also dream of eating when the stomach is suffering from repletion. The dream is the same, but the psychological mechanism is entirely different, in the one case emotional, in the other intellectual. In the first case the picture of eating is built up in response to an organic visceral craving, and we have an elementary wish-dream of what Freud would call infantile type; in the second case the same dream is a theory, embodied in a concrete picture, to account for the existence of the repletion experienced.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that the wish-dream, in its simple or what Freud calls its infantile form, represents an extremely common type of dream.[160] A large number of the dreams of children are concerned with wishes and their fulfilments. Those dreams of adults which are aroused by actual organic sensations also tend to fall, though not invariably, into the same form. Again, we chance to want a thing when we are awake; when we are asleep we dream we have found it. It may also be said, almost with certainty, that in some cases our dreams are the fulfilment of unexpressed and unconscious waking wishes. Even the best people, it is probable, may occasionally dream of events which represent the fulfilment of wishes they have never consciously formulated. Archbishop Laud was accustomed to note down his dreams in his Diary. On one[177] occasion we find him setting down a disturbing dream, in which he saw the Lord Keeper dead, and 'rotten already.' A little later we find that Laud is 'much concerned at the envy and undeserved hatred borne to me by the Lord Keeper.'[161] It is not difficult to see in the Archbishop's relations to the Lord Keeper an explanation of his dream.

If, however, wishes, conscious or unconscious, are often fulfilled in dreams, and if, as we have seen reason to conclude, symbolism is a fundamental tendency of dreaming activity, it is inevitable that wish-dreams should sometimes take on a symbolic form. It is thus, for instance, that I interpret my dream of being in an English cathedral and seeing on the wall a notice to the effect that at evensong on such a day the edifice will not be illuminated, in order to avoid attracting moths; I awake with a slight headache, and the unilluminated cathedral was the symbol of the coolness and absence of glare which one desires when suffering from headache.

There cannot, also, be any doubt that erotic wishes frequently make themselves felt as dreams, both in the infantile and the symbolic form. It is sufficient to bring forward one illustration. It is furnished by a young lady of somewhat neurotic tendencies and heredity, aged twenty-three, musical and intelligent, who was in love with her music-master, the organist at her church. The dream was written down at the time. 'I was at the school of my childhood, and I was[178] told that I was St. Agnes Virgin and Martyr, and in five minutes' time I was to be beheaded with a large knife. The sheen of the blade frightened me so much that I asked if instead I might be strangled by the man I was in love with. Permission was given if I could induce him to come in time. I ran to our church (saying to myself that I knew it was a dream, but that I must see what he would say) over huge stones that cut my bare feet, and wondered what age I was living in, longing to meet some women in order to find out. When I did, they all wore crinolines. I rushed up the central aisle, which was full of people, thinking that, as I was going to be killed, nothing could matter. Mr. T. (the organist) was giving a choir practice in the vestry. I ran up to him and said: "Come at once, I am going to be killed." He became very angry, and said: "Do go away; you are always interrupting my choir practice." I said: "Don't you understand? I am going to be killed at once; there is a knife hanging over my head, but I would rather be strangled by you, and they said I could if I fetched you in time." As soon as he understood that he came at once. Then it seemed in the dream that we were married, and had a son, who was to be a musical composer. I said I must say goodbye to this son first, and told the nurse to bring him to me. When he came I said: "Good-bye, I am going to be killed." He said, "Mother, am I a boy or a girl? When I am with boys I don't seem like them, and they call me a girl, and yet I don't look like a girl." I replied: "You are both in one, because you are going[179] to be a perfect musical genius."' In this dream, which represents the fulfilment in sleep of an affection unsatisfied in life, we see side by side the infantile and the symbolic fulfilments of the erotic wish, culminating in a gifted musical child. The wish to be strangled is an undoubted erotic symbol,[162] and it is significant that in the course of the dream the accepted death by strangulation became fused with marriage, although the idea of death still inconsistently survives, doubtless because dream consciousness failed to realise that the accepted form of death was a subconsciously furnished symbol of the consummation of marriage.

The wish-dream of Freud's type has presented itself for consideration here, because it is a special and elaborate illustration of symbolism in dreaming. The important place of symbols in dreaming is by no means dependent on the validity of this particular type of dream, and we may now proceed to continue the discussion of the significance of the symbolic tendency during sleep in its most important form.

The symbols we have so far been mainly concerned with have been the result of a tendency of dreaming consciousness to objectify feelings and affections within the organism in concrete objects or processes outside the organism. In its complete form this symbolic tendency becomes the objectivation of part of the dreamer's feelings or personality in a distinct imaginary[180] personality. A process of dramatisation occurs, and the dreamer finds himself in action and reaction, friendly or hostile or indifferent, with seemingly external personalities which, by the light of the analysis possible on awakening, are demonstrably created out of split-off portions of his own personality.[163] A common and simple form of such objectivation, closely allied to some of the symbolisms already brought forward, occurs when the dreamer sees the image of a person suffering from some affection of a part of the body and finds on awakening that he is himself experiencing pain or discomfort in that part. Thus a medical man dreams he is examining a tumour in a patient's groin, and on awakening finds slight irritation in the same region of his own body. And similarly, just as our bodily needs, when experienced during sleep, may be symbolised by inanimate natural objects and processes, so they may also become objective in the image of another person who is occupied in gratifying the need which we are ourselves unconsciously experiencing.

An interesting and significant group of cases is furnished by those dreams in which—as the result of some compression or effort—the tactile and muscular sensations of our own limbs are split off from sleeping consciousness and built up into an imaginary personality. Thus a medical friend, shortly after an attack of influenza, dreamed that in conversation with a lady patient his hand rested on her knee; she requested him[181] to remove it, but his efforts to do so were fruitless, and he awoke in horror from this unprofessional situation to find that his hand was firmly clasped between his own knees. His body had thus been divided in dreaming consciousness between himself and an imaginary other person; the knee had become the other person's, while the hand remained his own, the hand being claimed in preference to the knee no doubt on account of its greater tactile sensibility and more complexly intimate association with the brain. In the hypnagogic (or hypnopompic) state such dream sensations may almost reach the intensity of hallucination. Thus, after an indigestible supper, I awake with the vivid feeling that some one is lying on me and attempting to drag off the bedclothes, and I find myself violently attempting, but apparently in vain, to articulate: 'Who is there?' In a dream of similar type, which occurred when lying on my back (and possibly with slight indigestion due to an unusually late dinner), I awoke making a kind of inarticulate exclamation which awakened my wife. I had dreamed that I was lying in bed, and that some unseen creature—more supernatural than human, it seemed—was violently dragging the bedclothes off me, while I shouted to it, very distinctly it seemed to me, 'Avaunt, avaunt!'

It is evident that my own sense of oppression, my own unconscious and involuntary movements in disturbing the bedclothes, were reconstructed by sleeping consciousness as the actions of an external person, in the second case, a supernatural creature, which, it is[182] interesting to note, I duly accepted as such and addressed in the conventionally appropriate manner of old romance. The illusion may persist for some moments after waking. A lady, after breathing rather loudly and convulsively for a few seconds, wakes up, saying 'There is a rat or a mouse on the bed, shaking it up and down.' 'You were asleep,' her husband replied, 'as I knew by your breathing.' 'Oh, I was breathing like that,' she said, 'to make it jump off.' Here we see that, somewhat as in the previous cases, the dreamer's own muscular activity is, during sleep, reconstructed into the image of an external force; but when she is in the semi-waking hypnagogic stage, she recognises that the activity was her own, though still unable to dismiss the delusion based on the theory formed during sleep.

At this point we reach the threshold of hallucination, and the next case to be brought forward may be said to lie on the threshold, for an impression received in the hypnagogic (or hypnopompic) stage is accepted in its illusional form, even when the dreamer is fully awake. A farmer's daughter—a bright girl of twenty-one, with quick nervous reactions, but untrained mind—dreamed that she saw her brother (dead some years previously) with blood streaming from his fingers. She awoke in a fright, and was comforting herself with the thought that it was only a dream when she felt a hand grip her shoulder three times in succession. There was no one in the room, the door was locked, and no explanation seemed possible to her. She was very frightened, got[183] up at once, dressed, and spent the rest of the night downstairs working. She was so convinced that a real hand had touched her that, although it seemed impossible, she asked her brothers if they had not been playing a trick on her. The nervous shock was considerable, and she was unable to sleep well for some weeks afterwards. She naturally knew nothing about abnormal psychic phenomena, and was utterly puzzled to explain the experience, except by supposing that it may have been a ghost. The explanation is really very simple. It is well recognised that involuntary muscular twitches may occur in the shoulder, especially after it has been subjected to pressure, and that in some cases such contractions may simulate a touch.[164] The dream of a bleeding hand indicates, when we bear in mind the tendency to objectify sensations symbolically, now familiar to us in dreaming, that the dreamer's arm was probably pressed beneath her in a cramped position.[165] This pressure would account, not only for the dream, but[184] for the muscular twitches occurring on awakening. The nature of the dream, the terrified emotional state it produced, and the mental obscurity of the hypnagogic state, naturally combined, in a subject unaccustomed to self-analysis, to create an illusion which reflection is unable to dispel, though in the normal waking state she would probably have given no attention at all to such muscular twitches. Strictly speaking, such an experience is an illusion—that is to say, a misinterpretation of a real sensation—and not a hallucination—or perception without known objective causation—but there is no clear line of demarcation. In any case it may now be taken as proved that hallucinations tend to occur in the neighbourhood of sleep, and therefore to partake of the nature of dreams.[166]

So far we have been concerned with the tendency in dreams to objectify portions of the body by constructing out of them new personalities. But precisely the same process goes on in sleep with regard to our thoughts and feelings. We split off portions of these also and construct other personalities out of them, and sometimes even endow the persons thus formed with thoughts and feelings more native to our own normal personality than those which we reserve for ourselves. Thus a lady who dreamed that when walking with a friend she discovered a species of animal fruit, a kind of[185] damson containing a snail, expressed her delight at finding a combination so admirably adapted to culinary purposes; it was the friend who, retaining the attitude of her own waking moments, uttered an exclamation of disgust. Most of the dreams in which there is any dramatic element are due to this splitting up of personality; in our dreams we may experience shame or confusion from the rebukes or the arguments of other persons, but the persons who administer the rebuke or apply the argument are still ourselves.[167]

Some writers on dreaming have marvelled greatly at this tendency of the sleeping mind to objectify portions of itself, and so to create imaginary personalities and evolve dramatic situations. It has seemed to them quite unaccountable except as the outcome of a special gift of imagination appertaining to sleep. Yet, remarkable as it is, this process is simply the inevitable outcome of the conditions under which psychic life exists during sleep. If we realise that a more or less pronounced degree of dissociation of the contents of the mind occurs during sleep, and if we also realise that, sleeping fully as much as waking, mind is a thing that instinctively reasons, and cannot refrain from building up hypotheses, then we may easily see how the personages and situations of dreams develop. Much the[186] same process might, under some circumstances, occur in waking life. If, for instance, we heard an unknown voice speaking behind a curtain, we could not fail to build up an imaginary person in connection with that voice, the characteristics of the imaginary person being largely determined by the nature of the voice and of the things it uttered: it would, further, be quite easy to enter into conversation with the person we had thus constructed. That is what seems to occur in dreams. We hear a voice behind the curtain of darkness, and to fit that voice and the things it utters we instinctively form a picture which, in virtue of the hallucinatory aptitude of sleep, is thrown against the curtain; it is then quite easy to enter into conversation with the person we have thus constructed. It no more occurs to us during sleep to suppose that the voice we hear is only a voice and nothing more, than it would occur to us awake to suppose that the voice behind the curtain is only a voice and nothing more. The process is the same; the difference is that in dreams we are, without knowing it, living among what from the waking point of view are called hallucinations.

This process by which dreams are formed in sleeping consciousness through the splitting of the dreamer's personality for the construction of other personalities has been recognised ever since dreams began to be seriously studied. Maury referred to the scission of personality in dreams.[168] Delboeuf dealt with what he termed the altruising by the dreamer of part of his[187] representations.[169] Foucault terms the same process personalisation.[170] Giessler attempts elaborately to explain the enigma of self-diremption—the formation of a secondary self—in dreams; if, he argues, a touch or other sensation exceeds the dream-body's capacity of adaptation—i.e., if the state of stimulus is above the apperceptive threshold—only one part of the perception is referred to the dream-body and the other is transferred to a secondary self.[171] This explanation, while it very fairly covers the presentative class of dreams, directly connected with sensory stimuli, cannot so easily be applied to the dramatisation of our representative dreams, which are not obviously traceable to direct bodily stimulation.

The splitting up of personality is indeed a very pronounced and widely extended tendency of the mind, and has, during recent years, been elaborately studied. We thus have the basis of that psychic phenomenon which is variously termed secondary personality, double personality, duplex personality, multiple personality, alternation of personality, etc.,[172] and in earlier ages was regarded as due to possession by demons. Such conditions seem to be usually associated with hysteria.[188] The essential fact about hysteria is, according to Janet, its lack of synthetising power, which is at the same time a lack of attention and of apperception, and has as its result a disintegration of the field of consciousness into mutually exclusive parts; that is to say, there is a process of dissociation. Now that is a condition resembling, as we have seen, the condition found in dreaming. It is not, therefore, difficult to accept the view of Sollier and others, that hysteria is a condition allied to sleep, a condition of vigilambulism in which the patients are often unable to obtain normal sleep, simply because they are all the time in a state of abnormal sleep; as one said to Sollier: 'I cannot sleep because I am asleep all the time.' It may thus be the case that hysterical multiple personalities[173] furnish a pathological analogue of that tendency to the dramatic objectivation of portions of our personality which is normal and healthy in dreams.

Similarly in insanity we have an even more constant and pronounced tendency for the subject to attribute his own sensations to imaginary individuals, and to create personalities out of portions of the real personality. All the illusions, delusions, and hallucinations of the insane are merely the manifold manifestations of this tendency. Without it the insanity would not exist. It is not because he is subjected to unusual sensations—visionary, auditory, tactile, olfactory, visceral, etc.—that a man is insane. It is because he[189] creates imaginary personalities to account for these sensations; if his food tastes strange some one has given him poison if he hears a strange voice it is some one communicating with him by telephones or microphones or hypnotism; if he feels a strange internal sensation it is perhaps because he has another person inside him. The case has even been recorded of a man who attributed any feeling he experienced, even the most normal sensations of hunger and thirst, to the people around him. It is exactly the same process as goes on in our dreams. The sane man, the normal waking man, may experience all these strange sensations, but he recognises that they are the spontaneous outcome of his own organisation.

We may, however, advance a step beyond this position. This self-objectivation, this dramatisation of our experiences, is not confined to sleep and to pathological conditions which resemble sleep. It is natural and primitive in a far wider sense. The infant will gaze inquisitively at its own feet, watch their movements, play with them, 'punish' them; consciousness has not absorbed them as part of the self.[174] The infant really acts and feels towards the remote parts of his own body as the adult acts and feels in dreaming. We are reminded of the generalisation of Giessler that dream consciousness corresponds to the[190] normal psychic state in childhood, while sleeping subconsciousness corresponds to the embryonic psychic state; so that the dream state represents the renascence of the ego disentangling itself from the impersonal sensations and indistinct images of the embryonic stage of life. That sleeping consciousness is the primitive embryonic consciousness is, indeed, indicated, it has often seemed to me, by the fact that in many animals the embryonic position is the position of rest and sleep. Ducklings and chicks in the shell have their heads beneath their wing. The dog lies with his feet together, head flexed, and hind-quarters drawn up. Man, alike in the womb and asleep, tends to be curled up, with the flexors predominating over the extensors.

The savage has gone beyond the infant in ability to assimilate the impressions of his own limbs, but on the psychic side he still constantly tends to objectify his own feelings and ideas, re-creating them as external beings. Primitive man has done so from the first, and this impulse has struck its roots into all our most fundamental human traditions even as they survive in civilisation to-day. The man of the early world moves, like the dreamer, among a sea of emotions and ideas which he cannot recognise the origin of, and, like the dreamer, he instinctively dramatises them. But, unlike the dreamer, he gives stability to the images he has thus created and in good faith mistaken for independent beings. Thus we have the animistic stages of culture, and early man peoples his world with gods and spirits and demons and fairies and ghosts[191] which enter into the traditions of his race, and are more or less accepted even by a later race which no longer creates them for itself.

In our more advanced civilisations we are still struggling with later forms of that Protean tendency to objectify the self and to animate the things and even the people around us with our own spirit. The impatient and imperfectly bred child, or even man, kicks viciously the object he stumbles against, animate or inanimate, in order to revenge a wrong which exists only in himself. On a slightly higher plane, the men of mediæval times brought actions in the law courts against offending animals and solemnly pronounced sentence against them as 'criminals,'[175] while even to-day society still 'punishes' the human criminal because it has imaginatively re-created him in the image of an ordinary normal person, and lacks the intelligence to perceive that he has been moulded by the laws of his nature and environment into a creature which we do well to protect ourselves against, but have no right to 'punish.'[176] Everywhere we still see around us the[192] surviving relics of this primitive tendency of men to project their own personalities into external objects. A fine civilisation lies largely in the due subordination of this tendency, in the realisation and control of our own emotional possibilities, and in the resultant growth of personal responsibility.

It is thus impossible to over-estimate the immense importance of the primitive symbolic tendency to objectify the subjective. Men have taken out of their own hearts their best feelings and their worst feelings, and have personalised and dramatised them, bowed down to them or stamped on them, unable to hear the voice with which each of their images spoke: 'I am thyself.' Our conceptions of religion, of morals, of many of the mightiest phenomena of life, especially the more exceptional phenomena, have grown up under this influence, which still serves to support many movements of to-day by some people imagined to be modern.

Dreaming, as we have seen, is not the sole source of such conceptions. But they could scarcely have been found convincing, and possibly could not even have arisen, among races which were wholly devoid of dream experiences. A large part of all progress in psychological knowledge, and, indeed, a large part of civilisation itself, lies in realising that the apparently objective is really subjective, that the angels and demons and geniuses of all sorts that once seemed to be external forces taking possession of feeble and vacant individualities are themselves but modes of action of marvellously[193] rich and varied personalities. In our dreams we are brought back into the magic circle of early culture, and we shrink and shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms that are built up of our own thoughts and emotions, and are really our own flesh.

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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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