Dreaming Sleep Mind

Early theories and thoughts on the mind in sleep. Includes Freudian theories of dreams, nightmares and sleeping.

The Mind in Sleep

Dreams and Sleeping 

It was a personal experience of a singular character that first impressed upon me, some years ago, the importance of dreams as a subject for serious investigation.  Until then I had shared the opinion prevailing among laymen and, it would seem, among most scientists also that dreams are entirely fanciful and meaningless.  But my experience was such that I could no longer believe this.  To state it briefly, it involved the re currence of a most bizarre dream.  At least twenty times during a period of six months I had the same dream namely, that a cat was clawing at my throat.  The stage setting and the minor incidents might vary, but always the central episode was the same, and usually the fury of the dream cat's onset was so great that it would awaken me.  Naturally, this recurrent dream puzzled me, so much so that I spoke about it.  But, ascribing it to indigestion, and classifying it with ordinary nightmares, I did not let it worry me at all.

Then, one day, the accident of a heavy cold that settled in my throat led to a medical examination which, much to my surprise, revealed the presence of a growth requiring immediate treatment by the sur geon's knife.  Some time afterward it sud denly occurred to me that since the removal of the dangerous growth I had not once been troubled by the cat-clawing dream.  Its significance now began to dawn on me.

I had suffered no pain, not even inconvenience, from the growth in my throat.  In fact, I had not consciously been aware of its presence.  But unquestionably the organic changes accompanying it had given rise to sensations which, slight though they were, had made an impression on my sleeping consciousness sufficient to excite it to activity.  My recurrent dream consequently was to be regarded as a symbolic repre sentation of the disorder in my throat an attempt to interpret it, to explain it.  And indeed, even in the dream, for all its fantastic imagery and symbolism, the seat of the trouble was indicated plainly enough, as I could appreciate after the surgeon had completed his labors.

The possibility at once suggested itself that, after all, dreaming might not be such an irrational process as I had hitherto supposed it; and, further, that from both a theoretical and a practical point of view the state of the mind in sleep might well repay examination.  It seemed certain, judging from my own experience, that some dreams, at all events, had a meaning ; and my astonishment was great, when I began to explore the literature on the subject, to discover how little had been done in the way of systematic inquiry.  A great many facts and observations had been assembled, but with scarcely any attempt to collate them and ascertain the laws of dreaming.  This, fortunately, is less the case to-day; the researches of such psy chologists as Sigmund Freud, Morton Prince, Pierre Janet, and Havelock Ellis having of late considerably advanced our knowledge, and having conclusively dem onstrated that the world of dreams, quite as much as the world of waking life, is a world of order in which things do not hap pen by chance.

Superficially, of course, it often is a topsyturvy world, places, persons, and events being jumbled together in amazing defiance of the laws of nature.  The in congruities of that classic dream-story "Alice in Wonderland," or the late W. S. Gilbert's grotesque but fascinating dream recitative, the Lord Chancellor's song in ''lolanthe," are paralleled every night bythe incongruities of actual dream experiences.  Probably this fact, more than any thing else, is responsible for the prevailing contempt for dreams and belief in their irrationality.

In reality, there is reason in the most "nonsensical" of dreams, as can always be shown if one takes the trouble to analyze them.  Indeed, as Havelock Ellis has re marked, it may almost be said that we use our reasoning powers more when we dream than when we are awake, for the endless and rapid succession of images and ideas that assails us in dreams is nothing but a process of reasoning, a determined effort "to argue out harmoniously the absurdly limited and incongruous data present to sleeping consciousness." 

The difficulty is that, although we can reason in dreams, we cannot, except to a slight extent, utilize the critical faculty which in the waking state renders our reasoning effective.  Our judgment is, as it were, temporarily atrophied, while our tendency to reason is hypertrophied as a result of our greater sensitiveness to all sorts of internal and external impressions.  In sleep, as illustrated by my cat-clawing dream, we feel the need of explaining matters to which, awake, we should be quite indifferent, or which we should in stantly understand through the aid of our sense organs.  Lacking free and co-opera tive use of these, we are compelled to construct a satisfactory explanation by the exercise of imagination, a process greatly furthered by the fact that in sleep the sensations which reach us, being cut off and isolated from the flood of sensations that compete for our attention when we are awake, seem far more massive and intense than ordinarily.

Thus it comes about that, as was long since demonstrated by repeated experiment, the slightest pin-prick, the mere  exposure of finger or toe to a feeble current of air, may occasion most complicated and terrifying dreams.  Besides which, in working out its explanation, the sleeping consciousness does so with a rapidity greatly exceeding that of conscious thought.  This statement, I am aware, is disputed by at least one of the principal modern au thorities, on the ground that "in all the cases in which the rapidity of the dream process has seemed so extraordinary it has merely been a question of visual I'm agery, and it is obviously quite easy to see in an instant an elaborate picture or series of pictures which it would take a long time to describe."  But it frequently is more than a matter of visual imagery.  Conver sations are introduced, there is action by the dream personages.  And, in any event, when one is awake it is by no means "obvi ously quite easy to see in an instant an elaborate picture or series of pictures."  On the contrary, it takes an appreciable length of time to see even the outstanding details of a small picture in anything like the fullness and vividness with which dream images are seen.

As emphasizing its extreme rapidity there is, too, this peculiarity in the dream process, that in many instances it completes its images and ideas before it begins to present them to the dreamer.  That is to say, it works out its story backwards, be ginning with the climax and passing from incident through incident to the starting point at which it first enters consciousness as a dream.  This is well illustrated by an experience reported by Alfred Maury, one of the earliest scientific investigators of the phenomena of sleep, who dreamed that he was living in Paris during the Terror, and had been put on the proscribed list.  After many exciting adventures, he was captured, tried, and sentenced to execution.  He saw himself dragged through the streets amid a clamoring multitude and forced to mount the scaffold and bare his neck to the fatal blow.  In that instant, as the guillotine knife descended, he woke to find that a piece of the cornice of his bed had fallen and struck him on the neck.

Testifying even more impressively to the twofold action of the dream process and to its rapidity is a dream experience of my own.  In this dream I was walking alone, at night, along a country road.  It was lined on both sides by trees which, as I learned from a man who presently joined me, were heavily laden with fruit.  I picked some pears and ate them as we walked and talked.  The road seemed to overlook a broad valley, in which, at perhaps half a mile's distance, I saw a solitary light.  My companion told me that it was in his home, and invited me to pass the night with him.  After a tiring walk in the dark across meadows, we reached the house, a small two-room cabin.  He retired into the in ner room, I went to bed in the outer.  I had not been long asleep when, in my dream, I was awakened by the noise of somebody running, and the thought in stantly flashed into my mind that my host was making off with my money.  I leaped up shouting: "Stop!  Stop!"

Then I really awoke, and as I did so distinctly heard on the pavement below my window the sound of hurried footfalls and a voice crying excitedly: "Stop!  Stop!"  At once it was clear that these two words, penetrating to my sleeping consciousness, had provided the necessary stimulus to set up a dream process which, in the fraction of a second, had interpreted them as best it could and had presented the results of its interpretation in the form of a curious little narrative of nocturnal adventure.

More frequently, however, I believe it is safe to say, the dream excitant is con nected directly with the state of the sleeper's physical organism.  Mention has already been made of the experimental demonstra tion of the ease with which dreams may be produced by the use of artificial irritants.  One sleeper, whose nose was lightly tickled with a feather, had a horrible dream of a mask of pitch being alternately applied to and drawn violently from his face.  An other, at whose feet a hot-water bag was placed, dreamed that he was walking over hot lava.  In a second experiment of the same sort, the accidental slipping of the cover from the hot-water bag led to an elaborate dream of capture and torture by Rocky Mountain bandits, who insisted that the dreamer knew how to convert copper into gold, and held his naked feet in a fire in order to compel him to communi cate his valuable secret.  Similarly, the application of a slight degree of heat to the feet of a patient with paralyzed limbs was followed by a dream of being trans formed into a bear and taught to dance by being placed on red-hot iron plates.

The falling dream, for example, is doubt less attributable, as is popularly believed, to some slight gastric disturbance affecting the heart's action.  As to the flying dream, the most reasonable theory, it seems to me, is one recently advanced by Havelock Ellis on the strength of a picturesque dreaming which, instead of the dreamer flying himself, as is usual, he saw another person flying.

"I dreamed," Mr. Ellis reports, "that I was watching a girl acrobat, in appro priate costume, who was rhythmically ris ing to a great height in the air and then falling, without touching the floor, though each time she appeared quite close to it.  At last she ceased, exhausted and perspir ing, and I had to lead her away.  Her movements were not controlled by mechan ism, and apparently I did not regard mechanism as necessary.  It was a vivid dream, and I awoke with a distinct sense of oppression in the chest.

"In trying to account for this dream, ... it occurred to me that probably I had here the key to a great group of dreams.  The rhythmic rising and falling of the acrobat was simply the objectivation of the rhythmic rising and falling of my own respiratory muscles in some dreams perhaps of the systole and diastole of the heart's muscles under the influence of some slight and unknown physical oppres sion.  .  .  .  There is, moreover, another element entering into the problem of noc turnal aviation : the state of the skin sen sations.  Respiratory activity alone would scarcely suffice to produce the imagery of flight if sensations of tactile pressure re mained to suggest contact with the earth.  In dreams, however, the sense of movement suggested by respiratory activity is un accompanied by the tactile pressure produced by boots or the contact of the ground with the soles of the feet." 

It is not to be supposed that these com mon dreams of falling, flying, and the like are constant in their details.  Everybody who has experienced them knows that their setting and incidents are likely to be different in every dream.  But their prin cipal feature, the sensation of falling or flying, is always present in one form or another; and there often is present, as in the dream just cited, a strong element of symbolism.  This element, again, is the most conspicuous feature in recurrent dreams stimulated, like my dream experi ence with the cat, by the organic changes involved in the development of some dis ease.  Just how far this fact may be turned to advantage by medical science it is as yet impossible to say, for the investigation of this phase of dreaming is only fairly under way.  I would add that, as a means of contributing to its progress, I should be glad to receive from any of my readers statements regarding the character and frequency of dreams that may have come to them immediately prior to an illness.

Certainly sufficient information has al ready been brought together to justify the assertion that several maladies of a slowly progressive nature such as cancer, tuberculosis, some forms of heart disease, and various nervous and mental maladies sometimes manifest their presence, before the physical symptoms of disease appear, by the recurrence of symbolic dreams.  Thus not a few persons suffering from heart disease have testified that before their ailment had developed so that they were really conscious of it, they had dreams of toiling and sweating up a high hill, or of seeing others climb great heights with much difficulty.  Malignant disease of the stomach is known in some cases to have been ushered in by dreams of mice or other small animals gnawing at the abdomen.  And, so far as concerns nervous and mental disorders, knowledge of the part played by dreams in their symptomatology is even to-day so far advanced that many neurolo gists and psychiatrists carefully analyze their patients' dreams as a help both in diagnosis and treatment.

Accordingly, without wishing to create undue feelings of alarm or to encourage morbid introspection, I am strongly of the opinion that any one who experiences an often recurring dream which seems to localize in its action some organ of the body, will do well to consult a competent physician.  No harm will be done if his examina tion discloses no malady, or one so slight as scarcely to require attention.  Whereas great benefit must follow if, as a result of the dream's indication, the physician suc ceeds in detecting at an early and reme diable stage some disease of real gravity.  Dreams, to repeat, in most cases, though I believe not all, represent nothing more than an effort on the part of the sleeping consciousness to interpret external or in ternal physical stimuli.  But in saying this I would have it well understood that I do not mean to imply that we have here a sufficient explanation of dreams.  We have still to account for their contents, a very different problem, and one that until the past few years has been ignored by most students, who have thereby missed making some of the most important and practically helpful discoveries connected with the phenomena of dreaming.  To say that the dream excitant, the physical stimulus, accounts for the dream itself is equivalent to saying that the crack of the starter's pistol accounts for the result of a boat race.  Whence come the details with which a dream is crowded?  Why does a similar stimulus frequently nay, usually provoke in one man a dream differing profoundly in its imagery from that which it provokes in another?  What are the laws governing the selection and presentation of dream images in the inter pretative process?  Such are some of the questions yet to be answered, and the answers to them can be found only in the psychological, not the physiological, domain.

One fact which immediately obtrudes itself when we begin to study dreams from the standpoint of their contents is the interesting circumstance that, nine times out of ten, they are woven out of and around waking experiences of the previous day ; and, furthermore, that the experi ences thus utilized for dream material are not, as a rule, those which have consciously impressed us most, but experiences so trivial that we have given them little thought.  They are not, to be sure, utilized in precisely the form in which we originally experienced them.  Rather, they reappear as suggestions giving direction and color and tone to the dream story.  To the truth of this all who have analyzed their dreams and reported on them bear unani mous testimony.

To cite a few illustrative instances that will make my meaning perfectly clear, a lady who, in the course of the day, had admired a friend's baby and bought a codfish for dinner, dreamed that night of finding a live baby sewed up in a big fish.

Another lady, having business during the day partly in the hen-yard and partly in the garden, had a grotesque dream of breeding chickens by planting hens' heads.  A college student, after attending a performance of "The Merchant of Venice," was tormented by a nightmare in which all his instructors imposed on him excessive tasks, the dream reaching a climax and an awakening when one of the largest members of the faculty, angered at his refusal to do the work assigned him, drew a huge knife and began to whet it on his boot in the manner of Shylock.

More elaborate, yet equally founded on trivial incidents of waking life, was the dream of a fourth sleeper.  In his dream, which I cite on the authority of Professor Jastrow, he was alone in a room with a corpse, a situation not at all to his liking.  He started to leave, but was stopped by an elderly woman, who shut and locked the door.  After a time she herself entered the room with a small box in her hand, saying: "Please give me something to help bury my poor husband."  At this there was a com motion in the coffin, the "dead" man sat up, and he, the elderly woman, and the terror-stricken visitor began a conversation.  On awaking the dreamer readily traced the dream to two incidents of no importance to him.  He had read in his newspaper that evening a paragraph about the burial alive of a man supposed to be dead, and later in the evening he had been asked by a lady to contribute to a missionary fund.  These incidents had supplied the material of his dream ; the stimulus producing it was in all probability some temporary disorder of the digestive apparatus.

My own experience is much the same.  For some years I have made it a practice to analyze my dreams if they are unusually vivid, and, while I cannot always trace their contents to suggestions and associations derived from incidents of the pre vious day, in most cases I find that such has been their source.  I remember one extremely complicated yet fairly coherent dream in which I was voyaging through the South Sea Islands in company with a couple of sailors.  We were shipwrecked, but managed to land on an island, where we were attacked by a number of monkeys, which, to our amazement, presently turned into a regiment of Moors.  This last part of the dream and the presence of the sailors I could easily understand, for I had that afternoon been reading a history of the campaigns of the American navy against the Barbary corsairs.  But the monkey element remained unintelligible until I suddenly remembered that after reading the naval history I had dipped for a few minutes into a critique of the evolutionary theory.

I find, in fact, that my reading supplies the material for a large proportion of mydreams, and that many others are trace able to allusions in conversation to per sons and topics which are of no great interest to me.  One of the most peculiar dreams that I can recollect was built around a chance reference by a carriage-driver to the fact that an acquaintance of mine a man in whom I have no special interest once lived in the New Hampshire town where I was making my summer home.  Sometimes, it is true, my dreams are mani festly rooted in incidents that have made a deep impression.  But this is the exception to the rule, and I am sure that I am not different from other persons in this respect.  The problem remains, of course, to deter mine just why trivial incidents should pre dominate in dream formation.

In solving this problem, as in solving so many other problems in normal psy chology, recourse must be had to certain facts lately brought to light by those whose special business it is to investigate the workings of the mind under abnormal conditions.  Of such facts the most I'm portant in the present connection is the persistence, in the way of subconscious memories, of long-forgotten happenings having a profound emotional significance frights, griefs, worries, shocks of various kinds, secret desires, and so forth.  These subconscious memories which form, to gether with their emotional coloring, what is technically called a "complex" are to-day known to constitute an important factor in the causation of many nervous and mental diseases, particularly hysteria and other psychoneuroses.

Freudian Theories of Dreams 

The theory, first advanced by the Viennese psychopathologist Sigmund Freud, is that the memories in question are forgotten by the upper consciousness simply because they are of a painful character, or of a character otherwise incompatible with the best interests of the one who experienced them.  But, although thus repressed and thrust from consciousness, they are far from being blotted out.  Subconsciously they remain as vivid and intense as when first experienced ; and, in addition, they perpetually seek to assert themselves and appear once more in the field of conscious memory.  Such is the human constitution, however, that they can do this only on condition of being so transformed that the upper consciousness shall not recognize them for what they really are.

One form of transformation, in the case of persons predisposed by conditions of heredity and environment, is into the symptoms of hysteria.  Or, as Freud him self would say, hysterical symptoms are so many monuments to subconsciously remembered emotional experiences.  In the case of normal persons the process of transformation does not involve such violent manifestations of the underlying psychic energy, which "works itself off" quite peacefully by various channels, and notably through the medium of dreams.  In truth, every dream, according to the theory of Freud, is symbolical, and on close analysis will be found related to, and expressive of, some secret, subconscious emotional com plex.  Besides which, Freud finds a strong "wish" element in all dreams, and has even ventured to sum up his theory of dreams in the single formula :

Every dream at bottom represents the imaginary fulfillment of an ungratified wish. 

Now, while I am not prepared to indorse the Freudian hypothesis in its entirety, and while I am inclined to agree with Morton Prince, Boris Sidis, and Havelock Ellis in holding that Freud, as regards both hysteria and dreams, has allowed the pas sion for generalization to carry him to a rash extreme, I am nevertheless convinced the Freudian theory of dreams, together with its practical implications, will be found worked out in detail in Doctor Coriat's contribution to this series of handbooks, "The Meaning of Dreams." hat he has furnished the necessary clue to the solution of the problem immediately before us the problem of the strange in fluence exercised over our dreams by trivial incidents of the waking state.

It is all a matter of "association of ideas," and trivial incidents, being numer ically far in excess of important ones, are proportionately more likely to affect by association some buried complex which, unable to cross the threshold of conscious ness in its true form, finds expression, during sleep, in the presentation of dream images centering about the incident that has excited it into activity.  During the day I do a hundred and one things; I talk with many people.  Somebody casu ally mentions to me the name of John Smith, and that night I have a vivid dream with John Smith figuring in it.  It is not because I am very much interested in him that I dream about him; I may not have a speaking acquaintance with him.  I dream about him because the mention of his name has, consciously or subconsciously, stirred within me, by association of ideas, a memory of some one or some thing that is, or was once, of keen emotional signifi cance to me.

There are dreams, it should be added, in which the buried complex does manage to show itself directly to the dreamer ; but dreams of this type are mostly forgotten on awaking, and can be recalled only by the use of hypnotism or some other method of reaching into the subconscious.  That they are often worth recalling every psychopathologist will testify, for in a number of cases they have been the only means of ascertaining the true cause of symptoms for which patients have long sought relief in vain.  In like manner, the analysis of consciously remembered dreams, no matter how absurd they super ficially seem, often results in unearthing the complexes responsible for hysterical symptoms, and impressively corroborates the view just set forth.  In every case where psychological analysis is employed on neurotic patients it is found that their dreams are fundamentally connected with the emotional disturbances to which their nervous and mental troubles are due.

To summarize, then, it may be said that in the ordinary, average dream, with which alone we are here concerned, there is always an initial physical stimulus, whether internal or external, to give occa sion to the dream ; that the dream repre sents an effort to interpret this stimulus ; and that the manner of the interpretation the story the dream tells is ultimately determined, not by the stimulus itself, but by the character of the emotional com plexes that have been roused to greatest activity by incidents of the waking life of the previous day.

---