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PRELIMINARY to our study of dreams it might be well to devote just a little time to the consideration of sleep. It is a well-known fact that sleeping persons will ofttimes respond to simple commands; they will obey these directions and yet in the morning be wholly oblivious to the experience. Frequently it is quite easy for us to induce our bed-mates to turn over and do other simple things during sleep, and these acts are performed wholly unconsciously.
There are so many theories concerning the nature of sleep that it would seem a foregone conclusion that no one of them could be right in its entirety. My own opinion at present is that sleep is best explained by taking into consideration certain factors of all of these four or five different hypotheses. The present-day theories of sleep are:
1. The circulatory theories - The teaching that we get drowsy and tend to become unconscious because of brain anemia.
2. The neurological theory - The doctrine that sleep is caused by the retraction of the so-called dendrites - the little terminal feelers of the nerve cells which reach out to make contact with their fellows; through the resultant fatigue from the day's work of thinking, these cells are supposed to be weary. Retraction takes place and thus continuity of nerve connection is more or less broken and sleep is supposed to result.
3. The chemical theory - The oxygen exhaustion hypothesis - the teaching that the ability to take in oxygen is diminished by the day's activities and that sleep comes on as the result of this partial suffocation. In this group should also be included the theory that modification of the secretions of the ductless glands favors sleep production. There is also the toxin teaching - the belief that lactic acid or some other poison accumulates in the blood stream during the day, and partially anesthetizes the brain cells and thus brings on drowsiness.
4. The psycho-biological theory - This is the theory that sleep is an instinct, a reversion to the animal resting stage; that it is a modification of hibernation; that its purpose is to prevent exhaustion and that it is brought on by merely producing a complete muscular relaxation. There is a great deal to support this contention - at least some phases of it - as both animal and human experiments show that muscular relaxation, if it is thoroughgoing and complete, is soon followed by sleep.
5. The psychoanalytic theory - The teaching that sleep is but a regression to the infantile state. It is a well-known fact that the new-born infant sleeps almost twenty-four hours out of the day. It is only aroused when taking nourishment. The Freudians would have us believe that sleep is but an effort to retreat from reality, to get back to the nursery.
Dreams are but one of the many abnormalities that occur as a part of commonplace sleep disturbances. The common disturbances of sleep may be summarized as follows:
1. Hallucinations - There is no question that the state of sleep favors the entertainment of certain hallucinations. In dreams or night terrors, things are made to appear real that are, on waking judgment, registered as unreal. There are also memory disturbances in connection with sleep, as shown in the dream -life. There may be marked nervousness in sleep, with constant rolling and tossing about on the bed; some nervous patients frequently wake up with a headache, and I am persuaded that sometimes this is the result of dreams and other psychic disturbances bordering on night terrors which have just preceded.
2. Insomnia - When an individual becomes more than ordinarily wakeful or persists in remaining awake for considerable periods of time during the night when once aroused, it is common to diagnose such sleep disturbance as insomnia. Insomnia, we know, is favored by extreme fatigue, by toxins, and even by habit. If something happens to wake one up at a certain time for a few nights, it is very easy to drift into the habit of waking up about that time. Many of our cases of insomnia are merely the fear of sleep. Certain types of nervous folks simply are afraid to fall asleep; at least, this was the case at one time during their nervous experience, and they have thus formed the habit of staying awake as the result of actually fighting against sleep. Again, we have those patients who fear insomnia to such an extent that they watch themselves trying to go to sleep, and of course they do not succeed in falling off into slumberland.
3. Partial sleep - Sleeping with "one eye open" - illustrated by light sleepers, as the mother who is sleeping by the side of her infant's crib; and those human alarm clocks who form the habit of waking up at 6:15 each morning, or those who can set their minds to wake up at 5, and nine times out of ten they do. This could not be said to be an abnormal condition, and it is one which gradually increases as we grow older. Older people do not sleep as soundly as the younger generation.
4. Night terrors - The night terror is simply an unusually distressing dream, in which the individual tosses about, sometimes moaning or crying out. Night terrors are influenced by unusual nervous stress and strain, as well as by storms occurring during the night, and seem to be very often associated with digestive disturbance.
5. Sleep-walking - Somnambulism is not uncommon and has been fully considered in preceding chapters. It is probably a form of hysteria, and when once experienced is quite likely to reappear. The condition of sleep during this state is fairly normal - at least, normal for that type of individual in which somnambulism occurs - and it should be borne in mind that this condition seldom appears except in those who belong to the hysteria group and thus are more or less prone to partial dissociation.
6. The prolonged state of sleep - This is probably no more nor less than an accentuation of the somnambulistic or hysterical accompaniment of sleep which we see sometimes continued over into the cataleptic state. It is in reality a form of hysteria and is not normal sleep.
7. An excessive tendency to sleep - Here again, barring those cases that are bona fide sleeping sickness, we are dealing with an effort to get back to the nursery, to the infantile state of freedom from responsibility. We meet with certain hysteric individuals every now and then, who, when they want to escape from troublesome duties, just take a prolonged nap. They seem to be able to revert easily to the nursery and to sleep indefinitely. There is no doubt that this form of sleep is a defense reaction to escape from disagreeable duties and unpleasant situations.
8. Sleep of the insane - There seems to be a peculiarly profound and unusual state of sleep which characterizes some of the insanities, an accentuation of the stupors of the insane to the point of unconsciousness, with a tendency to indulge in prolonged and deep sleep.
9. Drugs and sleep - There are many powerful drugs which are able to produce profound unconsciousness, but this condition can hardly be called sleep. Other and milder drugs belonging to this group may encourage a condition of relaxation which contributes to sleep, so that by their use more or less natural sleep is induced.
I am persuaded that the average individual is engaged in dreaming all night long, perhaps indulging in simultaneous dream episodes on different levels of consciousness; but we remember our dreams only when sleep is shallow or when we are suddenly awakened and catch the tail-end of the dream fleeing through consciousness. Most of the dreams which we remember are found to occur after 4 o'clock in the morning. When we are awakened at any time during the night we are usually aware that a dream was passing through consciousness at the moment of awakening.
Most dreams are built up of visual or auditory imagery, and it is interesting to record that colors seldom appear in our dreams; they are mostly in dull gray.
It appears that unpleasant dreams occur about two or three times as often as pleasant or passably pleasant dreams. When young, we experience many fairy dreams. Later on the wish-fulfillment dreams begin to predominate, and still later in adult life we have more of the fear type of dreams; at various times of life, in addition to our wish-fulfillment type of dreams, we also have those which belong to the punishment type. Wounded soldiers during the World War dreamed a great deal of battle. They had built up a battle complex, and this intruded itself in the dream-life as a sort of repetition compulsion, just as in our waking moments we indulge in tics, twitchings, and other motor obsessions. New automobile drivers are always dreaming about automobile accidents.
Children often confuse their dreams with the memory-images of real experiences. They tell stories in which their dreams are mixed up with their waking memories. I am satisfied that many a new fear has been suggested to neurotic patients by a dream; although they awaken without the consciousness of the terrorizing experience of the dream, this fear became attached to their waking consciousness during the moment of passing from sleep to wakefulness and it appears the following morning as a new fear.
The speed of dream s is well known but difficult to prove. Every now and then cases occur in which we know we had only dozed off to sleep for a few moments and yet dreamed over a period of years. I have had such an experience myself. It seems that the dream symbolism, the technique of the pageantry employed by the subconscious, enables it to shove up into the mind an enormous mass of material which has been previously prepared and made ready for just such an exhibition, and in this way the vast panorama of life is viewed by just a momentary sweep of the sleeping eye around the borderland of consciousness.
The absurdity and grotesqueness of our dreams is due not only to the fact that we do not understand the symbolism of dreams, but also to the fact that we recall only the terminal fringe of any one dream experience. If we could see it all and could understand the interpretation of the dream symbolism, then we would probably form a more correct appreciation of the real content and significance of these dream parades.
Dreams are, then, essentially sleep hallucinations, tho it would appear that the average dream is not quite so vivid as the waking hallucination; but when they reach the night-terror stage they become just as realistic and vivid as any waking hallucination entertained by an insane mind.
From time immemorial man has sought to find some key whereby he might interpret his dreams. The ancient peoples took dreams very seriously, and the survival of the old-fashioned dream-books testifies to man's effort to find an interpretation for these nocturnal vagaries.
It is probable that a dream, in trying to ascend consciousness, follows the path of least psychic resistance; no doubt in its ascent of the mind it picks up, on the fringe, many irrelevant ideas, and it probably does not hesitate to incorporate within its main drift any current sensory stimuli which may be coming in from the physical sensorium to the mind centers being traversed. Organic sensations - visceral sensations - as they arise in the internal organs are also transferred immediately to the brain and may become incorporated in our dream-life. This would explain why digestive disturbances so directly contribute to the production of nightmares.
The chemistry of the blood stream and its content of the secretions of the ductless glands have something to do with our dream-life, as was shown in the case recorded where the patient had the most pleasant and agreeable type of dreams while taking pituitary extract, but under the administration of the adrenal secretion, the dreams became of the fear type and culminated in nocturnal seizures of terror.
It is not strange that certain types of individuals should indulge in premonitory dreaming, since they live during their waking hours in fear of everything that could happen. These premonitory dreams might in some degree come to be fulfilled, but there is no real proof on record that "coming events cast their shadows before" in the form of nocturnal dreams.
There is more on record to prove the probability of prodromic dreams; that is, dreaming that something is going to happen physically, and then to have it occur - such as dreaming of a feeling of congestion around the thigh, to have it followed later by genuine attacks of sciatic neuralgia. In this case the dream-life was merely more sensitive to the early symptoms of the disease, and therefore was able to record in advance the fact that the process was working, thus making it appear that the dream had really preceded the disease or that the attack was the result of the dream.
The fact that two individuals dream the same thing at the same time does not mean very much. Such dreams have been reported. In the chapter on telepathy we called attention to the fact that identical twins have dreamed the same thing at the same time, even when separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Most of these cases are simply coincidences, or in the case of twins, the two individuals are very much alike and under similar circumstances it is not strange that they might experience an all but identical dream.
Dreams of levitation, of soaring through the air, are very common. They have to do with disturbance in the so-called kinesthetic sense - the muscular, tendon, and joint sensations. These sensations are similar to those reported by patients when they are going under an anesthetic, when they feel as tho they were floating in the air. They are not due to reversion to the flight memories of our bird-ancestors or anything of that kind. They are merely the result of the arousal of the kinesthetic sensations. The dreams of falling belong in this same group. Many times the individual remains asleep until he strikes bottom, and contrary to the popular notion, nothing serious happens.
Dreams having to do with derangement of the special senses are very common. Patients often dream of being paralyzed or being blind and deaf. Very commonly we dream of wanting to talk, to sound an alarm in the presence of danger, but find ourselves unable to utter a sound, and what consternation comes over the sleeping soul who finds himself in the dream state trying to call for help, but speechless!
The dream-life of the congenitally deaf and dumb is found to be different from that of ordinary individuals, as they have no memory-images stored in the mind as the result of sound and speech.
Recurrent dreams are very difficult to explain. Even nightmares are sometimes recurrent. Patients complain to me of dreaming night after night of the same horrible proceedings. I myself have had a recurrent dream over a period of twenty years. Every few weeks I dream of being in a terrible predicament because I cannot get to some appointment, some lecture, on time. Everything on top of the earth is happening to interfere with my getting there. My experiences would make almost a serial movie thriller. Yet I am not conscious, in my waking hours, of worrying about being late to my appointments. All my life I have been punctual. In meeting hundreds and hundreds of speaking engagements I do not recall ever having been late. I have reasoned with myself about this matter, and yet this dream persists. It is the only type of recurrent dream I have ever had. In fact, aside from this one dream , I cannot recall having dreamed about anything a second, and certainly not a third or fourth time. Sometimes I can find a plausible reason for recurrent dreams, but frankly, in other cases, I find no rational explanation.
The psychoanalytic theory of dreams supposes that the censor lives in the foreconscious realm of the mind, which also contains much memory material that has not been forcibly repressed. Memory material from this region is supposed to be easily recallable. Of course, the Freudian theory of dreams is predicated on the hypothesis of the pleasure principle, the theory that the individual is always engaged in an effort, whether awake or asleep, to produce pleasure and avoid pain; when the Freudians speak of dreams being phenomena of wishfulfillment, they include under the term wish, instinct-impulses, desires, hopes, and longings.
And so Freud believes that dreams afford an opportunity for repressed wishes to find modified or symbolized expression; that our primitive and unacceptable wishes, which have been more or less suppressed, are thus, when dressed up, able to get by the censor, and, at least in our sleeping consciousness, to find an opportunity for self-expression. In a few words, they believe that a dream is the concealed expression of a repressed wish.
The Freudians are wont to divide all dreams into manifest content and latent content. They believe that even a dream has something significant concealed within and beyond its symbolism, and in their system of dream interpretation they frequently use such terms as condensation, displacement, dramatization, and secondary elaboration. By condensation they mean that a single idea of a dream may be composite in origin; by secondary elaboration they teach that the dream often picks up something all but foreign in an effort to make itself more plausible, or that in our interpretation of the dream, which seems to be so bizarre and meaningless, we seize upon certain loosely associated elements, whose incorporation would serve to make the whole thing more acceptable, to render the dream picture more coherent and presentable. The Freudians maintain that the dream is the protector of sleep, not the disturber. They claim that these ideas that come up from the subconscious would waken us were it not for their elaboration and modification into the less disturbing and distressing symbolic dream form.
While I may be disposed to accept some of Freud's views of dreams, I am not disposed to accept his contention that practically all wishes that are suppressed and seek expression in the dream life are of a sexual nature. I believe that other wishes and feelings having to do with the five great dynamic urges of life may be almost equally concerned in furnishing themes and data for the fabrication of dreams.
Day-dreaming is a state of consciousness which deserves separate consideration. It is a mental station midway between waking and sleeping. In the day-dream, the adult mind tries to achieve by psychic drifting and fantasy that indulgence which it longs for in reality but has been unable to attain.
Day-dreaming is nothing more nor less than plain, premeditated relapse of consciousness into the infantile state and method of thinking. A certain amount of day-dream ing is altogether harmless, but when overindulged it not only leads to that state of mind and associated conduct which we commonly designate as "the dreamer", but when indulged to its fullest extent it drifts off dangerously near to the borderland of dementia precox, tho I would hasten to say that there is no direct connection between the ordinary day-dreamer and the well-defined case of dementia precox. In the one case we have a simple and very common form of psychic indulgence; in the other we have a definite and well recognized form of insanity.
Let us not make the mistake of confusing day-dreaming with the indulgence of constructive imagination. When the artist, the architect, or the author, indulges in the panoramas of imagination and flights of fancy which we call day-dreams, and when these lead to action on his part - to successful effort to produce in the world of reality those visions which have entertained and enthralled him during his flights of fantasy he is more than a dreamer; he is a thinker, a doer, a builder. Constructive imagination followed by actual effort at practical realization is certainly without objection.
Some of our delirious states are closely allied to dream states; not only the delirium of fever patients, but the delirium of alcoholics - except that in the latter case there is usually indulgence in motor activity. The dream state of the insane is so highly confused as to be far different from the psychic condition of either day-dreaming or nocturnal dreaming. We frequently find such experiences in the insanities as a patient entertaining a delusion of pregnancy wholly traceable to a dream of being raped.
There is more or less dissociation in the dream life, just as there is in major hysteria; the state of dissociation is sometimes very marked in the case of the day-dreamer who allows his mind to drift on, unopposed, amid the scenes of its own imagination, as he sways in the breeze in a hammock out under the shade trees on a beautiful summer day. In fact, in trying to present the relation of dreams to the neuroses, we could truthfully say the hysterical patient is one who is simply trying to live a dream.
Not long ago prominent mention was made in the daily press of the case of a railroad builder who claimed to be under the control of spirits in the planning and execution of his engineering feats. The particulars were reported by a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, as follows:
"New York, June 14 - (Special) - At an exhibition of spirit pictures at the Anderson galleries to-day, a railroad builder told how spirits had furnished him nightly with the plans for more than 3,000 miles of track, which he constructed."
"Arthur E. Stillwell, formerly a leading figure in Chicago railway circles, according to Arthur Conan Doyle and other authorities on this subject, has had the greatest psychic experiences of any man living. He has been president of many railroads, and was president for seven years of the National Surety Company."
"I have built more than 3,000 miles of railroad", Mr. Stillwell said, "and that, I believe, is more than any other living man has built. Every part of every route has been determined by spirits who have come to me in my dreams and told me what to do".
"When he was building the route of the Kansas City Southern, Mr. Stillwell said, he was warned by his spirits not to build the terminal at Galveston, as was planned, because that would lead to disaster, but to terminate it at Lake Sabine, where he built the terminal of Port Arthur, which is named after him."
"Four days after the terminal was completed", he said, "the great tidal wave wiped out Galveston".
"Mr. Stillwell said that nearly all his life he had made a secret of his powers, because he feared that people would think him a `nut'. For years, however, some of his friends and many directors in companies associated with him, knew the source of his inspiration and believed in his spirits."
"To-day I am telling everything. I don't care whether I am called a `nut' or not. I receive communications to-day from a corps of spirits, I do not know how many. The engineering plans that I have put in effect have all come from an engineer who has been long dead".
"I have transcribed scores of poems which have been dictated to me by spirits. I have written the music of many songs which have been dictated to me by spirits. I ask them why they choose me. They say, `For some reason it is easier to communicate through you than through others. You don't know why and neither do we.' I do not know the names of any of them. I have asked them and they tell me that it makes no difference and that I should not bother about who they are".
I am familiar with many cases like the foregoing. I know an inventor, most of whose inventions originated in dreams. I am acquainted with an author who plans many of his books in his dreams. I have a patient, a business man, who dreams out most of his financial deals - and they are usually successful, too. I have myself solved many a complicated problem in my dreams, and the dream solution was very much better than the ones I had worked out during my waking moments. The fact that dream s may "come true", or that the conclusion reached in the dream state proves to be valuable or serviceable, in no way connects the dream-life with supernatural forces or with discarnate spirits.
It should be made clear to the reader that during sleep the subconscious mind is in full commission, in fact, is able to act much more freely, unhampered by the restraints and cautions of the higher powers of reason, judgment, and logic; although it must not be inferred that the subconscious mind does not reason; it does reason, but it reasons largely by deduction, not so much by induction.
It is not unusual to meet persons who dream much concerning their work, and who obtain valuable suggestions from their dreams - tho they are the exception, not the rule. The average engineer who builds railroads by his dreams, or by the guidance of "spooks", will make a sorry mess of the whole undertaking; but there are exceptions, many of which I have investigated and studied. But it is not necessary to fall into the arms of spiritualism in order to understand, explain, or account for these interesting and unusual cases.
Many persons get suggestions from their dreams, just as they would if they reclined in a hammock, out on a mountainside on a summer's afternoon, and allowed fantasy to run riot in the mind, indulging in day-reveries, permitting the marginal consciousness to push far up into the central consciousness, and thus by reflection and meditation inducing many new ideas to come trooping into the conscious mind. And this is true, whether the meditations be of the religious sort or of the mechanical sort.
Now, it is easy to imagine, in the case of the average individual who has been exposed to a long course of preparatory training leading to a belief in spirits, that he might connect his dream experiences - in which new and valuable ideas concerning his life-work were unfolded by the subconscious mind - with spirit beliefs or other fantastic and symbolic maneuvers of the dream-life. The tricks of association employed by the subconscious mind also would aid in giving him this impression. Thus it is easy for those who already lean toward a belief in spiritualism, to have their dreams of a quiet, orderly, and sometimes valuable nature connected with supposed spirit manifestations. The railway engineer above mentioned, it will be recalled, was very indefinite about the identity of his spirits; he merely connected two ideas - the fact of what he dreamed and the belief in spirit revelations.
I have under my care at the present time an architect who gets up early in the morning and draws the plans which he has dreamed out, and which, until I explained these matters to him, he had really come to believe were revelations presented to him by the disembodied spirits of departed architects. By proper teaching of the psychology of it, the matter has been made quite clear to him, and he now fully understands, indulges, enjoys, and profits by these dream revelations, the nocturnal outpourings of his subconscious mind.
The threshold between the central and marginal consciousness in this sort of individual is such that it permits, during certain sorts of sleep, the memory and retentive centers of the waking consciousness to receive a large volume of material from the subconscious reservoir, which can be (in many cases) recalled after the individual is fully awakened.
I had a friend, a physician, who died a dozen years ago. We were very intimate, and two or three years back I had a vivid dream one night of his coming to me and discussing quite minutely a certain paper which I had in preparation, or which I contemplated preparing. The suggestions he gave me, or the ideas I gathered from our dream conversation, were very interesting, and on waking up I jotted them down, feeling that I had received a valuable "hunch". In fact, I wrote the article along this line, and it proved to be something out of the ordinary. Now, it would have been very easy for me to utilize this as a demonstration of the return of the spirit, of spirit control, and of help from the spirit land, would it not? Indeed, but for two reasons:
1. I am not disposed to grab for spiritualistic explanations of ordinary physical and psychic phenomena, and
2. After the article was published, in one of those periodical house-cleanings that occur - when one goes through the memoranda that accumulate in the desk drawers - I found an outline of this article, which I had prepared long before, and totally forgotten. The outline showed that I had planned the article almost exactly as my departed medical friend discussed it with me in my dream. I had written these memoranda while traveling on a train one afternoon, en route to Chicago; had mislaid them, and had forgotten all about them.
The psychology of my experience is simply this: The outline which I had thought out in a day-reverie came up again, with certain modifications, in a night-reverie, and this night-reverie happened to collide and become confused with the dream-vision concerning my departed friend. What was more natural than that he and I should talk over this, as we had talked over many similar things in life? And yet how easy, without analysis, it would be to proclaim my article, which was one of the most successful I ever prepared, as having been transmitted to me by the spirit of my dead colleague?
And so one remarkable spirit communication after another, as related by numerous individuals, vanishes into thin air when accurately analyzed. Yet I am frank to say that it would have been very difficult for me to explain my experience had I not found the forgotten memoranda. Such an experience, however, helps us to understand some others which we are not in position to analyze in the same fortunate manner.
The dream may have as its content, directly employed or symbolically utilized, anything that has ever been registered in consciousness. Not only can we employ in our dreams the ideas, sensations, feelings, emotions, and sentiments, as such, deposited in the reservoirs of memory; but in our dream-life the mind undoubtedly has the power of recombining these various elements into entirely new situations; thus our dreams may come to be characterized by these familiar ideas and emotions as well as by situations that are new and, to our waking consciousness, altogether unique.
Most authorities on psychology believe that we may have a symbolic expression in our dream-life of almost any situation, thought, or idea which has associated with it strong emotional tones. In particular, those things which cause us great sorrow or joy - our anxieties, apprehensions, beliefs, wishes, fears, and scruples - represent the complexes which are most likely to come trooping forth from the subconscious to exercise themselves in our dream-life.
Whatever may be said for or against the Freudian philosophy, one thing is certain - Freud has taught us, by the systematic analysis of dreams, that they are devoid of a spiritual content. Psychoanalysis has finally and forever settled the matter of the natural genesis and the psychological province of ordinary dreams. Dreams can be induced experimentally, can be suggested by hypnotism, and their careful analysis unfailingly shows their purely natural and psychological origin. Our dreams and our premonitions originate within our own minds and represent the recombination of those ideas which are symbolic of the natural content of our own minds.
The Freudian hypothesis of dreams, their origin and interpretation, also contributes much evidence to warrant us in the belief that the subconscious mind is a working, functioning mechanism, and that its content is systematized, organized, and capable of conducting itself in an intelligent manner. Freud believes that underlying all dreams there is a subconscious process which fabricates the dream themes, ideas, and symbols.
Not all of us are able to agree with Freud in all the factors of his hypothesis, but we do agree on the fact that the dream is a fabrication of the subconscious mind. Personally, I believe that dreams are just as likely to be an expression of antecedent doubts, fears, and anxieties as they are to be a reflection or echo of some of the immediate activities in the life-work and experience of the preceding day. At any rate, the study of dreams does show that they are fantasms of the unconscious; and such study definitely suggests the possibility of an overflow of just that sort of dream material - in the waking state or in the trance state - which is characteristic of mystics and mediums. Dreams represent a type of hallucination, and we need only imagine the medium to be in something of the same state without the profound unconsciousness which characterizes ordinary sleep.