Psychology

by Robert Sessions Woodworth

Dreams

Let us turn now from daydreams to dreams of the night. These also are play of imagination, even freer from control and criticism than the daydream. In sleep the cortical brain functions sink to a low level, and perhaps cease altogether in the deepest sleep. Most of the dreams that are coherent enough to be recalled probably occur just after we have gone to sleep or just before we wake up, or at other times when sleep is light. At such times the simpler and more practised functions, such as recall of images, can go on, though criticism, good judgment, reasoning, and all that sort of delicate and complex activity, do not occur. Daytime standards of probability, decorum, beauty, wit, and excellence of any sort are in abeyance; consistency is thrown to the winds, the scenes being shifted in the middle of a [{500}] speech, and a character who starts in as one person merging presently into somebody else. Dreams follow the definition of imagination or invention, in that materials recalled from different contexts are put together into combinations and rearrangements never before experienced. The combinations are often bizarre and incongruous.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of dreams is their seeming reality while they last. They seem real in spite of their incongruity, because of the absence of critical ability during sleep. In waking life, when the sight of one object reminds me of another and calls up an image of that other, I know that the image is an image, and I know I have thought of two different things. In sleep the same recall by association occurs, but the image is forthwith accepted as real; and thus things from different sources get together in the same dream scene, and a character who reminds us of another person forthwith becomes that other person. We are not mentally active enough in sleep to hold our images apart. Associative recall, with blending of the recalled material, and with entire absence of criticism, describes the process of dreaming.

What is the stimulus, to which the dream responds? Sometimes there is an actual sensory stimulus, like the alarm clock or a stomach ache; and in this case the dream comes under the definition of an illusion; it is a false perception, more grotesquely false than most illusions of the day. A boy wakes up one June morning from a dream of the Day of Judgement, with the last trump pealing forth and blinding radiance all about--only to find, when fully awake, that the sun is shining in his face and the brickyard whistle blowing the hour of four-thirty a.m. This was a false perception. More often, a dream resembles a daydream in being a train of thoughts and images without much relation to present sensory stimuli; and then the dream [{501}] would come under the definition of hallucination instead of illusion.

Sometimes a sensory stimulus breaks in upon a dream that is in progress, and is interpreted in the light of this dream. In one experiment, the dreamer, who was an authoress, was in the midst of a dream in which she was discussing vacation plans with a party of friends, when the experimenter disturbed her by declaiming a poem; in her dream this took the form of a messenger from her publisher, reciting something about a contract which seemed a little disturbing but which she hoped (in the dream) would not interfere with her vacation. Maury, an early student of this topic, was awakened from a feverish dream of the French Revolution by something falling on his neck; this, under the circumstances, he took to be the guillotine.

Now, why is a dream? What satisfaction does it bring to the dreamer? Or shall we say that it is merely a mechanical play of association, with no motivation behind it? Dreams are interesting while they last, sometimes fearful, sometimes angry, sometimes amorous, otherwise not very emotional but distinctly interesting, so that many people hate to have a dream broken up by awaking. It seems likely, then, that dreams are like daydreams in affording gratification to desires. They are "wish-fulfilling", to borrow a term from Freud's theory of dreams, soon to be considered.

A boy dreams repeatedly of finding whole barrels of assorted jackknives, and is bitterly disappointed every time to awake and find the knives gone; so that finally he questions the reality of the dream, but pinching himself (in the dream) concludes he must be awake this time. An adult frequently dreams of finding money, first a nickel in the dust, and then a quarter close by, and then more and more, till he wakes up and spoils it all. Such dreams are [{502}] obviously wish-fulfilling, as are also the sex dreams of sexually abstinent persons, or the feasting dreams of starving persons, or the polar explorer's recurring dream of warm, green fields. An eminent psychologist has given a good account of a dream which he had while riding in an overcrowded compartment of a European train, with the window closed and himself wedged in tightly far from the window. In this uncomfortable situation he dropped asleep and dreamed that he had the seat next to the window, had the window open and was looking out at a beautiful landscape. In all these cases the wish gratified in the dream is one that has been left unsatisfied in the daytime, and this is according to the famous passage, slightly paraphrased, "What a man hath, why doth he yet dream about?" The newly married couple do not dream of each other. We seldom dream of our regular work, unless for some reason we are disturbed over it. The tendencies that are satisfied during the day do not demand satisfaction in dreams; but any tendency that is aroused during the day without being able to reach its conclusion is likely to come to the surface in a dream.

Any sort of desire or need, left unsatisfied in the day, may motivate a dream. Desire for food, warmth, sex gratification, air, money, etc., have been exemplified in dreams already cited. Curiosity may be the motive, as in the case of an individual, who, having just come to live in Boston, was much interested in its topography, and who saw one day a street car making off in what seemed to him a queer direction, so that he wondered where it could be going and tried unsuccessfully to read its sign. The next night he dreamed of seeing the car near at hand and reading the sign, which, though really consisting of nonsense names, satisfied his curiosity during the dream.

The mastery motive, so prominent in daydreams, can be detected also in many sleep dreams. There are dreams in [{503}] which we do big things--tell excruciatingly funny jokes, which turn out when recalled next day to be utterly flat; or improvise the most beautiful music, which we never can recall with any precision, but which probably amounted to nothing; or play the best sort of baseball. The gliding or flying dream, which many people have had, reminds one of the numerous toys and sports in which defiance of gravity is the motive; and certainly it gives you a sense of power and freedom to be able, in a dream, to glide gracefully up a flight of stairs, or step with ease from the street upon the second-story balcony. One dream which at first thought cannot be wish-fulfilling perhaps belongs under the mastery motive: The dreamer sees people scurrying to cover, looks up and sees a thunderstorm impending; immediately he is struck by lightning and knocked down in the street; but he finds he can rise and walk home, and seems to have suffered no harm except for a black blotch around one eye. Now, any man who could take lightning that way would be proud to wear the scar. So the dream was wish-fulfilling, and the wish involved was, as often, the self-assertive impulse.

This last dream is a good one, however, for pointing another moral. We need not suppose that the dreamer was aiming at the denouement from the beginning of the dream. Dreams have no plot in most instances; they just drift along, as one thing suggests another. The sight of people running to cover suggested a thunderstorm, and that suggested that "I might get struck", as it would in the daytime. Now, the dream mentality, being short on criticism, has no firm hold on "may be" and "might be", but slides directly into the present indicative. The thought of being struck is being struck, in a dream. So we do not need to suppose that the dreamer pictured himself as struck by lightning in order to have the satisfaction of coming off [{504}] whole and bragging of the exploit. In large measure the course of a dream is determined by free association; but the mastery motive and other easily awakened desires act as a sort of bias, facilitating certain outcomes and inhibiting others.

But there are unpleasant dreams, as well as pleasant. There are fear dreams, as well as wish dreams. A child who is afraid of snakes and constantly on the alert against them when out in the fields during the day, dreams repeatedly of encountering a mass of snakes and is very much frightened in his sleep. Another child dreams of wolves or tigers. A person who has been guilty of an act from which bad consequences are possible dreams that those consequences are realized. The officer suffering from nervous war strain, or "shell shock", often had nightmares in which he was attacked and worsted by the enemy. Since Freud has never admitted that dreams could be fear-motived, holding that here, as in worry, the fear is but a cloak for a positive desire, some of his followers have endeavored to interpret these shell-shock nightmares as meaning a desire to be killed and so escape from the strain. To be consistent, they would have also to hold that the child, who of all people is the most subject to terrifying dreams, secretly desires death, though not avowing this wish even to himself. This would be pushing consistency rather far, and it is better to admit that there are real fear dreams, favored by indigestion or nervous strain, but sometimes occurring simply by the recall of a fear-stimulus in the same way that anything is recalled, i.e., through association.

A large share of dreams does not fit easily into any of the classes already described. They seem too fantastic to have any personal meaning. Yet they are interesting to the dreamer, and they would be worth going to see if they could be reproduced and put on the stage. Isn't that sufficient [{505}] excuse for them? May they not be simply a free play of imagination that gives interesting results because of its very freedom from any control or tendency, and because of the vividness of dream imagery?