The curve of sleep depth shows that our withdrawal from reality is not sudden but gradual. The transition from wakefulness to sleep is characterized at first by blurred visions, colours, shapes, moving objects with a scarcely defined outline, and immediately after by curiously symbolical visions, known as hypnogogic visions.
Those phenomena are difficult to study for they are forgotten by the end of the night. The observer has to train himself to wake up after a few minutes of unconsciousness, a result which is achieved without difficulty after a few trials.
The first visions of the night are in every subject I have asked and in myself, symbolical of the passage from one state to another. One hypnogogic vision I have had many times is of wading slowly into a lake or the sea, until the water reaches to the middle of my body after which I start swimming.[2]
One night when I had a little difficulty in falling asleep my hypnogogic vision represented a truckman looking like myself whipping a team of horses hitched to a big load who were crossing a very high bridge leading from the city into the open.
Another night, after seeing the “Follies,” I dreamt that the police was trying vainly to quell a disturbance and that the rioters succeeded in placing their own police in charge of the disturbance. The newcomers were attired like the front row girls of the Follies. No more symbolical picture of the whole nervous situation could be found. The day’s repressions being gradually replaced by the “follies” of dreamland.
Not only is the passage from reality into dreamland thus symbolized by appropriate representation but the mental work of reality gradually merges with the mental work of the sleeping state.
Thoughts of the day merge directly with the dream thoughts. There is no gap between waking thoughts and sleeping thoughts. This has been demonstrated by Silberer’s experiments.
“The very first dream,” Silberer says, “visualizes, dramatises and interprets the very last waking thought.”
1st Example: “I applied some boric ointment to the mucous of my nose before retiring to relieve a painful dryness.”
Dream: “I see some one offering money to some one else. Only I notice that it is my right hand which is putting money into my left hand.”