Like the sleep walker, the day dreamer manages at times to take just enough notice of reality to direct himself through his house or along the streets, while his mind is elaborating stories of varying complication.
A day dreamer who consulted me during the war would imagine himself, while walking along the streets, enlisting, taking a tearful farewell from his relatives and friends and accomplishing deeds of valour which made him famous; after which he would be so affected by his greatness that tears would roll down his cheeks. Or the dream would end tragically and he would die and then again a cascade of tears would be let loose at the thought of all the grief his demise would cause. The result was that day after day he would suddenly “wake up” in some public place, his face wet with tears, annoyed and embarrassed by the attention which his appearance would attract.
Those day dreams constituted in spite of their sad cast a fulfilment of his egotistical cravings. Even death was not too high a price to pay for the importance he acquired in his dream, a psychological fancy which is often found at the bottom of some sensational forms of suicide.
The anxiety day dream is the form of compensation sought by many neurotics, weak in body and frequently taken advantage of by more vigorous and ruthless persons.
It also plays at times the same part as masochistic nightmares, filling as it does, the body with glycogen and a sense of power.
I have heard patients suffering from a sense of real or imaginary inferiority tell me of their obsessive anger finding relief in scenes which they made, while walking along the streets or when sleepless of nights, to some absent person whom they held responsible for their troubles.
They would then rehearse some annoying or humiliating incident provoked by the offensive person and let loose a torrent of abuse leading unavoidably to a fight in which they would beat, scratch or murder their enemy.
The sound of their own voice or the remarks of passers by would generally wake them up at the climax; their hearts then would beat wildly, they would be out of breath, if not bathed in perspiration, but they would experience withal a certain amount of satisfaction from the victory they had won and they would feel full of what a patient of mine termed “almost murderous energy.”
This form of “abreaction,” when it does not assume the form of a constant indulgence taking the place of positive action, is rather desirable. The psychoanalytic treatment consists, in part at least, in the production of day dreams based on memories which free in the patient a certain amount of repressed energy. Thus a great deal of unrelated and unconscious material is made conscious and related. Day dreams, without any definite direction and unchecked, are likely, however, to be very dangerous and to exert a paralysing influence on the dreamer.
The concentration and meditation recommended by some Hindoo philosophers can accomplish valuable results if the subject has a clear, analytical mind and knows how to correlate the scraps of thoughts which are thus allowed to rise to consciousness.