A monograph on sleep and dream: their physiology and psychology

by Edward W. Cox

CHAPTER VIII.
THE PHENOMENA OF DREAM.

Such being the Physiology and Psychology of Dream—that is to say, the conditions of the bodily and mental mechanism under which the phenomena of Dream are presented—let us observe those phenomena and from the facts noted endeavour to learn what light is thrown by them upon Psychology. A mental state so strange and abnormal cannot fail to assist in the solution of that great problem of the Mechanism of Man which it is the vocation of Psychology to solve. Is that Mechanism moved or directed by any but a self-generated force? Is it compounded of any but the tangible material structure? Does Soul exist and, if it exists, what is its relationship to the body?

A Dream is not a confused crowd of disconnected ideas. It is a succession of associated incidents more or less orderly, even when incongruous, improbable or even impossible. The mind of the sleeper constructs a drama, often having many parts played by many persons; but always himself is one of the actors. As suggestion is the process by which the mind works in waking life—one idea suggesting another with which it had been at some past time associated and then another linked with that, and so forth—so does the unsleeping mind of the sleeper present to the Conscious Self a succession of suggested pictures which other mental faculties weave into a story that is enacted before himself with all its scenery and machinery! And this drama is not performed in dumb show or in pantomime merely, but it is a drama spoken as well as acted by the players, men, women, or animal, who appear to the dreamer to play before him and with him their several parts as perfectly as they would have been enacted in actual life.

Hence we learn that in dream, as in the waking state, the mind acts in obedience to the laws of mind. The various mental functions are not exercised vaguely, but in more or less of orderly relationship to one another. Thus, imagination presents pictures which are accepted as having been brought from without by the senses and therefore to the sleeper are as real as if they had been objects of sight. These ideal pictures, thus received as real, according to their various characteristics excite precisely the same emotions as they would have excited had they been real. But although the picture is imaginary, the emotion is actual. We do not merely dream that we are angry or fearful; we feel actual anger and real fear. The reader may remember that often the emotion excited by the dream has continued to be felt after waking and when the dream itself has vanished. Indeed we know not how much the mental character of the day is influenced by the passions and emotions that have been stimulated by the dreams of the night, the mental excitement continuing after the cause of it has vanished and is forgotten.

The most wonderful of the many wonders that attend the condition of dream is the development of the inventive faculty so far beyond its capacity in the waking state. Reflect for a moment what this performance is. Every dreamer, however ignorant, however stupid, however young, performs a feat which few could accomplish in the waking state, when in full command of all their mental faculties. Every dream is a story. Most dreams are dramas, having not a story merely, but often many actors, whose characters are as various as on the stage of real life.

What does the dreaming mind?

Not merely does it invent the ideal story; it invents also all the characters that play parts in it! Nor this only. It places in the mouth of each of those characters speech appropriate to the character of each! Yet are all of these dialogues invented by the mind of the sleeper! In a restless night many such dream-dramas, each having its own distinct plot and actors, will be invented by the dreamer, and a dialogue will be constructed by himself in which each of the actors will play his proper part. Strange as the assertion may appear, it is a fact which a moment’s reflection will confirm, that the ignorant ploughboy in his dreams has made more stories and invented vastly more characters to enact them and constructed more appropriate dialogues for those characters than the most copious dramatist or novelist—aye, more than Shakespeare himself!

Another suggestive feature of the phenomena of dream is the marvellous speed of the mental action. Working untrammelled by the slow motions of the body, the dreaming mind sets at defiance all the waking conceptions of time. A dream of a series of adventures which would extend over many days is, by the mind in dream, enacted in a few minutes; yet it is all performed—all perfect—all minutely perceived, said and done; proving that, when the mind is untrammelled by the body, it has other very different conceptions of time. May it not be that time, as counted by our waking thoughts, is in truth the ideal time, and that mental time as measured in dream is the real time?

Not long ago I was enabled to apply some measure to this remarkable difference between the action of the mind independently of the body and its action when conducted through the slow moving mechanism of the body. Called at the usual hour in the morning, I looked at my watch and in about two minutes fell asleep again. I dreamed a dream of a series of events that in their performance occupied what the mind conceived to be a whole day—events in which I was an actor and played a part that would have occupied a day in actual doing. Waking suddenly with the influence of the dream upon me and the memory of it full before me, I looked at my watch again, thinking that I must have been sleeping for an hour and had lost the train. I found that, in fact, I had been asleep but four minutes. In four minutes my mind had passed through the history of a day, had invented that history, and contemplated it as a whole day’s action, although it was in fact a day’s work done by the mind in four minutes. This may give us some conception of what is the capacity of the Soul for perception and action when, if ever, there is a falling away from it of the cumbrous bodily material mechanism through which alone, in its present stage of evolution, it is adapted to communicate with the external material world.

Another phenomenon of Dream is exaltation of the mental faculties generally. Often there is an extraordinary development of special faculties in special dreams. A proof of this is found in the fact, already noted, that dream itself is an invention of the mind whose then capacities far exceed anything of which it is capable when the body is awake and imposing upon it the conditions of its own slow, because material—that is molecular—action. Not only do we invent the dream, but we act it in thought. Not merely do we act in it ourselves, but we paint the scenery, construct the dresses and decorations, invent the characters, and put into their mouths the language that would properly be theirs had they been beings of flesh and blood instead of shadows summoned by the fancy. Almost every faculty of the mind must be exercised upon such a work. Even the waking mental condition will not enable us to do this. If you doubt, try it. Set yourself to invent a dream and describe it on paper, making each one of the personages with whom you have peopled it talk in his proper character. Unless you are a skilful and practised dramatist you will find yourself wholly at fault. Remember that what you in the full possession of your intellect have failed to do, the most ignorant and stupid do every night and you will begin to measure this marvel of the exaltation of the mental powers that attends upon the condition of dream. If you indulge in the pleasant but dangerous practice of reading in bed, have you not often, on closing the book, extinguishing the candle, and turning to sleep, continued in a state of dream to read on, believing that you were still reading the book. But what was the fact? Your mind was then composing all you dreamed that you were reading. It was inventing a continuation of the argument or narrative, or whatever you may have been perusing when sleep stole upon you and you lapsed into dream. Have you never dreamed that you were preaching a sermon, or reading aloud, or composing music, or singing a song? Probably, in your waking state, you could do neither. In dream, your mind does it all without a conscious effort. Nor is it, as some have suggested, merely a fancy that the mind is so acting and not a positive action of the mind. If wakened while so dreaming, the argument, the speech, the song, will recur to the waking consciousness and become a positive memory capable of being subsequently recalled. Sometimes the dream vanishes after an interval and cannot be recollected by any effort of the Will, although it may recur in dream long years afterwards. In this manner Coleridge composed that beautiful fragment of a poem, “Kublai Khan.” His mind had wrought the whole in a dream. Suddenly waking with a vivid impression of that dream, he grasped a pen and began to write the remembered rhymes of what had been a long poem, although composed in dream with the speed at which the mind works when untrammelled by the conditions of its material mechanism. He seized pen and paper and had set down the beautiful lines that have been preserved when he was interrupted by some matter of business. On his return to resume the work, the dream had vanished and the world to its great loss has received nothing but the exquisite fragment we read now.