A monograph on sleep and dream: their physiology and psychology

by Edward W. Cox

This mental exaltation so frequent in dream is recognised in some familiar practices, the reason for which is, perhaps, not known to those who resort to them. In our schooldays, a lesson was best learned by reading it when going to bed. It was then easily remembered in the morning. The advice so often given, when a matter of moment is presented, to “Sleep upon it,” is a recognition of this higher mental action in sleep. The Mind seems in sleep unconsciously to work upon the idea presented to it, and we wake with clearer conceptions and larger views of the pros and cons. I have known cases in which a doubting mind has thus been “made up” without conscious perception of the convincing argument.

Although in dream the mind works with such wonderful rapidity that the events of a day may be enacted in a few minutes, it has not quite lost its consciousness of the measure of external time. A desire to wake at a particular hour will often be followed by an actual awakening at that hour. Continued mental consciousness of the desire is unintelligible. But in what manner does the mind count the flight of a time whose measure is so different from its own conceptions of time?

Say, that you want to wake at six o’clock. You fall asleep with this impression upon the mind; but you fall also into the condition of dream and in that condition your mind is engaged in inventing adventures that are the business of a long day. Nevertheless, it preserves the consciousness of the time as it is in the external world and you wake at the desired hour. I can suggest no other solution of this than that the brain that dreams, and the Conscious Self that perceives the dream, are two entities, and that it is the Conscious Self or Soul that notes the flight of time in the external world, while the dreaming brain is revelling in its own conception of time as measured by the flow of its own ideas, and not in hours measured by the motions of the earth and moon. Another solution suggests itself. May not the duality of the mind, the action of the double brain, which explains so many other mental phenomena, account for this also?

But these phenomena of dream are proofs that to the mind “time” is more ideal than real; that the measure of it may differ in individuals and still more in races. May it not be that thus lives are equalised and that to the ephemera its one day of life may appear to be as long as our lives appear to us? A life is practically as long or short as it appears to the mind to be.

Dreams are rarely, if ever, without foundation; that is to say, they are the product of some suggestion, although it may be difficult to trace them to their sources. Very slight suggestions suffice to set the mind in motion, as is proved by a multitude of recorded cases which the memory of every reader will present to him. The senses are not wholly paralysed in ordinary sleep. They carry to the mind impressions of various degrees of power and act with more or less of force according to the condition of the recipient ganglion. Sounds are heard and suggest dreams. But the loudest sounds are not always perceived most readily. The unaccustomed sound most startles the consciousness. Often a whisper will waken when the roar of cannon makes no impression upon the sleeper. A dweller in a noisy street sleeps soundly amid the roar of carts and carriages and is wakeful in the country by reason of the silence. Habit governs this as so many others of our sense impressions. We learn not to hear. Hence the influence of trifling impressions upon the sleeping senses when powerful ones fail to reach us. Very slight impressions suffice to suggest the subjects of dreams. The mind having taken the direction given by that impulse forthwith employs its inventive faculties in the construction of a story based upon the faint lines of that suggested subject.

Even when awake we are ignorant what impulses set up trains of thought. We know not why this or that idea “comes into the head.” The suggesting cause is often so slight as to be imperceptible. The brain is an organ of inconceivable sensitiveness. Its fibres are so delicate that millions are packed into the circumference of a sixpence. Yet has each fibre its own function and each is a musical chord competent to catch and to vibrate to motions of the ether which the senses cannot perceive. It is probable (not proved) that in sleep, when not distracted by the claims of the nerve system and the thronging impressions brought by the senses; these brain fibres are vastly more sensitive and moved by still slighter action of the ether than in waking life.

In Dream we never lose the consciousness of our own identity. We retain our individuality. You dream often that you are something other than you are, but never that you are some other person. Does not this indicate the existence of an entity, other than the dreaming brain, which preserves its oneness and its sanity while the material organ with which it is associated and through which it communicates with the external world is, as it were, forgetting its reason, its experience and itself, and so becoming in very truth insane.

And here we touch upon the most perplexing characteristic of dream. We are conscious of existence, of individuality, and, in a slight degree, of sense impressions. We have ideas, reflections, emotions, sentiments, passions. We can invent stories, construct characters, endow them with dramatic language, paint ideal pictures, make speeches, compose music and conduct a train of argument. But withal we are not rational. We can think wise things, but we are the veriest fools of nature. Every mental faculty is awake and alive—save one—namely, the faculty, whatever it be, that enables us to distinguish between fancy and fact, between the possible and the impossible, the congruous and the incongruous; the faculty, in brief, which separates sanity from insanity.

In dream, with rare exceptions, we are not conscious that we are dreaming. Fancies are accepted as facts, shadows as substances, the ideal as the real. And they are so accepted without suspicion or doubt. We see them, hear them, feel them. Nothing in our actual waking life is more real to us than are the unrealities of dream at the moment of dreaming. Probably there are few readers who have not occasionally dreamed that they were dreaming, and while noting the drama have said to themselves “this is a dream.” But these are rare exceptions to the rule that a dream is accepted by the sleeping mind as an event of actual occurrence and the scenes and persons implicitly believed to be objective and not subjective; that is to say—as being then actually existing in the external world.

So believing, what are the materials to which this implicit credence is given? Here we arrive at the most perplexing of the problems presented by the phenomena of dream.