A monograph on sleep and dream: their physiology and psychology

by Edward W. Cox

We accept without hesitation, or questioning, or even a suspicion of its unreality, that which in waking life would have been banished instantly as the baseless fabric of a vision. We believe implicitly in objects and actions which, when awake, we should have pronounced to be impossible. Moreover we contemplate the wildest conceptions of the fancy without the slightest consciousness of their incongruity or folly. Nothing is too impossible or unreal for acceptance by the dreamer as facts that cause him neither surprise at their presence nor wonder how they come to be.

What is the change in the mental condition that has wrought this mental revolution—not slowly and by degrees, but wholly and in a moment? At this instant, the mind is competent to discern the ideal from the real, the shadow from the substance, the practical from the impossible. In the next moment it can distinguish neither—all appears to itself to be equally possible, probable, real. Starting from sleep, the normal state is recovered, but not so speedily as it is lost. The dream itself sometimes continues after the senses are restored. The memory of it remains longer and its unconscious influence longer still. Passions and emotions which the dream has kindled do not subside at once and often the agitation continues to disturb the mind long after the cause of it has vanished from the memory.

Two answers present themselves.

1. This marvellous character of dream may be consequent upon the severance of the mind from its communication with the external world by reason of the partial paralysis of the senses.

2. Some one or more of the mental faculties may be sleeping while others are awake and active.

The first is the solution commonly accepted. It is contended that the senses correct the vagaries of the mind; that we are enabled to distinguish between the creations of the mind and the impressions brought to it from the external world solely by the consciousness we have, when we are awake, of the action of the senses and the knowledge we have that the impressions borne to us by the senses are objective—that is, made by something existing without ourselves. If, for instance, you close your eyes and give rein to the imagination, a stream of ideas—pictures of persons and places—flows before the mind’s eye. You do not mistake these for realities. You are conscious that they are born of your own brain. Had you been asleep and dreaming, instead of being awake and using your senses, you would not have discovered that these mental pictures were subjective only; you would have accepted them implicitly as objective impressions brought to you by your senses.

This, however, explains but a portion of the phenomenon. Even if it be a true solution, it accounts only for the acceptance in dream of the ideal as real. It leaves wholly unexplained the more remarkable feature exhibited in the entire unconsciousness by the dreamer of the absurdities and impossibilities presented in the dream and the absence of surprise and wonder how such things can be. In the waking state, the mind would therefore reject them instantly as the illusions they are. Hence the reasonable conclusion that, in addition to the sleep of the senses and of the will, some part of the material mechanism of the mind is also sleeping or its activity is suspended during dream.

The investigation is of serious moment, for it raises some other questions of even greater importance. If the explanation be sufficient, it determines some moot points in Mental Physiology. It proves that the mental machine, the brain, is not one and indivisible—that the whole brain is not employed in each mental act, as contended by Dr. Carpenter.

To what mental faculties are we indebted for our waking consciousness of incongruity, impracticability, absurdity, irrationality? Obviously these faculties must be slumbering in dream. To their temporary paralysis this most remarkable phenomenon of dream is certainly due.