Sit on the rest, like an elderly male,
And gulp down the whole as a horse can.'
It is evident that the tipcat suggested a cat's tail, while the suggestion of a cooking recipe in 'cut off its tail' led on to eggs and saucepan; the eggs suggested 'sitting,' while 'gulp,' as the dreamer noted, appeared as 'gallop,' and suggested the horse. The ease with which the whole fell into a completely rhymed doggerel stanza is due to the fact that the dreamer is a poet.[40]
A more common phenomenon in my experience than association by verbal clues is a transference from visual terms into the terms of some other sense, and a repetition in that form. Thus a lady dreams that a large and very beautiful picture resembling tapestry forms itself before her, and in it she sees herself, only much more beautiful in shape, standing by a tree, and on the other side of the tree an old friend is standing, while there are a crowd of people around. Then she sees her friend touch her on the arm. At the same time the dreamer feels the touch. The visual image is reduplicated in a motor form. Such a phenomenon is doubtless a natural result of the special conditions of dream life. In waking life the senses are working co-ordinately, and if we see ourselves touched we shall probably feel ourselves touched. But in dreams the body is a vision, and not our real body, and when we see it touched, we realise we ought to feel it touched, and a tactile sensation is thus suggested and experienced.
There are, however, other reduplications to which this explanation will not apply. Thus I imagined I was sitting at a window, at the top of a house, writing. As I looked up from my table I saw, with all the emotions naturally accompanying such a sight, a woman in her nightdress appear at a lofty window some distance off, and throw herself down. I went on writing, however, and found that in the course of my literary employment—I am not clear as to its precise nature—the very next thing I had to do was to describe exactly such a scene as I had just witnessed. I was extremely puzzled at such an extraordinary coincidence; it seemed to me wholly inexplicable. Again I dreamed that I was coming up the Thames (apparently in a steamboat), reading a novel, written by a friend, which was the history of some one who arrives in England coming up the Thames to London, by what I felt to be an extraordinary coincidence, in exactly the same way as I was at the moment. Then I found myself seemingly at the end of a London pier, with the river rippling at my feet, and in front the superb panorama of London; exactly the scene which, in less detail, was described in the book. Such dreams, reduplicating the imagery in a new sensory medium, are fairly common, with me at all events. The association is less that of analogy than of sensory media, as of the visual image becoming a verbal motor image. In other cases a scene is first seen as in reality, and then in a picture. Thus I dreamed that I was witnessing the performance of an orchestra, and observed that all the players had instruments of ancient pattern which, I understood, had been in constant use for several hundred years; I could recall the shapes of many on awaking, and none of them were quite modern; I could not, however, recall the character of the music, which seemed to make no impression on me, since I was absorbed in observing the shapes of the instruments. I specially observed an old framed engraving hanging on the wall, in my dream, representing precisely one of the instruments played on, and I understood that it was called a bourdon.[41] It is interesting to observe the profound astonishment with which sleeping consciousness apperceives such simple reduplication.
In dreams planes of existence that in waking life are fundamentally distinct are brought together, so that events belonging to different planes move on the same plane, and even become combined. Acting and life, the picture and the reality, are no longer absolutely distinct. Art and life flow in the same channel. The reason, doubtless, is that for the dreamer the world of waking life, the world of things as they are to the waking senses, is closed and cannot even be completely recalled. So that all modes of representation are strictly on the same level, and it is, therefore, perfectly natural and logical that they should stand side by side and merge into one another.
CHAPTER III
THE LOGIC OF DREAMS