All Dreaming is a Process of Reasoning—The Fundamental Character of Reasoning—Reasoning as a Synthesis of Images—Dream Reasoning Instinctive and Automatic—It is also Consciously carried on—This a result of the Fundamental Split in Intelligence—Dissociation—Dreaming as a Disturbance of Apperception.
IN dreams we are always reasoning. That is a general characteristic of dreams which is worth noting, because its significance is not usually recognised. It is sometimes imagined that reason is in abeyance during sleep.[42] So far from this being the case, we may almost be said to reason much more during sleep than when we are awake. That our reasoning is bad, often even preposterous, that it constantly ignores the most elementary facts of waking life, scarcely affects the question. All dreaming is a process of reasoning. That artful confusion of ideas and images which, at the outset, I referred to as the most constant feature of dream mechanism is nothing but a process of reasoning, a perpetual effort to argue out harmoniously the absurdly limited and incongruous data present to sleeping consciousness. Binet, grounding his conclusions on hypnotic experiments, finds that reasoning is the fundamental part of all thinking, the very texture of thought.[43] It is founded on perception itself, which already contains all the elements of the ancient syllogism. For in all perception, as Binet plausibly argues, there is a succession of three images, of which the first fuses with the second, which, in its turn, suggests the third. Now this establishment of new associations, this construction of images, which, as we may easily convince ourselves, is precisely what takes place in dreaming, is reasoning itself.
Reasoning may thus be regarded as a synthesis of images suggested by resemblance and contiguity, indeed a sort of logical vision, more intense even than actual vision, since it is capable of producing hallucinations. To reasoning all forms of mental activity may finally be reduced; mind, as Wundt has said, is a thing that reasons. Or, as H. R. Marshall puts it, 'reason is a mode of instinct.'[44] When we apply these general statements to dreaming, we may see that the whole phenomenon of dreaming is really the same process of image formation, based on resemblance and contiguity. Every dream is the outcome of this strenuous, wide-ranging instinct to reason. The supposed 'imaginative faculty,' regarded as so highly active during sleep, is the inevitable play of this automatic logic.
The syllogistic arrangement of dream imagery is carried on in an absolutely automatic manner; it is spontaneous, involuntary, without effort. Sleeping consciousness, though all the time it is weaving the data that reach it into some pattern of reason with immense ingenuity, is quite unaware that it is itself responsible for the arguments thus presented. In the evening, before going to bed, I glance casually through a newspaper; I see the usual kind of news, revolutionists in Russia, Irish affairs, crimes, etc.; I see also a caricature of the Liberal Party as a headless horseman on a barren plain. During sleep these unconnected impressions revive, float into dream consciousness, and spontaneously fall into as reasonable a whole as could be expected. I dream that by some chemical or mechanical device a man has succeeded in conveying the impression that he is headless, and is preparing to gallop across some district in Russia, with the idea of making so mysterious an impression upon the credulous population that he will be accepted as a great religious prophet. I distinctly see him careering across sands like those of the seashore, but I avoid going near him. Then I see figures approaching him in the far distance, and his progress ceases. I learn subsequently that he has been arrested and found to be an Irish criminal. A coherent story is thus formed out of a few random impressions.
All such typical dreams are syllogistic. There is, that is to say, as Binet expresses it, the establishment of an association between two states of consciousness by means of an intermediate state which resembles the first, is associated with the second, and by fusing with the first associates it with the second. In this dream, for instance, we have the three terms of (1) headless horseman, (2) revolutionary crime, and (3) Russia and Ireland. The intermediate term, by the fact that it resembles the first, and is contiguous in the mind with the third, seems to fuse the first and the third terms, so that the headless horseman becomes an Irish criminal in Russia. In dreaming life, as in waking life, our minds are always moving by the construction of similar syllogisms, marked by more or less freedom and audacity.
It is unnecessary to multiply examples of the instinctive and persistent efforts on the part of the sleeping mind to construct a coherent whole out of the incongruous elements that come before it; nearly every dream furnishes some proof of this profoundly rooted impulse.[45] It is instructive, however, to consider the nature and the limitations of dreaming reason.
This rationalisation and logical construction of imagery, it is necessary to realise, occurs at the very threshold of sleeping consciousness. The dreamer makes no effort to arrange isolated imagery; the arrangement has already occurred when the imagery comes to the focus of sleeping consciousness; so that this reasoning and arranging process is so fundamental and instinctive that it occurs in a region which may be said to be subconscious to dreaming consciousness. If it were not so our dreams would never be real to us, for even dreaming consciousness could not accept as real a hallucination which it had itself arranged. In this sense it is true that, to some extent, our dreams are often based on an ultimate personal and emotional foundation.[46]
But this ingeniously guided and rationalised confusion of imagery by no means covers the whole of the reasoning process in dreams. This is a double process. It is first manifested subconsciously in the formation of dream imagery, and then it is manifested consciously in the dreamer's reaction to the imagery presented to him. Every dream is made up of action and reaction between a pseudo-universe and a freely responding individual. On the one side there is the irresistibly imposed imagery—really, though we know it not, conditioned and instinctively moulded by our own organism—which stands for what in our waking hours we may term God and Nature; on the other side is the Soul struggling with all its might, and very inefficient means, against the awful powers that oppose it. The problem of the waking world is presented over again in this battle between the dreaming protagonist and his dreamed fate. Both of these elements are instinctively reasoned out, consciously or subconsciously; both are imperfect fragments from the rich reservoir of human personality.
The things that happen to us in dreams, the pseudo-external world that is presented to sleeping consciousness—the imagery, that is, that floats before the mental eye of sleep—are a perpetual source of astonishment and argument to the dreamer. A large part of dreaming activity is concerned with the attempt to explain and reason out the phenomena we thus encounter, to construct a theory of them, or to determine the attitude which we ought to take up with regard to them. Most dreams will furnish evidence of this reasoning process.