The World of Dreams

by Havelock Ellis

Thus a lady dreamed that an acquaintance wished to send a small sum of money to a person in Ireland. She rashly offered to take it over to Ireland. On arriving home she began to repent of her promise, as the weather was extremely wild and cold. She proceeded, however, to make preparations for dressing warmly, and went to consult an Irish friend, who said she would have to be floated over to Ireland tightly jammed in a crab basket. On returning home she fully discussed the matter with her husband, who thought it would be folly to undertake such a journey, and she finally relinquished it, with great relief. In this dream—the elements of which could all be accounted for—the association between sending money and the post-office, which would at once occur to waking consciousness, was closed; consciousness was a prey to such suggestions as reached it, but on the basis of those suggestions it reasoned and concluded quite sagaciously.

Again (after looking at photographs of paintings and statuary, and also reading about the theatre), I dreamed that I was at the theatre, and that the performers were acting and dancing in a more or less, in some cases completely, nude state, but with admirable propriety and grace, and very charming effect. At first I was extremely surprised at so remarkable an innovation; but then I reflected that the beginnings of such a movement must have long been in progress on the stage unknown to me; and I proceeded to rehearse the reasons which made such a movement desirable. On another occasion, I dreamed that I was in the large plaza of a Spanish city (Pamplona possibly furnishing the elements of the picture), and that the governor emerged from his residence facing the square and began talking in English to the subordinate officials who were waiting to receive him. The real reason why he talked English was, of course, the simple one that he spoke the language native to the dreamer. But in my dream I was extremely puzzled why he should speak English. I looked carefully into his face to assure myself that he was not really English, and I finally concluded that he was speaking English in order not to be understood by the bystanders. Once more, I dreamed that I was looking at an architectural drawing of a steeple, of quite original design, somewhat in the shape of a cross, but very elongated. I attempted in my dream to account for this elongation, and concluded that it was intended to neutralise the foreshortening caused when the steeple would be looked at from below.

There is, we here see afresh, a fundamental split in dreaming intelligence. On the one side there is the subconscious, yet often highly intelligent, combination of imagery along rational although often bizarre lines. On the other side is concentrated the conscious intelligence of the dreamer, struggling to comprehend and explain the problems offered by the pseudo-external imagery thus presented to it. One might almost say that in dreams subconscious intelligence is playing a game with conscious intelligence. In a dream previously narrated (p. 43) subconscious intelligence offered to my dreaming consciousness the mysterious substance selvdrolla, and bid me guess what it was; I could not guess. And subconscious intelligence presented the drawing of the elongated steeple, and I was able to offer an explanation which seems fairly satisfactory. So that, in the world of dreams, it may be said, we see over again the process which, James Hinton was accustomed to say, we see in the universe of our waking life; God or Nature playing with man, compelling him to join in a game of hide-and-seek, and setting him problems which he must solve as best he can. It may well be, one may add, that the dream process furnishes the key to the metaphysical and even, indeed, the physical problems of our waking thoughts, and that the puzzles of the universe are questions that we ourselves unconsciously invent for ourselves to solve.

We can never go behind the fantastic universe of our dreams. The validity of that universe is for dreaming consciousness unassailable. We may try to understand it and explain it, but we can never deny it, any more than we can deny the universe of our waking life, however we may attempt to analyse it. Dreaming consciousness never realises that the universe that confronts it springs from the same source as itself springs. I dreamed that a man was looking at his own house from a distance, and on the balcony he saw his daughter and a man by her side. 'Who is that man flirting with my daughter?' he asked. He produced a field-glass, and, on looking through it, he exclaimed: 'Good Heavens, it's myself!' Dreaming consciousness accepted this situation with perfect equanimity and solemnity. In the dream world there is, indeed, nothing else to do. We may puzzle over the facts presented to us; we may try to explain them; but it would be futile to deny them, even when they involve the possibility of a man being in two places at the same time.[47]

Only to a few people there comes occasionally in dreams a dim realisation of the unreality of the experience: 'After all, it does not matter,' they are able to say to themselves with more or less conviction, 'this is only a dream.' Thus one lady, dreaming that she is trying to kill three large snakes by stamping on them, wonders, while still dreaming, what it signifies to dream of snakes,[48] and another lady, when she dreams that she is in any unpleasant position—about to be shot, for instance—often says to herself: 'Never mind, I shall wake before it happens.'

I have never detected in my own dreams any recognition that they are dreams. I may say, indeed, that I do not consider that such a thing is really possible, though it has been borne witness to by many philosophers and others from Aristotle and Synesius and Gassendi onwards. The phenomenon occurs; the person who says to himself that he is dreaming believes that he is still dreaming, but one may be permitted to doubt that he is. It seems far more probable that he has for a moment, without realising it, emerged at the waking surface of consciousness.[49] The only approach to a recognition of dreaming as dreaming that I have experienced, is connected with the reduplication that may sometimes occur, and the sense of a fatalistic predetermination. Thus I dreamed (with nothing that could suggest the dream) that I was one of a group of people who, as I realised, were carrying out a drama in which by force of circumstance I was destined to be the villain, having, by bad treatment, been driven to revenge. I knew at the outset how events would turn out, and yet, though it seemed real life, I felt vaguely that it was all a play that was merely being rehearsed. I had attained in the world of dreams to the Shakespearian feeling that it was all a stage, and I merely a player. So we may become the Prosperos of the life of dreams.[50]

This quality of dreaming consciousness is a manifestation, and the chief one, of what is called dissociation.[51] In dissociation we have a phenomenon which runs through the whole of the dreaming life, and is scarcely less fundamental than the process of fusion by which the imagery is built up. The fact that the reasoning of dreams is usually bad, is due partly to the absence of memory elements that would be present to waking consciousness, and partly to the absence of sensory elements to check the false reasoning which, without them, appears to us conclusive. That is to say, that there is a process of dissociation by which ordinary channels of association are temporarily blocked, perhaps by exhaustion of their conductive elements, and the conditions are prepared for the formation of the hallucination. It is, as Parish has argued, in sleep and in those sleep-resembling states called hypnagogic that a condition of dissociation leading to hallucination is most apt to occur.[52]

Thus it is that though the psychic frontier of the sleeping state is more extended than that of the normal waking state, the focus of sleeping consciousness is more contracted than that of waking consciousness. In other words, while facts are liable to drift from a very wide psychic distance under our dreaming attention, we cannot direct the searchlight of that attention at will over so wide a field as when we are awake. We deal with fewer psychic elements, though those elements are drawn from a wider field.

The psychology of 'attention' is, indeed, a very disputed matter.[53] There is no agreement as to whether it is central or peripheral, motor or sensory. As we have seen in the previous chapter, it seems reasonable to conclude, according to a convenient distinction established by Ribot, that spontaneous attention is persistent during sleep, but voluntary attention is at a minimum. In some such way, it seems, whatever theory of attention we adopt, we have to recognise that in dreams the attention is limited.