The World of Dreams

by Havelock Ellis

On the other hand, an even more cursory investigation of our dream life suffices to show that in every dream there is also a representative element. No dream can be said to be strictly and literally presentative. If, when I am seemingly asleep, a person speaks to me, and I become conscious that he is present and speaking, I am not entitled to say that I 'dream' it. A consciousness which perceives facts in the same way as they may be perceived by waking consciousness is not a dreaming consciousness. So that there are, in the literal sense, no presentative dreams. What happens is that the stimulus, instead of being presented directly to consciousness, and recognised for what it is to waking consciousness, serves to arouse old memories and ideas which dream consciousness accepts as a reasonable explanation of the external or peripheral stimulus. The stimulus may be said to be, in a sense, the cause of the dream, but the dream itself remains central, and as truly a combined picture of mental images as though there were no known peripheral stimulus at all.

Thus, while it is true that the division of dreams into two classes corresponds to a recognisable distinction, it is yet a superficial and unimportant distinction. It is likely that all dreams have a peripheral or presentative element, and certain that they all have a central or representative element. This will become clearer if we now proceed to discuss those dreams which have, demonstrably, their exciting cause in some external or internal organic stimulus.

The world which we enter through the portal of sleep presents such obvious and serious limitations that we are apt to under-estimate its real richness and variety. In some respects, indeed, we can accomplish in sleep what is beyond our reach awake. Thus it sometimes happens that we reason better in sleep than when awake, that we may find in dreams the solutions of difficulties which escape us awake, and that we may remember things which, when awake, we had forgotten. But even within the ordinary range of experience, it is interesting to note that our dreams contain the same elements as our waking life. The sensory activities which stir us during the day are equally active, though in strange transformations, in the world of dreams.

It is probable that all the senses may furnish the medium through which stimuli may reach sleeping consciousness; though touch and hearing are doubtless the main channels to dream life. The eyes are closed, so that while the chief parts of our dream life are in terms of vision, direct visual stimuli can only be a very dim and uncertain influence. But no sense is absolutely excluded from activity in dreams.[57]

Heat or cold sensations and pressure sensations, as well as their anaesthetic absence, undoubtedly play an important part in explaining various kinds of dreams. They do not necessarily result in rememberable dreams, even although it is possible that they still affect the current of sleeping consciousness. It is possible to press and massage the body of a sleeper all over, gently but firmly, without interrupting sleep. When the pressure reaches a considerable degree of vigour, the sleeper may move a muscle, perhaps the lips, even an arm, may go so far as to half wake and move the whole body. All these movements suggest that they have accompaniments on the psychic side, yet, on finally awakening, the sleeper may be unable to recall any memory of the occurrence, or any vestige of a dream.

In a certain proportion of cases, however, a dream results. Thus a lady dreams that, with a number of other people, she is on board a ship which is rocking heavily, and on awakening she finds that her large dog is on the bed, vigorously scratching himself. The ship has clearly been the theory invented by sleeping consciousness to account for the unfamiliar sensations of movement.

When living in the south of Spain, I awoke early one morning, and heard a mosquito buzzing. I fell asleep again and dreamed that a huge insect—as large as a lobster, but flat like a cockroach, and scarlet in colour—had alighted on my hand. The creature had two long horns, and from each of these proceeded numerous very long and delicate filaments which were inserted into my hand to a considerable depth. I had to cut the creature in half, and draw away the forepart, which was attached to my hand, with great care lest I should leave portions of the filaments in the flesh. This animal seemed all the more unpleasant because it was noiseless, and its attacks, I thought, imperceptible. I appeared to be attacked by a succession of them. On awakening, there was irritation of the left wrist, as though the mosquito had bitten me, although I had long ceased to be bitten by mosquitoes. This dream, it will be seen, corresponds in an unusually close way to the idea of a presentative dream; imagination followed reality in presenting an insect as the cause of the sensation experienced (possibly because I had actually heard the mosquito when awake), but still, as in all dreams, the process was mainly central, and imagination was freely exercised in creating a creature adequate to explain the doubtless vague and massive cutaneous sensations transmitted to sleeping consciousness.[58]

Perhaps one of the commonest skin sensations to excite dream formation is that of cold due to disturbance of the bed coverings. The following example may serve as an illustration of this class. I dreamed that I was in an hotel, mounting many flights of stairs, until I entered a room where the chambermaid was making the bed; the white bedclothes were scattered over everything, and looked to me like snow; then I became conscious that I was very cold, and it appeared to me that I really was surrounded by snow, for the chambermaid remarked that I was very courageous to come up so high in the hotel, very few people venturing to do so on account of the great cold at this height. I awoke to find that it was a cold night, and that I was entangled in the sheets, and partly uncovered. Nothing else had occurred to suggest this dream which sleeping consciousness had elaborated out of the two associated ideas of altitude and snow in order to explain the actual sensations experienced. It is noteworthy that, as in the dream just before narrated, there was here also a link with reality, this time furnished by the disarranged bedclothes.[59]

The auditory experiences of dreams, to a greater extent perhaps than those involving the sense of touch, may be based on spontaneous disturbances within the sensory mechanism. This is notably also the case with visual experiences, and in many respects the conditions in the ear are analogous. Apart from increased resonance of the ear, or hyperaesthesia of the auditory nerve, producing special sensitiveness to sounds, an increased flow of blood through the ear, as well as muscular contractions and mucous plugs in the external ear, furnish the faint rudimentary noises which, in sleep, may constitute the nucleus around which hallucinations crystallise. Disease of the ear may obviously act in the same way, but, even apart from actual disease, various nervous disturbances favour the production of auditory hallucinations during sleep, and, in marked cases, even awake.

We may dream of listening to music in the absence of all external sounds having any musical character. In such cases, no doubt, the actual conditions within the auditory mechanism are suggesting music to the brain, but the resulting music seems usually to be less definite, less rememberable, than when it forms around the nucleus of an external series of sounds. In many of these cases it is probable that we do not hear music in our dream; we are simply under conditions in which we imagine that we hear music. Thus, on going to bed soon after supper, but not perceptibly suffering from indigestion, I dreamed that I was present at a public meeting combined with an orchestral concert. A speech was to be made by a man who looked like an old sailor or soldier, and meanwhile the orchestra was playing. The speaker—unaccustomed, I gathered, to the etiquette of such a meeting—suddenly interrupted the orchestra by a remark, and the surprised conductor stopped the performance for a moment and then continued, subsequent remarks by the speaker failing to affect the music, which continued to the end, becoming more lively and vigorous in character. But what the music was, I knew not at the time, nor could I recall any fragment of it on awakening. It is even possible that such a dream is mainly visual, and that no hallucinatory music is heard, its occurrence being merely deduced from the nature of the vision.