The World of Dreams

by Havelock Ellis

There is certainly no profounder emotional excitement during sleep than that which arises from a disturbed or distended stomach, and is reflected by the pneumogastric to the accelerated heart and the excited respiration.[88] We are thereby thrown into a state of emotional agitation, a state of agony and terror, such as we rarely or never attain during waking life. Sleeping consciousness, blindfolded and blundering, a prey to these massive waves from below, and fumbling about desperately for some explanation, jumps at the idea that only the attempt to escape some terrible danger or the guilty consciousness of some awful crime can account for this immense emotional uproar. Thus the dream is suffused by a conviction which the continued emotion serves to support. We do not—it seems most simple and reasonable to conclude—experience terror because we think we have committed a crime, but we think we have committed a crime because we experience terror. And the fact that in such dreams we are far more concerned with escape from the results of crime than with any agony of remorse is not, as some have thought, due to our innate indifference to crime, but simply to the fact that our emotional state suggests to us active escape from danger rather than the more passive grief of remorse. Thus our dreams bear witness to the fact that our intelligence is often but a tool in the hands of our emotions.[89]

In this tendency, it may be noted, we see the basis of the symbolism which plays so real a part in dreams. Such symbolism rests on the fact that we associate two things—even if the one happens to be physical and the other spiritual—which both happen to imply a similar state of feeling.[90] Symbolism of this kind is, indeed, characteristic of the human mind at all times, in all stages of its development. Thus the physical idea of height seems to express also a moral idea, which we feel to be correspondent, while wormwood and gall furnish a taste which enabled men to speak of what seemed to them the corresponding bitterness of death. In dreams this natural tendency of the mind is able to work unchecked and extravagantly. It acts with much facility on any impulse arising from the gastric region, because this region is the seat of various sensations and emotions, both physical and moral, which may thus act symbolically the one for the other.[91]

Even when we realise the process of transformation and irradiation, through which organic sensations can alone reach the brain in sleep, and the inevitable 'errors of judgment' thus produced, it may still seem strange and puzzling to observe how a stimulus which has its origin in the stomach will, by affecting the neighbouring viscera, in its circuitous course along the nerves and through the brain, be transformed, as it may be, into a tragic scene which has never been experienced, nor even deliberately imagined, as for instance—to cite a dream of my own—in the fiery vision of following a leader, in real life a peaceful and inoffensive man, who, revolver in hand, dashes among foes, shooting and shot at, every moment in danger of life, and always miraculously escaping.

I may illustrate this transformation by the following example: A lady dreamed that her husband called her aside and said, 'Now, do not scream or make a fuss; I am going to tell you something. I have to kill a man. It is necessary, to put him out of his agony.' He then took her into his study, and showed her a young man lying on the floor, with a wound in his breast, and covered with blood. 'But how will you do it?' she asked. 'Never mind,' he replied; 'leave that to me.' He took something up and leaned over the man. She turned aside and heard a horrible gurgling sound. Then all was over. 'Now,' he said, 'we must get rid of the body. I want you to send for So-and-so's cart, and tell him I wish to drive it.' The cart came. 'You must help me to make the body into a parcel,' he said to his wife; 'give me plenty of brown paper.' They made it into a parcel, and with terrible difficulty and effort the wife assisted her husband to get the body downstairs, and lift it into the cart. At every stage, however, she presented to him the difficulties of the situation. But he carelessly answered all objections, said he would take the body up to the moor, among the stones, remove the brown paper, and people would think the murdered man had killed himself. He drove off, and soon returned with the empty cart. 'What's this blood in my cart?' asked the man to whom it belonged, looking inside. 'Oh, that's only paint,' replied the husband. But the dreamer had all along been full of apprehensions lest the deed should be discovered, and the last thing she could recall, before waking in terror, was looking out of the window at a large crowd which surrounded the house with shouts of 'Murder!' and threats.

This tragedy, with its almost Elizabethan air, was built up out of a few commonplace impressions received during the previous day, none of which impressions contained any suggestion of murder. The tragic element appears to have been altogether due to the psychic influences of indigestion arising from a supper of pheasant.[92] To account for our oppression during sleep, sleeping consciousness assumes moral causes, which alone appear to it of sufficient gravity to be adequate to the immense emotions we are experiencing. Even in our waking and fully conscious states we are inclined to give the preference to moral over physical causes, quite irrespective of the justice of our preferences; in our sleeping states this tendency is exaggerated, and the reign of purely moral causes is not often disturbed by even a suggestion of physical causation.

In an emotional dream of similar visceral origin, I dreamed that I was to die—why or how I could not tell on awakening. With the object of putting an end to my sufferings, I imagined that my wife administered to me some substance mixed in jam. I found the taste peculiar, not bitter, as I recalled on awaking, but warm and spicy, and I asked what she had put in it. She replied that it was strychnine. I remarked that that would be a very painful mode of death, and refused to take any more. I debated with myself whether I had probably taken a poisonous dose, and had not better resort to an antidote; the only antidote that suggested itself to me was opium pills. Meanwhile the horror of impending death grew more and more acute until, at length, I awoke. I thereupon found that I had a headache, a faint taste in my mouth, and some general malaise evidently associated with a slightly disordered stomach. The definite images brought forward in the dream had all been fairly familiar during the previous day, but the idea of impending death which pervaded the whole dream so indefinitely and incoherently, yet so acutely, was entirely a theory to account for the massive and widely irradiated messages of discomfort which reached the sleeping brain.

Many people are unwilling to admit that psychic phenomena so tragical, poignant, or pathetic as these dreams may be, should receive their stimulus from a source which they regard as so humble as the stomach. Thus Frederick Greenwood, whose conception of the function of dreaming was very exalted, only admitted this association with reluctance, and was careful to point out that 'if an unwholesome supper produces such phenomena, it does so only in the sense that a bird singing in the air produced Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark."'[93] That analogy really underestimates the distance of the physical stimulus of such dreams from its psychic concomitants. When we talk of dreams we must place ourselves at the dreamer's standpoint. The poet was conscious that his inspiration was stimulated by the bird's song, but the dreamer has no consciousness that the tragic experiences he passes through imaginatively are stimulated by the activity of his visceral organs. He is altogether unconscious of visceral disturbance; if he were conscious of any of these physical facts which occupy waking consciousness, he would no longer be a dreamer. He lives in a psychic world which physical facts, from within or from without, can never reach until they have been transformed. His position resembles, therefore, not that of the poet who deliberately seeks to interpret the song of the bird, but rather that of the bird itself, the poet 'hidden in the light of thought,' sublimely unconscious of the mechanism revealed in its own structure.

The explanations devised by sleeping consciousness to account for visceral discomfort of gastric origin are not necessarily tragic. Thus I dreamed, after a somewhat indigestible meal, that I was slowly and painfully eating bread mingled with cinders and mouse's excrement, trying in vain to avoid these impurities, and after the meal was over, finding my mouth full of cinders. On awaking there was no traceable taste or sensation of any kind in the mouth, and the dream was apparently a theory to account for some gastric disturbance. Such a theory seems less far-fetched than that of murder, and probably indicates much less marked and diffused visceral disturbance. Occasionally the explanatory theories of actual sensations accepted by sleeping consciousness are plausible and ingenious, indeed entirely adequate and probable. Thus a lady dreamed that she was drinking glass after glass of champagne, saying to herself the while that she would have to pay for this afterwards. On awaking she found that she was feeling the slight rheumatic pains and discomfort that she was really liable to experience after taking a glass or two of champagne. She had not tasted champagne, or thought of it, for some time previously; the dream champagne was a theory invented to account for the sensations which were actually experienced, though those sensations remained outside dreaming consciousness.

Most of the examples I have presented of the influence of emotion of visceral origin in suggesting dream theories have had the stomach as their source. There can be no doubt that the stomach has enormous influence in this respect; its easily and constantly varying state of repletion, its central position and liability to press on other organs, its important nervous associations, together with the fact that sleep sometimes tends to impede its activity and initiate disturbance, combine to impart to it a manifold and extensive influence over the emotional state in sleep, and at the same time render the source of that emotional state peculiarly difficult for sleeping consciousness to detect.