In this way it comes about that out of dreams and of dream-like waking states, one of the most permanent of human spiritual conceptions has been evolved. To float, to rise into the air, to fly up to heaven, has always seemed to man to be the final climax of spiritual activity. The angel is the most ethereal creature the human imagination can conceive. Browning's cry to his 'lyric love, half angel and half bird,' pathetically crude as poetry, is sound as psychology. The prophets and divine heroes of the race have constantly seemed to their devout followers to disappear at last by floating up into the sky, like Elijah, who went up 'by a whirlwind into heaven.' St. Peter once thought he saw his Master walking on the waves, and the last vision of Jesus in the Gospels reveals him rising into the air. For it is in the world of dreams that the human soul has its indestructible home, and in the attempt to realise these dreams lies a large part of our business in life.
CHAPTER VII
SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS
The Dramatisation of Subjective Feelings Based on Dissociation—Analogies in Waking Life—The Synaesthesias and Number-forms—Symbolism in Language—In Music—The Organic Basis of Dream Symbolism—The Omnipotence of Symbolism—Oneiromancy—The Scientific Interpretation of Dreams—Why Symbolism prevails in Dreaming—Freud's Theory of Dreaming—Dreams as Fulfilled Wishes—Why this Theory cannot be applied to all Dreaming—The Complete Form of Symbolism in Dreams—Splitting up of Personality—Self-objectivation in Imaginary Personalities—The Dramatic Element in Dreams—Hallucinations—Multiple Personality—Insanity—Self-objectivation a Primitive Tendency—Its Survival in Civilisation.
In discussing dreams of flying I have referred to a dream in which a slight disturbance of the heart's action was transformed by sleeping consciousness into the image of an athlete manipulating an elastic ball. This objectivation of what are really the dreamer's subjective sensations, although he is not conscious of them as subjective, is, indeed, a phenomenon which we have encountered many times. It is, however, so important a feature of dream psychology, and probably of such significant weight in its influence on waking life, that it is worth while to deal with it separately.
The dramatisation of subjective elements of the personality, which contributes so largely to render our dreams vivid and interesting, rests on that dissociation, or falling apart of the constituent groups of psychic centres, which is so fundamental a fact of dream life. That is to say, that the usually coherent elements of our mental life are split up, and some of them—often, it is curious to note, precisely those which are at that very moment the most prominent and poignant—are reconstituted into what seems to us an outside and objective world, of which we are the interested or the merely curious spectators, but in neither case realise that we are ourselves the origin of.
An elementary source of this tendency to objectivation is to be found, it may be noted, in the automatic impulse towards symbolism by which all sorts of feelings experienced by the dreamer become transformed into concrete visible images. When objectivation is thus attained, dissociation may be said to be secondary. So far indeed as I am able to dissect the dream-process, the tendency to symbolism seems nearly always to precede the dissociation in consciousness, though it may well be that the dissociation of the mental elements is a necessary subconscious condition for the symbolism.
Sensory symbolism rests on a very fundamental psychic tendency. On the abnormal side we find it in the synaesthesias which, since Galton first drew attention to them in 1883, in his Inquiries into Human Faculty, have become well known, and are found among between six to over twelve per cent. of people. Galton investigated chiefly those kinds of synaesthesias which he called 'number-forms' and 'colour associations.' The number-form is characteristic of those people who almost invariably think of numerals in some more or less constant form of visual imagery, the number instantaneously calling up the picture. In persons who experience colour-associations, or coloured-hearing, there is a similar instantaneous manifestation of particular colours in connection with particular sounds, the different vowel sounds, for instance, each constantly and persistently evolving a definite tint, as a white, e vermilion, i yellow, etc., no two persons, however, having exactly the same colour scheme of sounds.[130] These phenomena are not so very rare, and, though they must be regarded as abnormal, they occur in persons who are perfectly healthy and sane.