The World of Dreams

by Havelock Ellis

It seems to-day by no means improbable that, amid the absurdities of this popular oneiromancy, there are some items of real significance. Until recent years, however, the absurdities have frightened away the scientific investigator. Almost the only investigator of the psychology of dreaming who ventured to admit a real symbolism in the dream world was Scherner,[144] and his arguments were not usually accepted nor even easy to accept. When we are faced by the question of definite and constant symbols it still remains true that scepticism is often called for. But there can be no manner of doubt that our dreams are full of symbolism.[145]

The conditions of dream life, indeed, lend themselves with a peculiar facility to the formation of symbolism, that is to say, of images which, while evoked by a definite stimulus, are themselves of a totally different order from that stimulus. The very fact that we sleep, that is to say, that the avenues of sense which would normally supply the real image of corresponding order to the stimulus are more or less closed, renders symbolism inevitable.[146] The direct channels being thus largely choked, other allied and parallel associations come into play, and since the control of attention and apperception is diminished, such play is often unimpeded. Symbolism is the natural and inevitable result of these conditions.[147]

It might still be asked why we do not in dreams more often recognise the actual source of the stimuli applied to us. If a dreamer's feet are in contact with something hot, it might seem more natural that he should think of the actual hot-water bottle, rather than of an imaginary Etna, and that, if he hears a singing in his ears, he should argue the presence of the real bird he has often heard rather than a performance of Haydn's Creation, which he has never heard. Here, however, we have to remember the tendency to magnification in dream imagery, a tendency which rests on the emotionality of dreams. Emotion is normally heightened in dreams. Every impression reaches sleeping consciousness through this emotional atmosphere, in an enlarged form, vaguer it may be, but more massive. The sleeping brain is thus not dealing with actual impressions—if we are justified in speaking of the impressions of waking life as 'actual'—even when actual impressions are being made upon it, but with transformed impressions. The problem before it is to find an adequate cause, not for the actual impression, but for the transformed and enlarged impression. Under these circumstances symbolism is quite inevitable. Even when the nature of an excitation is rightly perceived its quality cannot be rightly perceived. The dreamer may be able to perceive that he is being bitten, but the massive and profound impression of a bite which reaches his dreaming consciousness would not be adequately accounted for by the supposition of the real mosquito that is the cause of it; the only adequate explanation of the transformed impression received is to be found (as in a dream already narrated) in a creature as large as a lobster. This creature is the symbol of the real mosquito.[148] We have the same phenomenon under somewhat similar conditions in the intoxication of chloroform and nitrous oxide.

The obscuration during sleep of the external sensory channels, with the checks on false conclusions they furnish, is not alone sufficient to explain the symbolism of dreams. The dissociation of thought during sleep, with the diminished attention and apperception involved, is also a factor. The magnification of special isolated sensory impressions in dreaming consciousness is associated with a general bluntness, even an absolute quiescence, of the external sensory mechanism. One part of the organism, and it seems usually a visceral part, is thus apt to magnify its place in consciousness at the expense of the rest. As Vaschide and Piéron say, during sleep 'the internal sensations develop at the expense of the peripheral sensations.' That indeed seems to be the secret of the immense emotional turmoil of our dreams. Yet it is very rare for these internal sensations to reach the sleeping brain as what they are. They become conscious, not as literal messages, but as symbolical transformations. The excited or labouring heart recalls to the brain no memory of itself, but some symbolical image of excitement or labour. There is association, indeed, but it is association not along the matter-of-fact lines of our ordinary waking civilised life, but along much more fundamental and primitive channels, which in waking life we have now abandoned or never knew.

There is another consideration which may be put forward to account for one group of dream-symbolisms. It has been found that certain hysterical subjects of old standing when in the hypnotic state are able to receive mental pictures of their own viscera, even though they may be quite ignorant of any knowledge of the shape of these viscera. This autoscopy, as it has been called, has been specially studied by Féré, Comar, and Sollier.[149] Hysteria is a condition which is in many respects closely allied to sleep, and if it is to be accepted as a real fact that autoscopy occasionally occurs in the abnormal psychic state of hypnotic sleep in hysterical persons, it is possible to ask whether it may not sometimes occur normally in the allied state of sleep. In the hypnotic state it is known that parts of the organism normally involuntary may become subject to the will; it is not incredible that similarly parts normally insensitive may become sufficiently sensitive to reveal their own shape or condition. We may thus, indeed, the more easily understand those premonitory dreams in which the dreamer becomes conscious of morbid conditions which are not perceptible to waking consciousness until they have attained a greater degree of intensity.[150]

The recognition of the transformation in dream life of internal sensations into symbolic motor imagery is ancient. Hippocrates said that to dream, for instance, of springs and wells denoted some disturbance of the bladder. In such a case a disturbed bladder sends to the brain, not the naked message of its own needs, but a symbolic message of those needs in motor imagery, as (in one case known to me) of a large cistern with a stream of water flowing from it.[151] Sometimes the symbolism aroused by visceral processes remains physiological; thus indigestion frequently leads to dreams of eating, as of chewing all sorts of inedible and repulsive substances, and occasionally—it would seem more abnormally—to agreeable dreams of food.

It is due to the genius of Professor Sigmund Freud, of Vienna—to-day the most daring and original psychologist in the field of morbid psychic phenomena—that we owe the long-neglected recognition of the large place of symbolism in dreaming. Scherner had argued in favour of this aspect of dreams, but he was an undistinguished and unreliable psychologist, and his arguments failed to be influential. Freud avows himself a partisan of Scherner's theory of dreaming and opponent of all other theories,[152] but his treatment of the matter is incomparably more searching and profound. Freud, however, goes far beyond the fundamental—and, as I believe, undeniable—proposition that dream-imagery is largely symbolic. He holds that behind the symbolism of dreams there lies ultimately a wish; he believes, moreover, that this wish tends to be really of more or less sexual character, and, further, that it is tinged by elements that go back to the dreamer's infantile days. As Freud views the mechanism of dreams, it is far from exhibiting mere disordered mental activity, but is (much as he has also argued hysteria to be[153]) the outcome of a desire, which is driven back by a kind of inhibition or censure (i.e., that kind of moral check which is still more alert in the waking state), and is seeking new forms of expression. There is first in the dream the process of what Freud calls condensation (Verdichtung), a process which is that fusion of separate elements which must be recognised at the outset of every discussion of dreaming, but Freud maintains that in this fusion all the elements have a point in common, and overlie one another like the pictures in a Galtonian composite photograph. Then there comes the process of displacement or transference (Verschiebung), a process by which the really central and emotional basis of the dream is concealed beneath trifles. Then there is the process of dramatisation or transformation into a concrete situation of which the elements have a symbolic value. Thus, as Maeder puts it, summarising Freud's views, 'behind the apparently insignificant events of the day utilised in the dream there is always an important idea or event hidden. We only dream of things that are worth while. What at first sight seems to be a trifle is a grey wall which hides a great palace. The significance of the dream is not so much held in the dream itself as in that substratum of it which has not passed the threshold and which analysis alone can bring to light.'

'We only dream of things that are worth while.' That is the point at which many of us are no longer able to follow Freud. That dreams of the type studied by Freud do actually occur may be accepted; it may even be considered proved. But to assert that all dreams must be made to fit into this one formula is to make far too large a demand. As regards the presentative element in dreams—the element that is based on actual sensory stimulation—it is in most cases unreasonable to invoke Freud's formula at all. If, when I am asleep, the actual song of a bird causes me to dream that I am at a concert, that picture may be regarded as a natural symbol of the actual sensation, and it is unreasonable to expect that psycho-analysis could reveal any hidden personal reason why the symbol should take the form of a concert. And, if so, then Freud's formula fails to hold good for phenomena which cover one of the two main divisions of dreams, even on a superficial classification, and perhaps enter into all dreams.

But even if we take dreams of the remaining or representative class—the dreams made up of images not directly dependent on actual sensation—we still have to maintain a cautious attitude. A very large proportion of the dreams in this class seem to be, so far as the personal life is concerned, in no sense 'worth while.' It would, indeed, be surprising if they were. It seems to be fairly clear that in sleep, as certainly in the hypnagogic state, attention is diminished, and apperceptive power weakened. That alone seems to involve a relaxation of the tension by which we will and desire our personal ends. At the same time, by no longer concentrating our psychic activities at the focus of desire it enables indifferent images to enter more easily the field of sleeping consciousness. It might even be argued that the activity of desire, when it manifests itself in sleep and follows the course indicated by Freud, corresponds to a special form of sleep in which attention and apperception, though in modified forms, are more active than in ordinary sleep.[154] Such dreams seem to occur with special frequency, or in more definitely marked forms, in the neurotic and especially the hysterical, and if it is true that the hysterical are to some extent asleep even when they are awake, it may also be said that they are to some extent awake even when they are asleep. Freud certainly holds, probably with truth, that there is no fundamental distinction between normal people and psychoneurotic people, and that there is, for instance, as Ferenczi says, emphasising this point, 'a streak of hysterical disposition in everybody.' Freud has, indeed, made interesting analytic studies of his own dreams, but the great body of material accumulated by him and his school is derived from the dreams of the neurotic. Thus Stekel states that he has analysed many thousand dreams, but his lengthy study on the interpretation of dreams deals exclusively with the dreams of the neurotic.[155] Stekel believes, moreover, that from the structure of the dream life conclusions may be drawn, not only as to the life and character of the dreamer, but also as to his neurosis, the hysterical person dreaming differently from the obsessed person, and so on. If that is the case we are certainly justified in doubting whether conclusions drawn from the study of the dreams of neurotic people can be safely held to represent the normal dream life, even though it may be true that there is no definite frontier between them. Whatever may be the case among the neurotic, in ordinary normal sleep the images that drift across the field of consciousness, though they have a logic of their own, seem in a large proportion of cases to be quite explicable without resort to the theory that they stand in vital but concealed relationship to our most intimate self.