Even in waking life, and at normal moments which are not those of reverie, it seems possible to trace the appearance in the field of consciousness of images which are evoked neither by any known mental or physical circumstance of the moment, or any hidden desire, images that are as disconnected from the immediate claims of desire and even of association as those of dreams seem so largely to be. It sometimes occurs to me—as doubtless it occurs to other people—that at some moment when my thoughts are normally occupied with the work immediately before me, there suddenly appears on the surface of consciousness a totally unrelated picture. A scene arises, vague but usually recognisable, of some city or landscape—Australian, Russian, Spanish, it matters not what—seen casually long years ago, and possibly never thought of since, and possessing no kind of known association either with the matter in hand or with my personal life generally. It comes to the surface of consciousness as softly, as unexpectedly, as disconnectedly, as a minute bubble might arise and break on the surface of an actual stream from ancient organic material silently disintegrating in the depths beneath.[156] Every one who has travelled much cannot fail to possess, hidden in his psychic depths, a practically infinite number of such forgotten pictures, devoid of all personal emotion. It is possible to maintain, as a matter of theory, that when they come up to consciousness, they are evoked by some real, though untraceable, resemblance which they possess to the psychic or physical state existing when they reappear. But that theory cannot be demonstrated. Nor, it may be added, is it more plausible than the simple but equally unprovable theory that such scenes do really come to the surface of consciousness as the result of some slight spontaneous disintegration in a minute cerebral centre, and have no more immediately preceding psychic cause than my psychic realisation of the emergence of the sun from behind a cloud has any psychic preceding cause.
Similarly, in insanity, Liepmann, in his study Ueber Ideenflucht, has forcibly argued that ordinary logorrhœa—the incontinence of ideas linked together by superficial associations of resemblance or contiguity—is a linking without direction, that is, corresponding to no interest, either practical or theoretical, of the individual. Or, as Claparède puts it, logorrhœa is a trouble in the reaction of interest in life. It seems most reasonable to believe that in ordinary sleep the flow of imagery follows, for the most part, the same easy course. That course may to waking consciousness often seem peculiar, but to waking consciousness the conditions of dreaming life are peculiar. Under these conditions, however, we may well believe that the tendency to movement in the direction of least resistance still prevails. And as attention and will are weakened and loosened during sleep, the tense concentration on personal ends must also be relaxed. We become more disinterested. Personal desire tends for the most part rather to fall into the background than to become more prominent. If it were not a period in which desire were ordinarily relaxed, sleep would cease to be a period of rest and recuperation.
Sleeping consciousness is a vast world, a world scarcely less vast than that of waking consciousness. It is futile to imagine that a single formula can cover all its manifold varieties and all its degrees of depth. Those who imagine that all dreaming is a symbolism which a single cypher will serve to interpret must not be surprised if, however unjustly, they are thought to resemble those persons who claim to find on every page of Shakespeare a cypher revealing the authorship of Bacon. In the case of Freud's theory of dream interpretation, I hold the cypher to be real, but I believe that it is impossible to regard so narrow and exclusive an interpretation as adequate to explain the whole world of dreams. It would, a priori, be incomprehensible that sleeping consciousness should exert so extraordinary a selective power among the variegated elements of waking life, and, experientially, there seems no adequate ground to suppose that it does exert such selective action. On the contrary, it is, for the most part, supremely impartial in bringing forward and combining all the manifestations, the most trivial as well as the most intimate, of our waking life. There is a symptom of mental disorder called extrospection, in which the patient fastens his attention so minutely on events that he comes to interpret the most trifling signs and incidents as full of hidden significance, and may so build up a systematised delusion.[157] The investigator of dreams must always bear in mind the risk of falling into morbid extrospection.
Such considerations seem to indicate that it is not true that every dream, every mental image, is 'worth while,' though at the same time they by no means diminish the validity of special and purposive methods of investigating dream consciousness. Freud and those who are following him have shown, by the expenditure of much patience and skill, that his method of dream-interpretation may in many cases yield coherent results which it is not easy to account for by chance. It is quite possible, however, to recognise Freud's service in vindicating the large place of symbolism in dreams, and to welcome the application of his psycho-analytic method to dreams, while yet denying that this is the only method of interpreting dreams. Freud argues that all dreaming is purposive and significant, and that we must put aside the belief that dreams are the mere trivial outcome of the dissociated activity of brain centres. It remains true, however, that, while reason plays a larger part in dreams than most people realise, the activity of dissociated brain centres furnishes one of the best keys to the explanation of psychic phenomena during sleep. It would be difficult to believe in any case that in the relaxation of sleep our thoughts are still pursuing a deliberately purposeful direction under the control of our waking impulses. Many facts indicate—though Freud's school may certainly claim that such facts have not been thoroughly interpreted—that, as a matter of fact, this control is often conspicuously lacking. There is, for instance, the well-known fact that our most recent and acute emotional experiences—precisely those which might most ardently formulate themselves in a wish—are rarely mirrored in our dreams, though recent occurrences of more trivial nature, as well as older events of more serious import, easily find place there. That is easily accounted for by the supposition—not quite in a line with a generalised wish-theory—that the exhausted emotions of the day find rest at night.
It must also be said that even when we admit that a strong emotion may symbolically construct an elaborate dream edifice which needs analysis to be interpreted, we narrow the process unduly if we assert that the emotion is necessarily a wish. Desire is certainly very fundamental in life and very primitive. But there is another equally fundamental and primitive emotion—fear.[158] We may very well expect to find this emotion, as well as desire, subjacent to dream phenomena.[159]
The infantile form of the wish-dream, alike in adults and children, is thus, there can be little doubt, extremely common, and, even in its symbolic forms, it is a real and not rare phenomenon. But it is impossible to follow Freud when he declares that all dreams fall into the group of wish-dreams. The world of psychic life during sleep is, like the waking world, rich and varied; it cannot be covered by a single formula. Freud's subtle and searching analytic genius has greatly contributed to enlarge our knowledge of this world of sleep. We may recognise the value of his contribution to the psychology of dreams while refusing to accept a premature and narrow generalisation.
The wish-dream of the kind elaborately investigated by Freud may be accepted as one type of dreaming, and a very interesting type, but it seems evident that it is only one type. There are even other types which seem closely related to it, and yet are quite distinct. This is, for instance, the case with the contrast-dream. The contrast-dream of Näcke's type represents the emergence of characteristics which are distinctly opposed to the dreamer's character and habits. Thus, in the course of four consecutive nights, I have dreamed in much detail that (1) I was the mayor of a large northern city about to take the chair at a local meeting of the Bible Society; (2) that I was a soldier in the heat of battle; and (3) that I was meditating the step of going on the stage as a comedian—the only rôle of the three which seemed to cause me any nervousness or misgiving. In contrast-dreams of this type we are not concerned with the eruption of concealed and repressed wishes. They are merely based on vestigial possibilities, entirely alien to our temperament as it has developed in life, and only a part of our complex personalities in the sense that, as Schopenhauer said, whatever path we take in life there are latent germs within us which could only have developed in an exactly opposite path. Even the very same dream may be due to quite different causes. To take a very simple dream, for we may best argue on the simplest facts: the dream of eating. We dream of eating when we are hungry, but sometimes we also dream of eating when the stomach is suffering from repletion. The dream is the same, but the psychological mechanism is entirely different, in the one case emotional, in the other intellectual. In the first case the picture of eating is built up in response to an organic visceral craving, and we have an elementary wish-dream of what Freud would call infantile type; in the second case the same dream is a theory, embodied in a concrete picture, to account for the existence of the repletion experienced.
There cannot be the slightest doubt that the wish-dream, in its simple or what Freud calls its infantile form, represents an extremely common type of dream.[160] A large number of the dreams of children are concerned with wishes and their fulfilments. Those dreams of adults which are aroused by actual organic sensations also tend to fall, though not invariably, into the same form. Again, we chance to want a thing when we are awake; when we are asleep we dream we have found it. It may also be said, almost with certainty, that in some cases our dreams are the fulfilment of unexpressed and unconscious waking wishes. Even the best people, it is probable, may occasionally dream of events which represent the fulfilment of wishes they have never consciously formulated. Archbishop Laud was accustomed to note down his dreams in his Diary. On one occasion we find him setting down a disturbing dream, in which he saw the Lord Keeper dead, and 'rotten already.' A little later we find that Laud is 'much concerned at the envy and undeserved hatred borne to me by the Lord Keeper.'[161] It is not difficult to see in the Archbishop's relations to the Lord Keeper an explanation of his dream.
If, however, wishes, conscious or unconscious, are often fulfilled in dreams, and if, as we have seen reason to conclude, symbolism is a fundamental tendency of dreaming activity, it is inevitable that wish-dreams should sometimes take on a symbolic form. It is thus, for instance, that I interpret my dream of being in an English cathedral and seeing on the wall a notice to the effect that at evensong on such a day the edifice will not be illuminated, in order to avoid attracting moths; I awake with a slight headache, and the unilluminated cathedral was the symbol of the coolness and absence of glare which one desires when suffering from headache.
There cannot, also, be any doubt that erotic wishes frequently make themselves felt as dreams, both in the infantile and the symbolic form. It is sufficient to bring forward one illustration. It is furnished by a young lady of somewhat neurotic tendencies and heredity, aged twenty-three, musical and intelligent, who was in love with her music-master, the organist at her church. The dream was written down at the time. 'I was at the school of my childhood, and I was told that I was St. Agnes Virgin and Martyr, and in five minutes' time I was to be beheaded with a large knife. The sheen of the blade frightened me so much that I asked if instead I might be strangled by the man I was in love with. Permission was given if I could induce him to come in time. I ran to our church (saying to myself that I knew it was a dream, but that I must see what he would say) over huge stones that cut my bare feet, and wondered what age I was living in, longing to meet some women in order to find out. When I did, they all wore crinolines. I rushed up the central aisle, which was full of people, thinking that, as I was going to be killed, nothing could matter. Mr. T. (the organist) was giving a choir practice in the vestry. I ran up to him and said: "Come at once, I am going to be killed." He became very angry, and said: "Do go away; you are always interrupting my choir practice." I said: "Don't you understand? I am going to be killed at once; there is a knife hanging over my head, but I would rather be strangled by you, and they said I could if I fetched you in time." As soon as he understood that he came at once. Then it seemed in the dream that we were married, and had a son, who was to be a musical composer. I said I must say goodbye to this son first, and told the nurse to bring him to me. When he came I said: "Good-bye, I am going to be killed." He said, "Mother, am I a boy or a girl? When I am with boys I don't seem like them, and they call me a girl, and yet I don't look like a girl." I replied: "You are both in one, because you are going to be a perfect musical genius."' In this dream, which represents the fulfilment in sleep of an affection unsatisfied in life, we see side by side the infantile and the symbolic fulfilments of the erotic wish, culminating in a gifted musical child. The wish to be strangled is an undoubted erotic symbol,[162] and it is significant that in the course of the dream the accepted death by strangulation became fused with marriage, although the idea of death still inconsistently survives, doubtless because dream consciousness failed to realise that the accepted form of death was a subconsciously furnished symbol of the consummation of marriage.