The World of Dreams

by Havelock Ellis

The wish-dream of Freud's type has presented itself for consideration here, because it is a special and elaborate illustration of symbolism in dreaming. The important place of symbols in dreaming is by no means dependent on the validity of this particular type of dream, and we may now proceed to continue the discussion of the significance of the symbolic tendency during sleep in its most important form.

The symbols we have so far been mainly concerned with have been the result of a tendency of dreaming consciousness to objectify feelings and affections within the organism in concrete objects or processes outside the organism. In its complete form this symbolic tendency becomes the objectivation of part of the dreamer's feelings or personality in a distinct imaginary personality. A process of dramatisation occurs, and the dreamer finds himself in action and reaction, friendly or hostile or indifferent, with seemingly external personalities which, by the light of the analysis possible on awakening, are demonstrably created out of split-off portions of his own personality.[163] A common and simple form of such objectivation, closely allied to some of the symbolisms already brought forward, occurs when the dreamer sees the image of a person suffering from some affection of a part of the body and finds on awakening that he is himself experiencing pain or discomfort in that part. Thus a medical man dreams he is examining a tumour in a patient's groin, and on awakening finds slight irritation in the same region of his own body. And similarly, just as our bodily needs, when experienced during sleep, may be symbolised by inanimate natural objects and processes, so they may also become objective in the image of another person who is occupied in gratifying the need which we are ourselves unconsciously experiencing.

An interesting and significant group of cases is furnished by those dreams in which—as the result of some compression or effort—the tactile and muscular sensations of our own limbs are split off from sleeping consciousness and built up into an imaginary personality. Thus a medical friend, shortly after an attack of influenza, dreamed that in conversation with a lady patient his hand rested on her knee; she requested him to remove it, but his efforts to do so were fruitless, and he awoke in horror from this unprofessional situation to find that his hand was firmly clasped between his own knees. His body had thus been divided in dreaming consciousness between himself and an imaginary other person; the knee had become the other person's, while the hand remained his own, the hand being claimed in preference to the knee no doubt on account of its greater tactile sensibility and more complexly intimate association with the brain. In the hypnagogic (or hypnopompic) state such dream sensations may almost reach the intensity of hallucination. Thus, after an indigestible supper, I awake with the vivid feeling that some one is lying on me and attempting to drag off the bedclothes, and I find myself violently attempting, but apparently in vain, to articulate: 'Who is there?' In a dream of similar type, which occurred when lying on my back (and possibly with slight indigestion due to an unusually late dinner), I awoke making a kind of inarticulate exclamation which awakened my wife. I had dreamed that I was lying in bed, and that some unseen creature—more supernatural than human, it seemed—was violently dragging the bedclothes off me, while I shouted to it, very distinctly it seemed to me, 'Avaunt, avaunt!'

It is evident that my own sense of oppression, my own unconscious and involuntary movements in disturbing the bedclothes, were reconstructed by sleeping consciousness as the actions of an external person, in the second case, a supernatural creature, which, it is interesting to note, I duly accepted as such and addressed in the conventionally appropriate manner of old romance. The illusion may persist for some moments after waking. A lady, after breathing rather loudly and convulsively for a few seconds, wakes up, saying 'There is a rat or a mouse on the bed, shaking it up and down.' 'You were asleep,' her husband replied, 'as I knew by your breathing.' 'Oh, I was breathing like that,' she said, 'to make it jump off.' Here we see that, somewhat as in the previous cases, the dreamer's own muscular activity is, during sleep, reconstructed into the image of an external force; but when she is in the semi-waking hypnagogic stage, she recognises that the activity was her own, though still unable to dismiss the delusion based on the theory formed during sleep.

At this point we reach the threshold of hallucination, and the next case to be brought forward may be said to lie on the threshold, for an impression received in the hypnagogic (or hypnopompic) stage is accepted in its illusional form, even when the dreamer is fully awake. A farmer's daughter—a bright girl of twenty-one, with quick nervous reactions, but untrained mind—dreamed that she saw her brother (dead some years previously) with blood streaming from his fingers. She awoke in a fright, and was comforting herself with the thought that it was only a dream when she felt a hand grip her shoulder three times in succession. There was no one in the room, the door was locked, and no explanation seemed possible to her. She was very frightened, got up at once, dressed, and spent the rest of the night downstairs working. She was so convinced that a real hand had touched her that, although it seemed impossible, she asked her brothers if they had not been playing a trick on her. The nervous shock was considerable, and she was unable to sleep well for some weeks afterwards. She naturally knew nothing about abnormal psychic phenomena, and was utterly puzzled to explain the experience, except by supposing that it may have been a ghost. The explanation is really very simple. It is well recognised that involuntary muscular twitches may occur in the shoulder, especially after it has been subjected to pressure, and that in some cases such contractions may simulate a touch.[164] The dream of a bleeding hand indicates, when we bear in mind the tendency to objectify sensations symbolically, now familiar to us in dreaming, that the dreamer's arm was probably pressed beneath her in a cramped position.[165] This pressure would account, not only for the dream, but for the muscular twitches occurring on awakening. The nature of the dream, the terrified emotional state it produced, and the mental obscurity of the hypnagogic state, naturally combined, in a subject unaccustomed to self-analysis, to create an illusion which reflection is unable to dispel, though in the normal waking state she would probably have given no attention at all to such muscular twitches. Strictly speaking, such an experience is an illusion—that is to say, a misinterpretation of a real sensation—and not a hallucination—or perception without known objective causation—but there is no clear line of demarcation. In any case it may now be taken as proved that hallucinations tend to occur in the neighbourhood of sleep, and therefore to partake of the nature of dreams.[166]

So far we have been concerned with the tendency in dreams to objectify portions of the body by constructing out of them new personalities. But precisely the same process goes on in sleep with regard to our thoughts and feelings. We split off portions of these also and construct other personalities out of them, and sometimes even endow the persons thus formed with thoughts and feelings more native to our own normal personality than those which we reserve for ourselves. Thus a lady who dreamed that when walking with a friend she discovered a species of animal fruit, a kind of damson containing a snail, expressed her delight at finding a combination so admirably adapted to culinary purposes; it was the friend who, retaining the attitude of her own waking moments, uttered an exclamation of disgust. Most of the dreams in which there is any dramatic element are due to this splitting up of personality; in our dreams we may experience shame or confusion from the rebukes or the arguments of other persons, but the persons who administer the rebuke or apply the argument are still ourselves.[167]

Some writers on dreaming have marvelled greatly at this tendency of the sleeping mind to objectify portions of itself, and so to create imaginary personalities and evolve dramatic situations. It has seemed to them quite unaccountable except as the outcome of a special gift of imagination appertaining to sleep. Yet, remarkable as it is, this process is simply the inevitable outcome of the conditions under which psychic life exists during sleep. If we realise that a more or less pronounced degree of dissociation of the contents of the mind occurs during sleep, and if we also realise that, sleeping fully as much as waking, mind is a thing that instinctively reasons, and cannot refrain from building up hypotheses, then we may easily see how the personages and situations of dreams develop. Much the same process might, under some circumstances, occur in waking life. If, for instance, we heard an unknown voice speaking behind a curtain, we could not fail to build up an imaginary person in connection with that voice, the characteristics of the imaginary person being largely determined by the nature of the voice and of the things it uttered: it would, further, be quite easy to enter into conversation with the person we had thus constructed. That is what seems to occur in dreams. We hear a voice behind the curtain of darkness, and to fit that voice and the things it utters we instinctively form a picture which, in virtue of the hallucinatory aptitude of sleep, is thrown against the curtain; it is then quite easy to enter into conversation with the person we have thus constructed. It no more occurs to us during sleep to suppose that the voice we hear is only a voice and nothing more, than it would occur to us awake to suppose that the voice behind the curtain is only a voice and nothing more. The process is the same; the difference is that in dreams we are, without knowing it, living among what from the waking point of view are called hallucinations.

This process by which dreams are formed in sleeping consciousness through the splitting of the dreamer's personality for the construction of other personalities has been recognised ever since dreams began to be seriously studied. Maury referred to the scission of personality in dreams.[168] Delboeuf dealt with what he termed the altruising by the dreamer of part of his representations.[169] Foucault terms the same process personalisation.[170] Giessler attempts elaborately to explain the enigma of self-diremption—the formation of a secondary self—in dreams; if, he argues, a touch or other sensation exceeds the dream-body's capacity of adaptation—i.e., if the state of stimulus is above the apperceptive threshold—only one part of the perception is referred to the dream-body and the other is transferred to a secondary self.[171] This explanation, while it very fairly covers the presentative class of dreams, directly connected with sensory stimuli, cannot so easily be applied to the dramatisation of our representative dreams, which are not obviously traceable to direct bodily stimulation.

The splitting up of personality is indeed a very pronounced and widely extended tendency of the mind, and has, during recent years, been elaborately studied. We thus have the basis of that psychic phenomenon which is variously termed secondary personality, double personality, duplex personality, multiple personality, alternation of personality, etc.,[172] and in earlier ages was regarded as due to possession by demons. Such conditions seem to be usually associated with hysteria. The essential fact about hysteria is, according to Janet, its lack of synthetising power, which is at the same time a lack of attention and of apperception, and has as its result a disintegration of the field of consciousness into mutually exclusive parts; that is to say, there is a process of dissociation. Now that is a condition resembling, as we have seen, the condition found in dreaming. It is not, therefore, difficult to accept the view of Sollier and others, that hysteria is a condition allied to sleep, a condition of vigilambulism in which the patients are often unable to obtain normal sleep, simply because they are all the time in a state of abnormal sleep; as one said to Sollier: 'I cannot sleep because I am asleep all the time.' It may thus be the case that hysterical multiple personalities[173] furnish a pathological analogue of that tendency to the dramatic objectivation of portions of our personality which is normal and healthy in dreams.

Similarly in insanity we have an even more constant and pronounced tendency for the subject to attribute his own sensations to imaginary individuals, and to create personalities out of portions of the real personality. All the illusions, delusions, and hallucinations of the insane are merely the manifold manifestations of this tendency. Without it the insanity would not exist. It is not because he is subjected to unusual sensations—visionary, auditory, tactile, olfactory, visceral, etc.—that a man is insane. It is because he creates imaginary personalities to account for these sensations; if his food tastes strange some one has given him poison if he hears a strange voice it is some one communicating with him by telephones or microphones or hypnotism; if he feels a strange internal sensation it is perhaps because he has another person inside him. The case has even been recorded of a man who attributed any feeling he experienced, even the most normal sensations of hunger and thirst, to the people around him. It is exactly the same process as goes on in our dreams. The sane man, the normal waking man, may experience all these strange sensations, but he recognises that they are the spontaneous outcome of his own organisation.