The World of Dreams

by Havelock Ellis

It is not, however, necessary to believe that fatigue, in the ordinary sense of the word, whether physical or mental, is the invariable accompaniment of paramnesia. If it is the presence of a condition resembling that of sleep or the hypnagogic state which predisposes to the experience, that condition may be produced by other circumstances. Distraction, excited hyperaesthesia simulating increased power, and various chronic psychic states due to a highly-strung or over-strained nervous system may all tend in the same direction, even though no sense of exhaustion is felt.[233] This is doubtless why it is that so many poets, novelists, and other men of strenuous intellectual aptitude are liable to this experience.

It has been argued by some who admit that there is often an element of fatigue in paramnesia,[234] that the real cause of the false memory is an abnormal celerity of perception, perhaps due to hyperaesthesia. The scene would thus be perceived so quickly that the subject concludes that he must have had this experience before. That the subject often has a feeling of unusual rapidity of perception may very well be admitted. But there is no reason whatever to suppose that the perception actually is received with any such unusual rapidity. The probabilities are in the other direction. We know that many influences (such as drugs like alcohol) which produce a feeling of heightened and quickened perceptions really have a slowing and dulling effect, in the same way as the wise and beautiful things we utter in dreams are usually found on awaking to be commonplace, if not meaningless. There is no evidence to show that paramnesia is accompanied by a real heightening of perception, while, as we have seen, a broad survey of the facts makes it more reasonable to suppose that we have, on the contrary, a sudden fall towards the dream state, a state in which, as Tissié and others have pointed out, there are many stages.

It must be remembered in this connection that in the hypnagogic and other states related to sleep we are not able to estimate time conditions consciously, though, as the frequent ability to wake at fixed moments indicates, we may do so subconsciously. Time is long, short, or non-existent in dream-like states. This is always true of the onset of the hypnagogic state. When I am suddenly awakened at night by a voice or a bell or other stimulus, I often find it very difficult to say whether I was or was not already awake, and have frequently replied, when so awakened, that I was already awake. That is an illusion, as is shown by the frequency with which elderly people who fall asleep in the day time, will declare, though they may have been snoring a moment before, that they have never been asleep. By a somewhat similar paramnesic illusion we can never fix the exact moment when we awake. When we become conscious that we are awake it always seems to us that we are already awake, awake for an indefinite time, and not that we have just awakened. If I had to register the exact moment I awake in the morning I should usually feel that I was considerably late in making the observation. It seems that the imperfect hypnagogic consciousness projects itself behind. At the first onset, consciousness is not sufficiently developed to be able to realise that it is beginning, and when it becomes sufficiently developed to make such a statement the moment when it can be correctly made is already past. Consciousness is only able to assert that it has been continuing for an indefinite time. And that assertion involves a paramnesic illusion of putting back a present experience into the past, analogous to the illusion of pseudo-reminiscence.[235]

If we realise these characteristics of paramnesia we can scarcely fail to conclude that we are concerned here with illusions which, while they fall within the sphere of memory, are largely conditioned by the whole psychic condition. As in dreams, it is inattention, failure of apperception, defective association of the mental contents, which make the paramnesia possible. Paramnesia is, as Fouillée has said, a kind of diplopia or seeing double in the mental field. 'I have the impression,' says one of the writers on this subject who himself experiences the sensation, 'that the present reality has a double.' Actual double vision is due to the failure of that muscular co-ordination which, as Ribot and others have insisted, is of the very essence of attention. This wider psychic basis on which paramnesia rests has of late been recognised by several psychologists. Thus Léon-Kindberg states that in paramnesia there is an absence of mental attention, of the effort of synthesis necessary to grasp an actual occurrence, which is, therefore, perceived with the same facility as a memory not requiring synthesis, with the resulting illusion that it is a memory.[236] Ballet, again, regards paramnesia as a transitory or permanent psychasthenic state, due to dissociation.[237] Dugas, also, who has repeatedly returned to this subject during many years, in his latest contributions attaches primary importance to this broader factor of paramnesia. In analysing memory, he says, there is an element which, though often overlooked, is capital: the recognition of a state of consciousness not merely as passed, but as bound up with our own personal past; when that synthetic function ceases to be accomplished, or is only accomplished defectively, then memory is lacking or perverted. Nervous weakness, he proceeds, produces failure of attention, the inhibitory power of attention being no longer exerted, and the psychic elements fall back to anarchy. Now many psychic states, such as sensations, recollections, and images, differ from each other less by their substance than by the way in which the mind takes hold of and apprehends them. The mind seizes a sensation with a stronger grasp than a recollection, and a recollection with a stronger grasp than an image. When attention is relaxed the line of demarcation between these psychic states tends to be effaced; the sensation becomes vague and floating like the recollection and the image, while the recollection and the image, on the contrary, become objective and acquire something of the brilliance and relief of the sensation. The very same cause—enfeeblement of attention—thus produces opposite effects, on the one side raising the tone, on the other lowering it, so that states of mind which are ordinarily distinct tend to be approximated and confused, as we may observe in the hypnagogic condition.[238]

Although Dugas makes no reference to Janet, it is not difficult to see that he has assimilated some of the views of that distinguished investigator of psychic mysteries. Janet, as we know, in various morbid psychic conditions, attaches great explanatory force to the individual's loss of hold, through psychic weakness, of his own personality, and to the diminished sense of reality and even depersonalisation thence ensuing. It so happens that Janet himself has set forth a theory of pseudo-reminiscence which is characteristic of his own attitude, and also harmonises with the wider outlook which now marks the attempts to explain these perversions of memory. Janet declares that pseudo-reminiscence is a negative phenomenon and belongs to a group in which various other feelings of diminished sense of reality belong. These people all say in effect: 'It seems to me that these things are not real; it seems to me that these events are not actual or present.' The essence of this form of paramnesia is thus more a negation of the present than an affirmation of the past. 'The function of adaptation to the present moment,' Janet remarks, 'is the most complicated and the most recent of all. The function of the real is the most elevated and the most difficult of all cerebral functions.' Under various influences there is a diminution of nervous and psychic tension, and such suppression of the high tension of the mind leaves only the lower functions subsisting. When that fall of tension is rapid, there may be a crisis of which pseudo-reminiscence is one of the symptoms.[239] Janet would thus place pseudo-reminiscence among the manifestations of psychasthenia, though he leaves untouched the difficult question of its precise mechanism.

The most comprehensive attempt to explain the mystery of paramnesia in recent years is certainly that made in an elaborately eclectic study by one of the most distinguished of living French thinkers, Professor Bergson.[240] He first casts a glance over what he considers the two main groups of explanations of this puzzling phenomenon: (1) those, advocated by Ribot, Fouillée, Lalande, Arnaud, Piéron, Myers, etc., which involve the more or less simultaneous existence in consciousness of two images, of which one is the reproduction of the other; (2) those advocated by Janet, Heymans, Léon-Kindberg, Dromard and Albès, etc., which insist on the lower mental tone, the diminished attention, the lack of synthetising power, which mark the condition in which paramnesia occurs. Bergson is quite ready to accept the principles of both these groups of explanations, and to combine them. But, he argues, to understand the phenomenon adequately, we must go deeper; we must analyse the normal mechanism of memory. And he finds, if we do this, that not merely the moment of a paramnesic illusion, but every moment of our life, offers two aspects, actual and virtual, perception on one side, and memory on the other. The moment itself, indeed, consists of such a scission, for it is always moving, always a fleeting boundary between the immediate past and the immediate future, and would be a mere abstraction if it were not 'precisely the mobile mirror which ceaselessly reflects perception in recollection.' When the matter is thus regarded a recollection is seen to be, in reality, not something which has been, but something which is, proceeding pari passu with the perception it reproduces. It is a recollection of the moment taking place at that moment. Belonging to the past as regards its form, it belongs to the present as regards its matter. It is recollection of the present. Now this is exactly the state in which the paramnesic person consciously finds himself, and the only problem before us, therefore, is to ascertain why every one at every moment is not conscious of the same experience. Bergson replies that nothing is more useless for present action than the recollection of the present. It has nothing to tell us; we hold the real object, and to give up that for its recollection would be to sacrifice the substance to the shadow. Therefore we obstinately and persistently turn away from the recollection of the present. It emerges consciously only under the influence of some abnormal or pathological disturbance of attention. Paramnesia is an anomaly of this kind, and it is due to a temporary enfeeblement of the general attention to life, a momentary arrest of the forward movement of consciousness. 'False recognition,' Bergson concludes, 'may thus be regarded as the most inoffensive form of inattention to life. It seems to result from the combined play of perception and memory given up to their own energy. It would take place at every moment if it were not that will, ceaselessly directed towards action, prevents the present from folding in on itself by pushing it indefinitely into the future.'

So far as my own explanation is concerned, it will be seen that I still place weight on the general condition of temporary or chronic nervous fatigue as the soil on which paramnesia arises—a belief now accepted by most psychologists[241]—and that I think we must search for the clue to the mechanism of the illusion in those dreaming and hypnagogic states in which it most often occurs. As regards a definite explanation of the mechanism we must, in the face of so many ingenious and complicated theories, perhaps still await more general agreement.[242] What I have suggested, and am still inclined to maintain, is that the psychic enfeeblement, temporary or chronic, which is the general preliminary condition of paramnesia, whether or not there is any subjective sensation of increased power, may account for the paramnesia by bringing an externally aroused perception down to a lower and fainter stage on which it is on a level with an internally aroused perception—a memory. Just as in hypnagogic paramnesia the vivid and life-like dream, or internal impression, is raised to the class of memories, and becomes the shadow of a real experience, so in waking paramnesia the external impression is lowered to the same class. Perception is alike dulled in each case, and the immediate experience follows the line of least resistance—this time too carelessly or too prematurely—to join the great bulk of our experiences.

We thus realise how it is that that doubling of experience occurs. The mind has for the moment become flaccid and enfeebled; its loosened texture has, as it were, abnormally enlarged the meshes in which sensations are caught and sifted, so that they run through too easily. In other words, they are not properly apperceived. To use a crude simile, it is as though we poured water into a sieve. The impressions of the world which are actual sensations as they strike the relaxed psychic meshwork are instantaneously passed through to become memories, and we see them in both forms at the same moment, and are unable to distinguish one from the other.