The World of Dreams

by Havelock Ellis

WHEN we fall asleep we enter a dim and ancient house of shadow, unillumined by any direct ray from the outer world of waking life. We are borne about through its chambers, without conscious volition of our own; we fall down its mouldy and rotten staircases, we are haunted by strange sounds and odours from its mysterious recesses; we move among phantoms we cannot consciously control. As we emerge into the world of daily life again, for an instant the sunlight seems to flash into the obscure house before the door closes behind us; we catch one vivid glimpse of the chambers we have been wandering in, and a few more or less fragmentary memories come back to us of the life we have led there. But they soon fade away in the light of common day, and if a few hours later we seek to recall the strange experiences we have passed through, it usually happens that the visions of the night have already dissolved in memory into a few shreds of mist we can no longer reconstruct.

For most of us our whole knowledge ends here. Our dreams are real enough while they last, but the interests of waking life absorb us so entirely that we rarely have leisure, and still less inclination, to subject our sleeping adventures, trivial and absurd as they must usually seem, to the careful tests which waking intelligence is accustomed to subject more obviously important matters to. The world of dreams and the mysterious light which prevails there[1] are abandoned entirely to our sleeping activities.

This leading characteristic of dream life—the fact that it takes place in another and more shadowy world and in a different kind of consciousness[2]—has led to the criticism of the study of dreams from the scientific side. We cannot really study our dreams, these objectors say, because we—that is to say, our waking consciousness—cannot come sufficiently closely in contact with them. Dreams, it is argued, are inevitably transformed in our hands; what we are studying is not our dreams, but only our waking, and probably altogether false, impressions of our dreams. There is a certain element of truth in this objection. It is very difficult, indeed impossible, to recall exactly, and in their proper order, even the details of a real adventure which has only just happened to us. It is, obviously, incomparably more difficult to recall an experience which took place, under such shadowy conditions, in a world so remote from the world of waking life. There is, further, the very definite difficulty that we only catch our dreams for a moment by the light, as it were, of the open door as we are emerging from sleep. In other words, our waking consciousness is for a moment observing and interpreting a process in another kind of consciousness, or even if we assert that it is the same consciousness it is still a consciousness that has been working under quite different conditions from waking consciousness, and accepting data which in the waking state it would not accept. For the student of dreams it must ever be a serious question how far the facts become inevitably distorted in this process. Sleeping or waking, it is probable, our consciousness never embraces the whole of the possible psychic field within us. There are, when we are dreaming as well as when we are awake—as will become clearer in the sequel—subconscious, or imperfectly conscious, states just below our consciousness, and exerting an influence upon it.[3] Our latent psychic possessions, among which dreams move, would seem to be by no means always at the same depth; the specific gravity of consciousness, as it were, varies, and these latent elements rise or fall, becoming nearer to the conscious surface or falling further away from it. But the greatest change must take place when the waking surface is reached and the outer world breaks on sleeping consciousness. In that change there is doubtless a process of necessary and automatic transformation and interpretation. We may picture it, perhaps, as somewhat the same process as when a person skilled in both languages takes up a foreign book and reads it out in his own tongue. With practice the reader may become unconscious that he is transforming everything, that the words he utters are different from the words he sees, and that he even transposes their order, sometimes putting in the middle of a sentence the verb he sees at the end.

Yet even if we admit that the passage from sleeping to waking consciousness involves a change as complete as this—and it is probable, as we shall see, that some such change sometimes takes place—for a faithful interpreter the sense still remains the same. It is impossible to believe that the witness of waking consciousness to the nature of the visions it has caught at the threshold between sleeping and waking life is false, and the most convincing evidence of this is the utter unlikeness of these visions to the data of ordinary waking life.

But even this conclusion has been subjected to severe criticism which we have to face before we proceed further. Foucault, an acute investigator of dream psychology—carrying to its extreme point a position more partially and tentatively stated by Delbœuf and Tannery—has denied that our dreams, as they finally present themselves to waking consciousness, at all correspond to the psychic process in sleep upon which they are founded, and he especially insists that the logical connections are superadded.[4] He considers that dreaming is an 'observation of memory' made under such conditions that 'it would be very imprudent to regard the remembrance of the dream as reproducing faithfully the mental state of sleep.' During sleep, he believes, our dream ideas proceed, concurrently, it may be, but separately and independently; at the moment when awakening begins, the mind, as an act of immediate memory, grasps the plurality of separate pictures and applies itself spontaneously to the task of organising them according to the rules of logic and the laws of the real world, making a drama of them as like as possible to the dramas of waking life.[5] He agrees with Goblot that 'the dream we remember is a waking thought,' and with Tannery that 'we do not remember our dreams, but only the reconstructions of them we effected at the moment of waking.' It is after awakening, Foucault concludes, that the dream develops, and its final shape depends on the period at which it is noted down; 'the evolution of the dream after awakening is a logical evolution, dominated and directed by the instinctive need to give a reasonable appearance to the ensemble of images and sensations present to the mind, and to assimilate the representation of the dream to the system of representations which constitutes our knowledge of the real world.'[6]

In arguing his thesis, Foucault makes much of the modifications which can be proved to take place if any one is asked to repeat a dream at intervals of months. Under the influence of time and repetition a dream becomes more coherent and more conformed to reality. In illustration Foucault presents two versions of an insignificant dream in which a lady imagines that she is out with her husband for a drive, and in the course of it experiences a natural need which she seeks an opportunity to satisfy; the details of the first version were highly improbable; some months later they had become much more like what might have occurred in real life. Such a process, Foucault thinks, is taking place from the first in the making of dreams as we know them awake.

There are, undoubtedly, facts which may seem to support Foucault's argument that the logic of the dream, as we know it, is not in the original dream, but is introduced afterwards. Thus I once dreamed in the morning that I asked my wife if she had been into a certain room, and that she replied, 'Can't get in.' I immediately awoke and realised that my wife had actually spoken these words, not to me, but to an approaching servant, in anticipation of a message about entering a neighbouring room of which the door was locked. It is thus evident that although it seemed to me in my dream that the question came first and the answer followed in the ordinary course, in reality the answer came first. The question was a theory, supplied automatically by sleeping intelligence and prefixed to the answer, in which order they both appeared to sleeping consciousness, that is to say, in the only way in which sleeping consciousness can ever be known, as translated into waking consciousness.[7]

It must be borne in mind that such a dream as I have recorded—in which an actual sensory experience is introduced, untransformed, as a foreign body into sleeping consciousness—is not a typical dream. Dreams are, however, without doubt of various kinds, and we may well admit that there is a class of dreams formed in this way. That supposition will, indeed, be helpful in explaining several dreams I shall have to record. The process is much the same as when a nervous person receives a telegram, and at once assumes that some dreaded accident has occurred, and that the telegram is the announcement of it. The craving for reasons is instinctive, and the dreamer's sense of logic even dominates his sense of time.

But Foucault's argument is that waking consciousness effects this logical construction of the dream. Here his position is weak and incapable of proof. It is, indeed, contrary to all the tests we are able to apply to it. If it is the object of the logic of our dreams to make them conformable to our waking experience, that end, we must admit, is in most cases very far from being attained. In their original form, as Foucault views the matter, our dreams are simple dissociated images. In that shape they would present nothing whatever to shock the consciousness of waking life. The logic, hypothetically introduced solely to make them conformable to real life, is frequently a preposterous logic such as the consciousness of waking life could not accept or even conceive. This fact alone serves to throw serious doubt upon the theory that it is waking consciousness which impresses its logic upon our dreams.