The World of Dreams

by Havelock Ellis

CHAPTER II

THE ELEMENTS OF DREAM LIFE

The Spontaneous Procession of Dream Imagery—Its Kaleidoscopic Character—Attention in Dreams—Relation of Drug Visions and Hypnagogic Imagery to Dreaming—Colour in Dreams—The Fusion of Dream Imagery—Compared to Dissolving Views—Sources of the Imagery—Various types of Fusion—The Subconscious Element in Dreaming—Verbal Transformations as Links in Dream Imagery—The Reduplication of Visual Imagery in Motor and other Terms.

PERHAPS the most elementary fact about dream vision is the perpetual and unceasing change which it is undergoing at every moment. Sight is for most of us the chief sensory activity of sleeping as it is of waking life; the commonest kind of dream is mainly a picture, but it is always a living and moving picture, however inanimate the objects which appear in vision before us would be in real life. No man ever gazed at a dream picture which was at rest to his sleeping eye as are the pictures we gaze at with our waking eyes. So far as my own experience is concerned, I have rarely in sleep seen a sentence, a word, a letter written on a sheet of dream-paper which was not changing beneath the eye of sleep. I dream, for instance, that I wish to stamp a letter, and look in my pocket-book for a penny stamp; I am able to find stamps of other values, I am able to find penny stamps that are torn or defaced or of an antiquated type disused thirty years ago; all sorts of stamps, as well as little pictures resembling stamps, develop and multiply beneath my gaze; the stamp I seek remains unfound, probably because it had appeared at the beginning of the series and suggested all the rest. That is indicated by another dream (experienced, it may be noted, during the early stage of a cold in the head): I have to catch a train; I see my hat hanging on a peg among other hats, and I move towards it; but as I do so it has vanished; and I wander among rows of hats, of all shapes and sizes, but not one of them mine. Sleeping consciousness is a stream in which we never bathe twice, for it is renewed every second. It is this as much as any characteristic of the visual dream—for the mainly auditory or motor dream often presents less difficulty in this respect—which makes it so difficult to recall and reproduce. We are, as it were, gazing at a constantly revolving kaleidoscope in which every slightest turn produces a new pattern, somewhat resembling that which immediately preceded it—so that, if the kaleidoscope were conscious we should say that each picture had been suggested by the preceding pattern—but yet definitely novel.[12]

Delbœuf has denied that this process ever involves any real metamorphosis of images; he regarded it as an illusion due to rapid succession of distinct images which are afterwards combined in memory. That view is not, however, tenable; apart from the fact that it makes the illegitimate assumption that our recollection of a dream is entirely unreliable, it must be remembered that (as Giessler has pointed out) the shock of emotional horror or surprise that frequently accompanies such dreams suffices to prove the reality of the metamorphosis. Thus I once, as a youth, had a vivid dream of an albatross that became transformed into a woman, the beautiful eyes of the albatross taking on a womanly expression, but the bird's beak only being imperfectly changed into a nose as the bird-woman murmured, 'Do you love me?' In this case the vivid surprise of the dream was precisely associated with the simultaneous existence of the two sets of characters.

It is not, however, necessary that there should be any metamorphosis of dream images, nor even that the procession of dream imagery should be continuous. And whether or not there is metamorphosis of images, whether the imagery is continuous or discontinuous, it seems to me that we must admit the possibility of its spontaneous character. That is, indeed, a debated, and, it may be admitted, a debateable point. Thus Foucault[13] accounts for the multiplication of almost similar images sometimes witnessed in dreams as due to desire; we see a number of things because we desire to possess a number of these things, and he explains a dream of Delbœuf's, of a procession of lizards, as due to the fact that Delbœuf was a collector of lizards, in the same way as he would explain the dreams of thirsty people who imagine they are drinking repeated glasses of water or wine. I am quite unable to accept this explanation. The shifting and multiplication of dream imagery, as in the procession of lizards, is a fundamental and elementary character of spontaneous mental imagery, and is constant in some drug visions, notably those occasioned by mescal.[14] The repetition of imaginary drinks in the dreams of a thirsty man belongs to another more special class in explanation of which desire may be more properly invoked; it is merely the expression of the fact that after the imaginary drink the dreamer remains thirsty, and the suggested image is therefore repeated.

That in some cases there is what we may call a deliberate subconscious selection in the imagery presented to consciousness in dreams, there can be no doubt. But mental imagery is deeper and more elemental than any of the higher psychic functions even when exerted subconsciously. Just as the immense procession of continuous and totally unfamiliar imagery which is evoked by the action of mescal on the visual centres has no more connection with the subject's volition or desires than the procession of the starry skies, so likewise, we seem bound to admit, it may be in the case of a succession of separate images in dreams. It is nearly always possible to find a link of connection between any two images chosen at random, and the link is often a real subconscious link, but not necessarily so. Discontinuous images may arise, it seems probable, from a psychic basis deeper than choice, their appearance being determined by their own dynamic condition at the moment. We must, as Baron Mourre[15] not quite happily puts it, take into account 'the physiological state of ideas.' If we hold to the belief that dreaming is based on a fundamental and elementary tendency to the formation of continuous or discontinuous images, which may or may not be controlled by psychic emotions or impulses, we shall be delivered from many hazardous speculations.

When we thus start with the recognition of a more or less spontaneous procession of images as the elemental stuff of dreams, one of the first problems we encounter is the relation of attention to that imagery. What is the degree and the nature of the attention we exert in dreams?

'Sleep from the psychological point of view,' says Foucault, 'is a state of profound distraction or total inattention.' And Mourre shows by dreams of his own that any exercise of will in dreaming leads to awakening, and that the deeper the sleep the more absent is volition from dreams. Hence the involuntary wavering and perpetually mere meaningless change of dream imagery. Such concentration as is possible during sleep usually reveals a shifting, oscillating, uncertain movement of the vision before us. We are, as it were, reading a sign-post in the dusk, or making guesses at the names of the stations as our express train flashes by the painted letters. It is this factor in dreams which causes them so often to baffle our analysis. There is thus a failure of sleeping attention to fix definitely the final result—a failure which itself may evidently serve to carry on the dream process by suggesting new images and combinations. It can scarcely be said, however, that the question of attention in dreams is thus settled. It would be inconceivable that the terrible occurrences that may overtake us in dreams and the emotional turmoil aroused should be accompanied by 'total inattention and distraction.' Nor can it be said that that supposition agrees with the vivid memory which our dreams sometimes leave. We can probably account for the phenomena much more satisfactorily by adopting Ribot's useful distinction between voluntary attention and spontaneous attention.[16] Voluntary or artificial attention is a product of education and training. It is directed by extrinsic force, is the result of deliberation, and is accompanied by some feeling of effort. It always acts on the muscles and by the muscles; without muscular tension there can be no voluntary attention. Spontaneous or natural attention, on the other hand, is that more fundamental kind of attention which exists anteriorly to any education or training, and is the only kind of attention which animals and young children are capable of. It may be weak or strong, but always and everywhere it is based on emotional states; every creature moved by pleasure and pain is capable of spontaneous attention under the influence of those stimuli. These two kinds of attention are at the opposite poles from each other, and are incompatible with each other. There can be no doubt that, as Ribot himself pointed out, it is voluntary attention that is defective (though it may not always be entirely absent) in dreams;[17] the muscular weakness and inco-ordination of sleep involve this lack of attention which is indeed an essential condition of the restoration and repose of sleep. But all the characters of spontaneous attention are present. The attention we exercise in dreams is mainly of this fundamental, automatic, involuntary character, conditioned by the emotions we experience, and for the most part escaping all the efforts of our voluntary attention. Further, it has been ably argued by Leroy that a similar state of involuntary automatic attention, with concomitant diminution or disturbance of voluntary attention, is a necessary condition for the appearance of the visual and auditory hallucinations abnormally experienced in the waking state.[18]