Illusions: A Psychological Study

by James Sully

I will give a simple illustration of this lyrical type of dream. A little girl of about four years and three-quarters went with her parents to Switzerland. On their way she was taken to the cathedral at Strasburg, and saw the celebrated clock strike, and the figures of the Apostles come out, etc. In Switzerland she stayed at Gimmelwald, near Mürren, opposite a fine mass of snowy mountains. One morning she told her father that she had had "such a lovely dream." She fancied she was on the snow-peaks with her nurse, and walked on to the sky. There came out of the sky "such beautiful things," just like the figures of the clock. This vision of celestial things was clearly due to the fact that both the clock and the snow-peaks touching the blue sky had powerfully excited her imagination, filling her with much the same kind of emotion, namely, wonder, admiration, and longing to reach an inaccessible height.

Our feelings commonly have a gradual rise and fall, and the organic sensations which so often constitute the emotional basis of our lyrical dreams generally have stages of increasing intensity. Moreover, such a persistent ground-feeling becomes reinforced by the images which it sustains in consciousness. Hence a certain crescendo character in our emotional dreams, or a gradual rise to some culminating point or climax.

This phase of dream can be illustrated from the experience of the same little girl. When just five years old, she was staying at Hampstead, near a church which struck the hours somewhat loudly. One morning she related the following dream to her father (I use her own language). The biggest bells in the world were ringing; when this was over the earth and houses began to tumble to pieces; all the seas, rivers, and ponds flowed together, and covered all the land with black water, as deep as in the sea where the ships sail; people were drowned; she herself flew above the water, rising and falling, fearing to fall in; she then saw her mamma drowned, and at last flew home to tell her papa. The gradual increase of alarm and distress expressed in this dream, having its probable cause in the cumulative effect of the disturbing sound of the church bells, must be patent to all.

The following rather comical dream illustrates quite as clearly the growth of a feeling of irritation and vexation, probably connected with the development of some slightly discomposing organic sensation. I dreamt I was unexpectedly called on to lecture to a class of young women, on Herder. I began hesitatingly, with some vague generalities about the Augustan age of German literature, referring to the three well-known names of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. Immediately my sister, who suddenly appeared in the class, took me up, and said she thought there was a fourth distinguished name belonging to this period. I was annoyed at the interruption, but said, with a feeling of triumph, "I suppose you mean Wieland?" and then appealed to the class whether there were not twenty persons who knew the names I had mentioned to one who knew Wieland's name. Then the class became generally disorderly. My feeling of embarrassment gained in depth. Finally, as a climax, several quite young girls, about ten years and less, came and joined the class. The dream broke off abruptly as I was in the act of taking these children to the wife of an old college tutor, to protest against their admission.

It is worth noting, perhaps, that in this evolution of feeling in dreaming the quality of the emotion may vary within certain limits. One shade of feeling may be followed by another and kindred shade, so that the whole dream still preserves a degree, though a less obvious degree, of emotional unity. Thus, for example, a lady friend of mine once dreamt that she was in church, listening to a well-known novelist of the more earnest sort, preaching. A wounded soldier was brought in to be shot, because he was mortally wounded, and had distinguished himself by his bravery. He was then shot, but not killed, and, rolling over in agony, exclaimed, "How long!" The development of an extreme emotion of horror out of the vague feeling of awe which is associated with a church, gives a curious interest to this dream.

Verisimilitude in Dreams.

I must not dwell longer on this emotional basis of dreams, but pass to the consideration of the second and objective kind of unity which characterizes many of our more elaborate dream-performances. In spite of all that is fitful and grotesque in dream-combination, it still preserves a distant resemblance to our actual experience. Though no dream reproduces a particular incident or chain of incidents in this experience, though the dream-fancy invariably transforms the particular objects, relations, and events of waking life, it still makes the order of our daily experience its prototype. It fashions its imaginary world on the model of the real. Thus, objects group themselves in space, and act on one another conformably to these perceived space-relations; events succeed one another in time, and are often seen to be connected; men act from more or less intelligible motives, and so on. In this way, though the dream-fancy sets at nought the particular relations of our experience, it respects the general and constant relations. How are we to account for this?

It is said by certain philosophers that this superposition of the relations of space, time, causation, etc., on the products of our dream-fancy is due to the fact that all experience arises by a synthesis of mental forms with the chaotic matter of sense-impressions. These philosophers allow, however, that all particular connections are determined by experience. Accordingly, what we have to do here is to inquire how far this scientific method of explaining mental connections by facts of experience will carry us. In other words, we have to ask what light can be thrown on these tendencies of dream-imagination by ascertained psychological laws, and more particularly by what are known as the laws of association.

These laws tell us that of two mental phenomena which occur together, each will tend to recall the other whenever it happens to be revived. On the physiological side, this means that any two parts of the nervous structures which have acted together become in some way connected, so that when one part begins to work the other will tend to work also. But it is highly probable that a particular structure acts in a great many different ways. Thus, it may be stimulated by unlike modes of stimuli, or it may enter into very various connections with other structures. What will follow from this? One consequence would appear to be that there will be developed an organic connection between the two structures, of such a kind that whenever one is excited the other will be disposed to act somehow and anyhow, even when there is nothing in the present mode of activity of the first structure to determine the second to act in some one definite way, in other words, when this mode of activity is, roughly speaking, novel.

Let me illustrate this effect in one of the simplest cases, that of the visual organ. If, when walking out on a dark night, a few points in my retina are suddenly stimulated by rays of light, and I recognize some luminous object in a corresponding direction, I am prepared to see something above and below, to the right and to the left of this object. Why is this? There may from the first have been a kind of innate understanding among contiguous optic fibres, predisposing them to such concerted action. But however this be, this disposition would seem to have been largely promoted by the fact that, throughout my experience, the stimulation of any retinal point has been connected with that of adjoining points, either simultaneously by some second object, or successively by the same object as the eye moves over it, or as the object itself moves across the field of vision.