DELUSION AND DREAM
I
In a circle of men who take it for granted that the basic riddle of the dream has been solved by the efforts of the present writer,[[1]] curiosity was aroused one day concerning those dreams which have never been dreamed, those created by authors, and attributed to fictitious characters in their productions. The proposal to submit this kind of dream to investigation might appear idle and strange; but from one view-point it could be considered justifiable. It is, to be sure, not at all generally believed that the dreamer dreams something senseful and significant. Science and the majority of educated people smile when one offers them the task of interpreting dreams. Only people still clinging to superstition, who give continuity, thereby, to the convictions of the ancients, will not refrain from interpreting dreams, and the writer of Traumdeutung has dared, against the protests of orthodox science, to take sides with the ancients and superstitious. He is, of course, far from accepting in dreams a prevision of the future, for the disclosure of which man has, from time immemorial, striven vainly. He could not, however, completely reject the connections of dreams with the future, for, after completing some arduous analysis, the dreams seemed to him to represent the fulfilment of a wish of the dreamer; and who could dispute that wishes are preponderantly concerned with the future?
I have just said that the dream is a fulfilled wish. Whoever is not afraid to toil through a difficult book, whoever does not demand that a complicated problem be insincerely and untruthfully presented to him as easy and simple, to save his own effort, may seek in the above-mentioned Traumdeutung ample proof of this statement, and may, until then, cast aside the objection that will surely be expressed against the equivalence of dreams and wish-fulfilment.
We have, however, anticipated. The question is not now one of establishing whether the meaning of a dream is, in every case, to be interpreted as the fulfilment of a wish, or, just as frequently, as an anxious expectation, an intention or deliberation, etc. The first question is, rather, whether the dream has any meaning at all, whether one should grant it the value of a psychic process. Science answers, No; it explains the dream as a purely physiological process, behind which one need not seek meaning, significance nor intention. Physical excitations play, during sleep, on the psychic instrument and bring into consciousness sometimes some, sometimes other ideas devoid of psychic coherence. Dreams are comparable only to convulsions, not to expressive movements.
In this dispute over the estimation of dreams, writers seem to stand on the same side with the ancients, superstitious people and the author of Traumdeutung. For, when they cause the people created by their imagination to dream, they follow the common experience that people’s thoughts and feelings continue into sleep, and they seek only to depict the psychic states of their heroes through the dreams of the latter. Story-tellers are valuable allies, and their testimony is to be rated high, for they usually know many things between heaven and earth that our academic wisdom does not even dream of. In psychic knowledge, indeed, they are far ahead of us ordinary people, because they draw from sources that we have not yet made accessible for science. Would that this partizanship of literary workers for the senseful nature of dreams were only more unequivocal! Sharper criticism might object that writers take sides neither for nor against the psychic significance of an isolated dream; they are satisfied to show how the sleeping psyche stirs under the stimuli which have remained active in it as off-shoots of waking life.
Our interest for the way in which story-tellers make use of dreams is not, however, made less intense by this disillusionment. Even if the investigation should teach nothing of the nature of dreams, it may perhaps afford us, from this angle, a little insight into the nature of creative literary production. Actual dreams are considered to be unrestrained and irregular formations, and now come the free copies of such dreams; but there is much less freedom and arbitrariness in psychic life than we are inclined to believe, perhaps none at all. What we, laity, call chance resolves itself, to an acknowledged degree, into laws; also, what we call arbitrariness in psychic life rests on laws only now dimly surmised. Let us see!
There are two possible methods for this investigation; one is engrossment with a special case, with the dream-creations of one writer in one of his works; the other consists in bringing together and comparing all the examples of the use of dreams which are found in the works of different story-tellers. The second way seems to be by far the more effective, perhaps the only justifiable one, for it frees us immediately from the dangers connected with the conception of “the writer” as an artistic unity. This unity falls to pieces in investigations of widely different writers, among whom we are wont to honour some, individually, as the most profound connoisseurs of psychic life. Yet these pages will be filled by an investigation of the former kind. It so happened, in the group of men who started the idea, that some one remembered that the bit of fiction which he had most recently enjoyed contained several dreams which looked at him with familiar expression and invited him to try on them the method of Traumdeutung. He admitted that the material and setting of the little tale had been partly responsible for the origin of his pleasure, for the story was unfolded in Pompeii, and concerned a young archæologist who had given up interest in life, for that in the remains of the classic past, and now, by a remarkable but absolutely correct détour, was brought back to life. During the perusal of this really poetic material, the reader experienced all sorts of feelings of familiarity and concurrence. The tale was Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, a little romance designated by its author himself “A Pompeian Fancy.”
In order that my further references may be to familiar material, I must now ask my readers to lay aside this pamphlet, and replace it for some time with Gradiva, which first appeared in the book world in 1903. To those who have already read Gradiva, I will recall the content of the story in a short epitome, and hope that their memory will of itself restore all the charm of which the story is thereby stripped.
A young archæologist, Norbert Hanold, has discovered at Rome, in a collection of antiques, a bas-relief which attracts him so exceptionally that he is delighted to be able to get an excellent plaster-cast of it which he can hang up in his study in a German university-city and study with interest. The relief represents a mature young girl walking. She has gathered up her voluminous gown slightly, so that her sandalled feet become visible. One foot rests wholly on the ground; the other is raised to follow and touches the ground only with the tips of the toes while sole and heel rise almost perpendicularly. The unusual and especially charming walk represented had probably aroused the artist’s attention, and now, after so many centuries, captivates the eye of our archæological observer.