Part 9 (2/2)
There is, indeed, something, almost pathetic in the facility with which the dreamer's mind can be pacified with the least appearance of a connection. Just as a child's importunate ”Why?” is often silenced by a ridiculous caricature of an explanation, so the dreamer's intelligence is freed from its distress by the least semblance of a uniting order.
It thus remains true with respect even to our most coherent dreams, that there is a complete suspension, or at least a considerable r.e.t.a.r.dation, of the highest operations of judgment and thought; also a great enfeeblement, to say the least of it, of those sentiments such as the feeling of consistency and the sense of the absurd which are so intimately connected with these higher intellectual operations.
In order to ill.u.s.trate how oddly our seemingly rational dreams caricature the operations of waking thought, I may, perhaps, be allowed to record two of my own dreams, of which I took careful note at the time.
On the first occasion I went ”in my dream” to the ”Stores” in August, and found the place empty. A shopman brought me some large fowls. I asked their price, and he answered, ”Tenpence a pound.” I then asked their weight, so as to get an idea of their total cost, and he replied, ”Forty pounds.” Not in the least surprised, I proceeded to calculate their cost: 40x10=40012=33-1/3. But, oddly enough, I took this quotient as pence, just as though I had not already divided by 12, and so made the cost of a fowl to be 2s. 9d., which seemed to me a fair enough price.
In my second dream I was at Cambridge, among a lot of undergraduates. I saw a coach drive up with six horses. Three undergraduates got out of the coach. I asked them why they had so many horses, and they said, ”Because of the luggage.” I then said, ”The luggage is much more than the undergraduates. Can you tell me how to express this in mathematical symbols? This is the way: if _x_ is the weight of an undergraduate, then _x_ + _x_.n represents the weight of an undergraduate and his luggage together.” I noticed that this sally was received with evident enjoyment.[99]
We may say, then, that the structure of our dreams, equally with the fact of their completely illusory character, points to the conclusion that during sleep, just as in the moments of illusion in waking life, there is a deterioration of our intellectual life. The highest intellectual activities answering to the least stable nervous connections are impeded, and what of intellect remains corresponds to the most deeply organized connections.
In this way, our dream-life touches that childish condition of the intelligence which marks the decadence of old age and the encroachments of mental disease. The parallelism between dreams and insanity has been pointed out by most writers on the subject. Kant observed that the madman is a dreamer awake, and more recently Wundt has remarked that, when asleep, we ”can experience nearly all the phenomena which meet us in lunatic asylums.” The grotesqueness of the combinations, the lack of all judgment as to consistency, fitness, and probability, are common characteristics of the short night-dream of the healthy and the long day-dream of the insane.[100]
But one great difference marks off the two domains. When dreaming, we are still sane, and shall soon prove our sanity. After all, the dream of the sleeper is corrected, if not so rapidly as the illusion of the healthy waker. As soon as the familiar stimuli of light and sound set the peripheral sense-organs in activity, and call back the nervous system to its complete round of healthy action, the illusion disappears, and we smile at our alarms and agonies, saying, ”Behold, it was a dream!”
On the practical side, the illusions and hallucinations of sleep must be regarded as comparatively harmless. The sleeper, in healthy conditions of sleep, ceases to be an agent, and the illusions which enthral his brain have no evil practical consequences. They may, no doubt, as we shall see in a future chapter, occasionally lead to a subsequent confusion of fiction and reality in waking recollection. But with the exception of this, their worst effect is probably the lingering sense of discomfort which a ”nasty dream” sometimes leaves with us, though this may be balanced by the reverberations of happy dream-emotions which sometimes follow us through the day. And however this be, it is plain that any disadvantages thus arising are more than made good by the consideration that our liability to these nocturnal illusions is connected with the need of that periodic recuperation of the higher nervous structures which is a prime condition of a vigorous intellectual activity, and so of a triumph over illusion during waking life.
For these reasons dreams may properly be cla.s.sed with the illusions of normal or healthy life, rather than with those of disease. They certainly lie nearer this region than the very similar illusions of the somnambulist, which with respect to their origin appear to be more distinctly connected with a pathological condition of the nervous system, and which, with respect to their practical consequences may easily prove so disastrous.
_After-Dreams._
In concluding this account of dreams, I would call attention to the importance of the transition states between sleeping and waking, in relation to the production of sense-illusion. And this point may be touched on here all the more appropriately, since it helps to bring out the close relation between waking and sleeping illusion. The mind does not pa.s.s suddenly and at a bound from the condition of dream-fancy to that of waking perception. I have already had occasion to touch on the ”hypnagogic state,” that condition of somnolence or ”sleepiness” in which external impressions cease to act, the internal attention is relaxed, and the weird imagery of sleep begins to unfold itself. And just as there is this antic.i.p.ation of dream-hallucination in the presomnial condition, so there is the survival of it in the postsomnial condition. As I have observed, dreams sometimes leave behind them, for an appreciable interval after waking, a vivid after-impression, and in some cases even the semblance of a sense-perception.
If one reflects how many ghosts and other miraculous apparitions are seen at night, and when the mind is in a more or less somnolent condition, the idea is forcibly suggested that a good proportion of these visions are the _debris_ of dreams. In some cases, indeed, as that of Spinoza, already referred to, the hallucination (in Spinoza's case that of ”a scurvy black Brazilian”) is recognized by the subject himself as a dream-image.[101] I am indebted to Mr. W.H. Pollock for a fact which curiously ill.u.s.trates the position here adopted. A lady was staying at a country house. During the night and immediately on waking up she had an apparition of a strange-looking man in mediaeval costume, a figure by no means agreeable, and which seemed altogether unfamiliar to her. The next morning, on rising, she recognized the original of her hallucinatory image in a portrait hanging on the wall of her bedroom, which must have impressed itself on her brain before the occurrence of the apparition, though she had not attended to it. Oddly enough, she now learnt for the first time that the house at which she was staying had the reputation of being haunted, and by the very same somewhat repulsive-looking mediaeval personage that had troubled her inter-somnolent moments. The case seems to me to be typical with respect to the genesis of ghosts, and of the reputation of haunted houses.
NOTE.
THE HYPNOTIC CONDITION.
I have not in this chapter discussed the relation of dreaming to hypnotism, or the state of artificially produced quasi-sleep, because the nature of this last is still but very imperfectly understood. In this condition, which is induced in a number of ways by keeping the attention fixed on some non-exciting object, and by weak continuous and monotonous stimulation, as stroking the skin, the patient can be made to act conformably to the verbal or other suggestion of the operator, or to the bodily position which he is made to a.s.sume. Thus, for example, if a gla.s.s containing ink is given to him, with the command to drink, he proceeds to drink. If his hands are folded, he proceeds to act as if he were in church, and so on.
Braid, the writer who did so much to get at the facts of hypnotism, and Dr. Carpenter who has helped to make known Braid's careful researches, regard the actions of the hypnotized subject as a.n.a.logous to ideomotor movements; that is to say, the movements due to the tendency of an idea to act itself out apart from volition. On the other hand, one of the latest inquirers into the subject, Professor Heidenhain, of Breslau, appears to regard these actions as the outcome of ”unconscious perceptions” (_Animal Magnetism_, English translation, p. 43, etc.).
In the absence of certain knowledge, it seems allowable to argue from the a.n.a.logy of natural sleep that the actions of the hypnotized patient are accompanied with the lower forms of consciousness, including sensation and perception, and that they involve dream-like hallucinations respecting the external circ.u.mstances of the moment.
Regarding them in this light, the points of resemblance between hypnotism and dreaming are numerous and striking. Thus, Dr. Heidenhain tells us that the threshold or liminal value of stimulation is lowered just as in ordinary sleep sense-activity as a whole is lowered.
According to Professor Weinhold, the hypnotic condition begins in a gradual loss of taste, touch, and the sense of temperature; then sight is gradually impaired, while hearing remains throughout the least interfered with.[102] In this way, the mind of the patient is largely cut off from the external world, as in sleep, and the power of orientation is lost. Moreover, there are all the conditions present, both positive and negative, for the hallucinatory transformation of mental images into percepts just as in natural sleep. Thus, the higher centres connected with the operations of reflection and reasoning are thrown _hors de combat_ or, as Dr. Heidenhain has it, ”inhibited.”
The condition of hypnotism is marked off from that of natural sleep, first of all, by the fact that the accompanying hallucinations are wholly due to external suggestion (including the effects of bodily posture). Dreams may, as we have seen, be very faintly modified by external influences, but during sleep there is nothing answering to the perfect control which the operator exercises over the hypnotized subject. The largest quant.i.ty of our ”dream-stuff” comes, as we have seen, from within and not from without the organism. And this fact accounts for the chief characteristic difference between the natural and the hypnotic dream. The former is complex, consisting of crowds of images, and continually changing: the latter is simple, limited, and persistent. As Braid remarks, the peculiarity of hypnotism is that the attention is concentrated on a remarkably narrow field of mental images and ideas. So long as a particular bodily posture is a.s.sumed, so long does the corresponding illusion endure. One result of this, in connection with that impairing of sensibility already referred to, is the scope for a curious overriding of sense-impressions by the dominant illusory percept, a process that we have seen ill.u.s.trated in the active sense-illusions of waking life. Thus, if salt water is tasted and the patient is _told_ that it is beer, he complains that it is sour.
In being thus in a certain rapport, though so limited and unintelligent a rapport, with the external world, the mind of the hypnotized patient would appear to be nearer the condition of waking illusion than is the mind of the dreamer. It must be remembered, however, and this is the second point of difference between dreaming and hypnotism, that the hypnotized subject tends _to act out_ his hallucinations. His quasi-percepts are wont to transform themselves into actions with a degree of force of which we see no traces in ordinary sleep. Why there should be this greater activity of the motor organs in the one condition than in the other, seems to be a point as yet unexplained. All sense-impressions and percepts are doubtless accompanied by some degree of impulse to movement, though, for some reason or another, in natural and healthy sleep these impulses are restricted to the stage of faint nascent stirrings of motor activity which hardly betray themselves externally. This difference, involving a great difference in the possible practical consequences of the two conditions of natural and hypnotic sleep, clearly serves to bring the latter condition nearer to that of insanity than the former condition is brought. A strong susceptibility to the hypnotic influence, such as Dr. Heidenhain describes, might, indeed, easily prove a very serious want of ”adaptation of internal to external relations,” whereas a tendency to dreaming would hardly prove a maladaptation at all.
CHAPTER VIII.
ILLUSIONS OF INTROSPECTION.
<script>