Illusions - James Sully (online e reader .txt) 📗

the physiological hypothesis that among the nervous elements connected with a particular element, a, already excited, some, as m and n, are at the moment, owing to the state of their nutrition or their surrounding influences, more powerfully predisposed to activity than other elements, as b and c.

The subject of association naturally conducts us to the second great problem in the theory of dreams—the explanation of the order in which the various images group themselves in all our more elaborate dreams.

Coherence of Dreams.

A fully developed dream is a complex of many distinct illusory sense-presentations: in this respect it differs from the illusions of normal waking life, which are for the most part single and isolated. And this complex of quasi-presentations appears somehow or other to fall together into one whole scene or series of events, which, though it may be very incongruous and absurdly impossible from a waking point of view, nevertheless makes a single object for the dreamer's internal vision, and has a certain degree of artistic unity. This plastic force, which selects and binds together our unconnected dream-images, has frequently been referred to as a mysterious spiritual faculty, under the name of "creative fancy." Thus Cudworth remarks, in his Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality: "That dreams are many times begotten by the phantastical power of the soul itself ... is evident from the orderly connection and coherence of imaginations which many times are continued in a long chain or series." One may find a good deal of mystical writing on the nature and activity of this faculty, especially in German literature. The explanation of this element of organic unity in dreams is, it may be safely said, the crux in the science of dreams. That the laws of psychology help us to understand the sequences of dream-images, we have seen. What we have now to ask is whether these laws throw any light on the orderly grouping of the elements so brought up in consciousness in the form of a connected experience.

It is to be remarked at the outset that a singular kind of unity is sometimes given to our dream-combinations by a total or partial coalescence of different images. The conditions of such coalescence have been referred to already.[93] Simultaneous impressions or images will always tend to coalesce with a force which varies directly as the degree of their similarity. Sometimes this coalescence is instantaneous and not made known to consciousness. Thus, Radestock suggests that if the mind of the sleeper is simultaneously invaded by an unpleasant sensation arising out of some disturbance of the functions of the skin, and a subjective visual sensation, the resulting mental image may be a combination of the two, under the form of a caterpillar creeping over the bodily surface. And the coalescence may even be prepared by sub-conscious operations of waking imagination. Thus, for example, I once spoke about the cheapness of hares to a member of my family, who somewhat grimly suggested that they were London cats. I did not dwell on the idea, but the following night I dreamt that I saw a big hybrid creature, half hare, half cat, sniffing about a cottage. As it stood on its hind legs and took a piece of food from a window-ledge, I became sure that it was a cat. Here it is plain that the cynical observation of my relative had, at the moment, partially excited an image of this feline hare. In some dreams, again, we may become aware of the process of coalescence, as when persons who at one moment were seen to be distinct appear to our dream-fancy to run together in some third person.

A very similar kind of unification takes place between sequent images under the form of transformation. When two images follow one another closely, and have anything in common, they readily assume the form of a transmutation. There is a sort of overlapping of the mental images, and so an appearance of continuity produced in some respects analogous to that which arises in the wheel-of-life (thaumatrope) class of sense-illusions. This would seem to account for the odd transformations of personality which not unfrequently occur in dreams, in which a person appears, by a kind of metempsychosis, to transfer his physical ego to another, and in which the dreamer's own bodily phantom plays similar freaks. And the same principle probably explains those dissolving-view effects which are so familiar an accompaniment of dream-scenery.[94]

But passing from this exceptional kind of unity in dreams, let us inquire how the heterogeneous elements of our dream-fancy become ordered and arranged when they preserve their separate existence. If we look closely at the structure of our more finished dreams, we find that the appearance of harmony, connectedness, or order, may be given in one of two ways. There may, first of all, be a subjective harmony, the various images being held together by an emotional thread. Or there may, secondly, be an objective harmony, the parts of the dream, though answering to no particular experiences of waking life, bearing a certain resemblance to our habitual modes of experience. Let us inquire into the way in which each kind of order is brought about.

Lyrical Element in Dreams.

The only unity that belongs to many of our dreams is a subjective emotional unity. This is the basis of harmony in lyrical poetry, where the succession of images turns mainly on their emotional colouring. Thus, the images that float before the mind of the Poet Laureate, in his In Memoriam, clearly have their link of connection in their common emotional tone, rather than in any logical continuity. Dreaming has been likened to poetic composition, and certainly many of our dreams are built upon a groundwork of lyrical feeling. They might be marked off, perhaps, as our lyrical dreams.

The way in which this emotional force acts in these cases has already been hinted at. We have seen that the analogy of feeling is a common link between dream-images. Now, if any shade of feeling becomes fixed and dominant in the mind, it will tend to control all the images of the time, allowing certain congruous ones to enter, and excluding others.[95] If, for example, a feeling of distress occupies the mind, distressing images will have the advantage in the struggle for existence which goes on in the world of mind as well as in that of matter. We may say that attention, which is here wholly a passive process, is controlled by the emotion of the time, and bent in the direction of congruent or harmonious images.

Now, a ground-tone of feeling of a certain complexion, answering to the sum of sensations arising in connection with the different organic processes of the time, is a very frequent foundation of our dream-structure. So frequent is it, indeed, that one might almost say there is no dream in which it is not one great determining factor. The analysis of a very large number of dreams has convinced me that traces of this influence are discoverable in a great majority.

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