waking life. Sleeping consciousness, blindfolded and blundering, a prey to these massive waves from below, and fumbling about desperately for some explanation, jumps at the idea that only the attempt to escape some terrible danger or the guilty consciousness of some awful crime can account for this immense emotional uproar. Thus the dream is suffused by a conviction which the continued emotion serves to support. We do not – it seems most simple and reasonable to conclude – experience terror because we think we have committed a crime, but we think we have committed a crime because we experience terror. And the fact that in such dreams we are far more concerned with escape from the results of crime than with any agony of remorse is not, as some have thought, due to our innate indifference to crime, but simply to the fact that our emotional state suggests to us active escape from danger rather than the more passive grief of remorse. Thus our dreams bear witness to the fact that our intelligence is often but a tool in the hands of our emotions.5
I have had frequent occasion to refer to the objectivation of subjective sensations as a phenomenon of dreaming. It is, indeed, so frequent and so important a phenomenon that it needs some further reference. In hysteria (which by some of the most recent authorities, like Sollier, is regarded as a species of somnambulism), in "demon-possession," and many other abnormal phenomena it is well known that there is, as it were, a doubling of personality; the ego is split up into two or more parts, each of which may act as a separate personality. The literature of morbid psychology is full of extraordinary and varied cases exhibiting this splitting up of personality. But it is usually forgotten that in dreams the doubling of personality is a normal and constant phenomenon in all healthy people. In dreaming we can divide our body between ourselves and another person. Thus a medical friend dreamed that in conversation with a lady patient he found his hand resting on her knee and was unable to remove it; awakening in horror from this unprofessional situation he found his own hand firmly clasped between his knees; the hand had remained his own, the knee had become another person's, the hand being claimed, rather than the knee, on account of its greater tactile sensibility. Again, we sometimes objectify our own physical discomforts felt during sleep in the emotions of some other person, or even in some external situations. And, possibly, every dream in which there is any dramatic element is an instance of the same splitting up of personality; in our dreams we may experience shame or confusion from the rebuke or the arguments of other persons, but the persons who administer the rebuke or apply the argument are still ourselves.
When we consider that this dream process, with its perpetual dramatization of our own personality, has been going on as long as man has been man – and probably much longer, for it is evident that animals dream – it is impossible to overestimate its immense influence on human belief. Men's primitive conceptions of religion, of morals, of many of the mightiest phenomena of life, especially the more exceptional phenomena, have certainly been influenced by this constant dream experience. It is the universal primitive explanation of abnormal psychic and even physical phenomena that some other person or spirit is working within the subject of the abnormal experience. Certainly dreaming is not the sole source of such conceptions, but they could scarcely have been found convincing, and possibly could not ever have arisen, among races who were wholly devoid of dream experiences. A large part of all progress in psychological knowledge, and, indeed, a large part of civilization itself, lies in realizing that the apparently objective is really subjective, that the angels and demons and geniuses of all sorts that seemed at first to take possession of the feeble and vacant individuality are themselves but modes of action of marvelously rich and varied personalities. But in our dreams we are brought back into the magic circle of early culture, and we shrink and shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms that are built up of our own thoughts and emotions, and are really our own flesh.
There is one other general characteristic of dreams that is worth noting, because its significance is not usually recognized. In dreams we are always reasoning. It is sometimes imagined that reason is in abeyance during sleep. So far from this being the case, we may almost be said to reason much more during sleep than when we are awake. That our reasoning is bad, even preposterous, that it constantly ignores the most elementary facts of waking life, scarcely affects the question. All dreaming is a process of reasoning. That artful confusion of ideas and images which at the outset I referred to as the most constant feature of dream mechanism is nothing but a process of reasoning, a perpetual effort to argue out harmoniously the absurdly limited and incongruous data present to sleeping consciousness. Binet, grounding his conclusions on hypnotic experiments, has very justly determined that reasoning is the fundamental part of all thinking, the very texture of thought. It is founded on perception itself, which already contains all the elements of the ancient syllogism. For in all perception, as he shows, there is a succession of three images, of which the first fuses with the second, which in its turn suggests the third. Now this establishment of new associations, this construction of images, which, as we may easily convince ourselves, is precisely what takes place in dreaming, is reasoning itself.
Reasoning is a synthesis of images suggested by resemblance and contiguity, indeed a sort of logical vision, more intense even than actual vision, since it produces hallucinations. To reasoning all forms of mental activity may finally be reduced; mind, as Wundt has said, is a thing that reasons. When we apply these general statements to dreaming, we may see that the whole phenomenon of dreaming is really the same process of image-formation, based on resemblance and contiguity, which is at the basis of reasoning. Every dream is the outcome of this strenuous, wide-ranging instinct to reason. The supposed "imaginative faculty," regarded as so highly active during sleep, is simply the inevitable play of this automatic logic. The characteristic of the reasoning of dreams is that it is unusually bad, and this badness is due chiefly to the absence of memory elements that would be present to waking consciousness, and to the absence of sensory elements to check the false reasoning which without them appears to us conclusive. That is to say – to fall back on the excellent generalization which Parish has elaborately applied to all forms of hallucination – there is a process of dissociation by which ordinary channels of association are temporarily blocked and the conditions prepared for the formation of the hallucination. It is, as Parish has argued, in sleep and in those sleep-resembling states called hypnagogic that a condition of dissociation leading to hallucination is most apt to occur.
The following dream illustrates the part played by dissociation: A lady dreamed that an acquaintance wished to send a small sum of money to a person in Ireland. She rashly offered to take it over to Ireland. On arriving home she began to repent of her promise, as the weather was extremely wild and cold. She began, however, to make preparations for dressing warmly, and went to consult an Irish friend, who said she would have to be floated over to Ireland tightly jammed in a crab basket. On returning home she fully discussed the matter with her husband, who thought it would be folly to undertake such a journey, and she finally relinquished it, with great relief. In this dream – the elements of which could all be accounted for – the association between sending money and postal orders which would at once occur to waking consciousness was closed; consciousness was a prey to such suggestions as reached it, but on the basis of these suggestions it reasoned and concluded quite sagaciously. The phenomena of dreaming furnish a delightful illustration of the fact that reasoning, in its rough form, is only the crudest and most elementary form of intellectual operation, and that the finer forms of thinking only become possible when we hold in check this tendency to reason. "All the thinking in the world," as Goethe puts it, "will not lead us to thought."
It is in such characteristics as these – at once primitive, childlike, and insane – that we may find the charm of dreaming. In our sleeping emotional life we are much more like ourselves than we are in our sleeping intellectual life. It is a mistake to imagine that our moral and æsthetic instincts are abolished in dreams; they are often weakened, but by no means abolished. Such a result is natural when we remember that our emotions and instincts are both more primitive and less under the dominion of the external senses than are our ideas. Yet in both respects we are removed a stage backward in our dreams. The emotional intensity, the absurd logic, the tendency to personification – nearly all the points I have referred to as characterizing our dreams – are the characteristics of the child, the savage, and the madman. Time and space are annihilated, gravity is suspended, and we
It may be added that they also present evidence – to which attention has not, I believe, been previously called – in support of the James-Lange or physiological theory of emotion, according to which the element of bodily change in emotion is the cause and not the result of the emotion.
