Autobiographical note 4 страница

Instances of the diagnostic power of dreams seem to be vouched for in more recent times. Thus Tissié (1898, 62 f.) quotes from Artigues (1884, 43) the story of a forty-three-year old woman, who, while apparently in perfect health, was for some years tormented by anxiety-dreams. She was then medically examined and found to be in the early stages of an affection of the heart, to which she eventually succumbed.

Pronounced disorders of the internal organs obviously act as instigators of dreams in a whole number of cases. The frequency of anxiety-dreams in diseases of the heart and lungs is generally recognized. Indeed, this side of dream-life is placed in the foreground by so many authorities that I am content with a mere reference to the literature: Radestock, Spitta, Maury, Simon (1888), Tissié. Tissié is even of the opinion that the particular organ affected gives a characteristic impress to the content of the dream. Thus the dreams of those suffering from diseases of the heart are usually short and come to a terrifying end at the moment of waking; their content almost always includes a situation involving a horrible death. Sufferers from diseases of the lungs dream of suffocation, crowding and fleeing, and are remarkably subject to the familiar nightmare. (It may be remarked, incidentally, that Börner (1855) has succeeded in provoking the latter experimentally by lying on his face or covering the respiratory apertures.) In the case of digestive disorders dreams contain ideas connected with enjoyment of food or disgust. Finally, the influence of sexual excitement on the content of dreams can be adequately appreciated by everyone from his own experience and provides the theory that dreams are instigated by organic stimuli with its most powerful support.

No one, moreover, who goes through the literature of the subject can fail to notice that some writers, such as Maury and Weygandt (1893), were led to the study of dream problems by the effect of their own illnesses upon the content of their dreams.

Nevertheless, though these facts are established beyond a doubt, their importance for the study of the sources of dreams is not so great as might have been hoped. Dreams are phenomena which occur in healthy people - perhaps in everyone, perhaps every night - and it is obvious that organic illness cannot be counted among its indispensable conditions. And what we are concerned with is not the origin of certain special dreams but the source that instigates the ordinary dreams of normal people.

We need only go a step further, however, in order to come upon a source of dreams more copious than any we have so far considered, one indeed which seems as though it could never run dry. If it is established that the interior of the body when it is in a diseased state becomes a source of stimuli for dreams, and if we admit that during sleep the mind, being diverted from the external world, is able to pay more attention to the interior of the body, then it seems plausible to suppose that the internal organs do not need to be diseased before they can cause excitations to reach the sleeping mind - excitations which are somehow turned into dream-images. While we are awake we are aware of a diffuse general sensibility or coenaesthesia, but only as a vague quality of our mood; to this feeling, according to medical opinion, all the organic systems contribute a share. At night, however, it would seem that this same feeling, grown into a powerful influence and acting through its various components, becomes the strongest and at the same time the commonest source for instigating dream-images. If this is so, it would only remain to investigate the laws according to which the organic stimuli turn into dream-images.

We have here reached the theory of the origin of dreams which is preferred by all the medical authorities. The obscurity in which the centre of our being (the ‘moi splanchnique’, as Tissié calls it) is veiled from our knowledge and the obscurity surrounding the origin of dreams tally too well not to be brought into relation to each other. The line of thought which regards vegetative organic sensation as the constructor of dreams has, moreover, a particular attraction for medical men since it allows of a single aetiology for dreams and mental diseases, whose manifestations have so much in common; for coenaesthetic changes and stimuli arising from the internal organs are also held largely responsible for the origin of the psychoses. It is not surprising, therefore, that the origin of the theory of somatic stimulation may be traced back to more than one independent source.

The line of argument developed by the philosopher Schopenhauer in 1851 has had a decisive influence on a number of writers. Our picture of the universe, in his view, is arrived at by our intellect taking the impressions that impinge on it from outside and remoulding them into the forms of time, space and causality. During the daytime the stimuli from the interior of the organism, from the sympathetic nervous system, exercise at the most an unconscious effect upon our mood. But at night, when we are no longer deafened by the impressions of the day, those which arise from within are able to attract attention just as at night we can hear the murmuring of a brook which is drowned by daytime noise. But how is the intellect to react to these stimuli otherwise than by carrying out its own peculiar function on them? The stimuli are accordingly remodelled into forms occupying space and time and obeying the rules of causality, and thus dreams arise. Scherner (1861) and after him Volkelt (1875) endeavoured subsequently to investigate in more detail the relation between somatic stimuli and dream-images, but I shall postpone my consideration of these attempts till we reach the section dealing with the various theories about dreams.

Krauss, the psychiatrist, in an investigation carried through with remarkable consistency, traces the origin alike of dreams and of deliria and delusions to the same factor, namely to organically determined sensations. It is scarcely possible to think of any part of the organism which might not be the starting-point of a dream or of a delusion. Organically determined sensations ‘may be divided into two classes: (1) those constituting the general mood (coenaesthesia) and (2) the specific sensations immanent in the principal systems of the vegetative organism. Of these latter five groups are to be distinguished: (a) muscular, (b) respiratory, (c) gastric, (d) sexual and (e) peripheral sensations.’ Krauss supposes that the process by which dream-images arise on the basis of somatic stimuli is as follows. The sensation that has been aroused evokes a cognate image, in accordance with some law of association. It combines with the image into an organic structure, to which, however, consciousness reacts abnormally. For it pays no attention to the sensation, but directs the whole of it to the accompanying images - which explains why the true facts were for so long misunderstood. Krauss has a special term for describing this process: the ‘trans-substantiation’ of sensations into dream-images.

The influence of organic somatic stimuli upon the formation of dreams is almost universally accepted to-day; but the question of the laws that govern the relation between them is answered in very various ways, and often by obscure pronouncements. On the basis of the theory of somatic stimulation, dream-interpretation is thus faced with the special problem of tracing back the content of a dream to the organic stimuli which caused it; and, if the rules for interpretation laid down by Scherner (1861) are not accepted, one is often faced with the awkward fact that the only thing that reveals the existence of the organic stimulus is precisely the content of the dream itself.

There is a fair amount of agreement, however, over the interpretation of various forms of dreams that are described as ‘typical’, because they occur in large numbers of people and with very similar content. Such are the familiar dreams of falling from a height, of teeth falling out, of flying and of embarrassment at being naked or insufficiently clad. This last dream is attributed simply to the sleeper’s perceiving that he has thrown off his bedclothes in his sleep and is lying exposed to the air. The dream of teeth falling out is traced back to a ‘dental stimulus’, though this does not necessarily imply that the excitation of the teeth is a pathological one. According to Strümpell the flying dream is the image which is found appropriate by the mind as an interpretation of the stimulus produced by the rising and sinking of the lobes of the lungs at times when cutaneous sensations in the thorax have ceased to be conscious: it is this latter circumstance that leads to the feeling which is attached to the idea of floating. The dream of falling from a height is said to be due to an arm falling away from the body or a flexed knee being suddenly extended at a time when the sense of cutaneous pressure is beginning to be no longer conscious; the movements in question cause the tactile sensations to become conscious once more, and the transition to consciousness is represented psychically by the dream of falling (ibid., 118). The obvious weakness of these attempted explanations, plausible though they are, lies in the fact that, without any other evidence, they can make successive hypotheses that this or that group of organic sensations enters or disappears from mental perception, till a constellation has been reached which affords an explanation of the dream. I shall later have occasion to return to the question of typical dreams and their origin.

Simon (1888, 34 f.) has attempted to deduce some of the rules governing the way in which organic stimuli determine the resultant dreams by comparing a series of similar dreams. He asserts that if an organic apparatus which normally plays a part in the expression of an emotion is brought by some extraneous cause during sleep into the state of excitation which is usually produced by the emotion, then a dream will arise which will contain images appropriate to the emotion in question. Another rule lays it down that if during sleep an organ is in a state of activity, excitation or disturbance, the dream will produce images related to the performance of the function which is discharged by the organ concerned. Mourly Vold (1896) has set out to prove experimentally in one particular field the effect on the production of dreams which is asserted by the theory of somatic stimulation. His experiment consisted in altering the position of a sleeper’s limbs and comparing the resultant dreams with the alterations made. He states his findings as follows:

(1) The position of a limb in the dream corresponds approximately to its position in reality. Thus, we dream of the limb being in a static condition when it is so actually.

(2) If we dream of a limb moving, then one of the positions passed through in the course of completing the movement in variably corresponds to the limb’s actual position.

(3) The position of the dreamer’s own limb may be ascribed in the dream to some other person.

(4) The dream may be of the movement in question being hindered.

(5) The limb which is in the position in question may appear in the dream as an animal or monster, in which case a certain analogy is established between them.

(6) The position of a limb may give rise in the dream to thoughts which have some connection with the limb. Thus, if the fingers are concerned, we dream of numbers.

I should be inclined to conclude from findings such as these that even the theory of somatic stimulation has not succeeded in completely doing away with the apparent absence of determination in the choice of what dream-images are to be produced.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] This author has since produced a two-volume report on his experiments (1910 and 1912), which is referred to below. 4. PSYCHICAL SOURCES OF STIMULATION

When we were dealing with the relations of dreams to waking life and with the material of dreams, we found that the most ancient and the most recent students of dreams were united in believing that men dream of what they do during the daytime and of what interests them while they are awake. Such an interest, carried over from waking life into sleep, would not only be a mental bond, a link between dreams and life, but would also provide us with a further source of dreams and one not to be despised. Indeed, taken in conjunction with the interests that develop during sleep - the stimuli that impinge on the sleeper - it might be enough to explain the origin of all dream-images. But we have also heard the opposite asserted, namely that dreams withdraw the sleeper from the interests of daytime and that, as a rule, we only start dreaming of the things that have most struck us during the day, after they have lost the spice of actuality in waking life. Thus at every step we take in our analysis of dream-life we come to feel that it is impossible to make generalizations without covering ourselves by such qualifying phrases as ‘frequently’, ‘as a rule’ or ‘in most cases’, and without being prepared to admit the validity of exceptions.

If it were a fact that waking interests, along with internal and external stimuli during sleep, sufficed to exhaust the aetiology of dreams, we ought to be in a position to give a satisfactory account of the origin of every element of a dream: the riddle of the sources of dreams would be solved, and it would only remain to define the share taken respectively by psychical and somatic stimuli in any particular dream. Actually no such complete explanation of a dream has ever yet been achieved, and anyone who has attempted it has found portions (and usually very numerous portions) of the dream regarding whose origin he could find nothing to say. Daytime interests are clearly not such far-reaching psychical sources of dreams as might have been expected from the categorical assertions that everyone continues to carry on his daily business in his dreams.

No other psychical sources of dreams are known. So it comes about that all the explanations of dreams given in the literature of the subject - with the possible exception of Scherner’s, which will be dealt with later - leave a great gap when it comes to assigning an origin for the ideational images which constitute the most characteristic material of dreams. In this embarrassing situation, a majority of the writers on the subject have tended to reduce to a minimum the part played by psychical factors in instigating dreams, since those factors are so hard to come at. It is true that they divide dreams into two main classes - those ‘due to nervous stimulation’ and those ‘due to association’, of which the latter have their source exclusively in reproduction (cf. Wundt, 1874, 657 f.). Nevertheless they cannot escape a doubt ‘whether any dream can take place without being given an impetus by some somatic stimulus’ (Volkelt, 1875, 127). It is difficult even to give a description of purely associative dreams. ‘In associative dreams proper, there can be no question of any such solid core. Even the very centre of the dream is only loosely put together. The ideational processes, which in any dream are ungoverned by reason or common sense, are here no longer even held together by my relatively important somatic or mental excitations, and are thus abandoned to their own kaleidoscopic changes and to their own jumbled confusion.’ (Ibid., 118.) Wundt (1874, 656-7), too, seeks to minimize the psychical factor in the instigation of dreams. He declares that there seems to be no justification for regarding the phantasms of dreams as pure hallucinations; most dream-images are probably in fact illusions, since they arise from faint sense-impressions, which never cease during sleep. Weygandt (1893, 17) has adopted this same view and made its application general. He asserts of all dream-images ‘that their primary causes are sensory stimuli and that only later do reproductive associations become attached to them’. Tissié (1898, 183) goes even further in putting a limit to the psychical sources of stimulation: ‘Les rêves d’origine absolument psychique n’existent pas’; and (ibid., 6) ‘les pensées de nos rêves nous viennent du dehors....’ ¹

¹ [‘Dreams of purely psychical origin do not exist.’ ‘The thoughts in our dreams reach us from outside.’]

Those writers who, like that eminent philosopher Wundt, take up a middle position do not fail to remark that in most dreams somatic stimuli and the psychical instigators (whether unknown or recognized as daytime interests) work in co-operation.

We shall find later that the enigma of the formation of dreams can be solved by the revelation of an unsuspected psychical source of stimulation. Meanwhile we shall feel no surprise at the over-estimation of the part played in forming dreams by stimuli which do not arise from mental life. Not only are they easy to discover and even open to experimental confirmation; but the somatic view of the origin of dreams is completely in line with the prevailing trend of thought in psychiatry to-day. It is true that the dominance of the brain over the organism is asserted with apparent confidence. Nevertheless, anything that might indicate that mental life is in any way independent of demonstrable organic changes or that its manifestations are in any way spontaneous alarms the modern psychiatrist, as though a recognition of such things would inevitably bring back the days of the Philosophy of Nature, and of the metaphysical view of the nature of mind. The suspicions of the psychiatrists have put the mind, as it were, under tutelage, and they now insist that none of its impulses shall be allowed to suggest that it has any means of its own. This behaviour of theirs only shows how little trust they really have in the validity of a causal connection between the somatic and the mental. Even when investigation shows that the primary exciting cause of a phenomenon is psychical, deeper research will one day trace the path further and discover an organic basis for the mental event. But if at the moment we cannot see beyond the mental, that is no reason for denying its existence.

(D)WHY DREAMS ARE FORGOTTEN AFTER WAKING

It is a proverbial fact that dreams melt away in the morning. They can, of course, be remembered; for we only know dreams from our memory of them after we are awake. But we very often have a feeling that we have only remembered a dream in part and that there was more of it during the night; we can observe, too, how the recollection of a dream, which was still lively in the morning, will melt away, except for a few small fragments, in the course of the day; we often know we have dreamt, without knowing what we have dreamt; and we are so familiar with the fact of dreams being liable to be forgotten, that we see no absurdity in the possibility of someone having had a dream in the night and of his not being aware in the morning either of what he has dreamt or even of the fact that he has dreamt at all. On the other hand, it sometimes happens that dreams show an extraordinary persistence in the memory. I have analysed dreams in my patients which occurred twenty-five and more years earlier; and I can remember a dream of my own separated by at least thirty-seven years from to-day and yet as fresh as ever in my memory. All of this is very remarkable and not immediately intelligible.

The most detailed account of the forgetting of dreams is the one given by Strümpell. It is evidently a complex phenomenon, for Strümpell traces it back not to a single cause but to a whole number of them.

In the first place, all the causes that lead to forgetting in waking life are operative for dreams as well. When we are awake we regularly forget countless sensations and perceptions at once, because they were too weak or because the mental excitation attaching to them was too slight. The same holds good of many dream-images: they are forgotten because they are too weak, while stronger images adjacent to them are remembered. The factor of intensity, however, is certainly not in itself enough to determine whether a dream-image shall be recollected. Strümpell admits, as well as other writers (e.g. Calkins, 1893, 312), that we often forget dream-images which we know were very vivid, while a very large number which are shadowy and lacking in sensory force are among those retained in the memory. Moreover when we are awake we tend easily to forget an event which occurs only once and more readily to notice what can be perceived repeatedly.¹ Now most dream-images are unique experiences; and that fact will contribute impartially towards making us forget all dreams. Far more importance attaches to a third cause of forgetting. If sensations, ideas, thoughts, and so on, are to attain a certain degree of susceptibility to being remembered, it is essential that they should not remain isolated but should be arranged in appropriate concatenations and groupings. If a short line of verse is divided up into its component words and these are mixed up, it becomes very hard to remember. ‘If words are properly arranged and put into the relevant order, one word will help another, and the whole, being charged with meaning, will be easily taken up by the memory and retained for a long time. It is in general as difficult and unusual to retain what is nonsensical as it is to retain what is confused and disordered.’ Now dreams are in most cases lacking in intelligibility and orderliness. The compositions which constitute dreams are barren of the qualities which would make it possible to remember them, and they are forgotten because as a rule they fall to pieces a moment later. Radestock (1879, 168), however, claims to have observed that it is the most peculiar dreams that are best remembered, and this, it must be admitted, would scarcely tally with what has just been said.

Strümpell believes that certain other factors derived from the relation between dreaming and waking life are of still greater importance in causing dreams to be forgotten. The liability of dreams to be forgotten by waking consciousness is evidently only the counterpart of the fact which has been mentioned earlier that dreams scarcely ever take over ordered recollections from waking life, but only details selected from them, which they tear from the psychical context in which they are usually remembered in the waking state. Thus dream-compositions find no place in the company of the psychical sequences with which the mind is filled. There is nothing that can help us to remember them. ‘In this way dream-structures are, as it were, lifted above the floor of our mental life and float in psychical space like clouds in the sky, scattered by the first breath of wind.’ (Strümpell, 1877, 87.) After waking, moreover, the world of the senses presses forward and at once takes possession of the attention with a force which very few dream-images can resist; so that here too we have another factor tending in the same direction. Dreams give way before the impressions of a new day just as the brilliance of the stars yields to the light of the sun.

¹ Dreams that recur periodically have often been observed. Cf. the collection given by Chabaneix (1897).

Finally, there is another fact to be borne in mind as likely to lead to dreams being forgotten, namely that most people take very little interest in their dreams. Anyone, such as a scientific investigator, who pays attention to his dreams over a period of time will have more dreams than usual - which no doubt means that he remembers his dreams with greater ease and frequency.

Two further reasons why dreams should be forgotten, which Benini quotes as having been brought forward by Bonatelli as additions to those mentioned by Strümpell, seem in fact to be already covered by the latter. They are (1) that the alteration in coenaesthesia between the sleeping and waking states is unfavourable to reciprocal reproduction between them; and (2) that the different arrangement of the ideational material in dreams makes them untranslatable, as it were, for waking consciousness.

In view of all these reasons in favour of dreams being forgotten, it is in fact (as Strümpell himself insists) very remarkable that so many of them are retained in the memory. The repeated attempts by writers on the subject to lay down the rules governing the recollection of dreams amount to an admission that here too we are faced by something puzzling and unexplained. Certain particular characteristics of the recollection of dreams have been rightly emphasized recently (cf. Radestock, 1879, and Tissié, 1898), such as the fact that when a dream seems in the morning to have been forgotten, it may nevertheless be recollected during the course of the day, if its content, forgotten though it is, is touched upon by some chance perception.

But the recollection of dreams in general is open to an objection which is bound to reduce their value very completely in critical opinion. Since so great a proportion of dreams is lost altogether, we may well doubt whether our memory of what is left of them may not be falsified.

These doubts as to the accuracy of the reproduction of dreams are also expressed by Strümpell (1877): ‘Thus it may easily happen that waking consciousness unwittingly makes interpolations in the memory of a dream: we persuade ourselves that we have dreamt all kinds of things that were not contained in the actual dreams.’

Jessen (1855, 547) writes with special emphasis on this point: ‘Moreover, in investigating and interpreting coherent and consistent dreams a particular circumstance must be borne in mind which, as it seems to me, has hitherto received too little attention. In such cases the truth is almost always obscured by the fact that when we recall dreams of this kind to our memory we almost always - unintentionally and without noticing the fact - fill in the gaps in the dream-images. It is seldom or never that a coherent dream was in fact as coherent as it seems to us in memory. Even the most truth-loving of men is scarcely able to relate a noteworthy dream without some additions or embellishments. The tendency of the human mind to see everything connectedly is so strong that in memory it unwittingly fills in any lack of coherence there may be in an incoherent dream.’

Some remarks made by Egger, though they were no doubt arrived at independently, read almost like a translation of this passage from Jessen: ‘... L’observation des rêves a ses ifficultés spéciales et le seul moyen d’éviter tout erreur en pareille matière est de confier au papier sans le moindre retard ce que l’on vient d’éprouver et de remarquer; sinon, l’oubli vient vite ou total ou partiel; l’oubli total est sans gravité; mais l’oubli partiel est perfide; car si l’on se met ensuite à raconter ce que l’on n’a pas oublié, on est exposé à compléter par imagination les fragments incohérents et disjoints fournis par la mémoire...; on devient artiste à son insu, et le récit périodiquement répété s’impose à la créance de son auteur, qui, de bonne foi, le présente comme un fait authentique, dûment établi selon les bonnes méthodes....’ ¹

Very similar ideas are expressed by Spitta (1882, 338), who seems to believe that it is not until we try to reproduce a dream that we introduce order of any kind into its loosely associated elements: we ‘change things that are merely juxtaposed into sequences or causal chains, that is to say, we introduce a process of logical connection which is lacking in the dream.’

Since the only check that we have upon the validity of our memory is objective confirmation, and since that is unobtainable for dreams, which are our own personal experience and of which the only source we have is our recollection, what value can we still attach to our memory of dreams?

¹ [‘There are peculiar difficulties in observing dreams, and the only way of escaping all errors in such matters is to put down upon paper with the least possible delay what we have just experienced or observed. Otherwise forgetfulness, whether total or partial, quickly supervenes. Total forgetfulness is not serious; but partial forgetfulness is treacherous. For if we then proceed to give an account of what we have not forgotten, we are liable to fill in from our imagination the incoherent and disjointed fragments furnished by memory.... We unwittingly become creative artists; and the tale, if it is repeated from time to time, imposes itself on its author’s own belief, and he ends by offering it in good faith as an authentic fact duly and legitimately established.’]

(E)THE DISTINGUISHING PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF DREAMS

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