Autobiographical note 2 страница

The preponderant majority of writers, however, take a contrary view of the relation of dreams to waking life. Thus Haffner (1887, 245): ‘In the first place, dreams carry on waking life. Our dreams regularly attach themselves to the ideas that have been in our consciousness shortly before. Accurate observation will almost always find a thread which connects a dream with the experiences of the previous day.’ Weygandt (1893, 6) specifically contradicts Burdach’s statement which I have just quoted: ‘For it may often, and apparently in the majority of dreams, be observed that they actually lead us back to ordinary life instead of freeing us from it.’ Maury (1878, 51) advances a concise formula: ‘Nous rêvons de ce que nous avons vu, dit, désiré ou fait’ ¹; while Jessen, in his book on psychology (1855, 530), remarks at somewhat greater length: ‘the content of a dream is invariably more or less determined by the individual personality of the dreamer, by his age, sex, class, standard of education and habitual way of living, and by the events and experiences of his whole previous life.’

¹ [‘We dream of what we have seen, said, desired or done.’]

The most uncompromising attitude on this question is adopted by J. G. E. Maass, the philosopher (1805), quoted by Winterstein (1912): ‘Experience confirms our view that we dream most frequently of the things on which our warmest passions are centred. And this shows that our passions must have an influence on the production of our dreams. The ambitious man dreams of the laurels he has won (or imagines he has won) or of those he has still to win; while the lover is busied in his dreams with the object of his sweet hopes.... All the sensual desires and repulsions that slumber in the heart can, if anything sets them in motion, cause a dream to arise from the ideas that are associated with them or cause those ideas to intervene in a dream that is already present.’

The same view was taken in antiquity on the dependence of the content of dreams upon waking life. Radestock (1879, 134) tells us how before Xerxes started on his expedition against Greece, he was given sound advice of a discouraging kind but was always urged on again by his dreams; whereupon Artabanus, the sensible old Persian interpreter of dreams, observed to him pertinently that as a rule dream-pictures contain what the waking man already thinks.

Lucretius’ didactic poem De rerum natura contains the following passage (IV, 962):

Et quo quisque fere studio devinctus adhaeret

aut quibus in rebus multum sumus ante morat

atque in ea ratione fuit contenta magis mens,

in somnis eadem plerumque videmur obire;

causidici causas agere et componere leges,

induperatores pugnare ac proelia obire...¹

¹ [‘And whatever be the pursuit to which one clings with devotion, whatever the things on which we have been occupied much in the past, the mind being thus more intent upon that pursuit, it is generally the same things that we seem to encounter in dreams: pleaders to plead their cause and collate laws, generals to contend and engage battle...’]

Cicero (De divinatione, II, lxvii, 140) writes to exactly the same effect as Maury so many years later: ‘Maximeque reliquiae rerum earum moventur in animis et agitantur de quibus vigilantes aut cogitavimus aut egimus.’ ¹

The contradiction between these two views upon the relation between dream-life and waking life seems in fact insoluble. It is therefore relevant at this point to recall the discussion of the subject by Hildebrandt (1875, 8 ff.), who believes that it is impossible to describe the characteristics of dreams at all except by means of ‘a series of contrasts which seem to sharpen into contradictions’. ‘The first of these contrasts’, he writes, ‘ is afforded on the one hand by the completeness with which dreams are secluded and separated from real and actual life and on the other hand by their constant encroachment upon each other and their constant mutual dependence. A dream is something completely severed from the reality experienced in waking life, something, as one might say, with an hermetically sealed existence of its own, and separated from real life by an impassable gulf. It sets us free from reality, extinguishes our normal memory of it and places us in another world and in a quite other life-story which in essentials has nothing to do with our real one....’ Hildebrandt goes on to show how when we fall asleep our whole being with all its forms of existence ‘disappears, as it were, through an invisible trap-door’. Then, perhaps, the dreamer may make a sea-voyage to St. Helena in order to offer Napoleon, who is a prisoner there, a choice bargain in Moselle wines. He is received most affably by the ex-Emperor and feels almost sorry when he wakes and the interesting illusion is destroyed. But let us compare the situation in the dream, proceeds Hildebrandt, with reality. The dreamer has never been a wine-merchant and has never wished to be. He has never gone on a sea-voyage, and if he did, St. Helena would be the last place he would choose to go to. He nourishes no sympathetic feelings whatever towards Napoleon, but on the contrary a fierce patriotic hatred. And, on top of all the rest, the dreamer was not even born when Napoleon died on the island; so that to have any personal relations with him was beyond the bounds of possibility. Thus the dream experience appears as something alien inserted between two sections of life which are perfectly continuous and consistent with each other.

¹ [‘Then especially do the remnants of our waking thoughts and deeds move and stir within the soul.’]

‘And yet’, continues Hildebrandt, ‘what appears to be the contrary of this is equally true and correct. In spite of everything, the most intimate relationship goes hand in hand, I believe, with the seclusion and separation. We may even go so far as to say that whatever dreams may offer, they derive their material from reality and from the intellectual life that revolves around that reality.... Whatever strange results they may achieve, they can never in fact get free from the real world; and their most sublime as well as their most ridiculous structures must always borrow their basic material either from what has passed before our eyes in the world of the senses or from what has already found a place somewhere in the course of our waking thoughts - in other words from what we have already experienced either externally or internally.’

(B)THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS - MEMORY IN DREAMS

All the material making up the content of a dream is in some way derived from experience, that is to say, has been reproduced or remembered in the dream - so much at least we may regard as an undisputed fact. But it would be a mistake to suppose that a connection of this kind between the content of a dream and reality is bound to come to light easily, as an immediate result of comparing them. The connection requires, on the contrary, to be looked for diligently, and in a whole quantity of cases it may long remain hidden. The reason for this lies in a number of peculiarities which are exhibited by the faculty of memory in dreams and which, though generally remarked upon, have hitherto resisted explanation. It will be worth while to examine these characteristics more closely.

It may happen that a piece of material occurs in the content of a dream which in the waking state we do not recognize as forming a part of our knowledge or experience. We remember, of course, having dreamt the thing in question, but we cannot remember whether or when we experienced it in real life. We are thus left in doubt as to the source which has been drawn upon by the dream and are tempted to believe that dreams have a power of independent production. Then at last, often after a long interval, some fresh experience recalls the lost memory of the other event and at the same time reveals the source of the dream. We are thus driven to admit that in the dream we knew and remembered something which was beyond the reach of our waking memory.¹

A particularly striking example of this is given by Delboeuf from his own experience. He saw in a dream the courtyard of his house covered with snow and found two small lizards half-frozen and buried under it. Being an animal-lover, he picked them up, warmed them and carried them back to the little hole in the masonry where they belonged. He further gave them a few leaves of a small fern which grew on the wall and of which, as he knew, they were very fond. In the dream he knew the name of the plant: Asplenium ruta muralis. The dream proceeded and, after a digression, came back to the lizards. Delboeuf then saw to his astonishment two new ones which were busy on the remains of the fern. He then looked round him and saw a fifth and then a sixth lizard making their way to the hole in the wall, until the whole roadway was filled with a procession of lizards, all moving in the same direction... and so on.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Vaschide (1911) remarks that it has often been observed that in dreams people speak foreign language more fluently and correctly than in waking life.

When he was awake, Delbouf knew the Latin names of very few plants and an Asplenium was not among them. To his great surprise he was able to confirm the fact that a fern of this name actually exists. Its correct name is Asplenium ruta muraria, which had been slightly distorted in the dream. It was hardly possible that this could be a coincidence; and it remained a mystery to Delboeuf how he had acquired his knowledge of the name ‘Asplenium’ in his dream.

The dream occurred in 1862. Sixteen years later, while the philosopher was on a visit to one of his friends, he saw a little album of pressed flowers of the sort that are sold to foreigners as mementoes in some parts of Switzerland. A recollection began to dawn on him - he opened the herbarium, found the Asplenium of his dream and saw its Latin name written underneath it in his own handwriting. The facts could now be established. In 1860 (two years before the lizard dream) a sister of this same friend had visited Delboeuf on her honeymoon. She had with her the album, which was to be a gift to her brother, and Delboeuf took the trouble to write its Latin name under each dried plant, at the dictation of a botanist.

Good luck, which made this example so well worth recording, enabled Delboeuf to trace yet another part of the content of the dream to its forgotten source. One day in 1877 he happened to take up an old volume of an illustrated periodical and in it he found a picture of the whole procession of lizards which he had dreamed of in 1862. The volume was dated 1861 and Delbouf remembered having been a subscriber to the paper from its first number.

The fact that dreams have at their command memories which are inaccessible in waking life is so remarkable and of such theoretical importance that I should like to draw still more attention to it by relating some further ‘hypermnesic’ dreams. Maury tells us how for some time the word ‘Mussidan’ kept coming into his head during the day. He knew nothing about it except that it was the name of a town in France. One night he dreamt that he was talking to someone who told him he came from Mussidan, and who, on being asked where that was, replied that it was a small town in the Department of Dordogne. When he woke up, Maury had no belief in the information given him in the dream; he learnt from a gazetteer, however, that it was perfectly correct. In this case the fact of the dream’s superior knowledge was confirmed, but the forgotten source of that knowledge was not discovered.

Jessen (1855, 551) reports a very similar event in a dream dating from remoter times: ‘To this class belongs among others a dream of the elder Scaliger (quoted by Hennings, 1784, 300) who wrote a poem in praise of the famous men of Verona. A man who called himself Brugnolus appeared to him in a dream and complained that he had been overlooked. Although Scaliger could not remember having ever heard of him, he wrote some verses on him. His son learnt later in Verona that someone named Brugnolus had in fact been celebrated there as a critic.’

The Marquis d’Hervey de St. Denys, quoted by Vaschide (1911, 232 f.), describes a hypermnesic dream which has a special peculiarity, for it was followed by another dream which completed the recognition of what was at first an unidentified memory: ‘I once dreamt of a young woman with golden hair, whom I saw talking to my sister while showing her some embroidery. She seemed very familiar to me in the dream and I thought I had seen her very often before. After I woke up, I still had her face very clearly before me but I was totally unable to recognize it. I then went to sleep once more and the dream-picture was repeated.... But in this second dream I spoke to the fair-haired lady and asked her if I had not had the pleasure of meeting her before somewhere. "Of course," she replied, "don’t you remember the plage at Pornic?" I immediately woke up again and I was then able to recollect clearly all the details associated with the attractive vision in the dream.’

The same author (quoted again by Vaschide, ibid., 233-4-) tells how a musician of his acquaintance once heard in a dream a tune which seemed to him entirely new. It was not until several years later that he found the same tune in an old collected volume of musical pieces, though he still could not remember ever having looked through it before.

I understand that Myers has published a whole collection of hypermnesic dreams of this kind in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research; but these are unluckily inaccessible to me.

No one who occupies himself with dreams can, I believe, fail to discover that it is a very common event for a dream to give evidence of knowledge and memories which the waking subject is unaware of possessing. In my psycho-analytic work with nervous patients, of which I shall speak later, I am in a position several times a week to prove to patients from their dreams that they are really quite familiar with quotations, obscene words and so on, and make use of them in their dreams, though they have forgotten them in their waking life. I will add one more innocent case of hypermnesia in a dream, because of the great ease with which it was possible to trace the source of the knowledge that was accessible only in the dream.

One of my patients dreamt in the course of a fairly lengthy dream that he had ordered a ‘Kontuszówka’ while he was in a cafe. After telling me this, he asked me what a ‘Kontuszówka’ was, as he had never heard the name. I was able to tell him in reply that it was a Polish liqueur, and that he could not have invented the name as it had long been familiar to me from advertisements on the hoardings. At first he would not believe me; but some days later, after making his dream come true in a cafe, he noticed the name on a hoarding at a street corner which he must have gone past at least twice a day for several months.

I have noticed myself from my own dreams how much it a matter of chance whether one discovers the source of particular elements of a dream. Thus, for several years before completing this book, I was pursued by the picture of a church tower of very simple design, which I could not remember ever having seen. Then I suddenly recognized it, with absolute certainty, at a small station on the line between Salzburg and Reichenhall. That was during the second half of the eighteen nineties and I had travelled over the line for the first time in 1886. During later years, when I was already deeply absorbed in the study of dreams, the frequent recurrence in my dreams of the picture of a particular unusual-looking place became a positive nuisance to me. In a specific spatial relation to myself, on my left-hand side, I saw a dark space out of which there glimmered a number of grotesque sandstone figures. A faint recollection, which I was unwilling to credit, told me it was the entrance to a beer-cellar. But I failed to discover either the meaning of the dream-picture or its origin. In 1907 I happened to be in Padua, which, to my regret, I had not been able to visit since 1895. My first visit to that lovely University town had been a disappointment, as I had not been able to see Giotto’s frescoes in the Madonna dell’Arena. I had turned back half-way along the street leading there, on being told that the chapel was closed on that particular day. On my second visit, twelve years later, I decided to make up for this and the first thing I did was to set off towards the Arena chapel. In the street leading to it, on my left-hand side as I walked along and in all probability at the point at which I had turned back in 1895, I came upon the place I had seen so often in my dreams, with the sandstone figures that formed part of it. It was in fact the entrance to the garden of a restaurant.

One of the sources from which dreams derive material for reproduction - material which is in part neither remembered nor used in the activities of waking thought - is childhood experience. I will quote only a few of the authors who have noticed and stressed this fact.

Hildebrandt (1875, 23): ‘I have already expressly admitted that dreams sometimes bring back to our minds, with a wonderful power of reproduction, very remote and even forgotten events from our earliest years.’

Strümpell (1877, 40): ‘The position is even more remarkable when we observe how dreams sometimes bring to light, as it were, from beneath the deepest piles of débris under which the earliest experiences of youth are buried in later times, pictures of particular localities, things or people, completely intact and with all their original freshness. This is not limited to experiences which created a lively impression when they occurred or enjoy a high degree of psychical importance and return later in a dream as genuine recollections at which waking consciousness will rejoice. On the contrary, the depths of memory in dreams also include pictures of people, things, localities and events dating from the earliest times, which either never possessed any psychical importance or more than a slight degree of vividness, or which have long since lost what they may have possessed of either, and which consequently seem completely alien and unknown alike to the dreaming and waking mind till their earlier origin has been discovered.’

Volkelt (1875, 119): ‘It is especially remarkable how readily memories of childhood and youth make their way into dreams. Dreams are continually reminding us of things which we have ceased to think of and which have long ceased to be important to us.’

Since dreams have material from childhood at their command, and since, as we all know, that material is for the most part blotted out by gaps in our conscious faculty of memory, these circumstances give rise to interesting hypermnesic dreams, of which I will once more give a few examples.

Maury (1878, 92) relates how when he was a child he used often to go from Meaux, which was his birthplace, to the neighbouring village of Trilport, where his father was superintending the building of a bridge. One night in a dream he found himself in Trilport and was once more playing in the village street. A man came up to him who was wearing a sort of uniform. Maury asked him his name and he replied that he was called G. and was a watchman at the bridge. Maury awoke feeling sceptical as to the correctness of the memory, and asked an old maid-servant, who had been with him since his childhood, whether she could remember a man of that name. ‘Why, yes’, was the reply, ‘he was the watchman at the bridge when your father was building it.’

Maury (ibid., 143-4) gives another equally well corroborated example of the accuracy of a memory of childhood emerging in a dream. It was dreamt by a Monsieur F., who as a child had lived at Montbrison. Twenty-five years after leaving it, he decided to revisit his home and some friends of the family whom he had not since met. During the night before his departure he dreamt that he was already at Montbrison and, near the town, met a gentleman whom he did not know by sight but who told him he was Monsieur T., a friend of his father’s. The dreamer was aware that when he was a child he had known someone of that name, but in his waking state no longer remembered what he looked like. A few days later he actually reached Montbrison, found the locality which in his dream had seemed unknown to him, and there met a gentleman whom he at once recognized as the Monsieur T. in the dream. The real person, however, looked much older than he had appeared in the dream.

At this point I may mention a dream of my own, in which what had to be traced was not an impression but a connection. I had a dream of someone who I knew in my dream was the doctor in my native town. His face was indistinct, but was confused with a picture of one of the masters at my secondary school, whom I still meet occasionally. When I woke up I could not discover what connection there was between these two men. I made some enquiries from my mother, however, about this doctor who dated back to the earliest years of my childhood, and learnt that he had only one eye. The schoolmaster whose figure had covered that of the doctor in the dream, was also one-eyed. It was thirty-eight years since I had seen the doctor, and so far as I know I had never thought of him in my waking life, though a scar on my chin might have reminded me of his attentions.

A number of writers, on the other hand, assert that elements are to be found in most dreams, which are derived from the very last few days before they were dreamt; and this sounds like an attempt to counterbalance the laying of too much weight upon the part played in dream-life by experiences in childhood. Thus Robert (1886, 46) actually declares that normal dreams are as a rule concerned only with the impressions of the past few days. We shall find, however, that the theory of dreams constructed by Robert makes it essential for him to bring forward the most recent impressions and leave the oldest out of sight. None the less the fact stated by him remains correct, as I am able to confirm from my own investigations. An American writer, Nelson, is of the opinion that the impressions most frequently employed in a dream arise from the day next but one before the dream occurs, or from the day preceding that one - as though the impressions of the day immediately before the dream were not sufficiently attenuated or remote.

Several writers who are anxious not to cast doubts on the intimate connection between the content of dreams and waking life have been struck by the fact that impressions with which waking thoughts are intensely occupied only appear in dreams after they have been pushed somewhat aside by the workings of daytime thought. Thus, after the death of someone dear to them, people do not as a rule dream of him to begin with, while they are overwhelmed by grief (Delage, 1891). On the other hand one of the most recent observers, Miss Hallam (Hallam and Weed, 1896, 410-11), has collected instances to the contrary, thus asserting the right of each of us to psychological individualism in this respect.

The third, most striking and least comprehensible characteristic of memory in dreams is shown in the choice of material reproduced. For what is found worth remembering is not, as in waking life, only what is most important, but on the contrary what is most indifferent and insignificant as well. On this point I will quote those writers who have given the strongest expression to their astonishment.

Hildebrandt (1875, 11): ‘For the remarkable thing is that dreams derive their elements not from major and stirring events nor the powerful and compelling interests of the preceding day, but from incidental details, from the worthless fragments, one might say, of what has been recently experienced or of the remoter past. A family bereavement, which has moved us deeply and under whose immediate shadow we have fallen asleep late at night, is blotted out of our memory till with our first waking moment it returns to it again with disturbing violence. On the other hand, a wart on the forehead of a stranger whom we met in the street and to whom we owe no second thought after passing him has a part to play in our dream....’

Strümpell (1877, 39): ‘There are cases in which the analysis of a dream shows that some of its components are indeed derived from experiences of the previous day or its predecessor, but experiences so unimportant and trivial from the point of view of waking consciousness that they were forgotten soon after they occurred. Experiences of this kind include, for instance, remarks accidentally overheard, or another person’s actions inattentively observed, or passing glimpses of people or things, or odd fragments of what one has read, and so on.’

Havelock Ellis (1899, 727): ‘The profound emotions of waking life, the questions and problems on which we spread our chief voluntary mental energy, are not those which usually present themselves at once to dream consciousness. It is, so far as the immediate past is concerned, mostly the trifling, the incidental, the "forgotten" impressions of daily life which reappear in our dreams. The psychic activities that are awake most intensely are those that sleep most profoundly.’

Binz (1878, 44-5) actually makes this particular peculiarity of memory in dreams the occasion for expressing his dissatisfaction with the explanations of dreams which he himself has supported: ‘And the natural dream raises similar problems. Why do we not always dream of the mnemic impressions of the day we have just lived through? Why do we often, without any apparent motive, plunge instead into the remote and almost extinct past? Why does consciousness so often in dreams receive the impression of indifferent mnemic images, while the brain cells, just where they carry the most sensitive marks of what has been experienced, lie for the most part silent and still, unless they have been stirred into fresh activity shortly before, during waking life?’

It is easy to see how the remarkable preference shown by the memory in dreams for indifferent, and consequently unnoticed, elements in waking experience is bound to lead people to overlook in general the dependence of dreams upon waking life and at all events to make it difficult in any particular instance to prove that dependence. Thus Miss Whiton Galkins (1893, 315), in her statistical study of her own and her collaborator’s dreams, found that in eleven per cent of the total there was no visible connection with waking life. Hildebrandt (1875,) is unquestionably right in asserting that we should be able to explain the genesis of every dream-image if we devoted enough time and trouble to tracing its origin. He speaks of this as ‘an exceedingly laborious and thankless task. For as a rule it ends in hunting out every kind of utterly worthless psychical event from the remotest corners of the chambers of one’s memory, and in dragging to light once again every kind of completely indifferent moment of the past from the oblivion in which it was buried in the very hour, perhaps, after it occurred.’ I can only regret that this keen-sighted author allowed himself to be deterred from following the path which had this inauspicious beginning; if he had followed it, it would have led him to the very heart of the explanation of dreams.

The way in which the memory behaves in dreams is undoubtedly of the greatest importance for any theory of memory in general. It teaches us that ‘nothing which we have once mentally possessed can be entirely lost’ (Scholz, 1893, 59); or, as Delboeuf puts it, ‘que toute impression même la plus insignifiante, laisse une trace inaltérable, indéfiniment susceptible de reparâitre au jour.’ This is a conclusion to which we are also driven by many pathological phenomena of mental life. Certain theories about dreams which we shall mention later seek to account for their absurdity and incoherence by a partial forgetting of what we know during the day. When we bear in mind the extraordinary efficiency that we have just seen exhibited by memory in dreams we shall have a lively sense of the contradiction which these theories involve.

It might perhaps occur to us that the phenomenon of dreaming could be reduced entirely to that of memory: dreams, it might be supposed, are a manifestation of a reproductive activity which is at work even in the night and which is an end in itself. This would tally with statements such as those made by Pilcz (1899), according to which there is a fixed relation observable between the time at which a dream occurs and its content-impressions from the remotest past being reproduced in dreams during deep sleep, while more recent impressions appear towards morning. But views of this sort are inherently improbable owing to the manner in which dreams deal with the material that is to be remembered. Strümpell rightly points out that dreams do not reproduce experiences. They take one step forward, but the next step in the chain is omitted, or appears in an altered form, or is replaced by something entirely extraneous. Dreams yield no more than fragments of reproductions; and this is so general a rule that theoretical conclusions may be based on it. It is true that there are exceptional cases in which a dream repeats an experience with as much completeness as is attainable by our waking memory. Delboeuf tells how one of his university colleagues had a dream which reproduced in all its details a dangerous carriage accident he had had, with an almost miraculous escape. Miss Calkins (1893) mentions two dreams whose content was an exact reproduction of an event of the previous day, and I shall myself have occasion later to report an example I came across of a childhood experience re-appearing in a dream without modification.¹

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