Autobiographical note 6 страница

¹ [‘(1) A mental act which is spontaneous and as it were automatic; (2) an invalid and irregular association of ideas.’]

² [Footnote added 1909:] At later stage we shall come to understand the meaning of dreams such as this which are filled with alliterations and similar-sounding first syllables.

³ [`Dreams are not contrary to reason or even entirely lacking in reason.’]

Thus Havelock Ellis (1899, 721), without dwelling on the apparent absurdity of dreams, speaks of them as ‘an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts’, the study of which might reveal to us primitive stages in the evolution of mental life.

The same view is expressed by James Sully (1893, 362) in a manner that is both more sweeping and more penetrating. His words deserve all the more attention when we bear in mind that he was more firmly convinced, perhaps, than any other psychologist that dreams have a disguised meaning. ‘Now our dreams are a means of conserving these successive personalities. When asleep we go back to the old ways of looking at things and of feeling about them, to impulses and activities which long ago dominated us.’

The sagacious Delboeuf (1885, 222) declares (though he puts himself in the wrong by not giving any refutation of the material which contradicts his thesis): ‘Dans le sommeil, hormis la perception, toutes les facultés de l’esprit, intelligence, imagination, mêmoire, volonté, moralité, restent intactes dans leur essence; seulement elles s’appliquent à des objets imaginaires et mobiles. Le songeur est un acteur qui joue à volontà les fous et les sages, les bourreaux et les victimes, les nains et les géants, les démons et les anges.’ ¹

¹ [‘In sleep, all the mental faculties (except for perception) - intelligence, imagination, memory, will and morality - remain essentially intact; they are merely applied to imaginary and unstable objects. A dreamer is an actor who at his own will plays the parts of madmen and philosophers, of executioners and their victims, of dwarfs and giants, of demons and angels.’]

The most energetic opponent of those who seek to depreciate psychical functioning in dreams seems to be the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, with whom Maury carried on a lively controversy, and whose book, in spite of all my efforts, I have not succeeded in procuring. Maury (1878, 19) writes of him: ‘M. le Marquis d’Hervey prête à l’intelligence durant le sommeil, toute sa liberté d’action et d’attention et il ne semble faire consister le sommeil que dans l’occlusion des sens, dans leur fermeture au monde extérieur; en sorte que l’homme qui dort ne se distingue guère, selon sa manière de voir, de l’homme qui laisse vaguer sa pensée en se bouchant les sens; toute la différence qui sépare alors la pensée ordinaire de celle du dormeur c’est que, chez celui-ci, l’idée prend une forme visible, objective et ressemble, à s’y méprendre, à la sensation déterminée par les objets extérieurs; le souvenir revêt l’apparence du fait présent.’ ¹ To this Maury adds ‘qu’il y a une différence de plus et capitale à savoir que les facultés intellectuelles de l’homme endormi n’offrent pas l’équilibre qu’elles gardent chez l’homme éveillé.’ ²

Vaschide (1911, 146 f.) gives us a clearer account of Hervey de Saint-Denys’ book and quotes a passage from it upon the apparent incoherence of dreams: ‘L’image du rêve est la copie de l’idée. Le principal est l’idée; la vision n’est qu’accessoire. Ceci établi, il faut savoir suivre la marche des idées, il faut savoir analyser le tissu des rêves; l’incohérence devient alors compréhensible, les conceptions les plus fantasques deviennent des faits simples et parfaitement logiques.... Les rêves les plus bizarres trouvent même une explication des plus logiques quand on sait les analyser.’ ³

¹ [‘The Marquis d’Hervey attributes complete liberty of action and attention to the intelligence during sleep, and he seems to think that sleep consists merely in the blocking of the senses, in their being closed to the external world. So that on his view a sleeping man would hardly be different from a man who shut off his senses and allowed his thought to wander; the only distinction between ordinary thoughts and those of a sleeper would be that, in the latter, ideas assume a visible and objective shape and are indistinguishable from sensations determined by external objects, while memories take on the appearance of present events.’]

² [‘There is a further distinction and one of capital importance: namely, that the intellectual faculties of a sleeping man do not exhibit the balance maintained in a man who is awake.’]

³ [ ‘Dream-images are copies of ideas. The essential thing is the idea, the vision is a mere accessory. When this is once established, we must know how to follow the sequence of the ideas, we must know how to analyse the texture of dreams; their incoherence then becomes intelligible, and the most fantastic notions become simple and perfectly logical facts.... We can even find a most logical explanation for the strangest dreams if we know how to analyse them.’]

Johan Stärcke (1913, 243) has pointed out that a similar explanation of the incoherence of dreams was put forward by an earlier writer, Wolf Davidson (1799, 136), whose work was unknown to me: ‘The remarkable leaps taken by our ideas in dreams all have their basis in the law of association; sometimes, however, these connections occur in the mind very obscurely, so that our ideas often seem to have taken a leap when in fact there has been none.’

The literature of the subject thus shows a very wide range of variation in the value which it assigns to dreams as psychical products. This range extends from the deepest disparagement, of the kind with which we have become familiar, through hints at a yet undisclosed worth, to an overvaluation which ranks dreams far higher than any of the functions of waking life. Hildebrandt (1875, 19 f.), who, as we have heard, has summed up the whole of the psychological features of dream-life in three antinomies, makes use of the two extreme ends of this range of values for his third paradox: ‘it is a contrast between an intensification of mental life, an enhancement of it that not infrequently amounts to virtuosity, and, on the other hand, a deterioration and enfeeblement which often sinks below the level of humanity. As regards the former, there are few of us who could not affirm, from our own experience, that there emerges from time to time in the creations and fabrics of the genius of dreams a depth and intimacy of emotion, a tenderness of feeling, a clarity of vision, a subtlety of observation, and a brilliance of wit such as we should never claim to have at our permanent command in our waking lives. There lies in dreams a marvellous poetry, an apt allegory, an incomparable humour, a rare irony. A dream looks upon the world in a light of strange idealism and often enhances the effects of what it sees by its deep understanding of their essential nature. It pictures earthly beauty to our eyes in a truly heavenly splendour and clothes dignity with the highest majesty, it shows us our everyday fears in the ghastliest shape and turns our amusement into jokes of indescribable pungency. And sometimes, when we are awake and still under the full impact of an experience like one of these, we cannot but feel that never in our life has the real world offered us its equal.’

We may well ask whether the disparaging remarks quoted on earlier pages and this enthusiastic eulogy can possibly relate to the same thing. Is it that some of our authorities have overlooked the nonsensical dreams and others the profound and subtle ones? And if dreams of both kinds occur, dreams that justify both estimates, may it not be a waste of time to look for any distinguishing psychological feature of dreams? Will it not be enough to say that in dreams anything is possible - from the deepest degradation of mental life to an exaltation of it which is rare in waking hours? However convenient a solution of this kind might be, what lies against it is the fact that all of the efforts at research into the problem of dreams seem to be based on a conviction that some distinguishing feature does exist, which is universally valid in its essential outline and which would clear these apparent contradictions out of the way.

There can be no doubt that the psychical achievements of dreams received readier and warmer recognition during the intellectual period which has now been left behind, when the human mind was dominated by philosophy and not by the exact natural sciences. Pronouncements such as that by Schubert (1814, 20 f.) that dreams are a liberation of the spirit from the power of external nature, a freeing of the soul from the bonds of the senses, and similar remarks by the younger Fichte (1864, 1, 143 f.)¹ and others, all of which represent dreams as an elevation of mental life to a higher level, seem to us now to be scarcely intelligible; today they are repeated only by mystics and pietists.² The introduction of the scientific mode of thought has brought along with it a reaction in the estimation of dreams. Medical writers in especial tend to regard psychical activity in dreams as trivial and valueless; while philosophers and non-professional observers - amateur psychologists - whose contributions to this particular subject are not to be despised, have (in closer alignment with popular feeling) retained a belief in the psychical value of dreams. Anyone who is inclined to take a low view of psychical functioning in dreams will naturally prefer to assign their source to somatic stimulation; whereas those who believe that the dreaming mind retains the greater part of its waking capacities have of course no reason for denying that the stimulus to dreaming can arise within the dreaming mind itself.

¹ Cf. Haffner (1887) and Spitta (1882, 11 f.).

² [Footnote added 1914:] That brilliant mystic Du Prel, one of the few authors for whose neglect in earlier editions of this book I should wish to express my regret, declares that the gateway to metaphysics, so far as men are concerned, lies not in waking life but in the dream. (Du Prel, 1885, 59.)

Of the superior faculties which even a sober comparison may be inclined to attribute to dream-life, the most marked is that of memory; we have already discussed at length the not uncommon evidence in favour of this view. Another point of superiority in dream-life, often praised by earlier writers - that it rises superior to distance in time and space - may easily be shown to have no basis in fact. As Hildebrandt (1875,) points out, this advantage is an illusory one; for dreaming rises superior to time and space in precisely the same way as does waking thought, and for the very reason that it is merely a form of thought. It has been claimed for dreams that they enjoy yet another advantage over waking life in relation to time - that they are independent of the passage of time in yet another respect. Dreams such as the one dreamt by Maury of his own guillotining (see above, p. 539 f.) seem to show that a dream is able to compress into a very short space of time an amount of perceptual matter far greater than the amount of ideational matter that can be dealt with by our waking mind. This conclusion has however been countered by various arguments; since the papers by Le Lorrain (1894) and Egger (1895) on the apparent duration of dreams, a long and interesting discussion on the subject has developed, but it seems unlikely that the last word has yet been said on this subtle question and the deep implications which it involves.¹

Reports of numerous cases seem to put it beyond dispute that dreams can carry on the intellectual work of daytime and bring it to conclusions which had not been reached during the day, and that they can resolve doubts and problems and be the source of new inspiration for poets and musical composers. But though the fact may be beyond dispute, its implications are open to many doubts, which raise matters of principle.²

Lastly, dreams are reputed to have the power of divining the future. Here we have a conflict in which almost insuperable scepticism is met by obstinately repeated assertions. No doubt we shall be acting rightly in not insisting that this view has no basis at all in fact, since it is possible that before long a number of the instances cited may find an explanation within the bounds of natural psychology.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] A further bibliography and a critical discussion of these problems will be found in Tobowolska (1900).

² [Footnote added 1914:] Cf. the criticism in Havelock Ellis (1911, 265).

(F)THE MORAL SENSE IN DREAMS

For reasons which will only become apparent after my own investigations into dreams have been taken into account, I have isolated from the subject of the psychology of dreams the special problem of whether and to what extent moral dispositions and feelings extend into dream-life. Here too we are met by the same contradictory views which, curiously enough, we have found adopted by different authors in regard to all the other functions of the mind during dreams. Some assert that the dictates of morality have no place in dreams, while others maintain no less positively that the moral character of man persists in his dream-life.

Appeal to the common experience of dreams seems to establish beyond any doubt the correctness of the former of these views. Jessen (1855, 553) writes: ‘Nor do we become better or more virtuous in sleep. On the contrary, conscience seems to be silent in dreams, for we feel no pity in them and may commit the worst crimes - theft, violence and murder - with complete indifference and with no subsequent feelings of remorse.’

Radestock (1879, 164): ‘It should be borne in mind that associations occur and ideas are linked together in dreams without any regard for reflection, common sense, aesthetic taste or moral judgement. Judgement is extremely weak and ethical indifference reigns supreme.’

Volkelt (1875, 23): ‘In dreams, as we are all aware, proceedings are especially unbridled in sexual matters. The dreamer himself is utterly shameless and devoid of any moral feeling or judgement; moreover, he sees everyone else, including those for whom he has the deepest respect, engaged in acts with which he would be horrified to associate them while he was awake, even in his thoughts.’

In diametrical opposition to these, we find statements such as Schopenhauer’s that everyone who figures in a dream acts and speaks in complete accordance with his character. K. P. Fischer (1850, 72 f.), quoted by Spitta (1882, 188), declares that subjective feelings and longings, or affects and passions, reveal themselves in the freedom of dream-life, and that people’s moral characteristics are reflected in their dreams.

Haffner (1884, 251): ‘With rare exceptions... a virtuous man will be virtuous in his dreams as well; he will resist temptations and will keep himself aloof from hatred, envy, anger and all other vices. But a sinful man will as a rule find in his dreams the same images that he had before his eyes while he was awake.’

Scholz: ‘In dreams is truth: in dreams we learn to know ourselves as we are in spite of all the disguises we wear to the world,.... The honourable man cannot commit a crime in dreams, or if he does he is horrified over it as over something contrary to his nature. The Roman Emperor who put a man to death who had dreamt that he had assassinated the ruler, was justified in so doing if he reasoned that the thoughts one has in dreams, one has, too, when awake. The common expression "I wouldn’t dream of such a thing" has a doubly correct significance when it refers to something which can have no lodgement in our hearts or mind.’ (Plato, on the contrary, thought that the best men are those who only dream what other men do in their waking life.)

Pfaff (1868), quoted by Spitta (1882, 192), alters the wording of a familiar saying: ‘Tell me some of your dreams, and I will tell you about your inner self.’

The problem of morality in dreams is taken as the centre of interest by Hildebrandt, from whose small volume I have already quoted so much - for, of all the contributions to the study of dreams which I have come across, it is the most perfect in form and the richest in ideas. Hildebrandt too lays it down as a rule that the purer the life the purer the dream, and the more impure the one the more impure the other. He believes that man’s moral nature persists in dreams. ‘Whereas’, he writes, ‘even the grossest mistake in arithmetic, even the most romantic reversal of scientific laws, even the most ridiculous anachronism fails to upset us or even to arouse our suspicions, yet we never lose sight of the distinction between good and evil, between right and wrong or between virtue and vice. However much of what accompanies us in the daytime may drop away in our sleeping hours, Kant’s categorical imperative is a companion who follows so close at our heels that we cannot be free of it even in sleep.... But this can only be explained by the fact that what is fundamental in man’s nature, his moral being, is too firmly fixed to be affected by the kaleidoscopic shuffling to which the imagination, the reason, the memory and other such faculties must submit in dreams.’ (Ibid., 45 f.)

As the discussion of this subject proceeds, however, both groups of writers begin to exhibit remarkable shifts and inconsistencies in their opinions. Those who maintain that the moral personality of man ceases to operate in dreams should, in strict logic, lose all interest in immoral dreams. They could rule out any attempt at holding a dreamer responsible for his dreams, or at deducing from the wickedness of his dreams that he had an evil streak in his character, just as confidently as they would reject a similar attempt at deducing from the absurdity of his dreams that his intellectual activities in waking life were worthless. The other group, who believe that the ‘categorical imperative’ extends to dreams, should logically accept unqualified responsibility for immoral dreams. We could only hope for their sake that they would have no such reprehensible dreams of their own to upset their firm belief in their own moral character.

It appears, however, that no one is as confident as all that of how far he is good or bad, and that no one can deny the recollection of immoral dreams of his own. For writers in both groups, irrespective of the opposition between their opinions on dream-morality, make efforts at explaining the origin of immoral dreams; and a fresh difference of opinion develops, according as their origin is sought in the functions of the mind or in deleterious effects produced on the mind by somatic causes. Thus the compelling logic of facts forces the supporters of both the responsibility and the irresponsibility of dream-life to unite in recognizing that the immorality of dreams has a specific psychical source.

Those who believe that morality extends to dreams are, however, all careful to avoid assuming complete responsibility for their dreams. Thus Haffner (1887, 250) writes: ‘We are not responsible for our dreams, since our thought and will have been deprived in them of the basis upon which alone our life possesses truth and reality... For that reason no dream-wishes or dream-actions can be virtuous or sinful.’ Nevertheless, he goes on, men are responsible for their sinful dreams in so far as they cause them indirectly. They have the duty of morally cleansing their minds not only in their waking life but more especially before going to sleep.

Hildebrandt presents us with a far deeper analysis of this mingled rejection and acceptance of responsibility for the moral content of dreams. He argues that in considering the immoral appearance of dreams allowance must be made for the dramatic form in which they are couched, for their compression of the most complicated processes of reflection into the briefest periods of time, as well as for the way in which, as even he admits, the ideational elements of dreams become confused and deprived of their significance. He confesses that he has the greatest hesitation, nevertheless, in thinking that all responsibility for sins and faults in dreams can be repudiated.

‘When we are anxious to disown some unjust accusation, especially one that relates to our aims and intentions, we often use the phrase "I should never dream of such a thing", we are in that way expressing, on the one hand, our feeling that the region of dreams is the most remote and furthest in which we are answerable for our thoughts, since thoughts in that region are so loosely connected with our essential self that they are scarcely to be regarded as ours; but nevertheless, since we feel obliged expressly to deny the existence of these thoughts in this region, we are at the same time admitting indirectly that our self-justification would not be complete unless it extended so far. And I think that in this we are speaking, although unconsciously, the language of truth.’ (Ibid., 49.)

‘It is impossible to think of any action in a dream for which the original motive has not in some way or other - whether as a wish, or desire or impulse - passed through the waking mind.’ We must admit, Hildebrandt proceeds, that this original impulse was not invented by the dream; the dream merely copied it and spun it out, it merely elaborated in dramatic form a scrap of historical material which it had found in us; it merely dramatized the Apostle’s words: ‘Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer’. And although after we have awoken, conscious of our moral strength, we may smile at the whole elaborate structure of the sinful dream, yet the original material from which the structure was derived will fail to raise a smile. We feel responsible for the dreamer’s errors - not for the whole amount of them, but for a certain percentage. ‘In short, if we understand in this scarcely disputable sense Christ’s saying that "out of the heart proceed evil thoughts", we can hardly escape the conviction that a sin committed in a dream bears with it at least an obscure minimum of guilt.’ (Hildebrandt, 1875, 51 ff.)

Thus Hildebrandt finds the source of immorality in dreams in the germs and hints of evil impulses which, in the form of temptations, pass through our minds during the day; and he does not hesitate to include these immoral elements in his estimate of a person’s moral value. These same thoughts, as we know, and this same estimate of them, are what have led the pious and saintly in every age to confess themselves miserable sinners.¹

There can of course be no doubt as to the general existence of such incompatible ideas; they occur in most people and in spheres other than that of ethics. Sometimes, however, they have been judged less seriously. Spitta (1882, 194) quotes some remarks by Zeller, which are relevant in this connection: ‘A mind is seldom so happily organized as to possess complete power at every moment and not to have the regular and clear course of its thoughts constantly interrupted not only by inessential but by positively grotesque and nonsensical ideas. Indeed, the greatest thinkers have had to complain of this dreamlike, teasing and tormenting rabble of ideas, which have disturbed their deepest reflections and their most solemn and earnest thoughts.’

A more revealing light is thrown upon the psychological position of these incompatible thoughts by another remark of Hildebrandt’s (1875, 55), to the effect that dreams give us an occasional glimpse into depths and recesses of our nature to which we usually have no access in our waking state. Kant expresses the same idea in a passage in his Anthropologie in which he declares that dreams seem to exist in order to show us our hidden natures and to reveal to us, not what we are, but what we might have been if we had been brought up differently. Radestock (1879, 84), too, says that dreams often do no more than reveal to us what we would not admit to ourselves and that it is therefore unfair of us to stigmatize them as liars and deceivers. Erdmann writes: ‘Dreams have never shown me what I ought to think of a man; but I have occasionally learnt from a dream, greatly to my own astonishment, what I do think of a man and how I feel towards him.’ Similarly I. H. Fichte (1864, I, 539) remarks: ‘The nature of our dreams gives a far more truthful reflection of our whole disposition than we are able to learn of it from self-observation in waking life.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] It is of some interest to learn the attitude of the Inquisition to our problem. In Caesar Carena’s Tractatus de Officio sanctissimae Inquisitionis, 1659, the following passage occurs: ‘If anyone speaks heresies in a dream, the inquisitors should take occasion to enquire into his way of life, for what occupies a man during the day is wont to come again in his sleep.’ (Communicated by Dr. Ehniger, St. Urban, Switzerland.)

It will be seen that the emergence of impulses which are foreign to our moral consciousness is merely analogous to what we have already learnt - the fact that dreams have access to ideational material which is absent in our waking state or plays but a small part in it. Thus Benini (1898) writes: ‘ Certe nostre inclinazioni che si credevano soffocate e spente da un pezzo, si ridestano; passioni vecchie e sepolte rivivono; cose e persone a cui non pensiamo mai, ci vengono dinanzi.’ ¹ And Volkelt (1875, 105): ‘Ideas, too, which have entered waking consciousness almost unnoticed and have perhaps never again been called to memory, very frequently announce their presence in the mind through dreams.’ At this point, finally, we may recall Schleiermacher’s assertion that the act of falling asleep is accompanied by the appearance of ‘involuntary ideas’ or images.

We may, then, class together under the heading of ‘involuntary ideas’ the whole of the ideational material the emergence of which, alike in immoral and in absurd dreams, causes us so much bewilderment. There is, however, one important point of difference: involuntary ideas in the moral sphere contradict our usual attitude of mind, whereas the others merely strike us as strange. No step has yet been taken towards a deeper knowledge which would resolve this distinction.

¹ [`Certain of our desires which have seemed for a time to be stifled and extinguished are re-awakened; old and buried passions come to life again; things and persons of whom we never think appear before us.’]

The question next arises as to the significance of the appearance of involuntary ideas in dreams, as to the light which the emergence during the night of these morally incompatible impulses throws upon the psychology of the waking and dreaming mind. And here we find a fresh division of opinion and yet another different grouping of the authorities. The line of thought adopted by Hildebrandt and others who share his fundamental position inevitably leads to the view that immoral impulses possess a certain degree of power even in waking life, though it is an inhibited power, unable to force its way into action, and that in sleep something is put out of action which acts like an inhibition in the daytime and has prevented us from being aware of the existence of such impulses. Thus dreams would reveal the true nature of man, though not his whole nature, and they would constitute one means of rendering the hidden interior of the mind accessible to our knowledge. Only upon some such premises as these can Hildebrandt base his attribution to dreams of warning powers, which draw our attention to moral infirmities in our mind, just as physicians admit that dreams can bring unobserved physical illnesses to our conscious notice. So, too, Spitta must be adopting this view when, in speaking of the sources of excitation which impinge upon the mind (at puberty, for instance), he consoles the dreamer with the assurance that he will have done all that lies within his power if he leads a strictly virtuous life in his waking hours, and if he takes care to suppress sinful thoughts whenever they arise and to prevent their maturing and turning into acts. According to this view we might define the ‘involuntary ideas’ as ideas which had been ‘suppressed’ during the day, and we should have to regard their emergence as a genuine mental phenomenon.

Other writers, however, regard this last conclusion as unjustifiable. Thus Jessen (1855) believes that involuntary ideas, both in dreams and in waking, and in feverish and other delirious conditions, ‘have the character of a volitional activity that has been put to rest and of a more or less mechanical succession of images and ideas provoked by internal impulses’. All that an immoral dream proves as to the dreamer’s mental life is, in Jessen’s view, that on some occasion he had cognizance of the ideational content in question; it is certainly no evidence of a mental impulse of the dreamer’s own.

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