THE CAPRICES OF DREAMS.
A, WRITER on the "Laws of Dream-Fancy," in the new LI number of the Cornhill Magazine, makes some very acute suggestions towards the explanation of Dreams. But there is, of course, much which he does not in the least attempt to explain, while some of his explanations start from the assumptionof the greatest difficulty which besets the whole subject. For instance, the principle of his explanation of our more passive dreams is that some initial impulse to dream having been given by a special excitation of the nerves, either by a mere irritation of the body, or by the spontaneous action of the brain, that excitation first summons up some imake, and then leads, by the law of associa- tion, to the conjuring up of some other image which has been formerly associated with the one first summoned up, and that to another, in wild, incoherent order, until another initial impulse, either from without or from some special action of the blood which feeds the nerves, springs up, either to originate a new succession, or to blend a new series of images with the former one. That is all very well, but it offers no explana- tion of the most inexplicable of all the facts which make dreams so bewildering,—namely, why those' links in our asso- ciations which seem the most powerful when we are awake, should seem the least powerful when we are asleep,—although in sleep, as in waking, the dream takes its point of departure, accord- ing to this theory, from some physical impression. Our essayist's explanation does not really even offer any help in understanding this difficulty. He says, indeed, that in our waking states many of the "innumerable outlets" of mere associative fancy are barred by the effect of the external world upon us, and of our practical duties and desires, which in dream-life are withdrawn. But that is the very puzzle. Why is the effect of these ordi- nary duties and desires upon us withdrawn in dream-life? On the physiological ground, there is no special reason to offer, for though the supply of blood to the brain is said to be greatly diminished during sleep, one part of it is not fed relatively less than another. There is, as far as we know, no physio- logical reason why dream-life should not be a kind of pale- tinted copy of our ordinary life, except of course that the nerves of sight are almost exclusively stimulated from within, and not by light from outside. We can understand how the image of a thing in a dream takes the place of the reality, because we have no real visual image with which to compare it, so that we have not the corrective which the exercise of the full sense gives. But what we do not understand is why the laws of association themselves seem to operate so differently in sleep from the manner in which they operate in reverie or in idle waking hours. We can understand, for instance, why the barking of a dog should bring the image of a dog into our dreams, and why that image should be mistaken for a real dog. But we cannot understand why that image of a dog generally suggests to us something wholly different in kind from what the real dog, idly seen in waking hours, would suggest. The dog, if actually seen, for instance, would probably suggest idle speculations as to his owner, his exact breed, his temper, the probable neigh- bourhood of his master, and so forth. In sleep the image will usually not suggest anything so rational, but rather per- haps one of the most grotesque associations we have ever had with the image of a dog,—the preternatural dog, perhaps, that takes a bite out of the moon, according to Hindoo mythology, at the period of an eclipse; or the poor dog Tray, who was _cut up into mutton pies, and with his image will come, perhaps, laborious specu- lations as to which part of the mutton pie its bark had got into. In a word, why is the clue of association in sleep so often a silly and nonsensical one, and in waking almost always one that is at least sane and natural ? Why should not the same habits of associa- tion which are so constantly exercised by day hold their power, relatively at least, in sleep? Admit that the whole action of the mind is feebler and weaker, still why are the links which would be utterly powerless to control the waking imagination powerful enough to control the sleeping imagination? And why are those which hold us so fast in waking apparently paralysed in sleeping? The Cornhill essayist says, like a good many other writers on dreams, that the thing which has impressed us most in the daytime will generally reassert its associative influence at night. And of course, this often happens. But in the present writer's experience at least, it is much oftener the other way. What the thoughts are occupied with in the daytime does not enter into his dreams. The exhausted nerves rest when relaxed ; it is the regions of feeling or fancy which have had no hold on his waking mind, which most haunt his sleeping mind. Nor is this experience uncommon. How often you hear a mourner say that he wishes he could dream of the face he has lost, but that he never does. How often you hear the psychologist,—say, the theorist on dreams,—confess that he has done his best to carry his analysis on into his dreams, and that he has utterly failed, and dreamt instead, perhaps, that he was driving a Hansom cab. Certainly with many persons there is quite as much reason to suppose that the trains of fancy
which are most frequent by day will be most often absent at night, as there .is in the case of others to expect that the dream of the night will be connected with the impression of the day. One of the most inscrutable facts about the whole subject is the apparently different character of the trains of association which influence the waking hours (however idle) from those which influence dreams.
Yet undoubtedly there are cases in which the dream-life seems what we have suggested that it would be natural to expect it,— very like the life of an idle man with his eyes shut,—a pale copy of his ordinary thoughts as he lies awake. Take the case of the curious dream which a correspondent details in another column. Our correspondent assumes that he composed an exceedingly lame charade in verse, with only this peculiarity,—as he believes, —that he composed the charade before he had got any idea of the solution, and found, or was told, the solution (also in his dream) after the charade had been put together. Well, the most probable explanation seems to us to be that some such charade,— a little more coherent, perhaps,—had really been learned by the dreamer in his childhood, had been imperfectly reproduced in sleep, though without producing any recognition of it in memory when he awoke, and that as, in the real life, the charade was probably stated first, and the answer next, so it was also in his dream. In other words, we should conjecture his dream to be a misty recollection, but bite many such recollections, one which did not produce on his mind the effect of recognition. Had it been really a compo- sition, we think it clear that the answer must have entered his mind before the riddle was constructed to suit it. If that be the true explanation, it resembles closely what very often occurs in idle moods, with the eyes shut. Some words rush into the memory— we cannot tell whence—and we repeat them with a certain sur- prise, but without recognition, asking ourselves,—" Where did we get hold of that ?-L-it sounds new, and yet it comes somehow pat." Then perhaps another related point of past memory will come out beside it, and there the two correlative points remain, without ever recalling the whole time or scene of which they are the frag- mentary vestiges. Another dream showing the same sort of half- steam power was recorded in these columns in our impression of April 15, the writer telling us how he had apparently read-off in sleep what he conjectured that he must really have composed, a somewhat flat and washed-out fragment of 'elegant extract,' of which he could so distinctly recall the words when he awoke that he put them down, as did our correspondent of this week. In both cases we suspect that what really happened was that a word or a sentence had revived, imperfectly, some very old track of nearly obliterated association, formerly impressed on the mind not by really interesting thoughts, but rather by a rhythm which had for some unexplained reason caught the ear in early life, and rang in it without conveying much more than the mere sound with it.
Now it seems to us that, as far as we can yet understand the physiological conditions of sleep, this sort of experience of re- calling or living a somewhat dim ordinary life, ought to be the common one, while the more usual phenomena of passing through a rapid succession of most grotesque and impossible conditions ought to be extraordinary. As our. Cornhill essayist justly says, there is hardly any element of our ordinary life which is not revived in dreams. We are quite conscious of resistance at times, that is, of volition ; we are conscious of controlling our thoughts by attending to one particular phase of the scenery which passes before them; we are conscious certainly at times of comparing one thing with another and of reasoning ; nay, there are dreams, as every one knows, in which we continue with even exalted acuteness the discussions of our ordinary life. We are conscious of the activity of the highest affections, and of the liveliest remorse. Well, then, when our essayist accounts most subtly and justly, as he does, for the extraordinary exaggerations of dreams by the remark that when one sole image is before us, and we have lost all the other subjects of interest by which to reduce its importance to the proper dimensions, the image in question naturally grows in significance before our inward vision, till our absorption in it at last leads our fancy to rise into the grotesque or the horrible, he says what is valuable and clear, but what nevertheless assumes what is to our mind precisely the most difficult point to be explained. Why is the complete insulation of one image before the mind more common in dreams than in idle reverie with the eyes shut? In such reveries, we do not see frogs swelling themselves into elephants, or suggestions of loss transformed into suggestions of theft, and suggestions of theft into suggestions of violence and murder, as in one of the dreams which the writer in the Cornhill quotes from " Volkelt." There is, too, as he says, abundant evidence that all the faculties of the mind are capable of working—perhaps at half-power and in a less vivid way— but still working in dreams, as they do in our waking moments. Why, then, are not the dreams more common in which the life lived is very much like our waking life, only on a rather lower level of vivacity and reality? Why don't the grooves of waking associations hold their own in dreams ? If the physiological difference between sleep and waking is simply that less blood feeds the brain in the former than in the latter state, why does not that fact show itself in a generally depressed level of mental life, and not in those grotesque, capricious, and impossi- ble extravagances, which constitute most of our dreams? The Cornhill essayist seems to us to explain much, but not to explain the assumption at the root of his explanations.
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