THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

I

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE
OF DREAM-PROBLEMS (UP TO 1900)

In the following pages I shall demonstrate that there is a psycho-
logical technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams,
and that on the application of this technique every dream will
reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance,
and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the
psychic activities of the waking state. Further, I shall endeavour
to elucidate the processes which underly the strangeness and
obscurity of dreams, and to deduce from these processes the
nature of the psychic forces whose conflict or co-operation
is responsible for our dreams. This done, my investigation
will terminate, as it will have reached the point where the
problem of the dream merges into more comprehensive
problems, and to solve these we must have recourse to material
of a different kind.

I shall begin by giving a short account of the views of earlier
writers on this subject, and of the status of the dream-problem
in contemporary science; since in the course of this treatise
I shall not often have occasion to refer to either. In spite of
thousands of years of endeavour, little progress has been made
in the scientific understanding of dreams. This fact has been so
universally acknowledged by previous writers on the subject
that it seems hardly necessary to quote individual opinions.
The reader will find, in the works indexed at the end of this
book, many stimulating observations, and plenty of inter-
esting material relating to our subject, but little or nothing
that concerns the true nature of the dream, or that solves
definitely any of its enigmas. The educated layman, of course,
knows even less of the matter.

The conception of the dream that was held in prehistoric
ages by primitive peoples, and the influence which it may have
exerted on the formation of their conceptions of the universe,

20

and of the soul, is a theme of such great interest that it is only
with reluctance that I refrain from dealing with it in these
pages. I will refer the reader to the well-
known works of
Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), Herbert Spencer, E. B.
Tylor, and other writers; I will only add that we shall not
realize the importance of these problems and speculations
until we have completed the task of dream-interpretation that
lies before us.

A reminiscence of the concept of the dream that was held
in primitive times seems to underly the evaluation of the dream
which was current among the peoples of classical antiquity.¹
They took it for granted that dreams were related to the
world of the supernatural beings in whom they believed, and
that they brought inspirations from the gods and demons.
Moreover, it appeared to them that dreams must serve a
special purpose in respect of the dreamer; that, as a rule, they
predicted the future. The extraordinary variations in the
content of dreams, and in the impressions which they produced
on the dreamer, made it, of course, very difficult to formulate
a coherent conception of them, and necessitated manifold
differentiations and group-formations, according to their
value and reliability. The valuation of dreams by the indi-
vidual philosophers of antiquity naturally depended on the
importance which they were prepared to attribute to manticism
in general.

In the two works of Aristotle in which there is mention of
dreams they are already regarded as constituting a problem of
psychology. We are told that the dream is not god-sent, that
it is not of divine but of daimonic origin. For nature is really
daimonic, not divine; that it is to say, the dream is not a super-
natural revelation, but is subject to the laws of the human
spirit, which has, of course, a kinship with the divine. The
dream is defined as the psychic activity of the sleeper, inasmuch
as he is asleep. Aristotle was acquainted with some of the
characteristics of the dream-life; for example, he knew that
a dream converts the slight sensations perceived in sleep into
intense sensations (“one imagines that one is walking through
fire, and feels hot, if this or that part of the body becomes

¹The following remarks are based on Büchsenschütz’s careful essay, Traum und
Traumdeutung im Altertum (Berlin, 1868).

21

only quite slightly warm”), which led him to conclude that
dreams might easily betray to the physician the first indica-
tions of an incipient physical change which escaped obser-
vation during the day.¹⁾

As has been said, those writers of antiquity who preceded
Aristotle did not regard the dream as a product of the dreaming
psyche, but as an inspiration of divine origin, and in ancient
times the two opposing tendencies which we shall find through-
out the ages in respect of the evaluation of the dream-life
were already perceptible. The ancients distinguished between
the true and valuable dreams which were sent to the dreamer
as warnings, or to foretell future events, and the vain, fraudu-
lent, and empty dreams whose object was to misguide him or
lead him to destruction.

Gruppe²⁾ speaks of such a classification of dreams, citing
Macrobius and Artemidorus: “Dreams were divided into two
classes; the first class was believed to be influenced only by
the present (or the past), and was unimportant in respect of
the future; it included the ἐνύπνια (insomnia), which directly
reproduce a given idea or its opposite; e.g. hunger or its
satiation; and the φαντάσματα, which elaborate the given
idea phantastically, as e.g. the nightmare, ephialtes. The second
class of dreams, on the other hand, was determinative of the
future. To this belonged:

1. Direct prophecies received in the dream (χρηματισμός,
oraculum);
2. the foretelling of a future event (ὅραμα, visio);
3. the symbolic dream, which requires interpretation
(ὄνειρος, somnium).

This theory survived for many centuries.”

Connected with these varying estimations of the dream
was the problem of “dream-interpretation.” Dreams in
general were expected to yield important solutions, but not
every dream was immediately understood, and it was impos-
sible to be sure that a certain incomprehensible dream did
not really foretell something of importance, so that an effort

¹⁾ The relationship between dreams and disease is discussed by Hippocrates in a
chapter of his famous work.

²⁾ Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte, p. 390.

22

was made to replace the incomprehensible content of the dream
by something that should be at once comprehensible and
significant. In later antiquity Artemidorus of Daldis was
regarded as the greatest authority on dream-
interpretation. His comprehensive works must serve to compensate us for
the lost works of a similar nature.¹ The pre-scientific con-
ception of the dream which obtained among the ancients was,
of course, in perfect keeping with their general conception of
the universe, which was accustomed to project as an external
reality that which possessed reality only in the life of the
psyche. Further, it accounted for the main impression made
upon the waking life by the morning memory of the dream;
for in this memory the dream, as compared with the rest of
the psychic content, seems to be something alien, coming, as
it were, from another world. It would be an error to suppose
that the theory of the supernatural origin of dreams lacks
followers even in our own times; for quite apart from pietistic
and mystical writers–who cling, as they are perfectly justified
in doing, to the remnants of the once predominant realm of
the supernatural until these remnants have been swept away
by scientific explanation–we not infrequently find that
quite intelligent persons, who in other respects are averse from
anything of a romantic nature, go so far as to base their religious
belief in the existence and co-operation of superhuman spiritual
powers on the inexplicable nature of the phenomena of dreams
(Haffner). The validity ascribed to the dream-life by certain
schools of philosophy–for example, by the school of Schelling
–is a distinct reminiscence of the undisputed belief in the
divinity of dreams which prevailed in antiquity; and for some
thinkers the mantic or prophetic power of dreams is still a
subject of debate. This is due to the fact that the explanations
attempted by psychology are too inadequate to cope with the
accumulated material, however strongly the scientific thinker

¹For the later history of dream-interpretation in the Middle Ages consult Diepgen,
and the special investigations of M. Förster, Gotthard and others. The inter-
pretation of dreams among the Jews has been studied by Amoli, Amram and
Löwinger, and recently, with reference to the psychoanalytic standpoint, by
Lauer. Details of the Arabic methods of dream-interpretation are furnished by
Drexel, F. Schwarz, and the missionary Tfinkdji. The interpretation of dreams
among the Japanese has been investigated by Miura and Iwaya, among the
Chinese by Secker, and among the Indians by Negelein.

23

may feel that such superstitious doctrines should be repudiated.
To write a history of our scientific knowledge of the dream-
problem is extremely difficult, because, valuable though this
knowledge may be in certain respects, no real progress in a
definite direction is as yet discernible. No real foundation of
verified results has hitherto been established on which future
investigators might continue to build. Every new author
approaches the same problems afresh, and from the very
beginning. If I were to enumerate such authors in chrono-
logical order, giving a survey of the opinions which each has
held concerning the problems of the dream, I should be quite
unable to draw a clear and complete picture of the present
state of our knowledge on the subject. I have therefore pre-
ferred to base my method of treatment on themes rather than
on authors, and in attempting the solution of each problem
of the dream I shall cite the material found in the literature
of the subject.

But as I have not succeeded in mastering the whole of this
literature—for it is widely dispersed, and interwoven with the
literature of other subjects—I must ask my readers to rest
content with my survey as it stands, provided that no funda-
mental fact or important point of view has been overlooked.
Until recently most authors have been inclined to deal with
the subjects of sleep and dreams in conjunction, and together
with these they have commonly dealt with analogous con-
ditions of a psychopathological nature, and other dream-
like phenomena, such as hallucinations, visions, etc. In recent works,
on the other hand, there has been a tendency to keep more
closely to the theme, and to consider, as a special subject,
the separate problems of the dream-life. In this change I
should like to perceive an expression of the growing conviction
that enlightenment and agreement in such obscure matters
may be attained only by a series of detailed investigations.
Such a detailed investigation, and one of a special psychological
nature, is expounded in these pages. I have had little occasion
to concern myself with the problem of sleep, as this is essen-
tially a physiological problem, although the changes in the
functional determination of the psychic apparatus should be
included in a description of the sleeping state. The literature
of sleep will therefore not be considered here.

24

A scientific interest in the phenomena of dreams as such
leads us to propound the following problems, which to a cer-
tain extent, interdependent, merge into one another.

A

THE RELATION OF THE DREAM TO THE WAKING STATE

The naïve judgement of the dreamer on waking assumes
that the dream–even if it does not come from another world
–has at all events transported the dreamer into another
world. The old physiologist, Burdach, to whom we are indebted
for a careful and discriminating description of the phenomena
of dreams, expressed this conviction in a frequently quoted
passage (p. 474): “The waking life, with its trials and joys,
its pleasures and pains, is never repeated; on the contrary,
the dream aims at relieving us of these. Even when our whole
mind is filled with one subject, when our hearts are rent by
bitter grief, or when some task has been taxing our mental
capacity to the utmost, the dream either gives us something
entirely alien, or it selects for its combinations only a few
elements of reality; or it merely enters into the key of our
mood, and symbolizes reality.” J. H. Fichte (I. 541) speaks
in precisely the same sense of supplementary dreams, calling
them one of the secret, self-healing benefits of the psyche.
L. Strümpell expresses himself to the same effect in his Natur
und Entstehung der Träume, a study which is deservedly held in
high esteem. “He who dreams turns his back upon the world
of waking consciousness” (p. 16); “In the dream the memory
of the orderly content of waking consciousness and its normal
behaviour is almost entirely lost” (p. 17); “The almost complete
and unencumbered isolation of the psyche in the dream
from the regular, normal content and course of the waking
state . . .” (p. 19).

Yet the overwhelming majority of writers on the subject
have adopted the contrary view of the relation of the dream
to waking life. Thus Haffner (p. 19): “To begin with, the
dream continues the waking life. Our dreams always connect
themselves with such ideas as have shortly before been present
in our consciousness. Careful examination will nearly always

25

detect a thread by which the dream has linked itself to the
experiences of the previous day.” Weygandt (p. 6) flatly con-
tradicts the statement of Burdach. “For it may often be observed,
apparently indeed in the great majority of dreams, that they
lead us directly back into everyday life, instead of releasing
us from it.” Maury (p. 56) expresses the same idea in a concise
formula: “Nous rêvons de ce que nous avons vu, dit, desiré, ou fait.”
Jessen, in his Psychologie, published in 1855 (p. 530), is rather
more explicit: “The content of dreams is always more or
less determined by the personality, the age, sex, station in
life, education and habits, and by the events and experiences
of the whole past life of the individual.”

The philosopher, I. G. E. Maas, adopts the most unequivocal
attitude in respect of this question (Über die Leidenschaften,
1805): “Experience corroborates our assertion that we dream
most frequently of those things toward which our warmest
passions are directed. This shows us that our passions must
influence the generation of our dreams. The ambitious man
dreams of the laurels which he has won (perhaps only in
imagination), or has still to win, while the lover occupies him-
self, in his dreams, with the object of his dearest hopes. . . .
All the sensual desires and loathings which slumber in the
heart, if they are stimulated by any cause, may combine with
other ideas and give rise to a dream; or these ideas may mingle
in an already existing dream.”¹⁾

The ancients entertained the same idea concerning the
dream-content on life. I will quote Radestock
(p. 139): “When Xerxes, before his expedition against
Greece, was dissuaded from his resolution by good counsel,
but was again and again incited by dreams to undertake it,
one of the old, rational dream-interpreters of the Persians,
Artabanus, told him, and very appropriately, that dream-
images for the most part contain that of which one has been
thinking in the waking state.”

In the didactic poem of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (IV.
v. 959), there occurs this passage:

“Et quisque fere studio devinctus adhaeret, aut quibus in rebus multum sumue
ante morati atque in ea ratione fuit contenta magis mens, in somnis eadem plerumque

¹Communicated by Winterstein to the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse.

26

videmur obire; causidici causas agere et componere leges, induperatores pugnare ac
proelia obire, etc., etc.

Cicero (De Divinatione, II) says, in a similar strain, as does
also Maury many centuries later: “Maximeque reliquiae earum
rerum moventur in animis et agitantur, de quibus vigilantes aut cogi-
tavimus aut egimus.”

The contradiction between these two views concerning the
relation between dream life and waking life seems indeed
irresolvable. Here we may usefully cite the opinion of F. W.
Hildebrandt (1875), who held that on the whole the peculiarities
of the dream can only be described as “a series of contrasts
which apparently amount to contradictions” (p. 8). “The
first of these contrasts is formed by the strict isolation or seclusion
of the dream from true and actual life on the one hand, and
on the other hand by the continuous encroachment of
the one upon the other, and the constant dependence of the
one upon the other. The dream is something absolutely
divorced from the reality experienced during the waking state;
one may call it an existence hermetically sealed up and insu-
lated from real life by an unbridgeable chasm. It frees us
from reality, blots out the normal recollection of reality,
and sets us in another world and a totally different life, which
fundamentally has nothing in common with real life. . . .”
Hildebrandt then asserts that in falling asleep our whole
being, with its forms of existence, disappears “as through
an invisible trapdoor.” In one’s dream one is perhaps making
a voyage to St. Helena in order to offer the imprisoned
Napoleon an exquisite vintage of Moselle. One is most affably
received by the ex-emperor, and one feels almost sorry when,
on waking, the interesting illusion is destroyed. But let us
now compare the situation existing in the dream with the
actual reality. The dreamer has never been a wine-merchant,
and has no desire to become one. He has never made a sea-
voyage, and St. Helena is the last place in the world that he
would choose as the destination of such a voyage. The dreamer
feels no sympathy for Napoleon, but on the contrary a strong
patriotic aversion. And lastly, the dreamer was not yet among
the living when Napoleon died on the island of St. Helena;
so that it was beyond the realms of possibility that he should
have had any personal relations with Napoleon. The dream-
 

27

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS

experience thus appears as something entirely foreign, inter-
polated between two mutually related and successive periods
of time.

“Nevertheless,” continues Hildebrandt, “the apparent con-
trary is just as true and correct. I believe that side by side with
this seclusion and insulation there may still exist the most
intimate interrelation. We may therefore justly say: Whatever
the dream may offer us, it derives its material from reality,
and from the psychic life centred upon this reality. However
extraordinary the dream may seem, it can never detach itself
from the real world, and its most sublime as well as its most
ridiculous constructions must always borrow their elementary
material either from that which our eyes have beheld in the
outer world, or from that which has already found a place
somewhere in our waking thoughts; in other words, it must be
taken from that which we have already experienced, either
objectively or subjectively.”

B

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS—MEMORY IN DREAMS

That all the material composing the content of a dream is
somehow derived from experience, that it is reproduced or
remembered in the dream—this at least may be accepted as an
incontestable fact. Yet it would be wrong to assume that such
a connection between the dream-content and reality will be
easily obvious from a comparison between the two. On the
contrary, the connection must be carefully sought, and in
quite a number of cases it may for a long while elude dis-
covery. The reason for this is to be found in a number of
peculiarities evinced by the faculty of memory in dreams;
which peculiarities, though generally observed, have hitherto
defied explanation. It will be worth our while to examine these
characteristics exhaustively.

To begin with, it happens that certain material appears in
the dream-content which cannot be subsequently recognized,
in the waking state, as being part of one’s knowledge and
experience. One remembers clearly enough having dreamed
of the thing in question, but one cannot recall the actual

28

experience or the time of its occurrence. The dreamer is there-
fore in the dark as to the source which the dream has tapped,
and is even tempted to believe in an independent productive
activity on the part of the dream, until, often long afterwards,
a fresh episode restores the memory of that former experience,
which had been given up for lost, and so reveals the source
of the dream. One is therefore forced to admit that in the dream
something was known and remembered that cannot be remem-
bered in the waking state.¹

Delbœuf relates from his own experience an especially
impressive example of this kind. He saw in his dream the
courtyard of his house covered with snow, and found there
two little lizards, half-frozen and buried in the snow. Being
a lover of animals he picked them up, warmed them, and put
them back into the hole in the wall which was reserved
especially for them. He also gave them a few fronds of a
little fern which was growing on the wall, and of which he
knew they were very fond. In the dream he knew the name
of the plant; Asplenium ruta muralis. The dream continued,
returning after a digression to the lizards, and to his astonish-
ment Delbœuf saw two other little lizards falling upon what
was left of the ferns. On turning his eyes to the open fields he
saw a fifth and a sixth lizard making for the hole in the wall,
and finally the whole road was covered by a procession of
lizards, all wandering in the same direction.

In his waking state Delbœuf knew only a few Latin names
of plants, and nothing of any Asplenium. To his great surprise
he discovered that a fern of this name did actually exist, and
that the correct name was Asplenium ruta muraria, which the
dream had slightly distorted. An accidental coincidence was
of course inconceivable; yet where he got his knowledge of
the name Asplenium in the dream remained a mystery to him.

The dream occurred in 1862. Sixteen years later, while at
the house of one of his friends, the philosopher noticed a small
album containing dried plants, such as are sold as souvenirs
to visitors in many parts of Switzerland. A sudden recollection
came to him: he opened the herbarium, discovered therein

¹Vaschide even maintains that it has often been observed that in one’s dreams
one speaks foreign languages more fluently and with greater purity than in the
waking state.

29

the Asplenium of his dream, and recognized his own handwriting
in the accompanying Latin name. The connection could now
be traced. In 1860, two years before the date of the lizard
dream, one of his friend’s sisters, while on her wedding-
journey, had paid a visit to Delbœuf. She had with her at the time this
very album, which was intended for her brother, and Delbœuf
had taken the trouble to write, at the dictation of a botanist,
the Latin name under each of the dried plants.

The same good fortune which gave this example its unusual
value enabled Delbœuf to trace yet another portion of this
dream to its forgotten source. One day in 1877 he came
upon an old volume of an illustrated periodical, in which he
found the whole procession of lizards pictured, just as he had
dreamt of it in 1862. The volume bore the date 1861, and
Delbœuf remembered that he had subscribed to the journal
since its first appearance.

That dreams have at their disposal recollections which are
inaccessible to the waking state is such a remarkable and
theoretically important fact that I should like to draw attention
to the point by recording yet other “hypermnesic” dreams.
Maury relates that for some time the word Mussidan used to
occur to him during the day. He knew it to be the name of a
French city, but that was all. One night he dreamed of a
conversation with a certain person, who told him that she came
from Mussidan, and, in answer to his question as to where the
city was, she replied: “Mussidan is the principal town of a
district in the department of Dordogne.” On waking, Maury
gave no credence to the information received in his dream;
but the gazetteer showed it to be perfectly correct. In this case
the superior knowledge of the dreamer was confirmed, but
it was not possible to trace the forgotten source of this
knowledge.

Jessen (p. 55) refers to a very similar incident, the period
of which is more remote. “Among others we may here mention
the dream of the elder Scaliger (Hennings, l.c., p. 300), who
wrote a poem in praise of the famous men of Verona, and to
whom a man named Brugnolus appeared in a dream, com-
plaining that he had been neglected. Though Scaliger could
not remember that he had heard of the man, he wrote some
verses in his honour, and his son learned subsequently that

30

a certain Brugnolus had at one time been famed in Verona
as a critic.”

A hypermnesic dream, especially remarkable for the fact
that a memory not at first recalled was afterwards recognized
in a dream which followed the first, is narrated by the Marquis
d’Hervey de St. Denis¹: “I once dreamed of a young woman
with fair golden hair, whom I saw chatting with my sister as
she showed her a piece of embroidery. In my dream she seemed
familiar to me; I thought, indeed, that I had seen her repeatedly.
After waking, her face was still quite vividly before me, but I
was absolutely unable to recognize it. I fell asleep again;
the dream-picture repeated itself. In this new dream I addressed
the golden-haired lady and asked her whether I had not had
the pleasure of meeting her somewhere. ‘Of course,’ she replied;
‘don’t you remember the bathing-place at Pornic?’ Thereupon
I awoke, and I was then able to recall with certainty and in
detail the incidents with which this charming dream-face
was connected.”

The same author² recorded that a musician of his acquain-
tance once heard in a dream a melody which was absolutely
new to him. Not until many years later did he find it in an
old collection of musical compositions, though still he could
not remember ever having seen it before.

I believe that Myers has published a whole collection of
such hypermnesic dreams in the Proceedings of the Society for
Psychical Research, but these, unfortunately, are inaccessible
to me. I think everyone who occupies himself with dreams
will recognize, as a very common phenomenon, the fact that
a dream will give proof of the knowledge and recollection of
matters of which the dreamer, in his waking state, did not
imagine himself to be cognizant. In my analytic investigations
of nervous patients, of which I shall speak later, I find that it
happens many times every week that I am able to convince
them, from their dreams, that they are perfectly well acquainted
with quotations, obscene expressions, etc., and make use of
them in their dreams, although they have forgotten them
in their waking state. I shall here cite an innocent example
of dream-hypermnesia, because it was easy to trace the source
of the knowledge which was accessible only in the dream.

¹ See Vaschide (p. 232).

² Vaschide, p. 233.

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS 31

A patient dreamed amongst other things (in a rather long
dream) that he ordered a “kontuszówka” in a café, and after
telling me this he asked me what it could be, as he had never
heard the name before. I was able to tell him that "kontus-
zówka” was a Polish liqueur, which he could not have invented
in his dream, as the name had long been familiar to me from
the advertisements. At first the patient would not believe me,
but some days later, after he had allowed his dream of the
café to become a reality, he noticed the name on a signboard
at a street corner which for some months he had been passing
at least twice a day.

I have learned from my own dreams how largely the dis-
covery of the origin of individual dream-elements may be
dependent on chance. Thus, for some years before I had
thought of writing this book, I was haunted by the picture
of a church tower of fairly simple construction, which I could
not remember ever having seen. I then suddenly recognized
it, with absolute certainty, at a small station between Salzburg
and Reichenhall. This was in the late nineties, and the first
time I had travelled over this route was in 1886. In later years,
when I was already busily engaged in the study of dreams,
I was quite annoyed by the frequent recurrence of the dream-
image of a certain peculiar locality. I saw, in definite orienta-
tion to my own person—on my left—a dark space in which
a number of grotesque sandstone figures stood out. A glim-
mering recollection, which I did not quite believe, told me
that it was the entrance to a beer-cellar; but I could explain
neither the meaning nor the origin of this dream-picture.
In 1907 I happened to go to Padua, which, to my regret,
I had been unable to visit since 1895. My first visit to this
beautiful university city had been unsatisfactory. I had been
unable to see Giotto's frescoes in the church of the Madonna
dell” Arena: I set out for the church, but turned back on being
informed that it was closed for the day. On my second visit,
twelve years later, I thought I would compensate myself for this
disappointment, and before doing anything else I set out for
Madonna dell’ Arena. In the street leading to it, on my left, prob-
ably at the spot where I had turned back in 1895, I discovered
the place, withits sandstone figures, which I had so often seen in
my dream. It was, in fact, the entrance to a restaurant garden.

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS 33

wearing a sort of uniform. Maury asked him his name, and
he introduced himself, saying that his name was C., and that
he was a bridge-guard. On waking, Maury, who still doubted
the actuality of the reminiscence, asked his old servant, who
had been with him in his childhood, whether she remembered
a man of this name. “Of course,” was the reply; “he used to
be watchman on the bridge which your father was building
then.”

Maury records another example, which demonstrates no
less clearly the reliability of the reminiscences of childhood
that emerge in our dreams. M. F., who as a child had lived in
Montbrison, decided, after an absence of twenty-five years,
to visit his home and the old friends of his family. The night
before his departure he dreamt that he had reached his desti-
nation, and that near Montbrison he met a man whom he
did not know by sight, and who told him that he was M. F.,
a friend of his father’s. The dreamer remembered that as a
child he had known a gentleman of this name, but on waking
he could no longer recall his features. Several days later,
having actually arrived at Montbrison, he found once more
the locality of his dream, which he had thought was unknown
to him, and there he met a man whom he at once recognized
as the M. F. of his dream, with only this difference, that the
real person was very much older than his dream-image.

Here I might relate one of my own dreams, in which the
recalled impression takes the form of an association. In my
dream I saw a man whom I recognized, while dreaming, as the
doctor of my native town. His face was not distinct, but his
features were blended with those of one of my schoolmasters,
whom I still meet from time to time. What association there was
between the two persons I could not discover on waking, but
upon questioning my mother concerning the doctor I learned
that he was a one-eyed man. The schoolmaster, whose image
in my dream obscured that of the physician, had also only one
eye. I had not seen the doctor for thirty-eight years, and as
far as I know I had never thought of him in my waking state,
although a scar on my chin might have reminded me of his
professional attentions.

As though to counterbalance the excessive part which is
played in our dreams by the impressions of childhood, many

c

34 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

authors assert that the majority of dreams reveal elements
drawn from our most recent experiences. Robert (p. 46)
even declares that the normal dream generally occupies itself
only with the impressions of the last few days. We shall find,
indeed, that the theory of the dream advanced by Robert
absolutely requires that our oldest impressions should be
thrust into the background, and our most recent ones brought
to the fore. However, the fact here stated by Robert is correct;
this I can confirm from my own investigations. Nelson, an
American author, holds that the impressions received in a
dream most frequently date from the second day before the
dream, or from the third day before it, as though the impres-
sions of the day immediately preceding de dream were not
sufficiently weakened and remote.

Many authors who are unwilling to question the intimate
connection between the dream-content and the waking state
have been struck by the fact that the impressions which have
intensely occupied the waking mind appear in dreams only
after they have been to some extent removed from the mental
activities of the day. Thus, as a rule, we do not dream of a
beloved person who is dead while we are still overwhelmed
with sorrow (Delage). Yet Miss Hallam, one of the most recent
observers, has collected examples which reveal the very oppo-
site behaviour in this respect, and upholds the claims of
psychological individuality in this matter.

The third, most remarkable, and at the same time most
incomprehensible, peculiarity of memory in dreams is shown in
the sclection of the material reproduced ; for here it is not, as
in the waking state, only the most significant things that are
held to be worth remembering, but also the most indifferent
and insignificant details. In this connection I will quote those
authors who have expressed their surprise in the most emphatic
language.

Hildebrandt (p. 11) : “For it is a remarkable fact that dreams
do not, as a rule, take their elements from important and
far-reaching events, or from the intense and urgent interests
of the preceding day, but from unimportant incidents, from
the worthless odds and ends of recent experience or of the
remoter past. The most shocking death in our own family, the
impressions of which keep us awake long into the night, is

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS 35

obliterated from our memories until the first moment of
waking brings it back to us with distressing force. On the other
hand, the wart on the forehead of a passing stranger, to whom
we did not give a moment’s thought once he was out of sight,
finds a place in our dreams.”

Strümpell (p. 39) speaks of “cases in which the analysis
of a dream brings to light elements which, although derived
from the experiences of yesterday or the day before yesterday,
were yet so unimportant and worthless for the waking state
that they were forgotten soon after they were experienced.
Such experiences may be the chance-heard remarks of other
persons, or their superficially observed actions, or fleeting
perceptions of things or persons, or isolated phrases that we
have read, etc.”

Havelock Ellis (p. 727) : “The profound emotions of waking
life, the questions and problems on which we spend 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 inci-
dental, 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.”

It is precisely in connection with these characteristics of
memory in dreams that Binz (p. 45) finds occasion to express
dissatisfaction with the explanations of dreams which he
himself had favoured: “And the normal dream raises similar
questions. Why do we not always dream of mental impressions
of the day before, instead of going back, without any perceptible
reason, to the almost forgotten past, now lying far behind us?
Why, in a dream, does consciousness so often revive the
impression of indifferent memory-pictures, while the cerebral
cells that bear the most sensitive records of experience remain
for the most part inert and numb, unless an acute revival
during the waking state has quite recently excited them?”

We can readily understand how the strange preference
shown by the dream-memory for the indifferent and therefore
disregarded details of daily experience must commonly lead
us altogether to overlook the dependence of dreams on the
waking state, or must at least make it difficult for us to prove
this dependence in any individual case, Thus it happened

36 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

that in the statistical treatment of her own and her friend’s
dreams, Miss Whiton Calkins found that 11 per cent. of the
entire number showed no relation to the waking state. Hilde-
brandt was certainly correct in his assertion that all our dream-
images could be genetically explained if we devoted enough
time and material to the tracing of their origin. To be sure, he
calls this “a most tedious and thankless job. For most often
it would lead us to ferret out all sorts of psychically worthless
things from the remotest corners of our storehouse of memories,
and to bring to light all sorts of quite indifferent events of long
ago from the oblivion which may have overtaken them an
hour after their occurrence.” I must, however, express my
regret that this discerning author refrained from following
the path which at first sight seemed so unpromising, for it
would have led him directly to the central point of the explana-
tion of dreams.

The behaviour of memory in dreams is surely most significant
for any theory of memory whatsoever. It teaches us that
“nothing which we have once psychically possessed is ever
entirely lost” (Scholz, p. 34); or as Delbæuf puts it, “que
toute impression, méme la plus insignificante, laisse une trace inaltérable,
indéfiniment susceptible du reparaître au jour”; a conclusion to which
we are urged by so many other pathological manifestations
of mental life. Let us bear in mind this extraordinary capacity
of the memory in dreams, in order the more keenly to realize
the contradiction which has to be put forward in certain
dream-theories to be mentioned later, which seek to explain
the absurdities and incoherences of dreams by a partial for-
getting of what we have known during the day.

It might even occur to one to reduce the phenomenon of
dreaming to that of remembering, and to regard the dream
as the manifestation of a reproductive activity, unresting even
at night, which is an end in itself. This would seem to be in
agreement with statements such as those made by Pilcz,
according to which definite relations between the time of
dreaming and the contents of a dream may be demonstrated,
inasmuch as the impressions reproduced by the dream in
deep sleep belong to the remote past, while those reproduced
towards morning are of recent origin. But such a conception
is rendered improbable from the outset by the manner in

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS 37

which the dream deals with the material to be remembered.
Strümpell rightly calls our attention to the fact that repetitions
of experiences do not occur in dreams. It is true that a dream
will make a beginning in that direction, but the next link is
wanting; it appears in a different form, or is replaced by
something entirely novel. The dream gives us only fragmentary
reproductions ; this is so far the rule that it permits of a theoreti-
cal generalization. Still, there are exceptions in which an epi-
sode is repeated in a dream as completely as it can be reproduced
by our waking memory. Delbœuf relates of one of his university
colleagues that a dream of his repeated, in all its details, a
perilous drive in which he escaped accident as if by miracle.
Miss Calkins mentions two dreams, the contents of which
exactly reproduced an experience of the previous day, and
in a later chapter I shall have occasion to give an example
that came to my own knowledge of a childish experience
which recurred unchanged in a dream."

0
DREAM-STIMULI AND SOURCES

What is meant by dream-stimuli and dream-sources may
be explained by a reference to the popular saying: “Dreams
come from the stomach.” This notion covers a theory which
conceives the dream as resulting from a disturbance of sleep.
We should not have dreamed if some disturbing element
had not come into play during our sleep, and the dream is
the reaction against this disturbance.

The discussion of the exciting causes of dreams occupies
a great deal of space in the literature of dreams. It is obvious
that this problem could have made its appearance only after
dreams had become an object of biological investigation. The
ancients, who conceived of dreams as divine inspirations, had

* From subsequent experience I am able to state that it is not at all rare to find
in dreams reproductions of simple and unimportant occupations of everyday life,
such as packing trunks, preparing food in the kitchen, etc., but in such dreams
the dreamer himself emphasizes not the character of the recollection but its
“reality” —“I really did this during the day.”

38 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

no need to look for stimuli; for them a dream was due to the
will of divine or daemonic powers, and its content was the
product of their special knowledge and intention. Science,
however, immediately raised the question whether the stimuli
of dreams were single or multiple, and this in turn led to the
consideration whether the causal explanation of dreams
belonged to the region of psychology or to that of physiology.
Most authors appear to assume that disturbance of sleep,
and hence dreams, may arise from various causes, and that
physical as well as mental stimuli may play the part of dream-
excitants. Opinions differ widely in preferring this or the other
factor as the cause of dreams, and in classifying them in the
order of importance.

Whenever the sources of dreams are completely enumerated
they fall into the following four categories, which have also
been employed in the classification of dreams: (1) external
(objective) sensory stimuli; (2) internal (subjective) sensory
stimuli; (3) internal (organic) physical stimuli; (4) purely
psychical sources of excitation.

I. EXTERNAL SENSORY STIMULI

The younger Striimpell, the son of the philosopher, whose
work on dreams has already more than once served us as a
guide in considering the problems of dreams, has, as is well
known, recorded his observations of a patient afflicted with
general anaesthesia of the skin and with paralysis of several
of the higher sensory organs. This man would lapse into sleep
whenever the few remaining sensory paths between himself
and the outer world were closed. When we wish to fall asleep
we are accustomed to strive for a condition similar to that
obtaining in Strümpells experiment. We close the most
important sensory portals, the eyes, and we endeavour to
protect the other senses from all stimuli or from any change of
the stimuli already acting upon them. We then fall asleep,
although our preparations are never wholly successful. For we
can never completely insulate the sensory organs, nor can we
entirely abolish the excitability of the sensory organs themselves.
That we may at any time be awakened by intenser stimuli
should prove to us “that the mind has remained in constant
communication with the external world even during sleep.”

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS 39

The sensory stimuli that reach us during sleep may easily
become the source of dreams.

There are a great many stimuli of this nature, ranging
from those unavoidable stimuli which are proper to the state
of sleep or occasionally admitted by it, to those fortuitous
stimuli which are calculated to wake the sleeper. Thus a
strong light may fall upon the eyes, a noise may be heard,
or an odour may irritate the mucous membranes of the nose.
In our unintentional movements during sleep we may lay bare
parts of the body, and thus expose them to a sensation of cold,
or by a change of position we may excite sensations of pressure
and touch. A mosquito may bite us, or a slight nocturnal
mischance may simultaneously attack more than one sense-
organ. Observers have called attention to a whole series of
dreams in which the stimulus ascertained on waking and
some part of the dream-content corresponded to such a degree
that the stimulus could be recognized as the source of the
dream.

I shall here cite a number of such dreams, collected by
Jessen (p. 527), which are traceable to more or less accidental
objective sensory stimuli. Every noise indistinctly perceived
gives rise to corresponding dream-representations ; the rolling
of thunder takes us into the thick of battle, the crowing of a
cock may be transformed into human shrieks of terror, and
the creaking of a door may conjure up dreams of burglars
breaking into the house. When one of our blankets slips off
us at night we may dream that we are walking about naked,
or falling into water. If we lie diagonally across the bed with
our feet extending beyond the edge, we may dream of standing
on the brink of a terrifying precipice, or of falling from a
great height. Should our head accidentally get under the
pillow we may imagine a huge rock overhanging us and about
to crush us under its weight. An accumulation of semen
produces voluptuous dreams, and local pains give rise to ideas
of suffering ill-treatment, of hostile attacks, or of accidental
bodily injuries. . . .

“Meier (Versuch einer Erklärung des Nachtwandelns, Halle,
1758, p. 33) once dreamed of being attacked by several men
who threw him flat on the ground and drove a stake into the
earth between his first and second toes. While imagining this

40 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

in his dream he suddenly awoke and felt a piece of straw
sticking between his toes. The same author, according to
Hemmings (Von den Traumen und Nachtwandlern, Weimar, 1784,
p. 258), "dreamed on another occasion, when his night-
shirt was rather too tight round his neck, that he was being
hanged. In his youth Hoffbauer dreamed of having fallen
from a high wall, and found, on waking, that the bedstead
had come apart, and that he had actually fallen on to the
floor. . . . Gregory relates that he once applied a hot-water
bottle to his feet, and dreamed of taking a trip to the summit
of Mount Etna, where he found the heat of the soil almost
unbearable. After having a blister applied to his head, another
man dreamed of being scalped by Indians; still another, whose
shirt was damp, dreamed that he was dragged through a
stream. Ån attack of gout caused a patient to believe that he
was in the hands of the Inquisition, and suffering the pains
of torture (Macnish).”

The argument that there is a resemblance between the
dream-stimulus and the dream-content would be confirmed
if, by a systematic induction of stimuli, we should succeed in
producing dreams corresponding to these stimuli. According
to Macnish such experiments had already been made by Giron
de Buzareingues. "He left his knee exposed and dreamed of
travelling on a mail-coach by night. He remarked, in this
connection, that travellers were well aware how cold the
knees become in a coach at night. On another occasion he
left the back of his head uncovered, and dreamed that he was
taking part in a religious ceremony in the open air. In the
country where he lived it was customary to keep the head
always covered except on occasions of this kind.”

Maury reports fresh observations on self-induced dreams of
his own. (A number of other experiments were unsuccessful.)

1. He was tickled with a feather on his lips and on the tip
of his nose. He dreamed of an awful torture, viz. that a mask
of pitch was stuck to his face and then forcibly torn off, bringing
the skin with it.

2. Scissors were whetted against a pair of tweezers. He
heard bells ringing, then sounds of tumult which took him
back to the days of the Revolution of 1848.

3. Eau de Cologne was held to his nostrils, He found himself

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS 41

in Cairo, in the shop of Johann Maria Farina. This was followed
by fantastic adventures which he was not able to recall. —

4. His neck was lightly pinched. He dreamed that a blister
was being applied, and thought of a doctor who had treated
him in childhood.

5. A hot iron was brought near his face. He dreamed that
chauffeurs: had broken into the house, and were forcing the
occupants to give up their money by thrusting their feet into
braziers. The Duchesse d’Abrantès, whose secretary he
imagined himself to be, then entered the room.

8. À drop of water was allowed to fall on to his forehead.
He imagined himself in Italy, perspiring heavily, and drinking
the white wine of Orvieto.

9. When the light of a candle screened with red paper was
allowed to fall on his face, he dreamed of thunder, of heat,
and of a storm at sea which he once witnessed in the English
Channel.

Hervey, Weygandt, and others have made attempts to
produce dreams experimentally.

Many have observed the striking skill of the dream in
interweaving into its structure sudden impressions from the
outer world, in such a manner as to represent a gradually
approaching catastrophe (Hildebrandt). “In former years,”
this author relates, “I occasionally made use of an alarm-clock
in order to wake punctually at a certain hour in the morning.
It probably happened hundreds of times that the sound of
this instrument fitted into an apparently very long and con-
nected dream, as though the entire dream had been especially
designed for it, as though it found in this sound its appropriate

‚ and logically indispensable climax, its inevitable denouement.”

I shall presently have occasion to cite three of these alarm-
clock dreams in a different connection.

Volkelt (p. 68) relates: “A composer once dreamed that he
was teaching a class, and was just explaining something to
his pupils. When he had finished he turned to one of the
boys with the question: ‘Did you understand me?” The boy
cried out like one possessed ‘Oh, ja!” Annoyed by this, he
reprimanded his pupil for shouting. But now the entire class

* Chauffeurs were bands of robbers in the Vendée who resorted to this form of
torture,

42 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

was screaming 'Orja, then “Eurjo, and finally “Feuerjo.”
He was then aroused by the actual fire alarm in the street.”

Garnier (Traité des facultés de l’âme, 1865), on the authority
of Radestock, relates that Napoleon I, while sleeping in a
carriage, was awakened from a dream by an explosion which
took him back to the crossing of the Tagliamento and the
bombardment of the Austrians, so that he started up, crying,
“We have been undermined.”

The following dream of Maury’s has become celebrated :
He was ill in bed; his mother was sitting beside him. He
dreamed of the Reign of Terror during the Revolution. He
witnessed some terrible scenes of murder, and finally he himself
was summoned before the Tribunal. There he saw Robespierre,
Marat, Fouquier-Tinville, and all the sorry heroes of those
terrible days; he had to give an account of himself, and after
all manner of incidents which did not fix themselves in his
memory, he was sentenced to death. Accompanied by an
enormous crowd, he was led to the place of execution. He
mounted the scaffold ; the executioner tied him to the plank,
it tipped over, and the knife of the guillotine fell. He felt his
head severed from his trunk, and awakened in terrible anxiety,
only to find that the head-board of the bed had fallen, and had
actually struck the cervical vertebrae just where the knife of
the guillotine would have fallen.

This dream gave rise to an interesting discussion, initiated
by Le Lorrain and Egger in the Revue Philosophique, as to whether,
and how, it was possible for the dreamer to crowd together
an amount of dream-content apparently so large in the short
space of time elapsing between the perception of the waking
stimulus and the moment of actual waking.

Examples of this nature show that objective stimuli occurring
in sleep are among the most firmly-established of all the
sources of dreams; they are, indeed, the only stimuli of which
the layman knows anything whatever. If we ask an educated
person who is not familiar with the literature of dreams how
dreams originate, he is certain to reply by a reference to a
case known to him in which a dream has been explained
after waking by a recognized objective stimulus. Science,
however, cannot stop here, but is incited to further investi-
gation by the observation that the stimulus influencing the

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS 43

senses during sleep does not appear in the dream at all in its
true form, but is replaced by some other representation, which
is in some way related to it. But the relation existing between
the stimulus and the resulting dream is, according to Maury,
“une affinité quelconque mais qui n’est pas unique et exclusive” (p. 72).
If we read, for example, three of Hildebrandt's “alarm-clock
dreams,” we shall be compelled to ask why the same causal
stimulus evoked so many different results, and why just these
results and no others.

(P. 37) : “I am taking a walk on a beautiful spring morning.
I stroll through the green meadows to a neighbouring village,
where I see numbers of the inhabitants going to church, wearing
their best clothes and carrying their hymn-books under their
arms. I remember that it is Sunday, and that the morning
service will soon begin. I decide to attend it, but as I am rather
overheated I think I will wait in the churchyard until I am
cooler. While reading the various epitaphs, I hear the sexton
climbing the church-tower, and I see above me the small
bell which is about to ring for the beginning of service. For a
little while it hangs motionless; then it begins to swing, and
suddenly its notes resound so clearly and penetratingly that
my sleep comes to an end. But the notes of the bell come from
the alarm-clock.”

“A second combination. It is a bright winter day; the
streets are deep in snow. I have promised to go on a sleigh-ride,
but I have to wait some time before I am told that the sleigh
is at the door. Now I am preparing to get into the sleigh.
I put on my furs, the foot-warmer is put in, and at last I have
taken my seat. But still my departure is delayed. At last the
reins are twitched, the horses start, and the sleigh bells, now
violently shaken, strike up their familiar music with a force
that instantly tears the gossamer of my dream. Again it is
only the shrill note of my alarm-clock.”

“Yet a third example. I see the kitchen-maid walking along
the passage to the dining-room, with a pile of several dozen
plates. The porcelain column in her arms seems to me to be in
danger of losing its equilibrium. ‘Take care,” I exclaim, ‘you
will drop the whole pile!” The usual retort is naturally made
—that she is used to such things, etc. Meanwhile I continue
to follow her with my anxious gaze, and behold, at the threshold

44 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

the fragile plates fall and crash and roll across the floor in
hundreds of pieces. But I soon perceive that the endless din
is not really a rattling but a true ringing, and with this ringing
the dreamer now becomes aware that the alarm-clock has done
its duty.”

The question why the dreaming mind misjudges the nature
of the objective sensory stimulus has been answered by Strüm-
pell, and in an almost identical fashion by Wundt; their
explanation is that the reaction of the mind to the stimulus
attacking sleep is complicated and confused by the formation
of illusions. A sensory impression is recognized by us and
correctly interpreted—that is, it is classed with the memory-
group to which it belongs according to all previous experience
if the impression is strong, clear, and sufficiently prolonged,
and if we have sufficient time to submit it to those mental
processes. But if these conditions are not fulfilled we mistake
the object which gives rise to the impression, and on the
basis of this impression we construct an illusion. “If one takes
a walk in an open field and perceives indistinctly a distant
object, it may happen that one will at first take it for a horse.”
On closer inspection the image of a cow, resting, may obtrude
itself, and the picture may finally resolve itself with certainty
into a group of people sitting on the ground. The impressions
which the mind receives during sleep from external stimuli are
of a similarly indistinct nature; they give rise to illusions
because the impression evokes a greater or lesser number of
memory-images, through which it acquires its psychic value.
As for the question, in which of the many possible spheres of
memory the corresponding images are aroused, and which
of the possible associative connections are brought into play,
that—to quote Strimpell again—is indeterminable, and is
left, as it were, to the caprices of the mind.

Here we may take our choice. We may admit that the laws
of dream-formation cannot really be traced any further, and
so refrain from asking whether or not the interpretation of
the illusion evoked by the sensory impression depends upon
still other conditions; or we may assume that the objective
sensory stimulus encroaching upon sleep plays only a modest
råle as a dream-source, and that other factors determine the
choice of the memory-image to be evoked. Indeed, on carefully

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS 45

examining Maury’s experimentally produced dreams, which
I have purposely cited in detail, one is inclined to object that
his investigations trace the origin of only one element of the
dreams, and that the rest of the dream-content seems too
independent and too full of detail to be explained by a single
requirement, namely, that it must correspond with the element
experimentally introduced. Indeed, one even begins to doubt
the illusion theory, and the power of objective impressions to
shape the dream, when one realizes that such impressions are
sometimes subjected to the most peculiar and far-fetched inter-
pretations in our dreams. Thus M. Simon tells of a dream in
which he saw persons of gigantic stature" seated at a table,
and heard distinctly the horrible clattering produced by the
impact of their jaws as they chewed their food. On waking
he heard the clatter of a horse’s hooves as it galloped past his
window. If in this case the sound of the horse’s hooves had
revived ideas from the memory-sphere of Gulliver's Travels,
the sojourn with the giants of Brobdingnag, and the virtuous
horse-like creatures—as I should perhaps interpret the dream
without any assistance on the author’s part—ought not the
choice of a memory-sphere so alien to the stimulus to be further
elucidated by other motives?

2. INTERNAL (SUBJECTIVE) SENSORY STIMULI

All objections to the contrary notwithstanding, we must
admit that the réle of the objective sensory stimuli as producers
of dreams has been indisputably established, and if, having
regard to their nature and their frequency, these stimuli
seem perhaps insufficient to explain all dream-pictures, this
indicates that we should look for other dream-sources which
act in a similar fashion. I do not know where the idea first
arose that together with the external sensory stimuli the
internal (subjective) stimuli should also be considered, but as
a matter of fact this has been done more or less explicitly in
all the more recent descriptions of the etiology of dreams.
“I believe,” says Wundt (p. 363), “that an important part is

* Gigantic persons in a dream justify the assumption that the dream is dealing
with a scene from the dreamer’s childhood. This interpretation of the dream
as a reminiscence of Gulliver's Travels is, by the way, a good example of how an
interpretation should not be made. The dream-interpreter should not permit
his own intelligence to operate in disregard of the dreamer’s impressions,

46 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

played in dream-illusions by those subjective sensations of
sight and hearing which are familiar to us in the waking state
as a luminous chaos in the dark field of the vision, and a
ringing, buzzing, etc., of the ears, and in especial, subjective
irritations of the retina. This explains the remarkable tendency
of dreams to delude the eyes with numbers of similar or identical
objects. Thus we see outspread before our eyes innumerable
birds, butterflies, fishes, coloured beads, flowers, etc. Here the
luminous dust in the dark field of vision has assumed fantastic
forms, and the many luminous points of which it consists are
embodied in our dreams in as many single images, which,
owing to the mobility of the luminous chaos, are seen as moving
objects. This is perhaps the reason of the dream’s decided
preference for the most varied animal forms, for owing to the
multiplicity of such forms they can readily adapt themselves
to the subjective luminous images.”

The subjective sensory stimuli as a source of dreams have
the obvious advantage that, unlike objective stimuli, they are
independent of external accidents. They are, so to speak, at
the disposal of the interpretation whenever they are required.
But they are inferior to the objective sensory stimuli by the
fact that their claim to the réle of dream-inciters—which
observation and experiment have established in the case of
objective stimuli—can in their case be verified with difficulty
or not at all. The main proof of the dream-inciting power of
subjective sensory stimuli is afforded by the so-called hyp-
nogogic hallucinations, which have been described by Johann
Müller as “phantastic visual manifestations.” They are those
very vivid and changeable pictures which with many people
occur constantly during the period of falling asleep, and which
may linger for a while even after the eyes have been opened.
Maury, who was very subject to these pictures, made a thorough
study of them, and maintained that they were related to or
rather identical with dream-images. This had already been
asserted by Johann Miiller. Maury maintains that a certain
psychic passivity is necessary for their origin; that it requires
a relaxation of the intensity of attention (p. 59). But one may
perceive a hypnogogic hallucination in any frame of mind
if one falls into such a lethargy for a moment, after which
one may perhaps wake up, until this oft-repeated process

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS 47

terminates in sleep. According to Maury, if one wakes up
shortly after such an experience, it is often possible to trace
in the dream the images which one has perceived before
falling asleep as hypnogogic hallucinations (p. 134). Thus
Maury on one occasion saw a series of images of grotesque
figures with distorted features and curiously dressed hair, which
obtruded themselves upon him with incredible importunity
during the period of falling asleep, and which, upon waking,
he recalled having seen in his dream. On another occasion,
while suffering from hunger, because he was subjecting himself
to a rather strict diet, he saw in one of his hypnogogic states
a plate, and a hand armed with a fork taking some food from
the plate. In his dream he found himself at a table abundantly
supplied with food, and heard the clatter of the diners’ forks.
On yet another occasion, after falling asleep with strained
and painful eyes, he had a hypnogogic hallucination of micro-
scopically small characters, which he was able to decipher,
one by one, only with a great effort; and on waking from
sleep an hour later he recalled a dream in which there was
an open book with very small letters, which he was obliged to
read through with laborious effort.

Not only pictures, but auditory hallucinations of words,
names, etc., may also occur hypnogogically, and then repeat
themselves in the dream, like an overture announcing the
principal motif of the opera which is to follow.

A more recent observer of hypnogogic hallucinations,
G. Trumbull Ladd, follows the same lines as Johann Müller
and Maury. By dint of practice he succeeded in acquiring the
faculty of suddenly arousing himself, without opening his
eyes, two to five minutes after gradually falling asleep. This
enabled him to compare the disappearing retinal sensations
with the dream-images remaining in his memory. He assures
us that an intimate relation between the two can always be
recognized, inasmuch as the luminous dots and lines of light
spontaneously perceived by the retina produce, so to speak,
the outline or scheme of the psychically perceived dream-images.
For example, a dream in which he saw before him clearly
printed lines, which he read and studied, corresponded with
a number of luminous spots arranged in parallel lines; or,
to express it in his own words: The clearly printed page

48 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

resolved itself into an object which appeared to his waking
perception like part of an actual printed page seen through
a small hole in a sheet of paper, but at a distance too great
to permit of its being read. Without in any way underestimating
the central element of the phenomenon, Ladd believes that
hardly any visual dream occurs in our minds that is not
based on material furnished by this internal condition of
retinal irritability. This is particularly true of dreams which
occur shortly after falling asleep in a dark room, while dreams
occurring in the morning, near the period of waking, receive
their stimulus from the objective light penetrating the eye in
a brightly-lit room. The shifting and infinitely variable char-
acter of the spontaneous luminous excitations of the retina
exactly corresponds with the fitful succession of images presented
to us in our dreams. If we attach any importance to Ladd’s
observations, we cannot underrate the productiveness of this
subjective source of stimuli; for visual images, as we know,
are the principal constituents of our dreams. The share contri-
buted by the other senses, excepting, perhaps, the sense of
hearing, is relatively insignificant and inconstant.

8. INTERNAL (ORGANIC) PHYSICAL STIMULI

If we are disposed to look for the sources of dreams not
outside but inside the organism, we must remember that
almost all our internal organs, which in a state of health
hardly remind us of their existence, may, in states of excitation
—as we call them—or in disease, become a source of the most
painful sensations, and must therefore be put on a par with
the external excitants of pain and sensation. Striimpell, for
example, gives expression to a long-familiar experience when
he declares that “during sleep the psyche becomes far more
deeply and broadly conscious of its corporality than in the
waking state, and it is compelled to receive and to be influenced
by certain stimulating impressions originating in parts of the
body, and in alterations of the body, of which it is unconscious
in the waking state.” Even Aristotle declares it to be quite
possible that a dream may draw our attention to incipient
morbid conditions which we have not noticed in the waking
state (owing to the exaggerated intensity of the impressions

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS 49

experienced in the dream!; and some medical authors, who
certainly did not believe in the prophetic nature of dreams,
have admitted the significance of dreams, at least in so far as
the predicting of disease is concerned. [Cf. M. Simon, р. 31,
and many earlier writers.*])

Even in our days there seems to be no lack of authenticated
examples of such diagnostic achievements on the part of
dreams. Thus Tissié cites from Artigues (Essai sur la valeur
séméiologique des Réves) the history of a woman of forty-three,
who, during several years of apparently perfect health, was
troubled with anxiety-dreams, and in whom a medical exami-
nation subsequently revealed an incipient affection of the heart,
to which she presently succumbed.

Serious derangements of the internal organs clearly excite
dreams in quite a number of persons. The frequency of anxiety-
dreams in diseases of the heart and lungs has been generally
realized ; indeed, this function of the dream-life is emphasized
by so many writers that I shall here content myself with a
reference to the literature of the subject (Radestock, Spitta,
Maury, M. Simon, Tissié). Tissié even believes that the diseased
organs impress upon the dream-content its characteristic
features. The dreams of persons suffering from diseases of the.
heart are generally very brief, and end in a terrified awakening ;
death under terrible circumstances almost always finds a
place in their content. Those suffering from diseases of the
lungs dream of suffocation, of being crushed, and of flight,
and a great many of them are subject to the familiar nightmare
—which, by the way, Borner has succeeded in inducing experi-

1 Cf. above, p. 20.
* Inaddition to the diagnostic valuation of dreams (e.g. by Hippocrates) mention
must also be made of their therapeutic significance in antiquity.

Among the Greeks there were dream oracles, which were vouchsafed to patients
in quest of recovery. The patient betook himself to the temple of Apollo or
Aesculapius; there he was subjected to various ceremonies, bathed, rubbed and
perfumed. A state of exaltation having been thus induced, he was made to lie
down in the temple on the skin of a sacrificial ram. He fell asleep and dreamed of
remedies, which he saw in their natural form, or in symbolic images which the
priests afterwards interpreted.

For further references concerning the remedial dreams of the Greeks, cf.
Lehmann, i, 74; Bouché-Leclerq; Hermann, Gottesd. Altert. d. Gr.,$ 41; Privataltert.
$ 38, 16; Bóttinger in Sprengel's Beitr. z. Gesch. d. Med., ii, p. 163, et seq.; W. Lloyd,
Magnetism and Mesmerism in Antiquity, London, 1877; Dôllinger, Heidentum und
Judentum, p. 130.

D

50 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

mentally by lying on the face and covering the mouth and
nostrils. In digestive disturbances the dream contains ideas
from the sphere of gustatory enjoyment and disgust. Finally,
the influence of sexual excitement on the dream-content is
obvious enough in everyone's experience, and provides the
strongest confirmation of the whole theory of dream-instiga-
tion by organic sensation.

Moreover, if we study the literature of dreams it becomes
quite evident that some writers (Maury, Weygandt) have been
led to the study of dream-problems by the influence their
own pathological state has had on the content of their dreams.

The enlargement of the number of dream-sources by such
undeniably established facts is, however, not so important as
one might be led to suppose; for dreams are, after all, pheno-
mena which occur in healthy persons—perhaps in all persons,
and every night—and a pathological state of the organs is
evidently not one of the indispensable conditions. For us,
however, the question is not whence particular dreams originate,
but rather: what is the exciting cause of ordinary dreams in
normal people?

But we have only to go a step farther to find a source of
dreams which is more prolific than any of those mentioned
above, and which promises indeed to be inexhaustible. If it
is established that the bodily organs become, in sickness, an
exciting source of dreams, and if we admit that the mind,
when diverted during sleep from the outer world, can devote
more of its attention to the interior of the body, we may readily
assume that the organs need not necessarily become diseased
in order to permit stimuli, which in one way or another grow
into dream-images, to reach the sleeping mind. What in the
waking state we vaguely perceive as a general sensation,
perceptible by its quality alone—a sensation to which, in the
opinion of physicians, all the organic systems contribute their
share—this general sensation would at night attain a greater
potency, and, acting through its individual components, would
constitute the most prolific as well as the most usual source
of dream-representations. We should then have to discover the
laws by which organic stimuli are translated into dream-
representations.

This theory of the origin of dreams is the one most favoured

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS 51

by all medical writers. The obscurity which conceals the
essence of our being—the “moi splanchnique” as Tissié terms
it—from our knowledge, and the obscurity of the origin of
dreams, correspond so closely that it was inevitable that they
should be brought into relation with one another. The
theory according to which the organic sensations are re-
sponsible for dreams has, moreover, another attraction for
the physician, inasmuch as it favours the etiological union of
the dream with mental derangement, both of which reveal so
many points of agreement in their manifestations, since
changes in the general organic massive sensation and in the
stimuli emanating from the internal organs are also considered
to have a far-reaching significance as regards the origin of
the psychoses. It is therefore not surprising that the organic
stimulus theory can be traced to several writers who have
propounded this theory independently.

A number of writers have followed the train of thought
developed by Schopenhauer in 1851. Our conception of the
universe has its origin in the recasting by the intellect of the
impressions which reach it from without in the moulds of time,
space, and causality. During the day the stimuli proceeding
from the interior of the organism, from the sympathetic
nervous system, exert at most an unconscious influence on
our mood. At night, however, when the overwhelming effect
of the impressions of the day is no longer operative, the impres-
sions that surge upward from within are able to force them-
selves on our attention—just as in the night we hear the
rippling of the brook that was drowned in the clamour of the
day. But how else can the intellect react to these stimuli than
by transforming them in accordance with its own function
into things which occupy space and time and follow the lines
of causality?—and so a dream originates. Thus Scherner, and
after him Volkelt, endeavoured to discover the more intimate
relations between physical sensations and dream-pictures;
but we shall reserve the discussion of this point for our chapter
on the theory of dreams.

As a result of a singularly logical analysis, the psychiatrist
Krauss referred the origin of dreams, and also of deliria and
delusions, to the same element, namely, to organically deter-
mined sensations. According to him, there is hardly any

52 THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

part of the organism which might not become the starting-
point of a dream or a delusion. Organically determined sensa-
tions, he says, “may be divided into two classes: (1) general
sensations—those affecting the whole system; (2) specific
sensations—those that are immanent in the principal systems
of the vegetative organism, and which may in turn be sub-
divided into five groups: (a) the muscular, (4) the pneumatic,
(c) the gastric, (4) the sexual, (e) the peripheral sensations
(p- 33 of the second article).”

The origin of the dream-image from physical sensations is
conceived by Krauss as follows: The awakened sensation, in
accordance with some law of association, evokes an idea or
image bearing some relation to it, and combines with this
idea or image, forming an organic structure, towards which,
however, the consciousness does not maintain its normal
attitude. For it does not bestow any attention on the sensation,
but concerns itself entirely with the accompanying ideas;
and this explains why the facts of the case have been so long
misunderstood (p. rr ff). Krauss even gives this process the
special name of “transubstantiation of the sensations into
dream-images” (p. 24).

The influence of organic physical stimuli on the formation
of dreams is to-day almost universally admitted, but the
question as to the nature of the law underlying this relation
is answered in various ways, and often obscurely. On the
basis of the theory of physical excitation the special task
of dream-interpretation is to trace back the content of a dream
to the causative organic stimulus, and if we do not accept the
rules of interpretation advanced by Scherner, we shall often
find ourselves confronted by the awkward fact that the organic
source of excitation reveals itself only in the content of the
dream.

A certain agreement, however, appears in the interpretation
of the various forms of dreams which have been designated
as “typical,” because they recur in so many persons with
almost the same content. Among these are the well-known
dreams of falling from a height, of the dropping out of teeth,
of flying, and of embarrassment because one is naked or scantily
clad. This last type of dream is said to be caused simply by the
dreamer’s perception, felt in his sleep, that he has thrown off

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS 53

the bed-clothes and is uncovered. The dream that one’s teeth
are dropping out is explained by “dental irritation,” which
does not, however, of necessity imply a morbid condition of
irritability in the teeth. According to Strümpell, the flying
dream is the adequate image employed by the mind to
interpret the quantum of stimulus emanating from the rising
and sinking of the pulmonary lobes when the cutaneous sensa-
tion of the thorax has lapsed into insensibility. This latter
condition causes the sensation which gives rise to images of
hovering in the air. The dream of falling from a height is said
to be due to the fact that an arm falls away from the body, or
a flexed knee is suddenly extended, after unconsciousness of
the sensation of cutaneous pressure has supervened, whereupon
this sensation returns to consciousness, and the transition from
unconsciousness to consciousness embodies itself psychically
as a dream of falling (Strümpell, p. 118). The weakness of
these fairly plausible attempts at explanation clearly lies in
the fact that without any further elucidation they allow this
or that group of organic sensations to disappear from psychic
perception, or to obtrude themselves upon it, until the con-
stellation favourable for the explanation has been established.
Later on, however, I shall have occasion to return to the
subject of typical dreams and their origin.

From a comparison of a series of similar dreams, M. Simon
endeavoured to formulate certain rules governing the influence
of organic sensations on the nature of the resulting dream.
He says (p. 34) : “If during sleep any organic apparatus, which
normally participates in the expression of an affect, for any
reason enters into the state of excitation to which it is usually
aroused by the affect, the dream thus produced will contain
representations which harmonize with that affect.”

Another rule reads as follows (p. 35): “If, during sleep,
an organic apparatus is in a state of activity, stimulation,
or disturbance, the dream will present ideas which correspond
with the nature of the organic function performed by that
apparatus.”

Mourly Vold has undertaken to prove the supposed influence
of bodily sensation on the production of dreams by experi-
menting on a single physiological territory. He changed the
positions of a sleeper’s limbs, and compared the resulting

54

dreams with these changes. He recorded the following
results:

1. The position of a limb in a dream corresponds approxi-
mately to that of reality, i.e. we dream of a static condition
of the limb which corresponds with the actual condition.

2. When one dreams of a moving limb it always happens
that one of the positions occurring in the execution of this
movement corresponds with the actual position.

3. The position of one’s own limb may in the dream be
attributed to another person.

4. One may also dream that the movement in question is
impeded.

5. The limb in any particular position may appear in the
dream as an animal or monster, in which case a certain analogy
between the two is established.

6. The behaviour of a limb may in the dream incite ideas
which bear some relation or other to this limb. Thus, for
example, if we are using our fingers we dream of numerals.

Results such as these would lead me to conclude that even
the theory of organic stimulation cannot entirely abolish the
apparent freedom of the determination of the dream-picture
which will be evoked.¹

4. PSYCHIC SOURCES OF EXCITATION

When considering the relation of dreams to waking life,
and the provenance of the material of dreams, we learned
that the earliest as well as the most recent investigators are
agreed that men dream of what they do during the day, and
of the things that interest them in the waking state. This interest,
continued from waking life into sleep, is not only a psychic
bond, joining the dream to life, but it is also a source of dreams
whose importance must not be underesti-
mated, and which,
taken together with those stimuli which become active and
of interest during sleep, suffices to explain the origin of all
dream-
images. Yet we have also heard the very contrary of
this asserted; namely, that dreams bear the sleeper away from
the interests of the day, and that in most cases we do not dream
of things which have occupied our attention during the day

¹See below for a further discussion of the two volumes of records of dreams
since published by this writer.

55

until after they have lost, for our waking life, the stimulating
force of belonging to the present. Hence in the analysis of
dream-
life we are reminded at every step that it is inadmissible
to frame general rules without making provision for qualifi-
cations by introducing such terms as “frequently,” “as a rule,”
“in most cases,” and without being prepared to admit the
validity of exceptions.

If interest during the waking state, together with the internal
and external stimuli that occur during sleep, sufficed to cover
the whole etiology of dreams, we should be in a position to
give a satisfactory account of the origin of all the elements of
a dream; the problem of the dream-
sources would then be
solved, leaving us only the task of discriminating between the
part played by the psychic and that played by the somatic
dream-
stimuli in individual dreams. But as a matter of fact
no such complete solution of a dream has ever been achieved
in any case, and everyone who has attempted such a solution
has found that components of the dream–and usually a great
many of them–are left whose source he is unable to trace.
The interests of the day as a psychic source of dreams are
obviously not so influential as to justify the confident assertion
that every dreamer continues the activities of his waking
life in his dreams.

Other dream-
sources of a psychic nature are not known.
Hence, with the exception perhaps of the explanation of
dreams given by Scherner, to which reference will be made
later on, all the explanations found in the literature of the
subject show a considerable hiatus whenever there is a question
of tracing the images and ideas which are the most character-
istic material of dreams. In this dilemma the majority of authors
have developed a tendency to belittle as far as possible the
share of the psychic factor, which is so difficult to determine,
in the evocation of dreams. To be sure, they distinguish as
major divisions the nerve-
stimulus dream and the association-
dream, and assert that the latter has its source exclusively in
reproduction (Wundt, p. 365), but they cannot dismiss the
doubt as to “whether they appear without any impulsion
from organic stimuli” (Volkelt, p. 127). And even the charac-
teristic quality of the pure association-
dream disappears.
To quote Volkelt (p. 118): “In the association-
dream proper

56

there is no longer any question of such a stable nucleus. Here
the loose grouping penetrates even to the very centre of the
dream. The imaginative life, already released from the control
of reason and intellect, is here no longer held together by the
more important psychical and physical stimuli, but is left to
its own uncontrolled and confused divagations.” Wundt,
too, attempts to belittle the psychic factor in the evocation
of dreams by asserting that “the phantasms of the dream are
perhaps unjustly regarded as pure hallucinations. Probably
most dream-representations are really illusions, inasmuch
as they emanate from the slight sensory impressions which are
never extinguished during sleep” (p. 359, et seq.). Weygandt
has adopted this view, and generalizes upon it. He asserts
that “the most immediate cause of all dream-
representations are sensory stimuli to which reproductive associations then
attach themselves” (p. 17). Tissié goes still further in sup-
pressing the psychic sources of excitation: (p. 183): “Les rêves
d’origine absolument psychique n’existent pas”, and elsewhere
(p. 6), “Les pensées de nos rêves nous viennent de dehors. . . .”

Those writers who, like the eminent philosopher Wundt,
adopt a middle course, do not hesitate to assert that in most
dreams there is a co-
operation of the somatic stimuli and
psychic stimuli which are either unknown or are identified
with the interests of the day.

We shall learn later that the problem of dream-
formation
may be solved by the disclosure of an entirely unsuspected
psychic source of excitation. In the meanwhile we shall not
be surprised at the over-
estimation of the influence of those
stimuli which do not originate in the psychic life. It is not
merely because they alone may easily be found, and even
confirmed by experiment, but because the somatic conception
of dreams entirely corresponds with the mode of
thought prevalent in modern psychiatry. Here, it is true, the
mastery of the brain over the organism is most emphatically
stressed; but everything that might show that the psychic
life is independent of demonstrable organic changes, or spon-
taneous in its manifestations, is alarming to the contemporary
psychiatrist, as though such an admission must mean a return
to the old-
world natural philosophy and the metaphysical
conception of the nature of the soul. The distrust of the psychia-
 

57

trist has placed the psyche under tutelage, so to speak; it
requires that none of the impulses of the psyche shall reveal
an autonomous power. Yet this attitude merely betrays a
lack of confidence in the stability of the causal concatenation
between the physical and the psychic. Even where on investiga-
tion the psychic may be recognized as the primary cause of a
phenomenon, a more profound comprehension of the subject
will one day succeed in following up the path that leads to
the organic basis of the psychic. But where the psychic must, in
the present state of our knowledge, be accepted as the terminus,
it need not on that account be disavowed.

D

WHY DREAMS ARE FORGOTTEN AFTER WAKING

That a dream “fades away” in the morning is proverbial.
It is, indeed, possible to recall it. For we know the dream, of
course, only by recalling it after waking; but we very often
believe that we remember it incompletely, that during the
night there was more of it than we remember. We may observe
how the memory of a dream which in the morning was still
vivid fades in the course of the day, leaving only a few trifling
remnants. We are often aware that we have been dreaming,
but we do not know of what we have dreamed; and we are
so well used to this fact—that the dream is liable to be forgotten
—that we do not reject as absurd the possibility that we may
have been dreaming even when, in the morning, we know
nothing either of the content of the dream or of the fact that
we have dreamed. On the other hand, it often happens that
dreams manifest an extraordinary power of maintaining
themselves in the memory. I have had occasion to analyse,
with my patients, dreams which occurred to them twenty-five
years or more previously, and I can remember a dream of my
own which is divided from the present day by at least thirty-
seven years, and yet has lost nothing of its freshness in my
memory. All this is very remarkable, and for the present
incomprehensible.

The forgetting of dreams is treated in the most detailed

58

manner by Strümpell. This forgetting is evidently a complex
phenomenon; for Strümpell attributes it not to a single cause,
but to quite a number of causes.
In the first place, all those factors which induce forgetfulness
in the waking state determine also the forgetting of dreams.
In the waking state we commonly very soon forget a great
many sensations and perceptions because they are too slight
to remember, and because they are charged with only a slight
amount of emotional feeling. This is true also of many dream-
images; they are forgotten because they are too weak, while
the stronger images in their neighbourhood are remembered.
However, the factor of intensity is in itself not the only deter-
minant of the preservation of dream-images; Strümpell, as
well as other authors (Calkins), admits that dream-images
are often rapidly forgotten although they are known to have
been vivid, whereas among those that are retained in the
memory there are many that are very shadowy and unmeaning.
Besides, in the waking state one is wont to forget rather easily
things that have happened only once, and to remember
more readily things which occur repeatedly. But most dream-
images are unique experiences,¹ and this peculiarity would
contribute towards the forgetting of all dreams equally. Of
much greater significance is a third cause of forgetting. In
order that feelings, representations, ideas and the like should
attain a certain degree of memorability, it is important that
they should not remain isolated, but that they should enter
into connections and associations of an appropriate nature.
If the words of a verse of poetry are taken and mixed together,
it will be very difficult to remember them. “Properly placed,
in a significant sequence, one word helps another, and the
whole, making sense, remains and is easily and lastingly fixed
in the memory. Contradictions, as a rule, are retained with
just as much difficulty and just as rarely as things that are
confused and disorderly.” Now dreams, in most cases, lack
sense and order. Dream-compositions, by their very nature,
are insusceptible of being remembered, and they are forgotten
because as a rule they fall to pieces the very next moment.
To be sure, these conclusions are not entirely consistent with

¹Periodically recurrent dreams have been observed repeatedly. Compare the
collection made by Chabaneix.

59

Radestock’s observation (p. 168), that we most readily retain
just those dreams which are most peculiar.

According to Strümpell, other factors, deriving from the
relation of the dream to the waking state, are even more effec-
tive in causing us to forget our dreams. The forgetfulness
of dreams manifested by the waking consciousness is evidently
merely the counterpart of the fact already mentioned, namely,
that the dream hardly ever takes over an orderly series of
memories from the waking state, but only certain details of
these memories, which it removes from the habitual psychic
connections in which they are remembered in the waking
state. The dream-composition, therefore, has no place in the
community of the psychic series which fill the mind. It lacks
all mnemonic aids. “In this manner the dream-structure
rises, as it were, from the soil of our psychic life, and floats
in psychic space like a cloud in the sky, quickly dispelled by
the first breath of reawakening life” (p. 87). This situation
is accentuated by the fact that on waking the attention is
immediately besieged by the inrushing world of sensation,
so that very few dream-images are capable of withstanding
its force. They fade away before the impressions of the new
day like the stars before the light of the sun.

Finally, we should remember that the fact that most people
take but little interest in their dreams is conducive to the
forgetting of dreams. Anyone who for some time applies
himself to the investigation of dreams, and takes a special
interest in them, usually dreams more during that period than
at any other; he remembers his dreams more easily and more
frequently.

Two other reasons for the forgetting of dreams, which
Bonatelli (cited by Benini) adds to those adduced by Strümpell,
have already been included in those enumerated above;
namely, (1) that the difference of the general sensation in the
sleeping and the waking state is unfavourable to mutual
reproduction, and (2) that the different arrangement of the
material in the dream makes the dream untranslatable, so
to speak, for the waking consciousness.

It is therefore all the more remarkable, as Strümpell himself
observes, that in spite of all these reasons for forgetting the
dream so many dreams are retained in the memory. The

60

continual efforts of those who have written on the subject to
formulate laws for the remembering of dreams amount to
an admission that here too there is something puzzling and
unexplained. Certain peculiarities relating to the remembering
of dreams have attracted particular attention of late; for
example, the fact that the dream which is believed to be
forgotten in the morning may be recalled in the course of the
day on the occasion of some perception which accidentally
touches the forgotten content of the dream (Radestock, Tissié).
But the whole recollection of dreams is open to an objection
which is calculated greatly to depreciate its value in critical
eyes. One may doubt whether our memory, which omits so
much from the dream, does not falsify what it retains.

This doubt as to the exactness of the reproduction of dreams
is expressed by Strümpell when he says: “It may therefore
easily happen that the waking consciousness involuntarily
interpolates a great many things in the recollection of the dream;
one imagines that one has dreamt all sorts of things which the
actual dream did not contain.”

Jessen (p. 547) expresses himself in very decided terms:
“Moreover, we must not lose sight of the fact, hitherto little
heeded, that in the investigation and interpretation of coherent
and logical dreams we almost always take liberties with the
truth when we recall a dream to memory. Unconsciously and
unintentionally we fill up the gaps and supplement the dream-
images. Rarely, and perhaps never, has a connected dream
been as connected as it appears to us in memory. Even the
most truth-loving person can hardly relate a dream without
exaggerating and embellishing it in some degree. The human
mind so greatly tends to perceive everything in a connected
form that it intentionally supplies the missing links in any
dream which is in some degree incoherent.”

The observations of V. Eggers, though of course indepen-
dently conceived, read almost like a translation of Jessen’s
words:

“... L’observation des rêves a ses difficultés spéciales et le seul
moyen d’éviter toute 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

61

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS

que l’on n’a pas oublié, on est exposé à compléter par imagination les
fragments incohérents et disjoints fourni 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. . . .”

Similarly Spitta, who seems to think that it is only in the
attempt to reproduce the dream that we bring order and
arrangement into the loosely associated dream-elements—
“turning juxtaposition into concatenation; that is, adding
the process of logical connection which is absent in the dream.”

Since we can test the reliability of our memory only by
objective means, and since such a test is impossible in the
case of dreams, which are our own personal experience, and
for which we know no other source than our memory, what
value do our recollections of our dreams possess?

E

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PECULIARITIES OF DREAMS

In our scientific investigation of dreams we start with the
assumption that dreams are a phenomenon of our own psychic
activity; yet the completed dream appears to us as something
alien, whose authorship we are so little inclined to recognize
that we should be just as willing to say “A dream came to
me,” as “I dreamed.” Whence this “psychic strangeness”
of dreams? According to our exposition of the sources of dreams,
we must assume that it is not determined by the material which
finds its way into the dream-content, since this is for the most
part common both to dream-life and waking life. We might
ask ourselves whether this impression is not evoked by modi-
fications of the psychic processes in dreams, and we might
even attempt to suggest that the existence of such changes is
the psychological characteristic of dreams.

No one has more strongly emphasized the essential difference
between dream-life and waking life and drawn more farr
reaching conclusions from this difference than G. Th. Fechne-
in certain observations contained in his Elemente der Psycho-
physik (Part II, p. 520). He believes that “neither the simple

62

depression of conscious psychic life under the main threshold,”
nor the distraction of the attention from the influences of the
outer world, suffices to explain the peculiarities of dream-life
as compared with waking life. He believes, rather, that the
arena of dreams is other than the arena of the waking life of
the mind. “If the arena of psychophysical activity were the
same during the sleeping and the waking state, the dream,
in my opinion, could only be a continuation of the waking
ideational life at a lower degree of intensity, so that it would
have to partake of the form and material of the latter. But
this is by no means the case.”

What Fechner really meant by such a transposition of the
psychic activity has never been made clear, nor has anybody
else, to my knowledge, followed the path which he indicates
in this remark. An anatomical interpretation in the sense of
physiological localization in the brain, or even a histological
stratification of the cerebral cortex, must of course be excluded.
The idea might, however, prove ingenious and fruitful if it
could refer to a psychical apparatus built up of a number of
successive and connected systems.

Other authors have been content to give prominence to
this or that palpable psychological peculiarity of the dream-
life, and even to take this as a starting-point for more compre-
hensive attempts at explanation.

It has been justly remarked that one of the chief peculiarities
of dream-life makes its appearance even in the state of falling
asleep, and may be defined as the sleep-heralding phenomenon.
According to Schleiermacher (p. 351), the distinguishing char-
acteristic of the waking state is the fact that its psychic activity
occurs in the form of ideas rather than in that of images.
But the dream thinks mainly in visual images, and it may be
noted that with the approach of sleep the voluntary activities
become impeded in proportion as involuntary representations
make their appearance, the latter belonging entirely to the
category of images. The incapacity for such ideational activities
as we feel to be deliberately willed, and the emergence of visual
images, which is regularly connected with this distraction—
these are two constant characteristics of dreams, and on
psychological analysis we are compelled to recognize them as
essential characteristics of dream-life. As for the images them-

63

selves–the hypnogogic hallucinations–we have learned that
even in their content they are identical with dream-images.¹
Dreams, then, think preponderantly, but not exclusively,
in visual images. They make use also of auditory images, and,
to a lesser extent, of the other sensory impressions. Moreover,
in dreams, as in the waking state, many things are simply
thought or imagined (probably with the help of remnants of
verbal conceptions). Characteristic of dreams, however, are
only those elements of its content which behave like images,
that is, which more closely resemble perceptions than mnemonic
representations. Without entering upon a discussion of the
nature of hallucinations–a discussion familiar to every psychi-
atrist–we may say, with every well-informed authority, that
the dream hallucinates–that is, that it replaces thoughts by
hallucinations. In this respect visual and acoustic impressions
behave in the same way. It has been observed that the recol-
lection of a succession of notes heard as we are falling asleep
becomes transformed, when we have fallen asleep, into a
hallucination of the same melody, to give place, each time we
wake, to the fainter and qualitatively different representations
of the memory, and resuming, each time we doze off again,
its hallucinatory character.

The transformation of an idea into a hallucination is not
the only departure of the dream from the more or less corre-
sponding waking thought. From these images the dream creates
a situation; it represents something as actually present; it
dramatizes an idea, as Spitta (p. 145) puts it. But the peculiar
character of this aspect of the dream-life is completely intel-
ligible only if we admit that in dreaming we do not as a rule
(the exceptions call for special examination) suppose our-
selves to be thinking, but actually experiencing; that is, we
accept the hallucination in perfectly good faith. The criticism
that one has experienced nothing, but that one has merely
been thinking in a peculiar manner–dreaming–occurs to
us only on waking. It is this characteristic which distinguishes
the genuine dream from the day-dream, which is never con-
fused with reality.

¹Silberer has shown by excellent examples how in the state of falling asleep even
abstract thoughts may be changed into visible plastic images, which, of course,
express them. (Jahrbuch, Bleuler-Freud, vol. i, 1900.) I shall return to the
discussion of his findings later on.

64

The characteristics of the dream-life thus far considered have
been summed up by Burdach (p. 476) as follows: “As charac-
teristic features of the dream we may state (a) that the sub-
jective activity of our psyche appears as objective, inasmuch
as our perceptive faculties apprehend the products of phantasy
as though they were sensory activities . . . (b) that sleep
abrogates our voluntary action; hence falling asleep involves
a certain degree of passivity. . . . The images of sleep are
conditioned by the relaxation of our powers of will.”

It now remains to account for the credulity of the mind in
respect to the dream-hallucinations which are able to make
their appearance only after the suspension of certain voluntary
powers. Strümpell asserts that in this respect the psyche
behaves correctly and in conformity with its mechanism. The
dream-elements are by no means mere representations, but
true and actual experiences of the psyche, similar to those
which come to the waking state by way of the senses (p. 34).
Whereas in the waking state the mind thinks and imagines
by means of verbal images and language, in dreams it thinks
and imagines in actual perceptual images (p. 35). Dreams,
moreover, reveal a spatial consciousness, inasmuch as in
dreams, just as in the waking state, sensations and images
are transposed into outer space (p. 36). It must therefore be
admitted that in dreams the mind preserves the same attitude
in respect of images and perceptions as in the waking state
(p. 43). And if it forms erroneous conclusions in respect of
these images and perceptions, this is due to the fact that in
sleep it is deprived of that criterion which alone can distinguish
between sensory perceptions emanating from within and
those coming from without. It is unable to subject its images
to those tests which alone can prove their objective reality.
Further, it neglects to differentiate between those images which
can be exchanged at will and those in respect of which there
is no free choice. It errs because it cannot apply the law of
causality to the content of its dreams (p. 58). In brief, its
alienation from the outer world is the very reason for its belief
in its subjective dream-world.

Delbœuf arrives at the same conclusion through a somewhat
different line of argument. We believe in the reality of dream-
pictures because in sleep we have no other impressions with

65

which to compare them; because we are cut off from the
outer world. But it is not because we are unable, when asleep, to
test our hallucinations that we believe in their reality. Dreams
can make us believe that we are applying such tests—that we
are touching, say, the rose that we see in our dream; and
yet we are dreaming. According to Delbœuf there is no valid
criterion that can show whether something is a dream or a
waking reality, except—and that only pragmatically—the
fact of waking. “I conclude that all that has been experienced
between falling asleep and waking is a delusion if I find on
waking that I am lying undressed in bed” (p. 84). “I considered
the images of my dream real while I was asleep on account of
the unsleeping mental habit of assuming an outer world with
which I can contrast my ego.”¹⁾

If the turning-
away from the outer world is accepted as the
decisive cause of the most conspicuous characteristics of our
dreams, it will be worth our while to consider certain subtle
observations of Burdach’s, which will throw some light on the
relation of the sleeping psyche to the outer world, and at the

¹⁾Haffner, like Delbœuf, has attempted to explain the act of dreaming by the
alteration which an abnormally introduced condition must have upon the other-
wise correct functioning of the intact psychic apparatus; but he describes this
condition in somewhat different terms. He states that the first distinguishing mark
of dreams is the abolition of time and space, i.e. the emancipation of the repre-
sentation from the individual’s position in the spatial and temporal order. Asso-
ciated with this is the second fundamental character of dreams, the unmasking of
the hallucinations, imaginations, and phantasy-combinations for objective per-
ceptions. “The sum-total of the higher psychic functions, particularly the formation
of concepts, judgments, and conclusions on the one hand, and free self-deter-
mination on the other hand, combine with the sensory phantasy-images, and at
all times have these as a substratum. These activities too, therefore, participate
in the erratic nature of the dream-representations. We say therefore, for
far as their activity is concerned, we are just as shrewd and just as free as in the
waking state. A man cannot violate the laws of thought; that is, even in a dream
he cannot judge things to be identical which present themselves to him as
opposites. He can desire in a dream only that which he regards as a good (sub
ratione boni). But in this application of the laws of thought and will the human
intellect is led astray in dreams by confusing one notion with another. Thus it
happens that in dreams we formulate and commit the greatest of contradictions,
while, on the other hand, we display the shrewdest judgment and arrive at the
most logical conclusions, and are able to make the most virtuous and sacred
resolutions. The lack of orientation is the whole secret of our flights of phantasy
in dreams, and the lack of critical reflection and agreement with other minds
is the main source of the reckless extravagances of our judgments, hopes and
wishes in dreams” (p. 18).

66

same time serve to prevent our over-estimating the importance
of the above deductions. “Sleep,” says Burdach, “results only
under the condition that the mind is not excited by sensory
stimuli... yet it is not so much a lack of sensory stimuli
that conditions sleep as a lack of interest in them;¹ some
sensory impressions are even necessary in so far as they serve
to calm the mind; thus the miller can fall asleep only when he
hears the clatter of his mill, and he who finds it necessary, as
a matter of precaution, to burn a light at night, cannot fall
asleep in the dark” (p. 457).

“During sleep the psyche isolates itself from the outer world,
and withdraws from the periphery.... Nevertheless, the
connection is not entirely broken; if one did not hear and feel
during sleep, but only after waking, one would assuredly never
be awakened at all. The continuance of sensation is even
more plainly shown by the fact that we are not always awakened
by the mere force of the sensory impression, but by its relation
to the psyche. An indifferent word does not arouse the sleeper,
but if called by name he wakes... so that even in sleep the
psyche discriminates between sensations.... Hence one
may even be awakened by the obliteration of a sensory stimulus,
if this is related to anything of imagined importance. Thus
one man wakes when the nightlight is extinguished, and the
miller when his mill comes to a standstill; that is, waking is
due to the cessation of a sensory activity, and this presupposes
that the activity has been perceived, but has not disturbed
the mind, its effect being indifferent, or actually reassuring”
(p. 46, etc.).

Even if we are willing to disregard these by no means
trifling objections, we must yet admit that the qualities of
dream-life hitherto considered, which are attributed to with-
-
drawal from the outer world, cannot fully account for the
strangeness of dreams. For otherwise it would be possible to
reconvert the hallucinations of the dream into mental images,
and the situations of the dream into thoughts, and thus to
achieve the task of dream-interpretation. Now this is precisely
what we do when we reproduce a dream from memory after
waking, and no matter whether we are fully or only partially

¹Compare with this the element of “Désintérêt,” in which Claparède (1905)
finds the mechanism of falling asleep.

67

successful in this retranslation, the dream still remains as
mysterious as before.

Furthermore, all writers unhesitatingly assume that still
other and profounder changes take place in the plastic material
of waking life. Strümpell seeks to isolate one of these changes
as follows: (p. 17) “With the cessation of active sensory percep-
tion and of normal consciousness, the psyche is deprived of
the soil in which its feelings, desires, interests and activities
are rooted. Those psychic states, feelings, interests and valua-
tions, which in the waking state adhere to memory-images,
succumb to an obscuring pressure, in consequence of which
their connection with these images is severed; the perceptual
images of things, persons, localities, events and actions of the
waking state are, individually, abundantly reproduced, but
none of these brings with it its psychic value. Deprived of this,
they hover in the mind dependent on their own resources…”

This annihilation of psychic values, which is in turn referred
to a turning away from the outer world, is, according to
Strümpell, very largely responsible for the impression of
strangeness with which the dream is coloured in our memory.

We have seen that the very fact of falling asleep involves a
renunciation of one of the psychic activities–namely, the
voluntary guidance of the flow of ideas. Thus the supposition
obtrudes itself (though it is in any case a natural one) that the
state of sleep may extend even to the psychic functions. One
or another of these functions is perhaps entirely suspended;
we have now to consider whether the rest continue to operate
undisturbed, whether they are able to perform their normal
work under the circumstances. The idea occurs to us that

the peculiarities of the dream may be explained by the restricted
activity of the psyche during sleep, and the impression made
by the dream upon our waking judgment tends to confirm
this view. The dream is incoherent; it reconciles, without
hesitation, the worst contradictions; it admits impossibilities;
it disregards the authoritative knowledge of the waking state,
and it shows us as ethically and morally obtuse. He who should
behave in the waking state as his dreams represent him as
behaving would be considered insane. He who in the waking
state should speak as he does in his dreams, or relate such
things as occur in his dreams, would impress us as a feeble-

68

minded or muddle-
headed person. It seems to us, then, that
we are merely speaking in accordance with the facts of the case
when we rate psychic activity in dreams very low, and especially
when we assert that in dreams the higher intellectual activities
are suspended or at least greatly impaired.

With unusual unanimity (the exceptions will be dealt with
elsewhere) the writers on the subject have pronounced such
judgements as lead immediately to a definite theory or explana-
tion of dream-
life. It is now time to supplement the résumé
which I have just given by a series of quotations from a number
of authors—philosophers and physicians—bearing upon the
psychological characteristics of the dream.

According to Lemoine, the incoherence of the dream-
images
is the sole essential characteristic of the dream.

Maury agrees with him (Le Sommeil, p. 163): «Il n’y a pas
des rêves absolument raisonnables et qui ne contiennent quelque inco-
hérence, quelque absurdité.»

According to Hegel, quoted by Spitta, the dream lacks any
intelligible objective coherence.

Dugas says: «Le rêve, c’est l’anarchie psychique, affective et
mentale; c’est le jeu des fonctions livrées à elles-
mêmes et s’exerçant
sans contrôle et sans but; dans le rêve l’esprit est un automate spirituel.»

“The relaxation, dissolution, and promiscuous confusion
of the world of ideas and images held together in waking life
by the logical power of the central ego” is conceded even by
Volkelt (p. 14) according to whose theory the psychic activity
during sleep appears to be by no means aimless.

The absurdity of the associations of ideas which occur in
dreams can hardly be more strongly stigmatized than it was
by Cicero (De Divin. II): “Nihil tam praepostere, tam incondite,
tam monstruose cogitari potest, quod non possimus somniare.”

Fechner says (p. 522): “It is as though the psychological
activity of the brain of a reasonable person were to migrate
into that of a fool.”

Radestock (p. 145): “It seems indeed impossible to recognize
any stable laws in this preposterous behaviour. Withdrawing
itself from the strict policing of the rational will that guides our
waking ideas, and from the processes of attention, the dream,
in crazy sport, whirls all things about in kaleidoscopic con-
fusion.”

69

Hildebrandt (p. 45): “What wonderful jumps the dreamer
permits himself, for instance, in his chain of reasoning! With
what unconcern he sees the most familiar laws of experience
turned upside down! What ridiculous contradictions he is
able to tolerate in the order of nature and of society, before
things go too far, and the very excess of nonsense leads to an
awakening! Sometimes we quite innocently calculate that
three times three make twenty; and we are not in the least
surprised if a dog recites poetry to us, if a dead person walks
to his grave, or if a rock floats on the water. We solemnly
go to visit the duchy of Bernburg or the principality of Liech-
tenstein in order to inspect its navy; or we allow ourselves to
be recruited as a volunteer by Charles XII just before the battle
of Poltava.”

Binz (p. 33), referring to the theory of dreams resulting
from these impressions, says: “Of ten dreams nine at least have
an absurd content. We unite in them persons or things which
do not bear the slightest relation to one another. In the next
moment, as in a kaleidoscope, the grouping changes to one,
if possible, even more nonsensical and irrational than before;
and so the shifting play of the drowsy brain continues, until
we wake, put a hand to our forehead, and ask ourselves
whether we still really possess the faculty of rational imagina-
tion and thought.”

Maury, Le sommeil (p. 50) makes, in respect of the relation
of the dream-image to the waking thoughts, a comparison
which a physician will find especially impressive: “La produc-
tion de ces images que chez l’homme éveillé fait le plus souvent naître
la volonté, correspond, pour l’intelligence, à ce que sont pour la motilité
certains mouvements que nous offrent la chorée et les affections paraly-
tiques.” For the rest, he considers the dream “toute une
série de dégradations de la faculté pensante et raisonnante” (p. 27).

It is hardly necessary to cite the utterances of those authors
who repeat Maury’s assertion in respect of the higher indi-
vidual psychic activities.

According to Strümpell, in dreams—and even, of course,
where the nonsensical nature of the dream is not obvious—
all the logical operations of the mind, based on relations and
associations, recede into the background (p. 26). According to
Spitta (p. 148) ideas in dreams are entirely withdrawn from the

70

laws of causality; while Radestock and others emphasize the
feebleness of judgement and logical inference peculiar to
dreams. According to Jodl (p. 123), there is no criticism in
dreams, no correcting of a series of perceptions by the content
of consciousness as a whole. The same author states that “All
the activities of consciousness occur in dreams, but they are
imperfect, inhibited, and mutually isolated.” The contradic-
tions of our conscious knowledge which occur in dreams are
explained by Stricker and many others on the ground that facts
are forgotten in dreams, or that the logical relations between
ideas are lost (p. 98), etc., etc.
Those authors who in general judge so unfavourably of the
psychic activities of the dreamer nevertheless agree that
dreams do retain a certain remnant of psychic activity. Wundt,
whose teaching has influenced so many other investigators of
dream-problems, expressly admits this. We may ask, what are
the nature and composition of the remnants of normal psychic
life which manifest themselves in dreams? It is pretty generally
acknowledged that the reproductive faculty, the memory,
seems to be the least affected in dreams; it may, indeed, show
a certain superiority over the same function in waking life
(see above, p. 28), even though some of the absurdities of
dreams are to be explained by the forgetfulness of dream-life.
According to Spitta, it is the sentimental life of the psyche
which is not affected by sleep, and which thus directs our dreams.
By sentiment (Gemüt) he means “the constant sum of the
emotions as the inmost subjective essence of the man” (p. 84).
Scholz (p. 37) sees in dreams a psychic activity which mani-
fests itself in the “allegorizing interpretation” to which the
dream-material is subjected. Siebeck (p. 11) likewise perceives
in dreams a “supplementary interpretative activity” of the
psyche, which applies itself to all that is observed and perceived.
Any judgment of the part played in dreams by what is pre-
sumed to be the highest psychical function, i.e. consciousness,
presents a peculiar difficulty. Since it is only through con-
sciousness that we can know anything of dreams, there can be
no doubt as to its being retained. Spitta, however, believes
that only consciousness is retained in the dream, but not self-
consciousness. Delbœuf confesses that he is unable to compre-
hend this distinction.

71

The laws of association which connect our mental images
hold good also for what is represented in dreams; indeed, in
dreams the dominance of these laws is more obvious and com-
plete than in the waking state. Strümpell (p. 70) says : “Dreams
would appear to proceed either exclusively in accordance
with the laws of pure representation, or in accordance with
the laws of organic stimuli accompanied by such representa-
tions; that is, without being influenced by reflection, reason,
aesthetic taste, or moral judgment.” The authors whose
opinions I here reproduce conceive the formation of the dream
somewhat as follows : The sum of sensory stimuli of varying
origin (discussed elsewhere) that are operative in sleep at first
awaken in the psyche a number of images which present
themselves as hallucinations (according to Wundt, it is more
correct to say “as illusions,” because of their origin in external
and internal stimuli). These combine with one another in
accordance with the known laws of association, and, in accord-
ance with the same laws, they in turn evoke a new series of
representations (images). The whole of this material is then
elaborated as far as possible by the still active remnant of the
thinking and organizing faculties if the psyche (cf. Wundt
and Weygandt). Thus far, however, no one has been successful
in discerning the motive which would decide what particular
law of association is to be obeyed by those images which do
not originate in external stimuli.

But it has been repeatedly observed that the associations
which connect the dream-images with one another are of a
particular kind, differing from those found in the activities of
the waking mind. Thus Volkelt (s. 15) : “In dreams the ideas
chase and seize upon one another on the strength of accidental
similarities and barely perceptible connections. All dreams are
pervaded by casual and unconstrained associations of this kind.”
Maury attaches great value to this characteristic of the connec-
tion of ideas, for it allows him to draw a closer analogy between
the dream-life and certain mental derangements. He recog-
nizes two main characteristics of “deliria”: “(1) une action
spontanée et comme automatique de l’esprit; (2) une association vicieuse
et irrégulière des idées” (p. 126). Maury gives us two excellent
examples from his own dreams, in which the mere similarity
of sound decides the connection between the dream-repre-

72

sentations. Once he dreamed that he was on a pilgrimage
(pèlerinage) to Jerusalem, or to Mecca. After many adventures
he found himself in the company of the chemist Pelletier;
the latter, after some conversation, gave him a galvanized
shovel (pelle) which became his great broadsword in the next
portion of the dream (p. 137). In another dream he was walking
along a highway where he read the distances on the kilometre-
stones; presently he found himself at a grocer’s who had a
large pair of scales; a man put kilogramme weights into the
scales, in order to weigh Maury; the grocer then said to him:
“You are not in Paris, but on the island Gilolo.” This was
followed by a number of pictures, in which he saw the flower
lobelia, and then General Lopez, of whose death he had read
a little while previously. Finally he awoke as he was playing
a game of lotto.¹⁾

We are, indeed, quite well aware that this low estimate
of the psychic activities of the dream has not been allowed to
pass without contradiction from various quarters. Yet here
contradiction would seem rather difficult. It is not a matter
of much significance that one of the depreciators of dream-life,
Spitta (p. 118), should assure us that the same psychological
laws which govern the waking state rule the dream also, or
that another (Dugas) should state: “Le rêve n’est pas déraison
ni même irraison pure,” so long as neither of them has attempted
to bring this opinion into harmony with the psychic anarchy
and dissolution of all mental functions in the dream which they
themselves have described. However, the possibility seems to
have dawned upon others that the madness of the dream is
perhaps not without its method—that it is perhaps only a
disguise, a dramatic pretence, like that of Hamlet, to whose
madness this perspicacious judgment refers. These authors
must either have refrained from judging by appearances, or
the appearances were, in their case, altogether different.

Without lingering over its superficial absurdity, Havelock
Ellis considers the dream as “an archaic world of vast emotions
and imperfect thoughts,” the study of which may acquaint
us with the primitive stages of the development of mental
life. J. Sully (p. 362) presents the same conception of the dream

¹⁾Later on we shall be able to understand the meaning of dreams like these
which are full of words with similar sounds or the same initial letters.

73

in a still more comprehensive and penetrating fashion. His
statements deserve all the more consideration when it is
added that he, perhaps more than any other psychologist,
was convinced of the veiled significance of the dream. “Now
our dreams are a means of conserving these successive per-
sonalities. 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.” A thinker like Delbœuf
asserts—without, indeed, adducing proof in the face of contra-
dictory data, and hence without real justification—“Dans le
sommeil, hormis la perception, toutes les facultés de l’esprit, intelli-
gence, imagination, mémoire, 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 volonté les fous et les
sages, les bourreaux et les victimes, les nains et les géants, les démons
et les anges” (p. 222). The Marquis Hervey,¹⁾ who is flatly con-
tradicted by Maury, and whose essay I have been unable to
obtain despite all my efforts, appears emphatically to pro-
test against the under-estimation of the psychic capacity
in the dream. Maury speaks of him as follows (p. 19): “M. le
Marquis 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 du 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.”

Maury adds, however, “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.”

In Vaschide, who gives us fully information as to Harvey’s
book, we find that this author expresses himself as follows
in respect to the apparent incoherence of dreams: “L’image
du rêve est la copie de l’idée. Le principal est l’idée; la vision n’est
pas 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 conception les plus fantasques deviennent des

¹⁾Hervey de St. Denys.

74

faits simples et parfaitement logiques” (p. 146). And (p. 147):
“Les rêves les plus bizarres trouvent même une explication des plus
logiques quand on sait les analyser.”

J. Stärke has drawn attention to the fact that a similar solu-
tion of the incoherence of dreams was put forward in 1799
by an old writer, Wolf Davidson, who was unknown to me
(p. 136): “The peculiar leaps of our imaginings in the dream-
state all have their cause in the laws of association, but this
connection often occurs very obscurely in the soul, so that
we frequently seem to observe a leap of the imagination where
none really exists.”

The evaluation of the dream as a psychic product in the
literature of the subject varies over a very wide scale; it extends
from the extreme of under-estimation, as we have already seen,
through premonitions that it may have a value as yet unre-
vealed, to an exaggerated over-estimation, which sets the
dream-life far above the capacities of waking life. In his psy-
chological characterization of dream-life, Hildebrandt, as we
know, groups it into three antinomies, and he combines in the
third of these antinomies the two extreme points of this scale
of values (p. 19): “It is the contrast between, on the one hand,
an enhancement, an increase of potentiality, which often
amounts to virtuosity, and on the other hand a decided diminu-
tion and enfeeblement of the psychic life, often to a sub-human
level.”

“As regards the first, who is there that cannot confirm from
his own experience the fact that in the workings and weavings
of the genius of dreams, there are sometimes exhibited a
profundity and sincerity of emotion, a tenderness of feeling,
a clearness of view, a subtlety of observation and a readiness
of wit, such as we should have modestly to deny that we always
possessed in our waking life? Dreams have a wonderful poetry,
an apposite allegory, an incomparable sense of humour, a de-
lightful irony. They see the world in the light of a peculiar ideal-
ization, and often intensify the effect of their phenomena by the
most ingenious understanding of the reality underlying them.
They show us earthly beauty in a truly heavenly radiance,
the sublime in its supremest majesty, and that which we know
to be terrible in its most frightful form, while the ridiculous
becomes indescribably and drastically comical. And on waking

75

we are sometimes still so full of one of these impressions that
it will occur to us that such things have never yet been offered
to us by the real world.”

One might here ask oneself: do these depreciatory remarks
and these enthusiastic praises really refer to the self-same
phenomenon? Have some writers overlooked the foolish and
others the profound and sensitive dreams? And if both kinds
of dreams do occur—that is, dreams that merit both these
judgments—does it not seem idle to seek a psychological
characterization of the dream? Would it not suffice to state
that everything is possible in the dream, from the lowest degra-
dation of the psychic life to its flight to heights unknown in
the waking state? Convenient as such a solution might be,
it has this against it: that behind the efforts of all the investi-
gators of dreams there seems to lurk the assumption that there
is in dreams some characteristic which is universally valid in
its essential features, and which must eliminate all these contra-
dictions.

It is unquestionably true that the mental capacities of dreams
found readier and warmer recognition in the intellectual period
now lying behind us, when philosophy rather than exact
natural science ruled the more intelligent minds. Statements
like that of Schubert, to the effect that the dream frees the
mind from the power of external nature, that it liberates the
soul from the chains of sensory life, together with similar
opinions expressed by the younger Fichte¹ and others, who
represent dreams as a soaring of the mind to a higher plane—
all these seem hardly conceivable to us to-day; they are repeated
at present only by mystics and devotees.² With the advance
of a scientific mode of thought a reaction took place in the
estimation of dreams. It is the medical writers who are most
inclined to underrate the psychic activity in dreams, as
being insignificant and valueless; while philosophers and
unprofessional observers—amateur psychologists—whose con-
tributions to the subject in especial must not be overlooked,
have for the most part, in agreement with popular belief,

¹ Cf. Haffner and Spitta.

² That brilliant mystic, Du Prel, one of the few writers for the omission of whose
name in earlier editions of this book I should like to apologize, has said that,
so far as the human mind is concerned, it is not the waking state but dreams
which are the gateway to metaphysics (Philosophie der Mystik, p. 59).

76

laid emphasis on the psychological value of dreams. Those
who are inclined to underrate the psychic activity of dreams
naturally show a preference for the somatic sources of excitation
in the etiology of the dream; those who admit that the dream-
ing mind may retain the greater part of its waking faculties
naturally have no motive for denying the existence of auto-
nomous stimulations.

Among the superior accomplishments which one may be
tempted, even on a sober comparison, to ascribe to the dream
life, that of memory is the most impressive. We have fully
discussed the by no means rare experiences which prove this
superiority. Another privilege of the dream-life, often extolled
by the older writers—namely, the fact that it can overstep the
limitations of time and space—is easily recognized as an illu-
sion. This privilege, as Hildebrandt remarks, is merely illu-
sory; dreams disregard time and space only as does waking
thought, and only because dreaming is itself a form of thinking.
Dreams are supposed to enjoy a further advantage in respect
of time—to be independent of the passage of time in yet another
sense. Dreams like Maury’s dream of his execution (see p. 42)
seem to show that the perceptual content which the dream can
compress into a very short space of time far exceeds that
which can be mastered by our psychic activity in its waking
thoughts. These conclusions have, however, been disputed. The
essays of Le Lorraine and Egger on The Apparent Duration of
Dreams gave rise to a long and interesting discussion, which
in all probability has not yet found the final explanation of
this profound and delicate problem.¹

That dreams are able to continue the intellectual activities
of the day and to carry them to a point which could not be
arrived at during the day, that they may resolve doubts and
problems, and that they may be the source of fresh inspiration
in poets and composers, seems, in the light of numerous records,
and of the collection of instances compiled by Chabaneix, to
be proved beyond question. But even though the facts may be
beyond dispute, their interpretation is subject to many doubts
on wider grounds.²

¹For the further literature of the subject, and a critical discussion of these
problems, the reader is referred to Tobowolska’s dissertation (Paris, 1900).

²Compare Havelock Ellis’s criticism in The World of Dreams, p. 268.

77

Finally, the alleged divinatory power of the dream has
become a subject of contention in which almost insuperable
objections are confronted by obstinate and reiterated assertions.
It is, of course, right that we should refrain from denying that
this view has any basis whatever in fact, since it is quite possible
that a number of such cases may before long be explained on
purely natural psychological grounds.
 

F

THE ETHICAL SENSE IN DREAMS

For reasons which will be intelligible only after a consideration
of my own investigations of dreams, I have isolated from the
psychology of the dream the subsidiary problem as to whether
and to what extent the moral dispositions and feelings of
waking life extend into dream-life. The same contradictions
which we were surprised to observe in the descriptions by
various authors of all the other psychic activities will surprise
us again here. Some writers flatly assert that dreams know
nothing of moral obligations; others as decidedly declare that
the moral nature of man persists even in his dream-life.
 

Our ordinary experience of dreams seems to confirm beyond
all doubt the correctness of the first assertion. Jessen says
(p. 553): “Nor does one become better or more virtuous
during sleep; on the contrary, it seems that conscience is
silent in our dreams, inasmuch as one feels no compassion
and can commit the worst crimes, such as theft, murder and
homicide, with perfect indifference and without subsequent
remorse.”
 

Radestock (p. 146) says: “It is to be noted that in dreams
associations are effected and ideas combined without being
in any way influenced by reflection, reason, aesthetic taste
and moral judgment; the judgment is extremely weak, and
ethical indifference reigns supreme.”
 

Volkelt (p. 23) expresses himself as follows: “As every one
knows, dreams are especially unbridled in sexual matters. Just
as the dreamer himself is shameless in the extreme, and wholly
lacking in moral feeling and judgment, so likewise does he
 

78

see others, even the most respected persons, doing things
which, even in his thoughts, he would blush to associate with
them in his waking state.”

Utterances like those of Schopenhauer, that in dreams every
man acts and talks in complete accordance with his character,
are in sharpest contradiction to those mentioned above. R. Ph.
Fischer¹ maintains that the subjective feelings and desires,
or affects and passions, manifest themselves in the wilfulness
of the dream-life, and that the moral characteristics of a man
are mirrored in his dreams.

Haffner says (p. 25): “With rare exceptions . . . a virtuous
man will be virtuous also in his dreams; he will resist tempta-
tion, and show no sympathy for hatred, envy, anger, and all
other vices; whereas the sinful man will, as a rule, encounter
in his dreams the images which he has before him in the waking
state.”

Scholz (p. 36): “In dreams there is truth; despite all camou-
flage of nobility or degradation, we recognize our own true
selves. . . . The honest man does not commit a dishonouring
crime even in his dreams, or if he does, he is appalled by it
as by something foreign to his nature. The Roman emperor
who ordered one of his subjects to be executed because he
dreamed that he had cut off the emperor’s head was not
far wrong in justifying his action on the ground that he who
has such dreams must have similar thoughts while awake.
Significantly enough, we say of things that find no place even
in our intimate thoughts: ‘I would never even dream of such
a thing.’ ”

Plato, on the other hand, considers that they are the best
men who only dream the things which other men do.

Plaff² varying a familiar proverb, says: “Tell me your
dreams for a time and I will tell you what you are
within.”

The little essay of Hildebrandt’s from which I have already
taken so many quotations (the best-expressed and most sugges-
tive contribution to the literature of the dream-problem
which I have hitherto discovered), takes for its central theme
the problem of morality in dreams. For Hildebrandt, too, it

¹ Grundzüge des Systems der Anthropologie. Erlangen, 1850 (quoted by Spitta).

² Das Traumleben und seine Deutung, 1868 (cited by Spitta, p. 192).

79

is an established rule that the purer the life, the purer the dream;
the impurer the life, the impurer the dream.

The moral nature of man persists even in dreams. “But while
we are not offended or made suspicious by an arithmetical
error, no matter how obvious, by a reversal of scientific fact,
no matter how romantic, or by an anachronism, no matter
how ridiculous, we nevertheless do not lose sight of the differ-
ence between good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice.
No matter how much of that which accompanies us during
the day may vanish in our hours of sleep, Kant’s categorical
imperative dogs our steps as an inseparable companion, of
whom we cannot rid ourselves even in our slumber. …
This can be explained only by the fact that the fundamental
element of human nature, the moral essence, is too firmly fixed
to be subjected to the kaleidoscopic shaking-up to which
phantasy, reason, memory, and other faculties of the same
order succumb in our dreams” (p. 45, etc.).

In the further discussion of the subject we find in both these
groups of authors remarkable evasions and inconsequences.
Strictly speaking, all interest in immoral dreams should be
at an end for those who assert that the moral personality of
the individual falls to pieces in his dreams. They could as
coolly reject all attempts to hold the dreamer responsible for
his dreams, or to infer from the immorality of his dreams
that there is an immoral strain in his nature, as they have
rejected the apparently analogous attempt to prove from the
absurdity of his dreams the worthlessness of his intellectual
life in the waking state. The others, according to whom the
“categorical imperative” extends even into the dream, ought
to accept in toto the notion of full responsibility for immoral
dreams; and we can only hope that their own reprehensible
dreams do not lead them to abandon their otherwise firm
belief in their own moral worth.

As a matter of fact, however, it would seem that although
no one is positively certain just how good or how bad he is,
he can hardly deny that he can recollect immoral dreams of
his own. That there are such dreams no one denies; the
only question is: how do they originate? So that in spite of
their conflicting judgments of dream-morality both groups of
authors are at pains to explain the genesis of the immoral

80

dream; and here a new conflict arises, as to whether its origin
is to be sought in the normal functions of the psychic life,
or in the somatically conditioned encroachments upon this
life. The nature of the facts compels both those who argue
for and those who argue against moral responsibility in dream-
life to agree in recognizing a special psychic source for the
immorality of dreams.

Those who maintain that morality continues to function
in our dream-life nevertheless refrain from assuming full
responsibility for their dreams. Haffner says (p. 24): “We are
not responsible for our dreams, because that basis which alone
gives our life truth and reality is withdrawn from our thoughts
and our will. Hence the wishes and actions of our dreams
cannot be virtuous or sinful.” Yet the dreamer is responsible
for the sinful dream in so far as indirectly he brings it about.
Thus, as in waking life, it is his duty, just before going to sleep,
morally to cleanse his mind.

The analysis of this admixture of denial and recognition of
responsibility for the moral content of dreams is carried much
further by Hildebrandt. After arguing that the dramatic method
of representation characteristic of dreams, the condensation
of the most complicated processes of reflection into the briefest
periods of time, and the debasement and confusion of the
imaginative elements of dreams, which even he admits must
be allowed for in respect of the immoral appearance of dreams,
he nevertheless confesses that there are the most serious objec-
tions to flatly denying all responsibility for the lapses and
offences of which we are guilty in our dreams.
(P. 49): “If we wish to repudiate very decisively any sort
of unjust accusation, and especially one which has reference
to our intentions and convictions, we use the expression:
‘We should never have dreamt of such a thing.’ By this, it is
true, we mean on the one hand that we consider the region of
dreams the last and remotest place in which we could be held
responsible for our thoughts, because there these thoughts are
so loosely and incoherently connected with our real being
that we can, after all, hardly regard them as our own; but
inasmuch as we feel impelled expressly to deny the existence
of such thoughts even in this region, we are at the same time
indirectly admitting that our justification would not be com-

81

plete unless it extended even thus far. And I believe that here,
although unconsciously, we are speaking the language of truth.”
(S. 52): “No dream-action can be imagined whose first
beginnings have not in some shape already passed through the
mind during our waking hours, in the form of wish, desire,
or impulse.” Concerning this original impulse we must say:
The dream has not discovered it—it has only imitated and
extended it; it has only elaborated into dramatic form a scrap
of historical material which it found already existing within
us; it brings to our mind the words of the Apostle—that he
who hates his brother is a murderer. And though, after we
wake, being conscious of our moral strength, we may smile at
the whole widely elaborated structure of the depraved dream,
yet the original material out of which we formed it cannot be
laughed away. One feels responsible for the transgressions of
one’s dreaming self; not for the whole sum of them, but yet
for a certain percentage. “In short, if in this sense, which can
hardly be impugned, we understand the words of Christ,
that out of the heart come evil thoughts, then we can hardly
help being convinced that every sin committed in our dreams
brings with it at least a vague minimum of guilt.”

Thus Hildebrandt finds the source of the immorality of
dreams in the germs and hints of evil impulses which pass
through our minds during the day as mental temptations,
and he does not hesitate to include these immoral elements in
the ethical evaluation of the personality. These same thoughts,
and the same evaluation of these thoughts, have, as we know,
caused devout and holy men of all ages to lament that they were
wicked sinners.¹

The general occurrence of these contrasting thoughts in the
majority of men, and even in other regions than the ethical,
is of course established beyond a doubt. They have sometimes
been judged in a less serious spirit. Spitta quotes a relevant
passage from A. Zeller (Article Irre in the Allgemeine Ency-
klopädie der Wissenschaften, Ersch und Gruber, p. 144): “An

¹It is not uninteresting to consider the attitude of the Inquisition to this problem.
In the Tractatus de Officio sanctissimae Inquisitionis of Thomas Careña (Lyons edit.
1659) one finds the following passage:

“Should anyone utter heresies in his
dreams, the inquisitors shall consider this a reason for investigating his conduct
in life, for that is wont to return in sleep which occupies a man during the day”

(Dr. Ehniger, St. Urban, Switzerland).

82

intellect is rarely so happily organized as to be in full command
of itself at all times and seasons, and never to be disturbed in
the lucid and constant processes of thought by ideas not merely
unessential, but absolutely grotesque and nonsensical; indeed,
the greatest thinkers have had cause to complain of this
dream-like, tormenting and distressing rabble of ideas, which
disturbs their profoundest contemplations and their most
pious and earnest meditations.”

A clearer light is thrown on the psychological meaning of
these contrasting thoughts by a further observation of Hilde-
brandt’s, to the effect that dreams permit us an occasional
glimpse of the deepest and innermost recesses of our being,
which are generally closed to us in our waking state (p. 55).
A recognition of this fact is betrayed by Kant in his Anthropology,
when he states that our dreams may perhaps be intended to
reveal to us not what we are but what we might have been if
we had had another upbringing; and by Radestock (p. 84), who
suggests that dreams disclose to us what we do not wish to admit
to ourselves, and that we therefore unjustly condemn them as
lying and deceptive. J. E. Erdmann asserts: “A dream has
never told me what I ought to think of a person, but, to my
great surprise, a dream has more than once taught me what
I do really think of him and feel about him.” And J. H. Fichte
expresses himself in a like manner: “The character of our
dreams gives a far truer reflection of our general disposition
than anything that we can learn by self-observation in the
waking state.” Such remarks as this of Benini’s call our atten-
tion to the fact that the emergence of impulses which are
foreign to our ethical consciousness is merely analogous to
the manner already familiar to us, in which the dream disposes
of other representative material:

“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” (p. 149).

Volkelt expresses himself in a similar
fashion: “Even ideas which have entered into our consciousness
almost unnoticed, and which, perhaps, it has never before
called out of oblivion, often announce their presence in the
mind through a dream” (p. 105). Finally, we may remember
that according to Schleiermacher the state of falling asleep
is accompanied by the appearance of undesired imaginings.

83

We may include in such “undesired imaginings” the whole
of that imaginative material the occurrence of which surprises
us in immoral as well as in absurd dreams. The only important
difference consists in the fact that the undesired imaginings in
the moral sphere are in opposition to our usual feelings, whereas
the others merely appear strange to us. So far nothing has been
done to enable us to reconcile this difference by a profounder
understanding.

But what is the significance of the emergence of undesired
representations in dreams? What conclusions can the psychology
of the waking and dreaming mind draw from these nocturnal
manifestations of contrasting ethical impulses? Here we find
a fresh diversity of opinion, and also a different grouping of
the authors who have treated of the subject. The line of thought
followed by Hildebrandt, and by others who share his funda-
mental opinion, cannot be continued otherwise than by ascrib-
ing to the immoral impulses, even in the waking state, a latent
vitality, which is indeed inhibited from proceeding to action,
and by asserting that during sleep something falls away from
us, which, having the effect of an inhibition, has kept us from
becoming aware of the existence of such impulses. Dreams,
therefore, reveal the true, if not the whole nature of the dreamer,
and are one means of making the hidden life of the psyche
accessible to our understanding. It is only on such hypotheses
that Hildebrandt can attribute to the dream the rôle of a
monitor who calls our attention to the secret mischief in the
soul, just as, according to the physicians, it may announce a
hitherto unobserved physical disorder. Spitta, too, must be
influenced by this conception when he refers, for example, to
the stream of excitations which flow in upon the psyche during
puberty, and consoles the dreamer by assuring him that he
has done all that is in his power to do if he has led a strictly
virtuous life during his waking state, if he has made an effort
to suppress the sinful thoughts as often as they arise, and has
kept them from maturing and turning into action. According
to this conception, we might designate as “undesired imagin-
ings” those that are “suppressed” during the day, and we
must recognize in their emergence a genuine psychic pheno-
menon.

According to certain other authors we have no right to draw

84

this last inference. For Jessen (p. 360) the undesired ideas and
images, in the dream as in the waking state, and also in the
delirium of fever, etc., possess “the character of a voluntary
activity laid to rest, and of a procession, to some extent
mechanical, of images and ideas evoked by inner impulses.”
An immoral dream proves nothing in respect of the psychic
life of the dreamer, except that he has somehow become
cognizant of the imaginative content in question; it is certainly
no proof of a psychic impulse of his own mind. Another writer,
Maury, makes us wonder whether he, too, does not ascribe
to the dream-state the power of dividing the psychic activity
into its components, instead of aimlessly destroying it. He speaks
as follows of dreams in which one oversteps the bounds of
morality:

“Ce sont nos penchants qui parlent et qui nous font agir,
sans que la conscience nous retienne, bien que parfois elle nous avertisse.
J’ai mes défauts et mes penchants vicieux; à l’état de veille, je tâche
de lutter contre eux, et il m’arrive assez souvent de n’y pas succomber.
Mais dans mes songes j’y succombe toujours, ou pour mieux dire j’agis
par leur impulsion, sans crainte et sans remords. . . . Evidemment
les visions qui se déroulent devant ma pensée, et qui constituent le rêve,
me sont suggérées par les incitations que je ressens et que ma volonté
absente ne cherche pas à refouler.”

—Le Sommeil (p. 113).

If one believed in the power of the dream to reveal an actually
existing, but suppressed or concealed, immoral disposition
of the dreamer, one could not express one’s opinion more
emphatically than in the words of Maury (p. 115):

“En rêve
l’homme se révèle donc tout entier à soi-même dans sa nudité et sa
misère natives. Dès qu’il suspend l’exercice de sa volonté, il devient
le jouet de toutes les passions contre lesquelles, à l’état de veille, la
conscience, le sentiment d’honneur, la crainte nous défendent.”

In another
place he makes the striking assertion (p. 462):

“Dans le rêve,
c’est surtout l’homme instinctif que se révèle. . . . L’homme revient
pour ainsi dire à l’état de nature quand il rêve; mais moins les idées
acquises ont pénétré dans son esprit, plus ‘les penchants en désaccord’
avec elles conservent encore sur lui d’influence dans le rêve.”

He then
mentions, as an example, that his own dreams often reveal
him as a victim of just those superstitions which he has most
vigorously attacked in his writings.

The value of all these acute observations is, however,
impaired in Maury’s case, because he refuses to recognize

85

in the phenomena which he has so accurately observed anything
more than a proof of the automatisme psychologique which in his
own opinion dominates the dream-
life. He conceives this
automatism as the complete opposite of psychic activity.

A passage in Stricker’s Studien über das Bewusstsein reads :
“Dreams do not consist purely and simply of delusions; for
example, if one is afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers
indeed are imaginary, but the fear is real.” Our attention is
here called to the fact that the affective development of a dream
does not admit of the judgment which one bestows upon the
rest of the dream-
content, and the problem then arises : What
part of the psychic processes in a dream may be real? That is
to say, what part of them may claim to be enrolled among the
psychic processes of the waking state?

G

DREAM-THEORIES AND THE FUNCTION OF THE DREAM

A statement concerning the dream which seeks to explain
as many as possible of its observed characteristics from a single
point of view, and which at the same time defines the relation
of the dream to a more comprehensive sphere of phenomena,
may be described as a theory of the dream. The individual
theories of the dream will be distinguished from one another
by their designating as essential this or that characteristic
of dreams, and relating thereto their data and their explana-
tions. It is not absolutely necessary that we should deduce
from the theory of the dream a function, i.e. a use or any
such similar rôle, but expectation, being as a matter of habit
teleologically inclined, will nevertheless welcome those theories
which afford us some insight into a function of dreams.

We have already become acquainted with many conceptions
of the dream, which in this sense are more or less deserving
of the name of dream-
theories. The belief of the ancients
that dreams were sent by the gods in order to guide the actions
of man was a complete theory of the dream, which told them
all that was worth knowing about dreams. Since dreams have
become an object of biological research we have a greater

86

number of theories, some of which, however, are very incom-
plete.

Provided we make no claim to completeness, we might
venture on the following rough grouping of dream-theories,
based on their fundamental conception of the degree and mode
of the psychic activity in dreams:—

1. Theories, like those of Delbœuf, which allow the full
psychic activity of the waking state to continue in our dreams.
Here the psyche does not sleep; its apparatus remains intact;
but under the conditions of the sleeping state, which differ
from those of the waking state, it must in its normal functioning
give results which differ from those of the waking state. As
regards these theories, it may be questioned whether their
authors are in a position to derive the distinction between
dreaming and waking thought entirely from the conditions
of the sleeping state. Moreover, they lack one possible access
to a function of dreams; one does not understand to what
purpose one dreams—why the complicated mechanism of
the psychic apparatus should continue to operate even when
it is placed under conditions to which it does not appear to
be adapted. There are only two purposeful reactions in the
place of the reaction of dreaming: to sleep dreamlessly, or to
wake when affected by disturbing stimuli.

2. Theories which, on the contrary, assume for the dream a
diminution of the psychic activity, a loosening of connections,
and an impoverishment of the available material. In accord-
ance with these theories, one must assume for sleep a psycho-
logical character entirely different from that given by Delbœuf.
Sleep encroaches widely upon the psyche; it does not consist
in the mere shutting it off from the outer world; on the con-
trary, it enters into its mechanism, and makes it for the time
being unserviceable. If I may draw a comparison from
psychiatry, I would say that the first group of theories construes
the dream like a paranoia, while the second represents it as
a type of mental deficiency or amentia.

The theory that only a fragment of the psychic activity
paralysed by sleep finds expression in dreams is that by far
the most favoured by medical writers, and by scientists in
general. In so far as one may presuppose a general interest
in dream-interpretation, one may indeed describe it as the

87

most popular theory of dreams. It is remarkable how nimbly
this particular theory avoids the greatest danger that threatens
every dream-interpretation; that is, shipwreck on one of the
contrasts incorporated in dreams. Since this theory regards
dreams as the result of a partial waking (or as Herbart puts it
in his Psychologie über den Traum “a gradual, partial, and at
the same time very anomalous waking”), it is able to cover
the whole series, from the inferior activities of dreams, which
betray themselves by their absurdity, to fully concentrated
intellectual activity, by a series of states of progressive awaken-
ing, ending in complete wakefulness.

Those who find the physiological mode of expression indis-
pensable, or who deem it more scientific, will find this theory
of dreams summarized in Binz’s description (s. 43):–

“This state (of torpor), however, gradually comes to an end
in the hours of early morning. The accumulated products of
fatigue in the albumen of the brain gradually diminish. They
are slowly decomposed, or carried away by the constantly
flowing blood-stream. Here and there individual groups of
cells can be distinguished as being awake, while around them
all is still in a state of torpidity. The isolated work of the indi-
vidual groups now appears before our clouded consciousness,
which is still powerless to control other parts of the brain, which
govern the associations. Hence the pictures created, which for
the most part correspond to the objective impressions of the
immediate past, combine with one another in a wild and
uncontrolled fashion. As the number of brain-cells set free
constantly increases, the irrationality of the dream becomes
constantly less.”

The conception of the dream as an incomplete, partial
waking state, or traces of the influence of this conception,
will of course be found in the works of all the modern physio-
logists and philosophers. It is most completely represented
by Maury. It often seems as though this author conceives the
state of being awake or asleep as susceptible of shifting from
one anatomical region to another; each anatomical region
seeming to him to be connected with a definite psychic function.
Here I will merely suggest that even if the theory of partial
waking were confirmed, its finer superstructure would still
call for exhaustive consideration.

88

No function of dreams, of course, can emerge from this
conception of the dream-life. On the contrary, Binz, one of
the chief proponents of this theory, consistently enough denies
that dreams have any status or importance. He says (s. 357) :
“All the facts, as we see them, urge us to characterize the
dream as a physical process, in all cases useless, and in many
cases definitely morbid.”
The expression physical in reference to dreams (the word is
emphasized by the author) points, of course, in more than
one direction. In the first place, it refers to the etiology of
dreams, which was of special interest to Binz, as he was studying
the experimental production of dreams by the administration
of drugs. It is certainly in keeping with this kind of dream-
theory to ascribe the incitement to dreaming, whenever
possible, exclusively to somatic origins. Presented in the most
extreme form the theory is as follows: After we have put our
selves to sleep by the banishment of stimuli, there would be
no need to dream, and no reason for dreaming until the
morning, when the gradual awakening through the fresh
invasion of stimuli might be reflected in the phenomenon of
dreaming. But, as a matter of fact, it is not possible to protect
our sleep from stimuli; like the germs of life of which Mephisto-
pheles complained, stimuli come to the sleeper from all
directions—from without, from within, and even from all those
bodily regions which never trouble us during the waking
state. Thus our sleep is disturbed; now this, now that little
corner of the psyche is jogged into the waking state, and the
psyche functions for a while with the awakened fraction, yet
is thankful to fall asleep again. The dream is the reaction to
the disturbance of sleep caused by the stimulus, but it is, when
all is said, a purely superfluous reaction.
The description of the dream—which, after all, remains
an activity of the psychic organ—as a physical process has
yet another connotation. So to describe it is to deny that the
dream has the dignity of a psychic process. The old simile of
“the ten fingers of a person ignorant of music running over
the keyboard of an instrument” perhaps best illustrates in
what esteem the dream is commonly held by the representa-
tives of exact science. Thus conceived, it becomes something
wholly insusceptible of interpretation. How could the ten

89

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS

fingers of a player ignorant of music perform a musical
composition?

The theory of partial wakefulness did not escape criticism
even by the earlier writers. Thus Burdach wrote in 1830:
“If we say that dreaming is a partial waking, then, in the first
place, neither the waking nor the sleeping state is explained
thereby; secondly, this amounts only to saying that certain
powers of the mind are active in dreams while others are
at rest. But such irregularities occur throughout life . . .”
(s. 482).

The prevailing dream-theory which conceives the dream as
a “physical” process finds a certain support in a very inter-
esting conception of the dream which was first propounded
by Robert in 1866, and which is seductive because it assigns
to the dream a function or a useful result. As the basis of his
theory Robert takes two objectively observable facts which
we have already discussed in our consideration of dream-
material (see p. 12). These facts are: (1) that one very often
dreams about the most insignificant impressions of the day;
and (2) that one rarely carries over into the dream the absorb-
ing interests of the day. Robert asserts as an indisputable
fact that those matters which have been fully settled and
solved never evoke dreams, but only such as lie incompleted
in the mind, or touch it merely in passing (p. 10). “For this
reason we cannot usually explain our dreams, since their causes
are to be found in sensory impressions of the preceding day which
have not attained sufficient recognition on the part of the dreamer.”
The condition permitting an impression to reach the dream
is, therefore, that this impression has been disturbed in its
elaboration, or that it was too insignificant to lay claim to
such elaboration.

Robert therefore conceives the dream “as a physical
process of elimination which in its psychic reaction reaches
the consciousness.” Dreams are eliminations of thoughts nipped in
the bud. “A man deprived of the capacity for dreaming would
in time become mentally unbalanced, because an immense
number of unfinished and unsolved thoughts and superficial
impressions would accumulate in his brain, under the pressure
of which all that should be incorporated in the memory as a
completed whole would be stifled.” The dream acts as a safety-

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valve for the over-burdened brain. Dreams possess a healing and
unburdening power (p. 32).

We should misunderstand Robert if we were to ask him how
representation in the dream could bring about an unburdening
of the mind. The writer apparently concluded from these two
peculiarities of the dream-
material that during sleep such
an elimination of worthless impressions is effected somewhat
as a somatic process; and that dreaming is not a special psychic
process, but only the information which we receive of such
elimination. Moreover, elimination is not the only thing that
takes place in the mind during sleep. Robert himself adds that
the stimuli of the day are likewise elaborated, and “what
cannot be eliminated from the undigested thought-
material
lying in the mind is bound up into a completed whole by mental clues
borrowed from the imagination, and is thus enrolled in the memory
as a harmless phantasy-picture” (p. 23).

But it is in his criticism of the sources of dreams that Robert
is most flatly opposed to the prevailing theory. Whereas
according to this theory there would be no dream if the
external and internal sensory stimuli did not repeatedly wake
the mind, according to Robert the impulse to dream lies in
the mind itself. It lies in the overloading of the mind, which
demands discharge, and Robert considers, quite consistently,
that those causes conditioning the dream which depend on the
physical condition assume a subordinate rank, and could not
incite dreams in a mind which contained no material for
dream-formation derived from the waking consciousness.
It is admitted, however, that the phantasy-images originating
in the depths of the mind may be influenced by nervous
stimuli (p. 48). Thus, according to Robert, dreams are not,
after all, wholly dependent on the somatic element. Dreaming
is, of course, not a psychic process, and it has no place among
the psychic processes of the waking state; it is a nocturnal
somatic process in the apparatus of mental activity, and has
a function to perform, viz., to guard this apparatus against
excessive strain, or, if we may be allowed to change the com-
parison, to cleanse the mind.

Another author, Yves Delage, bases his theory on the same
characteristics of the dream-characteristics which are per-
ceptible in the selection of the dream-material, and it is instruc-

91

tive to observe how a trifling twist in the conception of
the same things gives a final result entirely different in its
bearings.

Delage, having lost through death a person very dear to
him, found that we either do not dream at all of what occupies
us intently during the day, or that we begin to dream of it
only after it is overshadowed by the other interests of the
day. His investigations in respect of other persons corroborated
the universality of this state of affairs. Concerning the dreams
of newly-married people, he makes a comment which is
admirable if it should prove to be generally true: “S’ils ont
été fortement épris, presque jamais ils n’ont rêvé l’un de l’autre avant
le mariage ou pendant la lune de miel; et s’ils ont rêvé d’amour c’est
pour être infidèles avec quelque personne indifférente ou odieuse.”
But of what does one dream? Delage recognizes that the
material of our dreams consists of fragments and remnants
of impressions, both from the last few days and from earlier
periods. All that appears in our dreams, all that we may at
first be inclined to consider the creation of the dream-life,
proves on closer investigation to be unrecognized reproduction,
“souvenir inconscient.” But this representative material reveals
one common characteristic; it originates from impressions
which have probably affected our senses more forcibly than
our mind, or from which the attention has been deflected soon
after their occurrence. The less conscious, and at the same time
the stronger an impression, the greater the prospect of its
playing a part in our next dream.

These two categories of impressions–the insignificant and
the undisposed-of–are essentially the same as those which
were emphasized by Robert, but Delage gives them another
significance, inasmuch as he believes that these impressions
are capable of exciting dreams not because they are indifferent,
but because they are not disposed of. The insignificant impres-
sions also are, in a sense, not fully disposed of; they too, owing
to their character of new impressions, are “autant de ressorts
tendus,” which will be relaxed during sleep. Still more entitled
to a rôle in the dream than a weak and almost unnoticed
impression is a vivid impression which has been accidentally
retarded in its elaboration, or intentionally repressed. The
psychic energy accumulated during the day by inhibition or

92

suppression becomes the mainspring of the dream at night.
In dreams psychically suppressed material achieves expression.¹

Unfortunately Delage does not pursue this line of thought
any farther; he is able to ascribe only the most insignificant
rôle in our dreams to an independent psychic activity, and
thus, in his theory of dreams, he reverts to the prevailing
doctrine of a partial slumber of the brain: “En somme le rêve
est le produit de la pensée errante, sans but et sans direction, se fixant
successivement sur les souvenirs, qui ont gardé assez d’intensité pour
se placer sur sa route et l’arrêter au passage, établissant entre eux un
lien tantôt faible et indécis, tantôt plus fort et plus serré, selon que
l’activité actuelle du cerveau est plus ou moins abolie par le sommeil.”

3. In a third group we may include those dream-theories
which ascribe to the dreaming mind the capacity for and
propensity to special psychic activities, which in the waking
state it is able to exert either not at all or imperfectly. In most
cases the manifestation of these activities is held to result in a
useful function of dreams. The evaluations of dreams by the
earlier psychologists fall chiefly within this category. I shall
content myself, however, with quoting in their stead the
assertion of Burdach, to the effect that dreaming “is the natural
activity of the mind, which is not limited by the power of the
individuality, nor disturbed by self-consciousness, nor directed
by self-determination, but is the vitality of the sensible focus
indulging in free play” (s. 486).

Burdach and others evidently consider this revelling in the
free use of its own powers as a state in which the mind refreshes
itself and gathers fresh strength for the day’s work; something,
indeed, after the fashion of a vacation. Burdach therefore cites
with approval the admirable words in which the poet Novalis
lauds the power of the dream: “The dream is a bulwark
against the regularity and commonplace character of life, a
free recreation of the fettered phantasy, in which it intermingles
all the images of life and interrupts the constant seriousness of
the adult by the joyful play of the child. Without the dream we
should surely grow old earlier, so that the dream may be

¹⁾A novelist, Anatole France, expresses himself to a similar effect (Le Lys Rouge) :
“Ce que nous voyons la nuit ce sont les restes malheureux que nous avons négligé dans la
veille. Le rêve est souvent la revanche des choses qu’on méprise ou le reproche des êtres aban-
donnés.”

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considered, if not precisely as a gift from above, yet as a
delightful exercise, a friendly companion on our pilgrimage
to the grave.”

The refreshing and healing activity of dreams is even more
impressively described by Purkinje (p. 456). “The productive
dreams in particular would perform these functions. These
are the unconstrained play of the imagination, and have no
connection with the events of the day. The mind is loth to
continue the tension of the waking life, but wishes to relax it
and recuperate from it. It creates, in the first place, conditions
opposed to those of the waking state. It cures sadness by joy,
worry by hope and cheerfully distracting images, hatred by
love and friendliness, and fear by courage and confidence;
it appeases doubt by conviction and firm belief, and vain
expectation by realization. Sleep heals many sore spots in
the mind, which the day keeps continually open, by covering
them and guarding them against fresh irritation. On this
depends in some degree the consoling action of time.” We all
feel that sleep is beneficial to the psychic life, and the vague
surmise of the popular consciousness is apparently loth to
surrender the notion that dreaming is one of the ways in which
sleep bestows its benefits.

The most original and most comprehensive attempt to explain
dreaming as a special activity of the mind, which can freely
unfold itself only in the sleeping state, is that made by Scherner
in 1861. Scherner’s book is written in a heavy and bombastic
style and is inspired by an almost intoxicated enthusiasm for
the subject, which is bound to repel us unless it can carry us
away with it. It places so many difficulties in the way of an
analysis that we gladly resort to the clearer and conciser presen-
tation of Scherner’s theories made by the philosopher Volkelt :
“From these mystical conglomerations, from all these outbursts
of splendour and radiance, there indeed flashes and shines an
ominous semblance of meaning ; but the path of the philosopher
is not illumined thereby.” Such is the criticism of Scherner’s
exposition by one of his own followers.

Scherner is not one of those writers for whom the mind
carries its undiminished faculties into the dream-
life. He
even explains how, in our dreams, the centrality and spon-
taneous energy of the ego become enervated ; how cognition,

94

feeling, will and imagination are transformed by this decen-
tralization; how the remnant of these psychic forces has not
a truly intellectual character, but is rather of the nature of a
mechanism. But, on the other hand, that activity of the psyche
which may be described as phantasy, freed from all rational
governance, and hence no longer strictly controlled, rises to
absolute supremacy in our dreams. To be sure, it borrows all
its building-material from the memory of the waking state,
but with this material it builds up structures which differ
from those of the waking state as day differs from night. In
our dreams it reveals itself as not only reproductive but also
productive. Its peculiarities give the dream-life its singular
character. It shows a preference for the unlimited, the exag-
gerated, the prodigious; but by its liberation from the inhibiting
categories of thought, it gains a greater flexibility and agility,
and indulges in pleasurable turns. It is excessively sensitive
to the delicate emotional stimuli of the mind, to its stirring
and disturbing affects, and it rapidly recasts the inner life
into an external, plastic visibility. The dream-phantasy
lacks the language of concepts. What it wishes to say it must
express in visible form; and since in this case the concept does
not exert an inhibitory control, it depicts it in all the fulness,
power and breadth of visible form. But hereby its language,
plain though it is, becomes cumbersome, awkward and prolix.
Plain speaking is rendered especially difficult by the fact that
it dislikes expressing an object by its actual image, but prefers
to select an alien image, if only the latter is able to express that
particular aspect of the object which it is anxious to represent.
Such is the symbolizing activity of the phantasy. . . . It is,
moreover, very significant that the dream-phantasy reproduces
objects not in detail, but only in outline, and in the freest
possible manner. Its paintings, therefore, are like light and
brilliant sketches. The dream-phantasy, however, does not
stop at the mere representation of the object, but feels an
internal urge to implicate the dream-ego to some extent with
the object, and thus to give rise to action. The visual dream,
for example, depicts gold coins lying in the street; the dreamer
picks them up, rejoices, and carries them away.
According to Scherner, the material upon which the dream-
phantasy exerts its artistic activity consists preponderantly

95

of the organic sensory stimuli which are so obscure during the
day (cf. p. 50); hence it is that the over-fantastic theory of
Scherner, and the perhaps too matter-of-fact theories of Wundt
and other physiologists, though otherwise diametrically opposed
to each other, are in perfect agreement in their assumptions
with regard to dream-sources and dream-stimuli. But whereas,
according to the physiological theory, the psychic reaction
to the inner physical stimuli becomes exhausted with the
arousing of any of the ideas appropriate to these stimuli
(as these ideas then, by way of association, call to their aid
other ideas, so that on reaching this stage the chain of psychic
processes appears to terminate), according to Scherner, on
the other hand, the physical stimuli merely supply the psyche
with material which it may utilize in fulfilling its phantastic
intentions. For Scherner dream-formation begins where,
according to the views of other writers, it comes to an end.

What the dream-phantasy does with the physical stimuli
cannot, of course, be regarded as purposeful. The phantasy
plays a tantalizing game with them, and represents the organic
source of the stimuli of the dream in question by any sort of
plastic symbolism. Indeed, Scherner holds–though here
Volkelt and others differ from him–that the dream-phantasy
has a certain favourite symbol for the organism as a whole:
namely, the house. Fortunately, however, for its representa-
tions, it does not seem to limit itself to this material; it may also
employ a whole series of houses to designate a single organ;
for example, very long streets of houses for the intestinal stimu-
lus. In other dreams particular parts of the house may actually
represent particular regions of the body, as in the headache-
dream, when the ceiling of the room (which the dream sees
covered with disgusting toad-like spiders) represents the head.

Quite apart from the symbol of the house, any other suitable
object may be employed to represent those parts of the body
which excite the dream. “Thus the breathing lungs find their
symbol in the flaming stove with its windy roaring, the heart
in hollow chests and baskets, the bladder in round, ball-shaped,
or simply hollow objects. The man’s dreams, when due to the
sexual stimulus, make the dreamer find in the street the
upper portion of a clarinet, or the mouthpiece of a tobacco-
pipe, or, again, a piece of fur. The clarinet and tobacco-

96

pipe represent the approximate form of the male sexual
organ, while the fur represents the pubic hair. In the sexual
dreams of the female the tightness of the closed thighs may be
symbolized by a narrow courtyard surrounded by houses, and
the vagina by a very narrow, slippery and soft footpath,
leading through the courtyard, upon which the dreamer is
obliged to walk, in order perhaps to carry a letter to a man”
(Volkelt, p. 39). It is particularly noteworthy that at the end
of such a physically stimulated dream the phantasy, as it
were, unmasks itself by representing the exciting organ or its
function unconcealed. Thus the “tooth-excited dream” usually
ends with the dreamer taking a tooth out of his mouth.

The dream-phantasy may, however, direct its attention
not merely to the form of the exciting organ, but may even
make the substance contained therein the object of symboli-
zation. Thus, for example, the dream excited by the intestinal
stimuli may lead us through muddy streets, the dream due
to stimuli from the bladder to foaming water. Or the stimulus
as such, the nature of its excitation, and the object which it
covets, are represented symbolically. Or, again, the dream-ego
enters into a concrete association with the symbolization
of its own state; as, for example, when in the case of painful
stimuli we struggle desperately with vicious dogs or raging
bulls, or when in a sexual dream the dreamer sees herself
pursued by a naked man. Disregarding all the possible prolixity
of elaboration, a phantastic symbolizing activity remains as
the central force of every dream. Volkelt, in his fine and
enthusiastic essay, attempted to penetrate still further into the
character of this phantasy, and to assign to the psychic activity
thus recognized its position in a system of philosophical ideas,
which, however, remains altogether too difficult of compre-
hension for anyone who is not prepared by previous training
for the intuitive comprehension of philosophical modes of
thought.

Scherner attributes no useful function to the activity of the
symbolizing phantasy in dreams. In dreams the psyche plays
with the stimuli which are offered to it. One might conjecture
that it plays in a mischievous fashion. And we might be asked
whether our detailed consideration of Scherner’s dream-
theory, the arbitrariness of which, and its deviation from the

97

rules of all forms of research are only too obvious, can lead to
any useful results. We might fitly reply that to reject Scherer’s
theory without previous examination would be imposing
too arrogant a veto. This theory is based on the impressions
produced by his dreams on a man who paid close attention
to them, and who would appear to be personally very well
equipped for tracing obscure psychic phenomena. Further-
more, it treats of a subject which (though rich in its contents
and relations) has for thousands of years appeared mysterious
to humanity, and to the elucidation of which science, strictly
so called, has, as it confesses, contributed nothing beyond
attempting–in uncompromising opposition to popular senti-
ment–to deny its content and significance. Finally, let us
frankly admit that it seems as though we cannot very well
avoid the phantastical in our attempts to explain dreams.
We must remember also that there is such a thing as a phantasy
of ganglion cells; the passage cited (p. 87) from a sober and
exact investigator like Binz, which describes how the dawn of
awakening floods the dormant cell-masses of the cerebral
cortex, is not a whit less fanciful and improbable than
Scherner’s attempts at interpretation. I hope to be able to
demonstrate that there is something real underlying these
attempts, though the phenomena which he describes have
been only vaguely recognized, and do not possess the character
of universality that should entitle them to be the basis of a
theory of dreams. For the present, Scherer’s theory of dreams,
in contrast to the medical theory, may perhaps lead us to
realize between what extremes the explanation of dream-life
is still unsteadily vacillating.

H

THE RELATION BETWEEN DREAMS AND MENTAL DISEASES

When we speak of the relation of dreams to mental derange-
ment, we may mean three different things: (1) etiological
and clinical relations, as when a dream represents or initiates
a psychotic condition, or occurs subsequently to such a con-
dition; (2) changes which the dream-life undergoes in cases

98

of mental disease; (3) inner relations between dreams and
psychoses, analogies which point to an intimate relationship.
These manifold relations between the two series of phenomena
were in the early days of medical science—and are once more
at the present time—a favourite theme of medical writers, as
we may learn from the literature on the subject collated by
Spitta, Radestock, Maury, and Tissié. Recently Sante de
Sanctis has directed his attention to this relationship.¹ For the
purposes of our discussion it will suffice merely to glance at
this important subject.

As to the clinical and etiological relations between dreams
and the psychoses, I will report the following observations as
examples: Hohnbaum asserts (see Krauss) that the first attack
of insanity is frequently connected with a terrifying anxiety-
dream, and that the predominating idea is related to this
dream. Sante de Sanctis adduces similar observations in respect
of paranoiacs, and declares the dream to be, in some of them,
“la vraie cause déterminante de la folie.” The psychosis may come
to life quite suddenly, simultaneously with the dream that
contains its effective and delusive explanation, or it may develop
slowly through subsequent dreams that have still to struggle
against doubt. In one of de Sanctis’s cases an intensively moving
dream was accompanied by slight hysterical attacks, which,
in their turn, were followed by an anxious melancholic state.
Féré (cited by Tissié) refers to a dream which was followed by
hysterical paralysis. Here the dream is presented as the etiology
of mental derangement, although we should be making a
statement equally consistent with the facts were we to say that
the first manifestation of the mental derangement occurred in
the dream-life, that the disorder first broke through in the
dream. In other instances the morbid symptoms are included
in the dream-life, or the psychosis remains confined to the
dream-life. Thus Thomayer calls our attention to anxiety-
dreams which must be conceived as the equivalent of epileptic
attacks. Allison has described cases of nocturnal insanity
(see Radestock), in which the subjects are apparently perfectly
well in the day-time, while hallucinations, fits of frenzy and the

¹⁾Among the more recent authors who have occupied themselves with these
relations are: Féré, Ideler, Laségue, Pichon, Régis Vespa, Giessler, Kazodowsky,
Pachantoni, and others.

99

like regularly make their appearance at night. De Sanctis
and Tissié record similar observations (the equivalent of a
paranoiac dream in an alcoholic, voices accusing a wife of
infidelity). Tissié records many observations of recent date
in which behaviour of a pathological character (based on
delusory hypotheses, obsessive impulses) had their origin in
dreams. Guislain describes a case in which sleep was replaced
by an intermittent insanity.

We cannot doubt that one day the physician will concern
himself not only with the psychology, but also with the psycho-
pathology of dreams.

In cases of convalescence from insanity it is often especially
obvious that while the functions may be healthy by day the
dream-life may still partake of the psychosis. Gregory is said
to have been the first to call attention to such cases (see Krauss).
Macario (cited by Tissié) gives an account of a maniac who, a
week after his complete recovery, once more experienced in
dreams the flux of ideas and the unbridled impulses of his
disease.

Concerning the changes which the dream-life undergoes
in chronic psychotics, little research has been undertaken as
yet. On the other hand, early attention has been given to the inner
relationship between dreams and mental disturbances, a
relationship which is demonstrated by the complete agreement
of the manifestations occurring in each. According to Maury,
Cabanis, in his Rapports du Physique et du Moral, was the first
to call attention to this relationship; he was followed by Lélut,
J. Moreau, and more particularly the philosopher Maine de
Biran. The comparison between the two is of course older
still. Radestock begins the chapter in which he deals with the
subject by citing a number of opinions which insist on the
analogy between insanity and dreaming. Kant says somewhere:
“The lunatic is a dreamer in the waking state.” According to
Krauss, “Insanity is a dream in which the senses are awake.”
Schopenhauer terms the dream a brief insanity, and insanity
a long dream. Hagen describes delirium as a dream-life which
is inducted not by sleep but by disease. Wundt, in his Physio-
logische Psychologie, declares: “As a matter of fact we ourselves
may in dreams experience almost all the manifestations which
we observe in the asylums for the insane.”

100

The specific points of agreement in consequence of which
such a comparison commends itself to our judgement are
enumerated by Spitta, who groups them (very much as Maury
has done) as follows: “(1) Suspension, or at least retardation
of self-consciousness, and consequently ignorance of the
condition as such, the impossibility of astonishment, and a lack
of moral consciousness. (2) Modified perception of the sensory
organs; that is, perception is as a rule diminished in dreams,
and greatly enhanced in insanity. (3) Mutual combination of
ideas exclusively in accordance with the laws of association
and reproduction, hence automatic series-formations: hence
again a lack of proportion in the relations between ideas
(exaggerations, phantasms); and the results of all this: (4)
Changes in–for example, inversions of–the personality, and
sometimes of the idiosyncrasies of the character (perversities).”

Radestock adds a few additional data concerning the
analogous nature of the material of dreams and of mental
derangement: “The greatest number of hallucinations and
illusions are found in the sphere of the senses of sight and hear-
ing and general sensation. As in dreams, the fewest elements
are supplied by the senses of smell and taste. The fever-patient,
like the dreamer, is assailed by reminiscences from the remote
past; what the waking and healthy man seems to have forgotten
is recollected in sleep and in disease.” The analogy between
dreams and the psychoses receives its full value only when,
like a family resemblance, it is extended to the subtler points
of mimicry, and even the individual peculiarities of facial
expression.

“To him who is tortured by physical and mental sufferings
the dream accords what has been denied him by reality, to
wit, physical well-being and happiness; so, too, the insane
see radiant images of happiness, eminence, and wealth. The
supposed possession of estates and the imaginary fulfilment
of wishes, the denial or destruction of which have actually
been a psychic cause of the insanity, often form the main content
of the delirium. The woman who has lost a dearly beloved
child experiences in her delirium the joys of maternity; the
man who has suffered reverses of fortune deems himself
immensely wealthy; and the jilted girl sees herself tenderly
beloved.”

101

(This passage from Radestock is an abstract of a brilliant
exposition of Griesinger’s (p. 111), which reveals, with the
greatest clarity, wish-fulfilment as a characteristic of the imagi-
nation common to dreams and to the psychoses. My own
investigations have taught me that here is to be found the key
to a psychological theory of dreams and of the psychoses.)
“Absurd combinations of ideas and weakness of judgment
are the main characteristics of the dream and of insanity.”
The over-estimation of one’s own mental capacity, which appears
absurd to sober judgment, is found alike in both, and the
rapid flux of imaginings in the dream corresponds to the flux
of ideas in the psychoses. Both are devoid of any measure of time.
The splitting of the personality in dreams, which, for instance,
distributes one’s own knowledge between two persons, one of
whom, the strange person, corrects one’s own ego in the dream,
entirely corresponds with the well-known splitting of the
personality in hallucinatory paranoia; the dreamer, too, hears
his own thoughts expressed by strange voices. Even the constant
delusive ideas find their analogy in the stereotyped and recur-
ring pathological dream (rêve obsédant). After recovering from
delirium, patients not infrequently declare that the whole
period of their illness appeared to them like an uncomfortable
dream; indeed, they inform us that sometimes during their
illness they have suspected that they were only dreaming,
just as often happens in the sleep-dream.

In view of all this, it is not surprising that Radestock should
summarize his own opinion, and that of many others, in the
following words: “Insanity, an abnormal morbid phenomenon,
is to be regarded as an enhancement of the periodically recurring
normal dream-state” (p. 228).

Krauss attempted to base the relationship between the
dream and insanity upon their etiology (or rather upon the
sources of excitation), thus, perhaps, making the relationship
even more intimate than was possible on the basis of the
analogous nature of the phenomena manifested. According
to him, the fundamental element common to both is, as we
have already learned, the organically conditioned sensation,
the sensation of physical stimuli, the general sensation arising
out of contributions from all the organs (cf. Peisse, cited by
Maury, p. 52).

102

The undeniable agreement between dreams and mental
derangement, extending even to characteristic details, con-
stitutes one of the strongest confirmations of the medical
theory of dream-life, according to which the dream is repre-
sented as a useless and disturbing process, and as the expression
of a diminished psychic activity. One cannot expect, for the
present, to derive the final explanation of the dream from the
psychic derangements, since, as is well known, our under-
standing of the origin of the latter is still highly unsatisfactory.
It is very probable, however, that a modified conception of
the dream must also influence our views regarding the inner
mechanism of mental disorders, and hence we may say that
we are working towards the explanation of the psychoses
when we endeavour to elucidate the mystery of dreams.

ADDENDUM 1909

I shall have to justify myself for not extending my summary
of the literature of dream-problems to cover the period between
the first appearance of this book and the publication of the
second edition. This justification may not seem very satisfac-
tory to the reader; none the less, to me it was decisive. The
motives which induced me to summarize the treatment of
dreams in the literature of the subject have been exhausted by
the foregoing introduction; to have continued this would have
cost me a great deal of effort, and would not have been par-
ticularly useful or instructive. For the interval in question—
a period of nine years—has yielded nothing new or valuable
as regards the conception of dreams, either in actual material
or in novel points of view. In most of the literature which has
appeared since the publication of my own work the latter has
not been mentioned or discussed; it has, of course, received the
least attention from the so-called “research-workers on dreams,”
who have thus afforded a brilliant example of the aversion to
learning anything new so characteristic of the scientist. “Les
savants ne sont pas curieux,” said the scoffer Anatole France.
If there were such a thing in science as the right of revenge,
I in my turn should be justified in ignoring the literature which
has appeared since the publication of this book. The few reviews

103

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF DREAM-PROBLEMS

which have appeared in the scientific journals are so full of
misconceptions and lack of comprehension that my only
possible answer to my critics would be a request that they should
read this book over again–or perhaps merely that they should
read it!

In the works of those physicians who make use of the psycho
analytic method of treatment a great many dreams have been
recorded and interpreted in accordance with my directions.
In so far as these works go beyond the confirmation of my
own assertions, I have noted their results in the context of
my exposition. A supplementary bibliography at the end of this
volume comprises the most important of these new publica
tions. The comprehensive work on the dream by Sante de
Sanctis, of which a German translation appeared soon after
its publication, was produced simultaneously with my own,
so that I could not review his results, nor could he comment
upon mine. I am sorry to have to express the opinion that this
laborious work is exceedingly poor in ideas, so poor that one
could never divine from it the possibility of the problems
which I have treated in these pages.

I can think of only two publications which touch on my
own treatment of the dream-problems. A young philosopher,
H. Swoboda, who has ventured to extend W. Fliess’s discovery
of biological periodicity (in series of twenty-three and twenty-
eight days) to the psychic field, has produced an imaginative
essay,¹⁾ in which, among other things, he has used this key
to solve the riddle of dreams. Such a solution, however, would
be an inadequate estimate of the significance of dreams. The
material content of dreams would be explained by the coin
cidence of all those memories which, on the night of the dream,
complete one of these biological periods for the first or the nth
time. A personal communication of the author’s led me to
assume that he himself no longer took this theory very seriously.
But it seems that I was mistaken in this conclusion : I shall
record in another place some observations made with reference
to Swoboda’s thesis, which did not, however, yield convincing
results. It gave me far greater pleasure to find by chance, in
an unexpected quarter, a conception of the dream which is in
complete agreement with the essence of my own. The relevant

¹⁾H. Swoboda, Die Perioden des Menschlichen Organismus, 1904.

104

dates preclude the possibility that this conception was influenced
by reading my book: I must therefore hail this as the only
demonstrable concurrence with the essentials of my theory of
dreams to be found in the literature of the subject. The book
which contains the passage that I have in mind was published
(in its second edition) in 1900, by Lynkeus, under the title
Phantasien eines Realisten.¹⁾

ADDENDUM 1914

The above apologia was written in 1909. Since then, the state
of affairs has certainly undergone a change; my contribution
to the “interpretation of dreams” is no longer ignored in the
literature of the subject. But the new situation makes it even
more impossible to continue the foregoing summary. The
Interpretation of Dreams has evoked a whole series of new con-
tentions and problems, which have been expounded by the
authors in the most varied fashions. But I cannot discuss these
works until I have developed the theories to which their
authors have referred. Whatever has appeared to me as valuable
in this recent literature I have accordingly reviewed in the
course of the following exposition.

¹⁾Cf. Josef Popper-Lynkeus und die Theorie des Traumes (1923) in vol. xi of my
Gesammelten Schriften.