Illusions by James Sully (story reading txt) 📕

It is hardly necessary, perhaps, to give many illustrations of the effect of such organic sensations on our dreams. Among the most common provocatives of dreams are sensations connected with a difficulty in breathing, due to the closeness of the air or to the pressure of the bed-clothes on the mouth. J. Börner investigated the influence of these circumstances by covering with the bed-clothes the mouth and a part of the nostrils of persons who were sound asleep. This was followed by a protraction of the act of breathing, a reddening of the face, efforts to throw off the clothes, etc. On being roused, the sleeper testified that he had experienced a nightmare, in which a horrid animal seemed to be weighing him down.[87] Irregularity of the heart's action is also a frequent cause of dreams. It is not improbable that the familiar dream-experience of flying arises from disturbances of the respiratory and circulatory movements.

Again, the effects of indigestion, and more particularly stomachic derangement, on dreams are too well known to require illustration. It may be enough to allude to the famous dream which Hood traces to an excessive indulgence at supper. It is known that the varying condition of the organs of secretion influences our dream-fancy in a number of ways.

Finally, it is to be observed that an injury done to any part of the organism is apt to give rise to appropriate dream-images. In this way, very slight disturbances which would hardly affect waking consciousness may make themselves felt during sleep. Thus, for example, an incipient toothache has been known to suggest that the teeth are being extracted.[88]

It is worth observing that the interpretation of these various orders of sensations by the imagination of the dreamer takes very different forms according to the person's character, previous experience, ruling emotions, and so on. This is what is meant by saying that during sleep every man has a world of his own, whereas, when awake, he shares in the common world of perception.

Dream-Exaggeration.

It is to be noticed, further, that this interpretation of sensation during sleep is uniformly a process of exaggeration.[89] The exciting causes of the feeling of discomfort, for example, are always absurdly magnified. The reason of this seems to be that, owing to the condition of the mind during sleep, the nature of the sensation is not clearly recognizable. Even in the case of familiar external impressions, such as the sound of the striking of a clock, there appears to be wanting that simple process of reaction by which, in a waking condition of the attention, a sense-impression is instantly discriminated and classed. In sleep, as in the artificially induced hypnotic condition, the slighter differences of quality among sensations are not clearly recognized. The activity of the higher centres, which are concerned in the finer processes of discrimination and classification, being greatly reduced, the impression may be said to come before consciousness as something novel and unfamiliar. And just as we saw that in waking life novel sensations agitate the mind, and so lead to an exaggerated mode of interpretation; so here we see that what is unfamiliar disturbs the mind, rendering it incapable of calm attention and just interpretation.

This failure to recognize the real nature of an impression is seen most conspicuously in the case of the organic sensations. As I have remarked, these constitute for the most part, in waking life, an undiscriminated mass of obscure feeling, of which we are only conscious as the mental tone of the hour. And in the few instances in which we do attend to them separately, whether through their exceptional intensity or in consequence of an extraordinary effort of discriminative attention, we can only be said to perceive them, that is, recognize their local origin, very vaguely. Hence, when asleep, these sensations get very oddly misinterpreted.

The localization of a bodily sensation in waking life means the combination of a tactual and a visual image with the sensation. Thus, my recognition of a twinge of toothache as coming from a certain tooth, involves representations of the active and passive sensations which touching and looking at the tooth would yield me. That is to say, the feeling instantly calls up a compound mental image exactly answering to a visual percept. This holds good in dream-interpretation too; the interpretation is effected by means of a visual image. But since the feeling is only very vaguely recognized, this visual image does not answer to the bodily part concerned. Instead of this, the fancy of the dreamer constructs some visual image which bears a vague resemblance to the proper one, and is generally, if not always, an exaggeration of this in point of extensive magnitude, etc. For example, a sensation arising from pressure on the bladder, being dimly connected with the presence of a fluid, calls up an image of a flood, and so on.

This mode of dream-interpretation has by some writers been erected into the typical mode, under the name of dream-symbolism. Thus Scherner, in his interesting though somewhat fanciful work, Das Leben des Traumes, contends that the various regions of the body regularly disclose themselves to the dream-fancy under the symbol of a building or group of buildings; a pain in the head calling up, for example, the image of spiders on the ceiling, intestinal sensations exciting an image of a narrow alley, and so on. Such theories are clearly an exaggeration of the fact that the localization of our bodily sensations during sleep is necessarily imperfect.[90]

In many cases the image called up bears on its objective side no discoverable resemblance to that of the bodily region or the exciting cause of the sensation. Here the explanation must be looked for in the subjective side of the sensation and mental image, that is to say, in their emotional quality, as pleasurable or painful, distressing, quieting, etc. It is to be observed, indeed, that in natural sleep, as in the condition known as hypnotism, while differences of specific quality in the sense-impressions are lost, the broad difference of the pleasurable and the painful is never lost. It is, in fact, the subjective emotional side of the sensation that uniformly forces itself into consciousness. This being so, it follows that, speaking generally, the sensations of sleep, both external and internal, or organic, will be interpreted by what G.H. Lewes has called "an analogy of feeling;" that is to say, by means of a mental image having some kindred emotional character or colouring.

Now, the analogy between the higher emotional and the bodily states is a very close one. A sensation of obstruction in breathing has its exact analogue in a state of mental embarrassment, a sensation of itching its counterpart in mental impatience, and so on. And since these emotional experiences are deeper and fuller than the sensations, the tendency to exaggerate the nature and causes of these last would naturally lead to an interpretation of them by help of these experiences. In addition to this, the predominance of visual imagery in sleep would aid this transformation of a bodily sensation into an emotional experience, since visual perceptions have, as their accompaniments of pleasure and pain, not sensations, but emotions.[91]

Since in this vague interpretation of bodily sensation the actual impression is obscured, and not taken up as an integral part into the percept, it is evident that we cannot, strictly speaking, call the process an imitation of an act of perception, that is to say, an illusion. And since, moreover, the visual image by which the sensation is thus displaced appears as a present object, it would, of course, be allowable to speak of this as an hallucination. This substitution of a more or less analogous visual image for that appropriate to the sensation forms, indeed, a transition from dream-illusion, properly so called, to dream-hallucination.

Dream-Hallucinations.

On the physical side, these hallucinations answer to cerebral excitations which are central or automatic, not depending on movements transmitted from the periphery of the nervous system. Of these stimulations some appear to be direct, and due to unknown influences exerted by the state of nutrition of the cerebral elements, or the action of the contents of the blood-vessels on these elements.

Effects of Direct Central Stimulation.

That such action does prompt a large number of dream-images may be regarded as fairly certain. First of all, it seems impossible to account for all the images of dream-fancy as secondary phenomena connected by links of association with the foregoing classes of sensation. However fine and invisible many of the threads which hold together our ideas may be, they will hardly explain the profusion and picturesque variety of dream-imagery. Secondly, we are able in certain cases to infer with a fair amount of certainty that a dream-image is due to such central stimulation. The common occurrence that we dream of the more stirring events, the anxieties and enjoyments of the preceding day, appears to show that when the cerebral elements are predisposed to a certain kind of activity, as they are after having been engaged for some time in this particular work, they are liable to be excited by some stimulus brought directly to bear on them during sleep. And if this is so, it is not improbable that many of the apparently forgotten images of persons and places which return with such vividness in dreams are excited by a mode of stimulation which is for the greater part confined to sleep. I say "for the greater part," because even in our indolent, listless moments of waking existence such seemingly forgotten ideas sometimes return as though by a spontaneous movement of their own and by no discoverable play of association.

It may be well to add that this immediate revival of impressions previously received by the brain includes not only the actual perceptions of waking life, but also the ideas derived from others, the ideal fancies supplied by works of fiction, and even the images which our unaided waking fancy is wont to shape for itself. Our daily conjectures as to the future, the communications to us by others of their thoughts, hopes, and fears,—these give rise to numberless vague fugitive images, any one of which may become distinctly revived in sleep.[92]This throws light on the curious fact that we often dream of experiences and events quite unlike those of our individual life. Thus, for example, the common construction by the dream-fancy of the experience of flight in mid-air, and the creation of those weird forms which the terror of a nightmare is wont to bring in its train, seem to point to the past action of waking fancy. To imagine one's self flying when looking at a bird is probably a common action with all persons, at least in their earlier years, and images of preternaturally horrible beings are apt to be supplied to most of us some time during life by nurses or by books.

Indirect Central Stimulation.

Besides these direct central stimulations, there are others which, in contradistinction, may be called indirect, depending on some previous excitation. These are, no doubt, the conditions of a very large number of our dream-images. There must, of course, be some primary cerebral excitation, whether that of a present peripheral stimulation, or that which has been termed central and spontaneous; but