Illusions Part 9

Why is this? There may from the first have been a kind of innate understanding among contiguous optic fibres, predisposing them to such concerted action. But however this be, this disposition would seem to have been largely promoted by the fact that, throughout my experience, the stimulation of any retinal point has been connected with that of adjoining points, either simultaneously by some second object, or successively by the same object as the eye moves over it, or as the object itself moves across the field of vision.

When, therefore, in sleep any part of the optic centres is excited in a particular way, and the images thus arising have their corresponding loci in s.p.a.ce a.s.signed to them, there will be a disposition to refer any other visual images which happen at the moment to arise in consciousness to adjacent parts of s.p.a.ce. The character of these other images will be determined by other special conditions of the moment; their locality or position in s.p.a.ce will be determined by this organic connection. We may, perhaps, call these tendencies to concerted action of some kind general a.s.sociative dispositions.

Just as there are such dispositions to united action among various parts of one organ of sense, so there may be among different organs, which are either connected originally in the infant organism, or have communications opened up by frequent coexcitation of the two. Such links there certainly are between the organs of taste and smell, and between the ear and the muscular system in general, and more particularly the vocal organ.[96] A new odour often sets us asking how the object would taste, and a series of sounds commonly disposes us to movement of some kind or another. How far there may be finer threads of connection between other organs, such as the eye and the ear, which do not betray themselves amid the stronger forces of waking mental life, one cannot say. Whatever their number, it is plain that they will exert their influence within the comparatively narrow limits of dream-life, serving to impress a certain character on the images which happen to be called up by special circ.u.mstances, and giving to the combination a slight measure of congruity. Thus, if I were dreaming that I heard some lively music, and at the same time an image of a friend was anyhow excited, my dream-fancy might not improbably represent this person as performing a sequence of rhythmic movements, such as those of riding, dancing, etc.

A narrower field for these general a.s.sociative dispositions may be found in the tendency, on the reception of an impression of a given character, to look for a certain kind of second impression; though the exact nature of this is unknown. Thus, for example, the form and colour of a new flower suggest a scent, and the perception of a human form is accompanied by a vague representation of vocal utterances. These general tendencies of a.s.sociation appear to me to be most potent influences in our dream-life. The many strange human forms which float before our dream-fancy are apt to talk, move, and behave like men and women in general, however little they resemble their actual prototypes, and however little individual consistency of character is preserved by each of them. Special conditions determine what they shall say or do; the general a.s.sociative disposition accounts for their saying or doing something.

We thus seem to find in the purely pa.s.sive processes of a.s.sociation some ground for that degree of natural coherence and rational order which our more mature dreams commonly possess. These processes go far to explain, too, that odd mixture of rationality with improbability, of natural order and incongruity, which characterizes our dream-combinations.

_Rational Construction in Dreams._

Nevertheless, I quite agree with Herr Volkelt that a.s.sociation, even in the most extended meaning, cannot explain all in the shaping of our dream-pictures. The "phantastical power" which Cudworth talks about clearly includes something besides. It is an erroneous supposition that when we are dreaming there is a complete suspension of the voluntary powers, and consequently an absence of all direction of the intellectual processes. This supposition, which has been maintained by numerous writers, from Dugald Stewart downwards, seems to be based on the fact that we frequently find ourselves in dreams striving in vain to move the whole body or a limb. But this only shows, as M. Maury remarks in the work already referred to, that our volitions are frustrated through the inertia of our bodily organs, not that these volitions do not take place. In point of fact, the dreamer, not to speak of the somnambulist, is often conscious of voluntarily going through a series of actions.

This exercise of volition is shown unmistakably in the well-known instances of extraordinary intellectual achievements in dreams, as Condillac's composition of a part of his _Cours d'etudes_. No one would maintain that a result of this kind was possible in the total absence of intellectual action carefully directed by the will. And something of this same control shows itself in all our more fully developed dreams.

One manifestation of this voluntary activity in sleep is to be found in those efforts of attention which not unfrequently occur. I have remarked that, speaking roughly and in relation to the waking condition, the state of sleep is marked by a subjection of the powers of attention to the force of the mental images present to consciousness. Yet something resembling an exercise of voluntary attention sometimes happens in sleep. The intellectual feats just spoken of, unless, indeed, they are referred to some mysterious unconscious mental operations, clearly involve a measure of volitional guidance. All who dream frequently are occasionally aware on awaking of having greatly exercised their attention on the images presented to them during sleep. I myself am often able to recall an effort to see beautiful objects, which threatened to disappear from my field of vision, or to catch faint receding tones of preternatural sweetness; and some dreamers allege that they are able to retain a recollection of the feeling of strain connected with such exercise of attention in sleep.

The main function of this voluntary attention in dream-life is seen in the selection of those images which are to pa.s.s the threshold of clear consciousness. I have already spoken of a selective action brought about by the ruling emotion. In this case, the attention is held captive by the particular feeling of the moment. Also a selective process goes on in the case of the action of those a.s.sociative dispositions just referred to. But in each of these cases the action of selective attention is comparatively involuntary, pa.s.sive, and even unconscious, not having anything of the character of a conscious striving to compa.s.s some end. Besides this comparatively pa.s.sive play of selective attention, there is an active play, in which there is a conscious wish to gain an end; in other words, the operation of a definite motive. This motive may be described as an intellectual impulse to connect and harmonize what is present to the mind. The voluntary kind of selection includes and transcends each of the involuntary kinds. It has as its result an imitation of that order which is brought about by what I have called the a.s.sociative dispositions, only it consciously aims at this result. And it is a process controlled by a feeling, namely, the intellectual sentiment of consistency, which is not a mode of emotional excitement enthralling the will, but a calm motive, guiding the activities of attention. It thus bears somewhat the same relation to the emotional selection already spoken of, as dramatic creation bears to lyrical composition.

This process of striving to seize some connecting link, or thread of order, is ill.u.s.trated whenever, in waking life, we are suddenly brought face to face with an unfamiliar scene. When taken into a factory, we strive to arrange the bewildering chaos of visual impressions under some scheme, by help of which we are said to understand the scene. So, if on entering a room we are plunged in _medias res_ of a lively conversation, we strive to find a clue to the discussion. Whenever the meaning of a scene is not at once clear, and especially whenever there is an appearance of confusion in it, we are conscious of a painful feeling of perplexity, which acts as a strong motive to ever-renewed attention.[97]

In touching on this intellectual impulse to connect the disconnected, we are, it is plain, approaching the question of the very foundations of our intellectual structure. That there is this impulse firmly rooted in the mature mind n.o.body can doubt; and that it manifests itself in early life in the child's recurring "Why?" is equally clear. But how we are to account for it, whether it is to be viewed as a mere result of the play of a.s.sociated fragments of experience, or as something involved in the very process of the a.s.sociation of ideas itself, is a question into which I cannot here enter.

What I am here concerned to show is that the search for consistency and connection in the manifold impressions of the moment is a deeply rooted habit of the mind, and one which is retained in a measure during sleep.

When, in this state, our minds are invaded by a motley crowd of unrelated images, there results a disagreeable sense of confusion; and this feeling acts as a motive to the attention to sift out those products of the dream-fancy which may be made to cohere. When once the foundations of a dream-action are laid, new images must to some extent fit in with this; and here there is room for the exercise of a distinct impulse to order the chaotic elements of dream-fancy in certain forms.

The perception of any possible relation between one of the crowd of new images ever surging above the level of obscure consciousness, and the old group at once serves to detain it. The concentration of attention on it, in obedience to this impulse to seek for an intelligible order, at once intensifies it and fixes it, incorporating it into the series of dream-pictures.

Here is a dream which appears to ill.u.s.trate this impulse to seek an intelligible order in the confused and disorderly. After being occupied with correcting the proofs of my volume on _Pessimism_, I dreamt that my book was handed to me by my publisher, fully ill.u.s.trated with coloured pictures. The frontispiece represented the fantastic figure of a man gesticulating in front of a ship, from which he appeared to have just stepped. My publisher told me it was meant for Hamlet, and I immediately reflected that this character had been selected as a concrete example of the pessimistic tendency. I may add that, on awaking, I was distinctly aware of having felt puzzled when dreaming, and of having striven to read a meaning into the dream.

The _rationale_ of this dream seems to me to be somewhat as follows. The image of the completed volume represented, of course, a recurring antic.i.p.atory image of waking life. The coloured plates were due probably to subjective optical sensations simultaneously excited, which were made to fit in (with or without an effort of voluntary attention) with the image of the book under the form of ill.u.s.trations. But this stage of coherency did not satisfy the mind, which, still partly confused by the incongruity of coloured plates in a philosophic work, looked for a closer connection. The image of Hamlet was naturally suggested in connection with pessimism. The effort to discover a meaning in the pictures led to the fusion of this image with one of the subjective spectra, and in this way the idea of a Hamlet frontispiece probably arose.

The whole process of dream-construction is clearly ill.u.s.trated in a curious dream recorded by Professor Wundt.[98] Before the house is a funeral procession: it is the burial of a friend, who has in reality been dead for some time past. The wife of the deceased bids him and an acquaintance who happens to be with him go to the other side of the street and join the procession. After she has gone away, his companion remarks to him, "She only said that because the cholera rages over yonder, and she wants to keep this side of the street to herself." Then comes an attempt to flee from the region of the cholera. Returning to his house, he finds the procession gone, but the street strewn with rich nosegays; and he further observes crowds of men who seem to be funeral attendants, and who, like himself, are hastening to join the procession. These are, oddly enough, dressed in red. When hurrying on, it occurs to him that he has forgotten to take a wreath for the coffin.

Then he wakes up with beating of the heart.

The sources of this dream are, according to Wundt, as follows. First of all, he had, on the previous day, met the funeral procession of an acquaintance. Again, he had read of cholera breaking out in a certain town. Once more, he had talked about the particular lady with this friend, who had narrated facts which clearly proved her selfishness. The hastening to flee from the infected neighbourhood and to overtake the procession was prompted by the sensation of heart-beating. Finally, the crowd of red bier-followers, and the profusion of nosegays, owed their origin to subjective visual sensations, the "light-chaos" which often appears in the dark.

Let us now see for a moment how these various elements may have become fused into a connected chain of events. First of all, it is clear that this dream is built up on a foundation of a gloomy tone of feeling, arising, as it would seem, from an irregularity of the heart's action.

Secondly, it owes its special structure and its air of a connected sequence of events, to those tendencies, pa.s.sive and active, to order the chaotic of which I have been speaking. Let us try to trace this out in detail.

To begin with, we may suppose that the image of the procession occupies the dreamer's mind. From quite another source the image of the lady enters consciousness, bringing with it that of her deceased husband and of the friend who has recently been talking about her. These new elements adapt themselves to the scene, partly by the pa.s.sive mechanism of a.s.sociative dispositions, and partly, perhaps, by the activity of voluntary selection. Thus, the idea of the lady's husband would naturally recall the fact of his death, and this would fall in with the pre-existing scene under the form of the idea that he is the person who is now being buried. The next step is very interesting. The image of the lady is a.s.sociated with the idea of selfish motives. This would tend to suggest a variety of actions, but the one which becomes a factor of the dream is that which is specially adapted to the pre-existing representations, namely, of the procession on the further side of the street, and the cholera (which last, like the image of the funeral, is, we may suppose, due to an independent central excitation). That is to say, the request of the lady, and its interpretation, are a _resultant_ of a number of adaptative or a.s.similative actions, under the sway of a strong desire to connect the disconnected, and a lively activity of attention. Once more, the feeling of oppression of the heart, and the subjective stimulation of the optic nerve, might suggest numberless images besides those of anxious flight and of red-clad men and nosegays; they suggest these, and not others, in this particular case, because of the co-operation of the impulse of consistency, which, setting out with the pre-existing mental images, selects from among many tendencies of reproduction those which happen to chime in with the scene.

_The Nature of Dream-Intelligence._

It must not be supposed that this process of welding together the chaotic materials of our dreams is ever carried out with anything like the clear rational purpose of which we are conscious when seeking, in waking life, to comprehend some bewildering spectacle. At best it is a vague longing, and this longing, it may be added, is soon satisfied.

There is, indeed, something, almost pathetic in the facility with which the dreamer's mind can be pacified with the least appearance of a connection. Just as a child's importunate "Why?" is often silenced by a ridiculous caricature of an explanation, so the dreamer's intelligence is freed from its distress by the least semblance of a uniting order.

It thus remains true with respect even to our most coherent dreams, that there is a complete suspension, or at least a considerable r.e.t.a.r.dation, of the highest operations of judgment and thought; also a great enfeeblement, to say the least of it, of those sentiments such as the feeling of consistency and the sense of the absurd which are so intimately connected with these higher intellectual operations.

In order to ill.u.s.trate how oddly our seemingly rational dreams caricature the operations of waking thought, I may, perhaps, be allowed to record two of my own dreams, of which I took careful note at the time.

On the first occasion I went "in my dream" to the "Stores" in August, and found the place empty. A shopman brought me some large fowls. I asked their price, and he answered, "Tenpence a pound." I then asked their weight, so as to get an idea of their total cost, and he replied, "Forty pounds." Not in the least surprised, I proceeded to calculate their cost: 40x10=40012=33-1/3. But, oddly enough, I took this quotient as pence, just as though I had not already divided by 12, and so made the cost of a fowl to be 2s. 9d., which seemed to me a fair enough price.

In my second dream I was at Cambridge, among a lot of undergraduates. I saw a coach drive up with six horses. Three undergraduates got out of the coach. I asked them why they had so many horses, and they said, "Because of the luggage." I then said, "The luggage is much more than the undergraduates. Can you tell me how to express this in mathematical symbols? This is the way: if _x_ is the weight of an undergraduate, then _x_ + _x_.n represents the weight of an undergraduate and his luggage together." I noticed that this sally was received with evident enjoyment.[99]

We may say, then, that the structure of our dreams, equally with the fact of their completely illusory character, points to the conclusion that during sleep, just as in the moments of illusion in waking life, there is a deterioration of our intellectual life. The highest intellectual activities answering to the least stable nervous connections are impeded, and what of intellect remains corresponds to the most deeply organized connections.

In this way, our dream-life touches that childish condition of the intelligence which marks the decadence of old age and the encroachments of mental disease. The parallelism between dreams and insanity has been pointed out by most writers on the subject. Kant observed that the madman is a dreamer awake, and more recently Wundt has remarked that, when asleep, we "can experience nearly all the phenomena which meet us in lunatic asylums." The grotesqueness of the combinations, the lack of all judgment as to consistency, fitness, and probability, are common characteristics of the short night-dream of the healthy and the long day-dream of the insane.[100]

But one great difference marks off the two domains. When dreaming, we are still sane, and shall soon prove our sanity. After all, the dream of the sleeper is corrected, if not so rapidly as the illusion of the healthy waker. As soon as the familiar stimuli of light and sound set the peripheral sense-organs in activity, and call back the nervous system to its complete round of healthy action, the illusion disappears, and we smile at our alarms and agonies, saying, "Behold, it was a dream!"

On the practical side, the illusions and hallucinations of sleep must be regarded as comparatively harmless. The sleeper, in healthy conditions of sleep, ceases to be an agent, and the illusions which enthral his brain have no evil practical consequences. They may, no doubt, as we shall see in a future chapter, occasionally lead to a subsequent confusion of fiction and reality in waking recollection. But with the exception of this, their worst effect is probably the lingering sense of discomfort which a "nasty dream" sometimes leaves with us, though this may be balanced by the reverberations of happy dream-emotions which sometimes follow us through the day. And however this be, it is plain that any disadvantages thus arising are more than made good by the consideration that our liability to these nocturnal illusions is connected with the need of that periodic recuperation of the higher nervous structures which is a prime condition of a vigorous intellectual activity, and so of a triumph over illusion during waking life.

For these reasons dreams may properly be cla.s.sed with the illusions of normal or healthy life, rather than with those of disease. They certainly lie nearer this region than the very similar illusions of the somnambulist, which with respect to their origin appear to be more distinctly connected with a pathological condition of the nervous system, and which, with respect to their practical consequences may easily prove so disastrous.

_After-Dreams._

In concluding this account of dreams, I would call attention to the importance of the transition states between sleeping and waking, in relation to the production of sense-illusion. And this point may be touched on here all the more appropriately, since it helps to bring out the close relation between waking and sleeping illusion. The mind does not pa.s.s suddenly and at a bound from the condition of dream-fancy to that of waking perception. I have already had occasion to touch on the "hypnagogic state," that condition of somnolence or "sleepiness" in which external impressions cease to act, the internal attention is relaxed, and the weird imagery of sleep begins to unfold itself. And just as there is this antic.i.p.ation of dream-hallucination in the presomnial condition, so there is the survival of it in the postsomnial condition. As I have observed, dreams sometimes leave behind them, for an appreciable interval after waking, a vivid after-impression, and in some cases even the semblance of a sense-perception.

If one reflects how many ghosts and other miraculous apparitions are seen at night, and when the mind is in a more or less somnolent condition, the idea is forcibly suggested that a good proportion of these visions are the _debris_ of dreams. In some cases, indeed, as that of Spinoza, already referred to, the hallucination (in Spinoza's case that of "a scurvy black Brazilian") is recognized by the subject himself as a dream-image.[101] I am indebted to Mr. W.H. Pollock for a fact which curiously ill.u.s.trates the position here adopted. A lady was staying at a country house. During the night and immediately on waking up she had an apparition of a strange-looking man in mediaeval costume, a figure by no means agreeable, and which seemed altogether unfamiliar to her. The next morning, on rising, she recognized the original of her hallucinatory image in a portrait hanging on the wall of her bedroom, which must have impressed itself on her brain before the occurrence of the apparition, though she had not attended to it. Oddly enough, she now learnt for the first time that the house at which she was staying had the reputation of being haunted, and by the very same somewhat repulsive-looking mediaeval personage that had troubled her inter-somnolent moments. The case seems to me to be typical with respect to the genesis of ghosts, and of the reputation of haunted houses.

NOTE.

THE HYPNOTIC CONDITION.

I have not in this chapter discussed the relation of dreaming to hypnotism, or the state of artificially produced quasi-sleep, because the nature of this last is still but very imperfectly understood. In this condition, which is induced in a number of ways by keeping the attention fixed on some non-exciting object, and by weak continuous and monotonous stimulation, as stroking the skin, the patient can be made to act conformably to the verbal or other suggestion of the operator, or to the bodily position which he is made to a.s.sume. Thus, for example, if a gla.s.s containing ink is given to him, with the command to drink, he proceeds to drink. If his hands are folded, he proceeds to act as if he were in church, and so on.

Braid, the writer who did so much to get at the facts of hypnotism, and Dr. Carpenter who has helped to make known Braid's careful researches, regard the actions of the hypnotized subject as a.n.a.logous to ideomotor movements; that is to say, the movements due to the tendency of an idea to act itself out apart from volition. On the other hand, one of the latest inquirers into the subject, Professor Heidenhain, of Breslau, appears to regard these actions as the outcome of "unconscious perceptions" (_Animal Magnetism_, English translation, p. 43, etc.).

In the absence of certain knowledge, it seems allowable to argue from the a.n.a.logy of natural sleep that the actions of the hypnotized patient are accompanied with the lower forms of consciousness, including sensation and perception, and that they involve dream-like hallucinations respecting the external circ.u.mstances of the moment.

Regarding them in this light, the points of resemblance between hypnotism and dreaming are numerous and striking. Thus, Dr. Heidenhain tells us that the threshold or liminal value of stimulation is lowered just as in ordinary sleep sense-activity as a whole is lowered.

According to Professor Weinhold, the hypnotic condition begins in a gradual loss of taste, touch, and the sense of temperature; then sight is gradually impaired, while hearing remains throughout the least interfered with.[102] In this way, the mind of the patient is largely cut off from the external world, as in sleep, and the power of orientation is lost. Moreover, there are all the conditions present, both positive and negative, for the hallucinatory transformation of mental images into percepts just as in natural sleep. Thus, the higher centres connected with the operations of reflection and reasoning are thrown _hors de combat_ or, as Dr. Heidenhain has it, "inhibited."

The condition of hypnotism is marked off from that of natural sleep, first of all, by the fact that the accompanying hallucinations are wholly due to external suggestion (including the effects of bodily posture). Dreams may, as we have seen, be very faintly modified by external influences, but during sleep there is nothing answering to the perfect control which the operator exercises over the hypnotized subject. The largest quant.i.ty of our "dream-stuff" comes, as we have seen, from within and not from without the organism. And this fact accounts for the chief characteristic difference between the natural and the hypnotic dream. The former is complex, consisting of crowds of images, and continually changing: the latter is simple, limited, and persistent. As Braid remarks, the peculiarity of hypnotism is that the attention is concentrated on a remarkably narrow field of mental images and ideas. So long as a particular bodily posture is a.s.sumed, so long does the corresponding illusion endure. One result of this, in connection with that impairing of sensibility already referred to, is the scope for a curious overriding of sense-impressions by the dominant illusory percept, a process that we have seen ill.u.s.trated in the active sense-illusions of waking life. Thus, if salt water is tasted and the patient is _told_ that it is beer, he complains that it is sour.

In being thus in a certain rapport, though so limited and unintelligent a rapport, with the external world, the mind of the hypnotized patient would appear to be nearer the condition of waking illusion than is the mind of the dreamer. It must be remembered, however, and this is the second point of difference between dreaming and hypnotism, that the hypnotized subject tends _to act out_ his hallucinations. His quasi-percepts are wont to transform themselves into actions with a degree of force of which we see no traces in ordinary sleep. Why there should be this greater activity of the motor organs in the one condition than in the other, seems to be a point as yet unexplained. All sense-impressions and percepts are doubtless accompanied by some degree of impulse to movement, though, for some reason or another, in natural and healthy sleep these impulses are restricted to the stage of faint nascent stirrings of motor activity which hardly betray themselves externally. This difference, involving a great difference in the possible practical consequences of the two conditions of natural and hypnotic sleep, clearly serves to bring the latter condition nearer to that of insanity than the former condition is brought. A strong susceptibility to the hypnotic influence, such as Dr. Heidenhain describes, might, indeed, easily prove a very serious want of "adaptation of internal to external relations," whereas a tendency to dreaming would hardly prove a maladaptation at all.

CHAPTER VIII.

ILLUSIONS OF INTROSPECTION.