Psychotherapy

Our real advances in the knowledge of the significance of dreams have come from the study of the dreams that are common to most people. These show us exactly how and why dreams occur and just what their meaning is. Probably the most familiar dream common to all the human race is that of falling from a height. Everyone has been wakened with a startled sense of intense relief that the sensation of falling was illusory. The waking came just before the bottom was reached. There is a tradition that if one ever did strike the bottom in one's dream it would be the end and that death would result as surely as if the fall were real. So far we have had no one come back to tell us of that, and the tradition is reasonably safe from direct contradiction. It serves without any reason, however, to disturb timorous people and make them dread to fall asleep again. Often this dream-falling so seriously affects sensitive individuals that they do not get to sleep for an hour or more and occasionally those with an inclination to insomnia may even suffer for the rest of the night from the effect of it. It is important to explain, then, what we know about the causation of the dream. In nearly all cases the subject on waking finds himself on his back, and then the inclination is at once to turn over to the side with a sigh of relief. Commonly the dream occurs rather early in the night, when a rather heavy meal has been taken shortly before retiring. The weight in the stomach, particularly if considerable liquid has been taken, seems to press upon the abdominal aorta and interferes, to some extent at least, with the circulation to the legs. This deprives little nerves at the periphery of the body of some of their nutrition and causes a tingling feeling in them. This is quite different from pressure on nerves, which gives the sensation termed "being asleep" to a limb. This tingling feeling resembles that which we experience when going down rapidly in an elevator. It is the falling sensation. This sensation tries to force its way into the consciousness and in this process does not completely wake consciousness up, but brings about an association of ideas connected with falling—hence the dream of being on a height and of falling therefrom out of which we wake so startled. The whole process instead of being injurious is really conservative. It is important that the aorta should not be pressed upon and this is the mode by which awakening is brought about and the position shifted so that further interference is stopped, though we ourselves are quite unconscious of the real purpose that has been accomplished. An explanation of this kind usually makes people who suffer from such dreams and have been disturbed by them much more tolerant of the phenomenon and more ready to go to sleep again, since evidently nature can be trusted to care for them even during sleep.

After the sensation of falling probably the commonest dream that humanity has, at least in the civilized state, is that of being out in some public place without sufficient clothing. Usually we wake just to find that some portion of our anatomy has been exposed to the air and that it is cold. It is this sensation gradually forcing its way into consciousness that has gathered around it a group of ideas that form our dream.

Among men, a familiar dream is that of running for a car, or away from something, or to catch someone, and finding that it is almost impossible to move. We are so out of breath that we are scarcely able to drag one foot after another and, indeed, sometimes we seem to be actually rooted to the spot. We cannot move at all. When we wake after this dream we find that, because of a cold in the head, our nose is stopped up by the secretion and that our mouths are shut and consequently we were getting no air. When that sensation tries to break into the consciousness there gather around it certain familiar ideas usually associated with being out of breath and hence we have the dream of trying to run without being able to move.

Frequency of Dreams.—Nervous people often complain that they dream all night or else very frequently, and that as a consequence their sleep is not restful. It is probable that there are always ideas in the mind and that literally we dream without ceasing. These ideas, however, do not get into our consciousness except just during the process of waking. All those who have investigated the subject of dreams are practically agreed on this. In subsequent paragraphs we quote a number of good observers on this subject. Certainly this is what we should expect from what we all know about day-dreaming. We can never catch ourselves during the day without finding some thought wandering through our minds. If we want to understand dreaming during sleep this day dreaming is instructive. We jump from one idea to another, apparently without a connection; yet there is always some connecting link. We have just read in the paper of someone in Cairo, and we think of old Egypt, and then of old Babylonia, and the Code of Hammurrabi, and the laws of the Medes and the Persians, and Xenophon and our school days, and of an old schoolmaster now a missionary in Japan, and of Japanese art and of an American artist much influenced by it, and of one of his great windows in a church in New York and of social work in connection with that church, and of settlement houses and then Hull House, Chicago, and then of the Adamses in Massachusetts, and so on.

Thus, also, do our minds go flitting round apparently during the night. We remember only such things as are brought into our consciousness directly and emphatically during the process of wakening. During our day dreaming we recall only those things which for some reason led us to think consciously about them and then follow out our thoughts to definite conclusions. It is an interesting study to follow back our day dreams through their wanderings to the origin. As a rule, however, we lose track of the connections and after a time remember only some of the wonderful transformations and transmigrations of thought; and so it is in our dreams.

With regard to the frequency of dreaming. Sir Arthur Mitchell in his book "Dreaming, Laughing, and Blushing" (London, 1905), insists on the great probability of the constancy of our dreaming during sleep. He says:

It seems to me that there is no such thing as dreamless sleep. During the whole continuance of sleep, the mind, I believe, is occupied with a certain kind of thinking which works round what I have called hallucinations. I do not expect to be able to prove the correctness of this opinion as to the persistence of dreams all through sleep, but I think that it can easily be shown to be possibly correct. I go further, and say that many things show that it is probably correct. I may not be able to prove absolutely its correctness, but it is proper to bear in mind that it is quite as difficult to prove absolutely that it is not correct. My difficulty is frankly avowed. Many things, however, are taught in biology as being certainly true. In regard to which a like avowal could be made but is not made. There is what has been called a "conjectural biology."

We do not and we cannot remember much of what we have been thinking about while we are awake. This is unquestionably true in a large sense. But, nevertheless, we do not doubt that we have been thinking continuously. We do not suppose that at any time all thinking had ceased, though we may be completely unable to recall what it was about.

He shows further that many writers on dreams and careful students of the subject in the past have come to the same conclusion. Robert Dale Owen, for instance, deliberately endeavored to find out whether he had always been dreaming just before he awoke. After months of observation he records that in every instance he was conscious of having dreamed. Hazlitt, a century ago, tried the same thing for a prolonged period and notes that whenever he was waked, and immediately recollected himself as to possible dreaming, he was always aware that he had been dreaming. Sir Arthur Mitchell himself has tried this same experiment on himself and for a considerable time has scarcely ever failed to put to himself this question about dreaming when he awoke and always got a satisfying affirmative answer. Personally, for several years, I have been interested enough in this subject to recur frequently to it immediately on awaking and I cannot say that I have ever, under those circumstances, failed to find that there had been some vague dream fancies at least running through my mind before I was fully awake. This opinion as to the constancy of dreaming during sleep has many authorities in its support. Sir Arthur Mitchell has quoted a number, some of them distinguished physicians, who add the weight of their testimony to this view:

It is not a new thing to hold that there is no sleep without dreaming—in other words, that dreaming goes on unceasingly all through sleep. I have stated my own opinion strongly, but the same opinion has been nearly as strongly expressed by others. Sir Benjamin Brodie, for instance, may be said to express it when he writes, "I believe that I seldom if ever sleep without dreaming." Sir Henry Holland expresses it still more plainly when he says: "No moment of sleep is without some condition of dreaming." Goodwin says much the same thing when he asserts that "sleep is not a suspension of thought"—in other words, that dreaming is sleep-thinking. Dr. John Reid still more clearly holds the opinion, though he does not furnish me with a short apt quotation. Hazlitt, too, may be taken as holding that there is no such thing as dreamless sleep.

Descartes and his followers may, perhaps, be regarded as holding that the mind is unceasingly at work in sleep—even in the "profoundest sleep," though "the memory retains it not," and Isaac Watts says that "the soul never intermits its activity," and that we may "know of sleeping thoughts at the moment they arise, and not retain them the next moment."

Hippocrates, Leibnitz, and Abercrombie have also been quoted as holding that there is no dreamless sleep, and so far as they express themselves on the subject they appear to do so.

A strong weight of opinion in all ages favors the view that during sleep dream-thoughts are constantly running through our mind, though we recollect only those which are impressed upon us at the moment of awaking. We do not even recall those unless, for some reason, we have paid special attention to them. That is just exactly what is true of day dreaming. After it is over we have no idea at all of the thoughts that occupied our minds for hours, though we are all aware that at any given moment, if we turned our consciousness inwards we found that there was something that we were thinking about.

Short Duration of Dreams.—This view of the constant occurrence of dreams during sleep is confirmed by other things that we have come to know as to dreams and dream states. Probably the most interesting of these is with regard to the length of dreams. As our memory of dreams is only such as we have from the thoughts of sleep getting into our consciousness just at the moment of awaking, dreams are never as long as they sometimes seem to be. As a matter of fact, they occupy but a few moments, though in that time a long story may seem to unroll itself. Probably nothing gives more assurance to people who are persuaded that they are losing much rest because of their dreams than this explanation of the brevity of the phenomena. Nervous people wake frequently. Whenever they wake they find themselves dreaming. As a consequence, they acquire the persuasion that they have been dreaming "all the night long," and it is not hard for them to suggest to themselves in the early morning that they are not rested. Nervous people seldom feel rested in the early morning, it is their worst time, and with the occurrence of dreams as a suggested reason for this, they exaggerate the feeling of tiredness with which they get up. A frank discussion of this question of the duration of dreams is often the best possible therapeutic auxiliary for such cases. It gives them a new series of suggestions and, above all, relieves them of unfavorable suggestions.

Prof. Maury of the University of Paris tells a striking story of a very brief dream of his own which shows how short may be the time occupied by what seems surely a long dream. He had been reading before going to bed a very striking book on the Reign of Terror. He dreamt that he himself was arrested during the Terror, taken to prison, that his name was called on the list of the condemned, that he was carried to the guillotine, fastened to the board, pushed beneath the knife and that he woke just as the knife struck his neck. Of course he awoke with the usual sense of thankfulness and relief that comes at such times. When he awoke he found that a light curtain rod had fallen from the bed above him and had struck just across his neck. His dream evidently had all come to him during the extremely short time necessary for him to become fully awake after the rod had hit him. His mind was occupying itself with the history that he had read before going to bed. When the rod struck him the long story of his arrest and imprisonment, the journey to the place of the guillotine and the preparations for execution, all came to him as a series of rapid ideas during his coming to consciousness.

It is probable that most of our dreams are not much longer than this. One of my earliest recollections is of an old gentleman coming into the country school during my first year as a pupil and telling us the story of a dream of his of the night before quite as brief as that of Professor Maury. He had fallen asleep after dinner in his chair and, having a cold that stopped up his nose and his mouth being shut, he had the usual dream of being out of breath from running. It took him back to the story of the massacre of Wyoming, near the scene of which the school was situated. He dreamt that for hours he had been running away from the Indians and seemed at last utterly unable to escape them because he was out of breath. He made such efforts in his chair that his wife awakened him and then he found that he had been asleep altogether only a very few minutes.

Significance of Dreams.—Many people are quite sure that their dreams have a definite significance quite apart from any mere wandering of the mind or the suggestion of half-waking and the ideas that gather round sensations not fully in the consciousness. A number of people, for instance, have dreams of events that are happening at a distance at the moment that they dream. The Psychic Research Society of England has gathered a number of these and it is indeed difficult to understand many of them. There seems no doubt, however, that in many cases there is an illusion of memory, by which, after an event, dreams that might be taken to refer in some vague way to the happening, are clothed with a wealth of detail which appears to make them wonderful premonitory representations of future events or repetitions of simultaneous events. One of the most familiar of this form of dreams is what has been called a phantasm of the dying. People dying at a distance seem to have some wonderful power of making themselves appear to very near friends, especially brothers and sisters, and, above all, twins, and to friends with whom they have been very intimately associated. Occasionally such phantasms are seen during waking hours, or what are supposed to be waking hours, though it must not be forgotten that dreams may come very easily and almost unconsciously in short naps, but much more frequently in what are known to be dreams.

Nearly always these partake of the nature of the ordinary dream, as can be seen by a careful analysis of their conditions, and are mere coincidences occupying a very brief space of time. A typical example of this is to be found in one of the stories told by Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer, in his book "The Unknown." A young man who had fallen in love with a young woman was deeply grieved to be parted from her by the injunction of parents. Separated by a long distance, they kept up a clandestine correspondence for more than a year. For a considerable period, however, he had not heard from her, and he was beginning to be anxious lest anything had happened to her. One night she appeared to him in a dream in his room in white garments with a pale face and, placing her cold hand in his, she bade him good-bye. He awoke with a start. He found it difficult to sleep and was very anxious about her. The next day he learned that she had died the night before and concluded that his dream was a last message from her. The end of the story, however, as it is told, spoils this nice sentimental conclusion. When he awoke he found he had in his hand a glass of ice water which had been standing on the table beside him. The grasping of this had awakened him. During the awakening process the thoughts of her in his mind gathered round the cold sensation in his hand and gave him the dream of her and the last farewell.

There are many instances in which dreams of future events seem to come true. Indeed, so many of these stories have been told that it is hard to persuade some people that dreams have no meaning and can have no meaning. By this we mean that they can by no possibility represent prophetic foresight. What patients need to be made to understand is that dreams represent only straggling sensations trying to get into our consciousness, just barely succeeding, and then arousing trains of ideas unconnected in themselves, but which we connect afterwards when we recollect our dreams. This whole subject has been studied so thoroughly in Maury's work on "Le Sommeil et les Rêves" about the middle of the last century and Freud "Ueber den Traum" and Sante de Sanctis' "I Sogni" Turin, 1899, at the end of the century, that there can be no further doubts about the matter for those who are open to conviction. Most people, however, want to believe that their dreams mean something. They like to think that they are in some way picked out from the multitude and that their dreaming has a significance more than is accorded to other people. It is, indeed, this self-centeredness that makes for the belief in premonitions and prophetic dreams and, as in all cases, these feelings work out their own revenge.

If they will listen to reason, however, most people may be rather readily convinced that their dreams cannot have any serious significance. In the chapter on Premonitions we have already called attention to the situation that exists with regard to the possibility of future events giving information of themselves in advance of their happening. Simultaneous events may perhaps in some way give warnings. The possibility of action on the mind at a distance, especially where minds are involved, has been discussed and admitted. The cases in which it is supposed to have happened are, to my mind, all dubious and are mere coincidences. For future events, however, there is no possible physical explanation. When we turn to explanations in the borderland between spirit and matter we find nothing satisfactory. The future event exists nowhere. No spirit even knows it; it is dependent on human free will. To the Creator it is known only as a contingent possibility dependent on free will. The information does not come from Him, for then there would be more design in these incidents. Such dreams would effect some serious purpose, while usually they have but minor significance in the stories as told and they often concern only the most trivial things.

What is thus true of premonitions can readily be applied to dreams. There is no reasonable source of information with regard to future events. What, then, are we to say of the dreams that come true? There is no doubt that dreaming is extremely common. Probably, as was said, we never sleep without dreams. There are a billion dreams at least, probably many billions of dreams every night, then, in this little world of ours. When these are startling they cling to us. It would be surprising if some of them did not come true. Indeed, it is inevitable, according to the theory of probabilities, that some of them will connect themselves directly with future events. We have a few thousands of such startling coincidences in the history of the race. Out of these have been made all the data supposed to underlie the teaching that dreams have a prophetic significance. It is much easier to understand with regard to dreams than even with regard to telepathy coincidence explains all the supposedly wonderful warnings of events that actually happen after we have had apparently premonitory dreams.

An interesting example of a premonition that did not come true, the subject of which was sure that it was a waking premonition and not a dream, though it seems more likely that it was as suggested by the narrator a sleep vision, is told by Sir Arthur Mitchell in his "Dreaming, Laughing, Blushing" (London, 1905). A number of scientists who discussed the story declared that if it had only come true it would have been one of the most startling manifestations of premonition and of the clairvoyant power of dreams, or at least of their telepathic significance, that we have ever had. It involved so many distinguished scientists that there could have been no doubt about it. It was so detailed and those details were known to so many authorities in science, that it would have carried great weight and it would have been extremely difficult to have people accept it as a mere coincidence. It is easy to see now after the event that, if it had been fulfilled, it would have been, in spite of its startlingness, a mere coincidence. Since it was not fulfilled, however, it represents one of the best evidences that we have for the insignificance of premonitory or telepathic dreams.

Sir William T. Gairdner, K. C. B., whose interesting typhus delirium experience appears in the paper by Professor Coates on "Sleep, Dreams and Delirium" (Glas. Med. Jour., Vol. xxxviii, 1892, pp. 241-261), has written to me about his dreams generally, and he concludes his letter with the narrative of a dream, which, as he correctly says, "if it had only fulfilled itself, might have become famous." He prefaces the narrative by this statement: "In all my individual experience, now extending over more than the usual term of life, I have never met with anything suggestive in the remotest degree of telepathy or second sight, or of dream prophecies or any other fact bearing on the marvellous." He then goes on to tell the dream to which I have referred. "In crossing the Atlantic In 1891," he says, "in delightful weather and perfect bodily health, and without a shade of anxiety on my mind so far as I was aware (in waking consciousness), I was suddenly aroused in the very early morning, say, three or four a. m., out of a perfectly sound, and, as I should call it, dreamless sleep, by the apparition of a telegram written on the usual paper, and presumably from home, in these words: 'Miss Dorothea died at –,' all the rest being blurred and indistinct, but these words having a startling distinctness and a vivid sense of reality. I was not, I think, in the least degree alarmed at first, and certainly had no superstition about it on discovering that it was only a dream; but, failing to get any more sleep, I rose early, took my bath as usual, and went on deck, where I had to repeat the story of my dream to each one of some three or four companions who were on board, of whom I will only mention Sir. John Batty Tuke, Professor Young of Owens College, and Professor Cunningham, then of Trinity College, Dublin. Any of these gentlemen will confirm my saying that I attached no special importance to this dream in the way of a scare or a superstition, but in this way it got abroad to a certain extent within a small circle on board in such a way as would have ensured it a widespread fame had it only come true. In discussing the matter at breakfast I remarked (alluding to telepathy) that the telegram was clearly, judging from its terms, not from my wife or any member of my immediate family, and could only have been despatched by a servant or some one with whom I could not be supposed to be in telepathic rapport. From this point of view it clearly refuted itself, and yet the effect upon my mind was such that, upon arriving at New York, I at once despatched a telegram announcing my arrival and making inquiry, the reply to which showed that the family were pursuing a quite undisturbed course at St. Andrews."