Freud - Complete Works (90 page)

   As sources of dream-images,
subjective sensory excitations have the obvious advantage of not
being dependent, like objective ones, upon external chance. They
are ready to hand, as one might say, whenever they are needed as an
explanation. But they are at a disadvantage compared with objective
sensory stimuli in that the part they play in instigating a dream
is scarcely or not at all open to confirmation, as is the case with
objective stimuli, by observation and experiment. The chief
evidence in favour of the power of subjective sensory excitations
to instigate dreams is provided by what are known as
‘hypnagogic hallucinations’, or, to use Johannes
Müller’s term (1826), ‘imaginative visual
phenomena’. These are images, often very vivid and rapidly
changing, which are apt to appear - quite habitually, in some
people - during the period of falling asleep; and they may also
persist for a time after the eyes have been opened. Maury, who was
subject to them in a high degree, has made an exhaustive
examination of them and maintains (as did Müller before him)
their connection and indeed their identity with dream-images. In
order to produce them, he says (Maury, 1878, 59 f.), a certain
amount of mental passivity, a relaxation of the strain of
attention, is necessary. It is enough, however, to fall into a
lethargic state of this kind for no more than a second (provided
that one has the necessary predisposition) in order to have a
hypnagogic hallucination. After this one may perhaps wake up again
and the process may be repeated several times until one finally
falls asleep. Maury found that if he then woke up once more after
not too long an interval, he was able to detect in his dream the
same images that had floated before his eyes as hypnagogic
hallucinations before he fell asleep. (Ibid., 134 f.) This was the
case on one occasion with a number of grotesque figures with
distorted faces and strange
coiffures
which pestered him
with extreme pertinacity while he was going to sleep and which he
remembered having dreamt about after he woke. Another time, when he
was suffering from hunger owing to having put himself on a light
diet, he had a hypnagogic vision of a plate and a hand armed with a
fork which was helping itself to some of the food from the plate.
In the dream which followed he was sitting at a well spread table
and heard the noise made by the diners with their forks. Yet
another time, when he went to sleep with his eyes in an irritated
and painful state, he had a hypnagogic hallucination of some
microscopically small signs which he could only decipher one by one
with the greatest difficulty; he was woken from his sleep an hour
later and remembered a dream in which here was an open book printed
in very small type which he was reading painfully.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

 
544

   Auditory hallucinations of words,
names, and so on can also occur hypnagogically in the same way as
visual images, and may then be repeated in a dream - just as an
overture announces the principal themes which are to be heard in
the opera that is to follow.

   A more recent observer of
hypnagogic hallucinations, G. Trumbull Ladd (1892), has followed
the same lines as Müller and Maury. After some practice he
succeeded in being able to wake himself suddenly without opening
his eyes, from two to five minutes after gradually falling asleep.
He thus had an opportunity of comparing the retinal sensations
which were just disappearing with the dream-images persisting in
his memory. He declares that it was possible in every case to
recognize an internal relation between the two, for the luminous
points and lines of the idioretinal light provided, as it were, an
outline drawing or diagram of the figures mentally perceived in the
dream. For instance, an arrangement of the luminous points in the
retina in parallel lines corresponded to a dream in which he had
been seeing, clearly spread out in front of him, some lines of
print which he was engaged in reading. Or, to use his own words,
‘the clearly printed page which I was reading in my dream
faded away into an object that appeared to my waking consciousness
like a section of an actual page of print when seen through an oval
hole in a piece of paper at too great a distance to distinguish
more than an occasional fragment of a word, and even that
dimly.’ Ladd is of opinion (though he does not underestimate
the part played in the phenomenon by central factors) that scarcely
a single visual dream, occurs without the participation of material
provided by intraocular retinal excitation. This applies especially
to dreams occurring soon after falling asleep in a dark room, while
the source of stimulus for dreams occurring in the morning shortly
before waking is the objective light which penetrates the eyes in a
room that is growing light. The changing, perpetually shifting
character of the excitation of the idioretinal light corresponds
precisely to the constantly moving succession of images shown us by
our dreams. No one who attaches importance to these observations of
Ladd’s will underestimate the part played in dreams by these
subjective sources of stimulation, for, as we know, visual images
constitute the principal component of our dreams. The contributions
from the other senses, except for that of hearing, are intermittent
and of less importance.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

 
545

3.  INTERNAL ORGANIC SOMATIC
STIMULI

   Since we are now engaged in
looking for sources of dreams inside the organism instead of
outside it, we must bear in mind that almost all our internal
organs, though they give us scarcely any news of their working so
long as they are in a healthy state, become a source of what are
mainly distressing sensations when they are in what we describe as
states of excitation, or during illnesses. These sensations must be
equated with the sensory or painful stimuli reaching us from the
outside. The experience of ages is reflected in - to take an
example - Strümpell’s remarks on the subject (1877,
107): ‘During sleep the mind attains a far deeper and wider
sensory consciousness of somatic events than during the waking
state. It is obliged to receive and be affected by impressions of
stimuli from parts of the body and from changes in the body of
which it knows nothing when awake.’ So early a writer as
Aristotle regarded it as quite possible that the beginnings of an
illness might make themselves felt in dreams before anything could
be noticed of it in waking life, owing to the magnifying effect
produced upon impressions by dreams. (See above,
p. 518.
) Medical writers, too, who were
certainly far from believing in the prophetic power of dreams, have
not disputed their significance as premonitors of illness. (Cf.
Simon, 1888, 31, and many earlier writers.)¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] Apart from
the diagnostic value ascribed to dreams (e.g. in the works of
Hippocrates), their
therapeutic
importance in antiquity must
also be borne in mind. In Greece there were dream oracles, which
were regularly visited by patients in search of recovery. A sick
man would enter the temple of Apollo or Aesculapius, would perform
various ceremonies there, would be purified by lustration, massage
and incense, and then, in a state of exaltation, would be stretched
on the skin of a ram that had been sacrificed. He would then fall
asleep and would dream of the remedies for his illness. These would
be revealed to him either in their natural form or in symbols and
pictures which would afterwards be interpreted by the priests. For
further information upon therapeutic dreams among the Greeks see
Lehmann (1908, 1, 74), Bouché-Leclercq (1879-1882), Hermann
(1858, §41, 262 ff., and 1882, §38, 356), Böttinger
(1795, 163 ff.), Lloyd (1877), Döllinger (1857,
130).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

546

   Instances of the diagnostic power
of dreams seem to be vouched for in more recent times. Thus
Tissié (1898, 62 f.) quotes from Artigues (1884, 43) the
story of a forty-three-year old woman, who, while apparently in
perfect health, was for some years tormented by anxiety-dreams. She
was then medically examined and found to be in the early stages of
an affection of the heart, to which she eventually succumbed.

   Pronounced disorders of the
internal organs obviously act as instigators of dreams in a whole
number of cases. The frequency of anxiety-dreams in diseases of the
heart and lungs is generally recognized. Indeed, this side of
dream-life is placed in the foreground by so many authorities that
I am content with a mere reference to the literature: Radestock,
Spitta, Maury, Simon (1888), Tissié. Tissié is even
of the opinion that the particular organ affected gives a
characteristic impress to the content of the dream. Thus the dreams
of those suffering from diseases of the heart are usually short and
come to a terrifying end at the moment of waking; their content
almost always includes a situation involving a horrible death.
Sufferers from diseases of the lungs dream of suffocation, crowding
and fleeing, and are remarkably subject to the familiar nightmare.
(It may be remarked, incidentally, that Börner (1855) has
succeeded in provoking the latter experimentally by lying on his
face or covering the respiratory apertures.)  In the case of
digestive disorders dreams contain ideas connected with enjoyment
of food or disgust. Finally, the influence of sexual excitement on
the content of dreams can be adequately appreciated by everyone
from his own experience and provides the theory that dreams are
instigated by organic stimuli with its most powerful support.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

547

   No one, moreover, who goes
through the literature of the subject can fail to notice that some
writers, such as Maury and Weygandt (1893), were led to the study
of dream problems by the effect of their own illnesses upon the
content of their dreams.

   Nevertheless, though these facts
are established beyond a doubt, their importance for the study of
the sources of dreams is not so great as might have been hoped.
Dreams are phenomena which occur in healthy people - perhaps in
everyone, perhaps every night - and it is obvious that organic
illness cannot be counted among its indispensable conditions. And
what we are concerned with is not the origin of certain special
dreams but the source that instigates the ordinary dreams of normal
people.

   We need only go a step further,
however, in order to come upon a source of dreams more copious than
any we have so far considered, one indeed which seems as though it
could never run dry. If it is established that the interior of the
body when it is in a diseased state becomes a source of stimuli for
dreams, and if we admit that during sleep the mind, being diverted
from the external world, is able to pay more attention to the
interior of the body, then it seems plausible to suppose that the
internal organs do not need to be diseased before they can cause
excitations to reach the sleeping mind - excitations which are
somehow turned into dream-images. While we are awake we are aware
of a diffuse general sensibility or coenaesthesia, but only as a
vague quality of our mood; to this feeling, according to medical
opinion, all the organic systems contribute a share. At night,
however, it would seem that this same feeling, grown into a
powerful influence and acting through its various components,
becomes the strongest and at the same time the commonest source for
instigating dream-images. If this is so, it would only remain to
investigate the laws according to which the organic stimuli turn
into dream-images.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

548

   We have here reached the theory
of the origin of dreams which is preferred by all the medical
authorities. The obscurity in which the centre of our being (the
‘
moi splanchnique
’, as Tissié calls it)
is veiled from our knowledge and the obscurity surrounding the
origin of dreams tally too well not to be brought into relation to
each other. The line of thought which regards vegetative organic
sensation as the constructor of dreams has, moreover, a particular
attraction for medical men since it allows of a single aetiology
for dreams and mental diseases, whose manifestations have so much
in common; for coenaesthetic changes and stimuli arising from the
internal organs are also held largely responsible for the origin of
the psychoses. It is not surprising, therefore, that the origin of
the theory of somatic stimulation may be traced back to more than
one independent source.

   The line of argument developed by
the philosopher Schopenhauer in 1851 has had a decisive influence
on a number of writers. Our picture of the universe, in his view,
is arrived at by our intellect taking the impressions that impinge
on it from outside and remoulding them into the forms of time,
space and causality. During the daytime the stimuli from the
interior of the organism, from the sympathetic nervous system,
exercise at the most an unconscious effect upon our mood. But at
night, when we are no longer deafened by the impressions of the
day, those which arise from within are able to attract attention
just as at night we can hear the murmuring of a brook which is
drowned by daytime noise. But how is the intellect to react to
these stimuli otherwise than by carrying out its own peculiar
function on them? The stimuli are accordingly remodelled into forms
occupying space and time and obeying the rules of causality, and
thus dreams arise. Scherner (1861) and after him Volkelt (1875)
endeavoured subsequently to investigate in more detail the relation
between somatic stimuli and dream-images, but I shall postpone my
consideration of these attempts till we reach the section dealing
with the various theories about dreams.