Chapter I: Preface

There are at least four different ways of writing a book on dreams. There is, for instance, the _literary_ method. In this way one goes to books or to the memories of other people for one's material, and so collects a great number of more or less wonderful stories. I have rejected this method, for it is entirely untrustworthy. Dreams are elusive at the best; only a very careful observer can set down a dream faithfully, even directly after it has occurred, and no one can safely entrust a dream to memory.

There is, again, what I may call the _clinical_ method of studying dreams by the personal observation and collection of facts, with summation and analysis of the results. On a large scale, with the aid of the _questionnaire_, this method has been especially carried on in the United States, notably at Clark University under the inspiration of Dr. Stanley Hall. A strict and scientific adherence to the clinical method of studying dreams has resulted in Professor Sante de Sanctis's book _I Sogni_ (first edition 1899), which is, on the whole, the best book on dreams published in recent years.

Then there is the _experimental_ method, which, not content with mere objective study of the phenomena, endeavours to interfere with them and to find out the results of interference. This method may be combined with other methods of studying dreams. In its pure form it has in recent years been especially practised by the late Mourly Vold. Its results are not without interest, but they do not cover a large part of the field, and they are not altogether reliable. Dreaming activity is so fluid and suggestible--and this is notably so when experimenter and subject are the same person--that interference with the phenomena deforms them, and we cannot be sure that by experiment we have really learned much about the life of dreams.

There is, finally, the _introspective_ method. This may be said to be the earliest of the more scientific methods of studying dreams. Maine de Biran was here a pioneer, and Maury, in his famous book, _Le Sommeil et les Rêves_ (1861), which inaugurated the modern study of dreams, adopted a mainly introspective method, though he was not always quite successful in avoiding the fallacies of that method. It is in France that this method has been most frequently and most successfully cultivated.

Professor Sigmund Freud's _Die Traumdeutung_ (first edition, 1900), may be said to belong to the introspective class, though to a special division which Freud himself terms psycho-analytic. This is undoubtedly the most original, the most daring, the most challenging of recent books on dreams, and is now the text-book of a whole school of investigators. It is not a book to be neglected, for it is written by one of the profoundest of living investigators into the obscure depths of the human soul. Even if one rejects Freud's methods as unsatisfactory and his facts as unproved, the work of one so bold and so sincere cannot fail to be helpful and stimulating in the highest degree. If it is not the truth it will at least help us to reach the truth.

The little book now presented to the reader belongs mainly to the introspective group of dream studies, though not to the psycho-analytic variety. It is based on data which have accumulated beneath my hands during more than twenty years, and some of the ideas developed in it were put forward in a paper 'On Dreaming of the Dead,' _Psychological Review_, Sept. 1895; in 'A Note on Hypnagogic Paramnesia,' _Mind_, No. 22, 1896; and in 'The Stuff that Dreams are made of,' _Popular Science Monthly_, April 1899. The book is not the outcome of experiment or of any deliberate concentration of thought on dreaming. I have simply noted down dream experiences,--most often in myself, less often in immediate friends,--directly they have occurred, usually on awakening in the morning. The few unimportant exceptions to the rule are duly noted. By maintaining this rule I have been able to satisfy myself that everything I have set down is reasonably accurate. Such a method certainly tends towards the exclusion of peculiar and exceptional dreams. This I do not greatly regret. I am chiefly interested in the problems of normal dreaming; they are sufficiently puzzling and mysterious and they properly present themselves for explanation first. I do not wish it to be understood that I question the existence of telepathic and other abnormal dream experiences. That is not the case. But it so happens that under the conditions I have laid down I have not met with any dreams that clearly and decisively belong to this abnormal class. Such few possible examples as have come under my immediate observation (in no case as personal experiences) are slight, and, moreover, sometimes of too intimate a character for full exposition.

Thus my contribution to the psychology of dreaming is simple and unpretentious; it deals only with the fundamental elements of the subject. I do not make this statement entirely in a spirit of humility. It seems to me that in the past the literature of dreaming has often been overweighted by bad observation and reckless theory. By learning to observe and to understand the ordinary nightly experience of dream life we shall best be laying the foundation of future superstructures. For, rightly understood, dreams may furnish us with clues to the whole of life.

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

PAGE

The House of Dreams--Fallacies in the Study of Dreams--Is it
possible to Study Dreams?--How Fallacies may be Avoided--Do
we always Dream during Sleep?--The Two Main
Sources of Dreams with their Sub-divisions, 1

CHAPTER II

THE ELEMENTS OF DREAM LIFE

The Spontaneous Procession of Dream Imagery--Its Kaleidoscopic
Character--Attention in Dreams--Relation of Drug
Visions and Hypnagogic Imagery to Dreaming--Colour in
Dreams--The Fusion of Dream Imagery--Compared to
Dissolving Views--Sources of the Imagery--Various types
of Fusion--The Sub-Conscious Element in Dreaming--Verbal
Transformations as Links in Dream Imagery--The
Reduplication of Visual Imagery in Motor and other Terms, 20

CHAPTER III

THE LOGIC OF DREAMS

All Dreaming is a Process of Reasoning--The Fundamental
Character of Reasoning--Reasoning as a Synthesis of
Images--Dream Reasoning Instinctive and Automatic--It
is also Consciously carried on--This a result of the
Fundamental Split in Intelligence--Dissociation--Dreaming
as a Disturbance of Apperception, 56

CHAPTER IV

THE SENSES IN DREAMS

All Dreams probably contain both Presentative and Representative
Elements--The Influence of Tactile Sensations on
Dreams--Dreams excited by Auditory Stimuli--Dreams
aroused by Odours and Tastes--The Influence of Visual
Stimuli--Difficulty of distinguishing between Actual and
Imagined Sensory Excitations--The Influence of Internal
Visceral Stimuli on Dreaming--Erotic Dreams--Vesical
Dreams--Cardiac Dreams and their Symbolism--Prodromic
Dreams--Prophetic Dreams, 71

CHAPTER V

EMOTION IN DREAMS

Emotion and Imagination--How Stimuli are transformed into
Emotion--Somnambulism--The Failure of Movement in
Dreams--Nightmare--Influence of the approach of Awakening
on imagined Dream movements--The Magnification of
Imagery--Peripheral and Cerebral Conditions combine to
produce this Imaginative Heightening--Emotion in Sleep
also Heightened--Dreams formed to explain Heightened
Emotions of unknown origin--The fundamental Place of
Emotion in Dreams--Visceral and especially Gastric disturbance
as a source of Emotion--Symbolism in Dreams--The
Dreamer's Moral Attitude--Why Murder so often takes
place in Dreams--Moral Feeling not Abolished in Dreams
though sometimes Impaired, 94

CHAPTER VI

AVIATION IN DREAMS

Dreams of Flying and Falling--Their Peculiar Vividness--Dreams
of Flying an Alleged Survival of Primeval Experiences--Best
explained as based on Respiratory Sensations
combined with Cutaneous Anaesthesia--The Explanation
of Dreams of Falling--The Sensation of Levitation sometimes
experienced by Ecstatic Saints--Also experienced at
the Moment of Death, 129

CHAPTER VII

SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS

The Dramatisation of Subjective Feelings Based on
Dissociation--Analogies in Waking Life--The Synaesthesias and
Number-forms--Symbolism in Language--In Music--The Organic Basis
of Dream Symbolism--The Omnipotence of Symbolism--Oneiromancy--The
Scientific Interpretation of Dreams--Why Symbolism prevails
in Dreaming--Freud's Theory of Dreaming--Dreams as Fulfilled
Wishes--Why this Theory cannot be applied to all Dreaming--The
Complete Form of Symbolism in Dreams--Splitting up of
Personality--Self-objectivation in Imaginary Personalities--The
Dramatic Element in Dreams--Hallucinations--Multiple
Personality--Insanity--Self-objectivation a Primitive Tendency--Its
Survival in Civilisation, 148

CHAPTER VIII

DREAMS OF THE DEAD

Mental Dissociation during sleep--Illustrated by the Dream of
Returning to School Life--The Typical Dream of a Dead
Friend--Examples--Early Records of this Type of Dream--Analysis
of such Dreams--Atypical Forms--The Consolation
sometimes afforded by Dreams of the Dead--Ancient
Legends of this Dream Type--The Influence of Dreams on
the Belief of Primitive Man in the Survival of the Dead, 194

CHAPTER IX

MEMORY IN DREAMS

The Apparent Rapidity of Thought in Dreams--This Phenomenon largely
due to the Dream being a Description of a Picture--The Experience
of Drowning Persons--The Sense of Time in Dreams--The Crumpling
of Consciousness in Dreams--The Recovery of Lost Memories through
the Relaxation of Attention--The Emergence in Dreams of Memories
not known to Waking Life--The Recollection of Forgotten Languages
in Sleep--The Perversions of Memory in Dreams--Paramnesic False
Recollections--Hypnagogic Paramnesia--Dreams mistaken for Actual
Events--The Phenomenon of Pseudo-Reminiscence--Its Relationship
to Epilepsy--Its Prevalence especially among Imaginative and
Nervously Exhausted Persons--The Theories put forward to Explain
it--A Fatigue Product--Conditioned by Defective Attention and
Apperception--Pseudo-Reminiscence a reversed Hallucination, 212

CHAPTER X

CONCLUSION

The Fundamental Nature of Dreaming--Insanity and Dreaming--The
Child's Psychic State and the Dream State--Primitive
Thought and Dreams--Dreaming and Myth-Making--Genius
and Dreams--Dreaming as a Road into the Infinite, 261

INDEX, 283

THE WORLD OF DREAMS