dreams

Without lingering over its superficial absurdity, Havelock Ellis considers the dream as "an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect
thoughts," the study of which may acquaint us with the primitive stages of the development of mental life. J. Sully (p. 362) presents the same
conception of the dream in a still more comprehensive and penetrating fashion. His statements deserve all the more consideration when it is added
that he, perhaps more than any other psychologist, was convinced of the veiled significance of the dream. "Now our dreams are a means of
conserving these successive personalities. When asleep we go back to the old ways of looking at things and of feeling about them, to impulses
and activities which long ago dominated us." A thinker like Delboeuf asserts - without, indeed, adducing proof in the face of contradictory data,
and hence without real justification - "Dans le sommeil, hormis la perception, toutes les facultes de l'esprit, intelligence, imagination, memoire,
volonte, moralite, restent intactes dans leur essence; seulement, elles s'appliquent a des objets imaginaires et mobiles. Le songeur est un acteur qui
joue a volonte les fous et les sages, les bourreaux et les victimes, les nains et les geants, les demons et les anges"[34] (p. 222). The Marquis
Hervey,[35] who is flatly contradicted by Maury, and whose essay I have been unable to obtain despite all my efforts, appears emphatically to
protest against the under-estimation of the psychic capacity in the dream. Maury speaks of him as follows (p. 19): "M. le Marquis Hervey prete a
l'intelligence durant le sommeil toute sa liberte d'action et d'attention, et il ne semble faire consister le sommeil que dans l'occlusion des sens,
dans leur fermeture au monde exterieur; en sorte que l'homme qui dort ne se distingue guere, selon sa maniere de voir, de l'homme qui laisse
vaguer sa pensee en se bouchant les sens; toute la difference qui separe alors la pensee ordinaire du celle du dormeur c'est que, chez celui-ci,
l'idee prend une forme visible, objective, et ressemble, a s'y meprendre, a la sensation determinee par les objets exterieurs; le souvenir revet
l'apparence du fait present."[36]
Maury adds, however, "qu'il y a une difference de plus et capitale a savoir que les facultes intellectuelles de l'homme endormi n'offrent pas
l'equilibre qu'elles gardent chez l'homme eveille."[37]
In Vaschide, who gives us fully information as to Hervey's book, we find that this author expresses himself as follows, in respect to the apparent
incoherence of dreams: "L'image du reve est la copie de l'idee. Le principal est l'idee; la vision n'est pas qu'accessoire. Ceci etabli, il faut savoir
suivre la marche des idees, il faut savoir analyser le tissu des reves; l'incoherence devient alors comprehensible, les conceptions les plus
fantasques deviennent des faits simples et parfaitement logiques"[38] (p. 146). And (p. 147): "Les reves les plus bizarres trouvent meme une
explication des plus logiques quand on sait les analyser."[39]
J. Starke has drawn attention to the fact that a similar solution of the incoherence of dreams was put forward in 1799 by an old writer, Wolf
Davidson, who was unknown to me (p. 136): "The peculiar leaps of our imaginings in the dream-state all have their cause in the laws of
association, but this connection often occurs very obscurely in the soul, so that we frequently seem to observe a leap of the imagination where
none really exists."
The evaluation of the dream as a psychic product in the literature of the subject varies over a very wide scale; it extends from the extreme of
under-estimation, as we have already seen, through premonitions that it may have a value as yet unrevealed, to an exaggerated over-estimation,
which sets the dream-life far above the capacities of waking life. In his psychological characterization of dream-life, Hildebrandt, as we know,
groups it into three antinomies, and he combines in the third of these antinomies the two extreme points of this scale of values (p. 19): "It is the
contrast between, on the one hand, an enhancement, an increase of potentiality, which often amounts to virtuosity, and on the other hand a
decided diminution and enfeeblement of the psychic life, often to a sub-human level."
"As regards the first, who is there that cannot confirm from his own experience the fact that in the workings and weavings of the genius of
dreams, there are sometimes exhibited a profundity and sincerity of emotion, a tenderness of feeling, a clearness of view, a subtlety of observation
and a readiness of wit, such as we should have modestly to deny that we always possessed in our waking life? Dreams have a wonderful poetry,
an apposite allegory, an incomparable sense of humour, a delightful irony. They see the world in the light of a peculiar idealization, and often
intensify the effect of their phenomena by the most ingenious understanding of the reality underlying them. They show us earthly beauty in a truly
heavenly radiance, the sublime in its supremest majesty, and that which we know to be terrible in its most frightful form, while the ridiculous
becomes indescribably and drastically comical. And on waking we are sometimes still so full of one of these impressions that it will occur to us
that such things have never yet been offered to us by the real world."
One might here ask oneself: do these depreciatory remarks and these enthusiastic praises really refer to the self-same phenomenon? Have some
writers overlooked the foolish and others the profound and sensitive dreams? And if both kinds of dreams do occur - that is, dreams that merit
both these judgments - does it not seem idle to seek a psychological characterization of the dream? Would it not suffice to state that everything is
possible in the dream, from the lowest degradation of the psychic life to its flight to heights unknown in the waking state? Convenient as such a
solution might be, it has this against it: that behind the efforts of all the investigators of dreams there seems to lurk the assumption that there is in
dreams some characteristic which is universally valid in its essential features, and which must eliminate all these contradictions.
It is unquestionably true that the mental capacities of dreams found readier and warmer recognition in the intellectual period now lying behind us,
when philosophy rather than exact natural science ruled the more intelligent minds. Statements like that of Schubert, to the effect that the dream
frees the mind from the power of external nature, that it liberates the soul from the chains of sensory life, together with similar opinions expressed
by the younger Fichte[40] and others, who represent dreams as a soaring of the mind to a higher plane - all these seem hardly conceivable to us