Every act and motive of our lives, from infancy to age, is controlled by two sets of influences, the general nature of which has here been made sufficiently clear. They correspond on the one hand, to the numerous partial motives which psychoanalysis studies to great advantage, and on the other hand, to the ethical motives which are only thoroughly studied by philosophy.
(3) Another conclusion, which seems to me practically of great importance, follows from this same view. Every one who has studied carefully the life histories of patients, especially of children, and has endeavored in so doing to follow step by step the experiences through which they reach the various mile-stones on their journey, must have been astonished to observe the evidences of PREPAREDNESS on their part for each new step in this long journey. Human beings seem predestined, as it were, not only in a physical but in a mental sense, for what is coming, and the indications of this in the mental field are greater than the conditions of organic evolution could readily account for. The transcendency of the mind over the brain shows itself here as elsewhere.
We are told that our visions of the unpicturable, the ideal world, which our imagination paints and which our logical reasoning calls for as the necessary cap or final corollary to any finite world which our intelligence can actually define,- that such visions are nothing but the pictures of infantile desires projected on to a great screen and made to mock us with the appearance of reality.
I have nothing whatever to say against the value of the evidence that a portion of our visions are of this origin. In fact, I believe this as heartily as does any one. But I desire strenuously to oppose the view tacitly implied in the statement of the projection theory just cited, the acceptance of which as an exclusive doctrine would involve the virtual rejection of our right, as scientific men, to rely on the principle that the evidence afforded by logical presuppositions and logical inference is as cogent as that furnished through observation.
It is, in my opinion, just because we all belong to a world which is in outline not "in the making" but completed,-because, in short, we are in one sense like heirs returning to our estates,-that this remarkable preparedness of each child is found that impresses us so strongly. The universe is, in a sense, ours by prescriptive right and by virtue of the constitution of our minds. But the unity of such a universe must, of course, be of a sort that includes and indeed implies diversity and conflict as essential elements of its nature.
Psychoanalysts should not make light of inferential forms of reasoning, for it is on this form of reasoning that the value of their own conclusions largely rests. We infer contrary meanings for words that are used ostensibly in one sense, and we infer special conflicts in infancy of which we have but little evidence at hand, and cravings and passions of which it may be impossible to find more than a few traces by way of direct testimony.
Our immediate environment and the world that surrounds us in that sense, appear to our observation, indeed, as "in the making." But besides the power of observation which enables, and indeed forces us to see the imperfection in this environmental world, we possess, or are possessed by, a mental constitution which compels us, with still greater force, to the belief in a goal of positive perfection of which our nearer goals are nothing but the shadow.
It is because I believe in the necessity of such reasoning as this that I am not prepared to accept the "Lust-Unlust" principle (that is, to use philosophical terms, the "hedonistic" principle) as representing the forces by which even the child is finally animated. Men do not reach their best accomplishments, if indeed they reach any accomplishment, through the exclusive recognition, either unconscious or instinctive, of a utilitarian result, or a result which can be couched in terms of pleasure or personal satisfaction as the goal of effort. They may state the goal to themselves in these terms; but this is, then, the statement of what is really a fictitious principle, a principle in positing which the patient does but justify himself and does not define his real motive. Utilitarianism and hedonism and the pleasure-pain principle, useful though they are, are alike imperfect in that they refer to partial motives, partial forms of self-expression; whereas that which finally moves men to their best accomplishments and makes them dissatisfied with anything less than this, is the necessity rather than the desire to take complete self-expression as their final aim. The partial motives are more or less traceable as if by observation. The larger motives must be felt and reached through inferential reasoning, based on observation of ourselves through careful introspection.
Finally, the practical, therapeutic question arises, as to what measures the psychoanalyst is justified in taking to bring about the best sort of outcome in a given case?
It is widely felt that the psychoanalyst would weaken his own hold on the strong typically analytic principles through which painful conflicts are to be removed if he should form the habit of dealing with ethical issues, and talking of "duties", instead of stimulating his patients to the discovery of resistances and repressions, even of repression the origin of which is not to be found within the conscious life. Yet,-parallel, as one might say, with this clear-cut standard of professional psychoanalytic obligation, the force of which I recognize,-it has to be admitted that there are certain fairly definite limitations to the usefulness of psychoanalysis. As one of these limitations, well-pronounced symptoms of egoism, taking the form of narcissism, are to be reckoned. These symptoms are not easily analyzed away. But if one asks oneself, or asks one's patients, what conditions might, if they had been present from the outset, have prevented this narcistic outcome (Jehovah type, etc.), the influence that suggests itself-looming up in large shape-is just this broad sense of ethical obligation to which repeated reference has here been made. If these patients could have had it brought home to them in childhood that they belonged, not to themselves conceived of narrowly (that is, as separate individuals) but only to themselves conceived of broadly as representatives of a series of communities taken in the largest sense, the outcome that happened might perhaps have been averted.
And what might have happened may still happen. What is to be done? Each physician must decide this for himself. He should be able both to do his best as a psychoanalyst and at the same time help the patient to free himself from that sort of repression in consequence of which he is unable to see his own best possibilities. But he cannot do this unless he has trained himself to see and feel in himself the outlines of this vision any more than he could help the patient to rid himself of an infantile complex if he did not appreciate what this complex means. We must trust ourselves, as physicians, with deadly weapons, and with deadly responsibilities, and we ought to be well harried by our consciences if we should do injustice, in using them, either to our scientific or our philosophic training.
ASPECTS OF DREAM LIFE[*]
[*] It should be stated as possibly bearing on the interpretation of the dreams recorded by the author, who is well known to me, that she is the subject of an intense and unusual obsession of hatred of an obtrusively pathological character against a relative. The psycho-pathology of the obsession, of which I have an intimate knowledge, has not been determined. A reasonable interpretation is that the main etiological factor is jealousy. She has undergone prolonged psychoanalytic treatment by a skilled psycho-analyst without improvement of the obsession and without revealing a satisfactory explanation of its pathology. To what extent the contents of the dreams have been determined or coloured by culture acquired by this treatment and by the study of Freudian doctrines is also a question deserving of consideration.-Editor.
The Contribution of a Woman
IT is an easy matter to accept upon authority a given scientific theory and bring to its support certain selected evidence, but quite another to carefully observe and report phenomena, inspired, influenced and guided indeed by the scientific-theory but drawing conclusions no wider or deeper than individual insight warrants. Scientific knowledge advances not by ready acceptance of theories but by original observation and experiment and the following study of dreams is offered as fulfilling in some degree the latter requirement. While there is a certain familiarity on the part of the writer with the general theory advanced by Freud and with his principles of interpretation, there is no acquaintance at first hand with his Die Traumdeutung, the reading of which has been postponed lest there be excess of influence.
No apology is offered for this invasion of the domain of psychology by a layman. The laboratory of the mind is open to all and he who has missed conventional training may yet chance upon valuable facts and their interpretation. Neither is apology offered for the intimate nature of the data reported. Belonging as dreams do to the most personal and private life of the individual it is nevertheless true that continued and careful study of this form of mentation insensibly alters one's attitude so that at length the dream appears as a fact of nature, impersonal and objective.
It is a common remark that if one tells his dreams their number will increase but this increase is probably only apparent. With attention the products of the dream-self become more accessible until one who is practiced in introspection can raise the number of his remembered dreams from one in two or three nights to five, ten, or even fourteen in a single night. Even at this maximum of remembrance one feels that but a fraction of the mind's nocturnal activity is recalled. Images emerge in consciousness and fall back into obscurity before the waking thought can grasp them. Or it may be more accurate to say that upon awakening consciousness rises from level to level. It sometimes happens that when first awake I recall several dreams which vanish utterly as a sudden shifting of consciousness occurs. Then, upon this new level, a new set of dreams appears. There is reason to believe that in thinking again of a dream which has once been recalled it is not the original dream experience which comes to mind but the copy made in the waking consciousness when it first emerged. On the other hand visions recognized as dreams belonging to a long past time occasionally float into the mind giving rise to the suspicion that they have not before reached the waking consciousness. It is possible that all dreams are recorded in the depths of the mind, themselves influencing and merging with later dreams.
The number of my dreams recalled and written out during three years closely approaches five thousand and without doubt the total number far exceeds this. I am inclined to the belief that constantly, by day as well as by night, we are dreaming; that unnoticed and independent trains of thought are carried on. At times when resting if I fall into an abstracted state-not of set purpose-I find myself in the midst of a stream of thought appearing, for the moment, perfectly natural, familiar and intelligible, as if I knew the beginning and end of the matter. But only for a moment will consciousness remain at this lower level. There is a sudden return to the normal plane, the passage fades from memory and I wonder what on earth it was all about. These phases of subconscious activity differ from dreams proper in the absence of visual images. The ideas are embodied in words, heard with the mind one might say. The source may be the same as that of the night visions but it is evident that during the day the incessant stimulation of the eye from without leaves no opportunity for the emergence of the secondary visual images pertaining to subconscious ideas, which, we are told by Dr. Morton Prince, furnish the perceptual elements of the dream. The other senses are sometimes represented. Often we are performing, or trying to perform, some action. But dreams are predominantly visual. Goethe has said, "I believe men only dream that they may not cease to see."
An account of the probable genesis of the memory images not only furnishes a clue to the mechanism of dreaming but to the underlying conditions as well. The lowest forms of life possess no image-forming power. They have no sense organs; sensation is diffused over the entire form and undifferentiated. Gradually, as the scale of life is ascended, certain parts of the organisms become specially sensitive to certain stimuli and eventually individual organs give separate and distinct reports of phenomena. A substance hitherto merely felt, is seen, heard, smelled, tasted. The passage from sensation to perception occurs when but one or two of the sense organs are stimulated by an object, yet, because of nervous connections established during former more close and complete experience of the object the remaining sense organs are faintly roused, sending into consciousness copies of former sensations. Thus the whole is present to mind while but a part to sense. In the developing brain the store of memory images of various kinds would rapidly increase and these images would come at length to have a more or less independent existence. It is probable that the next step in the making of mind was the synthesis of one set of sense impressions to form an idea of the object, the first abstraction, and thenceforth a sensation gave rise to an idea. There is at this stage no impulse to explain sensations, but involuntarily, from the store of memory images, and from the reservoir of ideas above, emerges a representation of the exciting object. If this is one to which the organism is accustomed the resulting complex in the highest nerve centers fits the subject, but as evolution proceeds and environment and capacity for sensation grow more complex, new stimulations occur. In the absence of the capacity for knowledge and understanding of the object the developing mind, true to its law, brings forward mental images most nearly related-those which fit in one or two respects,-and thus we have the birth of analogy, "the inference of a further degree of resemblance from an observed degree of resemblance."
To look at one's self is a late endowment. The kitten pursues its own tail but would chase that of its mother with equal ardor. I once saw a monkey searching industriously with eyes and hands upon its own body. The sight was startling. I had never before seen an animal look intelligently at itself. It was long before man distinguished his self from the world without, and longer still before he began to understand himself. Physical and mental phenomena, pain and pleasure, could not be tracked to their sources and so came to be expressed in terms of the world of nature, and for a reason precisely similar that portion of the self functioning in sleep makes use of symbolism. Occasionally the higher thought centers are involved but the typical dream is the product of a restricted, primitive self, lacking the resources of the complete personality and limited in power of expression. In dreams we are deficient in self-consciousness because it is only a partial self that dreams. Our wishes are rarely given clear and definite expression for the reason that the section of the mind then active is incapable of clear, definite and adequate concepts. Symbolism and reasoning by analogy are the resources of the mind until the power of knowledge dawns.
Predicating then a dream-self by its nature largely restricted to the use of symbolism and having at its disposal a vast store of images endlessly susceptible to influences which combine and alter their form, we reach the crucial question, what initiates the dream? This is by no means a mere purposeless thronging of visual images as occasionally happens in the period preceding sleep when faces, forms and scenes flit aimlessly before the mind's eye, some bare replicas of stimulations of the eye from without, others the attendant visual images of past thoughts and experiences and their distorted combination. Somewhat closer to actual dreaming is the rise of images accompanying present bodily and mental states. I sometimes see a body in the posture my own body has that moment assumed and one night, when recalling a passage from Wilhelm Meister, I saw a young man seated bareheaded on a doorstep, plainly a picture of Wilhelm at Marianna's threshold. In the last example we come definitely upon a vision induced from within, an idea working downward upon the visual centers. Still nearer dreams, indeed if occurring in sleep they would be classed with them, are the purely imaginative pictures whose cause is as mysterious as that of the actual dream. Fire in the wall near the pantry door, a garden with a woman rising from a clump of bushes, high, rocky mountain tops, a perpendicular wall of rock and against it a man on a ladder reaching for a flower, a long vista ending with a pillared temple on a hill,-these are a few of my visions before sleep. But to return,-why the dream? Are all or most dreams sexual? Can we say with Freud that they express the fulfillment of repressed desires?
It is not my purpose to attempt a complete answer to this question as I am far from understanding even the majority of my own dreams. Broadly speaking I should say that considering the amount and complexity of the material on hand which the mind may use and the probable inconceivable number of dreams it is unlikely that all are concerned with this matter. This question may well be allowed to rest for the present. But certain convictions have arisen in my mind as the result of the study of hundreds of personal dreams, convictions which do not rest upon the arbitrary interpretation of accepted symbolism, though I am far from questioning the validity of this procedure. I venture little beyond the region illuminated by individual insight though examples are cited far exceeding my power of interpretation.
The sexual theory of dreams has by some authorities been characterized as greatly over-emphasized, as failing to take account of other factors and interests of human personality. To those critics let me present the matter briefly and simply. The very fact of a person's being alive today presupposes an ancestry stretching backward through uncounted ages, an ancestry whose chief function, up to very recent times, was sexual and reproductive. Modern interests, business, social, intellectual, religious, artistic and philanthropic, which today loom so large, are a recent innovation, occupying in comparison with the period when they were not but a moment of time. In a vertical section of man-both racial and individual, they are seen to constitute but a superficial layer, from a contemporary standpoint predominant and paramount but in the light of the ages secondary and unstable. Biologically a woman is only an agent for the reproduction of her kind; more than this, with mind, all save the conscious, socially and ethically restricted sections, set toward the same end and toward the means for its accomplishment. There is no gainsaying this fact and in my dreams which yielded to analysis it stands paramount. I am inclined to disregard the theory of a "censor" for the reason that after I had admitted to my thought and frankly considered certain facts, by a thousand devious hints, by a thousand subterfuges, my subconsciousness continued to express these same facts by means of obscure symbolism. As the savage seizes upon one link in a chain of events expecting thereby to repossess the whole, as the native of Borneo makes a wax figure of his enemy in the belief that as the image melts, the enemy's body will waste away, as the women of Sumatra when sowing rice let the hair hang loose down their backs in order that the rice may grow luxuriantly and have long stalks, so this woman, this under-self, ignorant of the true law of cause and effect, and unable to form definite concepts, instinctively selects from the innumerable memories and visual images at her disposal those having relation to her unfulfilled function and forms a picture or weaves a tale, expecting through the performance of some remotely associated act the complete result.
To the events of an hour or so, supremely significant from a biological standpoint, are related a very large number of my dreams. Again and again events of that day and of the preceding days form the basis of dreams; trivial circumstances are revived one by one and fragments of the experience itself are seized, distorted and each woven into what I can no longer term "the baseless fabric of a vision." For instance the day preceding I broke my umbrella and found a shop where it was mended. In dream after dream appears that broken umbrella under various circumstances and when I ask the reason for its apparent importance I can not escape the conclusion that the article in question stands for a period of time, a series of events, in which the dream-self would again be placed. Apparently on that road opportunity lay in waiting, therefore by any means at her disposal must that path be regained. Involuntarily the language of metaphor is assumed in attempting to describe a process so far removed from actual knowledge. Still are we driven to avail ourselves of the expedient of primitive man.
Of the dreams presently to be cited only a part fall within the category of analogical reasoning. In none of the examples is a complete analysis attempted. The mind of each reader may carry the solution of the problem as far as it will. I am content merely to furnish a clue. That each dream is of great significance must not be assumed. But that each one, even though it appear a mere fanciful reverie, means SOMETHING can hardly be doubted. At the outset it is acknowledged that the dreams recorded followed a period of intense emotion when, through the exigencies of life the strongest instinct of humanity required control and repression. Further the writer is a musician and a botanist, and especially interested in biological and social problems. Study of the latter subjects was continued throughout the period in question. It must be confessed also that though loth to accept the sexual theory of dreams, once convinced of its at least partial truth I was on the watch for confirmation. I expected sexual symbolism. On the other hand each dream was absolutely spontaneous, an utter surprise, having no slightest likeness to any creation of my waking mind and seeming to rise from a region so remote as to be not myself. It should be noted also that the greater number of the nearly five thousand remembered dreams, all but very few in fact, would have remained in the limbo of the unconscious but for the persistent and trained effort which rescued them from oblivion. Neither by, nor apparently for my waking self were they formed.
Each individual mind, besides sharing in the symbolism common to mankind, has doubtless its own particular and special forms. For instance during the period covered by my study no less than ninety different varieties of plant life figured in my dreams, not including indefinite ferns, moss, grass, weeds and trees, and several plants noted somewhat in detail yet unlike any form known to me. Of the recognizable plants a number were used somewhat cleverly for their analogical significance. Of these may be mentioned the snowball and hydrangea whose flowers as every botanist knows are sterile, the size of the individual blossom being gained at the expense of loss of stamens and pistils. These plants were plainly used to indicate barrenness and the predominance of traits other than sexual. The keen critic will here interpose an objection. How is the primitive, unreasoning dream-self able to make use of symbolism whose import is known only to higher and developed states of mind? The force of the objection is granted and without attempting fully to answer it I will say that the likeness of the primitive mind of the race to that surviving in the highly evolved individual is only partial. Like tendencies exist but the influence of a great body of knowledge above inevitably alters the action of the latter. Maidenhair fern stood indubitably in several instances for the pubic hair, once surrounding a cluster of trailing arbutus when talcum powder of that fragrance had been used on the body. I dreamed of Linnaea borealis, the little twin-flower, in connection with a woman who a few days before when told of the birth of twins to a friend, said, "That is the way to have them come." Lettuce, for its milky juice obviously, appeared in two bunches on the front of the waist of a woman into whose house I had broken by leaning against a screen door, and a lawn bordered by cowslips, our common name for Caltha palustris, certainly represented a certain lawn that a friend told me had been kept mown by the cows feeding upon it when driven from pasture.
In each of the above instances the floral symbolism was part of an elaborate dream having wider significance leaving no doubt as to the accuracy of my conclusions. A particularly interesting and devious use of flowers occurs in the following dream-I am in front of a certain house over which, in the dream, is growing a vine having white, star-like, fragrant blossoms. I want one flower and the woman living there says I may have it. The name of the vine seems to be "Dyak." There is no plant having that name but a few months before I was reading of the Dyak girls of Borneo who "are very careful of their clothing, and often very vain, but when they are married they frequently become exceedingly untidy." I quoted the passage in an article thus fixing it in my mind. The link with the dream consists in the fact that the woman living in the vine-decorated house is, in reality, notoriously untidy. Her two daughters as they approached womanhood greatly improved in the daintiness of their garb, and one had become pregnant- outside marriage. Another dream:-I see a friend, by name Anna, stoop and pull from the ground a tiny lily-of-the-valley plant. It has no roots. I say, "What a pity." This dream had no meaning until into my mind came the thought of another Anna, a young girl who was led astray and who, I had just been told, had taken medicine to terminate her pregnancy. When I learned of this I had thought of the loss of the incipient life. The same night I dreamed of going upstairs in a shed or barn. At the top of the stairs something-a door-is in the way. I go by it. A child is there. Again:-I am crossing a level field and come upon little star-like flowers which I try to analyse. I find many with pistils but no stamens,-the pollen bearing organs which effect fertilization. I wonder if they will keep fresh until I reach home. Once more:-I approach a city. I see woods and two gardens, either flower or vegetable, from which comes music. On a mound wild flowers are growing, some white, some small and dark. I gather them. Then very remote and vague,-my brother is there. I see a long snake which my brother puts on(?) and covers my flowers. Still another vision was of a branch of beautiful; fragrant apple blossoms growing through the wall of a room. Some of the flowers were pistillate, some staminate,-a condition false to nature as regards the apple.
A dream, which in common with many others, seems not the fulfillment of a wish but the symbolical expression of a bodily and mental state, is the following:-After a day of very great physical restlessness I dream that I am walking in a path by a river. I can not see the water for the over-hanging trees beneath whose branches grow quantities of Impatiens fulva, the spotted touch-me-not,-named from the sudden bursting of the pod when touched. The plant in question I had not seen for some time and the fitness of the symbolism to the bodily state was too close to be accidental. After a walk in the spring when the ground was white with the cotton-tufted seeds of the poplar and I thought if all germinated how overwhelmed we should be with poplars, I dream that I am sweeping a floor upon which cotton is scattered, some of which flies and is caught in my hair. I dream of walking under pine trees whose pollen falls on me, and finally-though examples of the significant use of plants are by no means exhausted-I have upon awakening the vision of a pine tree growing from my nose. This strange anomaly becomes intelligible when I recall that a friend told me that the pores of her nose were enlarged, and I said mine were also; we had been talking of a quotation from Emerson relating to nature's fecundity; my friend was soon to be married; and a line from Emerson often in my thought is that in regard to pines "throwing out pollen for the benefit of the next century."
For a musician to dream of playing, or of trying to play, upon an organ or piano is apparently the most natural thing in the world and an attempt at interpretation is, to uninstructed common sense, a journey far afield. Yet the strange and striking variations introduced and the hindrances to my accomplishment of the act invest the dream with marked significance. For instance:-It is after church service and I want to play upon the pipe organ. I find my music. The stool is a kettle of water with a board over it. A stream of water comes from the organ. There is a horse near which kicks or bites me. Again:-I play on the piano to a friend who is a German scholar the opening theme of the Tristan and Isolde Prelude. My friend tells me the pronunciation of the title of the opera and it sounds to me like Froebel. That the name of the world-famous music drama, the apotheosis of passion, should be transformed to that of the notable child educator is nonsense or otherwise according to the observer's point of view. Another dream:-Some children want me to play and I go to the piano and try to play the Spring Song. But the piano stops sounding; only a few bass notes respond. I dream that a table of sheet music is on fire. Sometimes the music is too far away or too high for me to see: the notes are flowers, or books, or animals, or "hanging objects," or queer figures; in the book from which I play are pictures of the sea, a ship, a person, and birds-sea gulls, among them. The bed becomes an organ upon which I try to play. I begin to play the Witches' Dance and there are not enough keys to the piano. Again the keys are covered by a cloth or there are no keys. An organ behind me is played and I see no organist, or I move the pedals of an organ and music begins before the instrument is open. I try to play and the stops are wrong. Often I search frantically for the hymn given out by the minister and can not find it. Once I picked flowers in its place, drooping racemes of sweet alyssum, which I gave to a woman. Oddest of all on the keys of a piano I see a small boy who salutes me. Lastly, I play for children to sing. At the top of the page of music are whole notes-easy to play; below there are whole notes in groups of two, joined like confluent living cells.
There are several examples of punning to record-not brilliant, even somewhat vulgar yet interesting as exhibiting varieties of mental action. I dream that I am at a barn yard trying to hold the gate shut. In the yard are two men, each with an animal, a kid, one light, one dark. The light kid is unmanageable, pawing and shaking its head. Some days elapsed before the interpretation dawned upon me but once noted could not be doubted. Several weeks previously I had a business engagement and of two pairs of gloves-kids-I hesitated which to wear. I was to do some writing necessitating their removal and as one fastening of a light glove was difficult I fixed upon the dark pair, as to ask help would under the circumstances, have proved exceedingly embarrassing.
A friend had informed me of her approaching marriage. I dream of eating at a table with her. I take meat but she wants me to do she does. So I return the meat I had chosen and take spare-rib. This variety of meat I had neither eaten nor thought of for months and the conclusion that the reference is to the story of Adam and Eve is inevitable. I dream of eating at the table of a friend. I am a little sick and cannot eat all that is given me. My friend points smilingly to a package of stuffed dates on my plate. One date is apart from the package. This dream relates unmistakably to a day when I had a pressure of engagements and had not time to eat; when I did feel slightly ill, and when one very significant engagement was made unexpectedly-a date apart from the others. A kiss of her lover upon the lips of a young girl becomes in my dream a piece of court plaster on her upper lip, and a woman about whose prospective marriage some one asked, returns, in my night vision to a university to obtain the degree of B. Ed., which in sleep I took to indicate Bachelor of Education but which is open to a different interpretation.
Visions of natural scenery are most remote, strange, beautiful and delightful. They are doubtless composites of actual localities but in their construction and use fine powers of imagination are at work and real life seems left far behind. In my dreams of this type the ocean stands as a symbol of Life itself, of the mighty and profound procreative force the entrance into whose domination is the crisis of existence. For this experience is demanded the mightiest symbol. It is evening. I am on the seashore with my father and mother. Greatwaves are rolling in. I look backward and see one wave break where we have passed. My mother is afraid but we cannot turn back. I am calm. Then-this immediately follows-I am in a kind of tunnel and fear that I shall suffocate. This and the following might be construed as symbolising my own birth. I am in a boat on the ocean with my mother. The waves are tremendous and as she goes out on deck to close a great door I fear she will be washed away. But she is safe. Next there is a violent jar and the boat is aground. Then I see down a city street. In a particularly impressive dream I approach the sea at early morning. I think I shall see the sun rise from the water. I go over a hill to reach the ocean which is frozen near the shore. I go into a little house and when I come out I can not close the door. The wind is high and the waves enormous. Then there is calm and I see a man on horseback in the water. Next a fog rises and out of the mist a little boat comes toward me, the oars flashing like silver. Then a little boy comes ashore. There are strange dreams of a frozen ocean, and of being out in a small boat with a friend, soon to be married, with ships passing and we afraid. I am near the ocean and longing to see it, and once trying to go with some one to see the foundation of the sea but am hindered.
Among visions of mountains is the following.-I see high and beautiful mountains as I stand on a bridge. I hear the squeal of a horse. Then stones fall from a mountain-top into the stream and spirals of bright water rise to meet them. After receiving from a man of vigorous, vital personality an atomizer for a slight hay fever, I dream of high mountains and at the foot of one is an irregular patch of red sunlight. Above are two houses, not side by side. In front of them is a fine, slanting veil of rain. A dream in which indications of the reputed "father complex" may be found is one of my father and myself in a team at the top of a high mountain, at the end of the road. My father wants to drive off among the peaks but I fear that we shall be lost. I dread the night there but think I can call for help. Somewhat similar is the following.-I am in a high, steep place with my father. I fear. He moves a stone and in the hollow of a rock I see moss or fungus. There are often brief, passing dreams in which no person figures. I see a bridge across a chasm; it is long and extends beyond where a bridge is necessary. I see two rivers join and wonder what the resulting stream is called. I see a river from the side of which emerges a spring of water and a new stream. A small, steep hill, snow-capped. A river with water above the banks.
To dream of moving to an old house-what signifies this? Apparently nothing. If one is to dream it must be of something-houses or people or scenery. But to dream often of going to live in an ancient house,-of trying to find in it my room; mosquito netting at the window, not quite tight; from my room into a smaller one a door which I try to fasten but can not because at the bottom it is a swaying curtain, the wall paper loose and a mouse hole near the floor; a long, sunshiny room where I see what appears to be a rat but which becomes a little kitten, weak from long confinement, that follows me from room to room and at last through a door leading to a porch;-why all these accessories? Once I go through many rooms-furnished but uninhabited-and come to an upper bed chamber where, upon a couch, lies a woman, quite dead I think; but presently she moves one hand. Again I go through room after room until I reach one where still another woman-or is it the same-lies dead on the bed. As I look she becomes a beautiful child who has lain there forty years. The child stirs and opens its eyes; I think something should be done to keep it alive but the eyes close, and sleep, or death, reigns again. After calling upon an expectant mother who showed me her layette, all white and blue, I dream that I go in an old house to a room with blue papered walls, a blue and white spread on the bed and a case of books, one of which is Dickens' Great Expectations. In one old house I find the bulbs of some plant sprouting on a shelf; in another I open the stove and find to my surprise that fire is still there. In still another house I see behind the stove a closed door which I long to open. I go about the house, up steep, worn stairs, down again and out into a garden where there is a single strawberry and I think staminate and pistillate plants should be set out to insure fertilization. Always I think of the closed door and presently I return to the house and enter the room behind the stove. On the floor is a green veil of firm texture. And at last there are cobwebs on the ceiling of my old house and I still search for my room.
After the presentation of this array of symbolism quite spontaneously the interpretation arose in my mind. The old house is the recurring abode of life. I would dwell there and take my place in the line of succession. Quite in line with this symbolism was the very beautiful dream of a young woman not many months before her bridal which I give in her words-"With a crowd of unknown people I was to visit and go over a haunted house. The living room was nicely furnished in antique furniture and the whole house was very still. We went upstairs, and it passed through my mind that people who were dead and gone had moved through the rooms. I was coming down the stairs when suddenly a pipe organ burst forth. That was the haunted part-music in the air, no organ at all. We were awestricken and I awoke with the same feeling." In dreams of this character we find it necessary to predicate a creative, myth-making tendency in the structure of the mind by means of which currents of life flowing beneath all thought become articulate.
Coming now to examples of reasoning by analogy directly expressive of the desire for maternity, I wish to make still more plain my view of the reason for symbolism. Maternity is untold ages old; intelligent comprehension of the function very recent. That portion of the mind functioning in dreams-that is in the majority of dreams-is unable to picture the process and its necessary antecedents. (Frankly sexual dreams occurred to me very rarely.) Instinctive acts are the last to be made objects of thought; a relatively high degree of mental development is necessary before the requisite detachment from the process can be obtained and as we have seen this detachment is beyond the power of the self that dreams. Hence the recourse to analogy and symbolism.
I call upon a woman who is pregnant and whose face is slightly bloated. In that night's dream I look in a mirror and see that my face is plump. I think I am too old. I see on the street a young girl in short skirts wheeling a baby carriage. My friend tells me that the girl is a mother. That night I dream of being in a shop to buy an article which I in reality intended to purchase and in addition looking at a dress for a girl of twelve or fourteen. I hear of a pregnant woman who ran away and worked for a time in a mill and a night or two after I have a dream of a devious walk with many details which finally ends at a kind of factory. An expectant mother tells me of her trip to a neighboring town where a friend gave her a tiny crocheted jacket. Soon after I start in a dream for that town, afoot, in the dark, without lantern or money, and hampered and stumbling, make the weary journey.
A dream which upon analysis proves extremely interesting is the following:- I come out from a house and stand looking at other houses. I am waiting for some one, and look toward the street. In the yard I see a large elm tree nearly sawed off but at one side the wood is continuous,-to indicate that the tree is still alive. I look up. A bough sways and I am dizzy. I think the bough will fall. Beneath the tree is a sick woman on a couch. Until the clue was found this appeared a mere aimless mixture of imagery but one circumstance makes it very clear. Shortly before I was reading a book on biology and in the section devoted to the influence of environment on organisms a portion of the trunk of an elm tree was shown and the influence of various factors noted as indicated by the annual rings of growth. One considerable variation was due to the fact that children had swung from one limb of the tree. At the time of reading the fact made so slight an impression that after the dream some time elapsed before I recalled it and then so faintly that I had to refer to the book for verification. Thus we see upon what slight and obscure basis a dream may be constructed.
That all dreams do not originate in one section or at one level of the mind is quite evident. The range extends from those which almost merge with waking thought to creations strangely remote and primitive. When I dream that Goethe is a guest at my home and I am trying to ask him in regard to Faust, Wilhelm Meister and Mignon,-when after reading of x-rays, ether waves and electrons wake with the thought, "To solve the problem of matter would prove materialism,"-when I dream that I am conversing with a conservative friend who says that he does not like new religions and I reply that Moses and Jesus were new once, it is plain that a different stratum of mind is operative than when I dream that I am in an old fort and chased by three rats, or that a snake is on my bed and my father kills it with a pitchfork, or strangest of all, that I throw an egg at the plug of a sap bucket which it hits and then flies to the left; it is rotten. Again, a very vague dream, I, see two eggs and then am climbing inside a kind of tower. A dream which immediately preceded the menstrual period, is as follows:-I pass a narrow, dark canal which seems to be under cover. On the very brink is a child and I fear it will fall in. A man is there whose business it is to save the child but be does not. That this indicates the impending passage from the body of the ovum can hardly be doubted. Under like conditions-this before sleep-I see a doorway filled with flowers.
It was natural that after a time I should wonder what event of the day would be woven into a dream; as I performed certain acts I found myself wondering, will this appear tonight, and how? One Sunday I walked across lots to church and on the way picked a twig of balm of Gilead poplar keeping it with me through service for its fragrance. That night I dream that I am in a pasture looking for fertile fronds of the cinnamon fern which I fail to find. I see cows and am afraid.-This based on reality of a few days before.-At length by a stone I find a fern coiled as in spring. This becomes a squirrel, the male comes, and then they are lions. The male has a sprig of leaves which he lays at the feet of the female and which she eats. I want to know what the leaves are but fear to look closely because of the lion. I found it difficult to deliberately influence dreams by suggestion. The dream-self is not to be coerced and usually I over-did the matter. Most of my examples deal with flowers and perhaps the most apposite is the following:-I plucked a stem of blossoms of white everlasting and wore it inside my waist on my bosom all day, asking as I fastened it in,-How will this reappear in my dream? The following morning as consciousness returned, I had a vision of a baby's bottle filled with milk and beyond it, more faint, another similar bottle. It is fair to say that this outcome was entirely unexpected. Another night after watching Venus, low in the southwestern sky, I dream that I am molding a statue-strangely enough the arms as the reference is to the Venus de' Melos-and the figure is that of a young woman of immoral life.
My store of dreams is so great and varied that the forms of symbolism are by no means exhausted. The reception of mail is a favorite subject and here again one may say that this is the most natural of dreams and quite its own excuse for being. But strange things come in the mail,-pieces of turf in which are growing tiny plants, boxes of rice, jelly, breakfast food, cooked fish still warm; and once a sack of mail is emptied upon my door-stone-not by the postman but by a man who the day before drove past with a little child. Other recurring motifs are strawberries, yeast, Bologna sausage, ice cream- once poured over slices of clear, transparent fruit which I eat, this very plainly referring to the fertilization of the eggs of fish about which I read the preceding evening:-"As soon as the female finishes spawning the male will approach the eggs and eject a milky fluid over them to effect fertilization. If this is successful the spawn will have a clear, glassy appearance." The dream-self can turn anything to its use,-I read of certain suffrage activities in England and forthwith dream that I attend a suffrage meeting. But the house at which it is held is in reality the home of a woman nearly my age, who is pregnant.
I pass over all the dreams obviously of an infantile character, and likewise those of travelling and of packing for a journey. More unusual is the dream of a flight of birds which twice occurred under conditions which left no doubt as to its sexual character. A house having a wet sink and a dry one is the verdict of my dream-self regarding a home in which the woman can bear no more children because of physical disability; and a railway station where I go down the steps, pick from the floor a flower-wondering if it is all right,-reach a restaurant in which seventy have that night been served and where I lose my flower, symbolizes a house of prostitution mentioned in Chicago's famous report where one woman served sixty men in one night and was said to have seven thousand dollars in the bank. Beneath convention strange unconvention lurks. A young woman of irregular life appears in my dream as one with soiled skirts, and, very vaguely, some one's else skirts are soiled also. After seeing a print of Tompkins' painting, Hester Prynne, heroine of The Scarlet Letter, I dream that I go to a shop, where I have great difficulty because of darkness, to buy some dark green silk for embroidering a letter somewhere on my dress. Not to pander to the base in human nature are these details given but to make known life's realities to those who are blinded by theories. The frank and honest truth is never foul and monstrous. Society can be renovated only when all the facts are brought to light.
In conclusion I give the dreams of a single night:-First, a drunken man and girl in the same team; I think they should not be there. Then I am on a porch looking off at a headland with ice at the foot. Farther up the hill are quantities of ice-a sheet of it over the ground and in one place it is as if water had been poured and allowed to freeze. In the midst of this last, which is not on the hill, is a fine and shapely tree with the ice about it very smooth and shining and slanting somewhat. I think it is a good place for skating. In the morning as I recalled this dream, quite abruptly into my mind came the remark of Philina in Wilhelm Meister, after seeing a woman "great with child," "It were prettier if we could shake children from the trees." Next I see far off high mountains with sunlight on the summits. Then I am in a porch enclosed by a wire screen; by me is a woman. From the window of a building outside, which seems to be a hospital without funds, a woman looks at me. I want to see far off and shade my eyes with my hands. I think I must cut the screen in order to see clearly. Then I see a rampart and beyond it is the ocean. I hear a bird, a robin, on the rampart. Near it is another bird, large, gray and strange. Then it is a rooster. The key to this dream lies in the fact that the day before I received an appeal for financial aid from a hospital and the printed request showed the picture of a row of nurses each with a tiny baby in her lap. Finally I go into a bed-room. On the bed is a baby. I uncover it and it moves and cries. It wants its mother and I go to find her.
That the mind which dreams is not uncognizant of the hopelessness of its aspirations is strangely indicated by the following for which at the time I found no direct exciting cause:- I see two long lines of seeds planted and at the end of the rows tiny lettuce plants. Near by are apple trees in blossom. But it is autumn.
Bergson at the close of his essay on dreams hints that the mind may transcend its conjectured limits and be influenced in profound slumber by telepathy. This is but an hypothesis which must long await verification. My own dreams which apparently forecast the future are out-numbered by erroneous forecasts and one vivid dream of the death of a friend though coinciding as to the day, is not of great value as evidence as I had been expecting the news for weeks, and further, beyond the surface portent the dream is remotely allied in certain details with more personal and vital memories.
Though the dream process may to a certain extent be made verbally intelligible he who studies it most best realizes the attendant mystery. Dream-self, subconscious ideas, visual images,-these are but terms which bridge the abyss of our ignorance. Further exploration of the mystery is of value not only from the standpoint of pure science, to whose domain there is no limit, but also in the interest of education, health, sanity and morality. It is neither necessary nor wise for all persons to study their dreams, but for those who shape the growing thought and conduct of the world a knowledge of even the remotest outposts of human mentality is supremely important.
REMARKS UPON DR. CORIAT'S PAPER "STAMMERING AS A PSYCHONEUROSIS"[1]
[1] Dr. Isador H. Coriat's paper with this title appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Volume IX, No. 6, February-March, 1915.
A CRITICISM
BY MEYER SOLOMON, M. D., CHICAGO