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DREAMS EXPLAINED BY RALPH SHIRLEY




Symbolism plays a part of importance hitherto quite unrealized in the waking life, its special province has been considered not without some show of justification to lie in the world of dreams. In sleep a large proportion of what we realize or are conscious of becomes transmuted into parallel incidents or corresponding symbols. We grasp an idea or sensation vaguely and in the rough and translate it to the satisfaction of our subconscious selves in terms of symbology.

Hence has been built up, it must be admitted from very insufficient premises, a whole science of oneiromancy or dream interpretation. In this symbolical language fat and lean cattle represent respectively years of plenty and of famine, to dream of royalty promises prosperity and the favours of influential people, to dream of diamonds honour or success; to dream of digging that you will have an uphill struggle in life; to dream of a death signifies, like many other dreams that are supposed to go by contraries, news of a marriage, and so on ad infinitum.

The number of dreams that go by contraries is indeed not a little remarkable, and suggests the idea of an imagined parallel between the world of sleep and the “hinter-land” of the looking-glass with which Lewis Carrol has familiarized us. Personally I question whether symbolism plays in actual fact a more important part in dreams than it does in our waking life. But it is certainly more obvious in the dream world. Our whole thought atmosphere is in truth permeated with symbology.

Language is built upon it. Written language came into existence in the same manner. If you doubt, study the hieroglyphics of Egypt. As Mr. Havelock Ellis well says in his fascinating book The World of Dreams (London: Constable & Co., Ltd.), the most natural and fundamental form of symbolism is the tendency “by which qualities of one order become symbols of qualities of a totally different order ” because they appear to have a similar effect upon us.

« In this way things in the physical order become symbols of things in the spiritual order. This symbolism penetrates the whole of language; we cannot escape from it. The sea is deep and so also may thoughts be; ice is cold, and we say the same of some hearts; sugar is sweet, as the lover finds also the presence of the beloved; quinine is bitter, and so is remorse»

If language illustrates this curious parallelism, so also does music. Bass notes seem deep to us and the treble high. Why is this?


It is certainly an instinct in the human mind permeating alike conscious and subconscious life. Thus Weygandt relates (1) that he once fell asleep in the theatre during a performance of Cavalleria Rusticana, when the tenor was singing in ever higher and higher tones, and dreamed that in order to reach the notes the performer was climbing up ladders and stairs on the stage.(2)

Probably there is a similar association, though a less obvious one, in the synaesthesias or parallelisms between colours and numbers which the late Sir Francis Galton investigated, and some form of inchoate symbolism may be held to be at the root of all alike, a symbolism which is evidence of a fundamental organic tendency of the human ego.

It is clear that in a great many of those dreams which have been suggested to the sleeper by some external incident or disturbance, generally quite a trifling one, the sensory impression produced by the incident is used by the sleep-mind as a basis on which to build an imaginary episode out of all proportion to its cause but which is adopted by the dreamer in explanation of what he semi-consciously cognizes. Such dreams bear witness to the extreme suggestibility of the sleeping consciousness no less than to its tendency to exaggerate enormously the smallest sensations or sounds.

A quite ordinary dream which Mr. Ellis relates from his own experience, and to which, I suppose, all of us could supply something in the nature of a parallel, will illustrate this tendency.

« I dreamed (he writes, World of Dreams p. 76) that I was in an hotel mounting many flights of stairs, until I entered a room where the chambermaid was making the bed; the white bedclothes were scattered over everything and looked to me like snow; then I became conscious that I was very cold, and it appeared to me that I really was surrounded by snow, for the chambermaid remarked that I was very courageous to come up so high in the hotel, very few people venturing to do so on account of the great cold at this height. I awoke to find that it was a cold night, and that I was entangled in the sheets and partly uncovered»


Sleeping consciousness with its customary ingenuity had elaborated the dream to explain the actual sensations experienced. On another occasion the author records how when bitten by a mosquito he imagined himself to have been attacked by a succession of animals about the size of lobsters, and when listening to the singing of a canary to have been present at a performance of Haydn’s Creation.

Mr. Ellis emphasizes the fact that “however far-fetched and improbable our dreams may seem to the waking mind, they are, from the point of view of the sleeping mind, serious and careful attempts to construct an adequate theory of the phenomena.”

It has generally been held that the mind is illogical in its dream experiences. Our author takes an opposite view, holding that the dream mind argues on strictly logical lines but from totally inadequate and insufficient premises, owing to the failure of important brain centres to respond to stimulus.

Vital considerations present to waking consciousness are thus totally ignored, a circumstance which naturally involves the dreamer in absurd conclusions. It is doubtless this fact, that the consciousness of brain areas on which we normally depend is temporarily in abeyance, which accounts for our accepting in sleep the most grotesque absurdities as grave realities.

A point to which attention is drawn in The World of Dreams the following up of which might, I think, take us a good deal further than its author has ventured, is the very curious fact that in spite of our eyes being (ordinarily) closed in sleep while our other senses are presumably capable of being employed when required, it is in reality almost entirely on our sense of sight that our dreams are built up.

Our dreams are in fact, through nine-tenths of their experiences, in the nature of a series of cinematograph portrayals of events, or moving picture shows. It is to this characteristic that Mr. Ellis attributes the facility with which the dreamer lives through years or even' a lifetime of experiences in a very brief space of actual time. Many dreams of this character have been cited, and very bold theories have been advanced on the strength of them. Fechner in alluding to them makes the following observation:

« In dream the soul sometimes exhibits the faculty of eliciting in the briefest time a vast multitude of; representations which in waking we could only develop successively in a protracted period»


Baron Karl du Prel claims that these dream experiences ”prove a form of human cognition directing us to an ego beyond the external consciousness," and thinks that in conjunction with other evidence they point to the existence of a transcendental subject of which the human ego is but a partial manifestation.

It seems doubtful if we are justified in pushing our conclusions so far on the strength of this dream evidence. The assumption of du Prel that they point to a totally different time measure than that which rules in waking life is surely a conclusion altogether in advance of such evidence as we possess, and even when we bring into association with them the doubtless parallel experiences of the nearly drowned who have claimed to witness in succession the incidents of an entire lifetime, probably the moving picture show is the truer parallel and the better gauge of their essential character. The capacity of the brain for storing up memories seems indeed to be practically infinite.

The problem is rather, what is the nature of the conditions which may bring these lapsed memories to the surface?


For indeed accumulating evidence tends to show more and more that we never really forget a fact, a face or an incident. All we forget is in what comer of our brains we have stored any particular memory away. Touch the right button and up it will pop to the surface once more, though submerged for fifty or sixty years.

Goethe mentions a case in which an old man on his deathbed recited correctly many Greek sentences. He had been taught them as a boy but had no knowledge of their meaning nor had he given the matter a thought for fifty years. Another instance is cited by Baron du Prel of a dying peasant whom the clergyman overheard praying in Greek and Hebrew. It appeared that as a boy he had heard the parish priest praying in these languages, but the sounds had never conveyed any corresponding sense to his mind.

This capacity of the sleeper for picking up the threads of lapsed memories has indeed been the frequent cause of surprise and wonderment, but (as Mr. Ellis observes):

« There is little doubt that the two processes — the sinking of some memory groups and the emergence on the surface of other memory groups which, so far as waking life is concerned, had apparently fallen to the depths and been drowned — are complementarily related to one another. We remember what we have forgotten, because we forget what we remembered»


The tension involved by the mental activities of daily life and the frequently overloaded condition of the brain must inevitably cast vast areas of memory into the background. The dissociation of familiar memory groups in sleep offers the ideal opportunity for the return to the surface of submerged facts, many of which readily come back with the relaxation of concentrated brain effort which sleep brings about.  Such instances of the recovery of “latent” facts are by no means rare. Here is one from the office of the Publishers of the Occult Review.

On April 3, the Sandinaviska Kredit Aktiebolag remitted to the Publishers for several collections of monies in Sweden. Among these was entered—Munksunds Sagverks, £18 15s. The amount to this firm’s debit in the ledger was £15. Nor was there any other account open in any of the books under that name. The Secretary was unable to explain it and enquired of the clerk who keeps the ledger, who was also at a loss to account for the amount of the remittance.

The following night the clerk in question dreamt that the difference £3 15s, was to be credited to the account of the Yttersfors Travaru Aktiebolag. He mentioned his dream to the Secretary, and on looking the matter up they found from the Swedish correspondence that the two advertisements had been ordered together by the same person and that the amount due by the Yttersfors Travaru tallied exactly with the overpayment.

While there are great limitations in certain directions to the consciousness of the sleeping ego, there is no doubt that its freedom from limitations in other directions is also equally marked. The subject is too wide a one to be adequately handled in one book and Mr. Ellis (as it appears to me) has erred several times on the side of caution in not following up dream clues which seem to point in the direction of the scientific establishment —were evidence collected and synthesized— of the existence of important latent powers and potentialities in mankind. There may be more in the dogmatic affirmation of Prentice Mulford, “You travel when you sleep,” than appears at first sight.

Certainly sleepers have brought home evidence in connexion with distant places and scenes which they could not have acquired normally, and there is evidence to show that consciousness and the physical body have not always been in the same locality.

I am brought by these observations to a subject sufficiently allied to dream phenomena for our author to have thought it worth his while to devote to it a number of pages in his book. In truth, the illusion he discourses of, if illusion it be, is liable to occur both in our waking and sleeping moments.

The psychologist has christened it paramnesia (false memory, I take it, is the correct translation of this) thereby begging the question at issue. The French, I understand, call it “sensation du déjà vue.” Curiously enough in the English language we seem to have no expression to describe it. But Dickens among others refers to it. Mr. Havelock Ellis cites him, so in lieu of name or adequate definition I will follow suit.

« We have all (says the novelist, in David Copperfield) some experience of a feeling that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said or done before in a remote time, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances, of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it»

I cannot say that I have ever clearly experienced such a sensation, except in the case of a repeated dream, but judging from those who have, and they are numerous enough, the experience is accompanied by a sensation of the weird and uncanny, and a sense of the unreality of the present.(3)

Mr. Ellis states that he only remembers one such experience of his own — on visiting the ruins of Pevensey Castle. In connexion with such experiences four explanations are cited:

1)   reminiscence from a past life, which Mr. Ellis declines to take seriously;
2)   false memory, that is to say that paramnesia is the correct word for it and that the impression arises in hallucination;
3)   actual experience in infancy subsequently forgotten;
4)   that the scene is recalled from some picture, photograph or presentment.


In his own case the author inclines to the last of these explanations, but as he well says, “here as elsewhere, there are no keys that will unlock all doors,” and his observation is recalled to us by a narrative which he himself cites of an incident at the funeral of Princess Charlotte. I quote in full (The World of Dreams, p.245):

« The earliest case of paramnesia recorded in detail by a trained observer is that described by Wigan as occurring to himself at the funeral of Princess Charlotte. He had passed several disturbed nights previous to the ceremony, with almost complete deprivation of rest on the night immediately preceding; he was suffering from grief as well as from exhaustion from want of food; he had been standing for four hours, and would have fainted on taking his place by the coffin, if it had not been for the excitement of the occasion.

When the music ceased the coffin slowly sank in absolute silence, broken by an outburst of grief from the bereaved husband. “In an instant," Wigan proceeds, “I felt not merely an impression, but a conviction, that I had seen the whole scene before on some former occasion»


Now this is a very important instance of the experience, as curiously enough it absolutely excludes the possibility of two out of the four explanations of the phenomenon given by Mr. Havelock Ellis, while of the remaining ones he himself refuses to take the reincarnation theory seriously. There remains, then, only the explanation, which I am bound to say I consider rather a halting one, in view of the universality of the experience, of illusory memory. Our memories frequently play us false.

If this phenomenon is only another instance of lapse of memory, whence its striking peculiarities?

Whence the potency of the illusion, the anticipation of what is going to happen next which frequently accompanies it, and the peculiar eerie sensation that attends it?


There is, however, a fifth explanation to which I think Mr. Ellis elsewhere makes allusion — the explanation that most strikingly connects the phenomenon with sleep, the explanation that there was prevision in sleep, that the whole circumstances had been lived through in the Dream World before they actually took place on the mundane plane.

Recollecting the story —already cited in the Occult Review and, as I understand, singularly we authenticated— of the lady who took for the summer months a haunted house, of which she herself was recognized as the haunting ghost, having wandered there frequently in her dream life, and being quite familiar with its appearance when first she visited it, we surely should be wise in accepting as our guide the evidence of established facts, and concluding that what has occurred elsewhere might also have happened in the present instance, and that the key that unlocks the door without a hitch and without a creak is the real key after all, even though there is stamped upon it in large letters the tabooed word Occult.

It may be urged that the supposition that these “déjà vue” experiences are to be explained by dreams in which the incidents had already been once lived through implies an unjustifiable assumption of dream prescience, and that the dream cited only appertains to dream travelling. We are of course entitled to express scepticism as to the value of the records of such a phenomenon, but the records themselves are indubitably very numerous. Here, for instance, is one related by Baron Karl du Prel:

« A somnambule of Dr. Wolf art being asked as to her future health always fell into a state of terror in which she spoke of the misfortune impending over her. Years afterwards, she was crippled in the feet and by a succession of mishaps so unpaired in intellect that she knew no one and only uttered incoherent sounds and words»


Here is another for which Mrs. Crowe is responsible. It is related of a Mr. S stated to have been an intimate friend of Spencer Perceval, the assassinated Prime Minister, about whose death, by the way, an equally apposite dream is recorded, too well known to need repetition here.

Mr. S in his dream found himself alone on horseback in an extensive forest.  Evening was drawing on and he looked for some place where he could pass the night. After riding a little farther he saw an inn, where he alighted and asked for lodging for himself and stabling for his horse. They showed him his room and he ordered refreshments. But on going down to the stables to see how his horse was faring, he noticed a group of very ill-looking men in conference in a side chamber, and weapons lying on the table.

Taking alarm he resolved on flight. After supper, waiting his opportunity he saddled his horse and cautiously rode away. He had not gone far when he heard the tramp of horses’ hoofs behind him, and realized that he was being pursued. He urged his horse forward but the animal was tired, and his pursuers were gaining on him when he observed that he was approaching a spot where two roads met.

Which should he follow?


He had nothing to guide him, and his life might depend on the choice. Suddenly a voice whispered in his ear, “Take the right!” He did so, and shortly reached a house where he obtained shelter and protection.

The dream, the story goes on to say, impressed him greatly. He related it to his friends, but as nothing came of it, it eventually passed entirely from his mind. Many years afterwards, however, when travelling through the Black Forest in Germany the entire dream repeated itself in real life.

It was not, however, until he found himself confronted by the two roads and obliged to make a decision which one to follow, that the memory of it recurred to him, when there flashed across his mind the words he had heard so plainly in his sleep, "Take the right." He did so, and found a house about half a mile from the turning, the owner of which received him hospitably. His host told him that the inn had an evil reputation, and that if he had taken the left hand road he would have been at his pursuers’ mercy.

Here is another record of a similar character, but much more recent. It is quoted from the Referee of April 17 last, from the column headed Mustard & Cress. It has the merit of offering a further problem in occultism for solution in addition to that of dream prescience, and one quite as baffling to the ordinary intelligence. Perhaps I should add that the publication of Mr. Havelock Ellis's book has apparently been the cause of its seeing the light.

« On Tuesday last at breakfast oar dreamer told us that she had had a terrible dream about the Opposite-the-Ducks Pom, Flash. She had dreamt that she saw him meet with an accident which left him lying in the roadway “badly crushed.” The dream made such an impression on my household that no one was allowed to take Flash out all that day except on his lead. The day passed, and the little dog was as gay and frisky as ever at the finish. The next morning he went out, but still, because of the dream, upon his lead. He was brought home all right, and sat in his usual chair in my study.

At noon I went to lift him out of the chair and he yelped. The dog was evidently in pain. I put him down, and he rolled over on his side and appeared to be very ill. He was taken at once in a taxi to Mr. Alfred Sewell, the famous veterinary. Mr. Sewell, after examining the little dog, announced that he "had been badly crushed.” There was a lump on his side and other evidence of injury. For two days the dog could hardly move, but, thanks to Mr. Sewell’s skill and care. Flash upon the third day began to recover rapidly, and he is now —touch wood— as bright and frolicksome as ever.

But the dream had come true. It had come true in a most remarkable and mysterious manner. In order to prevent the dream coming true the dog was not let out of our sight. We saw nothing happen to him. No one in the house saw anything happen to him. How and in what way the vision of the night was realized is a greater mystery to all of us than that Flash’s mistress should have been warned in a dream that an injury was about to happen to him»


Mr. Havelock Ellis has an interesting chapter on “Aviation in Dreams.” There are a certain number of generic dreams which seem to be common ground of experience to the majority of the human race. One of these is the flying dream. Reader! If your dreams you are like myself, in the minority.

This is how you do it, or ought to do it, and since reading Mr. Ellis's account I have questioned two or three of my sleep-flying acquaintances, and they concur as to the accuracy and general truthfulness of the description. “Dream flight is not usually the sustained flight of a bird or an insect, and the dreamer rarely or never imagines that he is borne high into the air."

“One almost always flies low,” says Hutchinson, “with a skimming manner, slightly, but only slightly, above the heads of pedestrians.” The sensation is invariably most agreeable, and gives a great impression of its reality. Mr. Ellis (happy man!) describes himself in these experiences, as "rhythmically bounding into the air, and supported on the air, remaining there for a perceptible interval."

He says: "On awaking I do not usually remember these dreams immediately . . . but they leave behind them a vague yet profound sense of belief in their reality and reasonableness."

Another dream-aviator describes his own experience as "a series of light bounds at one or two yards above the earth, each bound clearing from ten to twenty yards, the dream being accompanied by a delicious sensation of easy movement.”

Lafcadio Hearn describes a typical dream of his own, clearly a variety of the same experience as "a series of bounds in long, parabolic curves rising to a height of some twenty-five feet, and always accompanied by the sense that a new power had been revealed which for the future would be a permanent possession.”

Human ingenuity has apparently been plentifully expended in explaining these dream flights.  Some have considered them as excursions of the astral body. Professor Stanley Hall treats them (bating here as it seems to me all records) as reminiscences of the time when man's ancestors needed no feet to swim or float (4) — an atavistic echo from the primeval sea!

Our author inclines to regard them as a “misinterpretation of actual internal sensations," the motive being suggested by the rhythmic rising and falling of the respiratory muscles. This seems to me to be a knotty point.  I must leave the aviators to decide it for themselves. It is clear, however, that a large proportion of our ordinary dreams are due to disturbances, frequently slight enough, in our internal economies, while a large number of others are suggested by external sounds or disturbances.

A dream common to the race as a whole is presumably more likely to be the result of the natural processes of the vital organism than of anything else. That indigestion is a prolific source of dreams is a proposition that will be carried nomine contradicente.

The falling dream, practically always disagreeable, is doubtless due to this. The common or garden nightmare is also of this progeny. But why is it in childhood, when the heart is usually strong and the digestion unimpaired that we are visited by such terrifying dreams?

It looks as if the imagination had more to say in the matter than is generally admitted. For myself I shall never forget the savage animals from which my nurse was powerless to protect me, nor the innumerable little devils that lurked surreptitiously in the folds of the curtains of my infancy. Truly we have not yet solved the problems of the World of Dreams.

A fearful and a lovely thing is sleep!
And mighty store of secrets hath in keep;
And those there were of old who well could guess
What meant his fearfulness and loveliness.
And all his many shapes of life and death,
And all the secret things he uttereth.
But Wisdom lacketh sons like those that were.
And sleep hath never am interpreter!
So there be none that knows to read aright
The riddles he propoundeth every night.(5)


By the death of the Rev. John Page Hopps, which took place on April 6, the spiritual movement —on this side of the Great Equator at least— has lost a representative of exceptional ability, and of great sincerity and zeal. The seventy-six years of his life were filled with an unusual diversity of interests, and as litterateur, preacher and reformer he was continually animated by the highest ideals and spurred by an intense but unobtrusive enthusiasm. In his work he was associated with men of the highest stamp and loftiest purpose.

Mr. James Robertson said of him: "Among those brave souls who have laboured loyally and well for spiritual reformation, there are few indeed who have done better than the inspired teacher, John Page Hopps," and similar tribute is paid to his memory by the Venerable Archdeacon Wilberforce, who knew him well. Page Hopps was early associated with the Baptist Ministry, from which, however, he broke away in favour of Unitarianism, in which he was the colleague of George Dawson. Later he had charge of several large provincial centres of the Unitarian Church, and most recently was minister at Little Portland Street Chapel, the old seat of Dr. Martineau's labours.




Notes


  1. The World of Dreams, p.153.
  2. Quoted in Havelock Ellis’s World of Dreams, p.153.
  3. I should say from my own experience that this feeling is certainly present in paramnesiac- dreams.
  4. Mr. Ellis points out that the assumption that the human race evolved from the finny tribe is without justification,
  5. William Watson, The Prince’s Quest.


(Occult Review, May 1911, p.250-261)





OBSERVATION

In the next Occult Review one reader sent the following letter:

« Dear Sir,

Your remarks on the subject of Dreams in the current number of the Occult Review have greatly interested me. The collection and classification of dream-experiences will, no doubt, throw light on many obscure problems of psychology.

There is one domain of dreaming, however, which seems to me to have been insufficiently noticed in books on the subject. It is what I call “real” dreaming; I mean dreaming which has the same flavour of reality as die experiences of waking life. You will say all dreams seem real while being dreamt, and I feel almost powerless to convey my exact criterion of reality to another mind.

Perhaps this may define it best. A real dream is one in which you are perfectly aware that you are not in the condition we call “waking.” At first you doubt exactly where you are, perhaps, and then carefully take your bearings, just as you would if you had suddenly dropped from the sky into some unknown land.

You say to yourself, for instance, "If I am in my physical body, I shall not be able to get through that door without opening it”; and you proceed to diffuse yourself through it. I remember meeting, when in this real-dreaming condition, a friend who had been dead some years, and asked her how she had died.

She seemed to dislike the subject. Whether she retorted that she was not dead or not I forget; but in any case to convince her that we were not on the physical plane, I lifted her lightly by the elbow, and we both rose to the ceiling. I may say that such flying dreams as you mention are of common occurrence, but in my case not accompanied by any particular feeling of reality. They are generally of floating near the ground and touching it about every ten yards, but I have also passed over houses at a great height.

In the case of real dreaming, there is often no gap in the consciousness on waking.  It is like passing from one room into the other.  Sometimes, however, there is a very disagreeable and frightening sensation, like falling from a great height, and one has to brace oneself by a tremendous effort not to lose the thread of consciousness.

I have not had real dreams for many years now, but they made such a profound impression on me, that it would seem almost impossible for me to doubt the existence of the other world. There is one circumstance, however, which throws a suspicion on these experiences. At the time of their occurrence I was fully aware of, and believed in, the theosophic theory of the astral plane. May not my reading of theosophic pamphlets have suggested these dreams, which seemed to bear out what I learnt therein?

At present I believe in their reality. To argue me out of the belief would be as futile as to persuade me that I had never been to France, and that my recollections of that country were suggested by books I had read; but in some years the flavour of reality may wear off, and I can see myself laughing at these dreams as fictions of an imaginative brain. Consciousness is such a queer thing, it will not bear handling.

Before becoming aware of theosophic teaching, I had had a few strange experiences, which certainly seem explicable by it. I may say that I am not a psychic as far as I know, and day­dreaming and credulity would be ruinous to my profession, which depends on the constant exercise of the ordinary critical mind. I have always had to keep my occultism in the background.

I am, Sir,
Yours faithfully,
F.A.S. »

(Occult Review, June 1911, p.346-347)














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