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