The Origin and Growth of Dreaming
222 Art. VI.?
The subject of dreaming, as full of mystery and fraught with fascination, has always interested the thoughtful in every age. It seems doubtful whether the innate tendencies of the human mind to unduly love the supernatural has not often caused too much prominence to be given to the dream itself, without enough consideration of the growth of the habit of dreaming. Perhaps, too, the dreams of childhood have not been sufficiently noticed as the germs of the dreams of a lifetime. May it not, indeed, be that the precise form and manner of dreaming is more or less distinctly moulded and determined for each individual very early in life? May not many other dreams, which seem remarkable, be traced back to unconscious memories or impressions upon the brain which have hitherto lain dormant, or in some cases to atmospheric influences, causing both the dream and its fulfilment.
It would appear that a conception of sleep and dreams may be one of the earliest ot which we are capable. In counting the distinct words used by a child of two years and three months, in a number amounting to 3,140, of which 1,260 were substantives, all ot the latter, as might naturally be expected, were the names of things, and unconnected with ideas, with the exception of 47. These 47 included sleep and dreams, of which the child had so distinct a realisation that it attributed to flowers the faculty of dreaming, and said, ” How much the wallflowers must be thinking, during their long sleep, of what the garden and everything would look like when they awoke.” Yet unable to enter into the new products formed out of ideas in dreams, it tried to explain away the wonderful beauty of a certain doll’s dress of which it had dreamt, by saying that” it must have been really an old one cleaned and made to look quite different.” When a dog who has been in the possession of a kind master for many years, howls in sleep as if beaten, and testifies his joy on being awakened, we may only surmise that he has had terrible dreams of his own former experiences, or of those of his ancestors, and rejoices to find that they are not realities. So too with regard to the dreams of earty infancy. We can rarely attempt more than faint guesses at truth, for when an infant of eight months old gives utterance in sleep to terms of endearment which it never uses when awake, and has only heard from a nurse, who is absent for a night, we have no means of telling whether it dreams of the nurse or of its doll, or is merely an example of unconscious mimicry. It was interesting to trace back to its cause the dream of a child who at eighteen months was much frightened by seeing a hideous old woman with misshapen bloated face, standing by a gate near a country church. A year later, after seeing a similar church, and having eaten chocolate creams in the evening, it seemed to dream of this old woman, and talked in its sleep, exclaiming, “I want to go to the church ; I am frightened of that old woman; send away that ugly old woman standing by the gate.” Might there not have been in such a case countless sensorial memories, the scent of flowers, the hum of insects, the bleating of lambs, and other sounds peculiar to the time of year, to call up associations and act upon the brain ? Very young children certainly dream much of their toys ; and any bodily states which would in the adult cause painful dreams of humiliation of self, induce the same in them. The young child is distressed in sleep at the fancied loss of some article of clothing for a doll, or because it has ” old milk ” given to it instead of new; it dreams that its toys are taken away, or has a nightmare that some one is holding one of which it strives in vain to obtain possession, and a strong effort of will seems to awake it as it exclaims, ” I must have my doll’s right frock, the one that I want.” A striking instance of the direct translation of ideas in sleep into movement of speech was that of an infant of twenty months, who very rarely spoke in its sleep, and on having a mustard plaster put upon its chest whilst asleep, evidently dreamed that a favourite cat had sprung upon it, and exclaimed almost instantaneously, five seconds might have perhaps elapsed, ” Oh, naughty Minnie, to jump up at me like that, go down Minnie.”
It would seem as if the whole mystery of the mechanism of memory was closely interwoven with that of dreaming, and that the tactile sense plays perhaps the earliest, although other senses also, a most important part in the building up of a good unconscious memory, and consequently in the origin and gradual growth of dreaming. An infant of eighteen months who knows its way about, and can arrive at any precise spot it wishes to find along a most monotonous country road, may seem to be guided by instinct, and suggest an inquiry into the existence of a sixth sense of direction. But if, a few months later, the same child can give intelligent explanations of the spot where it lost something, and lead the way to it, guided by its own indications as “the place where there were a great many nettles in the ditch, a pink dog-rose which grew much higher than a white one, and t here was a sweet smell from some clover, which looked as if it was made into bows,” it becomes easy to realise how, when a year older, it can show the way home in London, by a route quite unknown to it and never even seen before ; the way this is done being evidently due neither to the possession of a new sense, nor to any special development of other senses. For a young child’s mind is open to sense perceptions which, although not lost to the adult, would be received unconsciously, other more violent impressions predominating; whilst the child receives one separate and distinct impression. Thus a railway whistle at a distance of a mile, which acts in so slight a degree upon the adult ear that we are not aware of its operation, is on another occasion perceived distinctly by the vivid mind of this young child, insulated from all other impressions, who led the way in a strange town guided by it. It is easy to conceive how, later in life, all these processes of smelling, seeing, hearing, and comparing become automatic, so that it would be quite impossible to describe how a result was arrived at.
Thus if Mr. Bishop, whose thought-reading recently attracted ro much attention, often played at hide-and-seek when a child, the scientific interest of his experiments, even when successful, may be considerably lessened thereby. If the principles upon which children base their mode of playing at this game be inquired into and noticed, I think it will be found that only a child evidently deficient in mental power, ever blunders to and fro in the room without aim or design, seeking and never finding. The intelligent child appears to have two ways of quickly attaining the end he has in view; he may, while searching for the object, seek for information by intently reading the muscular indication of his own proximity to it in his companions’ faces and hands. Or, choosing a surer way, knowing that hiding an object so thoroughly betrays the idiosyncrasies of character, that each individual has only a few ways of doing it in consonance with his character, he shuts or fixes his eyes for a moment to concentrate his attention, and then bases his search on the supposed character of the person who hid the object. If the latter should attempt to hide it in a way utterly at variance with the broad lines of his disposition, as shown in his face or felt in his muscles, something unnatural about him quickly betrays itself, and he will choose a place so foreign to his whole nature’s bent that it is speedily divined. A good deal of seeming clairvoyance in sleep, and even instances of so-called second-sight may be perhaps explained in the following way. The power of thought-reading, so active in childhood, has left extensive substrata, as it were, of different expressions of people’s faces stereotyped on the brain ; each flitting expression or glance of the eye having its own meaning attached to it. Perhaps no one could consciously call up, classify, and utilise these long dormant memories ; but an intense concentration of attention may often bring to light and group together old memories which shall seem like intuitions, and apparently produce almost miraculous results. May it not be that some of our keenest intuitions are thus originated, and that occasional opportunities of tracing their source to events in early life, may bear on the origin of many seemingly remarkable or even prophetic dreams? One conscious instance of this process may be worth recording. As a young child I chanced to recognise in a begging impostor a man who had twice before appeared very differently dressed, with a new story of distress each time. I believe that I did not at all enter into the deception, but thinking rather to express an interest and sympathy in the very varying circumstances of his life, I confronted him with, ” You have been here before; the last time you were a countryman with a green coat, and all your little children had been burnt in a fire.” A fierce glare in the man’s eye, accompanied as it was by a volley of oaths, left that expression of the eye indelibly fixed on the brain to be recognised afterwards at most unexpected moments, but never with its true significance at once attached to it, but only after an interval of half-conscious effort to revive the associations. Once it was seen in a pretended clergyman when one of his pupils, probably a mythical one, was spoken of by mistake as Brown instead of Smith! Perhaps a certain halting or sluggishness in the process by which the remembrance was arrived at, made that recognisable to me, which to another would have been a momentary and sure intuition.
Probably first and foremost in the origin of the manner and form of each one’s dreaming must be placed the inherited conformation of his brain. Although no two persons dream precisely alike, yet a strong family likeness may often be detected in the dreams most common to those related to one another. Next must be traced a curious relation between vivid impressions of a painful kind, received at a very early age, and the dreams which persistently cling to a person, and reappear throughout the whole after life, in connection with certain mental and bodily states upon which they apparently depend. At about the age of two, sometimes much earlier, there appears to be an important crisis in a child’s mental history; its first direct cravings after the supernatural, it ” wants to go into the stars,” is in intense sympathy with nature in her varying moods; is terrified at the unknown, sees in shadows ” great men with big white hands,” or a vague ” something in the corner.”
Some of the kindergarten toys would seem to be of great value in inculcating early, before this crisis arrives, the difference between shadows or semblances and realities. Especially might be mentioned the second gift of the revolving cube. If the critical moment be rightly used, and the source of a shadow be shown to the infant, a great gain has been achieved; it will of its own accord recognise a cat’s fear of a top spinning, and reassure it by leading it up to touch it when not in motion, and explain to it that it ” must look at it closely and find out what it really is and understand it, and then it will not be frightened at it.” But if the earliest fears in the unformed mind of the infant are left to vibrate there, it is hard to tell to what they may not in time grow. Doubtless many nervous miseries would date from such neglect; and it seems quite possible that any tendencies to brain diseasewould be readily lighted up by the too susceptible mind left untrained, thus morbidly preying upon itself, and that such a child would be also predisposed to fall a victim to the first epidemical illness which should attack it in a form at all severe. A relative of my own, who was narrating instances of the harmful effects of sensational nursery rhymes on the minds of young children, alluded to one intended to deter them from taking birds’ nests, by bidding them to picture to themselves ” some great monster a dozen yards high, who might stalk up at night to your bed, and out of the window away with you fly, nor stop while you bid your dear parents good-bye, nor care for a word that you said.” He vividly described the terror with which he used himself to fancy at night, as a young child, that he saw the great arm put in at the window to take him out. He also mentioned as a whimsical feature of one of his most frequent forms of terrible nightmare, which had clung to him from childhood, that there was always a sweep connected with it, sometimes six sweeps, each one growing bigger and bigger as he vainly tried to elude their pursuit. I was able to account for this, and could trace the peculiarity to a very early infantile impression received from the verse of another nursery rhyme about a child, who ” at night when he was gone to bed did jump up in his sleep, and sob and weep and cry again, ‘ I thought I saw the sweep.’ ” I never myself saw this traditional being even in dreams, but always after hearing the rhyme recited in the evening was full of horror and unable to sleep for fear lest I should see the sweep. Madame de Stael’s confession about ” les revenants,” ” Je ne les crois pas, mais je les crains,” would well embody the experience of many children.
Of nightmare dreaming, my own earliest experiences date from about the age of twenty months. There were only two forms of it: in one my fingers were inextricably entangled in masses of long yellow hair, from which I vainly fought to free myself, whilst unable to cry or utter a sound ; in the other I was trying to open a huge book with golden-edged leaves, which closed just as I was turning them over. Both dreams were accompanied by the same prolonged helpless silence so characteristic of nightmare, from which I always awoke screaming, and with a dread which lasted for a considerable time, when I was so greatly relieved by the presence of anyone near me as to gladly submit quietly to remedies for all kinds of pains which were imagined for me. Most curiously, once, and only once, again these two forms- of nightmare have re-appeared in later life? at a moment when bodily and mental tone and power were much exhausted. When at a little more than three years old, I heard of two robberies, a definite form was given as a colouring for many nightmare dreams: holding a door to keep robbers out, or fleeing from them under all kinds of circumstances. A little later a fright from a mad dog added that as a variety of dreaming. Probably some of the worst horrors of nightmare remain unknown to those who, like myself, never see monsters, and lack imagination, perhaps, to experience it in its worst forms; or memory to conceive, when awake, those that have been really experienced, with all the vividness of their terrific associations.
It would be most interesting to know whether those who, when writing on nightmare, have attached so grave an importance to the sensation of dying in sleep, as to conceive it possible that death might even take place under such conditions, have ever known what it was to be really dying, with an intense and passionate clinging to life, and a perfect realisation how narrowly it was trembling in a balance whose stronger impulse was towards death. Three times I can recall having died in nightmare dreams, and the horror of the last gasp always awoke me, and there mingled with the quiet sense of relief and keen satisfaction at being really alive, enough of interest and amusement to leave no dread of going to sleep again. The most agonising part of one dream was a prolonged feeling that a word spoken in time would have saved my life, but that then it was too late, the mouth being too rigid and fixed to frame a syllable. A record of individual feeling, which must so much depend on the more or less vivid power of imaginative memory in recalling sensations with their true force, seems worth little on so great a question. But I should incline to find something most analogous to this dream-death in the feeling experienced when there was temporary loss of speech for a few seconds through the pain and shock of burning. A person on fire tries to give an alarm, the lips faintly move, but all power of emitting sound is gone; another moment and unconsciousness may ensue. By a strong effort of will the thought comes of the horror of such a death, and with it a determination to fight for life and in some way extinguish the flames. By the time this is successfully accomplished, the power over the voice has been quite recovered. Possibly the same intense effort would have also resulted in audible speech then, as it does sometimes in nightmare dreaming, if it had not had to find an outlet in active movement. That the worst pains of nightmare are due to an imaginary or real feebleness of the will, seems evident from the many futile efforts to conquer it and cry out, ending at times successfully; and yet how vain it is to imagine that it is even then quite vanquished. Just once the dreamer may be awakened by his own cry, and proud of his triumph find that in future the will, again enfeebled, will allow him to dream on in spite of his screams.
As a young child interested in the theories explanatory of dreams, advanced by Dr Abercrombie in his ” Inquiries concsrning the Intellectual Powers,” I carefully tried to practise dreaming and remembering dreams. Yet I never once succeeded by any effort of concentrated thought, at the moment of going to sleep, in giving at will the slightest colour or form to any feature in a dream. I was often enabled to trace the singular blending of common incidents of daily life with scenes read of in books. Chance words spoken, associations revived by the senses of smell or touch, and a likeness, trick of manner or tone of voice in one person in common with another, often caused me to dream of the one thus resembled, when the similarity had been quite unnoticed in waking moments. A sonnet of Wordsworth’s ” How sweet it is when mother Fancy rocks the wayward brain to wander through a wood,” &c., often repeated as a sort of soothing soporific before going to sleep, might have helped to cause many beautiful dreams of tropical scenery and sunny islands, but I never dreamt of a wood, though often of lakes, rivers and water in every form of beauty. It was singular how a companion, very poetical, and with strong imagination, who made the same experiments, had always dreams the most commonplace or dreadful, whilst my own, with the nightmare exceptions, were full of scenes of beauty and adventure which I might try in vain to conjure up in waking hours. As exceptions to the general rule that we do not create images in our sleep, I can recall two dreams, a childish one of a visit to the planet Saturn, and much interesting converse with its inhabitants, who were like flashes of blue forked lightning. I had been reading an essay on the ” Plurality of Worlds,” and no doubt revived an old memory of an insane person mentioned bv Dr Abercrombie as having some delusion about Saturn. Much later, after reading Darwin on ” Insectivorous Plants,” and having eaten a new kind of turnip, I dreamt with intense satisfaction that, by cross fertilisation, I had produced a turnip woman?small, ugly, in fact an animated, elongated turnip, but capable of being utilised in cleaning knives and carrying water!
One incident, most strangely small to have stamped its impress on the brain so fixedly as to recur at long intervals in varying dreams, is the following: I was not four years old when being for the first time led to church in a London square, a red stone, probably a common pebble, fascinated me and seemed to my childish imagination a ruby of untold value. I had just grasped it when a hand on my shoulder forced me to relax my hold, and the memory alone remained. Three points always appear identical in the dreams, the red colour of the stone, my disappointment at not possessing it, and the stern pressure of the hand upon my shoulder. One such dream, the remembrance of whose details were unusually vivid, I transcribed at the time, as it curiously shows how an imaginative and easily impressed person, who had never chanced to trace the origin and gradual growth of dreams, might regard such a one with superstitious belief and supernatural awe.
I dreamed that I was travelling along a narrow strip of firm sandy beach on the brink of a vast ocean. The scene which lay before me was one of surpassing beauty, the waves dashed furiously in, the white foam crests glistened with dazzling brilliance in the glowing sunshine, and men, women, and children were diving beneath the surging billows in search of gold and sparkling gems. Their life seemed so joyous, so full of glee and merriment, that I often essayed to join them, but ever as I did so I felt the strong though gentle hand of an invisible one restraining me, and heard a voice whispering in my ear, ” Love not the world, the world passeth away.” ” But they are not at present in danger,” I said. ” There is ever danger,” was the reply, “for at any moment, when the great wave comes, they may all perish.” I never saw the face of my guide, although I was conscious in my dream of a great longing to see it. Once I thought that I left the beach to snatch a red jewel which glittered on the brink of the ocean, I had but time to grasp it ere the unseen one shattered it to fragments which turned black as I looked at them. Suddenly, while the sun shone brightly as ever, and thoughtless people were still pursuing their search, the great wave came, and all changed to blackness and desolation. At the same instant I felt my feet placed firmly upon a high rock, knew that I was near my guide, saw his glorious face, and behind him lofty hills, peak towering above peak, and as the rosy light of early morning illumined the faint and shadowy outlines he said to me, ” The day dawns and the shadows flee away,” and I awoke.
To atmospheric influences acting on the brain and senses unconsciously, might be attributed many of the so-called remarkable dreams, presaging death and disaster. As a striking instance of this I had, connected with a conscious knowledge of the unhealthiness of a certain locality, a dream of ghastly horror; I saw in a room, rarely used on account of its gloominess, a swollen corpse, and, though not recognising any features, quite believed in my dream that it was my own. In the morning I heard that the same night another person in the house had dreamt of my funeral, with the most minute details of the place, circumstance, &c., the coffin was in the gloomy room previous to its removal. Less than a week afterwards, when dangerously ill with infectious fevet, I remembered the dream as I looked at my purple, swollen hands, and thought how easily might any belief in such a dream as the forecast of doom, have had a fatally depressing effect, and thus have wrought out its own fulfilment. The other person who dreamed had no illness afterwards; but doubtless some subtle change in my countenance or sign of unhealth accounted, together with the state of the atmosphere, for the singular coincidence of two such dreams. There was added to this the knowledge, in the minds of both dreamers, that deaths from diphtheria had formerly occurred in the house.
Often a strong emotional stimulus will be powerful in evoking dreams which depend upon dormant memories, as well in sleep as in that twilight state when those who recount them will say that they hardly know whether they were waking or sleeping. To quote one under the latter circumstances. A mother, very anxious about a sick child of whom a strangernurse bad temporary charge, seemed suddenly, in the early morning, to see a bottle, which had been two days before full of very strong brandy, standing empty in her child’s nursery. Entering the room soon afterwards she looked with curiosity into the cupboard to find her dream or clairvoyant revelation a reality. This was easily accounted for by natural causes. The mother had once seen a woman in a state of incipient delirium tremens, who told her that she was suffering from an American disease quite unknown in England, called the ” cold chills,’ and this woman succeeded for a long time in imposing upon charitable persons and deceiving physicians by simulating hsemorrhage, &c., until at length a brandy bottle was found hidden between her mattresses. Although the mother’s attention was concentrated on the state of her child, she no doubt received unconscious impressions from the odour of alcoholism, this called up the memory of the long-forgotten sufferer from the ” cold chills,” unconsciously again the association of the brandy bottle unearthed from the mattresses brought to conscious remembrance the bottle of brandy which the intemperate nurse had suggested, after some had been used for the child, would be best placed in the cupboard because the physician was an ardent supporter of teetotalism. No advantage accrued to the child from this dream as the nurse was on the point of leaving. In another somewhat similar case a mother had three successive dreams in one night about an infant to whom a nurse was secretly administering laudanum, and although they may have contributed to the rescue of the child, their origin could be quite as easily explained. She dreamt that she was in a street in Calcutta, a little boy was on the ground writhing in convulsions, foaming at the mouth; like a dissolving view the face changed, and, as it became the face of her own child, she awoke. Again she slept and dreamt of a half-idiotic child with epileptic fits, to see her own child’s face as before, and awake. Yet a third time she dreamt. She was now in an opium-smoker’s den in the city of Peking; to her surprise, reclining on the ground, leaning against the older opium-smokers, who were all under the influence of the drug, was a young boy, his face too changed and faded until it became vividly transformed into her own child’s face, and, trembling with dread, she awoke. A long series of old memories and recent events were strangely blended in these dreams. The mother had known those who had contracted abroad the habit of opium-smoking; was thus really familiar with its smell, and the expression it gave to the countenance ; years before, in a group of children’s likenesses, one reclining in the position of the child in the dream had been said to look like an opium-smoker, hence that image; and there had been many unusual acts on the part of the nurse sufficient to arouse suspicion.
To briefly advert to those dreams which cannot be accounted for either by early impressions made upon the brain, by dormant memories or local atmospheric influences. How strange is the belief very general even amongst intelligent persons, that the spectre or semblance of a dying one appears in dreams, not to prefigure, but to announce the event. There is a great sameness about all these accounts; to mention two which came to my own knowledge. A father and son dream the same night that they see the brother of the latter, who is captain of a whaler in the Southern Seas, taken up out of the sea, dripping with water, just drowned; both are vividly impressed with the dream as a sad reality. Weeks pass, and news at length reaches them that he was drowned at the time of the dream by falling overboard whilst harpooning a whale. A mother, whose son is in the Navy, on board one of H.M. ships stationed at a port in South America, dreams with strange distinctness that her son appears as dead standing between the curtains of her bed ; she laughs at the dream, and, merely regarding it as a curious fact, takes notice of the day and hour, to find that her son died at that very time, taking into account the difference of longitude.
Allowing for many strange coincidences, and for the frequency with which such dreams take place without any fulfilment, when, as Lord Bacon said, ” men mark the hits and not the misses,” there still remains so large a residuum of unexplained phenomena of this kind as to make it seem possible that there may be some physical cause yet to be brought to light to account for them. What if an atmospheric current still remains to be discovered, of which we cannot as yet even dimly conjecture the nature? And if the researches of Matteucci and Du BoisReymond into the electrical relations of nerve, by showing that there are currents of electricity engendered in nerve as in other animal structures, which are actively circulating in it, should tend in the distant future towards the elucidation of this obscure subject ?
How, too, can we account for the many stories on record of dreams said to have completely changed the current of men’s lives? Was it that an unconscious change really caused the dream ? Or can a fugitive effort of will in sleep be stronger than its persistent efforts in waking moments ? Just as a person who is unable at all times in a waking state to overcome a nervous dread of danger of some kind, may yet occasionally gain the mastery over nightmare terrors in dreaming.
The mystery of dreaming is, after all, little lessened by slightly realising the manner in which the mind goes back to the past for its ideas in sleep. Nor is the greatness of the wonder diminished when we consider the countless thousands of distinct pictures in the mind?all in a latent state?and how closely the whole mysterious subject of the origin and growth of dreaming is interwoven with others equally obscure, as, for instance, the mechanism of memory, and the origin and nature of our intuitions. WlMA.
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