Havelock Ellis

“ Time and space are annihilated, gravity is suspended, and we are joyfully borne up in the air, as it were in the arms of angels; we are brought into a deeper communion with Nature, and in dreams a man listens to the arguments of his dog with as little surprise as Balaam heard the reproaches of his ass. The unexpected [279] limitations of our dream world, the exclusion of so many elements which are present even unconsciously in waking life, impart a splendid freedom and ease to the intellectual operations of the sleeping mind, and an extravagant romance, a poignant tragedy, to our emotions. ”

“ Dreaming consciousness never realises that the universe that confronts it springs from the same source as itself springs. I dreamed that a man was looking at his own house from a distance, and on the balcony he saw his daughter and a man by her side. 'Who is that man flirting with my daughter?' he asked. He produced a field-glass, and, on looking through it, he exclaimed: 'Good Heavens, it's myself!' Dreaming consciousness accepted this situation with perfect equanimity and solemnity. In the dream world there is, indeed, nothing else to do. We may puzzle over the facts presented to us ”

“ In the waking moments of our complex civilised life we are ever in a state of suspense which makes all great conclusions impossible; the multiplicity of the facts of life, always present to consciousness, restrains the free play of logic (except for that happy dreamer, the mathematician) , and surrounds most of our pains and nearly all our pleasures with infinite qualifications; we are tied down to a sober tameness. In our dreams the fetters of civilisation are loosened, and we know the fearful joy of freedom. ”

“ Primitive man has done so from the first, and this impulse has struck its roots into all our most fundamental human traditions even as they survive in civilisation to-day. The man of the early world moves, like the dreamer, among a sea of emotions and ideas which he cannot recognise the origin of, and, like the dreamer, he instinctively dramatises them. But, unlike the dreamer, he gives stability to the images he has thus created and in good faith mistaken for independent beings. ”

“ The circle of our conscious life is narrowed during sleep; it is even by a process of psychic dissociation broken up into fragments. From that narrowed and broken-up consciousness the outlook becomes vaster and more mysterious, full of strange and unsuspected fascination, and the possibilities of new experiences, just as a philosophic mite inhabiting a universe consisting of a Stilton cheese would probably be compelled to regard everything outside the cheese as belonging to the realm of the Infinite. In reality, if we think of it, all our visions of the infinite are similarly conditioned. ”

“ WHEN we fall asleep we enter a dim and ancient house of shadow, unillumined by any direct ray from the outer world of waking life. We are borne about through its chambers, without conscious volition of our own; we fall down its mouldy and rotten staircases, we are haunted by strange sounds and odours from its mysterious recesses; we move among phantoms we cannot consciously control. As we emerge into the world of daily life again, for an instant the sunlight seems to flash into the obscure house before the door closes behind us ”

“ When I come to consider I believe that much that I have written, and many things that I have said and thought and believed, are directly due to these dream-experiences and my ponderings over how they came. Beneath the superficiality of our conscious mind—prim, smug, self-satisfied, owlishly wise—there lies the vast gulf of a subconscious personality that is dark and obscure, seldom seen or even suspected. ”

“ So far from this being the case, we may almost be said to reason much more during sleep than when we are awake. That our reasoning is bad, often even preposterous, that it constantly ignores the most elementary facts of waking life, scarcely affects the question. All dreaming is a process of reasoning. That artful confusion of ideas and images which, at the outset, I referred to as the most constant feature of dream mechanism is nothing but a process of reasoning, a perpetual effort to argue out harmoniously the absurdly limited and incongruous data present to sleeping consciousness. ”

“ Sight is for most of us the chief sensory activity of sleeping as it is of waking life; the commonest kind of dream is mainly a picture, but it is always a living and moving picture, however inanimate the objects which appear in vision before us would be in real life. No man ever gazed at a dream picture which was at rest to his sleeping eye as are the pictures we gaze at with our waking eyes. So far as my own experience is concerned, I have rarely in sleep seen a sentence, a word, a letter written on a sheet of dream-paper which was not changing beneath the eye of sleep. ”

“ I have never detected in my own dreams any recognition that they are dreams. I may say, indeed, that I do not consider that such a thing is really possible, though it has been borne witness to by many philosophers and others from Aristotle and Synesius and Gassendi onwards. The phenomenon occurs; the person who says to himself that he is dreaming believes that he is still dreaming, but one may be permitted to doubt that he is. It seems far more probable that he has for a moment, without realising it, emerged at the waking surface of consciousness. ”

“ Thus I once, as a youth, had a vivid dream of an albatross that became transformed into a woman, the beautiful eyes of the albatross taking on a womanly expression, but the bird's beak only being imperfectly changed into a nose as the bird-woman murmured, 'Do you love me?' In this case the vivid surprise of the dream was precisely associated with the simultaneous existence of the two sets of characters. ”

“ The sleep of the real criminal, as Sante de Sanctis has shown on the basis of a wide experience, even of criminals guilty of serious acts of violence, tends to be peaceful and dreamless, and such dreams as they have are usually of a simple and innocent sort. If normal people often dream of crime, it is because they are more sensitive and imaginative, and because sleeping consciousness is strained to the utmost to invent a phantasmal tragedy adequate to account for the waves of emotion that beset it. ”

“ In the same way, we cannot argue that the shifting memory of a dream during a long period of time throws the slightest doubt on the accuracy of our original impression of it. We never catch a dream in course of formation. As it presents itself to consciousness on awakening there may be doubtful points and there may be missing links, but the dream is, once for all, completed, and if there are doubtful points or missing links we recognise them as such. We make no attempt to supply a logic that is not there, and we never see any such process going on involuntarily. ”

“ In this way the Paradise of dreams has been a reservoir from which men have always drawn consolation and sweet memory and hope, even belief, the imagination and gratification of desires that the world restrained, the promise and proof of the dearest and deepest aspirations. ”

“ Our dream imagery is all pictural, sometimes even to dream consciousness, and to see oneself in the picture is, therefore, not so very much more remarkable than it is in waking life to come upon oneself among a bundle of photographs. ”

“ A more common phenomenon in my experience than association by verbal clues is a transference from visual terms into the terms of some other sense, and a repetition in that form. Thus a lady dreams that a large and very beautiful picture resembling tapestry forms itself before her, and in it she sees herself, only much more beautiful in shape, standing by a tree, and on the other side of the tree an old friend is standing, while there are a crowd of people around. ”

“ We are thereby thrown into a state of emotional agitation, a state of agony and terror, such as we rarely or never attain during waking life. Sleeping consciousness, blindfolded and blundering, a prey to these massive waves from below, and fumbling about desperately for some explanation, jumps at the idea that only the attempt to escape some terrible danger or the guilty consciousness of some awful crime can account for this immense emotional uproar. Thus the [109] dream is suffused by a conviction which the continued emotion serves to support. ”

“ It sometimes occurs to me—as doubtless it occurs to other people—that at some moment when my thoughts are normally occupied with the work immediately before me, there suddenly appears on the surface of consciousness a totally unrelated picture. A scene arises, vague but usually recognisable, of some city or landscape—Australian, Russian, Spanish, it matters not what—seen casually long years ago, and possibly never thought of since, and possessing no kind of known association either with the matter in hand or with my personal life generally. ”

“ That is to say, that the usually coherent elements of our mental life are split up, and some of them—often, it is curious to note, precisely those which are at that very moment the most prominent and poignant—are reconstituted into what seems to us an outside and objective world, of which we are the interested or the merely curious spectators, but in neither case realise that we are ourselves the origin of. ”

“ At the most the dreamer has merely seen a kind of cinematographic drama which has been condensed and run together in very much the way practised by the cinematographic artist, so that although the whole story seems to be shown in constant movement, in reality the action of hours is condensed into moments. Further, it has always to be borne in mind that, asleep as well as awake, intense emotion involves a loss of the sense of time. ”

“ Professor Näcke, who has given much attention to the phenomena of dreaming, writes in a private letter: 'What I am amazed at, having perceived it in myself, is the little known fact that a person's character becomes worse in dreaming. Not only the most secret thoughts, wishes, and aspirations become clear, but also qualities which have never been observed before, as, for instance, that one becomes a murderer, an adulterer, etc.' Freud, especially, has elaborated this aspect of dreams as representing the fulfilment of the dreamer's most secret desires. ”

“ It may well be, one may add, that the dream process furnishes the key to the metaphysical and even, indeed, the physical problems of our waking thoughts, and that the puzzles of the universe are questions that we ourselves unconsciously invent for ourselves to solve.
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We can never go behind the fantastic universe of our dreams. The validity of that universe is for dreaming consciousness unassailable. We may try to understand it and explain it, but we can never deny it, any more than we can deny the universe of our waking life, however we may attempt to analyse it. ”

“ It is very difficult, indeed impossible, to recall exactly, and in their proper order, even the details of a real adventure which has only just happened to us. It is, obviously, incomparably more difficult to recall an experience which took place, under such shadowy conditions, in a world so remote from the world of waking life. ”

“ But some degree of suggestibility, some tendency to regard the things that come before us in dreams as familiar—in other words, as things that have happened to us before—is not merely a natural result of defective apperception, but one of the very conditions of dreaming. It enables us to carry on our dreams; without it their progress would be fatally inhibited by doubt, uncertainty, and struggle. So it is, perhaps, that in all dreaming, or at all events in certain stages of sleeping consciousness, we are liable to fall into a state of pseudo-reminiscence. ”

“ The movement of the cinematograph, indeed, scarcely corresponds to that fusion of heterogeneous images which marks dream visions. Our dreams are like dissolving views in which the dissolving process is carried on swiftly or slowly, but always uninterruptedly, so that at any moment two (often, indeed, more) incongruous pictures are presented to consciousness, which strives to make one whole of them, and sometimes succeeds, and is sometimes baffled. ”