Dreamikins

“ Miss Fletcher did not expect too much from her that morning; she knew how she would miss her little companions, and was extra kind and cheerful.
In a very few days a letter arrived addressed to, "Miss Emmeline Broughton." Dreamikins opened it with trembling fingers, and got her uncle to read it to her.
"OUR DARLING DREAMIKINS,—We are going to write between us, and you need not guess who does it, because Freda writes best, and Daffy spells best, and we've got our spelling-book and dictionary on the table, and Nurse tells us some. We are not doing lessons yet. Our governess is away. ”

“ Fibo judged it best not to take his small niece seriously. He refused to be drawn into any arguments, and would only talk nonsense, distracting her mind at once from the undesirable subject.
When Dreamikins met her governess a little later, she said:
"Fibo and me have been having such pretence games in his room that I feel quite tarred. He's the funniest man in the world. He's been turning his face into all kinds of things—a H.D., and a P.D., and a A.O., and into you!" ”

“ We act, strive, think, suffer and are glad to no purpose. We leave outside the portals of Sleep all troublesome incredulities and vexatious speculations as to probability. I float wraith-like upon clouds in and out among the winds, without the faintest notion that I am doing anything unusual. In Dreamland I find little that is altogether strange or wholly new to my experience. No matter what happens, I am not astonished, however extraordinary the circumstances may be. I visit a foreign land where I have not been in reality, and I converse with peoples whose language I have never heard. ”

“ Little Lasse straightened himself up stiff, and answered: 'I have sailed round the world in a pea-shell boat.'
'Oh!' said the gardener.
He had forgotten Dreamland. But you have not forgotten it; you know that it exists. You know the beautiful grotto and the bright silver walls whose lustre never fades, the sparkling diamonds which never grow dim, the music which never ceases its low, soft murmur through the sweet evening twilight. The airy fairy fancies of happy Dreamland never grow old; they, like the glorious stars above us, are always young. ”

“ There was no lock or bolt, and after a little tugging and pushing they got it open.
"It's like the door in 'Alice in Wonderland!'" gasped Freda. "Oh, look, Daffy, look! There's somebody there!"
They were kneeling down now with beating hearts. Both heads were close together, and eyes taking in all that there was to be seen. A garden indeed, with a cool green lawn, and rose-covered arches, and flowers of every colour crowding each other out of the beds. In the distance, a low, grey house with striped green-and-white sun-blinds, and under a shady tree on the lawn a man in a low hammock chair. ”

“ How am I to know that it is not a dream?"
"What does it matter?" returned North Wind. "The dream—if it is a dream—is a pleasant one, is it not?"
"That is just why I want it to be true! It is not for the dream itself—I mean it is not for the pleasure of it," answered Diamond, "for I have that whether it is a dream or not. It is for you, North Wind! I [112] cannot bear to find it a dream because then I should lose you! You would be nobody then and I could not bear that. You are not just a dream, dear North Wind, are you? ”

“ Deep in the woods a voice was singing, wild and solitary in the gathering gloom. Like the cry of a ghost, it seemed to set the silence quivering, the leaves quaking with a windless awe. The men who looked towards the sea heard it, a song that echoed in the heart like woe.
"Sire, there is yet hope."
"Life grows dim, and dreams elapse in fire."
Merlin pointed into the darkening woods. His eyes shone crystal bright, and there was a great radiance upon his face.
"Sire, trust thine own heart, and the god in thee. Through superstition thou hast been brought nigh unto death and to despair. ”

“ But the resistances never entirely lose their power, and the dream shows the material distorted. Seldom does one recognise his own repressed thoughts or unattained wishes. The dream really is the guardian of sleep to satisfy the activity of the unconscious and repressed mental processes that would otherwise disturb sleep by keeping the censor busy. In the case of a nightmare the watchman or censor is aroused, finds himself overpowered, so to speak, and calls on consciousness for help. ”

“ If the waking life shows an unmistakable intention to forget the dream formed at night, either as a whole, immediately after awakening, or in fragments during the course of the day, and if we recognise as the chief participator in this forgetting the psychic resistance against the dream which has already performed its part in opposing the dream at night—then the question arises, What has the dream formation actually accomplished against this resistance? Let us consider the most striking case in which the waking life has done away with the dream as though it had never happened. ”

“ My head, heavy and reeling, drooped to my breast, and when next I looked up it was in a dream; with the Pole Star grinning at me through a window from over the horrible swaying trees of a dream-swamp. And I am still dreaming.
In my shame and despair I sometimes scream frantically, begging the dream-creatures around me to waken me ere the Inutos steal up the pass behind the peak Noton and take the citadel by surprise; but these creatures are daemons, for they laugh at me and tell me I am not dreaming. ”

“ But into Dreamland, Knowledge and Experience do not enter. They stay without, together with the dull, dead clay of which they form a part; while the freed brain, released from their narrowing tutelage, steals softly past the ebon gate, to wanton at its own sweet will among the mazy paths that wind through the garden of Persephone. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If in kind or in intensity an affect and an idea are incongruous, our waking judgment becomes confused.
The fact that in dreams the presentation content does not entail the affective influence which we should expect as necessary in waking thought has always caused astonishment. Strümpell was of the opinion that ideas in the dream are stripped of their psychic values. But neither does the dream lack opposite instances, where the expression of intense affect appears in a content, which seems to offer no occasion for its development. ”

“ The incidents were not quite the same, for scenes from real life are scarcely ever reproduced on the stage of Dreamland in their entirety; but they were ghastly enough in all conscience, and Berselius, awake and wiping the 268 sweat from his brow, saw them clearly before him and remembered the callousness with which he had watched them but a few moments ago.
No man can command his dreams; the dreaming man lives in a world beyond law, and it came as a shock to Berselius that his old self should be alive in him like this, powerful, active, and beyond rebuke. ”

“ The earth advances. The sun does not pause. The Emperor is an old man. He cannot five forever."
"He can, in my memory."
"Enough of dreams!" cried An Lu-shan. "Face reality! Dreams do not exist."
"They are a vital part of life. Dreams are real, like sleep or quiet, or like love, or flower perfume." She paused, then she added, "Dreams are the fragrance of the night's cool slumber, a fragrance that remains long after we awaken. But it is not necessary to sleep in order to dream." ”

“ I also explained that I did not believe the Freud theory, that the dream is always a wish, and suggested that Jung was a surer guide.
"According to Jung," I said, "the dream is often compensatory. In your own case you are consciously living the higher life, but there is another side of life that you are ignoring, and that is the vulgar pub side. Your dream is a hint that the vulgar side of life cannot be ignored. You may ignore it consciously, but your unconscious will seek the other side in your dreams." ”

“ We should then say that in the dreamer, at night, the erotic desire stirs, makes a powerful advance to bring his memory of the beloved into consciousness and thus snatch him from the delusion, experiences rejection and transformation into fear, which now, on its part, brings the fearful pictures from the academic memory of the dreamer into the dream-content. In this way the peculiar unconscious content of the dream, the amorous longing for the once known Zoë, is transformed into the manifest-content of the destruction of Pompeii and the loss of Gradiva. ”

“ In dreams, the position is precisely that upon which the argument is based; but we know that in dreams the argument is wholly deceptive. We assume that the changing groups of phenomena represent personalities like our own. When we wake, we pronounce this to be a delusion. If the analogy deceives us at one time, it may at another. If the mind at one time may give an apparently distinct life to creations of its own, why may it not at another? I know that it will be said that dreams are fictitious reproductions of what has really presented itself to our waking consciousness. ”

“ One thing I immediately perceived which may have accounted for my bad dreams; I had been sleeping with the moonlight shining directly upon my face. Another thing I thought I perceived, but endeavored to assure myself that it represented the aftermath of an unpleasant nightmare. This was a lithe shape streaking through my open window—a figment of the imagination, as I concluded at the time, the tail-end of a dream visibly retreating in the moment of awakening. ”

“ These large dark orbs, now studying me with such sad earnestness, completed, without defining, my first impressions of the man. Here was finer vision for beauty than the vision of creatures of common clay. Here was keener insight into truth; here were the deeper faith, the larger love, that make Genius. A priceless spirit! so I fully discerned, now that the face had supplied its own illumination. A priceless spirit! and so nearly lost to the world, which has persons enough, but no spirits to waste. ”

“ Psychoanalytic experience has furnished us with another proof of the fact that the forgetting of dreams depends more on the resistance than on the strangeness existing between the waking and sleeping states, as the authorities have believed. It often happens to me, as well as to the other analysts and to patients under treatment, that we are awakened from sleep by a dream, as we would say, and immediately thereafter, while in full possession of our mental activity, we begin to interpret the dream. ”

“ The infantile form of the wish-dream, alike in adults and children, is thus, there can be little doubt, extremely common, and, even in its symbolic forms, it is a real and not rare phenomenon. But it is impossible to follow Freud when he declares that all dreams fall into the group of wish-dreams. The world of psychic life during sleep is, like the waking world, rich and varied ”

“ To this timidity in regard to superstition, the opposition to dream analysis is in a large measure due; but analysis is in no wise to blame for this. We do not select the dream as our object because we pay it the homage of superstitious admiration, but because it is a psychic product that is independent of the patient’s consciousness. We ask for the patient’s free thoughts, but he gives us little, or nothing; or at best something forced or irrelevant. Dreams are free thoughts, free phantasies, they are not forced, and they are psychic phenomena just as much as thoughts are. ”

“ According to Strümpell, there are still other factors effective in the forgetting of dreams which are derived from the relation of the dream to the waking state. The forgetfulness of the waking consciousness for dreams is evidently only the counterpart of the fact already mentioned, that the dream (almost) never takes over successive memories from the waking state, but only certain details of these memories which it tears away from the habitual psychic connections in which they are recalled while we are awake. ”

“ If indifferent impressions can get into the dream only in case they are recent, how does it happen that we find also in the dream content elements from earlier periods in our lives, which at the time when they were recent possessed, as Strümpell expresses it, no psychic value, which, therefore, ought to have been forgotten long ago, and which, therefore, are neither fresh nor psychologically significant? ”

“ The entire memory of the dream is open to an objection calculated to depreciate its value very markedly in critical eyes. One may doubt whether our memory, which omits so much from the dream, does not falsify what it retained.
Such doubts relating to the exactness of the reproduction of the dream are expressed by Strümpell when he says: "It therefore easily happens that the active consciousness involuntarily inserts much in recollection of the dream; one imagines one has dreamt all sorts of things which the actual dream did not contain." ”

“ They say that to see dreams was a common normal thing with ancients. Yes, after all, their life was a whirling carousel: green, orange, Buddha, sap. But we, people of today, we know all too well that dreaming is a serious mental disease.
I . . . Is it possible that my brain, this precise, clean, glittering mechanism, like a chronometer without a speck of dust on it, is . . . ? Yes, it is, now. I really feel there in the brain some foreign body like an eyelash in the eye. One does not feel one’s whole body, but this eye with a hair in it ”