The Mind In Sleep

R F Fortune

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136320958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This is Volume V of thirty-eight in the General Psychology series. First published in 1927, this study analyses the key elements of dreams of the author in a quest to understand how the mind functions when asleep and to explore free association.

THE BIOLOGICAL FUNCTION OF THIS TYPE OF DREAMING

THE mechanisms of surrogation, envelopment and substitution which I have described do not exhaust the possible methods by which a tendency of sleeping thought in active revolt against the return of waking thought can find play. The following two dreams illustrate the operation of the second method that I referred to early in my first chapter.

The Censer Dream

The dreamer is in a large house filled with his family and a number of people that he does not know. At one end of the front porch a Greek Catholic high mass is being celebrated. The ritual is unfamiliar and bizarre. There is a huge censer which the dreamer is told to light, igniting the white powder inside. After mass he is to cense the people.

He does not go to mass, being busy about the house, trying to fasten back a door which will not stay open. Suddenly he discovers that mass is over and that he has not been there to do the censing. He meets a somewhat heterodox attender at mass, and excuses himself for non-attendance on the plea of illness. The attender replies that he did the censing for the dreamer. He does not always go to church, but here he does. He likes the service. The priest and people preferred someone who was present through the mass, and who had entered into the spirit of it, to swing the censer rather than one rushing in right at the end.

The dreamer was of High-Church beliefs and was favourably disposed to the Anglo-Catholic movement. He was conscious, however, of a definite conflict between his religious beliefs including that of the sacramental nature of marriage and his loyalty to his wife on the one hand, and a desire to carry an extra-marital love affair beyond the bounds that his religious code and family loyalty imposed on the other. He had received a letter two days before the dream from the woman with whom he was in love reproaching him for his maintaining “le censeur” so rigidly and coldly. The letter ended “Vive le censeur! le censeur! le censeur!”

His family was agnostic and his early training had been entirely secular. His mature opinions led him to repress this early training. In the dream this repression is released. He fails in his religious duty of swinging the censer. The release of this repression, however, served as the release of the emotionally more important repression—he fails to maintain “le censeur” further. In this case there was a definite continuance of the non-religious attitude for some time after the dream. The sleeping thought was actually carried over into waking.

This dream shows that evasion of the censorship is not necessarily by affective association. Here there is not symbolism effected through the submergent becoming associated with a less repressed experience by community of affect. Here rather there is release of a repressed tendency towards agnosticism taking such an imaginary form that by a punning connection it serves as a symbolic release for a more deeply repressed sex tendency. This mechanism whereby the straight forward release of one repressed tendency serves to release another more repressed tendency, recurs in the following dream.

Horse versus Motor-Car Dream

The dreamer is drunk; X, his friend, is drunk. The dreamer is in a horse-drawn trap going round the Basin Reserve. X is behind, sleeping huddled in the back of the trap. The dreamer is unable to drive. But the horse goes round the corners without guidance. The dreamer reflects how much better a horse and trap is than a motor-car when one is drunk. Near John Street a motor-car approaches sounding its horn. The dreamer takes up the reins which had fallen. The trap piles one wheel up on the foot-path. Here the dreamer awakens and hears a car passing outside his window, sounding its horn.

The day before the dream the dreamer had decided to repress his heavy drinking tendencies. He would get drunk no more. He had met W. An old woman driving slowly in a trap had passed them. The dreamer had commented on the obsolete use of horse traffic, condemning it roundly. W had suggested that it was in many ways preferable to motor conveyance, for instance it did not break down unexpectedly. The dreamer rejected W’s defence as tenuous. He did not believe there was the slightest possibility of making a case against the immediate passing out of horse-drawn conveyance.

In the dream the repressed suggestion in favour of horse traffic evades the dreamer’s antagonism by expressing itself in terms of the release of another repression. This device, which I propose to term symbiotic association, is essentially the same as that of the previous dream, except that here a resisted suggestion of lesser strength appears to avail itself of the escape of a stronger, instead of vice-versa, and one of the repressed tendencies is not repressed out of manifest consciousness. In yet other cases, as in the dream of the Pike Attack, the dream may possibly directly release a repressed feeling or suggestion with no device for out-manœuvring the censorship—unless, as is open to question, mere dramatization is such a device. The following is of this dramatizing type.

The Dream of the Advanced Woman

The dreamer is walking with Z to whom she is engaged. Suddenly she seizes the end of a sheet hanging down from a telegraph wire. Instantly the sheet travels away with her with great rapidity. Soon she is far off, leaving Z far back in the distance.

The dreamer had decided to attend a University extension class in literature. Mrs. A, her prospective mother-in-law, thought fit to object to this arrangement. Her future daughter-in-law would get far ahead of her son and look down on him in consequence. Advanced women made bad wives for ordinary husbands. The dreamer who was a young lady with a fund of common sense, told Mrs. A that she thought her fears foolish, and that she did not intend to yield to them. She would not get far ahead of Z.

In the dream Mrs. A’s suggestion is given full effect despite the dreamer’s waking dismissal of it.

I have described the unevasive dramatic release of repressed material in dreams, evasion by surrogation, envelopment, substitution and symbiotic release by the close association of one repression with another. I wish now to mention the existence of another method of evasion by symbolism, where the manifest content has the same relation to the submergent latent content as the manifest content in the dream of Irises had to the surrogate latent content. The best example that I know is Rivers’ Presidency Dream. Rivers was in conflict between a desire to prosecute his researches undisturbed and a desire to accept the Presidency of the Royal Anthropological Society. He decided to reject the office. He dreamt that he was elected President, but his election was made symbolically. A man called S. Poole was elected because Stanley Pool is the centre of a great and complex system of rivers, and because pools and rivers are alike in that both are aggregations of water. References to reading matter in various places accounted for the particular form that the letters of the name assumed.

I wish now to turn to the problem of the biological value of dreaming. According to Freud, the dream is always a wish-fulfilment. It banishes care and trouble and ensures untroubled sleep. Esther Griggs, who dreamt on the morning of January 4th, 1859, that her house was on fire, and who threw her baby out of a second-storey window while still asleep, and, under this impression, was guilty either of the murder of the baby, or of intent toward arson, for her dream was a wish-fulfilment. Fortunately the grand jury had no such belief. Nightmares are plainly not wish-fulfilments. Nor can it be said that nightmares protect sleep. Rivers put forward the opposite theory that dreaming is a lightening of sleep in order to enable speedy arousal in the event of the approach of marauding enemies or of other disturbance. Many dreams, however, seem to have little or no reference to external conditions prevailing during the night. Their originating cause is not a stimulus of the night so much as a repressed emotional reaction of the day, or days preceding, which would tend, if anything, to have an obstructing effect on a rapid cognizance of outward conditions.

In those lower animals which congregate in groups or herds primitive suggestibility is overwhelmingly strong. The sight of a rabbit’s white tail bobbing sends every rabbit in the vicinity to cover. One bird rising raises a covey. Sheep will follow a leader in jumping over an obstacle removed immediately after the leader has hurdled it. Human groups, on the other hand, often act differently. There have been cases of a steadfast minority firing on their own comrades in retreat from the battlefield. There have been cases of conscientious objectors in war time. Opposition to the group is a rare characteristic even in man. But it occurs far more often in the human pack than in the wolf pack or in the bee swarm. Extreme flexibility to suggestion fosters a strong group life, but leaves the individual a social automaton, a cog in the social machine. Extreme resistance to suggestibility makes the individual solitary. To make the individual more than a cog in society, and at the same time to avoid depriving him of the advantages of social life entirely, it was necessary that the evolutionary process should contain some means whereby resistance to suggestion should operate without a weakening of the normal power of suggestibility. This means is dreaming. Strictly speaking, man cannot resist the great mastering power of suggestion any more than the sheep, the wolf, the bee or the ant. Unlike the lower herd animals, however, he can defer the breakdown of his resistance till sleep. In the dream, suggestion that runs contrary to that general trend of suggestion acted upon during waking finds hallucinatory vent and secures emotional satisfaction. To make man suggestible at all involved making him suggestible to contrary and incompatible modes of thought and action, and it was necessary that contrary and dissociated modes of affect-charged thinking exist lest confusion and mental chaos result. One of these, association by intellectual and logical similarity or contiguity prevails during waking. The other non-logical association, symbolic or symbiotic association, or association by community of affect, prevails in sleep. Each mode of thought is only faintly impregnated with its complementary and opposite mode. The absurdity of dreams is in part the price man pays for being a herding animal. But it is only an absurd mode of thought from the point of view of an alien mode of thought.

It has long been recognized that the waking mind tends to become organized by grouping various emotional reactions about an object, or the idea of an object in its absence. Thus, the miser loves his treasures when he can touch and handle them, he fears for them when burglars break into his neighbour’s house; he hates the thief if they are stolen from him; he envies anyone else the possession of similar valuables, and he covets such goods for himself. It must now be recognized that the dreaming mind is often organized differently. Various objects evoking the same emotion are grouped around that emotion. Thus the miser’s fear of burglars, his fear of a Socialist Government and his fear of bulls, due to having been tossed by one when a boy, may come together in his dreams; as, to take a less hypothetical case, where R. L. Stevenson’s schoolboy fear of examinations and fear of the Judgment Day used to coalesce in his dreams.¹

The organization of emotions about an object is the normal mode of working of the waking mind. The organization of objects about an emotion, on the other hand, is a normal mode of working of the dreaming mind. I say “objects” advisedly, because the images of dreams are hallucinatory, appear as objects, and are reacted to emotionally as if they were objects. The waking unit of organization has been called the sentiment. The organizing activity of the mind during sleep is directed towards the breaking down of the sentiment, and the rebuilding of a new structure where the objects formerly at the core of their respective sentiments are regrouped about an emotional tendency that their sentiments have in common. This new structure I propose to call the constellation. Then sentiment and constellation may be defined as follows:

A sentiment is an organized system of emotional tendencies grouped about an object and the idea of an object.

A constellation is a collection of ideas perceived in hallucinatory fashion as objects, disrupted from the sentiments of which they form the core, and regrouped about an emotional tendency which their respective sentiments have in common.

Then the waking mind may be said to have the sentiment as its unit, whereas the dreaming mind often has the constellation. It is this radical difference in organization between the waking and the sleeping mind that assists in separating them so effectively, or rather, which is the device that the evolutionary process has perfected to keep incompatible suggestion separated. Close upon waking the constellation frequently takes a specialized form due to the impact of returning waking standards on dream thought in opposition. This modified constella...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• I. Surrogation
• II. Affective Association
• III. Envelopment
• IV. Affect in the Dream and Displacement
• V. The Biological Function of This Type of Dreaming
• Index