civilization, we can scarcely doubt that such dreams, resting as they do on the foundation of consciousness, have had a powerful influence in persuading man that death is but a transient fact, and that the soul is independent of the body. I do not wish to assert that they suffice to originate the belief.[1]
While dreams are thus often formed by the molding together of more or less congruous images by a feeble but still intelligent sleeping activity, another factor is to be found in the involuntary wavering and perpetually mere meaningless change of dream imagery. Such concentration as is possible during sleep always reveals a shifting, oscillating, uncertain movement of the vision before us. We are, as it were, reading a sign-post in the dusk, or making guesses at the names of the stations as our express train flashes by the painted letters. Any one who has ever been subject to the hypnagogic imagery sometimes seen in the half-waking state, or who has ever taken mescal, knows that it is absolutely impossible to fix an image. It is this factor in dreams which causes them so often to baffle our analysis. In addition to the mere, as it were, mechanical flowing together of images and ideas, and the more or less intelligent molding of them into a whole, there is thus a failure of sleeping attention to fix definitely the final result—a failure which itself may evidently serve to carry on the dream process by suggesting new images and combinations. I dreamed once that I was with a doctor in his surgery, and saw in his hand a note from a patient saying that doctors were fools and did him no good, but he had lately taken some selvdrolla, recommended by a friend, and it had done him more good than anything, so please send him some more. I saw the note clearly, not, indeed, being conscious of reading it word by word, but only of its meaning as I looked at it; the one word I actually seemed to see, letter by letter, was the name of the drug, and that changed and fluctuated beneath my vision as I gazed at it, the final impression being selvdrolla. The doctor took from a shelf a bottle containing a bright yellow oleaginous fluid, and poured a little out, remarking that it had lately come into favor, especially in uric-acid disorders, but was extremely expensive.
- ↑ In Japan stories of the returning of the dead are very common. Lafcadio Hearn gives one as told by a Japanese which closely resembles the type of dream I am discussing. "A lover resolves to commit suicide on the grave of his sweetheart. He found her tomb and knelt before it and prayed and wept, and whispered to her that which he was about to do. And suddenly he heard her voice cry to him 'Anata!' and felt her hand upon his hand; and he turned and saw her kneeling beside him, smiling and beautiful as he remembered her, only a little pale. Then his heart leaped so that he could not speak for the wonder and the doubt and the joy of that moment. But she said: 'Do not doubt; it is really I. I am not dead. It was all a mistake. I was buried because my parents thought me dead—buried too soon. Yet you see I am not dead, not a ghost. It is I; do not doubt it!'"
