DREAMS AND INSOMNIA

Evening Post, Volume CIII, Issue 83, 8 April 1922, Page 11

DREAMS AND INSOMNIA

A PARTIAL AWAKENING

"WISHFUL" AND "ANXIETY" TYPES.

" Dreams, Their Cause and Effect" was the subject of Dr. W.'Brown's lecture at the Institute of Hygiene. This mental specialist propounded a now theory. Until quite recent times, he said, the science of drea-ms had not been deemed worthy of study. Dreams had the power of magnifying impressions during sleep. Descartes dreamt that he had been run through by a. sword; on waking, he found he had been bitten by a flea. This was an instance of magnification. With tho advance of science, the tendency had teen to depreciate more and more the prophetic nature of dreaming and its occult value, if it had such a thing. If we turned to the -predecessors of Freud, we found that they belittled the significance of dreams.

One theory to-day was that .dreams came from partial brain activity and that they were irrational owing to that ■ fact. Froud said that the dreams had a different meaning -from what was actually dreamt; there were dreams that were wishful —the wishes were at the back of the mind and had been repressed; hence, they came out in a distorted form, and the dreams were known its "anxiety" dreams. r Patients who had suffered from shelfshock during the late war dreamt over and over again of the battle scenes they had witnessed. THE FUNCTION OF A DREAM. Dr. Brown rejected the theory of the psycho-analysts that dreams are always significant, and that every part of them has a meaning which must be looked for in primitive desires lurking in the subconscious mind. Ho gave thonT a much simpler significance. " Tho function of a dream is to guard, sleep," he said. " Sleep is an instinct like fear, flight, and the rest, and has a function which has developed in the course of evolution. At night this instinct of sleep comes into pl.ay. but it find 6 itself in | conflict with other instincts and tendencies, as well as with external impulses. Desires, cravings, anxieties, the memories of earlier days, all of which are the lower and fundamental elements of the mind, well up and strive towards consciousness while the main personality is in abeyance. If they reach consciousness sleep is at an end, but the dream, which is a sort of intermediary form of consciousness, intervenes, and makes the impulses innocuous, so that sleep persists. This theory covers the entire ground of all types of dreams. We dream because we do not wake up all at once. Parts of us .wake sooner than other parts. A dream is a partial awakening. DREAM COMEDIES. The following ara some humorous results which followed experiments of external stimuli applied by Dr. Brown to various sleepers. A. very hot water bottle was applied to a man's feet; he dreamt he was walking on hot lava on the orater of Vesuvius. Another sleeper, whoso brow was sprinkled with water, dreamt that he was in Italy drinking wine. A third, whose noso was tickled with a feather, dreamt that a doctor was covpring his face, with plaster of Paris, anci then pulling it eff, causing him excruciating pain. Dr. Brown, claimed that ha himself .dreamt an examination paper 'which he was to set in a few day 6. Unfortunately he could not recall it when he awoke. Somnambulists, he said, never remembered their dreams, but their dreams could bo brought back by hypnotism. Somnambulism was a fuller dream, nnd tho patient had control of his motormechanism, which the ordinary dreamer had not. In such oases it may be found that there is a strange connection between the dream and the sleep-walking. A patient in his hospital who walked downstairs ,\vith a pillow in his hand was dreaming that a boy of whom he was very fond had sprained his ankle while fishing, and that ho was fetching water for him in a canvas bag. The patient at the timo was worrying because he .could get no news of the boy, who was in. Franoe. ; The 1 lecturer felt fairly certain he ctfuld not accept, generally Freud's .conclusions about the dream, and this following uyon the examination of his own and

others' dreams. Dreams were helpful in showing one's eubsconeious tendencies, and illustrated the active nature of eubconsciousness. SHUN SHEEP AND DOPE. Sufferers from insomnia should avoid drugs, and they should also refrain from counting sheep in the hope of inducing sleep. This was the keynote of a very striking address on mental hygiene given by Dr.' Hildred Carlill, of Westminster Hospital, and the West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases, boforo the Institute of Hygiene. Counting sheep he described as "ridiculous," while "the most useless treatment of all is to tell tho patient to I think of nothing; it is uncommonly difficult to-think of nothing. It is better to lie relaxed and to repeat with each breath the word 'sleepy' in a regular and monotonous manner." It was better to get up for an hour and read or write rather than to lie- in bed in a panic. Reading in bed was inadvisable in any circumstances. Education on right lines would do much to lessen the incidence of hysteria. Children should be, taught to chew; they should learn the reasons why people stammerqd, tho dangers of rapid eating and of eating between meals, and serious thought -should be encouraged : about acts and behaviour vital to efficiency. (Hear, hear.) Hysteria was often regarded as inordinate laughing or weeping, but other varieties of unusual conduct were equally hysteria!. Hysteria was always curable, and in many cases would never occur if someone with the needful personally were present. The moods, sulks, and tantrums of some children all had causes, and it was worth whilo taking time to discover them. It was useless meroly to scold, and worse than useless to let the child have its way. Terrors of darkness and fear of sleep were very common, and might originate in illchosen bedtime stories. Tho condition might be treated by drugs, but the dangers of the drug habit were greater than ,those of sleeplessness. Cases of suicide attributed to insomnia were usually due to dread of insanity. WOMEN DRUG VICTIMS. The victims of the drug habit seem to be increasing in number, jmd the most unlikely people succumb to temptation. Some women, rather than miss the season, pass into it with the artificial strength obtaine_d from drugs and out of it with an inability to stop the habit. It mattered little what we did once or twice in a lifetime; poisoning depended upon overdose. It is tho habit which goes against the laws of nature which destroys us. The majority of mankind he described as suggestible, though only a portion is hysterical. Ho ascribed many headaches to hysteria.' It had been said that men who suffered head wounds in the war wore not likely to be the same again on account of headaches, yet it was the exception at St. Dunstan's to find men, even though blinded by head wounds, complaining of headaches. Concussion shocks to the brain in _ peace time certainly got well, for a pugilist who has been knocked out by a blow on the chin is ready for the next fight as soon as his financial advisers. The war brought home to the- people that hysteria is not Deculiar to one sex, but is determined by the ! quality and condition of the mental soil when the seed of suggestion is sown. In conclusion, the lecturer remarked: "It is chiefly in connection with their own health and the health of their children that people are fools. The things men live by, and for lack of which they die, are very simple. For the body, we need little more than light, air, fresh food, and* water; and for the soul, we need no more and no less than work, play, love, and worship."