THE LOGIC OF DREAMS

Otago Witness, Issue 2955, 2 November 1910, Page 66

THE LOGIC OF DREAMS

It will be news to most folk that '' all dreaming is a process of reasoning." Dr Havelock Ellis offers proof of this assumption in the Contemporary and the North American for September. "In dreams we are always reasoning," says Dr Ellis. " That is a general characteristic of dreams which is worth noting,, because its significance is not usually recognised. It is sometimes imagined that reason is in abeyance during sleep. So far from this being the case, we t\y almost be said to reason much more diSing 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." It would appear from the dictum of the talented doctorauthor that confusion of ideas and images which may be regarded 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 presented to sleeping consciousness. iJr Ellis skilfully analyses the "process of image formation," which is at the basis of reasoning, and which holds sway in our dreams. " The things that happen to us in dreams, the pseudo-external world that is presented to sleeping consciousness^ —the imagery, that is, that floats before the mental eye of sleep — are a perpetual source of astonishment and argument to the dreamer. A large part of dreaming activity is concerned with the attempt to explain aDd reason out the phenomena we thus encounter, to construct a theory of them, or to determine the attitude which w$ ought to take up with regard to them. Most dreams will furnish evidence of this reasoning process." Then he gives a commonplace example : " A lady dreamed that she was visiting an acquaintance who wished to send a small sum of money to a person in Ireland. She rashly c"'ered to take it over to Ireland. On arriving home she began to repent of her promise, as the weather was extremely wild and cold. She began, however, to make preparations for dressing warmly, and went to consult an Irish friend, who said she would have to be floated over to Ireland tightly packed in a crab basket. On returning home she fully discussed fhe matter with her hus-* band, who thought it would be folly to undertake such a journey, and she finally relinquished it, with great relief. In this dream —the elements of which could all be accounted for, —the association between- sending money and the post office, which would at once occur to waking consciousness, was closed; consciousness was a prey to such suggestions as reached it, but on the basis of these suggestions it reasoned and concluded quite sagaciously." Dreamland to some is different from what it is to others. " Only to a few people there comes occasionally in dreams a dim realisation of the unreality of the experience. "After all, it does not matter," they are able to say to themselves with moro or less conviction, "this is only a dream," Thus one lady, dreaming that she is trying to kill three large snakes by stamping on them, wonders, while still dreaming, what it signifies to dream of snakes; and another lady, when she dreams that she is in any unpleasant position —about to be shot, for instance, — often says to herself : " Never mind, I shall wake before it happens." But Dr Ellis has never detected in his own dreams any recognition that they are dreams. " I may say, indeed, thai 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 in ancient times, and from Gassendi in modern times. The person who' says to himself that he is dreaming believes that he is still dreaming, but it seems more probable that he has for a moment, without realising it, emerged at the waking surface of consciousness."

The logic of dreams is, therefore, thus : " We accept the facts presented to us — that is the fundamental assumption of dream life - ,—and we argue about those ' facts' with the help of all the mental resources which are at our disposal, only those resources are frequently inadequate. Sometimes they are startlingly inadequate, to such an extent, indeed, that we are unaware of possibilities which would be the very first to suggest themselves to waking consciousness. Thus, the lady who wished to send money to Ireland is not aware of the existence of postal orders, and when she decides to carry the money herself she is not aware of the existence of boat trains, or even of boats; she might have been living in pakeolithic times. She discusses the question in a clear and logical manner with the resources at her disposal, and reaches a rational conclusion, but considerations which would be the first to occur to waking consciousness are at the moment absent from sleeping consciousness ; whole mental tracts have been dissociated, switched off from communication with consciousness; they are 'asleep' even to sleeping consciousness." And" so, according to Dr Ellis, " the phenomena of dreaming furnish a delightful illustration of the fact that reasoning, in its rough form, is only the crudest and mast elementary form of intellectual operation, and that the finer forms of thinking involve much more than logic."