THE BRAIN IN DREAM TIME

Waipa Post, Volume 36, Issue 2146, 19 April 1928, Page 2

THE BRAIN IN DREAM TIME

IS IT REALLY ASLEEP? A book on psychology which will make a particular appeal to the layman is " Studies in Psychology" by Dr William Elder, consulting physician to Leith Hospital. Dr Elder discusses such subjects as " memory, emotion, consciousness, sleep, and allied mental phenomena," in plain language and with a moderation which seems to be so often lacking in psychologists. His chapters on psycho-analysis and dreams arte of great interest, and he effectually disposes of many extreme theories. Writing of the nature of dreams, he says:— " If anyone doubts that dreams are only remembered if the dreamer wakens either completely or almost completely, let him try to remember in the morning any dream which he may have had when he was dozing off to sleep the night before. The author in his own experience has never been able to do this, unless he wakened to a greater or less extent after having the dream.

" And yet we all know that we usually do dream before going to sleep. Wc are all aware of the gradual dozing off, the coming loss of consciousness, the passing of one fancy after another, the confused imagery, and then the sudden awaking with a start. We remember because* we have become awake, but we have every reason to suppose that the same sort of hapl- - loccur if we do not awake but pass slowly into oblivion and sound sleep. Unless, therefore, the individual awakens more than once between night and morning, he is likely to remember only one dream that night. Of course the depth of sleep seems to ebb and flow, and sometimes a person may have a dream or nightmare in the middle of the night and awaken completely or incompletely. " Next morning his memory of the dream will depend very much on the completeness of his awakening and whether he remained long enough awake to fix it in his memory. Unless the details jof dreams are recalled after being awake, or are related or written down, they have a great tendency to be forgotten. This probably results from the fact.that although they often seem so vivid they are really of the nature of thoughts and ideas. The scenes are raised as imagery, and in ideation only just as one may think about scenes when awake. They are, in other words, not actually seen by the eyes or heard by the ears.

" Dreams being, as we believe, simply the-thoughts, ideas, and imaginations of a person whose; whole communal consciousness is not awake, there can be nothing mysterious concerning them. We believe with Sir Clifford Allbut that sound sleep is dreamless, and that it is only when a person is partly awake that dreams take plaoe. We know that every moment of the day in our wakeful state, thoughts, ideas, memories,' pictures, imaginations follow one another in varying sequences and vividness through our consciousness.

" Now, if that be so, is there anything .surprising in the fact that the same thing occurs when the brain is only partly asleep, when the person who has been asleep is gradually waking and becoming more and more conscious ? Is there any mystery if some of the thoughts, ideas, imaginations are divorded from reality, when it h known that they are lonly partly consciously corrected and also may be deprived of some of their necessary associations* because some of the associated neurones have not been stimulated ?

"If it be Asserted that the brain and communal consciousness always awake ftfom the state of sleep simultaneously, then our theory would be controverted, but, given that the sleep-* er gradually awakens out of sleep, and that in our wakeful state we are always thinking, etc., it follows conclusively that there must be a state between sound sleep and the fully awake state when the thoughts, ideas, images, etc., pass through the mind as they do in the wakeful state, but without the full wide-awake communal consciousness to correct them. " That is what constitutes the dream. If the person were fully awake it would not be a dream, but his ordinary thoughts, ideas, etc. It is therefore easy to explain why we dream. It would bo practically impossible to find an explanation if there were no such thing as dreaming. Absence of dream could result only from a person awaking instantly."