Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899

Produced by Judith Wirawan, Greg Bergquist, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by Biodiversity Heritage Library.)

Established by Edward L. Youmans

APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS

VOL. LIV

NOVEMBER, 1898, TO APRIL, 1899

NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1899

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

VOL. LIV. ESTABLISHED BY EDWARD L. YOUMANS. NO. 6.

APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

APRIL, 1899.

_EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS._

CONTENTS.

PAGE

I. The Stuff that Dreams are made of. By HAVELOCK ELLIS 721

II. The Best Methods of Taxation. By the Late Hon. DAVID A. WELLS. Part I 736

III. Mental Defectives and the Social Welfare. By MARTIN W. BARR, M. D. (Illustrated.) 746

IV. The Wheat Problem again. By EDWARD ATKINSON 759

V. The Coming of the Catbird. By SPENCER TROTTER 772

VI. Guessing, as Influenced by Number Preferences. By F. B. DRESSLAR 781

VII. Concerning Weasels. By WILLIAM E. CRAM. (Illustrated.) 786

VIII. Care of the Throat and Ear. By W. SCHEPPEGRELL, M. D. 791

IX. The Physical Geography of the West Indies. I. The Mammals of the Antilles. By Dr. F. L. OSWALD 802

X. Iron in the Living Body. By M. A. DASTRE 807

XI. The Malay Language. By Prof. R. CLYDE FORD 813

XII. Life on a South Sea Whaler. By FRANK T. BULLEN 818

XIII. Sketch of Manly Miles. (With Portrait.) 834

XIV. Editor's Table: Science and Culture.--Survival of the Fittest 842

XV. Scientific Literature 845

XVI. Fragments of Science 854

XVII. Index to Vol. LIV 865

NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 72 FIFTH AVENUE.

SINGLE NUMBER, 50 CENTS. YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION, $5.00.

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

Entered at the Post Office at New York, and admitted for transmission through the mails at second-class rates.

[Illustration: MANLY MILES.]

APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

APRIL, 1899.

THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF.

BY HAVELOCK ELLIS.

In our dreams we are taken back into an earlier world. It is a world much more like that of the savage, the child, the criminal, the madman, than is the world of our respectable civilized waking life. That is, in large part, it must be confessed, the charm of dreams. It is also the reason of their scientific value. Through our dreams we may realize our relation to stages of evolution we have long left behind, and by the self-vivisection of our sleeping life we may learn to know something regarding the mind of primitive man and the source of some of his beliefs, thus throwing light on the facts we obtain by ethnographic research.

This aspect of dreams has not always been kept steadily in sight, though it can no longer be said that the study of dreams is neglected. From one point of view or another--not only by the religious sect which, it appears, constitutes a "Dream Church" in Denmark, but by such carefully inquisitive investigators as those who have been trained under the inspiring influence of Prof. Stanley Hall--dreaming is seriously studied. I need not, therefore, apologize for the fact that I have during many years taken note from time to time and recorded the details and circumstances of vivid dreams when I could study their mechanism immediately on awakening, and that I have occupied myself, not with the singularities and marvels of dreaming--of which, indeed, I know little or nothing--but with their simplest and most general laws and tendencies. A few of these laws and tendencies I wish to set forth and illustrate. The interest of such a task is twofold. It not only reveals to us an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts, but by helping us to attain a clear knowledge of the ordinary dream processes, it enables us in advance to deal with many of the extraordinary phenomena of dreaming, sometimes presented to us by wonder-loving people as awesomely mysterious, if not indeed supernatural. The careful analysis of mere ordinary dreams frequently gives us the key to these abnormal dreams.

Perhaps the chief and most frequent tendency in the mechanism of dreaming is that by which isolated impressions from waking life flow together in dreams to be welded into a whole. There is then produced, in the strictest sense, a confusion. For instance, a lady, who in the course of the day has admired a fine baby and bought a big fish for dinner, dreams with horror and surprise of finding a fully developed baby in a large codfish. The confusion may be more remote, embodying abstract ideas and without reference to recent impressions. Thus I dreamed that my wife was expounding to me a theory by which the substitution of slates for tiles in roofing had been accompanied by, and intimately associated with, the growing diminution of crime in England. Amid my wife's rather contemptuous opposition, I opposed this theory, pointing out the picturesqueness of tiles, their cheapness, greater comfort both in winter and summer, but at the same time it occurred to me as a peculiar coincidence that tiles should have a sanguinary tinge suggestive of criminal bloodthirstiness. I need scarcely say that this bizarre theory had never suggested itself to my waking thoughts. There was, however, a real connecting link in the confusion--the redness--and it is a noteworthy point, of great significance in the interpretation of dreams, that that link, although clearly active from the first, remained subconscious until the end of the dream, when it presented itself as an entirely novel coincidence.

The best simile for the mechanism of the most usual type of dream phenomena is the magic lantern. Our dreams are like dissolving views in which the dissolving process is carried on swiftly or slowly, but always uninterruptedly, so that, at any moment, two (often indeed more) incongruous pictures are presented to consciousness which strives to make one whole of them, and sometimes succeeds and is sometimes baffled. Or we may say that the problem presented to dreaming consciousness resembles that experiment in which psychologists pronounce three wholly unconnected words, and require the subject to combine them at once in a connected sentence. It is unnecessary to add that such analogies fail to indicate the subtle complexity of the apparatus which is at work in the manufacture of dreams.

It is the presence of the strife I have just referred to between apparently irreconcilable groups of images, in the effort of overcoming the critical skepticism of sleeping consciousness--a feeble skepticism, it may be, but, as many people do not seem to recognize, a real skepticism--that the impressive emotional effects of dreams are often displayed. It sometimes happens that two irreconcilable groups of impressions reach sleeping consciousness, one flowing from a recent stratum of memories, the other from an older stratum. A typical form of this phenomenon often occurs in our dreams of dead friends. Professor Sully remarks that in dreams of the dead "awareness of the fact of death wholly disappears, or reduces itself to a vague feeling of something delightfully wonderful in the restored presence." That, however, as I have elsewhere shown,[1] is not the typical process in dreaming of the dead; although in the later dreams of those who often see their dead friends during sleep, the process is abbreviated, and the friend's presence is accepted without a struggle--a very interesting point, for it tends to show that in dreams, as in the hypnotic state, the recollection of previous similar states of consciousness persists, and the illusion is strengthened by repetition.

In typical dreams of a dead friend there is a struggle between that stream of recent memories which represents him as dead and that older stream which represents him as living. These two streams are inevitably caused by the fact of death, which sets up a barrier between them and renders one set of memories incongruous with the other set. In dreams we are not able to arrange our memories chronologically, but we are perpetually reasoning and striving to be logical. Consequently the two conflicting streams of memories break against each other in restless conflict, and sleeping consciousness endeavors to propound some theory which will reconcile them. The most frequent theories are, as I have found, either that the news of the friend's death was altogether false, or that he had been buried alive by mistake, or else that having really died his soul has returned to earth for a brief space. The mental and emotional conflict which such dreams involve renders them very vivid. They make a profound impression even after awakening, and for some sensitive persons are too sacred to speak of. Even so cautious and skeptical a thinker as Renan, when, after the death of his beloved sister Henriette, he dreamed more than once that she had been buried alive, and that he heard her voice calling to him from her grave, had to still his horrible suspicions by the consideration that she had been tended by experienced doctors. On less well-balanced minds, and more especially in primitive stages of 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.[2]

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. I expressed my surprise, having never before heard of it. Then, again to my surprise, he poured rather copiously from the bottle on to a plate of food, saying, in explanation, that it was pleasant to take and not dangerous. This was a vivid morning dream, and on awakening I had no difficulty in detecting the source of its various minor details, especially a note received on the previous evening and containing a dubious figure, the precise nature of which I had used my pocket lens to determine. But what was _selvdrolla_, the most vivid element of the dream? I sought vainly among my recent memories, and had almost renounced the search when I recalled a large bottle of salad oil seen on the supper table the previous evening; not, indeed, resembling the dream bottle, but containing a precisely similar fluid. _Selvdrolla_ was evidently a corruption of "salad oil." I select this dream to illustrate the uncertainty of dream consciousness, because it also illustrates at the same time the element of certainty in dream _subconsciousness_. Throughout my dream I remained, consciously, in entire ignorance as to the real nature of _selvdrolla_, yet a latent element in consciousness was all the time presenting it to me in ever-clearer imagery.

While the confusions of dreaming are usually the union of unconnected streams of imagery which have, as it were, come from widely remote parts of the memory system to strike together at the narrow focus of shaping consciousness, in some rarer cases the fused images are really suggested by analogy and are not accidental. Maury records successions of dream imagery strung together by verbal resemblances; I have found such dreams rare, but other forms of association fairly common. Thus I once dreamed that I was with a dentist who was about to extract a tooth from a patient. Before applying the forceps he remarked to me (at the same time setting fire to a perfumed cloth at the end of something like a broomstick in order to dissipate the unpleasant odor) that it was the largest tooth he had ever seen. When extracted I found that it was indeed enormous, in the shape of a caldron, with walls an inch thick. Taking from my pocket a tape measure (such as I always carry in waking life) I founds the diameter to be not less than twenty-five inches; the interior was like roughly hewn rock, and there were sea-weeds and lichenlike growths within. The size of the tooth seemed to me large, but not extraordinarily so. It is well known that pain in the teeth, or the dentist's manipulations, cause those organs to seem of extravagant extent; in dreams this tendency rules unchecked; thus a friend once dreamed that mice were playing about in a cavity in her tooth. But for the dream first quoted there was no known dental origin; it arose solely or chiefly from a walk during the previous afternoon among the rocks of the Cornish coast at low tide, and the fantastic analogy, which had not occurred to waking consciousness, suggested itself during sleep.

The following dream illustrates an association of quite a different order: I imagined I was sitting at a window, at the top of a house, writing. As I looked up from my table I saw, with all the emotions naturally accompanying such a sight, a woman in her night dress appear at a lofty window some distance off and throw herself down. I went on writing, however, and found that in the course of my literary employment--I am not clear as to its precise nature--the very next thing I had to do was to describe exactly such a scene as I had just witnessed. I was extremely puzzled at such an extraordinary coincidence: it seemed to me wholly inexplicable. Such dreams, reduplicating the imagery in a new sensory medium, are fairly common, with me at all events, though I can not easily explain them. The association is not so much of analogy as of sensory media, in this case the visual image becoming a verbal motor image. In other cases a scene is first seen as in reality, and then in a picture. It is interesting to observe the profound astonishment with which sleeping consciousness apperceives such simple reduplication.

It sometimes happens that the confused imagery of dreams includes elements drawn from forgotten memories--that is to say, that sleeping consciousness can draw on faint impressions of the past which waking consciousness is unable to reach. This is a very important type of dream because of its bearing on the explanation of certain dream phenomena which we are sometimes asked to bow down before as supernatural. I may illustrate what I mean by the following very instructive case. I woke up recalling the chief items of a rather vivid dream: I had imagined myself in a large old house, where the furniture, though of good quality, was ancient, and the chairs threatened to give way as one sat on them. The place belonged to one Sir Peter Bryan, a hale old gentleman who was accompanied by his son and grandson. There was a question of my buying the place from him, and I was very complimentary to the old gentleman's appearance of youthfulness, absurdly affecting not to know which was the grandfather and which the grandson. On awaking I said to myself that here was a purely imaginative dream, quite unsuggested by any definite experiences. But when I began to recall the trifling incidents of the previous day I realized that that was far from being the case. So far from the dream having been a pure effort of imagination I found that every minute item could be traced to some separate source. The name of Sir Peter Bryan alone completely baffled me; I could not even recall that I had at that time ever heard of any one called Bryan. I abandoned the search and made my notes of the dream and its sources. I had scarcely done so when I chanced to take up a volume of biographies which I had glanced through carelessly the day before. I found that it contained, among others, the lives of Lord _Peter_borough and George _Bryan_ Brummel. I had certainly seen those names the day before; yet before I took up the book once again it would have been impossible for me to recall the exact name of Beau Brummel, and I should have been inclined to say that I had never even heard the name of Bryan. I repeat that I regard this as, psychologically, a most instructive dream. It rarely happens (though I could give one or two more examples from the experience of friends) that we can so clearly and definitely demonstrate the presence of a forgotten memory in a dream; in the case of old memories it is usually impossible. It so happened that the forgotten memory which in this case re-emerged to sleeping consciousness was a fact of no consequence to myself or any one else. But if it had been the whereabouts of a lost deed or a large sum of money, and I had been able to declare, as in this case, that the impression received in my dream had never to my knowledge existed in waking consciousness, and yet were to declare my faith that the dream probably had a simple and natural explanation, on every hand I should be sarcastically told that there is no credulity to match the credulity of the skeptic.

The profound emotions of waking life, the questions and problems on which we spread our chief voluntary mental energy, are not those which usually present themselves at once to dream consciousness. It is, so far as the immediate past is concerned, mostly the trifling, the incidental, the "forgotten" impressions of daily life which reappear in our dreams. The psychic activities that are awake most intensely are those that sleep most profoundly. If we preserve the common image of the "stream of consciousness," we might say that the grave facts of life sink too deeply into the flood to reappear at once in the calm of repose, while the mere light and buoyant trifles of life, flung carelessly in during the day, at once rise to the surface, to dance and mingle and evolve in ways that this familiar image of "the stream of consciousness" will not further help us to picture.