SOGNO. — Dreaming is the realm of the subconscious; indeed, in it psychic activity processes material unfamiliar to the consciousness of the waking state. Yet empirical reality also becomes part of dreams, although experienced differently from in the waking state; it acquires, as it were, another value or flavor, so that P. Janet regards dreaming as a different orientation of the psychic personality, as an allotropic state of consciousness.
Considering the two aspects of normal psychic activity—that of wakefulness and that of dreaming—and wishing to call consciousness the specific mode of activity of wakefulness, the specific mode of activity during dreaming may be designated by the name dream consciousness. The two consciousnesses are connected with one another by a tenuous footbridge, namely memory; but, as modes of psychic activity, they are different. Thus it happens that one consciousness is not well informed about the other, and even less that either remains the guarantor of the other—precisely as occurs in cases of the pathological splitting of the personality (S. De Sanctis).
I. ORIGIN OF DREAMS
The problem of dreams has interested humanity since antiquity; the dreams of Pharaoh are well known, for which he found a famous interpreter in Joseph (Gen. 40:5 ff.; 41:1–37). Nevertheless, the Bible (Deut. 13:2 ff. and 18:10–12) warns the chosen people not to place their trust in augurs, diviners, and interpreters of dreams. In more recent times Descartes was driven to his meditations precisely by the problem of dreams. Among the authors who have concerned themselves with the origin of dreams, Scherner should be mentioned, as he studied dreams of cenesthetic origin. In 1875 Hildebrant drew attention to dreams induced by auditory stimuli: the sound of an alarm clock, for example, which is transformed into the sound of a bell or the crash of a row of plates falling onto the floor. In these cases the sensory stimulus produces at least part of the dream, which seems to the subject to have preceded the moment at which the stimulus enters into the dream episode.Among the attempts to study dreams experimentally, mention should be made of the studies of Foucault (1906), Stepanow (1915), and, more recently, S. De Sanctis, who succeeded in inducing dreams with words spoken softly into the ear, so as not to awaken the sleeper; with beams of light suddenly projected onto the eyelids; with odors, the binding of limbs, etc. The conclusions that can be drawn are the following: it is confirmed that sensory stimuli of various kinds can induce dreams connected with them; the same stimulus may give rise to dreams with different themes.
In this way the dream equivalents of nervous attacks and premonitory dreams of diseases are explained; Pascal, for example, dreamed that he was being strangled by a ribbon, and two days later was seized by a violent attack of angina pectoris; Arnaldo da Villanova dreamed that he had been bitten on one foot, and the following day saw an abscess develop. The fact that visual representations vastly predominate in dreams has led to the belief that dreams involve the visualization of auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, muscular, and visceral sensations that may be experienced during sleep. In sleep, the most important part seems to be due to the spontaneous reawakening of memories of the most interesting events, both recent and remote; sensory stimuli would have only an accessory role, that is, they could introduce into the dream current a foreign idea causing it to deviate. De Sanctis suggests the possibility that the affective charge linked to a representation may, in a dream, detach itself and be displaced onto other representations: this is a true transfert of emotion from one imaginary tableau to another.
Freud’s theory must be recalled, according to which all dreams would have a meaning and would reveal states of affective complexes and instincts which, prevented by censorship from rising into consciousness during waking life, would manifest themselves in disguised form during sleep, owing to the weakening of inhibitory powers. According to the author, dream content, even when it seems indecipherable, translates latent ideas which emerge in the dream as though in a different language, whose signs one need only learn to recognize in order to understand its meaning. «If, for example, I look at a rebus: it represents a house, on the roof of which there is a canoe, then an isolated letter, and a headless figure running. I could declare that neither the whole nor its various parts has any meaning, because a canoe ought not to be on the roof of a house and a headless person cannot run; moreover, the person is larger than the house, and, supposing that the whole were meant to represent a landscape, it would be inappropriate to introduce isolated letters into it, since such letters are not found in nature. I would not judge the rebus correctly unless I gave up considering the whole and its parts in this way and instead tried to replace each image with a syllable or a word which, for some reason or other, could be represented by that image. Once the words have thus been brought together, they will no longer be meaningless but may form some beautiful and profound sentence. The dream is a rebus». Freud recalls that censorship also operates in dreams, so that the scene is interrupted precisely at the moment when the repressed tendency is about to express itself with greatest intensity.
The laws according to which latent ideas are translated into dreams are condensation, displacement, dramatization, and symbolization. Through condensation, several latent ideas are summarized in a few images. Displacement consists in the fact that in a dream the affective cause which during waking life was concentrated on another object becomes concentrated upon a single image. Dramatization consists in the fact that in a dream latent ideas are expressed through concrete, scenic representations, as in language; for example, to indicate that a person is uncertain, one says that he finds himself at a crossroads; similarly, in a dream, doubt may find expression in two roads leading to different destinations. As for symbolization: in dreams one of the most constant symbols is the house, which signifies the human body, especially the female body; wood is a symbol of the mother; birth is symbolized by water, etc. Freud’s theory of dreams has a credible foundation, but it does not take due account of sensory stimuli, which can guide the dream current; moreover, not all dreams can be related to repressed complexes, nor can symbolization be accepted without reservations. It has been debated whether sleep is always accompanied by dreams. It is well known that alongside individuals who claim to dream every night, there are others who declare that they dream only rarely. Perhaps those who say they do not dream forget what they have dreamed. The dreams most commonly remembered are those of the morning before awakening, which are related to hypnopompic hallucinations, and those of the evening, at the moment of falling asleep, which are related to hypnagogic hallucinations.
II. MORAL CONSIDERATIONS
From what has been set forth, it follows that almost all those who have sought to interpret dreams naturally conclude that dreams are often the effect of things actually existing within or outside the person who dreams: there is therefore a causal relationship. Now science can proceed from the effect back to the cause; hence not every interpretation of dreams is to be condemned, since human science is capable of deducing from dreams useful data to be employed, for example, in the treatment of certain neuroses. It is necessary, however, to be certain that this is a matter of human science and to place one’s trust in a person who is serious also from the moral point of view.Knowing the natural causes of dreams, one may reasonably conclude something concerning the future; this too is morally licit if the dreams in question have a natural origin. To take dreams, however, as indicators of the future, without any natural causal connection, but solely on the basis of one’s own or another’s divinatory interpretations, is a sin of superstition, unless one is certain that the dream comes from God—which is exceedingly rare. With regard to dreams having sinful content (the most frequent being erotic dreams), it should be observed that, in themselves, all this unfolds without the intervention of the intellectual faculties (reason and will): there can therefore be neither imputability nor responsibility, except in causa, as might occur through maintaining conduct that is insufficiently chaste during the waking state.