Dream

DREAM. - The dream is the realm of the subconscious; in it, in fact, psychic activity elaborates a material that is unfamiliar to the consciousness of the waking state; however, empirical reality also becomes part of dreams, although it is experienced in a manner different from the waking state; it acquires, as it were, another value or flavor, so that P. Janet regards the dream as a different orientation of the psychic personality, as an allotropic state of consciousness.

Considering the two aspects of normal psychic activity — that of waking and that of the dream — and wishing to designate as consciousness the specific mode of activity of waking, the specific mode of activity during the dream can be qualified by the name of dream consciousness. The two consciousnesses are connected to each other by a tenuous footbridge that is memory; but they, as modes of psychic activity, are different; and so it happens that the one consciousness is not well informed of the other and that much less does the one remain guarantor of the other; precisely as happens in the case of pathological splitting of the personality (S. De Sanctis).

I. GENESIS OF DREAMS

The problem of dreams has interested man since antiquity; the dreams of Pharaoh are well known, and they found in Joseph a famous interpreter (Gen. 40:5 ff.; 41:1-37). Nevertheless the Bible (Deut. 13:2 ff. and 18:10-12) warns the chosen people not to give credence to soothsayers, 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 dealt with the origin of dreams, Scherner should be remembered, who studied dreams of cenesthetic origin. Hildebrandt in 1875 called attention to dreams prompted by auditory stimuli: the sound of an alarm clock, for example, which is transformed into the sound of a bell, into the crash of a row of plates falling to the floor. In these cases the sensory stimulus provokes at least a part of the dream, which seems to the subject to be prior to the moment when the stimulus enters into the dream episode.

Among the attempts to study dreams experimentally, mention should be made of the studies of Foucault (1906), of Stepanow (1915) and more recently of S. De Sanctis, who succeeded in provoking dreams with words spoken softly into the ear, so as not to wake the sleeper; with beams of light projected suddenly onto the eyelids; with odors, bandaging of limbs, etc. The deductions that can be drawn are the following: it remains confirmed that sensory stimuli of various kinds can prompt dreams connected with them; one and the same stimulus can arouse dreams with a different theme.

In this way the dream equivalents of nervous attacks and the dreams premonitory of illnesses find their explanation; Pascal, for example, dreamed of being strangled by a ribbon and two days later was seized by a violent attack of angina pectoris; Arnaldo da Villanova dreamed of having been bitten on a foot and the next day saw an abscess develop. The fact that in dreams visual representations prevail by far has led to the belief that in them there occurs a visualization of the auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, muscular and visceral sensations that may be had during sleep. In sleep the most important part seems due to the spontaneous reawakening of memories of the most interesting events, whether recent or remote; sensory stimuli would be of accessory importance, that is, they could introduce into the dream current an extraneous idea that makes it deviate. De Sanctis envisages the possibility that the affective charge, bound to a representation, may, in dreams, detach itself and become displaced onto other representations: this is a true transfert of the emotion from one fantastic picture to another.

One must recall Freud's theory according to which all dreams would have a meaning, and would be revealers of states of affective complexes and of instincts which, prevented by censorship from surfacing to consciousness during waking life, would manifest themselves masked, during sleep, because of the weakening of the inhibitory powers. According to the author the dream content, even when it seems indecipherable, translates latent ideas that surface in the dream as in a different language, whose signs one need only learn to know in order to understand the meaning. "If I look, for example, at a rebus: it represents a house, on whose roof there is a canoe, then an isolated letter, a headless figure running. I could declare that neither the whole nor its various parts have a meaning, because a canoe must not 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 ought to represent a landscape, it is not fitting to introduce into it isolated letters that are not found in nature. I would not judge the rebus correctly unless I renounced considering the whole and its parts in this way, and instead strove to replace every image with a syllable or with a word, which for some reason or other can be represented by this image. Thus joined together the words will no longer be devoid of meaning but may form some fine and profound phrase. The dream is a rebus." Freud recalls that in the dream too censorship holds sway, so that the scene is interrupted precisely at the moment when the repressed tendency is about to express itself with greater intensity.

The laws according to which the latent ideas would be translated into the dream are condensation, displacement, dramatization, symbolization. By condensation several latent ideas are summed up in a few images. Displacement consists in the fact that in the dream the affective cause that during waking life was concentrated on another object becomes concentrated on one image. Dramatization consists in the fact that in the dream the latent ideas are expressed with concrete, scenic figurations as in language; for example, to indicate that a person is in uncertainty, one says that he is at a crossroads; well then, in the dream doubt can find expression in two roads leading to a different destination. Symbolization: in the dream one of the most constant symbols is the house and it 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 foundation of credibility, but it does not take into due account the sensory stimuli that 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 known that alongside individuals who claim to dream every night, there are others who declare that they rarely dream. Perhaps those who say they do not dream forget what they have dreamed. The dreams most commonly remembered are those of the morning before waking, which are related to hypnopompic hallucinations, and those of the evening, while 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 come to the conclusion that dreams are often the effect of things really existing within or outside the person who dreams: there is therefore a relation of causality. Now science can trace back from the effect to the cause: therefore not every interpretation of dreams is condemnable, since human science is capable of deducing from dreams useful data to be used, for example, for the treatment of certain neuroses; it is necessary, however, that one be certain that this is human science and that one entrust oneself to a person who is serious also from the moral point of view.

Knowing the natural causes of dreams, one can reasonably conclude something about the future: which is also morally licit, if it is a question of dreams that have a natural origin. To take dreams, however, as indicators of the future, without any connection of natural causality, but only on the basis of divinatory interpretations of one's own or of others, is a sin of superstition, unless one is certain that the dream comes from God, which is very rare. As for dreams with a sinful content (the most frequent being erotic dreams), it should be observed that in themselves everything takes place without the intervention of the intellectual faculties (reason and will): there can therefore be no imputability and responsibility, except in cause, as could be the maintaining of a conduct not sufficiently chaste during the waking state.

Eleuterio Boganelli