Dreams | Page 7

It has come to us under the name of "The
Devil's Sonata." But it is very difficult, in regard to such old cases, to
distinguish between history and legend. We should have
auto-observations of certain authenticity. Now I have not been able to
find anything more than that of the contemporary English novelist,
Stevenson. In a very curious essay entitled "A Chapter on Dreams," this
author, who is endowed with a rare talent for analysis, explains to us
how the most original of his stories have been composed or at least
sketched in dreams. But read the chapter carefully. You will see that at
a certain time in his life Stevenson had come to be in an habitual
psychical state where it was very hard for him to say whether he was
sleeping or waking. That appears to me to be the truth. When the mind
creates, I would say when it is capable of giving the effort of
organization and synthesis which is necessary to triumph over a certain
difficulty, to solve a problem, to produce a living work of the
imagination, we are not really asleep, or at least that part of ourselves

which labors is not the same as that which sleeps. We cannot say, then,
that it is a dream. In sleep, properly speaking, in sleep which absorbs
our whole personality, it is memories and only memories which weave
the web of our dreams. But often we do not recognize them. They may
be very old memories, forgotten during waking hours, drawn from the
most obscure depths of our past; they may be, often are, memories of
objects that we have perceived distractedly, almost unconsciously,
while awake. Or they may be fragments of broken memories which
have been picked up here and there and mingled by chance, composing
an incoherent and unrecognizable whole. Before these bizarre
assemblages of images which present no plausible significance, our
intelligence (which is far from surrendering the reasoning faculty
during sleep, as has been asserted) seeks an explanation, tries to fill the
lacunæ. It fills them by calling up other memories which, presenting
themselves often with the same deformations and the same
incoherences as the preceding, demand in their turn a new explanation,
and so on indefinitely. But I do not insist upon this point for the
moment. It is sufficient for me to say, in order to answer the question
which I have propounded, that the formative power of the materials
furnished to the dream by the different senses, the power which
converts into precise, determined objects the vague and indistinct
sensations that the dreamer receives from his eyes, his ears, and the
whole surface and interior of his body, is the memory.
Memory! In a waking state we have indeed memories which appear and
disappear, occupying our mind in turn. But they are always memories
which are closely connected with our present situation, our present
occupation, our present action. I recall at this moment the book of M.
d'Hervey on dreams; that is because I am discussing the subject of
dreams and this act orients in a certain particular direction the activity
of my memory. The memories that we evoke while waking, however
distant they may at first appear to be from the present action, are
always connected with it in some way. What is the rôle of memory in
an animal? It is to recall to him, in any circumstance, the advantageous
or injurious consequences which have formerly arisen in analogous
circumstances, in order to instruct him as to what he ought to do. In
man memory is doubtless less the slave of action, but still it sticks to it.

Our memories, at any given moment, form a solid whole, a pyramid, so
to speak, whose point is inserted precisely into our present action. But
behind the memories which are concerned in our occupations and are
revealed by means of it, there are others, thousands of others, stored
below the scene illuminated by consciousness. Yes, I believe indeed
that all our past life is there, preserved even to the most infinitesimal
details, and that we forget nothing, and that all that we have felt,
perceived, thought, willed, from the first awakening of our
consciousness, survives indestructibly. But the memories which are
preserved in these obscure depths are there in the state of invisible
phantoms. They aspire, perhaps, to the light, but they do not even try to
rise to it; they know that it is impossible and that I, as a living and
acting being, have something else to do than to occupy myself with
them. But suppose that, at a given moment, I become disinterested in
the present situation, in the present action--in short, in all which
previously has fixed and guided my memory; suppose, in other words,
that