Dreams | Page 8

I am asleep. Then these memories, perceiving that I have taken
away the obstacle, have raised the trapdoor which has kept them
beneath the floor of consciousness, arise from the depths; they rise,
they move, they perform in the night of unconsciousness a great dance
macabre. They rush together to the door which has been left ajar. They
all want to get through. But they cannot; there are too many of them.
From the multitudes which are called, which will be chosen? It is not
hard to say. Formerly, when I was awake, the memories which forced
their way were those which could involve claims of relationship with
the present situation, with what I saw and heard around me. Now it is
more vague images which occupy my sight, more indecisive sounds
which affect my ear, more indistinct touches which are distributed over
the surface of my body, but there are also the more numerous
sensations which arise from the deepest parts of the organism. So, then,
among the phantom memories which aspire to fill themselves with
color, with sonority, in short with materiality, the only ones that
succeed are those which can assimilate themselves with the color-dust
that we perceive, the external and internal sensations that we catch, etc.,
and which, besides, respond to the affective tone of our general
sensibility.[1] When this union is effected between the memory and the
sensation, we have a dream.

In a poetic page of the Enneades, the philosopher Plotinus, interpreter
and continuator of Plato, explains to us how men come to life. Nature,
he says, sketches the living bodies, but sketches them only. Left to her
own forces she can never complete the task. On the other hand, souls
inhabit the world of Ideas. Incapable in themselves of acting, not even
thinking of action, they float beyond space and beyond time. But,
among all the bodies, there are some which specially respond by their
form to the aspirations of some particular souls; and among these souls
there are those which recognize themselves in some particular body.
The body, which does not come altogether viable from the hand of
nature, rises toward the soul which might give it complete life; and the
soul, looking upon the body and believing that it perceives its own
image as in a mirror, and attracted, fascinated by the image, lets itself
fall. It falls, and this fall is life. I may compare to these detached souls
the memories plunged in the obscurity of the unconscious. On the other
hand, our nocturnal sensations resemble these incomplete bodies. The
sensation is warm, colored, vibrant and almost living, but vague. The
memory is complete, but airy and lifeless. The sensation wishes to find
a form on which to mold the vagueness of its contours. The memory
would obtain matter to fill it, to ballast it, in short to realize it. They are
drawn toward each other; and the phantom memory, incarnated in the
sensation which brings to it flesh and blood, becomes a being with a
life of its own, a dream.
The birth of a dream is then no mystery. It resembles the birth of all our
perceptions. The mechanism of the dream is the same, in general, as
that of normal perception. When we perceive a real object, what we
actually see--the sensible matter of our perception--is very little in
comparison with what our memory adds to it. When you read a book,
when you look through your newspaper, do you suppose that all the
printed letters really come into your consciousness? In that case the
whole day would hardly be long enough for you to read a paper. The
truth is that you see in each word and even in each member of a phrase
only some letters or even some characteristic marks, just enough to
permit you to divine the rest. All of the rest, that you think you see, you
really give yourself as an hallucination. There are numerous and
decisive experiments which leave no doubt on this point. I will cite

only those of Goldscheider and Müller. These experimenters wrote or
printed some formulas in common use, "Positively no admission;"
"Preface to the fourth edition," etc. But they took care to write the
words incorrectly, changing and, above all, omitting letters. These
sentences were exposed in a darkened room. The person who served as
the subject of the experiment was placed before them and did not know,
of course, what had been written. Then the inscription was illuminated
by the electric light for a very short time, too short for the observer to
be able to perceive really all the letters. They began by determining
experimentally the time necessary for seeing one letter of the alphabet.
It was then easy to arrange it so that the