Dreaming and Hypnosis

I am assured that a lady of a well-known court saw in a dream and described to her friends the person she afterwards married, and the hall in which the betrothal was celebrated; and she did this before she had seen or known either the man or the place. They attributed the circumstance to some indefinite secret presentiment; but chance may produce this effect, since it is quite rare that it happens; besides, dream-images being somewhat obscure, there is more liberty in connecting them afterwards with certain others.—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

§ 79. Sleep and Dream.—The profound sleep that comes to us every night, and that we take entirely as a matter of course, rests without any doubt upon an instinctive tendency; but there can be little doubt, either, that the instinct has been modified in the course of human evolution. It seems probable, indeed, that profound sleep, the lapse of all but the vegetative organic functions, has been developed from the same fundamental tendency as hypnosis, so that natural sleep and artificial hypnosis represent two branches which spring from a single stem. This original and instinctive tendency is toward what we may call, in biological phrase, a partial or defensive sleep, a rest enjoyed while the animal is still partly on guard. It underlies the sleep of the mother, who is roused at once by the movement of her infant child; the sleep of the nurse, who is awaked by the restlessness of her patient; the sleep of the tired horseman or driver, who keeps the saddle or holds the reins, and remains alive to any sign of uneasiness on the part of his horse. It shows also in the ability of the wearied surgeon to rouse himself and perform an operation, though he falls asleep once more the moment it is over and has no remembrance of it at his normal waking. Such a partial rest, persisting only thus occasionally in the life of civilised man, is all that an animal surrounded by dangers can afford; if sight and smell and taste may be allowed to lapse, still touch and hearing must keep awake,—must keep awake, at any rate, to the kind of stimulus that spells danger. We are speaking now in figurative terms; the history and nervous mechanism of the sleep-tendency offer a problem to science, and must be scientifically worked out; but it is enough here if you get a general notion of the way in which sleep began.

In process of time, as dangers grow less or as the nightly care of the community is put into the hands of watchmen whose special duty it is to signal their approach, sleep becomes total and profound. Even our own protected sleep, however, is not always undisturbed. We resign ourselves to it with a full sense of security; and we go to sleep in a dark and quiet room, we rid ourselves of the friction of clothes, we keep a constant temperature in our bedroom, we lie down. Sleep, nevertheless, is interrupted, more or less often according to age and constitution, by a dream, by a series of experiences like those of the waking life; and sometimes the dream is accompanied by muscular activity; we talk or walk in our sleep.

The dream, then, is subject-matter for psychology; and the first question that we have to ask about it concerns its make-up; of what mental processes is the dream composed? The answer is twofold. So far as pattern goes, anything whatsoever may appear in the dream-state: perception, memory, emotion, imagination, thought, everything. But as regards the mental processes themselves, the dream is selective; certain processes are preferred for dreaming, so to say, as certain processes are preferred for the representation of self. The details of dreams are very quickly forgotten; and there is always danger lest recall and report, in the waking state, change the terms of a dream, translate them from their original mode into the customary terms of waking experience. We have, however, a large number of records, taken under favourable conditions, and we find substantial agreement among the various observers. Dreams are mainly visual, though lights are more and colours are less common, perhaps, than is ordinarily supposed. Next in order of frequency to vision stands audition; conversation, especially, is a common feature of dreams. Next follow sense-feelings and feeling-attitudes; unpleasant experiences seem, on the whole, to be more frequent than pleasant, though there are marked individual differences. Thereafter, at a wide remove, come touch and kinÆsthesis and organic complexes; and last of all, taste and smell.

We know so little of the nervous correlates of the dream that a discussion of these facts must of necessity be speculative. It has been said that we dream largely in terms of sight for the same reason that we remember and imagine largely in those terms (‘dream’ is, for that matter, the older English word for ‘imagine’): the eye is the most important of all the sense-organs, the organ most continuously used, and the organ most relied upon for knowledge of the outside world; hence the visual centre of the brain has multitudinous connections with all the other brain-centres, and is readily excited when any one of them is excited. It has been pointed out, also, that the eye is extremely sensitive to slight changes of illumination, as well as to changes in the pressure of the eyelids, the state of circulation in the retina, and so forth; and that the sensations thus set up are reinforced by the persistent central grey. Observation has proved that the figures of a dream-scene may roughly correspond with the dots and splashes of light and colour that you see over the dark field of vision just before you fall asleep. So in regard to hearing: it may be said that verbal perceptions and ideas are, in the waking life, subordinate in number and importance only to those of vision; and it may be said, also, that the ear is the great defensive organ of the night-time, so that ear-sleep (if we may coin the word) is rarely profound, and the ear is liable to excitation by any chance crack or rustle in our surroundings, even by the pulsing of the blood through its own vessels. Here, indeed, we raise the whole difficult question of the origination of dreams. We cannot say that a dream may not arise ‘in the brain’ altogether apart from stimulation of a sense-organ; yet the sense-organs are always liable to stimulation, from without or from within; we know that stimuli, too weak to arouse a sleeper, will set up dreams; and it seems safe to conclude that most dreams are originated by sensory stimulation, while their subsequent course is due to associative and perhaps to determining tendencies active at the moment. Attempts have been made to refer certain familiar kinds of dream—dreams of flying, falling, appearing in public scantily clothed, preparing for a journey, etc.—to particular forms of stimulus: arrest of heart-beat, irregular breathing, cold from the slipping down of bed-clothes, etc.; but no positive correlation has been arrived at.

Dreams are ordinarily regarded as the type of fantastic and disordered experience, “the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy”; and some dreams, it is true, are very fragmentary, and some dream-combinations seem ridiculous enough to the waking judgement, and some shifts of dream-scene are startlingly abrupt. It may be questioned, nevertheless, whether the changes are in fact more sudden or more radical than those of the waking life, and whether the grouping is more fantastic than in the day-dream. The great perceptive attitudes remain for the most part unchanged. We notice, on later reflection, that time may be curiously foreshortened, so that we have the events of a day crowded into a few seconds; but this is due partly to the occurrence of attitudes, of the nutshell-packing of experiences (p. 271), such as we find also in our waking memories, and partly to our own reflective reading of the dream; we, who are now awake, distribute the events over a day, much as the novelist may do in telling his story, or the playwright in developing his plot. The sense of personal identity is rarely lost; and the dream frequently reflects the personality of the dreamer; temperament, interests, principles, show themselves in it; no one of us could dream his neighbour’s dreams. In general, too, the dream plays about a topic or situation; and if the changes are both sudden and profound, we must remember that our waking trains are held in course, as dreams are not, by the continuity of the stimuli around us, and that even so we are often interrupted in a current train, and shift from topic to topic at a moment’s notice. The dream is under no external control by an environment, nor is it as a rule organised and regulated throughout by a dominant determining tendency, as is the case with thought and constructive imagination. It is subject, however, to the laws of associative tendency, and sometimes at any rate it seems to issue from a determination; a dream may, for example, be continued on successive nights. On the whole, then, dream-experience is less disorderly than is usually supposed. Our statements must be guarded: we cannot say that the perceptive attitudes are never disturbed; we know that personality may be greatly modified; we know that scene may follow scene in the most bizarre way. The whole trend of popular psychology, however, is to emphasize the differences between dreaming and waking, while the trend of accurate observation is to bring them together.

The dream-incidents are derived, in the lighter stages of of sleep, mainly from the incidents of the preceding day, and in the deeper stages mainly from the remoter experience of the waking life. This is what we should expect from our knowledge of the temporal course of associative tendencies. Moreover, we know that, in profound sleep, the brain is comparatively bloodless; and it is reasonable to suppose that, in dreaming, the activity of the tendencies is local and sporadic. That would account for the incongruities that our waking judgement discovers in the dream-situations, and also for the general ineffectiveness of dream-thought. When, however, we enquire further into the nervous mechanism of dreaming, we must enter the realm of hypothesis. It is a real puzzle, for instance, that we do not oftener walk and talk in our sleep; for dream-ideas are vivid, and the vivid ideas of the waking life are ordinarily followed or accompanied by action. We may guess that there is a positive blocking of the nerve-paths that lead from sensory to motor centres in the brain, or from the motor centres to the muscles; else the dream would surely be talked or acted out; but we can say nothing definite about this motor inhibition. The organism at large seems to be under a ‘negative suggestion’ in regard to movement; for the pattern of action—though, like all the mental patterns, it may appear in the dream-state—is notably less frequent than the patterns of perception and idea and emotion.

We said that dream-ideas are vivid; and there is no doubt that dreams in general have an hallucinatory character; dream-images are extremely vivid, dream-scenes are staged in what is taken for objective space, dream-events occur without any felt dependence upon the dreamer. This impression of the reality of dream-incident is partly due to a negative condition; we have no means, in the dream-state, of testing or checking what happens. In the waking life we compare experience with experience; in the dream there is nothing with which the present train of ideas may be compared. It seems, however, that the hallucinatory character is native to our dream-ideas, that it is due to positive as well as negative conditions; though, again, we cannot say what the conditions are, until we know more about the nervous correlate of dreaming. The net result is that, in popular phrase, we take our dreams for granted; the dream-world, so long as we are in it, appears as real as the world of our waking existence. This does not at all mean that we accept, blindly, everything that takes place. We may protest and criticise in dreams, just precisely as we protest and criticise in real life; we may dream that we are dreaming, just as we sometimes say ‘I must have been dreaming’ when we give a wrong account of some waking experience or find ourselves mistaken in a recollection; and we may have a sense of unreality in dreams, just as we have it now and again in waking situations. It means only that the nervous system of the dreamer is stamped with the great biological tendencies that we have noted and discussed; the tendency to take things as real is present by night as well as by day.

The old common-sense notion that dreams are prophetic has no foundation in fact. The idea that underlies it—the idea that dreams must be of some use to the organism—nevertheless persists, and has found recent expression in a comprehensive theory of dreams. The theory is that all dreams, if one interprets them aright, represent the fulfilment of a wish, entertained in the waking life but repressed by circumstances. The organism attains by night, though in veiled and transmuted shape, what it has failed of attaining by day. This theory has been elaborated and illustrated with very great ingenuity; but its claims are too sweeping. Recent observations seem to show that the wish-dream is likely to occur in the hours before waking, rather than in the early hours of the night or in the middle period of profound sleep; that many dreams cannot be interpreted, even with the best will, as fulfilments of wish; and, in particular, that fear-dreams form a category as distinct and ultimate as wish-dreams. The merit of the theory is that it emphasises the feeling-processes of the dream-life; it does not give us the key to the psychology of dreaming.

§ 80. Hypnosis.—We have seen that there are two lines of development from partial or defensive sleep; and that hypnosis is the final term of the one line, as normal deep sleep is the final term of the other. Hypnosis may therefore be regarded as a state in which the organism is partly asleep, and partly alert and awake. The wakefulness is characterised by a high degree of attention; and the hypnotised subject is accordingly liable to suggestion by anything that fits in with the direction of attention.

The symptoms of hypnosis do not follow any stereotyped pattern; so that it is difficult to draw a generalised picture of the hypnotic individual. If, however, we are willing to run the risk of generalisation, we may distinguish three successive stages in the phenomena. The hypnotised subject is at first heavy or drowsy; his behaviour is like that of a man suddenly aroused from sound sleep, and not yet ‘come to himself.’ Then follows the stage of light hypnosis or, as it is technically called, the stage of catalepsy. The subject is to some extent anÆsthetic; his sense-organs are closed to all the ordinary impressions from the outside world. At the same time, he hears what is said to him by the operator, and performs any action that the operator may suggest. He does nothing without the word of command; so that he will maintain a position, however uncomfortable it might be under ordinary circumstances, until the order comes to relax it. On waking, he remembers cloudily what took place during hypnosis. In the third and final stage, which is known as somnambulism, the anÆsthesia becomes more complete; and the subject not only acts, but also perceives, at the bidding of the operator; takes coal for sugar, ink for wine, tapping on the table for the playing of a violin, and so forth. On waking, he has no memory of what has taken place.

We see, then, that there are four main symptoms of hypnosis: anÆsthesia, motionlessness, suggestibility and amnesia; and it is worth while to remind ourselves, at once, that all these symptoms have their counterparts in the normal waking life. Thus, a child falls down and hurts itself; it may be crying bitterly; but you distract its attention by a toy, and the crying stops and the pain is forgotten; the diversion of attention has meant anÆsthesia. Again, you are on a country walk with a friend, and you begin to discuss some topic of mutual interest; you both get more and more absorbed, and you both walk more and more slowly, until presently you find yourselves at a standstill in the middle of the road; concentrated attention has meant arrest of movement. If the lecturer in a class-room says: ‘I want you now to take down what I am going to say,’ the suggestion is immediately accepted, and the whole class makes ready to write. Finally, we are all forgetful of what happens in a particular situation if circumstances change and we are confronted by another situation; how many of us remember our dreams? The new day brings its novel situations, and the dreams drop out of sight; and the change from dreaming to waking is no greater than the change from the hypnotic to the normal state. Hence the peculiarity of hypnosis is not the introduction of strange or curious phenomena, but rather the grouping, in an extreme and unusual way, of phenomena with which we are in principle familiar.

It would seem to follow from this analysis that we are all and sundry liable, under certain favourable conditions, to fall into the hypnotic state; and that conclusion is borne out by the facts. Only idiots and infants are exempt from hypnosis; and they are exempt only because of the low development of attention, because they cannot, under any conditions, concentrate or ‘pull themselves together.’ When people tell you that Professor So-and-so tried to hypnotise them, but that their will proved too strong for him, you may reply that they do not understand what they are talking about; it would be as logical for them to assert that the champion tennis-player of the world had failed to beat them in a match, because they had refused to lift a racquet. The stronger the ‘will,’ that is to say, the stronger the habit of absorbed attention and the greater the power of dominant determinations, the easier is the induction of hypnosis. Moreover, as human beings are one and all liable to be hypnotised, so do we find that the animals, in their degree, are liable to something like catalepsy. The nightly sleep of birds and the winter-sleep of many animals is a cataleptic sleep; very many insects ‘sham dead,’ as we say, when they are surprised or handled; and animals may be thrown, by manipulation, into an artificial state which resembles catalepsy in ourselves, and which has received the like name of cataplexy (‘catalepsy’ is a seizure, and ‘cataplexy’ is a stroke).

So much for the primary facts: what, now, of the ‘operator’? Well, it is quite possible to hypnotise oneself, just as it is quite possible to put oneself to sleep by counting sheep or listening to an imaginary rain. One has only to mean or intend to oneself that the hypnotic state is coming, and—if there is no interruption—it will presently come; self-suggestion or autosuggestion may be as effective as the suggestion of an operator. For in every case the influence that the operator has over the subject is an influence given him by the subject; the immediate conditions of hypnosis lie in the subject himself, and not in the personality of some other man. The professional operator has, it is true, two advantages. He asserts emphatically that he ‘can hypnotise’; he advertises; and we tend to believe emphatic and repeated statements, however groundless they may really be; so that we are likely to give him an influence over us before we have even seen him. Secondly, the operator knows, from long experience with hypnotised subjects, how the individual shall most readily be brought into the hypnotic state, how (that is) his complete attention may be secured and directed: whether by coaxing or by bullying, whether by strokes of the hand that suggest a gradual flow of power or by a smart blow on the back of the neck that produces a momentary helplessness and confusion. All the ‘methods’ of hypnotising are so many tricks to bring about a state of undivided attention and a corresponding suggestibility in the subject. So the operator has genuine advantages, but they are advantages that might be secured by anyone who took the trouble; they are not connected with special gifts or superiorities.

Here, however, you may raise an objection; you will say that operator and subject are en rapport, that there is a special bond which connects them, and that the records of hypnosis prove it. Yes, there may be a special bond; and yet the preceding paragraph sets forth the truth about the operator. Do we not all believe in our own physician, our own family lawyer, our own clergyman? and yet our neighbours make different choices. Suppose, then, that you have first-hand evidence of the powers of some platform operator, or of some physician who treats his patients hypnotically; you may very easily come to think that this particular man has a peculiar control over you. You may suggest this belief to yourself, or perhaps the physician—not wishing to have his case interfered with by others—may suggest it to you; in any event, you are imbued with the idea that this man, and this man only, is able to treat you; and it then follows, naturally, that the required concentration of attention and the required openness to suggestion can be secured only when he is present. But the rapport is, after all, nothing more than an insistent belief of your own; it is neither more effective nor less intelligible than would be the contrary belief that a certain person of your acquaintance could not hypnotise you. So far, therefore, from invalidating our former conclusions, the occasional existence of the rapport serves to confirm them.

We now turn from the hypnotic state itself to its relations with the waking state; and the first point to consider is the fact of post-hypnotic or terminal suggestion. Suppose that an operator suggests to the hypnotised subject that a certain action is to be performed at such-and-such a time after waking; “before I wake you let me impress upon you that you are to drink two glasses of water at five o’clock this afternoon; you understand?—two glasses of water at five o’clock.” The subject rouses; has no memory of the command; and yet, when the time comes, obediently pours and drinks the water. The fact is, you see, that the suggestion of time builds a bridge between the two separate states, the hypnotic and the waking; the idea of time is common to both. Hence when the suggested time comes round, and the subject knows—by the clock, by the sun, by his occupation, by his organic sensations—that five o’clock is approximately here, this idea acts as a suggestion; the hypnotic state is reinstated for a while, though probably in weakened form; and the action is performed. As soon as it is over, the subject is his waking self again.

We have the obverse of this post-hypnotic suggestion in the phenomenon of double consciousness. A subject is hypnotised and becomes somnambulistic; when he is waked, he has no memory whatsoever of the events that occurred during the hypnotic state. Later, he is hypnotised again; and now it turns out that he remembers what took place during the previous hypnosis. So he seems to have a double consciousness; the normal waking consciousness, which is sensibly continuous in his waking states, and a secondary hypnotic consciousness, which is continuous from one state of somnambulism to another. There is, again, nothing mysterious in the facts; we have their parallel in the normal shifts of personality; we have seen that a man is a different self in the office, on the golf-links, with his children in the nursery; and we have now only to add that the known laws of memory are adequate to these phenomena of double consciousness. For we do not pass in thought from one situation to another unless the situations are connected by some idea which is common to them both; the hard-worked professional man, when he is on the links, forgets the office; that is the reason for his play; and he forgets the office because there is no community of ideas between his work and his recreation. In hypnosis, too, we break sharply with the waking life; if the two are to be connected, a bridge must be built ad hoc by the operator; but when we relapse into hypnosis we pick up again the thread of our hypnotic memory, as naturally as the professional man picks up his work when he seats himself at his desk after a half-holiday.

There are still a couple of questions, often asked by students, that you may care to have answered; and the first of them usually takes the form: Can a man be hypnotised against his will? To which the author’s reply always is: It depends on what you mean by ‘against his will.’ For consider! There is no reason at all why we may not, any one of us, be taken off guard and surprised into the hypnotic state. We have probably all been surprised by sleep during a lecture or a sermon; the conditions were favourable, and we nodded. So the conditions may be favourable for hypnosis; and if someone is watching us, and sees that the conditions are favourable, he may have us hypnotised before we know where we are. The risk is not great; but the possibility is there. Again, if a patient has fallen into the habit of taking hypnotic treatment, and if he has thus slipped into a position of invalidish dependence upon his physician, so that obedience to the suggestion of hypnosis has become natural to him, then it is entirely likely that the physician’s command would induce the hypnotic state, even if the patient at the time should not desire it. And what holds of physician and patient holds of any operator and any subject in like circumstances; the habit of obedience grows by obeying. In this sense, then, one might be hypnotised ‘against one’s will.’ If, however, the question means what it is probably intended to mean: Can another man come to me and, by virtue of some inherent power, force me into hypnosis in spite of my resistance to that suggestion? then the answer is No; no more than a man can force you to lend him money or to perjure yourself for him in a court of law. It is you who must entertain his suggestion; so long as you refuse to do that, you are immune to hypnosis at his hands.

The other question concerns the value of hypnosis for medical or therapeutic purposes; can hypnosis effect cures? can it replace the anÆsthetics of ordinary medical practice? It has, as a matter of fact, received fairly extended trial as an anÆsthetic; and while it has allowed many operations, minor and major, to be carried out successfully, it is far less reliable than the an Æsthetic drugs; mainly, no doubt, because it cannot be administered by the physician, as drugs can, but depends upon the attitude of the patient himself. There is no future for hypnosis in this connection. As to its therapeutic value, we can only say that whatever can be accomplished by suggestion, in the normal life, can be accomplished by the very strong suggestion of hypnosis in the disordered life. A suggestion can initiate, modify, and arrest movement; a sharp rebuke will start a child into activity, or change his occupation, or stop a present misdeed and prevent like misdeeds in the immediate future. A suggestion, again, can make us blush; and a suggestion can make us cry. Here, then, is the therapeutic value of hypnosis; it may arrest or remedy habits like alcoholism, and it may act upon derangements of circulation and secretion. Farther than this it cannot go; and even within these limits its utility is variable. Some children obey the first word of command, and others must be bidden over and over again before they do as they are told; some of us blush easily, and some hardly ever; some are readily stirred to tears, and some with great difficulty. So it is with the liability to hypnotic suggestion; everyone is liable, but not everyone to the same degree. Besides, as we saw just now, the habit of hypnosis grows, like all habits, upon him who has formed it; the patient may develop a craving for the hypnotic treatment, and in this way may take on a habit of dependence, of constant reliance upon others, which is as afflicting and demoralising as the disorder which the treatment was meant to cure. So that, on the whole, hypnosis should not be lightly appealed to; the decision should in every case remain in the hands of the experienced physician.

There is one other effect of hypnosis that we have not spoken of in detail, and that is of great psychological interest; the somnambulist, we said, will perceive as the operator wishes him to perceive, will take coal for sugar and ink for wine. It has long been debated whether this statement is literally true. The hypnotised subject behaves as if he perceived the sugar and the wine; but is there any reason to think that he actually perceives them? Or if the suggestion is negative, and the subject is told that a certain person has left the room, he will behave as if that person were no longer present; but does he actually fail to see him? May not the suggestion bear directly upon the subject’s conduct, and leave his perceptions unchanged? The facts point in both directions. Many of the apparent changes of perception are, in all probability, nothing more than changes of behaviour towards the perceptual stimuli; but there is, all the same, no impossibility in a change of perception itself. We have already noted the negative effects of abstraction (p. 281); and recent experiments with normal subjects seem to show conclusively that a suggestion, a form of words that carries the force of a command, may set up the mental process, or the change of mental processes, normally correlated with presence or change of external stimulus. A red, seen under the suggestion of blue, will not only be reported as bluish, but will actually look bluish; and a thermally indifferent impression will not only be reported as warm or cold, but will actually be felt warm or cold. If such things happen in the normal waking life, they may assuredly happen in the narrowed and intensive suggestibility of the hypnotic state.

References

A. Moll, Hypnotism, 1891; W. Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 1896, Lect. xxii.; M. de ManacÉÏne, Sleep, 1897; J. Jastrow, Fact and Fable in Psychology, 1900; E. Jones, Freud’s Theory of Dreams, in American Journal of Psychology, xxi., April 1910, 283 ff.; S. Ferenczi, The Psychological Analysis of Dreams, ibid., 309 ff.; M. Bentley, The Study of Dreams, ibid., xxvi., April 1915, 196 ff.