DREAMS. These are mental activities, carried on during sleep, which are at times brought into consciousness by a process of secondary elaboration. They are as necessary a part of the brain's activity as is the movement of the heart or the storage of glycogen in the liver, functions of these two other organs re spectively. All people dream during sleep, but not all the dream activities come into consciousness. In some the memory of the dreaming is very distinct. In others it is less so. Careful atten tion to the subject shows the universality of the dream phenomena, and modern investigation is showing that the functional activity of the brain during sleep is of equal if not greater importance than the same activity during the waking state. The dream is the index or the mode of activity of the unconscious. Logical thinking, so-called, that of the conscious.
Cabanis, in his du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme,' says of Condillac, that he often brought to a conclusion in his dreams rea sonings on which he had been employed during the day, and which he had not completed when he went to bed; and of Franklin, that that wise and enlightened man believed that he had been often instructed in his dreams concerning the issue of events which at that time occupied his mind.
Coleridge thus describes the circumstances under which the fragment called Kubla Khan was composed: He had fallen asleep in his chair while reading in his Purchas' of a palace built by Khan Kubla, and remained in that state for about three hours; during which he could not have composed less than from 200 to 300 lines, if that can be called com position in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensa tion or consciousness of effort. On awaking he instantly sat down to commit the poem to paper. After he had written the lines subsequently pub lished, he was interrupted for a time, and when he returned to the task the poem had vanished from his memory. These are illustrations, by no means rare, of the fact that the real creative capacity of the brain is largely an unconscious product.
Viewed superficially, dreams are wanting in coherency; all probabilities and possibilities of time, place and 'circumstance are violated. Nothing is more common than for the mind in dreams to combine objects and events which apparently could have had no associated exist ence. The faces of friends long since dead and events long since past rise before us sometimes with more intense vividness than in real exist ence and cause no surprise by their incongruity.
The rapidity with which the dream takes place is also remarkable. We may seem to live a weary lifetime in the dream of a minute; the sprinkling of a few drops of water on a gentle man's face was accompanied by a dream in which the events of a whole life passed before him, ending with a protracted struggle on the borders of a lake into which he was plunged. The whole process must have taken place in a second or two, as the dreamer was aroused from sleep by the application of the water. Some authorities declare that all our dreams take place when we are in process of going to sleep or becoming awake, and that during deep sleep the mind is totally inactive. This is denied by the majority of philosophers, and with apparent reason.
Freud, one of the most acute and painstak ing of all of the students of the dream phe nomena, has truly stated that all men are great in their dreams. The dream is the primary creative art. Its great rapidity is due to the fact that in the unconscious all of the individual's life accumulated experiences are on view, as if in a cinematographic flash. The stream of the unconscious contains the entire urge of the in dividual's life, which when it would come into consciousness is immediately blocked off and only a tiny jet of it, as it were, permitted to pass beyond the portals into consciousness. It is a brain function to push back almost the entire force of this accumulated impulse and permit only a little of it to enter into real action —Le., to do useful work. By useful here is meant the purposeful work demanded by the rules of the herd.