United States or Armenia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The links of the chain which holds together these dream-images were really forged, in part, in our waking hours, though the process was so rapid as to escape our attention.
It may be added, that in many cases where a juxtaposition of dream-images seems to have no basis in waking life, careful reflection will occasionally bring to light some actual conjunction of impressions so momentary as to have faded from our recollection.
That music, by and of itself, cannot express the intellectual element in the beautiful dream-images of art with precision, is a palpable truth. Yet, by its imperial dominion over the sphere of emotion and sentiment, the connection of the latter with complicated mental phenomena is made to bring into the domain of tone vague and shifting fancies and pictures.
One may find a good deal of mystical writing on the nature and activity of this faculty, especially in German literature. The explanation of this element of organic unity in dreams is, it may be safely said, the crux in the science of dreams. That the laws of psychology help us to understand the sequences of dream-images, we have seen.
Most of us, probably, have gone through the experience of impolitely falling asleep when some one was reading to us, and of having dream-images suggested by the sounds that were still indistinctly heard.
Or else he saw her, closely, palpably before him, as she sat at her writing-table, frowning and a little flushed, her bent nape showing the light on her hair, her short lip pulled up by the effort of composition; and this picture had the violent reality of dream-images on the verge of waking.
Spinoza and Jean Paul Richter both experienced this survival of dream-images. Still more pertinent is the fact that the effects of retinal fatigue are producible by dream-images. The physiologist Gruithuisen had a dream, in which the principal feature was a violet flame, and which left behind it, after waking, for an appreciable duration, a complementary image of a yellow spot.
The flux of images in these dreams is very much the same as that in certain waking conditions, in which we relax attention, both external and internal, and yield ourselves wholly to the spontaneous play of memory and fancy. It is plain at a glance that the simultaneous concurrence of wholly disconnected initial impulses will serve to impress a measure of disconnectedness on our dream-images.
Each of these views is correct within certain limits; that is to say, there are dreams in which the strangest disorder seems to prevail, and others in which one detects the action of a central control. Yet, speaking generally, sequences of dream-images will be found to be determined by certain circumstances and laws, and so far not to be haphazard or wholly chaotic.
Finally, it is to be observed that an injury done to any part of the organism is apt to give rise to appropriate dream-images. In this way, very slight disturbances which would hardly affect waking consciousness may make themselves felt during sleep. Thus, for example, an incipient toothache has been known to suggest that the teeth are being extracted.
Word Of The Day