The Nature of Dream-Intelligence.

It must not be supposed that this process of welding together the chaotic materials of our dreams is ever carried out with anything like the clear rational purpose of which we are conscious when seeking, in waking life, to comprehend some bewildering spectacle.  At best it is a vague longing, and this longing, it may be added, is soon satisfied.  There is, indeed, something, almost pathetic in the facility with which the dreamer’s mind can be pacified with the least appearance of a connection.  Just as a child’s importunate “Why?” is often silenced by a ridiculous caricature of an explanation, so the dreamer’s intelligence is freed from its distress by the least semblance of a uniting order.

It thus remains true with respect even to our most coherent dreams, that there is a complete suspension, or at least a considerable retardation, of the highest operations of judgment and thought; also a great enfeeblement, to say the least of it, of those sentiments such as the feeling of consistency and the sense of the absurd which are so intimately connected with these higher intellectual operations.

In order to illustrate how oddly our seemingly rational dreams caricature the operations of waking thought, I may, perhaps, be allowed to record two of my own dreams, of which I took careful note at the time.

On the first occasion I went “in my dream” to the “Stores” in August, and found the place empty.  A shopman brought me some large fowls.  I asked their price, and he answered, “Tenpence a pound.”  I then asked their weight, so as to get an idea of their total cost, and he replied, “Forty pounds.”  Not in the least surprised, I proceeded to calculate their cost:  40x10=400/12=33-1/3.  But, oddly enough, I took this quotient as pence, just as though I had not already divided by 12, and so made the cost of a fowl to be 2s. 9d., which seemed to me a fair enough price.

In my second dream I was at Cambridge, among a lot of undergraduates.  I saw a coach drive up with six horses.  Three undergraduates got out of the coach.  I asked them why they had so many horses, and they said, “Because of the luggage.”  I then said, “The luggage is much more than the undergraduates.  Can you tell me how to express this in mathematical symbols?  This is the way:  if x is the weight of an undergraduate, then x + x.n represents the weight of an undergraduate and his luggage together.”  I noticed that this sally was received with evident enjoyment.[99]

We may say, then, that the structure of our dreams, equally with the fact of their completely illusory character, points to the conclusion that during sleep, just as in the moments of illusion in waking life, there is a deterioration of our intellectual life.  The highest intellectual activities answering to the least stable nervous connections are impeded, and what of intellect remains corresponds to the most deeply organized connections.