CHAPTER X: THE IDEAS OF SLEEP AND DREAMS.

§ 68. A conception which is made so familiar to us during education that we mistake it for an original and necessary one, is the conception of Mind, as an internal existence distinct from body. The hypothesis of a sentient, thinking entity, dwelling within a corporeal framework, is now so deeply woven into our beliefs and into our language, that we can scarcely imagine it to be one which the primitive man did not entertain, and could not entertain.

Yet if we ask what is given in experience to the untaught human being, we find that there is nothing to tell him of any such existence. From moment to moment he sees things around, touches them, handles them, moves them hither and thither. He knows nothing of sensations and ideas—has no words for them. Still less has he any such highly-abstract word or conception as consciousness. He thinks without observing that he thinks; and therefore never asks how he thinks, and what it is which thinks. His senses make him conversant only with objects externally existing, and with his own body; and he transcends his senses only far enough to draw concrete inferences respecting the actions of these objects. An invisible, intangible entity, such as Mind is supposed to be, is a high abstraction unthinkable by him, and inexpressible by his vocabulary.

This, which is obvious a priori, is verified a posteriori The savage cannot speak of internal intuition except in Edition: current; Page: [135] terms of external intuition. We ourselves, indeed, when saying that we see something that has been clearly explained, or grasp an argument palpably true, still express mental acts by words originally used to express bodily acts. And this use of words implying vision and touch, which with us is metaphorical, is, with the savage, not distinguished from literal. He symbolizes his mind by his eye. (See Principles of Psychology, § 404.)

But until there is a conception of Mind as an internal principle of activity, there can be no such conception of dreams as we have. To interpret the sights and sayings and doings we are conscious of during sleep, as activities of the thinking entity which go on while the senses are closed, is impossible until the thinking entity is postulated. Hence arises the inquiry—What explanation is given of dreams before the conception of Mind exists.

§ 69. Hunger and repletion, both very common with the primitive man, excite dreams of great vividness. Now, after a bootless chase and a long fast, he lies exhausted; and, while slumbering, goes through a successful hunt—kills, skins, and cooks his prey, and suddenly wakes when about to taste the first morsel. To suppose him saying to himself—“It was all a dream,” is to suppose him already in possession of that hypothesis which we see he cannot have. He takes the facts as they occur. With perfect distinctness he recalls the things he saw and the actions he performed; and he accepts undoubtingly the testimony of memory. True, he all at once finds himself lying still. He does not understand how the change took place; but, as we have lately seen, the surrounding world familiarizes him with unaccountable appearances and disappearances, and why should not this be one? If at another time, lying gorged with food, the disturbance of his circulation causes nightmare—if, trying to escape and being unable, he fancies himself in the clutches of a bear, and wakes with a shriek; why should he Edition: current; Page: [136] conclude that the shriek was not due to an actual danger? Though his squaw is there to tell him that she saw no bear, yet she heard his shriek; and like him has not the dimmest notion that a mere subjective state can produce such an effect—has, indeed, no terms in which to frame such a notion.

The belief that dreams are actual experiences is confirmed by narrations of them in imperfect language. We forget that discriminations easy to us, are impossible to those who have but few words, all concrete in their meanings, and only rude propositional forms in which to combine these words. When we read that in the language of so advanced a people as the ancient Peruvians, the word huaca meant “idol, temple, sacred place, tomb, hill, figures of men and animals,” we may judge how indefinite must be the best statements which the vocabularies of the rudest men enable them to make. When we read of an existing South American tribe, that the proposition—“I am an Abipone,” is expressible only in the vague way—“I, Abipone;” we cannot but infer that by such undeveloped grammatical structures, only the simplest thoughts can be rightly conveyed. When, further, we learn that among the lowest men inadequate words indefinitely combined are also imperfectly pronounced, as, for instance, among the Akka, whose speech struck Schweinfurth by its inarticulateness, we recognize a third cause of confusion. And thus prepared, we need feel no surprise on being told that the Zuni Indians require “much facial contortion and bodily gesticulation to make their sentences perfectly intelligible;” that the language of the Bushmen needs so many signs to eke out its meaning, that “they are unintelligible in the dark;” and that the Arapahos “can hardly converse with one another in the dark.” If, now, remembering all this, we ask what must happen when a dream is narrated by a savage, we shall see that even supposing he suspects some distinction between ideal actions and real actions, he cannot express it. His Edition: current; Page: [137] language does not enable him to say—“I dreamt that I saw,” instead of—“I saw.” Hence each relates his dreams as though they were realities; and thus strengthens in every other, the belief that his own dreams are realities.

What then is the resulting notion? The sleeper on awaking recalls various occurrences, and repeats them to others. He thinks he has been elsewhere; witnesses say he has not; and their testimony is verified by finding himself where he was when he went to sleep. The simple course is to believe both that he has remained and that he has been away—that he has two individualities, one of which leaves the other and presently comes back. He, too, has a double existence, like many other things.

§ 70. From all quarters come proofs that this is the conception actually formed of dreams by savages, and which survives after considerable advances in civilization have been made. Here are a few of the testimonies.

Schoolcraft tells us that the North American Indians in general, think “there are duplicate souls, one of which remains with the body, while the other is free to depart on excursions during sleep;” and, according to Crantz, the Greenlanders hold “that the soul can forsake the body during the interval of sleep.” The theory in New Zealand is “that during sleep the mind left the body, and that dreams are the objects seen during its wanderings;” and in Fiji, “it is believed that the spirit of a man who still lives will leave the body to trouble other people when asleep.” Similarly in Borneo. It is the conviction of the Dyaks that the soul during sleep goes on expeditions of its own, and “sees, hears, and talks.” Among Hill-tribes of India, such as the Karens, the same doctrine is held: their statement being that “in sleep it [the Là, spirit or ghost] wanders away to the ends of the earth, and our dreams are what the Là sees and experiences in his perambulations.” By the ancient Peruvians, too, developed as was the social state they had reached, Edition: current; Page: [138] the same interpretation was put upon the facts. They held that “the soul leaves the body while it is sleeping. They asserted that the soul could not sleep, and that the things we dream are what the soul sees in the world while the body sleeps.” And we are told the like even of the Jews: “Sleep is looked upon as a kind of death, when the soul departs from the body, but is restored again in awaking.”

Occurring rarely, it may be, somnambulism serves, when it does occur, to confirm this interpretation. For to the uncritical, a sleep-walker seems to be exemplifying that activity during sleep, which the primitive conception of dreams implies. Each phase of somnambulism furnishes its evidence. Frequently the sleeper gets up, performs various actions, and returns to rest without waking; and, recalling afterwards these actions, is told by witnesses that he actually did the things he thought he had been doing. What construction must be put on such an experience by primitive men? It proves to the somnambulist that he may lead an active life during his sleep, and yet find himself afterwards in the place where he lay down. With equal conclusiveness it proves to those who saw him, that men really go away during their sleep; that they do the things they dream of doing; and may even sometimes be visible. True, a careful examination of the facts would show that in this case the man’s body was absent from its place of rest. But savages do not carefully examine the facts. Again, in cases where the sleep-walker does not recollect the things he did, there is still the testimony of others to show him that he was not quiescent; and occasionally there is more. When, as often happens, his night-ramble brings him against an obstacle and the collision wakes him, he has a demonstration of the alleged fact that he goes hither and thither during sleep. On returning to his sleeping-place he does not, indeed, find a second self there; but this discovery, irreconcilable with the accepted notion, simply increases the confusion of his ideas about these matters. Unable to deny Edition: current; Page: [139] the evidence that he wanders when asleep, he takes his strange experience in verification of the current belief, without dwelling on the inconsistency.

When we consider what tradition, with its exaggerations, is likely to make of these abnormal phenomena, now and then occurring, we shall see that the primitive interpretation of dreams must receive from them strong support.

§ 71. Along with this belief there of course goes the belief that persons dreamt of were really met. If the dreamer thinks his own actions real, he ascribes reality to whatever he saw—place, thing, or living being. Hence a group of facts similarly prevalent.

Morgan states that the Iroquois think dreams real, and obey their injunctions—do what they are told by those they see in dreams; and of the Chippewas, Keating asserts that they fast for the purpose of “producing dreams, which they value above all things.” The Malagasy “have a religious regard to dreams, and think that the good dæmon . . . comes, and tells them in their dreams when they ought to do a thing, or to warn them of some danger.” The Sandwich Islanders say the departed member of a family “appears to the survivors sometimes in a dream, and watches over their destinies;” and the Tahitians have like beliefs. In Africa it is the same. The Congo people hold that what they see and hear in “dreams come to them from spirits;” and among East Africans, the Wanika believe that the spirits of the dead appear to the living in dreams. The Kaffirs, too, “seem to ascribe dreams in general to the spirits.” Abundant evidence is furnished by Bishop Callaway concerning the Zulus, whose ideas he has written down from their own mouths. Intelligent as these people are, somewhat advanced in social state, and having language enabling them to distinguish between dream-perceptions and ordinary perceptions, we nevertheless find among them (joined with an occasional scepticism) a prevalent belief that the persons Edition: current; Page: [140] who appear in dreams are real. Out of many illustrations, here is one furnished by a man who complains that he is plagued by the spirit of his brother. He tells his neighbours:—

Though this conception of a dead brother as a living being who demands meat, and inflicts pain for non-compliance, is so remote from our own conceptions as to seem scarcely possible; yet we shall see its possibility on remembering how little it differs from the conceptions of early civilized races. At the opening of the second book of the Iliad, we find the dream sent by Zeus to mislead the Greeks, described as a real person receiving from Zeus’s directions what he is to say to the sleeping Agamemnon. In like manner, the soul of Patroclus appeared to Achilles when asleep “in all things like himself,” saying “bury me soon that I may pass the gates of Hades,” and, when grasped at, “like smoke vanished with a shriek:” the appearance being accepted by Achilles as a reality, and its injunction as imperative. Hebrew writings show us the like. When we read that “God came to Abimelech in a dream by night,” that “the Lord came, and stood, and called as at other times, Samuel, Samuel;” we see an equally unhesitating belief in an equally objective reality. During civilization this faith has been but slowly losing ground, and even still survives; Edition: current; Page: [141] as is proved by the stories occasionally told of people who when just dead appeared to distant relations, and as is proved by the superstitions of the “spiritualists.”

Indeed, after recalling these last, we have but to imagine ourselves de-civilized—we have but to suppose faculty decreased, knowledge lost, language vague, and scepticism absent, to understand how inevitably the primitive man conceives as real, the dream-personages we know to be ideal.

§ 72. A reflex action on other beliefs is exercised by these beliefs concerning dreams. Besides fostering a system of erroneous ideas, this fundamental misconception discredits the true ideas which accumulated experiences of things are ever tending to establish.

For while the events dreamed are accepted as events that have really occurred—while the order of phenomena they exhibit is supposed to be an actual order; what must be thought about the order of phenomena observed at other times? Such uniformities in it as daily repetition makes conspicuous, cannot produce that sense of certainty they might produce if taken by themselves; for in dreams these uniformities are not maintained. Though trees and stones seen when awake, do not give place to other things which panoramically change, yet, when the eyes are closed at night they do. While looking at him in broad daylight, a man does not transform himself; but during slumber, something just now recognized as a companion, turns into a furious beast, threatening destruction; or what was a moment since a pleasant lake, has become a swarm of crocodiles. Though when awake, the ability to leave the earth’s surface is limited to a leap of a few feet; yet, when asleep, there sometimes comes a consciousness of flying with ease over vast regions. Thus, the experiences in dreams habitually contradict the experiences received during the day; and tend to cancel the conclusions drawn from day-experiences. Or rather, they tend to confirm the erroneous conclusions Edition: current; Page: [142] suggested by day-experiences, instead of the correct conclusions. For do not these sudden appearances and disappearances in dreams, prove, like many facts observed when awake, that things can pass unaccountably from visible to invisible states, and vice versa? And do not these dream-transformations thoroughly accord with those other transformations, some real and some apparent, which make the primitive man believe in an unlimited possibility of metamorphosis? When that which in his dream he picked up as a stone, becomes alive, does not the change harmonize with his discoveries of fossils having the hardness of stones and the shapes of living things? And is not the sudden exchange of a tiger-shape for the shape of a man, which his dream shows him, akin to the insect metamorphoses he has noticed, and akin to the seeming transformations of leaves into walking creatures?

Clearly, then, the acceptance of dream-activities as real activities, strengthens allied misconceptions otherwise generated. It strengthens them both negatively and positively. It discredits those waking experiences from which right beliefs are to be drawn; and it yields support to those waking experiences which suggest wrong beliefs.

§ 73. That the primitive man’s conception of dreaming is natural, will now be obvious. As said at the outset, his notions seem strange because, in thinking about them, we carry with us the theory of Mind which civilization has slowly established. Mind, however, as we conceive it, is unknown to the savage; being neither diclosed by the senses, nor directly revealed as an internal entity. The fact that even now some metaphysicians hold that nothing beyond impressions and ideas can be known to exist, while others hold that impressions and ideas imply a something of which they are states, proves that Mind, as conceived by us, is not an intuition but an implication; and therefore cannot be conceived until reasoning has made some progress.

Like every child, the primitive man passes through a phase of intelligence during which there has not yet arisen the power of introspection implied by saying—“I think—I have ideas.” The thoughts that accompany sensations and the perceptions framed of them, are so unobtrusive, and pass so rapidly, that they are not noticed: to notice them implies a self-criticism impossible at the outset. But these faint states of consciousness which, during the day, are obscured by the vivid states, become obtrusive at night, when the eyes are shut and the other senses dulled. Then the subjective activities clearly reveal themselves, as the stars reveal themselves when the sun is absent. That is to say, dream-experiences necessarily precede the conception of a mental self; and are the experiences out of which the conception of a mental self eventually grows. Mark the order of dependence:—The current interpretation of dreams implies the hypothesis of mind as a distinct entity; the hypothesis of mind as a distinct entity cannot exist before the experiences suggesting it; the experiences suggesting it are the dream-experiences, which seem to imply two entities; and originally the supposition is that the second entity differs from the first simply in being absent and active at night while the other is at rest. Only as this assumed duplicate becomes gradually modified by the dropping of physical characters irreconcilable with the facts, does the hypothesis of a mental self, as we understand it, become established.

Here, then, is the germinal principle which sets up such organization as the primitive man’s random observations of things can assume. This belief in another self belonging to him, harmonizes with all those illustrations of duality furnished by things around; and equally harmonizes with those multitudinous cases in which things pass from visible to invisible states and back again. Nay more. Comparison shows him a kinship between his own double and the doubles of other objects. For have not these objects their shadows? Has not he too his shadow? Does not his shadow Edition: current; Page: [144] become invisible at night? Is it not obvious, then, that this shadow which in the day accompanies his body is that other self which at night wanders away and has adventures? Clearly, the Greenlanders who, as we have seen, believe this, have some justification for the belief.