Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
The following dream illustrates an association of quite a different
order: I imagined I was sitting at a window, at the top of a house,
writing. As I looked up from my table I saw, with all the emotions
naturally accompanying such a sight, a woman in her night dress appear
at a lofty window some distance off and throw herself down. I went on
writing, however, and found that in the course of my literary
employment--I am not clear as to its precise nature--the very next
thing I had to do was to describe exactly such a scene as I had just
witnessed. I was extremely puzzled at such an extraordinary
coincidence: it seemed to me wholly inexplicable. Such dreams,
reduplicating the imagery in a new sensory medium, are fairly common,
with me at all events, though I can not easily explain them. The
association is not so much of analogy as of sensory media, in this
case the visual image becoming a verbal motor image. In other cases a
scene is first seen as in reality, and then in a picture. It is
interesting to observe the profound astonishment with which sleeping
consciousness apperceives such simple reduplication.
It sometimes happens that the confused imagery of dreams includes
elements drawn from forgotten memories--that is to say, that sleeping
consciousness can draw on faint impressions of the past which waking
consciousness is unable to reach. This is a very important type of
dream because of its bearing on the explanation of certain dream
phenomena which we are sometimes asked to bow down before as
supernatural. I may illustrate what I mean by the following very
instructive case. I woke up recalling the chief items of a rather
vivid dream: I had imagined myself in a large old house, where the
furniture, though of good quality, was ancient, and the chairs
threatened to give way as one sat on them. The place belonged to one
Sir Peter Bryan, a hale old gentleman who was accompanied by his son
and grandson. There was a question of my buying the place from him,
and I was very complimentary to the old gentleman's appearance of
youthfulness, absurdly affecting not to know which was the grandfather
and which the grandson. On awaking I said to myself that here was a
purely imaginative dream, quite unsuggested by any definite
experiences. But when I began to recall the trifling incidents of the
previous day I realized that that was far from being the case. So far
from the dream having been a pure effort of imagination I found that
every minute item could be traced to some separate source. The name of
Sir Peter Bryan alone completely baffled me; I could not even recall
that I had at that time ever heard of any one called Bryan. I
abandoned the search and made my notes of the dream and its sources. I
had scarcely done so when I chanced to take up a volume of
biographies which I had glanced through carelessly the day before. I
found that it contained, among others, the lives of Lord
_Peter_borough and George _Bryan_ Brummel. I had certainly seen those
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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