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.[88]
It is worth observing that the interpretation of these various orders of
sensations by the imagination of the dreamer takes very different forms
according to the person's character, previous experience, ruling
emotions, and so on. This is what is meant by saying that during sleep
every man has a world of his own, whereas, when awake, he shares in the
common world of perception.
_Dream-Exaggeration._
It is to be noticed, further, that this interpretation of sensation
during sleep is uniformly a process of exaggeration.[89] The exciting
causes of the feeling of discomfort, for example, are always absurdly
magnified. The reason of this seems to be that, owing to the condition
of the mind during sleep, the nature of the sensation is not clearly
recognizable. Even in the case of familiar external impressions, such as
the sound of the striking of a clock, there appears to be wanting that
simple process of reaction by which, in a waking condition of the
attention, a sense-impression is instantly discriminated and classed. In
sleep, as in the artificially induced hypnotic condition, the slighter
differences of quality among sensations are not clearly recognized. The
activity of the higher centres, which are concerned in the finer
processes of discrimination and classification, being greatly reduced,
the impression may be said to come before consciousness as something
novel and unfamiliar. And just as we saw that in waking life novel
sensations agitate the mind, and so lead to an exaggerated mode of
interpretation; so here we see that what is unfamiliar disturbs the
mind, rendering it incapable of calm attention and just interpretation.
This failure to recognize the real nature of an impression is seen most
conspicuously in the case of the organic sensations. As I have remarked,
these constitute for the most part, in waking life, an undiscriminated
mass of obscure feeling, of which we are only conscious as the mental
tone of the hour. And in the few instances in which we do attend to them
separately, whether through their exceptional intensity or in
consequence of an extraordinary effort of discriminative attention, we
can only be said to perceive them, that is, recognize their local
origin, very vaguely. Hence, when asleep, these sensations get very
oddly misinterpreted.
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