We may here take our choice. We may admit that the laws of the dream
formation cannot really be traced any further, and therefore refrain
from asking whether or not the interpretation of the illusion evoked by
the sensory impression depends upon still other conditions; or we may
suppose that the objective sensory stimulus encroaching upon sleep plays
only a modest part as a dream source, and that other factors determine
the choice of the memory picture to be evoked. Indeed, on carefully
examining Maury’s experimentally produced dreams, which I have purposely
reported in detail, one is apt to think that the experiment really
explains the origin of only one of the dream elements, and that the rest
of the dream content appears in fact too independent, too much
determined in detail, to be explained by the one demand, viz. that it
must agree with the element experimentally introduced. Indeed one even
begins to doubt the illusion theory, and the power of the objective
impression to form the dream, when one learns that this impression at
times experiences the most peculiar and far-fetched interpretations
during the sleeping state. Thus B. M. Simon[63] tells of a dream in
which he saw persons of gigantic stature[H] seated at a table, and heard
distinctly the awful rattling produced by the impact of their jaws while
chewing. On waking he heard the clacking of the hoofs of a horse
galloping past his window. If the noise of the horse’s hoofs had
recalled ideas from the memory sphere of “Gulliver’s Travels,” the
sojourn with the giants of Brobdingnag and the virtuous
horse-creatures—as I should perhaps interpret it without any assistance
on the author’s part—should not the choice of a memory sphere so
uncommon for the stimulus have some further illumination from other
motives?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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