III. _Internal (Organic) Physical Excitation._—If we are disposed to
seek dream sources not outside, but inside, the organism, we must
remember that almost all our internal organs, which in their healthy
state hardly remind us of their existence, may, in states of
excitation—as we call them—or in disease, become for us a source of the
most painful sensations, which must be put on an equality with the
external excitants of the pain and sensory stimuli. It is on the
strength of very old experience that, _e.g._, Strümpell[66] declares
that “during sleep the mind becomes far more deeply and broadly
conscious of its connection with the body than in the waking state, and
it is compelled to receive and be influenced by stimulating impressions
originating in parts and changes of the body of which it is unconscious
in the waking state.” Even Aristotle[1] declares it quite possible that
the dream should draw our attention to incipient morbid conditions which
we have not noticed at all in the waking state owing to the exaggeration
given by the dream to the impressions; and some medical authors, who
were certainly far from believing in any prophetic power of the dream,
have admitted this significance of the dream at least for the
foretelling of disease. (Compare M. Simon, p. 31, and many older
authors.)
Even in our times there seems to be no lack of authenticated examples of
such diagnostic performances on the part of the dream. Thus Tissié[68]
cites from Artigues (_Essai sur la Valeur séméiologique des Réves_), the
history of a woman of forty-three years, who, during several years of
apparently perfect health, was troubled with anxiety dreams, and in whom
medical examination later disclosed an incipient affection of the heart
to which she soon succumbed.
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