“When well arranged in suitable
sequence one word will help another, and the whole remains as sense
easily and firmly in the memory for a long time. Contradictions we
usually retain with just as much difficulty and rarity as things
confused and disarranged.” Now dreams in most cases lack sense and
order. Dream compositions are by their very nature incapable of being
remembered, and they are forgotten because they usually crumble together
the very next moment. To be sure, these conclusions are not in full
accord with the observation of Radestock[54] (p. 168), that we retain
best just those dreams which are most peculiar.
According to Strümpell, there are still other factors effective in the
forgetting of dreams which are derived from the relation of the dream to
the waking state. The forgetfulness of the waking consciousness for
dreams is evidently only the counterpart of the fact already mentioned,
that the dream (almost) never takes over successive memories from the
waking state, but only certain details of these memories which it tears
away from the habitual psychic connections in which they are recalled
while we are awake. The dream composition, therefore, has no place in
the company of psychic successions which fill the mind. It lacks all the
aids of memory. “In this manner the dream structure rises, as it were,
from the soil of our psychic life, and floats in psychic space like a
cloud in the sky, which the next breath of air soon dispels” (p. 87).
This is also aided by the fact that, upon awakening, the attention is
immediately seized by the inrushing sensory world, and only very few
dream pictures can withstand this power. They fade away before the
impressions of the new day like the glow of the stars before the
sunlight.
As a last factor favouring the forgetting of dreams, we may mention the
fact that most people generally take little interest in their dreams.
One who investigates dreams for a time, and takes a special interest in
them, usually dreams more during that time than at any other; that is,
he remembers his dreams more easily and more frequently.
Two other reasons for the forgetting of dreams added by Bonatelli (given
by Benini[3]) to those of Strümpell have already been included in the
latter; namely, (1) that the change of the general feeling between the
sleeping and waking states is unfavourable to the mutual reproductions,
and (2) that the different arrangement of the presentation material in
the dream makes the dream untranslatable, so to speak, for the waking
consciousness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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