In another dream in which I saw
a painter occupied on a picture, a landscape representing sunrise, memory
recalled the effect of light as vivid, but no definite sense of colour
remained. This seems to me the normal condition of things in the ordinary
dreams of most persons, colour, when it occurs, or when it is remembered,
being for the most part confined to a single object or a single tint, and
often being associated with a feeling of aesthetic pleasure.
In ordinary dreaming there is usually something more than a spontaneous
procession of related imagery. There is a more definitely central and
psychic element. There is association, not only by obvious resemblance,
but by contiguity, usually the casual contiguity of images received
during the previous day, which forces together images related to each
other indeed, but by no means obviously. Dreaming consciousness embodies
and actively co-ordinates definite, and not merely random, images. The
passive and spontaneous flow of imagery is thus modified in its course.
The image of the magic lantern well illustrates this character of
dream experiences. The movement of the cinematograph, indeed, scarcely
corresponds to that fusion of heterogeneous images which marks dream
visions. Our dreams are like dissolving views in which the dissolving
process is carried on swiftly or slowly, but always uninterruptedly, so
that at any moment two (often, indeed, more) incongruous pictures are
presented to consciousness, which strives to make one whole of them, and
sometimes succeeds, and is sometimes baffled. Or we may say that the
problem presented to dreaming consciousness resembles that experiment
in which psychologists pronounce three wholly unconnected words and
require the subject to combine them at once in a connected sentence. It
is unnecessary to add that such analogies fail to indicate the subtle
complexity of the apparatus which is at work in the manufacture of dreams.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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