The auditory experiences of dreams, to a greater extent perhaps than those
involving the sense of touch, may be based on spontaneous disturbances
within the sensory mechanism. This is notably also the case with visual
experiences, and in many respects the conditions in the ear are analogous.
Apart from increased resonance of the ear, or hyperaesthesia of the
auditory nerve, producing special sensitiveness to sounds, an increased
flow of blood through the ear, as well as muscular contractions and mucous
plugs in the external ear, furnish the faint rudimentary noises which, in
sleep, may constitute the nucleus around which hallucinations crystallise.
Disease of the ear may obviously act in the same way, but, even apart from
actual disease, various nervous disturbances favour the production of
auditory hallucinations during sleep, and, in marked cases, even awake.
We may dream of listening to music in the absence of all external sounds
having any musical character. In such cases, no doubt, the actual
conditions within the auditory mechanism are suggesting music to the
brain, but the resulting music seems usually to be less definite, less
rememberable, than when it forms around the nucleus of an external series
of sounds. In many of these cases it is probable that we do not hear
music in our dream; we are simply under conditions in which we imagine
that we hear music. Thus, on going to bed soon after supper, but not
perceptibly suffering from indigestion, I dreamed that I was present at
a public meeting combined with an orchestral concert. A speech was to be
made by a man who looked like an old sailor or soldier, and meanwhile
the orchestra was playing. The speaker--unaccustomed, I gathered, to the
etiquette of such a meeting--suddenly interrupted the orchestra by a
remark, and the surprised conductor stopped the performance for a moment
and then continued, subsequent remarks by the speaker failing to affect
the music, which continued to the end, becoming more lively and vigorous
in character. But what the music was, I knew not at the time, nor could
I recall any fragment of it on awakening. It is even possible that such
a dream is mainly visual, and that no hallucinatory music is heard, its
occurrence being merely deduced from the nature of the vision.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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