The dreams in which we seem to ourselves to be suffering from the
difficulty or impossibility of movement thus constitute a special class.
Jewell would apply to them the term 'nightmare,' which he regards as
'characterised by inability to move or speak.' When, in dreams, we become
conscious of difficult movement, it has frequently, and perhaps usually,
happened that the motor channels are not entirely closed, the sensory
channels unusually open, and very frequently, though not necessarily, this
is associated with the approach of awakening. I dreamed that I was walking
with a friend, that we quarrelled, and that thereupon I crossed the road,
and walked on ahead of him. These actions seemed entirely effortless.
Gradually, however, I became conscious of immense and ineffectual effort
in keeping in front, and slowly began to experience, as I awakened, a
feeling of lassitude in my actual and motionless limbs. In the process
of awakening, I take it, the increased, but still defective, efflux of
sensation from the legs, conveying the message of their real position,
entered into conflict with the dream imagery, and produced a struggle in
consciousness. It is by no means necessary to assume that there was a
complete absence of sensory impressions from the legs during the earlier
part of the dream; on the contrary, it is probable that the feeling of
lassitude was itself the cause of the dream, the idea of walking being a
theory to account for the lassitude; this seems more probable than that
the actual lassitude was caused by the mental exertion in the dream.
In a dream which a friend tells me he has often had, and always finds
painful, he imagines he is climbing a mountain, and at last reaches a
point at which, notwithstanding all his efforts, further progress is
impossible. It seems probable that this dream is also an example of the
conflict due to the process of awakening. In this case, however, the
solution is complicated by the fact that in earlier life the dreamer had
really once found himself in the situation he now only experiences in
dreams.
It is sometimes possible to prove, through the evidence of a witness,
that in our dreams of movements executed with difficulty, we are really
sufficiently awake on the motor side to be making actual movements,
though these actual movements may only very roughly correspond to the
movements we imagine we are trying to make. Very frequently, no doubt,
dreams of difficult movement co-exist with, or are caused by, some degree
of actual movement. In some such cases, indeed, the slight and imperfect
actual movement may, in dream consciousness, be a complete and adequate
movement. In these cases the imperfect sensory messages are not, it seems,
sufficiently precise to reveal to sleeping consciousness the imperfection
of the motor impulses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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