§ 19. The Symbolic Mode of Representation of the Dream-Imagination According to Its General Form

§ 19. The Symbolic Mode of Representation of the Dream-Imagination According to Its General Form.

The most manifold stimuli resound upon the imagination of the dream, compelling it thereby to step forth out of itself, and it does so by lending, out of its formative power, a corresponding expression to the impressions hurrying through it. Hence the dream-imagination very often becomes alive in plastic utterance, and it is this uttering that we understand by the symbolic representation of the imagination. The thinking of waking day speaks through the concept; without, in doing so, ordinarily entering into the more specific bringing-forth of individual features, whereby attention would be dispersed and apprehension rendered more burdensome, it grasps the concept, rather, only as a summary determinateness, and thereby designates, in the swiftest, easiest, and most adroit manner, the real, and whole successions of the same, in a single moment. But the power of imagination, left to itself in the dream, lacks the language of the concept; it is without the vision of objects proceeding from the inner concept, and grasps its objects, accordingly, out of the outer form of vision, and, since this outer form escapes enfeeblement through the bringing-forth of the inner, out of the fullness, power, and magnitude of that form of vision. The imagination speaks in impressions of vision, in images, and, because these present themselves in their unweakened, original nature, through the entire compass of what the reality underlying the impression, and, accordingly, the impression itself, contains. Hence, where the waking man utters the concept "house," the imagination paints, at once, the real house in its natural form and magnitude; for the concept "street," it sets forth the whole succession of real houses drawing away to right and left; for the concept "I," the bodily speaking and writing human being, and so forth. Its language is therefore, taken altogether, already very expansive and drawn out; its expression, however over-distinct and clear in particulars, becomes cumbersome and impeded in its summation, which comes forth in particular when the imagination has to express more complicated relations of plastic thought, although this impediment to clarity by no means exists, or appears, for the thinking of the imagination itself, but only in comparison with the waking, daytime thinking of the ego. A further increase in monstrousness is received by the language of the imagination through the indeterminacy of its measures, by which it figures dimensional concepts and, in general, determinations belonging to the spatial as such; the imagination lacks the strictly weighing power of the understanding, hence it expresses the concept of the lofty for one and the same object just as readily by the height of a tower as by that of a house, or of a single room within one; for the concept of the stiffly jutting, it sets forth just as readily the straight-standing tower as the staff lying in the street, and, in doing so, it is concerned, for the most part, only with the basic designation of the concept, not with quantitative relations; hence, if it paints, in the dream, the ramp of a castle, for instance, one marvels wrongly at why this rises up to the third story, from which the departure of the carriages takes place; it wished to express nothing further than the height of the ramp, and height remains height, quite regardless of whether the elevated object is of greater or lesser actual height. Further, the difficulty of clarity in this language grows through the peculiar disinclination of the imagination to express the object through itself, that is, through its own concrete image of reality; while, in waking, thought designates its objects by the concepts belonging to each, the ever-creative and image-forming imagination always chooses a foreign image in place of the natural one, provided that the former is capable of expressing, through itself, that very moment of the object at whose representation it aims, and it thus utters, through the secondary image, the content of the primary one. But since, once one knows this law, the primary sense of the language-image is easily guessed, and since the imagination, given often-recurring stimuli of the same kind, likewise gladly chooses the same symbols, the symbolic obscurity of this language, too, clears up here in the sense of the understanding; thus, for instance, the image of the cat standingly expresses the irritable ill-humor of the psyche; the image of the roll, and, in general, of bright and smooth baked goods, or of the baker's shop in general, expresses bodily nakedness; the image of shrub-like undergrowth expresses, extremely often, in the dreams of both men and women, the pubic hair, and so forth, whereby, at the same time, the astonishment vanishes at how seemingly wholly unrelated images suddenly find their way into the circle of vision. Peculiar symbolic difficulties of language are further generated by the affect. Through the strange juxtapositions of its images, which are at once guided by the wild laws of association, unregulated by the understanding, the imagination awakens a whole host of affects: wonder, astonishment, fear, terror, anxiety, and so on; but every affect gives the imagination a new impulse, that is, it strengthens its plastic activity, as one already sees, by day, in the case of rumor, which, through the affect it arouses in the telling and retelling, grows from a gnat into an elephant. If this already comes forth so distinctly by day, where the understanding, after all, holds the rein over the imagination, then the wholly liberated imagination of the dream must manifest it all the more. Every affect gives the imagination a new access of power, and hence a far more intensified energy, to continue on in its symbolic formation. If the last image, which, through its own content, or through its relation to the one before it, aroused the affect in some respect, expressed a concrete form of longitudinal extension, a road, say, or a beard, then, as a consequence of the affect, the road is monstrously lengthened, while the beard billows down, ell-long, from the chin; if it was an object brief and self-enclosed, or many such objects, a number of sparrows or doves, say, or money, and so on, then out of it grows an immeasurable flock of birds, or a never-ending succession of ducats, and if the dreaming housewife admires the fish in the brook, it is suddenly colossally enlarged, or a whole herd of others plays about it in the water; if it was an image that worked more through its inner intensity and its pronounced content than through its outward dimensions, then out of it forms a still fuller and strange showpiece-image: thus, if one admires, in the dream, the splendid horses with which one is driving in a carriage, the horse readily transforms itself into a wondrous creature of a wholly different, peculiar animal-form; or else the intensity expresses itself through a reinforcing addition to the unaltered first image, through lightning, storm, thunder, and so on, say, in images belonging to or drawn from the life of nature, an intensification that suddenly steps forth, as though by a magic stroke, in consequence of the affection of the psyche. The symbolic language thereby becomes still more expansive and more difficult, because not only do the individual symbolic forms of expression enlarge or multiply themselves beyond due measure, but also, particularly in the case of an inner intensification of the images, wholly other symbolic motifs are introduced into the representation than originally lay within the sense of the content to be represented. Further, the imagination, so powerfully winged within the life of the dream, does not content itself with expressing an object merely through a single symbolic image, but rather is accustomed, as a rule, to adding to it yet another image, which depicts, quite on its own account, the living relation of the object to the feeling of the soul, although both images are fused, in the most natural manner, with the whole scene; hence it sets the symbolic expression twofold at once, each time in a different manner, and thereby impedes the fluency of its outward representation, although, on the other hand, it thereby wishes to bring out and lay clear the inner significance of the matter all the more. So, for instance, in the often-occurring dream of intestinal stimulus: the content of the bowels appears as thickly lying filth upon the street, through which one can scarcely wade; but the disgusting quality of that intestinal content, or, that is, the disagreeable relation proceeding from it to the psychical feeling, is at once expressed by the imagination, too, through a person disagreeable to us who suddenly walks beside us upon the filthy street, or we must pass by a corpse, and so on. Finally, the never wholly restrainable activities of association belonging to the images employed for symbolic representation themselves bring, through lateral attraction, a multitude of images, connected with the actual thought-content of the dream only in the most external manner, into the symbolism, so that the primary sense of the dream is often, as it were, crushed beneath such intrusive ornamentation, and seems to conceal its true face; yet, viewed from within the dream's formation and its development, this too can nonetheless be resolved into clarity, in that, proceeding from the fundamental thought of the dream, one readily surveys what essentially belongs to it, and what does not. But should one wish to suppose that the imagination, in symbolically re-forming some objective shape of body or of spirit, thereby intends, in its involuntariness, to represent the entire content of the matter exhaustively, after the manner, say, of a waking description, one would be wholly mistaken; rather, it seizes, from every objectivity that has become perceptible to it, only a plastic outline, that is, the impression according to its chief moments, and works out this outline-form more fully in the freest manner, according to the urge and law of its creative power, which is why its symbolic paintings, too, appear so artistically light, and as if breathed forth in genius. On the other hand, however, there lies, in turn, within this fleeting taking-of-outline of the object, an essential moment of clarity: for the predominant moments of the object express themselves preeminently in this universal taking-of-outline, and, accordingly, also most strongly within the imagination, and the symbolic transference must, in turn, let precisely these come forth most powerfully as well, whereby the chief essence of the object is manifestly illuminated for apprehension; but the symbolic bringing-forth of these chief moments is brought about by the imagination in a measure which, while not equal to that of the intensification through affect, is nonetheless similar to it, in that it lingers longest upon the representation of the marked moment, or brings it forward, intensively or quantitatively, above the others, and hence we so often find, in the dream, enlargements beyond the ordinary measure. But as concerns, finally, the greater clarity or obscurity of symbolic dream-representation in general, this depends, in part, upon the degree of energy of the internalized impression, and this, in turn, upon the degree of living excitation within the objective occasion that supplied the impression; but, in part, too, it is determined according to the general vital condition of the imagination, and this condition is then the most favorable when it holds the mean between receptive affability and spontaneous delight in formation.