§ 31. Fifth Principal Group: The Sense-Dreams

§ 31. Fifth Principal Group: The Sense-Dreams.

They are so called because they have their ground of origin in the perceptions of the sense-organs during sleep. These impressions by means of the senses are, in themselves, of an obscure kind, in this immediately conforming to the plastic nature of the dream-sphere, and accordingly pass at once over into the plastic treatment of the dream-imagination; and out of this the sense-dreams develop. In essence it is only impressions of hearing and of the skin-feeling which give occasion for the formation of developed sense-dreams; of impressions of the remaining senses there are found almost only some indistinct traces, and hence the division of the sense-dreams must essentially be restricted to hearing-dreams and skin-feeling-dreams. But in order that an objective stimulus from without may produce a perception-effect upon the skin-feeling, it must act upon it with such a degree of intensity that the feeling, beclouded by sleep, actually bears away a sensation from it; and again, the outer effect must be only so strong that it calls forth no painful nerve-irritation, over which a mere nerve-stimulus dream would arise, while the objective content of the perception would be lost. In the case of impressions of hearing, tolerably loud sounds are, in essence, required in order to call forth objective sensations, whereby the sound itself, with its peculiarity taken alone, or together with its bearing, or rather its operative, substance, forms the object of the perception. But for a sensitive ear, which distinguishes itself proportionately even in sleep, quiet noises already suffice for dream-perception; hence such a sleeper, with the room-windows closed, already hears the softly splashing rain outside, or the quiet rustling of the leaves of the trees before the windows; the less acute hearer, on the other hand, hears only the full downpour of rain and the storm in the trees. If, however, the sleeper has, the evening before, in waking life, already strained his attention in advance upon the coming weather, in that he has a journey planned for the next day and wishes for good weather, or fears material disadvantages from continuing rain, and the like further, then he, even apart from an otherwise fine-sensitive hearing, hears the faintest sound of wind and rain. — Very ordinary sounds which assert themselves during sleep are, besides storm, rain, and thunderstorm: the whistle of the night-watchman, the striking of the clock-bells, the ringing of the early morning bells, shouting beneath the windows, knocking at the door, the blowing of the post-horn, the noises of mills near which one lives, and so forth. Of tones during sleep it has already been said and explained earlier that shrill watchman's whistles often appear long-echoing and full, like the tones of bells, while the sounds of the bells themselves appear infinitely softer than in reality. The mere remaining image of an actual tone in the memory is capable, when it comes forward in the dream, of likewise asserting itself as something living, echoing, and resounding, so that it appears to the imagination as something actual. — With regard to the form in which the sense-dream presents itself, there is found, in the case of hearing-dreams and skin-feeling-dreams, the objectively-bare and the symbolic. In the former case the dream-imagination contents itself with bringing forward again, in its immediate nature, that which it perceived from without, but in doing so it everywhere strays off into the amplification or intensification of the objective, in accordance with its own never-resting law of life, ever to spread itself forth and increase out of itself; or the objective perceptual content shows isolated tendencies toward symbolization. In the other case, by contrast, the sense-dream unfolds itself in the whole fullness and originality of symbolic art and invention. There enters, however, into the symbolism of hearing-dreams and feeling-dreams an essential difference, in that the former take their object, that is, the sound, from the distance, while the latter, on the other hand, have it in immediate contact with the sensing skin, whereupon the symbolism, too, must shape itself differently in each case. And it is for this very reason that, for the hearing-dream, the prefigurings of scenes which begin with an approach from the distance and spin themselves onward from this are characteristic; for the skin-feeling-dream, by contrast, actions upon that which is already immediately near and present at hand, or rather the dream-self transposes itself into immediate contact with the object of representation, instead of this object being said to draw near to it. — Finally, the two suborders differ from one another with respect to the frequency of their occurrence in general. The skin-feeling, since, during sleep in the closed room-space, it is affected only in rare cases by an object which chance brings about, is seldom in a position to furnish an objective occasion for dream-formations; hence skin-feeling-dreams form themselves only very sparsely; hearing-dreams, by contrast, are, proportionately, very frequent, since the affecting sound very easily penetrates the closed-off spaces of the sleeper, and the continual life of the outer world brings with it the frequent arising of sounds. — Let us turn, hereafter, to the dream-facts themselves.

First Order: The Hearing-Dreams.

a. In bare-objective representational form, with the unavoidable amplification brought about by fantasy.

For example: one dreams, upon hearing the sound of wind before the window, that a raging hurricane arises, threatening to knock down the trees, that it has torn open the casements of the room in which one sleeps; one gets up in order to close them again, and so forth.