APPLETONS' 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



APRIL, 1899. 



THE STUFF THAT DKEAMS ARE MADE OF. 



Bt HAVELOCK ELLIS. 



IN our dreams we are taken back into an earlier world. It is a 

 world much more like that of the savage, the child, the criminal, 

 the madman, than is the world of our respectable civilized waking 

 life. That is, in large part, it must be confessed, the charm of 

 dreams. It is also the reason of their scientific value. Through 

 our dreams we may realize our relation to stages of evolution we 

 have long left behind, and by the self-vivisection of our sleeping life 

 we may learn to know something regarding the mind of primitive 

 man and the source of some of his beliefs, thus throwing light on the 

 facts we obtain by ethnographic research. 



This aspect of dreams has not always been kept steadily in sight, 

 though it can no longer be said that the study of dreams is neg- 

 lected. From one point of view or another — not only by the religious 

 sect which, it appears, constitutes a " Dream Church " in Denmark, 

 but by such carefully inquisitive investigators as those who have been 

 trained under the inspiring influence of Prof. Stanley Hall — dream- 

 ing is seriously studied. I need not, therefore, apologize for the fact 

 that I have during many years taken note from time to time and 

 recorded the details and circumstances of vivid dreams when I 

 could study their mechanism immediately on awakening, and that I 

 have occupied myself, not with the singularities and marvels of dream- 

 ing — of which, indeed, I know little or nothing — but with their* 

 simplest and most general laws and tendencies. A few of these laws 

 and tendencies I wish to set forth and illustrate. The interest of such 

 a task is twofold. It not only reveals to us an archaic world of vast 

 emotions and imperfect thoughts, but by helping us to attain a clear 



VOL. LIV. — 54 



