42 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE SYMBOLISM OF DEEAMS 



By HAVELOCK ELLIS 



THE dramatization of subjective elements of the personality, which 

 contributes so largely to render our dreams vivid and interesting, 

 rests on that dissociation, or falling apart of the constituent groups of 

 psychic centers, which is so fundamental a fact of dream-life. That is 

 to say, that the usually coherent elements of our mental life are split 

 up, and some of them — often, it is curious to note, precisely those which 

 are at that very moment the most prominent and poignant — are recon- 

 stituted into what seems to us an outside and objective world, of which 

 we are the interested or the merely curious spectators, but in neither 

 case realize that we are ourselves the origin of. 



An elementary source of this tendency to objectivation is to be found 

 in the automatic impulse towards symbolism, by which all sorts of feel- 

 ings experienced by the dreamer become transformed into concrete 

 visible images. When objectivation is thus attained dissociation may 

 be said to be secondary. So far indeed as I am able to dissect the 

 dream-process, the tendency to symbolism seems nearly always to pre- 

 cede the dissociation in consciousness, though it may well be that the 

 dissociation of the mental elements is a necessary subconscious condi- 

 tion for the symbolism. 



Sensory symbolism rests on a very fundamental psychic tendency. 

 On the abnormal side we find it in the synesthesias which, since Galton 

 first drew attention to them in 1883 in his " Inquiries into Human 

 Faculty," have become well known and are found among between six 

 to over twelve per cent, of people. Galton investigated chiefly those 

 kinds of synesthesias which he called " number-forms " and " color asso- 

 ciations." The number-form is characteristic of those people who 

 almost invariably think of numerals in some more or less constant form 

 of visual imagery, the number instantaneously calling up the picture. 

 In persons who experience color-associations, or colored-hearing, there 

 is a similar instantaneous manifestation of particular colors in connec- 

 tion with particular sounds, the different vowel sounds, for instance, 

 each constantly and persistently evolving a definite tint, as a white, 

 e vermilion, i yellow, etc., no two forms, however, having exactly the 

 same color scheme of sounds. These phenomena are not so very rare 

 and, though they must be regarded as abnormal, they occur in persons 

 who are perfectly healthy and sane. 



It will be seen that a synesthesia — which may involve taste, smell 



