THE SYMBOLISM OF DREAMS 45 



and ideas to particular bodily movements and facial expressions. In a 

 similar manner, he pointed out that bitter tastes and bitter thoughts 

 tend to produce the same physical expression. 4 He also argued that 

 the character of a man's looks — his fixed or dreamy eyes, his lively or 

 stiff movements — correspond to real psychic characters. If this is so 

 we have a physiological, almost anatomical, basis for symbolism. 

 Cleland, 5 again, in an essay " On the Element of Symbolic Correlation 

 in Expression," argued that the key to a great part of expression is the 

 correlation of movements and positions with ideas, so that there are, 

 for instance, a host of associations in the human mind by which 

 " upward " represents the good, the great, and the living, while " down- 

 ward " represents the evil and the dead. Such associations are so 

 fundamental that they are found even in animals, whose gestures are, 

 as Fere 6 remarked, often metaphorical, so that a cat, for instance, will 

 shake its paw, as if in contact with water, after any disagreeable 

 experiences. 



The symbolism that to-day interpenetrates our language, and indeed 

 our life generally, has mostly been inherited by us, with the traditions 

 of civilization, from an antiquity so primitive that we usually fail to 

 interpret it. The rare additions we make to it in our ordinary normal 

 life are for the most part deliberately conscious. But so soon as we 

 fall below, or rise above, that ordinary normal level — to insanity and 

 hallucination, to childhood, to savagery, to folk-lore and legend, to 

 poetry and religion — we are at once plunged into a sea of symbolism. 7 

 There is even a normal sphere in which symbolism has free scope and 

 that is in the world of dreams. 



Oneiromancy, the symbolical interpretation of dreams, more espe- 

 cially as a method of divining the future, is a wide-spread art in early 

 stages of culture. The discerning of dreams is represented in the old 

 testament as a very serious and anxious matter (as in regard to 

 Pharoah's dream of the fat and lean cattle), and, nearer to our time, 

 the dreams of great heroes, especially Charlemagne, are represented as 

 highly important events in the medieval European epics. Little 

 manuals on the interpretation of dreams have always been much valued 

 by the uncultured classes, and among our current popular sayings there 

 are many dicta concerning the significance, or the good or ill luck, of 

 particular kinds of dreams. 



Oneiromancy has thus slowly degenerated to folk-lore and supersti- 



*T. Piderit, " Miinik und Physiognomik," 1867, p. 73. 



5 J. Cleland, "Evolution, Expression and Sensation," 1881. 



"Fere, " La Physiologie dans les MStaphores," Rewie Philosophique, October, 

 1895. 



T Maeder discusses symbolism in some of these fields in his " Die Symbolik 

 in den Legenden: Miirchen, Gebrauchen und Traumen," Psychiatrisch-Neurolo- 

 gische Wochenschrift, Nos. 6 and 7, May, 1908. 



