ix PSYCHO-PHYSICAL PHENOMENA 479 



due to some contrast or difference ; in sleep these guiding threads 

 to the course of our thoughts disappear, and similar or analogous 

 images combine and reinforce each other. This results in fantastic 

 groups of ideas, images, and emotions to which the bizarre and 

 grotesque character of most of our dreams is due. 



Some dreams according to Freud are founded on repressed 

 aspirations and desires, and the hallucinatory images they present 

 are only the symbolic clothing often of a sexual character of 

 such desires. All dreams thus represent something significant in 

 the life of the individual ; we only dream what is worthy of being 

 dreamt. 



Without denying the partial truth of this conception of dreams, 

 it does not seem to us acceptable as a general theory. Conscious- 

 ness for the sleeper is an immense world, more vast perhaps than 

 consciousness in the waking state. It is impossible to limit it 

 by Freud's narrow formula. Not all dreams are important and 

 significant ; many, as we have seen, are produced by fortuitous 

 external stimuli. Even in connection with representative dreams 

 we cannot accept Freud's opinion unreservedly. To assume that 

 dreams are the symbolical expression of some important motive 

 in the life of the sleeper and are therefore physiological in character, 

 conflicts with the fact that in sleep the power of perception and 

 attention is very low, which again implies depression of will-power 

 and of the faculty of perseverance to an end, and facilitates the 

 invasion of the field of consciousness by a crowd of indifferent 

 images. 



Havelock Ellis (World of Dreams, 1911) proposed an ingenious 

 psychological explanation of dreams, or rather of the great pre- 

 ponderance of visual images in dreams, which he refers to " sensory 

 symbolism." By this he means the automatic transformation 

 into visual imagery of sensory impressions of a different order 

 (gustatory, olfactory, tactile, auditory, etc.). The visual impression 

 becomes the symbol of another sensory impression ; in other 

 words, " a symbol means that two things of different orders have 

 become so associated that one of them may be regarded as the 

 sign and representative of the other." Coloured hearing, for 

 instance, is a phenomenon of sensory symbolism. In dreaming, 

 Havelock Ellis continues, " the usually coherent elements of our 

 mental life are split up, and some of them are reconstituted into 

 what seems to us an outside and objective world. An elementary 

 source of this tendency to objectivatiou is to be found in the 

 automatic impulse towards symbolism by means of which all sortis 

 of feelings experienced by the dreamer become transformed into 

 concrete visible images. . . . The conditions of dream life lend them- 

 selves with a peculiar facility to the formation of symbolism, that 

 is to say of images which, while evoked by a definite stimulus, are 

 themselves of a totally different order from that stimulus. The 



