THE SYMBOLISM OF DREAMS 49 
is association, indeed, but it is association not along the matter-of-fact 
lines of our ordinary waking civilized life but along much more funda- 
mental and primitive channels, which in waking life we have now aban- 
doned or never knew. 
There is another consideration which may be put forward to account 
for one group of dream-symbolisms. It has been found that certain 
hysterical subjects of old standing when in the hypnotic state are able to 
receive mental pictures of their own viscera, even though they may be 
quite ignorant of any knowledge of the shape of these viscera. This 
autoscopy, as it has been called, has been specially studied by Féré, 
Comar and Sollier.1 Hysteria is a condition which is in many respects 
closely allied to sleep, and if it is to be accepted as a real fact that 
autoscopy occasionally occurs in the abnormal psychic state of hypnotic 
sleep in hysterical persons, it is possible to ask whether it may not some- 
times occur normally in the allied state of sleep. In the hypnotic state 
it is known that parts of the organism normally involuntary may be- 
come subject to the will; it is not incredible that similarly parts nor- 
mally insensitive may become sufficiently sensitive to reveal their own 
shape or condition. We may thus indeed the more easily understand 
those premonitory dreams in which the dreamer becomes conscious of 
morbid conditions which are not perceptible to awaking consciousness 
until they have attained a greater degree of intensity. 
The recognition of the transformation in dream life of internal 
sensations into symbolic motor imagery is ancient. Hippocrates said 
that to dream, for instance, of springs and wells denoted some disturb- 
ance of the bladder. Sometimes the symbolism aroused by visceral 
processes remains physiological; thus indigestion frequently leads to 
dreams of eating, as of chewing all sorts of inedible and repulsive sub- 
stances, and occasionally—it would seem more abnormally—to agree- 
able dreams of food. 
It is due to the genius of Professor Sigmund Freud, of Vienna— 
to-day the most daring and original psychologist in the field of morbid 
psychic phenomena—that we owe the long-neglected recognition of the 
large place of symbolism in dreaming. Scherner had argued in favor 
of this aspect of dreams, but he was an undistinguished and unreliable 
psychologist and his arguments failed to be influential. Freud avows 
himself a partisan of Scherner’s theory of dreaming and opponent of 
all other theories, but his treatment of the matter is incomparably 
“Sollier, “L’Autoscopie Interne,” Revue Philosophique, January, 1903. 
Sollier deals with the objections made to the reality of the phenomenon. 
* Freud, “ Die Traumdentung,” p. 66. This work, published in 1900, is 
the chief and most extensive statement of Freud’s views. A shorter statement 
is embodied in a little volume of the “ Grenzfriigen ” Series, “ Ueber den Traum,” 
1901. <A brief exposition of 1'reud’s position is given by Dr. A. Maeder of 
Zurich in “ Essai d’Interpretation de Quelques Réves,” Archives de Psychologie, 
VOL. LXxvur1.—4. 
