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. 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,® 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 Féré* 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.’ 
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, “ Mimik und Physiognomik,” 1867, p. 73. 
5 J. Cleland, “ Evolution, Expression and Sensation,” 1881. 
* Féré, “ La Physiologie dans les Métaphores,” Revue Philosophique, October, 
1895. 
™ Maeder discusses symbolism in some of these fields in his “ Die Symbolik 
in den Legenden: Mirchen, Gebriiuchen und Triiumen,” Psychiatrisch-Neurolo- 
gische Wochenschrift, Nos. 6 and 7, May, 1908, 
