42 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
THE SYMBOLISM OF DREAMS 
By HAVELOCK ELLIS 
HE 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, 7 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 
