It seemed to me that now, underneath this blanket, nothing and no one could possibly get at me.—Sleep is a state of our existence in which we completely lose the consciousness of ourselves; but since a man falls asleep by degrees, he also loses consciousness by degrees.—Consciousness is another name for what we call our soul; but the word
Our remembrance of the time we spend asleep is not derived from the same source as our remembrance of real life – from memory, the capacity to recall our impressions – but from the capacity to group our impressions together. At the moment of waking we bring together all the impressions we have had while going to sleep and while sleeping (a man is hardly ever completely asleep) into a unity under the influence of the particular impression which contributed to our waking up – and waking up, like going to sleep, proceeds by degrees, from the lowest level to the highest.—This operation takes place so swiftly that it is hard to be completely aware of it, and being accustomed as we are to the sequential nature of things and to the mould of time in which life reveals itself to us, we accept this aggregate of impressions as the remembrance of the time we have spent asleep.—How are you to explain the fact that you may have a long dream which ends with precisely that circumstance which has woken you up? You dream that you are going out hunting, you load your rifle, spring the game, take aim and fire; and the noise you took for the gunshot was actually the water carafe which you have upset on to the floor in your sleep. Or again, you arrive at your friend N.’s house and you are waiting to see him; at length a servant appears and announces that N. has just come in; but in the real world it is your own servant who is talking to you in order to wake you up. In recognizing the truth of this, God forbid that you should believe in all those dreams related to you by people who have invariably seen something in them, and what is more, something both meaningful and important.
These people, from their habit of drawing conclusions from dreams on the basis of guesses, have provided themselves with a particular form to which they reduce everything: they make up any deficiencies from their own imagination, and reject anything which refuses to fit into the given form. For example, a mother will tell you how she dreamed that she saw her daughter flying off into the heavens and saying ‘Goodbye, dearest Mamma, I shall pray for you!’ Whereas she actually dreamed that her daughter was climbing on to the house roof, not saying anything, and that this daughter, as she climbed higher and higher, suddenly turned into Ivan the cook and said ‘You can’t climb up here.’
And perhaps by the power of habit, what they relate has actually taken that shape in their imagination: if so, that is further evidence for my theory of dreams …
If you want to confirm it, try the experiment on yourself: recall the thoughts and imaginings you had while going to sleep and waking up, and if anyone else saw you asleep and can tell you all the circumstances which may have affected you, you will then be able to understand why you had that particular dream and not some other. There are so many of these circumstances, depending on people’s bodily constitution, on their digestion, and on other physical causes, that they are past enumerating. Yet there is a saying that when we dream that we are flying or swimming, it means that we are growing. If you can observe what makes you dream on one occasion that you are swimming, and on another flying, and if you are able to recall it all, you will quite easily arrive at an explanation.
If my dream had been dreamt by one of those people who, as I have said, are accustomed to interpreting dreams, this is how the account of it (by a lady) might have run: ‘I dreamt that St Thomas was running and running for a very long time, and I seemed to be asking him “Why are you running?” and he said to me “I am looking for a bride.”—So you see, either he is getting married, or I shall soon be receiving a letter from him …’
