CHAPTER ONE (CONTINUED...)
D. Why Dreams Are Forgotten After Waking
That a dream fades away in the morning is proverbial.
It is, indeed, possible to recall it. For we know the dream, of course,
only by recalling it after waking; but we very often believe that we
remember it incompletely, that during the night there was more of it than
we remember. We may observe how the memory of a dream which in the morning
was still vivid fades in the course of the day, leaving only a few
trifling remnants. We are often aware that we have been dreaming, but we
do not know of what we have dreamed; and we are so well used to this fact-
that the dream is liable to be forgotten- that we do not reject as absurd
the possibility that we may have been dreaming even when, in the morning,
we know nothing either of the content of the dream or of the fact that we
have dreamed. On the other hand, it often happens that dreams manifest an
extraordinary power of maintaining themselves in the memory. I have had
occasion to analyze, with my patients, dreams which occurred to them
twenty-five years or more previously, and I can remember a dream of my own
which is divided from the present day by at least thirty-seven years, and
yet has lost nothing of its freshness in my memory. All this is very
remarkable, and for the present incomprehensible.
The forgetting of dreams is treated in the most
detailed manner by Strumpell. This forgetting is evidently a complex
phenomenon; for Strumpell attributes it not to a single cause, but to
quite a number of causes.
In the first place, all those factors which induce
forgetfulness in the waking state determine also the forgetting of dreams.
In the waking state we commonly very soon forget a great many sensations
and perceptions because they are too slight to remember, and because they
are charged with only a slight amount of emotional feeling. This is true
also of many dream-images; they are forgotten because they are too weak,
while the stronger images in their neighborhood are remembered. However,
the factor of intensity is in itself not the only determinant of the
preservation of dream-images; Strumpell, as well as other authors
(Calkins), admits that dream-images are often rapidly forgotten although
they are known to have been vivid, whereas, among those that are retained
in the memory, there are many that are very shadowy and unmeaning.
Besides, in the waking state one is wont to forget rather easily things
that have happened only once, and to remember more readily things which
occur repeatedly. But most dream-images are unique experiences, * and this
peculiarity would contribute towards the forgetting of all dreams equally.
Of much greater significance is a third cause of forgetting. In order that
feelings, representations, ideas and the like should attain a certain
degree of memorability, it is important that they should not remain
isolated, but that they should enter into connections and associations of
an appropriate nature. If the words of a verse of poetry are taken and
mixed together, it will be very difficult to remember them. "Properly
placed, in a significant sequence, one word helps another, and the whole,
making sense, remains and is easily and lastingly fixed in the memory.
Contradictions, as a rule, are retained with just as much difficulty and
just as rarely as things that are confused and disorderly." Now dreams, in
most cases, lack sense and order. Dream-compositions, by their very
nature, are insusceptible of being remembered, and they are forgotten
because as a rule they fall to pieces the very next moment. To be sure,
these conclusions are not entirely consistent with Radestock's observation
(p. 168), that we most readily retain just those dreams which are most
peculiar.
* Periodically recurrent dreams have been observed
repeatedly. Compare the collection made by Chabaneix.
According to Strumpell, other factors, deriving from
the relation of the dream to the waking state, are even more effective in
causing us to forget our dreams. The forgetfulness of dreams manifested by
the waking consciousness is evidently merely the counterpart of the fact
already mentioned, namely, that the dream hardly ever takes over an
orderly series of memories from the waking state, but only certain details
of these memories, which it removes from the habitual psychic connections
in which they are remembered in the waking state. The dream-composition,
therefore, has no place in the community of the psychic series which fill
the mind. It lacks all mnemonic aids. "In this manner the dream-structure
rises, as it were, from the soil of our psychic life, and floats in
psychic space like a cloud in the sky, quickly dispelled by the first
breath of reawakening life" (p. 87). This situation is accentuated by the
fact that on waking the attention is immediately besieged by the inrushing
world of sensation, so that very few dream-images are capable of
withstanding its force. They fade away before the impressions of the new
day like the stars before the light of the sun.
Finally, we should remember that the fact that most
people take but little interest in their dreams is conducive to the
forgetting of dreams. Anyone who for some time applies himself to the
investigation of dreams, and takes a special interest in them, usually
dreams more during that period than at any other; he remembers his dreams
more easily and more frequently.
Two other reasons for the forgetting of dreams, which
Bonatelli (cited by Benini) adds to those adduced by Strumpell, have
already been included in those enumerated above; namely, (1) that the
difference of the general sensation in the sleeping and the waking state
is unfavourable to mutual reproduction, and (2) that the different
arrangement of the material in the dream makes the dream untranslatable,
so to speak, for the waking consciousness.
It is therefore all the more remarkable, as Strumpell
himself observes, that, in spite of all these reasons for forgetting the
dream, so many dreams are retained in the memory. The continual efforts of
those who have written on the subject to formulate laws for the
remembering of dreams amount to an admission that here, too, there is
something puzzling and unexplained. Certain peculiarities relating to the
remembering of dreams have attracted particular attention of late; for
example, the fact that the dream which is believed to be forgotten in the
morning may be recalled in the course of the day on the occasion of some
perception which accidentally touches the forgotten content of the dream (Radestock,
Tissie). But the whole recollection of dreams is open to an objection
which is calculated greatly to depreciate its value in critical eyes. One
may doubt whether our memory, which omits so much from the dream, does not
falsify what it retains.
This doubt as to the exactness of the reproduction of
dreams is expressed by Strumpell when he says: "It may therefore easily
happen that the waking consciousness involuntarily interpolates a great
many things in the recollection of the dream; one imagines that one has
dreamt all sorts of things which the actual dream did not contain."
Jessen (p. 547) expresses himself in very decided
terms:
"Moreover, we must not lose sight of the fact, hitherto
little heeded, that in the investigation and interpretation of coherent
and logical dreams we almost always take liberties with the truth when we
recall a dream to memory. Unconsciously and unintentionally we fill up the
gaps and supplement the dream-images. Rarely, and perhaps never, has a
connected dream been as connected as it appears to us in memory. Even the
most truth-loving person can hardly relate a dream without exaggerating
and embellishing it in some degree. The human mind so greatly tends to
perceive everything in a connected form that it intentionally supplies the
missing links in any dream which is in some degree incoherent."
The observations of V. Eggers, though of course
independently conceived, read almost like a translation of Jessen's words:
"...L'observation des reves a ses difficultes speciales
et le seul moyen d'eviter toute erreur en pareille matiere est de confier
au papier sans le moindre retard ce que l'on vient d'eprouver et de
remarquer; sinon, l'oubli vient vite ou total ou partiel; l'oubli total
est sans gravite; mais l'oubli partiel est perfide: car si l'on se met
ensuite a raconter ce que l'on n'a pas oublie, on est expose a completer
par imagination les fragments incoherents et disjoints fourni par la
memoire... on devient artiste a son insu, et le recit, periodiquement
repete s'impose a la creance de son auteur, qui, de bonne foi, le presente
comme un fait authentique, dument etabli selon les bonnes methodes...." *
* ...The observation of dreams has its special
difficulties, and the only way to avoid all error in such matter is to put
on paper without the least delay what has just been experienced and
noticed; otherwise, totally or partially the dream is quickly forgotten;
total forgetting is without seriousness; but partial forgetting is
treacherous: for, if one then starts to recount what has not been
forgotten, one is likely to supplement from the imagination the incoherent
and disjointed fragments provided by the memory.... unconsciously one
becomes an artist, and the story, repeated from time to time, imposes
itself on the belief of its author, who, in good faith, tells it as
authentic fact, regularly established according to proper methods....
Similarly Spitta, who seems to think that it is only in
the attempt to reproduce the dream that we bring order and arrangement
into loosely associated dream-elements- "turning juxtaposition into
concatenation; that is, adding the process of logical connection which is
absent in the dream."
Since we can test the reliability of our memory only by
objective means, and since such a test is impossible in the case of
dreams, which are our own personal experience, and for which we know no
other source than our memory, what value do our recollections of our
dreams possess? |
