A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    unaware or forgetful, is called somnambulism when it occurs in sleep. (3) Closely connected with the hallucination is the dissociation in¬ volved in our dreaming. By dissociation is meant the interruption of ordinary habitual associations, the abnormal narrowing of our experience through the dropping out of images and memories which are normally present in the waking life. Such a narrow¬ ing of the ordinary consciousness has one (sometimes both) of two results. Either the remaining consciousness is more intense, or else other, more remote, imaginings take the place of those which have dropped out. The greater vividness of fewer objects is an explanation of the dream hallucination; the oc¬ currence of unusual imagery characterizes most dreams. On its neural side, dissociation implies what may be described, some¬ what figuratively, as a blocking of ordinary 1 association paths’ and a consequent damming up of cortical energy. This results on the one hand in the more intense functioning of the sense centres still excited, and on the other hand in the spread of the cortical energy through less frequently used ‘brain paths.’ It must, however, be noted that dreaming is not purely dis¬ sociative. On the contrary, dreams are connected in two ways with the waking life: they are due to past waking experience and they are remembered after waking. As regards the first point, most dreams can be traced associatively to a starting-point in the waking life; and some dreams even include specific memories of waking experience. Out of 194 of my own dreams, carefully studied, I found only 22 (11.3 per cent) in which I could trace no suggestion from the waking experience. Professor Sigismund Freud believes that the relation of dream to previous life is always emotional — that every dream is, in fact, a wish fulfilled.* In my *“Die Traumdeutung,” 1900, 1909. Dr. Freud offers as proof the care¬ fully analyzed and valuable records of many dreams, mainly his own. Un¬ questionably he shows that many dreams may reasonably be explained as fulfilments of wish. He does not, however, — in the nature of tln^case, he can¬ not, — show that all dreams correspond to actual wishes; indeed, he does not, in the opinion of many critics, successfully exclude the possibility that some of his own dreams might be otherwise explained.
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