DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Our chief investigations will at first be directed more especially to the problems common both to psychology and to psychical research, namely, dream and trance states, hallucinations, and possessions, in order to show what bearings, if any, they have in the eyes of science upon parallel phenomena said to be due to fairies, and set forth in chapter ii and anthropologically examined in chapter iii.

Dreams

The popular opinion that dreams are nonsense is quite overthrown by definite psychological facts. When during sleep our sensory organs are exposed to external irritants the impressions physically produced are transmitted to the brain by the nervous system and react in dreams as they would in the waking state, except that the reactions in the two states of consciousness — the dream state and the waking state — differ in proportion as the two states differ; but in both the Ego is the real percipient. 2 Such stimuli as arise from after-theatre dinners, wine-parties, and so forth, produce a well-known type of dreams; and the same stimuli at the same period of time would produce an equal effect, though an altered one, to suit the altered psycho-physical (p. 465) conditions, if the waking state were active rather than the dream state, just as would all dreams which arise from pathological disturbances in disease, or abnormal physiological functions. This is evident from dreams of a morbid and sensual type, which directly affect the physical organism and its functions as parallel waking-states would. In all such dreams of the lower order, animal and purely physical tendencies, which are directly due to the state of the body, act very freely: an imperfectly balanced, temporarily deranged, or diseased organism must correspondingly respond to its driving forces. And it is clear from comparative study of phenomena that these lower kinds of dream states express only the lower or animal consciousness, which in most individuals is the predominant or only consciousness even in the waking life; and not the higher consciousness of the Ego or subconsciousness which may be expressed in somnambulism, for ‘in somnambulism there awakes an inner, second Ego’, 1 which is the Subliminal Self of Myers. Dr. G. F. Stout urges against Myers’s theory of the Subliminal Self that ‘the usual incoherence of dreams is an objection to regarding them as manifestations of a stream of thought equal or superior in systematic complexity and continuity to that of the waking self’, 2 which objection Myers also observed. But if we regard all dreams which are of the lower order as being due to the imperfect response of the body to its driving forces because of various bad physical conditions in the body; and recognize that these driving forces depend ultimately on the subconsciousness, the difficulty seems to be met by observing that under such conditions there is no real mergence of the normal consciousness into the subconsciousness. Hence ordinary dreams are within the ordinary spectrum of consciousness; but extra-ordinary dreams pass beyond the ordinary spectrum into the truly supernormal state of consciousness. (p. 466)

As all this indicates, dreams are of many classes: those of the lowest type, which we have explained as due to bad physiological conditions in the animal-man; those which are readily explainable as distorted reflections of waking actions, often based on some stray thought or suggestion of the day and then comparable to post-hypnotic suggestions. Other dreams are demonstrably entirely outside the range of ordinary mental or physical disturbances, actions, reflections, or suggestions of the waking life, and seem thus ‘to have a wider purview, and to indicate that the record of external events which is kept within us is far fuller than we know’. 1 In some dreams there is reasoning as well as memory, and mathematicians have been known to solve problems in sleep: an American inventor known to the writer’s mother asserted that he had dreamt out the details of a certain ice-manufacturing process which proved successful when tested; through self-suggestion set up in the waking state, R. L. Stevenson, upon entering the dream state, secured details for his imaginary romances. 2 Dr. Stout himself, in criticizing Myers’s ‘Subliminal Self’, admits that ‘in some very rare instances, a man has achieved, while dreaming, intellectual performances equalling or perhaps surpassing the best of which he was capable in waking life’; 3 and there are many authentic cases of dream experiences which cannot possibly be explained as revivals of facts fallen out of the range of the ordinary memory or consciousness. We seem to be led to some hypothesis like this: in dreaming there is mental activity which in the waking state is either functionless or else below the psycho-physical threshold of sensibility; because much that is subconscious in the non-dream state is in the dream state fully conscious. And we probably do not remember one quarter of our dreams! they belong to a mainly different order of consciousness. Professor Freud’s view of dreams coincides pretty generally (p. 467) with this view. He holds that the subconsciousness is the storehouse out of which dream contents are drawn and acted upon by the dream mind. Very much distortion of the subconscious material takes place in the process, due to what he calls the ‘endopsychic censor’. In the waking state this censor is always on the alert to keep out of consciousness all subconscious processes or deposits, but in sleep the censor is less alert, and allows some subconscious content to escape over into the ordinary consciousness. The result is a dream distorted out of all recognition of its origin. Such a dream seems to occupy a position midway between what we have classed as the lowest or animal-mind dream and the highest or subliminal dream. It possibly shows an harmonious psycho-physical condition of the dream life, whereas the lowest type of dream shows the preponderance of the physical or animal, and the highest type of dream shows the preponderance of the psychical elements in man. Further, it may be designated as the normal dream, and the other two types respectively as the physically abnormal and the psychically abnormal.

Professor Freud detects other marked processes in the dream state, all of which help to illustrate the part of the Fairy-Faith dependent upon dreaming experiences. (1) There is condensation of details frequently in a proportion so great as one for ten and one for twenty; (2) displacement of details, or ‘a transvaluation of all values’; (3) much dramatization; (4) regression, a retrograde movement of abstract mental processes toward their primary conceptions; and (5) secondary elaboration, an attempt to rationalize all dream-material. 1 Also, Professor Freud discovered from his analysis of thousands of dreams that the subconsciousness makes use of a sort of symbolism :– ‘This symbolism in part varies with the individual, but in part is of a typical nature, and seems to be identical with the symbolism which we suppose to lie behind our myths and legends. It is not impossible that these latter creations of the people may find (p. 468) their explanation from the study of dreams.’ 1 Such processes, taken as a whole, show that man possesses a two-fold consciousness, the ordinary consciousness and the subconsciousness. And we have every reason to believe that subconscious activities go on continually, in waking and in sleeping.

By experiments on his own perfectly healthy children, Wienholt proved that there are natural forces existing whose stimulations are never perceived in waking life: he made passes over the face and neck of his son with an iron key at the distance of half an inch without touching him, whereupon the boy began to rub those parts and manifested uneasiness. Wienholt likewise experimented on his other children with lead, zinc, gold, and other metals, and in most cases the children ‘averted the parts so treated, rubbed them, or drew the clothes over them’. 2 Therefore, in sleep the consciousness perceives objects without physical contact; and this not inconceivably might suggest, inversely, that in sleep the human consciousness can affect objects without physical contact, as it is said fairies and the dead can, and in the way psychical researchers know that objects can be affected.

We have on record an account of a most remarkable dream quite the same in character as dreams wherein certain Celts believe they have met the dead or fairies. Professor Hilprecht had a broken Assyrian cylinder in cuneiform which he could not decipher; but in a dream an Assyrian priest in ancient garb appeared to him and deciphered the inscription. Of this dream Myers observed :– ‘We seem to have reached the utmost intensity of sleep faculty within the limits of our ordinary spectrum.’ 3

We may sum up the results of our examination of dreams by saying that scientific analysis of the dream life in its higher ranges proves that our Ego is not wholly embraced in self-consciousness, that the Ego exceeds the self-consciousness. (p. 469) Instead of a continuity of consciousness which constitutes self-consciousness we have parallel states of consciousness for the one subject, the Ego. Our study of the Celtic theory of re-birth, in the following chapter, will further explain this subtle aspect of the dream psychology.

When such a conclusion is applied to the Fairy-Faith, the various dream-like or trance-like states during which ancient and contemporary Celts testify to having been in Fairyland are seen to be scientifically plausible. In this aspect then, Fairyland, stripped of all its literary and imaginative glamour and of its social psychology, in the eyes of science resolves itself into a reality, because it is one of the states of consciousness co-ordinate with the ordinary consciousness. This statement will be confirmed by a brief examination of what is called ’supernatural lapse of time’, and which is invariably connected with Fairyland.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11