Day Dreams

We do not always need to sleep in order to escape normally from reality. Some of us manage to do it with their eyes open.

Day dreams are not essentially different from night dreams and would not be mentioned separately but for the fact that they at times verge on a neurosis and that in certain cases they are not easily distinguished from delusions and hallucinations.

Whatever was said of night dreams in the preceding chapters holds true to day dreams. There are pleasant day dreams, unpleasant day dreams and even day “nightmares” or anxiety day dreams.

Like the sleep walker, the day dreamer manages at t times to take just enough notice of reality to direct himself through his house or along the streets, while his mind is elaborating stories of varying complication.

A day dreamer who consulted me during the war would imagine himself, while walking along the streets, enlisted, taking a tearful farewell from his relatives and friends and accomplished deeds of valour which made him famous; after which he would be so affected by his greatness that tears would roll down his cheeks. Or the dream would end tragically and he would die and then again a cascade of tears would be let loose at the thought of all the grief his demise would cause. The result was that day after day he would suddenly “wake up” in some public place, his face wet with tears, annoyed and embarrassed by the attention which his appearance would attract.

Those day dreams constituted in spite of their sad cast a fulfillment of his egotistical cravings. Even death was not too high a prince to pay for the importance he acquired in his dream, a psychological fancy which is often found at the bottom of some sensational forms of suicide.

The anxiety day dream is the form of compensation sought by many neurotics, weak in body and frequently taken advantage of by more vigorous and ruthless persons.

It also plays at times the same part as masochistic nightmares, filling as it does, the body with glycogen and a sense of power.

I have heard patients suffering from a sense of real or imaginary inferiority tell me of their obsessive anger finding relief in scenes which they made, while walking along the streets or when sleepless of nights, to some absent person whom they held responsible for their troubles.

They would then rehearse some annoying or humiliating incident provoked by the offensive person and let loose a torrent of abuse leading unavoidably to a fight in which they would beat, scratch or murder their enemy.

The sound of their own voice or the remarks of passers by would generally wake them up at the climax; their hearts then would beat wildly, they would be out of breath, if not bathed in perspiration, but they would experience withal a certain amount of satisfaction from the victory they had won and they would feel full of what a patient of mind termed “almost murderous energy.”

This form of “abreaction,” when it does not assume the form of a constant indulgence taking the place of positive action, is rather desirable. The psychoanalytic treatment consists, in part at least, in the production of day dreams based on memories which free in the patient a certain amount of repressed energy. Thus a great deal of unrelated and unconscious material is made conscious and related. Day dreams, without any definite direction and unchecked, are likely, however, to be very dangerous and to exert a paralyzing influence on the dreamer.

The concentration and meditation recommended by some Hindu philosophers can accomplish valuable results if the subject has a clear, analytical mind and knows how to correlate the scraps of thoughts which are thus allowed to rise to consciousness.

For childish people, which are easily caught in the meshes of their fancies and let their imagination run away with them, that indulgence is deadly and it has led to millions of Orientals into a nirvana-like idleness and weakness, destructive of energy and life, a negative escape from reality.

This is one of the reasons why, in many forms of neurosis, a rest cure is the most dangerous form of treatment. The neurotic’s attention is generally directed away from reality. His energy is too often deflected toward fictitious goals located outside of the real world. The neurotic has to be brought back into contact with life and human beings; he has to be trained to accept them as they are and to enjoy them for what they are, instead of imagining what they might be. The idleness and seclusion of the rest cure may negative all efforts in that direction.

The rest cure from which day dreams cannot be excluded, is simply an abnormal flight from reality sanctioned and abetted by a physician ignorant of psychology.

The day dreams which produce happiness, which promote creation, scientific or artistic, and which lead the individual into the stream of life, are sound and healthy dreams. Those which only lead to more dreaming and away from life, are neurotic phenomena, devoid of any redeeming grace.