Dreams Imply Imperfect Sleep

by: John Bigelow, LL.D.

Science is obliged to admit that in sleep neither the intellectual nor moral faculties are at rest all the time. The voluminous history of dreams, somnambulism, hypnotism, quasi-supernatural exhibitions of memory, of courage, and of moral susceptibility, must all be accounted for before the dogma of sleep can be accepted as implying at any moment a state of absolute rest for our spiritual any more than for our material natures–for our souls than for our bodies.

“I have never been able to comprehend,” says Jouffroy, “what people mean who say that the mind sleeps. It is impossible to show that in sleep there are moments when the mind does not dream. Having no recollection of these dreams does not prove that we have not dreamed.

“It will not be questioned that the mind is sometimes awake while the senses sleep.

“The fact that the mind sometimes sleeps with the senses is not established. All the analogies go to prove that the mind is always awake. Conflicting facts are required to destroy the inference; but all facts, on the contrary, seem to confirm it. To me they imply this conclusion–that the mind during sleep is not in a special mood or state, but that it goes on and develops itself absolutely as in the waking hours.”1

A rustic visiting a large city for a night or two finds it difficult to sleep. A person reading a book finds it difficult to fix his attention while conversation is going on around him. After a while the novelty of these distractions wears off and fails to demand or receive any attention. Evidently the distraction in either case was not an affair of the senses, but purely of the mind.

It is not the senses that first hear the noises of the street or of the salon annoyingly, and gradually less, and finally not at all; it is the attention of the mind which is occupied with or neglects these sensations. The same sounds only render the savage and the blind man more sensible of them; but, on the other hand, familiarity with the sounds renders the rustic in town constantly more insensible to them.

Were the effect physical, and dependent on the body and not on the mind, this action would be contrary and logically impossible; for either the habit weakens the physical organ or sharpens it. It could not yield both these results at once, as it does in the case we have supposed of the savage and the blind.

The fact is that it neither weakens nor sharpens the sensibility of the organ, which receives always the same sensations; but when these sensations interest or concern us the mind takes a note of and analyzes them. When they cease to interest or concern us the mind gets accustomed gradually to neglect them and does not analyze them.

The phenomenon is purely psychical, not physical. The noise being the same on the hundredth day of the rustic’s sojourn in the city as the first, the difference in the effect can only be in the mind. Had the soul slept with the body it would have been equally put to sleep in both cases, and one would see no reason for either awakening rather than the other.

These facts seem to amount to a demonstration that the mind does not sleep like the body, but, disquieted by unaccustomed sensations, it awakens, and when those sensations become familiar, they do not awaken it.

There is an explanation of this difference which only confirms its correctness. If the mind be disquieted by unusual noises it has need of the senses to inform it of the cause and to relieve it from its inquietude. It is that which obliges it to awake; hence we find ourselves disquieted by an extraordinary noise, which would not have happened had not our minds been aroused by this noise before we awoke.

There is but one explanation of this. The soul or mind which watches knows whence come the sensations, and does not disquiet itself nor awaken the sensations to report on them unless they are unfamiliar and involve some duty to be performed or evil to be avoided. The unusual noise of a maid sweeping the carpet in a room adjoining your chamber, though comparatively feeble, will awaken the sleeper, while the whistle of a railway train which may be heard for miles, but to which he is inured, will not disturb him. So a nurse will sleep through all noises which do not concern her patient, while he cannot turn in his bed, nor draw a sigh, or even exhibit and unusual respiration, without attracting her attention.

The experience of the Scotch ploughboy, who complained that he never enjoyed a night’s rest because as soon as he put his head on his pillow it was time to get up again, is an experience by no means rare, especially among the young who live a good deal in the open air and indulge no habits to interfere with sleep.

The reader’s attention will now be invited to some other phenomena which are inconsistent with the idea that sleep is a condition of absolute repose, and which science neither attempts to gainsay nor explain.

Dreams ordinarily imply more or less imperfect sleep; a partial interruption only of our relations with external objects; the twilight or dawn of the phenomenal world as we are just entering it in the morning or just leaving it at night.

As Robert Herrick sings:

“Here we are all by day; by night we’re hurled by dreams each one into a several world.”

1 Jouffroy, Melanges Philosophiques du Sommeil

They are to the sleeper what the shore is to the swimmer when, emerging from the sea, his feet get support from the earthly bottom. Of the dreams–or, rather, of the mental or spiritual operations which we experience between this twilight and dawn;–that is, while our sleep is profound–our memory takes no note. We are only conscious of dreams which occur when the phenomenal world is only partially excluded from our consciousness; when we are, as it were, mounting the shore from the deep waters in which our souls have been immersed. Hence, perhaps, the confused, inconsequential, and fantastic character of what we can recall of most of them. The presumption, therefore, is that what takes place in our profound sleep, which is not in the least degree adulterated by direct influences from the phenomenal world, is entirely free from what seems often so improbable and fantastic in our remembered dreams–which are obviously a medley of emanations from two widely different worlds or states of being.1

All dreaming, as distinguished from sleep, is imperfect sleep; it is a condition in which the phenomenal world has already begun to dawn upon us again. Our consciousness, of course, returns with it, pari passu. One never remembers a dream without waking, nor is one conscious of dreaming until partially awake. Jouffroy was very right in affirming that our minds were active in sleep as at other times; but neither facts nor logic will support the contention “that we never sleep without dreaming.”

The sleep-walker, or somnambulist, exhibits at times even more vitality and energy than he would be capable of exhibiting in a waking state. He not only walks, runs, rides, and does other things which h e is accustomed to do, but with his eyes entirely closed he seems to have perceptions supernaturally acute. He walks with confidence and safety along the roofs of houses, on the banks of rivers, and other perilous places, where nothing could have tempted him to go when awake. What is more marvelous, he will write with critical accuracy in prose and verse; he will compose music; he will choose from among many specimens those best adapted to the most delicate work, with a promptness and precision of which, when awake, he would be wholly incapable.

“That the exercise of thought–and this on a high level–is consistent with sleep can hardly be doubted,” says Dr. Hack Tuke, an eminent English authority.

“Arguments are employed in debate which are not always illogical. We dreamed one night, subsequent to a lively conversation with a friend on spiritualism, that we instituted a number of test experiments in reference to it. The nature of these tests was retained vividly in the memory after waking. They were by no means wanting in ingenuity, and proved that the mental operations were in good form.

“That the higher moral sentiments are called into action in some instances must be admitted by those who take the trouble to analyze the motives by which they have been actuated during sleep. The conscience may be as loud in its calls and reproofs in the night as in the day.

1 In the citation above given from his writing Jouffroy confounds the impressions made in dreams, of which we are more or less conscious, with impressions received in profound sleep, of which we are rarely, if ever, conscious except through divine permission.“The memory, freed from distraction as it sometimes is, is so vivid as to enable the sleeper to recall events which had happened years before and which had been entirely forgotten.

“The dreamer is free from the nervousness or lack of courage or dread of the opinion of others from which he may suffer during the waking state.”

It deserves to be noted here that neither mesmerism, animal magnetism, hypnotism, nor any of the modern forms of super-normal or voluntary sleep can with propriety be attributed to what are commonly regarded as the chief and normal provocatives of sleep–fatigue and exhaustion.

It is also to be noted that all are used to a greater or less extent in the treatment of disease and as a part of the curriculum of the most important medical schools in the world.

In artificial sleep there may be exhibited the same evidences of languor and fatigue. Hypnosis may be induced by presenting to the hypnotic any one idea or image either by speech or example, as by stimulating the organs of vision or of hearing or of touch, by the ticking of a watch, a monotonous song or lullaby, or by gently stroking the skin. In every one of these cases the attention of the hypnotic is concentrated to a single object, and gradually detached from all else of the phenomenal world. This is the one uniform characteristic, I believe, of all hypnotic, mesmeric, and lethargic conditions whenever, wherever, and however, induced.

The reader will please to bear in mind that absolute detachment from the phenomenal world is the uniform condition of sleep, however provoked or incited. I hope later to further illustrate the enormous importance of this principle.

If, as it is no presumption to assume, there is nothing of divine ordinance that goes to waste, there must be a purpose in this periodical and universal change which we call sleep, conceived in infinite wisdom, and of course, therefore, for an infinitely important purpose, and what we call rest is only an incident, and certainly cannot be that ultimate purpose.

What, then, is that ultimate purpose?

If we will reason from what we know or easily can know; if we will resist the propensity to confound material phenomena with mental and spiritual operations, and keep distinctly before our minds, to the best of our comprehension, the ends or final purpose of our birth and experiences in this world, need we despair of obtaining a satisfactory solution of all these problems, without ascribing to matter or to spirit attributes which neither possesses, and without any wayward or presumptuous interpretation of the ways of God to men?

May we not be permitted to extort some further information about the uses and results of so many activities as are going on within us while in a state of presumed entire inactivity; some explanation of the daily and extraordinary improvement in our mental, our moral, and our physical condition, which no amount or kind of labor by day, when all our faculties are assumed to be at their best, ever yields?

1 Dr. Hack Tuke, Medial Physiology of Dream.

The late Professor Agassiz, in one of his scientific works, relates a very curious dream, interesting not only as a psychological fact, but as illustrating the indefatigable activity of the human mind. I give it as it has been reported by his widow in her biography of her distinguished husband.1

“He had been for two weeks striving to decipher the somewhat obscure impression of a fossil fish on the stone slab in which it was preserved. Weary and perplexed, he put his work aside at last, and tried to dismiss it from his mind. Shortly after, he waked one night persuaded that while asleep he had seen his fish with all the missing features perfectly restored. But when he tried to hold and make fast the image it escaped him. Nevertheless, he went early to the Jardin des Plantes, thinking that on looking anew at the impression he should see something which would put him on the track of his vision. In vain–the blurred record was as blank as ever. The next night he s aw the fish again, but with no more satisfactory result. When he awoke it disappeared from his memory as before. Hoping that the same experience might be repeated, on the third night he placed a pencil and paper beside his bed before going to sleep.

“Accordingly, Towards morning the fish reappeared in his dream, confusedly at first, but at last with such distinctness that he had no longer any doubt as to its zoological characters. Still half dreaming, in perfect darkness, he traced these characters on the sheet of paper at his bedside. In the morning he was surprised to see in his nocturnal sketch features which he thought it impossible the fossil itself reveal. He hasted to the Jardin des Plantes, and, with his drawing as a guide, succeeded in chiseling away the surface of the stone under which portions of the fish proved to be hidden. When wholly exposed it corresponded with his dream and his drawing, and he succeeded in classifying it with ease.”

1 Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles. “Cyclopoma Spinosum Agassix.” Vol. iv. tab. I pp. 20, 21.

About the Author

John Bigelow, LL.D.