Spiritualism and the New Psychology

ws paid great attention to them, as the Old Testament shows, and there is evidence that the pr

interpretations for the enquiring dreamer, but it is only in recent y

sed so much antagonism that the sound work he has done is still scorned and dream interpretation is regarded

ght sleeper reacting to external stimuli, turning away from a touch or making movements to protect himself from heat or cold, whilst the heavy sleeper fails to react to these minor disturbances. The memory of occurrences in the outside world during sleep may be

rom the control of the consciousness, sends up thoughts and feelings which manifest themselves in dreams. How far external stimu

ams. If we dreamed distinctly about these forgotten episodes, and remembered the dream on waking, they would come into consciousness and be recognised, but, being buried and refused admission to the wide-awake world, before entering consciousness the

meanings, listening to a patient's account of a dream, then giving him an explanation and persuading him to believe it; but, though a shrewd guess may often be made as to the meaning of a dream, the interpretation, to be of any value, must come from the patient. He is made to close his eyes and, visualising the dream, to describe it carefully. If it is a te

ience in France, and this loss spread to his life before the war so that he failed to recall eve

e with light showing through. Two pirates with cocked hats came and led seven of us up the cavern, where we saw some old men with whiskers. The pirates were quite kind and led us through another hole

a dissociation.) At this stage he was told, 'You felt like that in France, what was it?' The normal stream of consciousness being cut off, the censor was now out of action, and the man, putting his hands to his head, cried, 'It's a Minnewerfer', and when he became calmer told of a dug-out being blown in and several of his mates being killed. Then he was taken over the dream and made to look at the various parts and tell what they 'turned to'. The pleasure steamer was the boat in which he went to France, the cheery people on board being other soldiers; he now r

ieved it; but the result would have been valueless-it was necessary that he should bring up the memories himse

ore than a guess, but its truth was admitted though the dreamer said that he had hardly realised his feelings before. It is characteristic of dreams, as of the slips of the tongue discussed in Chapter I, that there is an obstacle to the dreamer's unaided understanding of them. A simple dream of my own will illustrate this: When going upstairs at a seaside hotel my wife, noticing a stu

ions. The world of the dream is pictured as something external to the dreamer and not arising from his own mind, just as the revelat

e in the night-watches to pen their elusive inspirations being paralleled by

tioned in Chapter III. In the same way the apparently honest medium may produce

ed a railway accident, and the other the destruction by fire of a distant house. Both the dreamers, who were of the male sex, had suffered from gross hysterical manifestations, or, in other words, had been woefully led astray by the unconscious concerning something other than prophecy. Accounts of prophetic dreams must always be suspect because of their origin

strologers, the sorcerers and the Chaldeans, failed, but the prophet Daniel took up the task and told the king his forgotten dream. We can only imagine his method, but it is possible to revive a dream by using the emotion felt on waking, and such a method, or even direct hypnosis, may have been available to Daniel; and if we regard the interpretation, not as prophetic, but as revealing to the king his forebodings of future disaster, then the chapter accords with modern conceptions of dream analysis. Nebuchadnezzar was already a psycho-neurotic o