Nachdenken über Leni G.

A famous review ("Reflections on Leni G.") of this author's novel by this German man of letters on the occasion of the novel's publication in 1971. You can read the original here.

Heinrich Böll, that loner, that Johnny-come-not-so-lately, that universally sanctioned rebel, that representative outsider of German society, and that same society's accredited prosecutor in Bonn, East Berlin, Rome, and Moscow, has accomplished the rather unique task of turning himself into a praeceptor Germaniae while still remaining a Rhenish rogue.

Authority and carelessness, of course, do not rhyme. Yet nowadays it seems that courtly preachers are only tolerable when they also prove to be court jesters. And herein lies the root of Böll's success as well as his international fame. What he has to offer the world is what it still, consciously or unconsciously, expects and desires from a German writer: morality and an acknowledgement of guilt. At the same time he denies the world what is commonly accepted as German: the thorough and the ceremonious. And what it finds in Böll is precisely what it would least suspect of the descendents of those victorious at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest: namely, charm and humor, a certain amount of roguishness that cannot be underestimated, and some touching frailties. He is a preacher with clownish features, a buffoon of priestly dignity. Yet he is no comedian. He does not fool anyone. Disproportionately more clever than all his heroes, he is just as unsure as they are, just as perplexed. He does not think of disguising or concealing his helplessness, and has nothing in common with every other German author who drags this helplessness to market as his crowning trump card. 

Paradoxically, it is in this authentic state of weakness that one finds Böll's strength. His fame cannot change the fact that we always seem to feel – and I mean this without the slightest condescension – somewhat sorry for him. Such sympathy, which should not be confused with tepid benevolence, is something he never wished to provoke; his readers nevertheless know this feeling (while it might be alien to the books of Dürrenmatt, Grass, or Uwe Johnson) and it contributes just as much to his success. There are more appreciated and more admired contemporary writers. But Böll, I believe, is loved, and perhaps we can only love when we at the same time feel sympathy. His new book will only heighten this tendency. Yet much like with the novel The Clown, where Böll could attribute the sudden increase in his readership to a hardly inhibited outbreak of sentimentality, so will the dubiousness of Group Portrait with Lady precipitate, in all likelihood, its spectacular success. Already now, a couple days after its first appearance, its publisher has printed over one hundred thousand copies. But the book does not recall The Clown as much as the earlier Böll novel, Billiards at Half-past Nine. For what begins here as the history and portrait of Leni Gruyten, a native of Cologne born in 1922, rapidly widens its lens to the group shot announced in the title. This group portrait will prove to be a swath of society including both multimillionaires and trash collectors; so too, will its time range, which concentrates primarily on the 1930s and 1940s, stretch from the fading Wilhelmine era all the way to today. In a word: a book on Germany much like Billiards at Half-past Nine, only disproportionately more opulent. Never before among Böll's works will one find such a plethora (often a confusing plethora) of motifs and milieus, of facts and figures, of topics and stages. In many chapters we often detect a pursuit for the shape of the subsequent section. And we have a narrator of incomparable observational ability, whose sensitivity and imagination know no bounds, picking from an embarrassment of riches. 

So is this a new masterpiece? Alas, this most lavish and indeed most comprehensive of Böll's novels, one distinguished by its generous aims and dimensions, at the same time strikes me as a very unambitious work. The structure is simple and has been tried and tested many times over, most recently in Christa Wolf's novel Reflections on Christa T. The first-person narrator, a shrewd and eloquent man, apparently a journalist by vocation but also an impassioned amateur detective and psychologist, pursues, in his own words, "the discovery of the truth." Böll does not select – as is customary in such novels, with Wolf's being no exception – an already deceased person whose life must be reconstructed, but, for whatever reason, Leni G., a no longer young native of Cologne who has just begun a relationship with a Turkish Gastarbeiter. She refuses, however, to share any information. What is more, many in her inner circle – her parents, her brother, a nun notable for her progressiveness, and especially the three men with whom she was involved during the war – all died long ago. Thus the obstinate truth-seeker must question witnesses and let them tell him not only about Leni, but also about all these people once close to her. In the end, most of these witnesses' statements slip into direct or indirect self-portraits; often, they also assume the dimensions of self-justification. The entire book consists of such memories and depictions (conveyed in direct speech), complemented by some inserted documents and the first-person narrator's own report. His account of his efforts, which incidentally is supposed to be comical in its meticulousness and devotion to the facts, seems in my view tedious and silly. Yet what becomes as we read on more like a collection of small literary works, was undoubtedly planned as a novel with a single central figure and a now still-recognizable fable. In the middle of all this there is Leni whom, I must say straight off, I do not like at all.     

That Böll loves simplicity and poverty as virtues in themselves, that he often mocks what we might denote as 'civilized,' that he utterly mistrusts education, are all facts long since known to his readers. And although anti-civilization affectation and anti-intellectual sentiments (examples of both of which, alas, our new novel provides in abundance) strike me as very dangerous, especially today when upon the use of terms such as "intellectual" or "man of letters" one must immediately qualify that they are not meant negatively, I have almost resigned myself to such phenomena in Böll's work (but only in Böll's work!). I cannot help but notice, however, that over time he has accorded his heroes less and less reason. The clown Hans Schnier was still permitted to say some intelligent things, which was not the legacy of the first-person narrator in "Away from the troop": he characterized himself, and not wrongly, as "artless" (tumb). Leni is also "artless," in the negative sense of the word, not that she is ever allowed to recognize this fact. At the very beginning we find: "Leni no longer understands the world; in fact, she doubts whether she has ever understood it." The novel's readers, however, are spared such doubts: it is clear that Leni comprehends absolutely nothing, that she "did not in any way, not even indirectly, have an idea of Nazism's political dimensions," or, for instance, until the end she did not know, "what a Jew or Jewess could possibly be." For a resident of the city of Cologne who by 1945 was twenty-three years old and long since part of the workforce, this ignorance does not imply a limitation as much as a stultification. Does it serve any purpose to place such a figure at the center of a novel critical of that era? Yet as little as this girl understands, just as much does she feel. Bereft of reason, but with one's heart in the right place: a combination so often preferred by German poets, if not quite by the very best of them. Moreover, Böll lauds Leni's "direct, proletarian, almost brilliant sensuality," to which the energy of her natural mystique is supposed to correspond. She wishes to be deflowered outside, in the open air, perhaps even among the heathers. That all men seem to be after this taciturn lass goes without saying. Yet "no one had wed" this "test subject" because "she was unapproachable." Why is she "unapproachable"? Is she a real girl or simply a symbol?

The fact that Böll had both in mind simultaneously can be deduced from the book's most important period. In 1943, at the cemetery landscaping job in which she works, Leni meets a young (and "oversensitive") Russian P.O.W. by the name of Boris. To spite the Nazis she plies the enemy with a cup of coffee; later she takes loving care of him, even going so far as to accrue considerable debts to be able to keep supplying him with food and cigarettes. And Boris is quite able to show his gratitude. Having an excellent command of German, he acquaints her with the poetry of Brecht and Georg Trakl; he recommends the prose of Franz Kafka; yes, it is this young Soviet, this Russian, who teaches the Catholic girl that had "lived unecclesiastically" since she was thirteen how to pray again. Here the injustice and cruelty of the world during wartime are conquered by the love shared between a German woman and a Russian man. Only when they are being bombed can they be alone. Their rendezvous takes place in the private chapel of a family crypt, because only in a crypt or some other sacrosanct space is there room for love. Admittedly, this is not only a macabre and decorative setting; it is also one whose symbolism leaves nothing more to be desired. 

Is Böll fully aware of what he has done here? Does he know that this blonde, true-hearted, simple-dimple Leni, noble, helpful, good, tender, and, as a rule, unapproachable Leni, this Leni who, if necessary, can work herself to the bone, who loves Schubert, who loves listening to sad verse, and who can sing songs such as "The young and beautiful Lilofee" – does he know that this Leni, so naïve and out-of-touch with this world and so connected to nature, corresponds with absolute precision to a fatal German feminine ideal? This ideal haunts second-rate German books, films, and ballads. So whether she treats a Soviet soldier to a cup of coffee, or hands some red wine to a handsome French lieutenant during the anti-Napoleonic German campaigns, or serves mead to a Roman legionary in the Teutoburg forest, or whether, as she does here, she gives herself over to the "starry sky evenly aglow" while lying among the heathers, or to the moon or the sun on some other meadow, it all amounts to the very same thing. No, let us not fool ourselves. This Leni G. is in no way representative or typical of the epoch depicted, nor of our century. She is timeless and eternal. Yet what is being revived here is not really the eternal feminine, but unfortunately – and this must quite clearly be said of Böll with all due respect – a seemingly eternal German kitsch. You can be sure that in German-speaking lands many tears will be cried over the tale of Leni and Boris. Yet we have one consolation: even Böll doesn't quite know what to do with Leni when she is in love and later when she is plagued by bad luck. In the second half of the book he increasingly loses track of her, which never detracts from the novel. It is precisely these small stories and sketches, these humoresques and genre pieces, these causeries and anecdotes where Leni is hardly or not at all the subject, which turn out to be the disproportionately more interesting parts of the volume.  

Should researchers (who will undoubtedly jump at the chance to study Group Portrait with Lady – the novel is supremely ripe for interpretation) come to the conclusion, however, that the composition of the whole is well thought out, even perhaps refined, then permit me to say that I don't believe a word of it. The book possesses no recognizable principle of form whatsoever. It would appear that Böll just came up with one thing after another. And off he went, unbothered, unconcerned, and without a scruple, piling up individual pieces into a whole. The merits of these pieces vary significantly: there are footling and silly episodes, then masterful works of genius written as only Böll can write. We also notice how minimal Böll's self-control was when we examine the novel's language. Hardly any attention is paid to age, profession, or level of education, or to the social and national provenance of the witnesses who become narrators; almost all of them speak the same language, a Böll-like colloquial German, which is not as bad as our mounting suspicion that the portrayal of various "informants" is being employed as an alibi for stylistic sloppiness and, worse still, for sheer prolixity. Never before has a great German author written as sloppily as Heinrich Böll has here. This applies to the final chapter as well. Here the author suddenly runs out of steam and ideas, and just like Lessing's Nathan, the novel runs along pell-mell towards an happy ending. Everything is quickly transformed into a fairy tale, recast into the wonderful, and capped with a conclusion of weary joviality. That grumpy-obstinate disposition which had become so important (already known to us from "After a business trip") should in any case not be misunderstood as a form of retraction.

Certainly many things in the novel benefit from this half-happy finale, particularly the sense of anarchy, a prick in the side of the cozy and the comfortable, while many other things are undoubtedly rendered harmless. But this cannot have escaped Böll. In all likelihood he wanted us to turn away from the consumer world and what he terms the service industry, and yet in the end not understand things too mechanically, but rather relativize our world with light irony and winking smirks. In any case, the whole only profits from this mix of doubt and mischief, of hard accusations and lush fun, of bitterness and pleasurability. Miniatures in which both of these feelings surface at once, Böll's repulsion and Böll's humor, prove that his negligence does not indicate a waning of his epic strength. Whatever objections one may have against this book, it offers no small number of plainly brilliant sidelights and impressions, close-ups, episodes, and reminiscences. In an objective, seemingly dry report by a Russian regarding the sufferings of prisoners-of-war, there is nothing new to be discovered; all the same it is chilling because Böll finds the only appropriate tone for such a subject. The description of the daily tasks in a cemetery during the war and the graveyard's habitual practices – wreathes every few days after the burial were taken, freshened up, and resold – is a sarcastic background piece that lets us know more than the weird ridiculousness of burial conventions. The tale of an old Mitläufer and speculator who prattles on wittily and with great pleasure about his alleged difficulties during the Third Reich is absolutely hilarious and renews Böll's status as an philanthropic satirist and ingenious psychologist. And the depiction of the sex scene in the bomb shelter, perhaps the apex of the whole book, expresses more about human suffering during the war than some novels in their entirety. 

I do not think that I am exaggerating when I claim that in these and other snippets Böll, like no other German writer, knows how to observe and pinpoint nuance and detail, mood and turns of phrase, sometimes with striking effect, so as to make palpable and visible what one tends somewhat solemnly to call the spirit of the times. Maybe, after all, we should be more content that we have such a great storyteller, instead of getting annoyed that he keeps churning out weak books. If I may make one Biblical reference: God comes to him in his sleep. But he, Heinrich Böll, does not choose at this time to put his talents to good use.

Proust

A famous and rather exquisite German novel once distinguished those who have read this French author and those who still read him (the novel wisely omitted those who think Proust is a type of champagne or peacock).  The obvious point being, one supposes, that most everyone has had some Proust in the way that most everyone has had some Shakespeare, or in the way that most everyone knows much more of the Bible than would ever be admissible in skeptical chit-chat.  The more subtle point lies in the unwaning affection that lifelong readers have for one of the greatest geniuses in any language.  In his extremes Proust has captivated many, in part because he himself had nothing that could be envied: he had no career or close friends, was refused time and again by literary society and both male and female love interests, and floated in a semi-permanent state of convalescence.  Yet he owes the intimidation he engenders to the typical insecurity regarding an unfinished book, often granted a level of cruelty akin to an unfinished meal left just outside and out of reach of a prisoner's window.  You will hear academic pundits proud of their achievement declaiming that if you have not ingested all two thousand two hundred pages, you cannot viably comment on Proust's greatness – never mind that the first five hundred or so tower above the rest of the project.  Proust is not meant to be read in the conventional sense, he is meant to become a repeated reading, a fixture on your bookshelf, an endless reference for life and its passions right next to our copies of King James and the Complete Plays and Sonnets.  With an aim that grand, therefore, we should perhaps be surprised at the insight of this slender monograph.    

The true impetus of such a study was, we learn, the conviction that despite brief success Proust was no longer being read.  Presumably the same torpor overcame the French literary world in the late 1920s that had murdered the career of the greatest of all American writers in the 1860s.  Taste was not with either man, with the only difference being that Melville bore witness to his own oblivion.  What was needed then was a pithy, precise apologia, preferably from a non-compatriot.  Beckett may have been ideal for this task because he was a Francophile, because he was in urgent need of a foil to his own notions of what comprises art, and because he was not an Englishman.  To enjoy the early Beckett, you must enjoy the awesome range of the English language; to enjoy the late Beckett, you must have a certain loathing for Romantic stickiness that can be best expressed by Goethe's phrase sollst entbehren (cited, as it were, in this trilogy).  Our very early Beckett has yet to choose between his two future selves, a pickle he would have gnawed on with particular relish.  What he has decided, however, may be rudely summarized in three points: Proust is a genius whose uniqueness stems from his emphasis of something called mémoire involontaire; Proust has no affinity for nor tendency towards morality, or any distinction of right from wrong; and, lastly, Proust's shunning of societal conventions was so exaggerated as to relegate him to a role not unlike that of a court clerk.  Beckett also casually mentions something of a weakness for the nobility but fails to suggest a reason why such a fetish plagued Proust for his entire life – yet this is the simplest question of all.  Nobility were once, and are no longer, prized for their God-given ability as well as the learning, poise, and grace their privileges bestowed upon them.  In a word, they were loved for being themselves, and they had no other destiny other than fulfilling what was already determined.  For an artist of acute sensibility there is nothing more delightful than being loved for one's essence, because that normally indicates that the artist has succeeded in making that essence translucent.  On the other hand, there is nothing worse for that same soul than being hated or dismissed for something misunderstood or distorted, especially when the misconstruer is of a vastly inferior intellect (compared to Proust, that would be nearly all of France).  Since Proust's family had money but no title he was afforded the company but not the status.  Very much like the humble clerk who is privy to all the intrigues of a trial but never allowed to comment, much less participate in its resolution.

This leaves us with two observations, one of which is as utterly correct as the other is so dreadfully wrong.  What is wrong about Beckett's assumption regarding Proust's view of morality is the woeful conclusion that someone who shuns society mindfully shuns the morals on which that society is structured.  Beckett's proof resides in a long segment on Albertine and "a couple of other Sapphists," whom he rightly terms vulgar and well beneath the gentle youth hovering in their vicinity in self-inflicted jealousy.  He then mentions Proust's proclivity for likening people to plants, and startles us with an odd passage:

He assimilates the human to the vegetal.  He is conscious of humanity as flora, never as fauna (There are no black cats and faithful hounds in Proust) .... This preoccupation accompanies very naturally his complete indifference to moral values and human justices.  Flower and plant have no conscious will.  They are shameless, exposing their genitals.  And so in a sense are Proust's men and women, whose will is blind and hard, but never self-conscious, never abolished in the pure perception of a pure subject.  They are victims of their volition, active with a grotesque predetermined activity, within the narrow limits of an impure world.  But shameless.  Homosexuality is never called a vice: it is as devoid of moral implications as the mode of fecundation of the Primula veris or the Lythrum salicoria [sic].

We know that Beckett subscribed to this philosopher's thoughts on the agony of animals; yet it is telling that a self-proclaimed non-believer would genuflect before some of the most restrictive of Catholic creeds, and even more telling that of the two plants used in his metaphor, one would be misnamed.  Beckett's categories, it seems, were always as hard and uncompromising as the bicycle handles, headboards, and other appurtenances that plagued some of his characters.  And while it seems humorous to think of the notoriously unhandy Proust studying a parterre for his literary needs, it may also be important to remember that as a mysophobe, hypochondriac, valetudinarian, and breathtakingly shy and neurotic person, he much preferred to gaze upon something that, in turn, did and could not pay him the least bit of attention.

With memory, and what our simple memories mean – here is where Proust separates himself from the rest of literature.  Re-reading Beckett's monograph I recalled quoting it in a graduate school paper; specifically, I savored the filthy shape of his comparison of habit – the most reviled term in all of Proust's pages – to "the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit."  I also recalled that the page of the edition used fifteen years ago was twenty-six (my current edition has it on nineteen), which allowed me to consider myself at twenty-six when I found life to be particularly enchanting.  I then remembered my twenty-sixth birthday in Moscow, the specific bean dish that a friend of mine ordered, the flower woman on the corner who accosted us hesitantly, and then the ice slipping beneath my feet, the pinkness of my cheeks, and the heady cologne that I still wear even though for some reason it does not remain with me as long.  That exact concatenation, what has been strived for time and again in the stream-of-consciousness narrative, is finally engirded in system in Proust.  It is the animal reflex when habit is forgotten, when we are unconscious of our surroundings, distracted, lost in thought (which implies that we are merely lost from habit) – this is when we gain truth:

No amount of voluntary manipulation can reconstitute in its integrity an impression that the will has – so to speak – buckled into incoherence.  But if, by accident, and given favourable circumstances (a relaxation of the subject's habit of thought and a reduction of the radius of his memory, a generally diminished tension of consciousness following upon a phase of extreme discouragement), if by some miracle of analogy the central impression of a past sensation recurs as an immediate stimulus which can be instinctively identified by the subject with the model of duplication (whose integral purity has been retained because it has been forgotten), then the total past sensation, not its echo nor its copy, but the sensation itself, annihilating every spatial and temporal restriction, comes in a rush to engulf the subject in all the beauty of its infallible proportion.

This engulfing restores the childhood pleasures of the most saccharine of melodies, of the newness of spice and smell, of an unexpected touch, of that shimmering hint of revelation that vanishes after a few succulent moments.  Did Proust understand this phenomenon better than anyone else or was his morbid lifestyle simply better equipped to permit him such pensiveness?  Maybe that should be pondered over a very fat book.

Bergson, "What is a dream?" (part 3)

The final part of a lecture given at the Institut général psychologique by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

So what then is the difference between perceiving and dreaming?  What then is sleeping?  I am not, of course, asking about the physiological conditions of sleep; that is a question for physiologists to debate, and it is far from being resolved.  I am asking how we should represent the state of a sleeping man's soul.  For the mind continues to function during sleep; it exerts itself − as we have just seen − upon sensations and memories.  And whether we are asleep or awake, it combines the sensation with the memory the sensation evokes.  The mechanism of this operation seems to be the same in both cases.  Nevertheless, we have, on the one hand, normal perception, and, on the other hand, we have dreams.  The mechanism therefore does not work in the same way.  Where is the difference?  And what is the psychological character of sleep?

Let us not trust too much in theories.  We have said that sleeping consisted of isolating oneself from the outside world.  Yet we have shown that sleep does not close off our senses from external impressions, but rather that these impressions lend most dreams their subject matter.  We have also seen that sleep may provide rest devoted to the higher functions of thought, a suspension of reasoning.  I do not think this can be more precise.  In dreams we often become indifferent to logic, but not incapable of logic.  At the risk of bordering on paradox, I would almost say that the fault of the dreamer is to reason too much.  He would avoid the absurd if he remained a mere spectator to the procession of his visions.  But when he wants to provide an explanation at any cost, his logic, destined to connect these incoherent images, cannot but parody reason and approach absurdity.  What is more, I recognize that the higher functions of intelligence are relaxed during sleep, and that even if the faculty of reason is not encouraged by the incoherent game of images, it occasionally amuses itself by defying normal reason.  Yet we could say the same thing about all other faculties.  Thus we cannot characterize the state of dreaming as an abolition of reason or an occlusion of the senses.  Let us put these theories aside and get in touch with the facts.

We have to conduct a decisive experiment upon ourselves.  As we leave the dream state − since we can scarcely analyze ourselves in the course of the dream itself − we will espy the passage from sleep to waking and tighten the beginning and end of that passage as closely together as we can.  Attentive to what is essentially inattentiveness, we will come upon, from a waking state's point of view, the state of the soul still present in the sleeping man.  This is difficult, but not impossible for those who have exerted themselves patiently.  Now permit this panelist to tell you one of his dreams and what he thought he verified upon waking.

The dreamer thinks he is at a tribune haranguing a crowd.  A confused murmur arises from the back of the auditorium.  It gets stronger and stronger; it grows into rumbling, yelling, a horrific din.  Finally, cries can be heard from every part, chanted to a regular rhythm: "Show him the door!  Show him the door!"  At this moment he suddenly wakes up.  A dog was barking in the neighboring garden, and every "woof, woof" of the dog was confused with one of the "Show him the door!" cries.  This is the moment to grasp.  The waking "I" which has just appeared will return to the dreaming "I," who is still there, and say to him: "I have caught you in the act!  You show me a crowd screaming but there is nothing more than a dog barking.  Do not try to flee; I have you: I will learn your secret; you will allow me to see what you did."  To which the dreaming "I" responds: "Take a look: I didn't do anything, and it's precisely in this regard that we differ, you and I, from one another.  Do you think you have to do nothing at all to hear a dog bark and understand that this is a dog barking?  A very serious mistake!  Without thinking about it, you make a considerable effort.  You have to take your entire memory and all your accumulated experience, then lead it, in a sudden constriction, to find only one sound amidst your memories of sound which most closely resembles the sensation of the sound you heard, or which best explains that sound.  This sensation is therefore recovered by memory.  Moreover, you have to obtain a perfect adherence so that there is not even the slightest gap between them (if not, you would be sitting squarely in that dream); the only way you can ensure that this adjustment occurs is by paying attention, or rather by a simulated tension of the sensation and the memory.  This is what a tailor does when he is about to have you try on a piece of clothing for 'basting': he uses pins and fits the material as tightly as he can to your body, which is offered for the task.  Your waking life is therefore a life of work, even when you think you're not doing anything, since at any given moment you must choose, and at any given moment you must exclude.  You choose from among your sensations since you reject a thousand 'subjective' sensations from your consciousness which reappear immediately after you fall asleep.  You choose with extreme precision and delicacy from among your memories since you shove aside all memories which do not fit your present state.  This choice, which you incessantly effectuate, this continually renewed adaptation, is the essential condition of what we call common sense.  But adaptation and choice keep you in a state of uninterrupted tension.  You do not realize it at the time, no more than you sense atmospheric pressure.  But at length you grow weary.  Having common sense is very tiring.

"For, as I just told you, I differ from you precisely in that I do not do anything.  I wholly and simply refrain from making the ceaseless effort which you make.  You are attached to life; I am detached from it.  I become indifferent to everything.  I am uninterested in everything.  To sleep is to be uninterested in life.  We sleep in the exact measure that we are uninterested.  A mother who sleeps next to her child may not hear cracks of thunder whereas a sigh from her child might wake her up.  Was she really sleeping in favor of her child?  We do not sleep in favor of that which continues to interest us.

"You ask me what I do when I dream?  I am going to tell you what you do when you are awake.  You take me − the dreaming "I," the totality of your past − and you lead me, from narrowing to narrowing, and enclose me in a very small circle which you trace around your current action.  This is being awake, this is living a normal psychological life, this is struggling, this is wanting.  As for dreams, do you need me to explain them to you?  Dreams are the state in which you naturally find yourself as soon as you abandon yourself, as soon as you neglect concentrating on a single point, as soon as you stop wanting.  If you insist, if you demand to have something explained to you, ask then how your will goes about the matter at every waking moment, in order to obtain instantaneously and almost unconsciously the concentration of everything you have within you regarding what interests you.  But direct your query to the psychology of awakedness.  Its principal purpose is to respond to you because being awake and wanting are one and the same thing."

This is what my dreaming "I" would say.  And it would tell us many other things if we let it do so.  But it is time to finish up.  What is the essential difference between dreaming and being awake?  We would be repeating ourselves by saying that the same faculties are exerted, whether in waking or in dreaming, but that they are tense in the first case and relaxed in the second.  Dreaming is our entire mental life minus the effort of concentration.  We still perceive, we still remember, we still reason: perceptions, memories, and reasonings might abound in the dreamer since abundance, in the domain of the mind, does not mean effort.  What requires effort is the precision of the adjustment.  We have to do nothing for a dog's bark to untether, in passing, the memory of a crowd's rumbling.  But for this memory to come back as a preference to all other memories, the memory of a dog barking, and to be understood henceforth, that is to say effectively perceived, as a bark, this requires a positive effort.  The dreamer no longer has the power to make that effort.  In that regard, and only in that regard, does he differ from a man who is awake.

This is the difference.  It is expressed in many forms.  I will not get into any detail; I will limit myself by drawing your attention to two or three points: the instability of dreams, the speed with which they can unfurl themselves, and the preference they bestow upon insignificant memories.

The instability of dreams can be easily explained.  Since dreams in essence involve not adjusting a sensation precisely to a memory, but instead allowing the sensation to frolic, a number of very diverse memories may be posed against a single sensation.  Take, for example, a green spot sprinkled with white dots in the field of vision.  This may summon a memory of a meadow full of flowers, a pool table and its balls − as well as many, many other things.  All these memories wish to be revived in this sensation; all of them run after it in pursuit.  Sometimes they reach their goal one after the other: the meadow becomes a pool table and we witness some extraordinary transformations.  Sometimes they come together: the meadow is a pool table − an absurdity the dreamer will perhaps attempt to alleviate by reason, which will aggravate it further.

The speed at which certain dreams develop seems to be another effect from the same cause.  In but a few seconds, our dream may present us with a series of events which would have taken several whole days if we were awake.  You know Alfred Maury's observation: it has remained a classic, and whatever might have been said about it recently, I deem it plausible because I have found analogous accounts in the literature on dreams.  Yet this precipitation of images has nothing mysterious about it.  Note that the images of dreams are mostly visual; conversations which the dreamer thinks he has had are, in the majority of cases, reconstructed, completed, and amplified when he wakes up.  Perhaps even, in certain cases, it may even have been only the thought of the conversation, its overall meaning, that accompanied those images.  For, as large a multitude of visual images as we may desire can occur all of a sudden, in panorama; more likely it will be a succession of a small number of moments.  It is therefore not surprising that dreams amass in a few seconds what would have taken many waking days: dreams see them in short; they proceed, when all is said and done, like memory proceeds.  In a waking state, the visual memory which serves to interpret the visual sensation is obliged to place itself precisely upon it; from here follows the unfurling; it takes up the same time; in short, the recognized perception of outside events lasts just as long they do.  But in dreams, the interpretative memory of the visual sensation regains its liberty: the fluidity of the visual sensation forces the memory not to stick; the rhythm of the interpretative memory therefore does not need to adopt the rhythm of reality; and the images may henceforth occur, if they so choose, with vertiginous speed, as would happen with a film reel if we did not regulate its unfurling.  Precipitation, no more than abundance, is no sign of power in the domain of the mind: it is order, it is always the precision of adjustment that requires effort.  The interpretative memory could become strained, it could pay attention to life, it could finally exit a dream: whatever the case, external events will chant its pace and slow down its speed.  As, in a clock, the pendulum in its slices delays for the period of several days the spring which would be practically instantaneous if it were free.

So what would be left is to find out why dreams prefer this or that memory to others just as capable of placing themselves upon actual sensations.   The fantasies of our dreams are scarcely more explicable that those of our waking hours; at the very least, we may note their strongest tendency.  During normal sleep our dreams gather those thoughts which passed like flashes or those objects which we perceived without fixing our attention upon them.  If we dream of the events of the day, insignificant occurrences, not more important things, have a greater chance of reappearing during the night.  On this point I agree completely with the views of many other researchers.  I am in the street; I am waiting for the tram; it would not be able to touch me because I do not budge from the sidewalk.  What do I then say when, at the moment it grazes me, the idea of a possible danger crosses my mind?  If my body shrinks back instinctively without my being conscious of being afraid, the next night I may dream that the tram will run me over.  During the day I take care of a sick person whose condition is hopeless.  If a ray of hope flares within me for just an instant − a momentary, almost imperceptible flash − my dreams that night may show me the sick person cured; in any case, I would be more likely to dream of a cure than of death or illness.  In short, what is preferably recalled is what is least noticed.  There is nothing surprising about that.  The dreaming "I" is a distracted "I" who is relaxed.  The memories that harmonize best with it are the memories of distraction, those, as it were, which do not bear the mark of effort. 

These are the observations which I wanted to present to you on the subject of dreams.  They are quite incomplete.  They still only refer to the dreams we know nowadays, to those which we remember and which usually belong to lighter sleep.  When we sleep deeply, we may experience dreams of another kind, but of them little is left by the time we wake up.   I tend to believe − for, it should be said, reasons predominantly theoretical and therefore hypothetical − that it is during this deep sleep that we have a far more extended and detailed vision of our past.  It is thus towards deep sleep that psychology should direct its efforts, not only to study the structure and function of unconscious memory, but also to scrutinize more mysterious phenomena that are the result of "psychical research."  I will not venture onto this terrain; nevertheless, I cannot but attach a certain importance to the observations culled with such indefatigable zeal by the Society for Psychical Research.  Exploring the unconscious, working in the basement of the mind with specially suited methods − such should be the principal tasks of psychology in this century that has just begun.  I have no doubts that some wonderful discoveries await us, discoveries perhaps as important as those in preceding centuries in the physical and natural sciences.  In the very least, this is my wish for our new century and the hope I convey to you here in conclusion.

Bergson, "What is a dream?" (part 2)

Part two of a lecture given at the Institut général psychologique by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Let us summarize what we have discussed.  During natural sleep our senses are in no way shut off from outside impressions.  Doubtless they do not have the same precision; on the other hand, they come across far more "subjective" impressions which took place unnoticed during waking hours, when we were moving about the outside world common to all men, and which reappear during sleep because now we only live for ourselves.  We cannot even claim that our perception is reduced when we sleep; rather, it expands, in certain ways at least, its field of operation.  It is true that it loses in tension what it gains in extension.  It hardly delivers anything not diffused and confused.  But we create dreams with just as much real sensation.

How do we create dreams?  The sensations which act as our material are vague and unspecified.  Let us take the most basic among them, those colored spots that evolve before us when we close our eyelids.  Here we have black lines on a white background.  They could represent a carpet, a chessboard, a page of writing, a host of other things as well.  Who selects these things?  What is the form that imprints its decision upon the indecision of the material?  This form is memory.

We note first of all that dreams generally create nothing at all.  Doubtless one may cite several examples of artistic, literary, or scientific works carried out in the course of a dream.  I will only mention the best known of these.  A musician of the eighteenth century, Tartini, burnt with the fires of composition but the muse remained rebellious.  He fell asleep; and here is where the Devil himself appeared, seized a violin, and played the sonata so desired.  Upon waking, Tartini wrote the sonata down from memory, and it comes down to us as the Devil’s Trill Sonata.  But we can get little from such a terse account.  What we really need to know is whether Tartini didn’t actually compose the sonata while trying to recollect it.  The imagination of the sleeper who wakes sometimes adds to the dream, retroactively changes it, or fills in the gaps which may be, we understand, considerable.  I have looked for more profound observations and, most of all, for more certain authenticity. But the only one I could find was that of the Scottish novelist Stevenson.  In a curious essay entitled “A chapter on dreams” Stevenson teaches us that the most original stories have been composed or at least completely sketched out in dreams.  But read that chapter attentively: you will see that the author once knew, at some point in his life, a psychological state in which he had difficulty determining whether he was asleep or awake.  In fact, I believe that when the mind creates, when it makes the effort that demands the composition of a work or the solution to a problem, it is not asleep – at least that part of the mind which is working is not the same as the one which is dreaming.  The working part pursues, in the subconscious, research which has no bearing on the dream and which only appears upon waking.

As for the dream itself, it is hardly more than a resurrection of the past.  But it is a past we do not recognize.  Often, it involves a forgotten detail, a remembrance that seemed erased and which, in reality, was hiding in the depths of memory.  Often the image evoked is also that of an object or action perceived distractedly, almost unconsciously, during waking hours.  And most of all, there are fragments of shattered remembrances which memory collects here and there and which it presents to the consciousness of the sleeper in an incoherent form.  Before this assembly deprived of sense, intelligence (which continues reasoning regardless of what is said) looks for meaning; it attributes incoherence to the gaps which it fills in evoking other remembrances, those which are often presented in the same disorder and which, in turn, suggest a new explanation, and so forth indefinitely.  But for the moment I will not insist on this viewpoint.  Suffice it to say that, to respond to the question I just asked, the informative power which converts vague impressions that catch the eye, the ear, and the entire surface and interior of the body into precise and specified objects – this is memory.

Memory!  When awake, we have quite a few remembrances which appear and disappear, demanding our attention one after another. But these are the remembrances closely attached to our situation and our action.  I recall now a book by the Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys on the subject of dreams.  The situation is that I am dealing with the question of dreams and I am here at the Psychology Institute; it involves my surroundings and my occupation, that which I perceive and what I am called upon to orient the activity of my memory in a particular direction.  The remembrances which we evoke while awake, as foreign as they often appear to our preoccupations of the moment, are always connected in some way.  What is the role of memory in an animal? It is to remind him, in each case, of the advantageous and disadvantageous consequences of analogous antecedents and thus to instruct him on what he has to do.  In man, memory is not as much a prisoner of action; I recognize what I have to do but I still persist in not doing it or doing something else.  Our remembrances, at any given time, form a solid whole – a pyramid, if you will – with an unceasingly moving summit that coincides with our present and surges with it into the future.  But behind the remembrances which come and rest in this way upon our present occupation, and which are then revealed in the occupation, there are also others, thousands and thousands of others, below the scene illuminated by our consciousness.

Yes, I believe that our past life is there, retained in its minutest details, and that we forget nothing, and that everything we have ever perceived, thought, wanted, from the first waking hour of our consciousness, persists indefinitely.  But the remembrances which my memory keeps in this way in its darkest depths are also in the form of invisible ghosts.  Perhaps they yearn for light; in any case, they do not try to surface.  They know that it is impossible, and that I, a living and moving creature, have other things to do apart from seeing to them.  But suppose that at a given moment I become disinterested in the present situation, in the present action, in that one point on which my memory would normally concentrate all its activities.  Suppose, in other words, that I fall asleep.  This is when these immobile remembrances, sensing that I have just hurdled the obstacle and lifted the trapdoor which kept them in the basement of my consciousness, set themselves in motion.  They rise, bustle about, carry out tasks, all during the night of the unconsciousness person, an immense danse macabre.  And, all together, they run to the door that has just been cracked open.  They all want to get through.  They all cannot, since there are too many of them.  From among this multitude of summoned remembrances, which are the ones selected?  You will have little difficulty in guessing.  Just now, when I was awake, the remembrances admitted were the ones that could invoke a relationship with the present situation, with my current perceptions.  Now they are the vaguest forms that take shape before my eyes; the most indecisive sounds which impress my ear; the most indistinct of touches which scatter across the surface of my body.  But they are also the most frequent sensations that come from the inside of my organs.  And so, among these ghost remembrances which seek to ballast themselves with color, with sound, with materiality in the end, those which manage to do so are the ones which can assimilate the colored dust that I see, the sounds from outside or inside which I hear, etcetera, and which, in addition, harmonize with the general affective state of which my organic impressions are composed.  When this junction operates between memory and sensation, I dream.

In a poetic page of The Enneads, the philosopher Plotinus, interpreter of and heir to Plato, explains to us how men are born into life.  Nature, he says, sketches out living bodies, but only sketches them out.  Left to its own devices, it would not complete the task.  On the other hand, souls reside in the world of Ideas.  Incapable of acting and not even thinking about doing so, they glide above time and outside space.  But among the bodies, there are certain ones who correspond more in form to the yearnings of certain souls.  And among the souls, there are those who recognize themselves more clearly in certain bodies.  The body, which emerges from nature’s hands still not quite viable, will then polarize to that soul which will give it a complete life.  And the soul, looking at the body in which it believes it has seen its reflection, fascinated as if looking in a mirror, will let itself be attracted as well, bow forward and fall.  Its fall is the beginning of life.  I would compare these detached souls to the remembrances which wait at the bottom of our unconscious.  I would also liken our nocturnal sensations to those hardly sketched bodies.  The sensation is warm, colored, vibrant, and almost living, but indecisive.  The remembrance is clean and precise, but without an inside and without life.  The sensation would surely like to find a form in which it may fix the indecision of its contours.  The remembrance would surely like to obtain material to fill itself out, to ballast itself, to realize itself at last.  They are attracted to one another, and the ghost remembrance materializing in the sensation which brings it blood and flesh becomes a being which lives its own life.  It becomes a dream.

The birth of a dream has therefore no mystery to it.  Our dreams are elaborated a bit like our vision of the real world.  The mechanism of operation is the same generally speaking.  What we see of an object placed before our eyes, and what we understand of a phrase pronounced in our ears, is little, as it were, next to what our memory adds to it.  When you glance through your newspaper, when you leaf through a book, do you think that you actually perceive every letter of every word, or even every word of every sentence?  You wouldn’t be reading many pages per day then. The truth is that you perceive neither the word nor the sentence, but instead only certain letters or certain characteristic traits, just enough for you to guess the rest.  All the rest you think to see, when in reality you have brought upon yourself a hallucination.  Many corroborative experiments leave no doubt in this regard.  I will only cite those of Goldscheider and Müller.  These researchers write or print formulations in contemporary usage: “Entry strictly forbidden”; “Preface to the fourth edition,” etcetera, but take care to make mistakes, changing and, above all, omitting letters.  The person subjected to this experiment is then placed before these formulations, in the dark, and naturally has no idea what was written.  Then the inscription is illuminated for a very short time, too short a time for the observer to see all the letters.  He begins, in fact, by determining experimentally the time needed to catch sight of a letter of the alphabet.  It is thus easy to make it so that the subject cannot distinguish more than eight or ten letters, for example, from the thirty or forty contained in the formulation.  For, more often than not, he can read this formulation without any difficulty.

But this is not the most instructive point of this experiment for us.  If one were to ask the observer which letters are the ones he perceived, the letters he would mention might in fact be present.  But they could also be letters which are absent, which have been replaced by others or which were simply omitted.  In this way, because sense seems to demand it, he sees himself working off nonexistent letters in full light.  The characters that are really perceived are those which serve to evoke a remembrance.  Unconscious memory, finding the formulation to which these characters begin to give shape, projects this remembrance out in hallucinatory form.  It is the remembrance which the observer has seen, much more than the inscription itself.  In short, reading is guesswork, but not abstract guesswork: it is the exteriorization of remembrances, of perceptions recalled simply and therefore unreal, all of which benefit from the partial realization which they find here and there in order to realize themselves completely.

In this way, in a waking state, our recognition of an object implies an analogous operation to that which a dream carries out.  We see nothing of an object except its sketch; this calls upon the remembrance of the complete thing; and the complete remembrance of which our mind was not conscious, remains in any case internal as a simple thought, and takes advantage of the occasion to project itself outwards.  It is this type of hallucination, inserted into a real frame, which we inflict upon ourselves when we see something.  There would also be a lot to say about the attitude and behavior of the remembrance during the course of the operation.  One should not think that the remembrances lodged at the bottom of memory remain there inert and indifferent.  They are waiting; they are almost ready at attention.  When the mind is more or less preoccupied and we open up our newspaper, don’t we immediately manage to stumble across a word which corresponds precisely to our preoccupation?  But the sentence makes no sense, and we perceive right away that the word we read is not the word printed: there were simply some traits in common between the two, a vague resemblance in their configuration.  The idea that we absorbed thus awakened, in our unconscious, all the images of the same family, all the remembrances of similar words, and made them hope, in a way, that they might return to consciousness.  And one has, in effect, become conscious once again that the actual perception of a certain form of word is beginning to come into being.

Such is the mechanism of perception strictly speaking, and such is the mechanism of dreams.  In both cases there are, on the one hand, real impressions made on the sensory organs, and, on the other hand, remembrances which come to be inserted into the impression and which profit from its vitality to return to life.

Bergson, "What is a dream?" (part 1)

The first part of a lecture given at the Institut général psychologique by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

The subject that the institute invited me to talk to you about is so complex and raises so many problems – some psychological, others physiological and even metaphysical – and would require explanations of such length (and we have so little time), that I request your permission to forgo all prefatory and non-essential remarks and come immediately to the heart of the matter.

So here is a dream: I see marching before me all sorts of objects; none of them exists in reality.  I feel that I am coming and going, enduring a series of adventures, when all the while I am asleep in my bed, and quite peacefully at that.  I listen to myself speak and I hear how I am answered; nonetheless, I am alone and say nothing.  Whence comes this illusion?  Why do we perceive people and things as if they were really present?

But first, is there nothing at all?  Isn't a certain perceptible material offered to our sight, to our hearing, to our touch, etcetera?

Let us close our eyes and see what happens.  Many people will say that nothing happens, but that is because they are not looking attentively.  In reality, we notice a great many things.  First of all, a black background.  Then spots of various colors, sometimes drab, sometimes of a singular clarity.  These spots dilate and contract, change forms and nuance, encroach upon one another.  The change may be slow and gradual.  On occasion this change also takes place with extreme rapidity.  Whence comes this phantasmagoria?  Physiologists and psychologists have spoken of "luminous dust," "ocular spectra," and "phosphenes"; in any case, they attribute these appearances to slight modifications produced incessantly in the circulation of the retina, or to the pressure which the closed eyelid exerts upon the human eye, mechanically exciting the optic nerve.  Yet it matters little what the explanation of the phenomenon may be, or what name we choose to give it.  It is found in everyone and it provides, without a doubt, the stuff from which we carve out our dreams.

Alfred Maury and, around the same period, the Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys had both remarked that these colored spots in moving form might be consolidated at the moment of our becoming sleepy, thus sketching the contours of the objects that will compose our dreams.  This observation was taken, however, with a grain of salt because it came from psychologists who were half-asleep.  G. T. Ladd, an American philosopher and professor at Yale University, has since devised a more rigorous method, if one of difficult application as it requires some training.  It involves keeping our eyes closed when we wake and retaining for a few moments the dream that is about to disappear from our field of vision and soon, of course, also from our memory.  Here we see the objects of our dreams dissolve into phosphenes and become confounded with the colored spots which the eye really perceived when our eyelids were closed.  For example, let's say we were reading a newspaper: this is a dream.  We wake up, and from the newspaper, whose lines are fading, we see a white spot with vague black streaks: this is reality.  Or we might think of a dream coming to us on the open water.  As far as the eye could see, the ocean was nurturing its grey waves crowned in white foam.  Upon waking, everything gets lost in a large spot of pale grey sprinkled with brilliant dots.  During sleep, therefore, something was offered to our perception, a visual dust, and this dust is used to create dreams.

Is it the only thing used?  To speak only about our sense of sight, let us say that beside these visual sensations whose source is internal, there is also an exterior cause.  The eyelids may have been closed, yet the eye still distinguishes light and darkness and even recognizes, up to a certain point, the nature of that light.  For the sensations provoked by real light lie at the origin of many of our dreams.  A candle lit suddenly will evoke in the sleeper, if his sleep is not too deep, an ensemble of visions dominated by the idea of fire.  Tissié cites two such examples: "B. dreams that the theater of Alexandria is on fire; the flames illuminate an entire city quarter.  All of a sudden he finds himself transported to the center of the basin at Manshieh square; a streak of fire runs along the chains connecting the bounds placed about the basin.  Then he finds himself in Paris at the Expo which is on fire ... he witnesses some harrowing scenes, etcetera.  He wakes up with a start.  His eyes had been taking in the ray of light projected by the dark lantern which the nurse on duty had turned towards his bed when she passed by..."; "M. dreams that he has been engaged by the marine corps, where he once served.  He goes to Fort-de-France, to Toulon, to Lorient, to the Crimea, to Constantinople.  He sees flashes of lightning; he hears thunder ... finally, he takes part in a battle in which he sees fire leaving the mouths of the cannons ... He wakes up with a start.  Like B., he was woken up by the stream of light projected by the dark lantern of the nurse making her rounds."  Such are the dreams that can be provoked by vivid and unexpected light.

Very different are those which suggest a continuous, soft light, such as that of the moon.  Krauss tells us that one night, as he was waking up, he noticed that he was still extending his arms towards the person who had been, in his dream, a young girl, towards what was nothing more than the moon, amidst whose beams of light he squarely sat.  This case is not the only one.  It seems that the rays of the moon, caressing the eyes of the sleeper, may have the power of provoking such virginal apparitions.  Would this not explain the fable of Endymion, the shepherd forever asleep, whom the goddess Selene (otherwise known as the Moon) loves so profoundly?

The ear also has its interior sensations – buzzing, chiming, whistling – which we make out rather poorly while awake yet which sleep cleanly detaches.  What is more, once we are asleep we continue to hear certain noises from outside.  The creak of furniture; the crackling fire; the rain beating against the window; the wind playing its chromatic scale in the chimney; as well as other sounds which catch the ear and which dreams convert into conversations, cries, concerts, etcetera.  When scissors and tongs are rubbed together before the ears of a sleeping Alfred Maury, we get the following: he immediately dreams that he hears an alarm and that he is witnessing the events of June 1848.  I can cite other examples.  But one must understand that sounds have as much place in the majority of dreams as forms and colors do.  Visual sensations predominate; in fact, often we do nothing more than see although we may believe that we hear at the same time.  According to Max Simon, we may even have an entire conversation during a dream and then suddenly realize that no one is speaking and that no one has spoken.  It was a direct exchange of thoughts between us and our interlocutor, a silent interview.  A strange phenomenon this, and yet one easy to explain.  For us to hear sounds in a dream, there generally need to be real sounds that are perceived.  With nothing the dream does nothing.  And so, when we do not provide our dream with acoustic material, it has trouble creating acoustics.

Moreover, the sense of touch interferes as much as the sense of hearing.  Contact and pressure affect consciousness more when one is asleep.  As it influences the images that at that moment occupy the field of vision, the sense of touch may be able to modify their form and meaning.  Let us suppose that all of a sudden the sleeper feels his shirt touch his body; he will remember that he is dressed lightly.  If he were then to believe he was walking down the street, he would think passers-by were gazing at him as he had very little on.  Those passers-by would not, however, be shocked, because it is rare that the eccentricities to which we subject ourselves during dreams have any emotional effect on our spectators, regardless of how confused or embarrassed we may be ourselves.

I have just referred to a very well-known dream.  And here is another, which many among you must certainly have had.  In this dream, we feel we are flying, gliding, and traversing space without touching the earth.  In general, when it happens once, it tends to happen again, and at every new experience, we say to ourselves: "I have always dreamed that I was in motion above the ground, but this time I am fully awake.  Now I know and I will show others how they can free themselves from the laws of gravity."  If you wake up suddenly, this, I believe, is what you will find.  You felt that your feet had lost their foothold since you were stretched or spread out.  On the other had, thinking you were not asleep, you were not conscious of being in bed.  Therefore you said to yourself that you were no longer touching the ground and, what is more, that you were standing up.  It was this conviction that developed your dream.  Notice that in the cases in which you feel that you are flying, you believe you are launching your body to the right or left side, lifting your arm in a sudden movement as if you were flapping a wing.  For this is precisely the side on which you are sleeping.  When you awake, you will find that the sensation of making an effort to fly was created by nothing more than the pressure of your arm and body against your bed.  This phenomenon, detached from its cause, was nothing more than a vague sensation of fatigue imputable to your effort.  Re-attached to the conviction that your body left the earth, it became the precise sensation of making an effort to fly.

It is interesting to see how the sensations of pressure, encompassing even the field of vision and taking advantage of the luminous dust present therein, can be transposed in this field into forms and colors.  One day, for example, Max Simon dreamed that he was standing before two piles of gold coins, that these piles were uneven, and that he was trying to even them out.  But he did not succeed.  Here he experienced a vivid feeling of anxiety.  This feeling, increasing from minute to minute, finally woke him up.  He then noticed that one of his legs was caught under the folds of his covers, and that his two feet were not at the same level, and were trying in vain to come closer to one another.  It is obviously from there that he derived his vague sensation of unevenness, which, having intruded upon the field of vision and finding there perhaps (this is the hypothesis I propose) one or more yellow spots, was expressed visually by the unevenness of two piles of gold coins.  Thus there exists, immanent in tactile sensations during sleep, a tendency to visualize ourselves and insert ourselves in such a form into our dreams.

More important still are the sensations of "interior touch" emanating from all points of the organism, in particular from the viscera.  Sleep may give them, or rather imbue them with a singular delicateness and acuity.  Doubtless they were there during waking hours as well, but since we were distracted from them by other actions, we were living outside of ourselves; sleep has made us return to ourselves.  It has happened that people suffering from laryngitis, tonsillitis, etcetera, have found themselves afflicted in the middle of a dream with a disagreeable stinging sensation in their throats.  A simple illusion, they tell themselves upon waking.  Alas, so quickly does the illusion become reality!  We can enumerate serious illnesses and accidents, epilepsy seizures, cardiac afflictions, etcetera, which were discovered this way, prophesied in a dream.  We are thus not surprised that philosophers such as Schopenhauer claim that dreams transfer to our consciousness the shocks sustained by our nervous system; that psychologists such as Scherner attribute to each organ the power of provoking specific dreams that represent those organs symbolically; and that doctors such as Artigues have written treatises on the semiological value of dreams, on the manner in which they aid in the diagnosis of illnesses.  More recently, Tissié has shown how troubles with digestion, breathing, and circulation can be conveyed in certain types of dreams.