The Interpretation of Dreams / Толкование сновидений

Internal (Organic) Physical Excitation. – If we are disposed to seek dream sources not outside, but inside, the organism, we must remember that almost all our internal organs, which in their healthy state hardly remind us of their existence, may, in states of excitation – as we call them – or in disease, become for us a source of the most painful sensations, which must be put on an equality with the external excitants of the pain and sensory stimuli. It is on the strength of very old experience that, e.

declares that “during sleep the mind becomes far more deeply and broadly conscious of its connection with the body than in the waking state, and it is compelled to receive and be influenced by stimulating impressions originating in parts and changes of the body of which it is unconscious in the waking state.” Even Aristotle

declares it quite possible that the dream should draw our attention to incipient morbid conditions which we have not noticed at all in the waking state (owing to the exaggeration given by the dream to the impressions; and some medical authors, who were certainly far from believing in any prophetic power of the dream, have admitted this significance of the dream at least for the foretelling of disease.

Even in our times there seems to be no lack of authenticated examples of such diagnostic performances on the part of the dream.

cites from Artigues (Essai sur la Valeur sГ©mГ©iologique des RГ©ves), the history of a woman of forty-three years, who, during several years of apparently perfect health, was troubled with anxiety dreams, and in whom medical examination later disclosed an incipient affection of the heart to which she soon succumbed.

Serious disturbances of the internal organs apparently act as inciters of dreams in a considerable number of persons. Attention is quite generally called to the frequency of anxiety dreams in the diseases of the heart and lungs; indeed this relation of the dream life is placed so conspicuously in the foreground by many authors that I shall here content myself with a mere reference to the literature.

Spitta,

Maury, M.В Simon, TissiГ©.) TissiГ© even assumes that the diseased organs impress upon the dream content their characteristic features.