The Interpretation of Dreams

step farther to find a source of dreams
which is more prolific than any of those mentioned above, and which
promises indeed to be inexhaustible. If it is established that the
bodily organs become, in sickness, an exciting source of dreams, and
if we admit that the mind, when diverted during sleep from the outer
world, can devote more of its attention to the interior of the body,
we may readily assume that the organs need not necessarily become
diseased in order to permit stimuli, which in one way or another
grow into dream-images, to reach the sleeping mind. What in the waking
state we vaguely perceive as a general sensation, perceptible by its
quality alone- a sensation to which, in the opinion of physicians, all
the organic systems contribute their share- this general sensation
would at night attain a greater potency, and, acting through its
individual components, would constitute the most prolific as well as
the most usual source of dream-representations. We should then have to
discover the laws by which organic stimuli are translated into
dream-representations.
This theory of the origin of dreams is the one most favoured by
all medical writers. The obscurity which conceals the essence of our
being- the "moi splanchnique" as Tissie terms it- from our
knowledge, and the obscurity of the origin of dreams, correspond so
closely that it was inevitable that they should be brought into
relation with one another. The theory according to which the organic
sensations are responsible for dreams has, moreover, another
attraction for the physician, inasmuch as it favours the
aetiological union of the dream with mental derangement, both of which
reveal so many points of agreement in their manifestations, since
changes in the general organic massive sensation and in the stimuli
emanating from the internal organs are also considered to have a
far-reaching significance as regards the origin of the psychoses. It
is therefore not surprising that the organic stimulus theory can be
traced to several writers who have propounded this theory
independently.
A number of writers have followed the train of thought developed
by Schopenhauer in 1851. Our conception of the universe has its origin
in the recasting by the intellect of the impressions which reach it
from without in the moulds of time, space and causality. During the
day the stimuli proceeding from the interior of the organism, from the
sympathetic nervous system, exert at most an unconscious influence
on our mood. At night, however, when the overwhelming effect of the
impressions of the day is no longer operative, the impressions that
surge upward from within are able to force themselves on our
attention- just as in the night we hear the rippling of the brook that
was drowned in the clamour of the day. But how else can the
intellect react to these stimuli than by transforming them in
accordance with its own function into things which occupy space and
time and follow the lines of causality?- and so a dream originates.
Thus Scherner,