WEBVTT
1
00:00:01.250 --> 00:00:05.009
Chapter 3. They do not suffice to produce them, because
2
00:00:05.030 --> 00:00:08.410
they are vague and intertermanent. To speak only of those
3
00:00:08.449 --> 00:00:12.000
that play the principal role, the changing colours and forms,
4
00:00:12.480 --> 00:00:15.919
which deploy before us when our eyes are closed, never
5
00:00:15.960 --> 00:00:20.800
have well-defined contours. Here are black lines upon a white background.
6
00:00:21.399 --> 00:00:23.820
They may represent to the dreamer the page of a book,
7
00:00:24.300 --> 00:00:27.269
or the façade of a new house, with dark blinds,
8
00:00:28.050 --> 00:00:31.949
or any number of other things. Who will choose? What
9
00:00:31.989 --> 00:00:35.030
is the form that will imprint its decision upon the
10
00:00:35.130 --> 00:00:38.740
indecision of this material? This form is our memory. Let
11
00:00:38.820 --> 00:00:41.579
us note first that the dream in general creates nothing.
12
00:00:42.159 --> 00:00:46.039
Doubtless there may be cited some examples of artistic, literary
13
00:00:46.159 --> 00:00:49.780
and scientific production in dreams. I will recall only the
14
00:00:49.820 --> 00:00:54.149
well-known anecdote told of Tartini, a violinist composer of the
15
00:00:54.350 --> 00:00:57.409
18th century. As he was trying to compose a sonata,
16
00:00:57.850 --> 00:01:01.810
and the muse remained recalcitrant, he went to sleep. and
17
00:01:01.850 --> 00:01:04.329
he saw in a dream the devil who seized his
18
00:01:04.349 --> 00:01:09.629
violin and played with master hand the desired sonata. Tartini
19
00:01:09.650 --> 00:01:11.989
wrote it out from memory when he woke. It has
20
00:01:12.030 --> 00:01:15.569
come to us under the name of the devil's sonata.
21
00:01:16.510 --> 00:01:20.219
But it is very difficult, in regard to such old cases,
22
00:01:20.799 --> 00:01:25.599
to distinguish between history and legend. We should have auto-observations
23
00:01:26.099 --> 00:01:29.719
of certain authenticity. Now I have not been able to
24
00:01:29.780 --> 00:01:34.659
find anything more than that of the contemporary English novelist, Stevenson.
25
00:01:35.099 --> 00:01:38.420
In a very curious essay entitled A Chapter on Dreams,
26
00:01:38.819 --> 00:01:42.079
this author, who is endowed with a rare talent for analysis,
27
00:01:42.579 --> 00:01:45.049
explains to us how the most original of his stories
28
00:01:45.439 --> 00:01:49.129
have been composed, or at least sketched in dreams. But
29
00:01:49.209 --> 00:01:51.590
read the chapter carefully. You will see that at a
30
00:01:51.609 --> 00:01:54.629
certain time in his life, Stevenson had come to be
31
00:01:54.730 --> 00:01:57.969
in an habitual psychical state, where it was very hard
32
00:01:58.030 --> 00:02:00.310
for him to say whether he was sleeping or waking.
33
00:02:01.150 --> 00:02:03.489
That appears to me to be the truth. When the
34
00:02:03.510 --> 00:02:06.390
mind creates, I would say, when it is capable of
35
00:02:06.430 --> 00:02:10.610
giving the effort of organization and synthesis, which is necessary
36
00:02:10.650 --> 00:02:14.069
to triumph over a certain difficulty, to solve a problem,
37
00:02:14.490 --> 00:02:17.569
to produce a living work of the imagination, we are
38
00:02:17.610 --> 00:02:21.090
not really asleep. Or at least that part of ourselves
39
00:02:21.180 --> 00:02:24.219
which labors is not the same as that which sleeps.
40
00:02:24.840 --> 00:02:28.520
We cannot say, then, that it is a dream. In sleep,
41
00:02:28.979 --> 00:02:33.650
properly speaking, in sleep which absorbs our whole personality, it
42
00:02:33.710 --> 00:02:37.289
is memories, and only memories, which weave the web of
43
00:02:37.370 --> 00:02:41.449
our dreams. But often we do not recognise them. They
44
00:02:41.490 --> 00:02:45.669
may be very old memories forgotten, during waking hours, drawn
45
00:02:45.710 --> 00:02:49.150
from the most obscure depths of our past. They may be,
46
00:02:49.469 --> 00:02:54.009
often are, memories of objects that we have perceived, distractedly,
47
00:02:54.370 --> 00:02:59.819
almost unconsciously, while awake. Or they may be fragments of
48
00:02:59.879 --> 00:03:02.360
broken memories which have been picked up here and there,
49
00:03:02.819 --> 00:03:07.560
and mingled by chance, composing an incoherent and unrecognisable whole,
50
00:03:07.939 --> 00:03:12.340
before these bizarre assemblages of images which present no plausible significance.
51
00:03:13.120 --> 00:03:16.699
Our intelligence, which is far from surrendering the reasoning faculty
52
00:03:16.759 --> 00:03:21.509
during sleep, as has been asserted, seeks an explanation, tries
53
00:03:21.550 --> 00:03:24.650
to fill the lacunae. It fills them by calling up
54
00:03:24.770 --> 00:03:28.780
other memories which, presenting themselves often with the same deformations
55
00:03:29.240 --> 00:03:32.879
and the same incoherences as the preceding, demand in their
56
00:03:32.939 --> 00:03:37.099
turn a new explanation, and so on indefinitely. But I
57
00:03:37.139 --> 00:03:40.520
do not insist upon this point, for the moment. It
58
00:03:40.580 --> 00:03:43.659
is sufficient for me to say, in order to answer
59
00:03:43.699 --> 00:03:47.710
the question which I have propounded, that the formative power
60
00:03:47.810 --> 00:03:51.530
of the materials, furnished to the dream by the different senses,
61
00:03:52.009 --> 00:03:57.060
the power which converts into precise, determined objects, the vague
62
00:03:57.099 --> 00:04:01.129
and indistinct sensations that the dreamer receives from his eyes,
63
00:04:01.550 --> 00:04:06.949
his ears, and the whole surface and interior of his body,
64
00:04:07.530 --> 00:04:10.949
is the memory, memory. In a waking state we have
65
00:04:11.009 --> 00:04:16.040
indeed memories which appear and disappear, occupying our mind in turn,
66
00:04:16.639 --> 00:04:20.220
but they are always memories, which are closely connected with
67
00:04:20.279 --> 00:04:25.850
our present situation, our present occupation. our present occupation, our
68
00:04:25.910 --> 00:04:30.600
present action. I recall at this moment the book of M.
69
00:04:30.899 --> 00:04:34.480
Dervion Dreams, that is because I am discussing the subject
70
00:04:34.540 --> 00:04:37.860
of dreams and this act orients in a certain particular
71
00:04:37.899 --> 00:04:41.959
direction the activity of my memory. The memories that we
72
00:04:42.019 --> 00:04:45.360
evoke while waking, however distant they may at first appear
73
00:04:45.399 --> 00:04:48.750
to be from the present action, are always connected with
74
00:04:48.810 --> 00:04:51.509
it in some way. What is the role of memory
75
00:04:51.550 --> 00:04:54.540
in an animal? It is to recall to him in
76
00:04:54.660 --> 00:05:00.100
any circumstance the advantageous or injurious consequences which have formerly
77
00:05:00.160 --> 00:05:03.620
arisen in analogous circumstances in order to instruct him as
78
00:05:03.660 --> 00:05:06.660
to what he ought to do. In man memory is
79
00:05:06.720 --> 00:05:10.670
doubtless less the slave of action, but still it sticks
80
00:05:10.750 --> 00:05:15.250
to it. Our memories, at any given moment, form a
81
00:05:15.310 --> 00:05:19.449
solid whole, a pyramid, so to speak, whose point is
82
00:05:19.490 --> 00:05:23.540
inserted precisely into our present action. but behind the memories
83
00:05:23.600 --> 00:05:27.009
which are concerned in our occupations, and are revealed by
84
00:05:27.089 --> 00:05:31.470
means of it, there are others, thousands of others, stored
85
00:05:31.569 --> 00:05:36.189
below the scene illuminated by consciousness. Yes, I believe indeed
86
00:05:36.250 --> 00:05:39.540
that all our past life is there, preserved even to
87
00:05:39.560 --> 00:05:43.959
the most infinitesimal details, and that we forget nothing, and
88
00:05:43.980 --> 00:05:48.980
that all that we have felt, perceived, thought, willed, from
89
00:05:49.019 --> 00:05:56.629
the first awakening of our consciousness. survives, indestructibly. But the
90
00:05:56.649 --> 00:06:00.430
memories which are preserved in these obscured depths are there
91
00:06:00.490 --> 00:06:04.069
in the state of invisible phantoms. They aspire, perhaps, to
92
00:06:04.110 --> 00:06:06.689
the light, but they do not even try to rise
93
00:06:06.750 --> 00:06:09.980
to it. They know that it is impossible, and that I,
94
00:06:10.060 --> 00:06:13.240
as a living and acting being, have something else to
95
00:06:13.279 --> 00:06:16.779
do than to occupy myself with. But suppose that, at
96
00:06:16.800 --> 00:06:20.579
a given moment, I become disinterested in the present situation.
97
00:06:21.060 --> 00:06:24.439
in the present action in short, in all which previously
98
00:06:24.480 --> 00:06:28.399
has fixed and guided my memory, suppose, in other words,
99
00:06:28.879 --> 00:06:33.360
that I am asleep. Then these memories, perceiving that I
100
00:06:33.399 --> 00:06:36.639
have taken away the lodstakel, have raised the trapdoor which
101
00:06:36.680 --> 00:06:40.040
has kept them beneath the floor of consciousness, arise from
102
00:06:40.060 --> 00:06:44.000
the depths. They rise, they move, they perform in the
103
00:06:44.050 --> 00:06:48.149
night of unconsciousness, a great dance macabre. They rush together
104
00:06:48.189 --> 00:06:50.800
to the door which has been left ajar. they all
105
00:06:50.839 --> 00:06:53.939
want to get through. But they cannot. There are too
106
00:06:54.000 --> 00:06:58.420
many of them. From the multitudes which are called, which
107
00:06:58.459 --> 00:07:01.920
will be chosen, it is not hard to say. Formerly,
108
00:07:02.399 --> 00:07:05.220
when I was awake, the memories which forced their way
109
00:07:05.610 --> 00:07:10.000
were those which could involve claims of relationship with the present, situation,
110
00:07:10.350 --> 00:07:13.689
with what I saw and heard around me. Now it
111
00:07:13.769 --> 00:07:18.310
is more vague, images which occupy my sight, more indecisive
112
00:07:18.350 --> 00:07:23.120
sounds which affect my year, more indistinct touches, which are
113
00:07:23.180 --> 00:07:26.439
distributed over the surface of my body, but there are
114
00:07:26.500 --> 00:07:30.199
also the more numerous sensations which arise from the deepest
115
00:07:30.259 --> 00:07:35.120
parts of the organism. So, then, among the phantom, memories
116
00:07:35.180 --> 00:07:38.970
which aspire to fill themselves with colour, with sonority, in short,
117
00:07:39.129 --> 00:07:43.269
with materiality, the only ones that succeed are those which
118
00:07:43.329 --> 00:07:46.389
can assimilate themselves with the colour dust that we perceive,
119
00:07:47.009 --> 00:07:53.290
the external and internal sensations that we catch. etc., and which, besides,
120
00:07:53.930 --> 00:07:57.829
respond to the affective tone of our general sensibility. When
121
00:07:57.860 --> 00:08:00.959
this union is effected between the memory and the sensation,
122
00:08:01.600 --> 00:08:02.199
we have a dream.
1
00:00:01.250 --> 00:00:05.009
Chapter 3. They do not suffice to produce them, because
2
00:00:05.030 --> 00:00:08.410
they are vague and intertermanent. To speak only of those
3
00:00:08.449 --> 00:00:12.000
that play the principal role, the changing colours and forms,
4
00:00:12.480 --> 00:00:15.919
which deploy before us when our eyes are closed, never
5
00:00:15.960 --> 00:00:20.800
have well-defined contours. Here are black lines upon a white background.
6
00:00:21.399 --> 00:00:23.820
They may represent to the dreamer the page of a book,
7
00:00:24.300 --> 00:00:27.269
or the façade of a new house, with dark blinds,
8
00:00:28.050 --> 00:00:31.949
or any number of other things. Who will choose? What
9
00:00:31.989 --> 00:00:35.030
is the form that will imprint its decision upon the
10
00:00:35.130 --> 00:00:38.740
indecision of this material? This form is our memory. Let
11
00:00:38.820 --> 00:00:41.579
us note first that the dream in general creates nothing.
12
00:00:42.159 --> 00:00:46.039
Doubtless there may be cited some examples of artistic, literary
13
00:00:46.159 --> 00:00:49.780
and scientific production in dreams. I will recall only the
14
00:00:49.820 --> 00:00:54.149
well-known anecdote told of Tartini, a violinist composer of the
15
00:00:54.350 --> 00:00:57.409
18th century. As he was trying to compose a sonata,
16
00:00:57.850 --> 00:01:01.810
and the muse remained recalcitrant, he went to sleep. and
17
00:01:01.850 --> 00:01:04.329
he saw in a dream the devil who seized his
18
00:01:04.349 --> 00:01:09.629
violin and played with master hand the desired sonata. Tartini
19
00:01:09.650 --> 00:01:11.989
wrote it out from memory when he woke. It has
20
00:01:12.030 --> 00:01:15.569
come to us under the name of the devil's sonata.
21
00:01:16.510 --> 00:01:20.219
But it is very difficult, in regard to such old cases,
22
00:01:20.799 --> 00:01:25.599
to distinguish between history and legend. We should have auto-observations
23
00:01:26.099 --> 00:01:29.719
of certain authenticity. Now I have not been able to
24
00:01:29.780 --> 00:01:34.659
find anything more than that of the contemporary English novelist, Stevenson.
25
00:01:35.099 --> 00:01:38.420
In a very curious essay entitled A Chapter on Dreams,
26
00:01:38.819 --> 00:01:42.079
this author, who is endowed with a rare talent for analysis,
27
00:01:42.579 --> 00:01:45.049
explains to us how the most original of his stories
28
00:01:45.439 --> 00:01:49.129
have been composed, or at least sketched in dreams. But
29
00:01:49.209 --> 00:01:51.590
read the chapter carefully. You will see that at a
30
00:01:51.609 --> 00:01:54.629
certain time in his life, Stevenson had come to be
31
00:01:54.730 --> 00:01:57.969
in an habitual psychical state, where it was very hard
32
00:01:58.030 --> 00:02:00.310
for him to say whether he was sleeping or waking.
33
00:02:01.150 --> 00:02:03.489
That appears to me to be the truth. When the
34
00:02:03.510 --> 00:02:06.390
mind creates, I would say, when it is capable of
35
00:02:06.430 --> 00:02:10.610
giving the effort of organization and synthesis, which is necessary
36
00:02:10.650 --> 00:02:14.069
to triumph over a certain difficulty, to solve a problem,
37
00:02:14.490 --> 00:02:17.569
to produce a living work of the imagination, we are
38
00:02:17.610 --> 00:02:21.090
not really asleep. Or at least that part of ourselves
39
00:02:21.180 --> 00:02:24.219
which labors is not the same as that which sleeps.
40
00:02:24.840 --> 00:02:28.520
We cannot say, then, that it is a dream. In sleep,
41
00:02:28.979 --> 00:02:33.650
properly speaking, in sleep which absorbs our whole personality, it
42
00:02:33.710 --> 00:02:37.289
is memories, and only memories, which weave the web of
43
00:02:37.370 --> 00:02:41.449
our dreams. But often we do not recognise them. They
44
00:02:41.490 --> 00:02:45.669
may be very old memories forgotten, during waking hours, drawn
45
00:02:45.710 --> 00:02:49.150
from the most obscure depths of our past. They may be,
46
00:02:49.469 --> 00:02:54.009
often are, memories of objects that we have perceived, distractedly,
47
00:02:54.370 --> 00:02:59.819
almost unconsciously, while awake. Or they may be fragments of
48
00:02:59.879 --> 00:03:02.360
broken memories which have been picked up here and there,
49
00:03:02.819 --> 00:03:07.560
and mingled by chance, composing an incoherent and unrecognisable whole,
50
00:03:07.939 --> 00:03:12.340
before these bizarre assemblages of images which present no plausible significance.
51
00:03:13.120 --> 00:03:16.699
Our intelligence, which is far from surrendering the reasoning faculty
52
00:03:16.759 --> 00:03:21.509
during sleep, as has been asserted, seeks an explanation, tries
53
00:03:21.550 --> 00:03:24.650
to fill the lacunae. It fills them by calling up
54
00:03:24.770 --> 00:03:28.780
other memories which, presenting themselves often with the same deformations
55
00:03:29.240 --> 00:03:32.879
and the same incoherences as the preceding, demand in their
56
00:03:32.939 --> 00:03:37.099
turn a new explanation, and so on indefinitely. But I
57
00:03:37.139 --> 00:03:40.520
do not insist upon this point, for the moment. It
58
00:03:40.580 --> 00:03:43.659
is sufficient for me to say, in order to answer
59
00:03:43.699 --> 00:03:47.710
the question which I have propounded, that the formative power
60
00:03:47.810 --> 00:03:51.530
of the materials, furnished to the dream by the different senses,
61
00:03:52.009 --> 00:03:57.060
the power which converts into precise, determined objects, the vague
62
00:03:57.099 --> 00:04:01.129
and indistinct sensations that the dreamer receives from his eyes,
63
00:04:01.550 --> 00:04:06.949
his ears, and the whole surface and interior of his body,
64
00:04:07.530 --> 00:04:10.949
is the memory, memory. In a waking state we have
65
00:04:11.009 --> 00:04:16.040
indeed memories which appear and disappear, occupying our mind in turn,
66
00:04:16.639 --> 00:04:20.220
but they are always memories, which are closely connected with
67
00:04:20.279 --> 00:04:25.850
our present situation, our present occupation. our present occupation, our
68
00:04:25.910 --> 00:04:30.600
present action. I recall at this moment the book of M.
69
00:04:30.899 --> 00:04:34.480
Dervion Dreams, that is because I am discussing the subject
70
00:04:34.540 --> 00:04:37.860
of dreams and this act orients in a certain particular
71
00:04:37.899 --> 00:04:41.959
direction the activity of my memory. The memories that we
72
00:04:42.019 --> 00:04:45.360
evoke while waking, however distant they may at first appear
73
00:04:45.399 --> 00:04:48.750
to be from the present action, are always connected with
74
00:04:48.810 --> 00:04:51.509
it in some way. What is the role of memory
75
00:04:51.550 --> 00:04:54.540
in an animal? It is to recall to him in
76
00:04:54.660 --> 00:05:00.100
any circumstance the advantageous or injurious consequences which have formerly
77
00:05:00.160 --> 00:05:03.620
arisen in analogous circumstances in order to instruct him as
78
00:05:03.660 --> 00:05:06.660
to what he ought to do. In man memory is
79
00:05:06.720 --> 00:05:10.670
doubtless less the slave of action, but still it sticks
80
00:05:10.750 --> 00:05:15.250
to it. Our memories, at any given moment, form a
81
00:05:15.310 --> 00:05:19.449
solid whole, a pyramid, so to speak, whose point is
82
00:05:19.490 --> 00:05:23.540
inserted precisely into our present action. but behind the memories
83
00:05:23.600 --> 00:05:27.009
which are concerned in our occupations, and are revealed by
84
00:05:27.089 --> 00:05:31.470
means of it, there are others, thousands of others, stored
85
00:05:31.569 --> 00:05:36.189
below the scene illuminated by consciousness. Yes, I believe indeed
86
00:05:36.250 --> 00:05:39.540
that all our past life is there, preserved even to
87
00:05:39.560 --> 00:05:43.959
the most infinitesimal details, and that we forget nothing, and
88
00:05:43.980 --> 00:05:48.980
that all that we have felt, perceived, thought, willed, from
89
00:05:49.019 --> 00:05:56.629
the first awakening of our consciousness. survives, indestructibly. But the
90
00:05:56.649 --> 00:06:00.430
memories which are preserved in these obscured depths are there
91
00:06:00.490 --> 00:06:04.069
in the state of invisible phantoms. They aspire, perhaps, to
92
00:06:04.110 --> 00:06:06.689
the light, but they do not even try to rise
93
00:06:06.750 --> 00:06:09.980
to it. They know that it is impossible, and that I,
94
00:06:10.060 --> 00:06:13.240
as a living and acting being, have something else to
95
00:06:13.279 --> 00:06:16.779
do than to occupy myself with. But suppose that, at
96
00:06:16.800 --> 00:06:20.579
a given moment, I become disinterested in the present situation.
97
00:06:21.060 --> 00:06:24.439
in the present action in short, in all which previously
98
00:06:24.480 --> 00:06:28.399
has fixed and guided my memory, suppose, in other words,
99
00:06:28.879 --> 00:06:33.360
that I am asleep. Then these memories, perceiving that I
100
00:06:33.399 --> 00:06:36.639
have taken away the lodstakel, have raised the trapdoor which
101
00:06:36.680 --> 00:06:40.040
has kept them beneath the floor of consciousness, arise from
102
00:06:40.060 --> 00:06:44.000
the depths. They rise, they move, they perform in the
103
00:06:44.050 --> 00:06:48.149
night of unconsciousness, a great dance macabre. They rush together
104
00:06:48.189 --> 00:06:50.800
to the door which has been left ajar. they all
105
00:06:50.839 --> 00:06:53.939
want to get through. But they cannot. There are too
106
00:06:54.000 --> 00:06:58.420
many of them. From the multitudes which are called, which
107
00:06:58.459 --> 00:07:01.920
will be chosen, it is not hard to say. Formerly,
108
00:07:02.399 --> 00:07:05.220
when I was awake, the memories which forced their way
109
00:07:05.610 --> 00:07:10.000
were those which could involve claims of relationship with the present, situation,
110
00:07:10.350 --> 00:07:13.689
with what I saw and heard around me. Now it
111
00:07:13.769 --> 00:07:18.310
is more vague, images which occupy my sight, more indecisive
112
00:07:18.350 --> 00:07:23.120
sounds which affect my year, more indistinct touches, which are
113
00:07:23.180 --> 00:07:26.439
distributed over the surface of my body, but there are
114
00:07:26.500 --> 00:07:30.199
also the more numerous sensations which arise from the deepest
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parts of the organism. So, then, among the phantom, memories
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which aspire to fill themselves with colour, with sonority, in short,
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with materiality, the only ones that succeed are those which
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can assimilate themselves with the colour dust that we perceive,
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the external and internal sensations that we catch. etc., and which, besides,
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respond to the affective tone of our general sensibility. When
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this union is effected between the memory and the sensation,
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we have a dream.
