The Subconscious Mind

Often we try, in vain, to recall from our memory a name or an incident that we are certain we entrusted to it; then at another time, without any special effort, we find ourselves remembering that name or that incident as though it had come to us from some strange source.

Things like these lead us to believe that we possess a mind we cannot master by our will: the subconscious mind. We can account for this reasonably if we know that our feelings suggest to us thoughts we do not perceive, just as our thoughts create in us feelings of which we may sense only a part. It is psychologically established that the mind forms images of everything by which sensation is affected, and these images are faithful or unfaithful in proportion to the precision and clarity of the sensation. From this arise the effects which our conscious mind proves unable to explain when they appear to it in our practical and intellectual life, and in our imaginative life above all.

Yet even if we explain some of the effects that appear in our mind by the existence of a subconscious mind, it is a mistake to believe in the existence of two separate minds in a single body. The subconscious mind is nothing but the margins of the conscious mind, and the process of thinking and directing the will is nothing but an attempt to concentrate these margins into a single point so that they may acquire a clear and effective force, just as we concentrate the rays of the sun in a lens so that they acquire the properties of fire. The strength or weakness of this concentration of thought depends on the sensations we have recorded in the margins, which become, as we said, images in the thinking mind.

What we record — or rather, what records itself — in our subconscious mind appears to us from time to time, in waking and in sleep alike, and has its good or ill effect on our health and our personality. That is why we see many modern physicians expose some of their patients to sensations which, without their being aware of it, leave in their subconscious mind an impression that helps to restore their morale and, consequently, their bodies.

The results of psychoanalysis show us that an idea may lie buried more than forty years in the subconscious mind and then return, resurrected in memory or in dream.

Dreams and the Subconscious Mind

Here I must state an important reservation: most of what scientists know about dreams is still closer to supposition than to established fact.

Most psychologists believe that dreams continue, in people in their normal states, all night long, but that they remember only those they carry away from the times of light sleep and shortly before waking.

We notice that most of the dreams we remember are the dreams of four o'clock in the morning, when we are on the point of waking.

Most dreams are built upon visual or auditory imaginings. It is a cause for astonishment, however, that we rarely remember having seen colors in our dreams, or having heard a language foreign to the language of our childhood; and rarer still is it that we speak a foreign language.

Scientists also observe that more than seventy percent of dreams are of the disturbing kind. This is because man avoids thinking of disturbing things while awake, and so dreams come to satisfy his desire to think about the thing, not to enjoy it!

Adolescents dream much of ghosts and jinn; then, a few years later, we find them speaking of dreams in which pleasurable appetites are supposedly satisfied, and speaking much of frightening dreams that bring them every kind of torment. Dreams are, for the most part, children of the environment: the soldier dreams most often of battles, the hunter of hunting, the painter of painting, and the student at a flying school has dreams almost confined to piloting airplanes and to disasters in the air.

Dreams may be vivid to a degree that makes people, especially the young among them, confuse their dreams with their waking memory: they relate incidents as having actually happened to them when they were nothing but dreams, and they deny matters they have thought about, believing them to have been dreams!

Hence we see some people take alarm at fears that never befell them at all. The strange thing is that these people usually do not remember the dreams that cause their fear; rather, they remember, or feel, the fear itself. The explanation of this is that the fear passes from their subconscious mind to their conscious mind in the instant that separates sleep from waking, without their being aware of it.

It is established that dreams pass with a strange swiftness! We may dream a whole lifetime in a single instant. It appears that the subconscious mind has been granted such a gift of symbolism as fits it to compress eternities past and to come into a single moment. The difficulty, however, arises in interpreting those symbols. Nor is the difficulty confined to the symbols being obscure; it results more often from our inability to remember all the symbols, or to remember them in their correct order. We remember scraps of the dream from here and there, and we deepen their obscurity when we err in arranging them according to the time of their occurrence, putting first what should come last and last what should come first. If we were able to remember all our dreams, in their correct order, we would look upon dreams with a deeper "literary" appreciation.

The Interpretation of Dreams

Among the problems that have occupied the human mind from its beginnings to this day is the problem of dreams, their explanation and their interpretation. The ancients regarded their interpretation more seriously than we do today, as is shown by the books they left us and which have reached us, chief among them the various mythologies.

Today we interpret them in the light of what we mentioned above: that every feeling must leave in the mind an image possessing an activity of its own. If some feeling occurs during sleep, the image resulting from that feeling is compelled to travel to the conscious mind to register itself there. On its way to it, it gathers up scraps of news from here and there and composes from them a tale which spares the subconscious mind a shock, and so it bears it.

As for the awakening of feeling during sleep, its cause is an unease in sensation resulting from an abnormal bodily condition. Hence we see the sick dream more than the healthy, and the anxious dream more than the tranquil.

By this we explain what they call the prophecies of dreams. If, for example, I dream this evening that my hand will hurt me tomorrow, and my hand actually hurts me tomorrow, I say that I have prophesied! The truth is that I dreamed that dream only because it hurt me during the night and sent an image of the pain to the brain, and the subconscious mind caught it on its way and showed it to me before I felt it.

As for propping up the theory of prophecy on the fact that two or three people have dreamed one and the same dream, it is a flimsy prop, for dreams, as we said, are children of the environment, and if two or three people find themselves in identical or very similar circumstances, it is not strange that they should dream similar dreams. It may happen, for example, that all the newspapers report the news of some airplane's disaster, and millions of people dream, that very night, that they flew in an airplane which caught fire, and that they threw themselves toward the earth, and then wake while still between earth and sky. Is it not foolishness to attribute that coincidence to magic and prophecy, or to explain it, as some have explained it and still do, as a return to the life of our ancestors the birds, according to the theory of evolution? Not to mention that most of our dreams turn upon our senses, and people's senses are alike, so it is natural that their dreams should be alike as well.

The hardest kind of dreams to interpret are the serial dreams: the sick man dreams the same terrifying dream night after night, perhaps because he finds himself in a particular circumstance that dominates all the other influences affecting the course of his life. This kind of dream, however, remains the furthest of all from admitting the application of the interpretations we have mentioned.

Freud's Theory of Dreams

It is natural that the theory of Freud and his followers concerning dreams should be built upon his general theory that individuals live in a constant struggle, night and day, to gain pleasure and to avoid pain. They say that dreams are a satisfaction of desires: of hopes, wishes, and appetites. They add that man, in his waking hours, avoids thinking of his appetites for fear of going too far in loving something he cannot attain; when the mind sleeps, that fear sleeps, and emotion alone stands independent. Dreams, then, are the expression of suppressed appetites, or of the appetite for expression itself. And they hold that dreams protect sleep instead of disturbing it, as others claim. Their argument is that the sensations which the subconscious mind catches on their way to the conscious mind, and shows to us as dreams, would wake us if they were able to reach the conscious mind.

They are right in this respect, for by our own experience we see that we usually wake upon some dream. It is reasonable that the dream itself should have wakened us when it slipped from our subconscious mind and reached our conscious mind. What supports this view is that we usually wake when we reach a danger in our dream. If we dream, for example, that we have fallen from an airplane or an automobile, or that a ravening beast is attacking us, or that an enemy intends to kill us, we wake before we pass through the danger or before it destroys us. That is because the situations which the subconscious mind cannot weave into the thread of its tale reach our conscious mind, and on arriving there they wake us. The subconscious mind, then, as Freud and his followers say, protects our sleep.

The Psychology of Dreams

Everything registered in the brain can become a dream, and can also contribute to the forming of a dream, because the dreaming mind has a capacity for collecting scraps of various incidents and reports and binding them into a single story. Most of those incidents are gathered from our strong emotions, saddening or joyful, such as enthusiasm, faith, appetite, fear, and the rest. (That is why we have so often taken the airplane as our example.)

If we know how to analyze dreams, we can trace them back to their origin in our conscious mind, or in our practical life, or in our sensations, and so the obsessions and delusions that monopolize our thoughts, and thereby affect the course of our lives, are dispelled. We must not let it slip from our minds that our subconscious mind has the conscious mind's power of drawing conclusions and connecting them with events, and of connecting events with one another logically (though often impractically), so that we suppose it impossible that our dream, whose logic has reached such a pitch, could be an old experience we are remembering; and so we attribute it to prophecy, and it becomes a cause of disquiet to our minds.

Dreams have a close connection with the will — that is, if faith is present... He who resolves before sleeping not to dream a disturbing dream, and believes that he will not dream, and then manages to forget that resolution completely, will assuredly not dream! Likewise, if he resolves to dream such-and-such a dream, or such-and-such another, and follows the same method, he will dream it.

I have tested this myself, and it has become possible for me to dream what I wish, and only what I wish, when I wish. Let him who believes make the test for himself...