Hervey de Saint-Denys was a pioneer dream researcher; his descriptions of lucid and cryptomnesic dreams are some of the earliest we have. But he got other things wrong. His theory to explain the inconsistency of dreams is that many memories are hazy--shards or blurs--and thus when evoked and blended into a dream scene, they retain their shoddy quality; the play has ragged stage costumes and crumbling sets. He says:

[Such memories] ...will sometimes lack vividness because they were originally collected under bad conditions of light... or at too great a distance, or too rapidly.

One lady told me that she had had a dream in which she thought she was sitting at her piano, with one of her brothers by her side, who had died some years before in the Italian war, appearing to her in his officer's uniform, without her being surprised by it.

She was playing a military march, but no matter how hard she pressed the pedal, the piano emitted only muffled, metallic, almost extinct sounds. As she turned to her brother, as if to show her surprise, she could no longer see him, but she saw a long line of soldiers passing silently at the back of the hall, looking like half-dull shadows. The memory of the loss of her brother came to her suddenly.

She felt a very strong emotion and woke with a start.

The lady who had had this dream never spoke of it without still feeling a sort of terror which had to do with... ideas of mysterious intervention... [i.e., she felt her brother's ghost visited her.]

For myself, who see in this nothing but the succession of a series of reminiscences perfectly in accordance with the ordinary laws of the association of ideas, I cite it precisely as an example of the unequal lucidity [clarity, not lucidity in the modern sense] which reigns and must reign in the various elements of the same vision.

This lady thinks she is in front of her piano, that is the starting-point; her brother used to sit there with her; the memory of this brother is evoked quite naturally; the image appears to her clear and distinct; for it is an image strongly engraved on her memory. From the officer in uniform to the inspiration of a military march she had often heard from afar, from soldiers she must also have seen from afar marching in some magazine, the connection could not be easier to grasp. But this march she remembers, she cannot recall it more clearly or with more force than the one she originally heard it with. Nor can the soldiers whose silhouettes come to life be shown more clearly than they [were] perceived in reality.

The imagination, which has the power to unite all these reminiscences into a single action, does not have the power to give them a uniform character of intensity. Hence this inconsistency in the clarity of the subjects of our dreams, as well as in the scenes they represent.

Source: Dreams and how to direct them, 2022, pp 75; Daniel Bernardo's translation of Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger by Hervey de Saint-Denys, 1867.

EDITOR'S COMMENT

What a claim! Dreams show us wild images all the time, yet he's saying they're helpless to whip up decent lighting, a few faces, a little piano music!

Here's an alternate theory. The dream never aimed for realism. The muffled music and shadowy soldiers aren't failures, they're esthetic choices. They add to the funereal mood, show how her grief still shadows present pleasures--music, men--and even point out her loss isn't private but political: her brother's death was no accident and he wasn't alone.

What Saint-Denys sees as the brain's failure to achieve literalism, I see as decisions to enhance a mood and make a point. But then, S-D hadn't lived through abstractionism, surrealism or expressionism in art, film and theater.

Saint-Denys was not alone. All his (male) contemporaries and successors in the late 19th century to early 20th centuries-- Alfred Maury, Havelock Ellis, Frederick Greenwood, Freud and his critics like neurologist Ramón y Cajal --just couldn't imagine an imagination with any imagination! Dreams were passively secreted or extruded by blind pressures and forces.

Who saw otherwise? Outsiders. Experienced, high-recall dreamworkers like Jung, Anna Kingsford, Yeats and his friend AE, Robert Louis Stevenson. But they weren't respectable--writers, artists... women!

Saint-Denys was progressive--for his day. He showed his dream-self could reason, choose, notice it's dreaming, take initiative. But believing dreams might take initiative... that was too much.

It still is, for many sincere, intelligent dream researchers like Zadra and Stickgold, who still see dreams as mechanistic. They're still as wrong as Saint-Denys, Maury and Freud.

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