Booklover — Dreaming

Column Editor: Donna Jacobs (Retired, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC 29425) <donna.jacobs55@gmail.com>

Has it really been two months since the season when Clement Clark Moore tells us about the night before Christmas and that children “were nestled all snug in their beds; while visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads?”

Dreaming. In Moore’s classic poem dreaming is a pleasantry about a magical season. In the movie “Nightmare on Elm Street”…. well nightmare is the operative word and thus self explanatory. And yet dreams in all forms captivate us. Henri Bergson explored the dimensions of dreams and the effects of and on the human psyche in his book simply entitled Dreams. In the Introduction presented by the translator, Edwin E Slosson, the reader learns: “To use Professor Bergson’s striking metaphor, our memories are packed away under pressure like steam in a boiler and the dream is their escape valve.” Let’s escape for a minute into Bergson’s world of dreams.

Henri-Louis Bergson was an influential French philosopher when he was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.” A disclaimer on the Nobel Prize website states that: “During the selection process in 1927, the Nobel Committee for Literature decided that none of the year’s nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel. According to the Nobel Foundation’s statutes, the Nobel Prize can in such a case be reserved until the following year, and this statute was then applied. Henri Bergson therefore received his Nobel Prize for 1927 one year later, in 1928.”

Pedigree, a crisis of faith, and an award winning proficiency in mathematics led Bergson to choose academic studies in the humanities, particularly philosophy, over a career in the sciences. (Maybe this was his dream?) The pedigree is intriguing. His father, Michael Bergson (Bereksohn), was of Polish Jewish descent. His mother, Katherine Levison, was of English/Irish Jewish descent. The Bereksohns were a prominent Polish family and known for their entrepreneurial spirit with Bergson’s greatgreat-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, serving as a protégé to Stanisław Antoni Poniatowski (Stanislaus II Augustus) the King of Poland. The crisis of faith is reported to have been associated with his discovery of the theory of evolution. His award and science publication came during his education time at Lycée Fontanes. However, this choice of humanities led to a doctoral degree and the publication of his thesis: “Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness” in 1889.

Now one can only imagine how a philosopher with a proficiency in the sciences, an intriguing pedigree and impacted by religious influences will tackle an understanding of dreams, how we dream and what we dream about. His essay on the matter is short and opens with a disclaimer essentially saying that on this complex matter involving multi perspectives he is going to cut to the chase. And in the next paragraph that is exactly what the reader gets: “A dream is this. I perceive objects and there is nothing there.” To which the philosopher in him asks: “But, first, is it true that there is nothing there? I mean, is there not presented a certain sense material to our eyes, to our ears, to our touch, etc., during sleep as well as during waking?” Bergson talks us through how visual, auditory, and tactile sensations mix with the cocktail of our memories to manifest into our dreams. “When this union is effected between the memory and the sensation, we have a dream.”

We have all had that dream where we are flying. Enjoy Bergson’s explanation on this dream state phenomenon: “I have had before now in a dream the illusion of flying or floating, but this time it is the real thing. It has certainly proved to me that we may free ourselves from the law of gravitation. Now, if you wake abruptly from this dream, you can analyze it without difficulty, if you undertake it immediately. You will see that you feel very clearly that your feet are not touching the earth. And, nevertheless, not believing yourself asleep, you have lost sight of the fact that you are lying down. Therefore, since you are not lying down and yet your feet do not feel the resistance of the ground, the conclusion is natural that you are floating in space. Notice this also: when levitation accompanies the flight, it is on one side only that you make an effort to fly. And if you woke at that moment you would find that this side is the one on which you are lying, and that the sensation of effort for flight coincides with the real sensation given you by the pressure of your body against the bed. This sensation of pressure, dissociated from its cause, becomes a pure and simple sensation of effort and, joined to the illusion of floating in space, is sufficient to produce the dream.”

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