Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/123

 VII. NEW BOOKS. About Dreaming, Laughing and Blushing. By Sir ARTHUR MITCHELL, K.C.B. Edinburgh and London : William Green & Sons, 1905. Pp. 157. THE three topics which are discussed by Sir Arthur Mitchell in this little volume offer some of the most difficult problems both to psychology and biology. Their intrinsic interest is here enhanced by the fact that the author has had wide experience of mental disease, and therefore of the correlation between mental states and bodily expression. His treatment of the subjects is unconventional, but at the same time thoroughly scien- tific ; he never goes beyond what he has himself observed or verified. At the end of each article is a short summary of the conclusions which have been formed, and a useful bibliography is added at the close of the book. The most controversial of the three articles is the first, on Dreaming. Briefly, Sir Arthur holds that dreaming is a temporary state of mental disorder, involving absence of will control, and diminution of the moral sense ; that this state is beneficial, since the exercise of the will, which is the cause of mental fatigue, is in abeyance ; and that dreaming almost certainly takes place continuously during sleep. Dreaming is thinking, uncontrolled by will, and thinking is coincident with, and perhaps a neces- sary condition of living, in man, just as are breathing, and the circulation of the blood. As Sir Arthur admits, this proposition is not capable of absolute proof, but neither is its contrary. T am not sure however that all his arguments hold. One of these is that whenever he sets himself to observe his mental state on emerging from sleep, he always finds a dream present. May not the resolve to observe have some effect on the manner of waking, forcing the consciousness, as it were, just as the resolve to awake at a certain hour has an effect on the time of waking '? The theory will no doubt be eagerly accepted by believers in the " sub- liminal consciousness," but Sir Arthur is not himself one of them ; he is not convinced that orderly, i.e., will-controlled, thinking occurs during sleep, although there is between the orderly thinking of wide-awake life, day- dreaming and sleep-thinking, only a difference of degree, not of kind. One of the chief difficulties of the theory, indeed, is its view of the will as in a sense external to thought ; true, it has high psychological authority for that. One of the many interesting suggestions which occur in this article is that momentary sleeps are much more frequent in waking hours than we believe, and that the dreams which come in these momentary breaks in waking life may explain many of the sup- posed apparitions of the dead. A person in one of these short sleeps, of which he is unaware, has the dream-vision of a deceased friend, and waking immediately after, believes he has really seen the friend. The explanation, if valid, might be extended to the visions of spiritualistic stances, and others of that type.