Note 87 — Chapter V

The fundamental character of emotion in dreams has been more or less clearly recognised by various investigators. Thus C. L. Herrick, who studied his own dreams for many months, found that the essential element is the emotional, and not the ideational, and that, indeed, when recalled at once, with closed eyes and before moving, they were nearly devoid of intellectual content (Journal of Comparative Neurology, vol. iii. p. 17, 1893). R. MacDougall considers that dreaming is 'a succession of intense states of feeling supported by a minimum of ideational content,' or, as he says again, more accurately, 'the feeling is primary; the idea-content is the inferred thing' (Psychological Review, vol. v. p. 2). Grace Andrews, who kept a record of her dreams (American Journal of Psychology, October 1900), found that dream emotions are often stronger and more vivid than those of waking life; 'the dream emotion seems to me the most real element of the dream life.' P. Meunier, again ('Des Rêves Stéreotypés,' Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, September-October 1905), states that 'the substratum of a dream consists of a cœnæsthesia or an emotional state. The intellectual operation which translates to the sleeper's consciousness, while he is asleep, this cœnæsthesia or emotional state is what we call a dream.'