Después del almuerzo (part 2)

The conclusion to a short story ("After lunch") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

We were already walking through Once; above us hovered a gorgeous sun and the streets were dry.  If I had been traveling alone at this hour, I would have no sooner left the tram than headed on foot to the city center.  It was nothing for me to go on foot from Once to the Plaza de Mayo; I once timed myself and made it in thirty-two minutes, running intermittently, most of all at the end.  Now, however, I had to deal with the window, since someone one time had calculated that it was able to open the window suddenly and hurl itself out, for no other reason than a desire to do so, like so many other desires that no one could comprehend.  One or two times I had the impression that it was indeed about to open the window, and I had to place my arm behind it and hold onto the window by its frame.  Perhaps it was just my over-concern, but I wanted to make sure it would not be able to lift up the window and hurl itself out.  After what happened with the inspector, for instance, I completely forgot about the matter and nevertheless it did not hurl itself out.  The inspector was a tall, thin fellow who appeared on the front platform and began punching tickets with that pleasant air that some inspectors have.  When he came to my seat I handed him the two tickets and he punched one, looked down, then looked at the other ticket.  He was about to punch that one as well when he stopped with the ticket in the middle of the control nippers.  All this time, as I prayed he would just go ahead and punch the ticket and return it to me, it seemed like the people in the tram were looking at us more and more.  In the end, shrugging his shoulders, he punched it and handed me the two tickets, and on the platform behind me I heard someone burst out in cruel laughter.  Of course, I had no desire to turn around.  I put my arm back to hold the window shut and pretended that I could not see the inspector, or anyone else for that matter.  On Sarmiento and Libertad people began to get off, and when we arrived at Florida there was almost no one left on board.  I waited until San Martin then made it get out onto the front platform, because I didn't want to pass by the mestizo who might have said something to me.  

I like the Plaza de Mayo very much.  When people talk about the center of town, I immediately think of the Plaza de Mayo.  I like it because of the pigeons, because of the Casa de Gobierno, and because it holds so many memories of history, of the bombs that fell during revolutions, and the caudillos who said they were going to attach their horses to the Pirámide de Mayo.  Peanut sellers and other vendors float about, and there's always an empty bench; walk a little more and you would soon arrive at the port where you could take in the boats and the cranes.  For that reason I thought that the best thing to do would be to take it to the Plaza de Mayo, far away from the cars and buses, and have the two of us sit there a while until it was time to go back home.  Yet when we got off the tram and started to walk towards San Martin, I felt faint.  All of a sudden I realized that I was terribly tired.  Almost an hour of traveling, and all that time having to look back and pretend that I didn't notice that we were being gawked at, and then the conductor with the tickets, and the lady who was about to get off the tram, and then the inspector.  I would have liked to be able to go into a dairy store and order an ice cream or a glass of milk, but I was certain that I simply couldn't, that I would regret it if I made it enter any place where people were sitting down and where, as it were, they would have more time to take a closer look at us.  

In the streets people were crossing about, each one of them following his own path, most of all in San Martin, which was full of banks and offices and everyone racing about with briefcases under their arms.  So we proceeded to the corner of Cangallo.  Then, when we were about to pass the Peuser store windows filled with inkwells and beautiful things, I sensed that it did not wish to follow, that it was making itself heavier and heavier, and as hard as I pulled (trying not to attract any attention), I could hardly move forward.  In the end I had to stop in front of the last store window and pretend that it was looking at the leather-embossed desk appurtenances.  Perhaps it was a little tired; perhaps this was not a whim or vagary.  There was, in short, nothing bad about our stopping here; yet nevertheless, I didn't like it because the people passing by had more time to look closely, and two or three times I noticed that one passer-by would comment to another, or they would bump elbows to get each other's attention.  Finally, I couldn't take it any more and I got a hold of it once again, having it walk with naturalness; yet every step pained me like in those dreams where you're wearing shoes that weigh a ton and you can barely lift them off the floor.  Soon its whim that made us stand here had passed and we proceeded through San Martin up to the corner of the Plaza de Mayo.  

Now the task was crossing the street, because it does not like crossing the street.  It is capable of opening the window of a tram and hurling itself therefrom, but crossing the street it does not like.  The bad thing was that, in order to come to the Plaza de Mayo, you always have to cross one street or another with heavy traffic.  It wouldn't have been so difficult at Cangallo and Bartolomé Mitre, but now I was at the point of giving up, it was weighing down terribly on my hand, the traffic stopped twice, and those who were on the curb on our side of the sidewalk began to cross the street.  I realized that we were not going to be able to reach the other side because it would decide to stop right in the middle, so I preferred to keep going and to wait until it made that decision.  Naturally, the man in the newspaper stand on the corner was already looking at us with rapidly increasing interest.  He was saying something to a lad of my age who was making faces and answering, "I know."  And the cars kept passing by and stopping and passing by again, and here we were planted smack in the middle of the street, and sooner or later a policeman was going to approach us, and that would be the worst thing that could happen.  The policemen here are very good, and for that reason they interfere, they start asking questions, they verify whether someone has gotten lost, and it could suddenly have one of its whims and who knows how it all would end.  The more I thought about it, the more it aggrieved me, and in the end I was really scared almost as if, I swear, I wanted to vomit, and just when traffic had stopped I got a good hold of it, closed my eyes, and, almost doubling over, pulled it forward.  When we had reached the Plaza de Mayo I released it and continued for a few steps on my own, and then turned back around.  I could have wanted it to die, to be already dead, or for Dad and Mom to be dead, for me, too, in the end.  And at the end of ends, for everyone to be dead and buried except for Aunt Encarnacion.

But these things pass right away.  We saw there was a completely empty bench and I restrained it without tugging, and off we went to place ourselves on this bench and look at the pigeons, who fortunately do not allow themselves to be gotten like cats.  I bought peanuts and caramels; I began peeling it both those things and we were rather content in the afternoon sun typical at the Plaza de Mayo and with the people walking from one side to the other.  

I don't know at what moment the idea came to me to abandon it here; the only thing I remember is that I was peeling it a peanut and thinking at the same time that if I pretended to go feed the pigeons roaming a little farther off, it would be extremely easy to turn at the pyramid and lose sight of it.  I think at this point I wasn't thinking about returning home, nor about the faces of my Mom and Dad, because if I had thought about it, I would never have done such a silly thing.  It must be very difficult to take in everything at the same time as wise men and historians do; I thought only that I could abandon it here and walk on alone through the city center with my hands in my pockets, then buy myself a magazine or go somewhere and get some ice cream, before heading back home.  I kept feeding it peanuts for a while but had already made up my mind, and sooner or later I pretended to get up and go stretch my legs and noticed that it did not care whether I remained at its side, or whether I was off to feed peanuts to the pigeons.  I began tossing them what I had left and the pigeons swarmed around me from all sides until I had run out of peanuts and they were all tired.  From the other side of the Plaza one could hardly make out the bench; it was a matter of a few seconds to cross over to the Casa Rosada where there were always two grenadiers on guard, and along the side I set off to the Paseo Colón, the street that Mom said little boys should not go to alone.  Out of habit I kept turning around and looking back but it was impossible for it to follow me; what it most wanted to do was roll around the bench until a policeman or some beneficent lady approached it. 

I do not remember very well what happened at this point as I was walking down the Paseo Colón, which is an avenue like any other.  All of a sudden I was sitting by a shop window below an export and import trade house, and it was then that my stomach began to hurt.  It was not like when I had to go to the bathroom immediately; the pain was higher up, in the stomach itself, as if little by little I were twisting myself into a knot.  I wanted to breathe but that was so hard; so I had to remain still and hope that the cramp would pass.  Before me appeared what seemed like a green spot with tiny dancing dots, and then Dad's face; in the end there was only Dad's face because I had closed my eyes, and in the middle of this green spot was Dad's face. After a while I could breathe better, and some boys looked at me for a moment and one of them said to the other that I was drunk, hammered, but I moved my head and said that it was nothing, that I would always get cramps, but that they would pass immediately.  One of them asked whether I wanted him to get me a glass of water, and the other suggested I dry my forehead because I was sweating.  I smiled and said that I was already better, and I started walking around so that they would go away and leave me alone.  I was sure that I was sweating because water was falling on my brows, and a salty tear entered my eye.  So I took out the handkerchief, passed it over my face, and on my lips I felt a scratch.  And when I looked, there was a dry leaf stuck on the handkerchief which had scratched my mouth.

I don't know how long it took me to get back to the Plaza de Mayo.  Halfway up there I fell, but got up again before anyone noticed, and I crossed in a hurry through all the cars passing by the Casa Rosada.  From afar I saw that it had not budged from the bench; yet I kept running and running until I got to the bench, and, dead tired, I threw myself towards it while the pigeons flew away scared and people turned around with that air they assume when looking at little boys running as if it were a sin.  After a short time, I cleaned it up and said that we had to go back home.  I said this to hear my own voice and to feel happier, because the only thing that worked with it was to take a good hold of it and carry it; it did not hear or pretended not to hear my words.  Fortunately this time, none of its whims surfaced as we crossed the streets, and the tram was almost empty at the beginning of our ride back home.  So I placed it on the first set of seats, sat down beside it, and did not turn around a single time during the whole trip, even as we were getting off the tram.  We walked so slowly through the very last block home, as it wanted to sit in the puddles and I struggled to keep us on dry flagstones.  But I didn't care, I didn't care at all.  The whole time I thought, "I abandoned it"; I looked at it and thought, "I abandoned it"; and even though I still had not forgotten about the Paseo Colón, I felt well, almost proud.  Perhaps some other time ... it wasn't easy, but perhaps ... Who knows with whose eyes Dad and Mom would look at me when they saw me arrive, holding it by the hand.  Of course they would be happy that I had taken it out for a walk downtown; parents are always happy about such things.  But I don't know why at that moment I came to think that sometimes Dad and Mom also produced a handkerchief to dry themselves off, and in that handkerchief there also was a dry leaf that hurt their faces.

Después del almuerzo (part 1)

Part one to a short story ("After lunch") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

After lunch I would have liked to stay in my room reading, but Mom and Dad arrived almost immediately and said that this afternoon I had to take it out for a walk.

My first response was No, Let someone else take it, and Could they just let me study in my room.  I was about to say other things, I was about to explain why I didn't like having to take it out, but Dad took a step forward and gazed at me in that way I cannot resist, riveting me with his eyes, and I felt them piercing deeper and deeper into my face until I was about to scream, and I had to turn around and answer Yes, Of course, Right away.  In these situations Mom would not say anything or look at me, but simply remain a few steps back, her two hands together, and I would see her grey hair falling over her forehead and have to turn around and say Yes, Of course, Right away.  And so they left without another word and I started to get dressed, with my only consolation being the debut of some yellow shoes that shone and shone.

It was two o'clock when I left my room; Aunt Encarnación said that she could come and look for it in the room downstairs, where it always liked to spend the afternoon.  Aunt Encarnación must have realized that my having to go out with it despaired me greatly, because she ran her hand over my hair then bent down and gave me a kiss on my forehead.  I felt her put something in my pocket.

"So that you can go buy yourself something," she whispered.  "And don't forget to give it a little bit.  It's better like that."

Happier now, I kissed her on the cheek, and passed right in front of the door to the room where Mom and Dad were playing checkers.  I think I told them, See you later, something like that, and then produced the five-peso note to smooth it out properly and keep it in my wallet, where there were some coins and another, one-peso note. 

I found it in a corner of the room.  I got a hold of it as best I could and we went out through the patio until we reached the door leading onto the front lawn.  Once or twice I was seized by the desire to release it, to return inside and tell Mom and Dad that it didn't want to come with me; yet I was certain that they would end up bringing it back and obliging me to take it up to the front gates.  They had never asked me to take it into town; it was unfair for them to ask because they knew full well that the one time they had made me walk it down the street, that horrible thing with the Alvarezes' cat had happened.  It seemed like I could still see the face of the policeman talking with Dad at the doorway, Dad pouring out two glasses of beer, and Mom crying in her room.  It was unfair of them to have asked me.         

It had rained that morning, and each time it did, the streets and alleyways of Buenos Aires slipped into further disrepair; scarcely could you walk anywhere without your feet landing in some pool or puddle.  I did as much as I could to traverse the driest parts and not get my new shoes wet, but I immediately saw that it liked the water, and I had to tug at it with all my strength to keep it at my side.  Despite all this, it managed to approach a flagstone set deeper than the others, and by the time I realized this, it was already completely soaked with dry leaves stuck all over it.  I was forced to stop and clean it, and all this time I felt the neighbors training their eyes upon us from their gardens, looking on without saying a word.  I do not wish to lie: in reality, I cared little that they were watching us (that they were watching it, and me who was taking it for a walk); the worst thing was to be held up here with a handkerchief which was getting wet and splattered with mud stains and pieces of dry leaves, all the while having to hold it tight so that it did not regain the puddle.  What is more, I was long since accustomed to walking through the streets with my hands in my pants pockets, whistling or chewing gum, or reading some trifling tales, with the lower part of my eyes detecting the ponds and puddles of the alleyways which I knew perfectly, from my house to the tram, in such a way that I knew when I was passing Tita's house, and when I was about to arrive on the corner of Carabobo.  Now that I could do none of this, and my handkerchief had begun to moisten the lining of my pocket, and I felt the moisture on my leg, so much bad luck at once was not to be believed. 

At this time, the tram was rather empty, and I prayed we could sit next to one another, with it on the window seat so that it would be less in the way.  It wasn't like it moved too much; but it bothered people all the same and I understood that.  For that reason I was distressed as we boarded the tram because it was almost full, and there were no unoccupied seats next to one another.  The trip was too long for us to remain on the platform: the tram conductor would have ordered me to sit down and put it somewhere, so I made it board immediately and took it to a seat in the middle where a lady was sitting by the window.  The best would have been to sit behind it and keep watch, but the tram was full and I had to proceed forward and sit down quite far away.  The passengers did not seem to pay much notice; at this hour people were digesting their food, half adoze with the jolts and bumps of the tram.  The bad thing was that the tram conductor stopped on the side of the seat where I had placed it, striking a coin against the metal of the ticket machine, and I had to turn around and signal for him to come and charge me, showing him the money so that he understood that he had to give me two tickets.  Yet the conductor was one of those mestizos who see things and do not wish to understand, and he kept banging the coins against his machine.  I had to get up (and now two or three passengers were looking at me) and approach the other seat.  "Two tickets," I told him.  He tore one off, looked at me for a moment, then held the ticket out and looked down, almost out of the corner of his eye.  "Two, please," I repeated, certain that now the whole tram had gotten wind of the matter.  The mestizo tore off the other ticket and gave it to me; he was about to say something but I reached for the money and returned to my seat in two strides without looking back.  The worst thing was that I had to keep spinning around to see whether it wasn't moving around in its seat back there; in doing this, I attracted the attention of some of the passengers.  At first I decided that I would only turn around every time we passed a stop, but the city blocks seemed terribly long, and I was constantly afraid of hearing an exclamation, a shout, like what happened with the Alvarezes' cat.  So I began to count to ten, just like in a boxing match, and this more or less lasted half a city block.  At ten I would turn around with some ulterior motive, to fix, for example, the collar of my shirt, or to put my hand in my jacket pocket, anything to give the impression of a nervous tic or something of the kind.    

I don't know why, but at eight blocks it seemed that the lady in the window seat was going to get off the tram.  This was the worst thing possible because she would say something for it to let her pass, and when it did not realize or did not want to realize what was happening, the lady would get annoyed and seek a way out by force.  Yet I knew precisely what was going to happen in this case and my nerves were on end, so much so, in fact, that I began to look back before we arrived at every stop.  On one of these occasions, I had the impression that the lady was about to get up, and I could have sworn that she said something to it because she looked in its direction and, I believe, she moved her lips.  Just at this very moment an old fat woman got up from one of the seats next to me and began making her way down the aisle.  I went right behind her wanting to push her, wanting to give her a kick in her legs for her to hurry up and let me get to the seat where the lady had taken up a basket or something from the floor and was getting up to get off the tram.  In the end, I think, I did push her, then heard her protesting, and have no idea how I managed to get to the seat in time to remove it so that the lady could get off at the next stop.  Then I placed it against the window and sat down very happily at its side, although four or five idiots were looking at me from the seats in front and the platform where, perhaps, the mestizo had said something to them.

Baudelaire, "Au lecteur"

A famous work ("To the reader") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

Errata, avarice, sin, and fool's bets  
Will occupy our minds and bodies whole: 
Regrets are nourished by our grateful souls,  
Just like the beggars feed their vermin pets.  

Our sins are stubborn, our repentance faint;
And our confessions rob us more than free:
As we return in joy through muddy street,
Believing such vile tears could cleanse our taints.

On evil's pillow sits Trismegistus,
That Satan so long lulling our rapt minds; 
And the rich metal of our will unbinds,   
All vaporized in that wise chemist's ruse.  

The Devil draws us to emotions' depths!  
In horrid objects will we find strange charms;  
Each day descending slowly to Hell's arms, 
Through reeking shadows, fearless, by one step. 

As might a poor debauch'd fool taste and kiss  
The martyred bosom of some ancient whore,  
So do we glide to secret pleasures' shores, 
Which, like a rotting orange, press our lips.

In serried swarm a million helminthes feast,  
A demon folk in riot in our brains;
And when we breathe, into our lungs Death strains,
Just like a river, with muffl'd moans, unseen. 

If violence, poison, daggers, or fire's blaze
Have not portrayed us yet in their doom's draft, 
That woeful canvas of our sad fate's path,
Alas, to this our souls remain unbrazed.

Amidst the jackals, panthers, and she-dogs,
The monkeys, scorpions, vultures, and base snakes,
That, barking, screaming, crawling, grunting, make
Our infamous menagerie of flaws, 

He is the ugliest and wickedest! 
Although bereft of noiseful gestes or shrieks, 
He would reduce the earth to mere debris, 
And in a gaping yawn our world ingest! 

He is Ennui!  Wet eyes unwill'd despair, 
His houkah's smoke dreams but of gallows' crease.
O reader, you know this exquisite beast!
My reader-hypocrite, my peer, my frere!

Bergson, "What is a dream?" (part 3)

The final part of a lecture given at the Institut général psychologique by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

So what then is the difference between perceiving and dreaming?  What then is sleeping?  I am not, of course, asking about the physiological conditions of sleep; that is a question for physiologists to debate, and it is far from being resolved.  I am asking how we should represent the state of a sleeping man's soul.  For the mind continues to function during sleep; it exerts itself − as we have just seen − upon sensations and memories.  And whether we are asleep or awake, it combines the sensation with the memory the sensation evokes.  The mechanism of this operation seems to be the same in both cases.  Nevertheless, we have, on the one hand, normal perception, and, on the other hand, we have dreams.  The mechanism therefore does not work in the same way.  Where is the difference?  And what is the psychological character of sleep?

Let us not trust too much in theories.  We have said that sleeping consisted of isolating oneself from the outside world.  Yet we have shown that sleep does not close off our senses from external impressions, but rather that these impressions lend most dreams their subject matter.  We have also seen that sleep may provide rest devoted to the higher functions of thought, a suspension of reasoning.  I do not think this can be more precise.  In dreams we often become indifferent to logic, but not incapable of logic.  At the risk of bordering on paradox, I would almost say that the fault of the dreamer is to reason too much.  He would avoid the absurd if he remained a mere spectator to the procession of his visions.  But when he wants to provide an explanation at any cost, his logic, destined to connect these incoherent images, cannot but parody reason and approach absurdity.  What is more, I recognize that the higher functions of intelligence are relaxed during sleep, and that even if the faculty of reason is not encouraged by the incoherent game of images, it occasionally amuses itself by defying normal reason.  Yet we could say the same thing about all other faculties.  Thus we cannot characterize the state of dreaming as an abolition of reason or an occlusion of the senses.  Let us put these theories aside and get in touch with the facts.

We have to conduct a decisive experiment upon ourselves.  As we leave the dream state − since we can scarcely analyze ourselves in the course of the dream itself − we will espy the passage from sleep to waking and tighten the beginning and end of that passage as closely together as we can.  Attentive to what is essentially inattentiveness, we will come upon, from a waking state's point of view, the state of the soul still present in the sleeping man.  This is difficult, but not impossible for those who have exerted themselves patiently.  Now permit this panelist to tell you one of his dreams and what he thought he verified upon waking.

The dreamer thinks he is at a tribune haranguing a crowd.  A confused murmur arises from the back of the auditorium.  It gets stronger and stronger; it grows into rumbling, yelling, a horrific din.  Finally, cries can be heard from every part, chanted to a regular rhythm: "Show him the door!  Show him the door!"  At this moment he suddenly wakes up.  A dog was barking in the neighboring garden, and every "woof, woof" of the dog was confused with one of the "Show him the door!" cries.  This is the moment to grasp.  The waking "I" which has just appeared will return to the dreaming "I," who is still there, and say to him: "I have caught you in the act!  You show me a crowd screaming but there is nothing more than a dog barking.  Do not try to flee; I have you: I will learn your secret; you will allow me to see what you did."  To which the dreaming "I" responds: "Take a look: I didn't do anything, and it's precisely in this regard that we differ, you and I, from one another.  Do you think you have to do nothing at all to hear a dog bark and understand that this is a dog barking?  A very serious mistake!  Without thinking about it, you make a considerable effort.  You have to take your entire memory and all your accumulated experience, then lead it, in a sudden constriction, to find only one sound amidst your memories of sound which most closely resembles the sensation of the sound you heard, or which best explains that sound.  This sensation is therefore recovered by memory.  Moreover, you have to obtain a perfect adherence so that there is not even the slightest gap between them (if not, you would be sitting squarely in that dream); the only way you can ensure that this adjustment occurs is by paying attention, or rather by a simulated tension of the sensation and the memory.  This is what a tailor does when he is about to have you try on a piece of clothing for 'basting': he uses pins and fits the material as tightly as he can to your body, which is offered for the task.  Your waking life is therefore a life of work, even when you think you're not doing anything, since at any given moment you must choose, and at any given moment you must exclude.  You choose from among your sensations since you reject a thousand 'subjective' sensations from your consciousness which reappear immediately after you fall asleep.  You choose with extreme precision and delicacy from among your memories since you shove aside all memories which do not fit your present state.  This choice, which you incessantly effectuate, this continually renewed adaptation, is the essential condition of what we call common sense.  But adaptation and choice keep you in a state of uninterrupted tension.  You do not realize it at the time, no more than you sense atmospheric pressure.  But at length you grow weary.  Having common sense is very tiring.

"For, as I just told you, I differ from you precisely in that I do not do anything.  I wholly and simply refrain from making the ceaseless effort which you make.  You are attached to life; I am detached from it.  I become indifferent to everything.  I am uninterested in everything.  To sleep is to be uninterested in life.  We sleep in the exact measure that we are uninterested.  A mother who sleeps next to her child may not hear cracks of thunder whereas a sigh from her child might wake her up.  Was she really sleeping in favor of her child?  We do not sleep in favor of that which continues to interest us.

"You ask me what I do when I dream?  I am going to tell you what you do when you are awake.  You take me − the dreaming "I," the totality of your past − and you lead me, from narrowing to narrowing, and enclose me in a very small circle which you trace around your current action.  This is being awake, this is living a normal psychological life, this is struggling, this is wanting.  As for dreams, do you need me to explain them to you?  Dreams are the state in which you naturally find yourself as soon as you abandon yourself, as soon as you neglect concentrating on a single point, as soon as you stop wanting.  If you insist, if you demand to have something explained to you, ask then how your will goes about the matter at every waking moment, in order to obtain instantaneously and almost unconsciously the concentration of everything you have within you regarding what interests you.  But direct your query to the psychology of awakedness.  Its principal purpose is to respond to you because being awake and wanting are one and the same thing."

This is what my dreaming "I" would say.  And it would tell us many other things if we let it do so.  But it is time to finish up.  What is the essential difference between dreaming and being awake?  We would be repeating ourselves by saying that the same faculties are exerted, whether in waking or in dreaming, but that they are tense in the first case and relaxed in the second.  Dreaming is our entire mental life minus the effort of concentration.  We still perceive, we still remember, we still reason: perceptions, memories, and reasonings might abound in the dreamer since abundance, in the domain of the mind, does not mean effort.  What requires effort is the precision of the adjustment.  We have to do nothing for a dog's bark to untether, in passing, the memory of a crowd's rumbling.  But for this memory to come back as a preference to all other memories, the memory of a dog barking, and to be understood henceforth, that is to say effectively perceived, as a bark, this requires a positive effort.  The dreamer no longer has the power to make that effort.  In that regard, and only in that regard, does he differ from a man who is awake.

This is the difference.  It is expressed in many forms.  I will not get into any detail; I will limit myself by drawing your attention to two or three points: the instability of dreams, the speed with which they can unfurl themselves, and the preference they bestow upon insignificant memories.

The instability of dreams can be easily explained.  Since dreams in essence involve not adjusting a sensation precisely to a memory, but instead allowing the sensation to frolic, a number of very diverse memories may be posed against a single sensation.  Take, for example, a green spot sprinkled with white dots in the field of vision.  This may summon a memory of a meadow full of flowers, a pool table and its balls − as well as many, many other things.  All these memories wish to be revived in this sensation; all of them run after it in pursuit.  Sometimes they reach their goal one after the other: the meadow becomes a pool table and we witness some extraordinary transformations.  Sometimes they come together: the meadow is a pool table − an absurdity the dreamer will perhaps attempt to alleviate by reason, which will aggravate it further.

The speed at which certain dreams develop seems to be another effect from the same cause.  In but a few seconds, our dream may present us with a series of events which would have taken several whole days if we were awake.  You know Alfred Maury's observation: it has remained a classic, and whatever might have been said about it recently, I deem it plausible because I have found analogous accounts in the literature on dreams.  Yet this precipitation of images has nothing mysterious about it.  Note that the images of dreams are mostly visual; conversations which the dreamer thinks he has had are, in the majority of cases, reconstructed, completed, and amplified when he wakes up.  Perhaps even, in certain cases, it may even have been only the thought of the conversation, its overall meaning, that accompanied those images.  For, as large a multitude of visual images as we may desire can occur all of a sudden, in panorama; more likely it will be a succession of a small number of moments.  It is therefore not surprising that dreams amass in a few seconds what would have taken many waking days: dreams see them in short; they proceed, when all is said and done, like memory proceeds.  In a waking state, the visual memory which serves to interpret the visual sensation is obliged to place itself precisely upon it; from here follows the unfurling; it takes up the same time; in short, the recognized perception of outside events lasts just as long they do.  But in dreams, the interpretative memory of the visual sensation regains its liberty: the fluidity of the visual sensation forces the memory not to stick; the rhythm of the interpretative memory therefore does not need to adopt the rhythm of reality; and the images may henceforth occur, if they so choose, with vertiginous speed, as would happen with a film reel if we did not regulate its unfurling.  Precipitation, no more than abundance, is no sign of power in the domain of the mind: it is order, it is always the precision of adjustment that requires effort.  The interpretative memory could become strained, it could pay attention to life, it could finally exit a dream: whatever the case, external events will chant its pace and slow down its speed.  As, in a clock, the pendulum in its slices delays for the period of several days the spring which would be practically instantaneous if it were free.

So what would be left is to find out why dreams prefer this or that memory to others just as capable of placing themselves upon actual sensations.   The fantasies of our dreams are scarcely more explicable that those of our waking hours; at the very least, we may note their strongest tendency.  During normal sleep our dreams gather those thoughts which passed like flashes or those objects which we perceived without fixing our attention upon them.  If we dream of the events of the day, insignificant occurrences, not more important things, have a greater chance of reappearing during the night.  On this point I agree completely with the views of many other researchers.  I am in the street; I am waiting for the tram; it would not be able to touch me because I do not budge from the sidewalk.  What do I then say when, at the moment it grazes me, the idea of a possible danger crosses my mind?  If my body shrinks back instinctively without my being conscious of being afraid, the next night I may dream that the tram will run me over.  During the day I take care of a sick person whose condition is hopeless.  If a ray of hope flares within me for just an instant − a momentary, almost imperceptible flash − my dreams that night may show me the sick person cured; in any case, I would be more likely to dream of a cure than of death or illness.  In short, what is preferably recalled is what is least noticed.  There is nothing surprising about that.  The dreaming "I" is a distracted "I" who is relaxed.  The memories that harmonize best with it are the memories of distraction, those, as it were, which do not bear the mark of effort. 

These are the observations which I wanted to present to you on the subject of dreams.  They are quite incomplete.  They still only refer to the dreams we know nowadays, to those which we remember and which usually belong to lighter sleep.  When we sleep deeply, we may experience dreams of another kind, but of them little is left by the time we wake up.   I tend to believe − for, it should be said, reasons predominantly theoretical and therefore hypothetical − that it is during this deep sleep that we have a far more extended and detailed vision of our past.  It is thus towards deep sleep that psychology should direct its efforts, not only to study the structure and function of unconscious memory, but also to scrutinize more mysterious phenomena that are the result of "psychical research."  I will not venture onto this terrain; nevertheless, I cannot but attach a certain importance to the observations culled with such indefatigable zeal by the Society for Psychical Research.  Exploring the unconscious, working in the basement of the mind with specially suited methods − such should be the principal tasks of psychology in this century that has just begun.  I have no doubts that some wonderful discoveries await us, discoveries perhaps as important as those in preceding centuries in the physical and natural sciences.  In the very least, this is my wish for our new century and the hope I convey to you here in conclusion.

Bergson, "What is a dream?" (part 2)

Part two of a lecture given at the Institut général psychologique by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Let us summarize what we have discussed.  During natural sleep our senses are in no way shut off from outside impressions.  Doubtless they do not have the same precision; on the other hand, they come across far more "subjective" impressions which took place unnoticed during waking hours, when we were moving about the outside world common to all men, and which reappear during sleep because now we only live for ourselves.  We cannot even claim that our perception is reduced when we sleep; rather, it expands, in certain ways at least, its field of operation.  It is true that it loses in tension what it gains in extension.  It hardly delivers anything not diffused and confused.  But we create dreams with just as much real sensation.

How do we create dreams?  The sensations which act as our material are vague and unspecified.  Let us take the most basic among them, those colored spots that evolve before us when we close our eyelids.  Here we have black lines on a white background.  They could represent a carpet, a chessboard, a page of writing, a host of other things as well.  Who selects these things?  What is the form that imprints its decision upon the indecision of the material?  This form is memory.

We note first of all that dreams generally create nothing at all.  Doubtless one may cite several examples of artistic, literary, or scientific works carried out in the course of a dream.  I will only mention the best known of these.  A musician of the eighteenth century, Tartini, burnt with the fires of composition but the muse remained rebellious.  He fell asleep; and here is where the Devil himself appeared, seized a violin, and played the sonata so desired.  Upon waking, Tartini wrote the sonata down from memory, and it comes down to us as the Devil’s Trill Sonata.  But we can get little from such a terse account.  What we really need to know is whether Tartini didn’t actually compose the sonata while trying to recollect it.  The imagination of the sleeper who wakes sometimes adds to the dream, retroactively changes it, or fills in the gaps which may be, we understand, considerable.  I have looked for more profound observations and, most of all, for more certain authenticity. But the only one I could find was that of the Scottish novelist Stevenson.  In a curious essay entitled “A chapter on dreams” Stevenson teaches us that the most original stories have been composed or at least completely sketched out in dreams.  But read that chapter attentively: you will see that the author once knew, at some point in his life, a psychological state in which he had difficulty determining whether he was asleep or awake.  In fact, I believe that when the mind creates, when it makes the effort that demands the composition of a work or the solution to a problem, it is not asleep – at least that part of the mind which is working is not the same as the one which is dreaming.  The working part pursues, in the subconscious, research which has no bearing on the dream and which only appears upon waking.

As for the dream itself, it is hardly more than a resurrection of the past.  But it is a past we do not recognize.  Often, it involves a forgotten detail, a remembrance that seemed erased and which, in reality, was hiding in the depths of memory.  Often the image evoked is also that of an object or action perceived distractedly, almost unconsciously, during waking hours.  And most of all, there are fragments of shattered remembrances which memory collects here and there and which it presents to the consciousness of the sleeper in an incoherent form.  Before this assembly deprived of sense, intelligence (which continues reasoning regardless of what is said) looks for meaning; it attributes incoherence to the gaps which it fills in evoking other remembrances, those which are often presented in the same disorder and which, in turn, suggest a new explanation, and so forth indefinitely.  But for the moment I will not insist on this viewpoint.  Suffice it to say that, to respond to the question I just asked, the informative power which converts vague impressions that catch the eye, the ear, and the entire surface and interior of the body into precise and specified objects – this is memory.

Memory!  When awake, we have quite a few remembrances which appear and disappear, demanding our attention one after another. But these are the remembrances closely attached to our situation and our action.  I recall now a book by the Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys on the subject of dreams.  The situation is that I am dealing with the question of dreams and I am here at the Psychology Institute; it involves my surroundings and my occupation, that which I perceive and what I am called upon to orient the activity of my memory in a particular direction.  The remembrances which we evoke while awake, as foreign as they often appear to our preoccupations of the moment, are always connected in some way.  What is the role of memory in an animal? It is to remind him, in each case, of the advantageous and disadvantageous consequences of analogous antecedents and thus to instruct him on what he has to do.  In man, memory is not as much a prisoner of action; I recognize what I have to do but I still persist in not doing it or doing something else.  Our remembrances, at any given time, form a solid whole – a pyramid, if you will – with an unceasingly moving summit that coincides with our present and surges with it into the future.  But behind the remembrances which come and rest in this way upon our present occupation, and which are then revealed in the occupation, there are also others, thousands and thousands of others, below the scene illuminated by our consciousness.

Yes, I believe that our past life is there, retained in its minutest details, and that we forget nothing, and that everything we have ever perceived, thought, wanted, from the first waking hour of our consciousness, persists indefinitely.  But the remembrances which my memory keeps in this way in its darkest depths are also in the form of invisible ghosts.  Perhaps they yearn for light; in any case, they do not try to surface.  They know that it is impossible, and that I, a living and moving creature, have other things to do apart from seeing to them.  But suppose that at a given moment I become disinterested in the present situation, in the present action, in that one point on which my memory would normally concentrate all its activities.  Suppose, in other words, that I fall asleep.  This is when these immobile remembrances, sensing that I have just hurdled the obstacle and lifted the trapdoor which kept them in the basement of my consciousness, set themselves in motion.  They rise, bustle about, carry out tasks, all during the night of the unconsciousness person, an immense danse macabre.  And, all together, they run to the door that has just been cracked open.  They all want to get through.  They all cannot, since there are too many of them.  From among this multitude of summoned remembrances, which are the ones selected?  You will have little difficulty in guessing.  Just now, when I was awake, the remembrances admitted were the ones that could invoke a relationship with the present situation, with my current perceptions.  Now they are the vaguest forms that take shape before my eyes; the most indecisive sounds which impress my ear; the most indistinct of touches which scatter across the surface of my body.  But they are also the most frequent sensations that come from the inside of my organs.  And so, among these ghost remembrances which seek to ballast themselves with color, with sound, with materiality in the end, those which manage to do so are the ones which can assimilate the colored dust that I see, the sounds from outside or inside which I hear, etcetera, and which, in addition, harmonize with the general affective state of which my organic impressions are composed.  When this junction operates between memory and sensation, I dream.

In a poetic page of The Enneads, the philosopher Plotinus, interpreter of and heir to Plato, explains to us how men are born into life.  Nature, he says, sketches out living bodies, but only sketches them out.  Left to its own devices, it would not complete the task.  On the other hand, souls reside in the world of Ideas.  Incapable of acting and not even thinking about doing so, they glide above time and outside space.  But among the bodies, there are certain ones who correspond more in form to the yearnings of certain souls.  And among the souls, there are those who recognize themselves more clearly in certain bodies.  The body, which emerges from nature’s hands still not quite viable, will then polarize to that soul which will give it a complete life.  And the soul, looking at the body in which it believes it has seen its reflection, fascinated as if looking in a mirror, will let itself be attracted as well, bow forward and fall.  Its fall is the beginning of life.  I would compare these detached souls to the remembrances which wait at the bottom of our unconscious.  I would also liken our nocturnal sensations to those hardly sketched bodies.  The sensation is warm, colored, vibrant, and almost living, but indecisive.  The remembrance is clean and precise, but without an inside and without life.  The sensation would surely like to find a form in which it may fix the indecision of its contours.  The remembrance would surely like to obtain material to fill itself out, to ballast itself, to realize itself at last.  They are attracted to one another, and the ghost remembrance materializing in the sensation which brings it blood and flesh becomes a being which lives its own life.  It becomes a dream.

The birth of a dream has therefore no mystery to it.  Our dreams are elaborated a bit like our vision of the real world.  The mechanism of operation is the same generally speaking.  What we see of an object placed before our eyes, and what we understand of a phrase pronounced in our ears, is little, as it were, next to what our memory adds to it.  When you glance through your newspaper, when you leaf through a book, do you think that you actually perceive every letter of every word, or even every word of every sentence?  You wouldn’t be reading many pages per day then. The truth is that you perceive neither the word nor the sentence, but instead only certain letters or certain characteristic traits, just enough for you to guess the rest.  All the rest you think to see, when in reality you have brought upon yourself a hallucination.  Many corroborative experiments leave no doubt in this regard.  I will only cite those of Goldscheider and Müller.  These researchers write or print formulations in contemporary usage: “Entry strictly forbidden”; “Preface to the fourth edition,” etcetera, but take care to make mistakes, changing and, above all, omitting letters.  The person subjected to this experiment is then placed before these formulations, in the dark, and naturally has no idea what was written.  Then the inscription is illuminated for a very short time, too short a time for the observer to see all the letters.  He begins, in fact, by determining experimentally the time needed to catch sight of a letter of the alphabet.  It is thus easy to make it so that the subject cannot distinguish more than eight or ten letters, for example, from the thirty or forty contained in the formulation.  For, more often than not, he can read this formulation without any difficulty.

But this is not the most instructive point of this experiment for us.  If one were to ask the observer which letters are the ones he perceived, the letters he would mention might in fact be present.  But they could also be letters which are absent, which have been replaced by others or which were simply omitted.  In this way, because sense seems to demand it, he sees himself working off nonexistent letters in full light.  The characters that are really perceived are those which serve to evoke a remembrance.  Unconscious memory, finding the formulation to which these characters begin to give shape, projects this remembrance out in hallucinatory form.  It is the remembrance which the observer has seen, much more than the inscription itself.  In short, reading is guesswork, but not abstract guesswork: it is the exteriorization of remembrances, of perceptions recalled simply and therefore unreal, all of which benefit from the partial realization which they find here and there in order to realize themselves completely.

In this way, in a waking state, our recognition of an object implies an analogous operation to that which a dream carries out.  We see nothing of an object except its sketch; this calls upon the remembrance of the complete thing; and the complete remembrance of which our mind was not conscious, remains in any case internal as a simple thought, and takes advantage of the occasion to project itself outwards.  It is this type of hallucination, inserted into a real frame, which we inflict upon ourselves when we see something.  There would also be a lot to say about the attitude and behavior of the remembrance during the course of the operation.  One should not think that the remembrances lodged at the bottom of memory remain there inert and indifferent.  They are waiting; they are almost ready at attention.  When the mind is more or less preoccupied and we open up our newspaper, don’t we immediately manage to stumble across a word which corresponds precisely to our preoccupation?  But the sentence makes no sense, and we perceive right away that the word we read is not the word printed: there were simply some traits in common between the two, a vague resemblance in their configuration.  The idea that we absorbed thus awakened, in our unconscious, all the images of the same family, all the remembrances of similar words, and made them hope, in a way, that they might return to consciousness.  And one has, in effect, become conscious once again that the actual perception of a certain form of word is beginning to come into being.

Such is the mechanism of perception strictly speaking, and such is the mechanism of dreams.  In both cases there are, on the one hand, real impressions made on the sensory organs, and, on the other hand, remembrances which come to be inserted into the impression and which profit from its vitality to return to life.