Adolf Kraus

Krauss is presented as a psychiatrist whose account links dreams, hallucinations, and delusions to sensations generated within the organism. His contribution is a proposed mechanism: bodily sensation evokes an associated imagined idea, and consciousness attends to that idea rather than to the sensation itself. The account gives physical stimuli a place in the formation of dreams while leaving unresolved how particular stimuli determine particular dream images.

Organic Sensation as a Source

In a rigorous inquiry, Krauss traces the origins of dreams, hallucinations, and delusions to the same source: organically caused sensations. In his view, almost any part of the organism could supply the starting point for a dream or delusion. He distinguishes general vital feelings, which convey an overall temper of feeling, from specific sensations associated with five systems: muscular, respiratory, gastric, sexual, and peripheral.

From Sensation to Dream Image

Krauss proposes that an awakened sensation, through an associative law, calls up an imagined idea related to it. The sensation and idea then combine into what he describes as an organic formation. In this process, consciousness behaves differently than it does in ordinary waking perception: it does not attend to the sensation itself, but turns its attention to the accompanying imagined idea. Krauss suggests that this diversion helps explain why the role of the sensation could remain unrecognized for so long. He calls the conversion of sensations into dream images “transubstantiation.”

Place in the Debate on Dream Stimuli

The book situates Krauss within a wider discussion of bodily stimuli and dream imagery. The influence of organic physical stimuli on dream formation is described as almost universally accepted, but the laws governing the relationship remain uncertain, and answers are often obscure. Dream interpretation based on physical stimulus therefore faces a specific task: tracing dream content back to its organic cause. Yet the cause may be disclosed only through the dream content itself, making the explanation difficult to establish independently.

Recurring dream forms illustrate both the appeal and the limits of such explanations. Accounts of dreams about falling, flying, teeth falling out, or being naked or ill-clad connect them to bodily sensations, including changes in pressure on the skin, breathing, and dental sensitivity. The book nevertheless cautions that these proposals may make sensations disappear from or re-enter awareness without supplying sufficient grounds for that shift. Krauss’s mechanism offers one way to understand how bodily stimuli might become dream images, but the broader problem of showing why a particular sensation produces a particular image remains open.