Scherner's theory of dream-symbolizing imagination

Scherner's theory of dream-symbolizing imagination presents dreaming as an unconstrained creative activity: bodily sensations and traces of waking memory supply its materials, but imagination reshapes them into vivid visual symbols and scenes in which the dreamer participates. Its bold account of that transformation stands in deliberate contrast to physiological theories that treat the emergence of associated ideas as the end of the process. Although the theory is criticized as arbitrary and scientifically insecure, its attention to the dream’s symbolic activity makes it a revealing extreme in the nineteenth-century effort to explain dreams.

Origins and account of the dreaming mind

In 1861, Scherner made what the book calls the most original and far-reaching attempt to explain dreaming as an activity peculiar to the psyche, able to develop freely only in sleep. His own book is described as florid and intensely enthusiastic, a style that can either sweep the reader along or repel. The philosopher Volkelt’s clearer, briefer account offers a more accessible route into the theory; even a follower, however, judges Scherner’s presentation as a mystical surging of images that flashes with meaning without illuminating a clear philosophical path.

Scherner does not imagine the ego entering dream life with its waking capacities intact. Its centrality and spontaneous energy are weakened; cognition, feeling, willing, and the production of ideas are altered, and what remains of these capacities can seem mechanical rather than fully mental. Imagination, by contrast, becomes dominant because it is freed from reason’s control and restraint. It draws its ultimate building blocks from waking memory, yet uses them to construct scenes unlike waking life: the dream is not only reproductive but productive.

Visual symbolism and dramatic form

This liberated imagination favors the unrestrained, exaggerated, and monstrous, while its release from conceptual thought also makes it supple and quick to change shape. It responds delicately to stimuli that arouse warmth or disturbance and gives inner life the vividness of outward perception. Because it lacks a conceptual language, it paints what it has to express. Its images may therefore be rich and forceful, but their visual, non-conceptual character can also make them rambling, awkward, or clumsy. Rather than showing an object in its own image, the imagination may choose a different image that expresses the particular aspect it wants to present: this substitution is the theory’s symbolizing activity.

Dream images are selective rather than exhaustive. The imagination represents objects in outline and with freedom, like brilliant improvisations, but it does not stop at depicting them: an inner compulsion draws the dreaming self into a dramatic relation with what appears. A visual impression may become pieces of gold lying in the street; the dreamer gathers them, rejoices, and carries them away. The scene thus turns representation into action, making the dream-self’s involvement part of the image’s form.

Bodily stimuli and symbolic examples

For Scherner, bodily-organ stimuli, dimly perceived during the day, provide much of the material on which the imagination works. Here his theory meets, despite their wider differences, the physiological accounts of Wundt and other researchers. Those accounts treat a bodily stimulus as prompting suitable ideas, which then call up further ideas by association, bringing the dream process to its apparent end. Scherner instead treats bodily stimuli as material for imaginative work: where those explanations consider the process finished, he sees dream formation beginning.

The imagination does not use these stimuli according to a clearly useful purpose. It plays with them, perhaps mischievously, and gives a palpable form to the organic source from which a sensation seems to arise. Scherner proposes that the whole organism may be represented as a house, although Volkelt and others do not accept this part of his account. One house can stand for an organ; a long street of houses can represent intestinal stimulation. Specific parts of a house can likewise become bodily parts: in a headache dream, a ceiling covered with disgusting, toad-like spiders represents the head.

Other examples extend the symbolism beyond houses. The breathing lung appears as a fiery oven with a breathlike roar; the heart as empty baskets and chests; and the bladder as pouch-shaped or hollow objects. In a male sexual dream, the dreamer finds the upper part of a clarinet in the street, beside it the corresponding part of a tobacco pipe, and then a fur coat: the instruments suggest the form of the male member, while the coat suggests pubic hair. In a female sexual dream, a narrow courtyard enclosed by houses can symbolize the crotch, and a narrow, slippery, soft path across it the vagina; the dreamer may have to cross the yard to deliver a letter to a gentleman.

Symbolization can represent not just an organ’s form but its contents, the stimulus itself, its particular excitation, or the object it desires. Intestinal stimulation may lead the dreamer through muddy streets, while a stimulus associated with urine may bring the dreamer beside foaming water. Pain may be staged as a desperate struggle with snapping dogs or raging bulls; sexual arousal may take the form of a woman pursued by a naked man. These differing scenes support Scherner’s broader claim that the central force at work is the imagination’s capacity to turn bodily conditions into symbolic, perceptible situations.

Limits and significance

The book refuses both to accept Scherner’s system uncritically and to dismiss it before examining it. Its arbitrariness and distance from scientific rules are plain, and the theory assigns no useful function to the activation of symbolizing imagination: the psyche simply plays with the stimuli it receives. Yet Scherner’s account is based on sustained attention to dreams and on an evident personal aptitude for pursuing obscure aspects of the psyche. It also addresses a subject long regarded as mysterious and rich in associations, while rigorous science, by the book’s account, has done little to explain it beyond denying the dream meaning or importance.

The comparison with physiological writing complicates any easy boundary between sober science and fantasy. Even a precise scientific description of awakening spreading through sleeping clusters of brain cells can seem as fantastic and improbable as Scherner’s interpretations. The book therefore leaves open the possibility that something real lies behind his theory, while limiting that possibility: whatever has been vaguely recognized does not have the universality required of a general theory of dreams. Set against medical explanations, Scherner’s theory makes visible the extremes between which explanations of dreaming continue to fluctuate.