INTRODUCTION

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was a Nobel Prize winner for his work in neurology; he essentially discovered the neuron. For decades, Cajal disputed Freud's dream theories. After retirement, he planned to publish a dream-journal that would disprove Freud's claim that every dream disguises a wish. Cajal thought instead that neurons who'd been squelched all day, that hold old memories or odd associations (including the occasional taboo desire, but generally random) find sleep a time to get harmless exercise, and we experience their workout-orgy as a dream. For Cajal, dreams mean nothing.

It's worth remembering that (then as now) these two camps dominated science--dreams meant what Freud said, or they meant nothing. Non-Freudian meaning or functions for dreams were fringy, though figures like Nobel winner Charles Richet, Carl Jung, dream-experimenter JW Dunne, science popularizer HG Wells, and anti-Freudian writer William Archer had other dream-theories (in my opinion better justified ones). Cajal was aware of most of these, but for him the man to defeat was Freud, who he felt had founded a cult betraying science.

Cajal's original dream-accounts--an unedited mass of scribbles on scraps and envelopes, anything that came to hand--are lost, but Cajal had asked one of his students to transcribe the dreams for preparation as a book, and that rough transcript did survive--over 100 dreams. [----] means a blank space, and +++ means words crossed out.

NOTES ON THIS DREAM

I've altered the transcript in one spot: Cajal says there are 'four men' inside the brain, yet lists & numbers only the first three. I added a break and a parenthetical (4) where I think he introduces his 'fourth man'.

Two definitions: gangue means the matrix around valuable ore, the low-value stuff; pneumonic doesn't mean 'wheezing with pneumonia'; just 'breathing'. I think he means the brain-level that can take a deep breath or hold the breath, overriding reflexive, unconscious breathing.

MORNING DREAM

After lecturing in the seminar room about who knows which philosophical topics, I find myself among friends. The issue of what constitutes the elements of human nature arises, I do not know how. Without letting anyone else speak in an authoritative tone and capturing the attention of my listeners--all friends and colleagues--(I hear myself proclaiming vehemently), I declare that the [-----] doctrines of the unity of the human individual is an illusion, that within us in reality there are four men:

l. The gangue man, the cellular cadaver, the connective tissue, bone +++, intercellular materials X. It is the filler of life. Stature, strength is the façade and the filler of the building.

2. The glandular and sympathetic man, that is to say, the colllection [sic] of internal and external secretory organs, coordinated by the +++ sympathetic ganglia governing vegetative life and whose influence higher individuals (emotional, synaesthetic) and the gangue man must endure.

3. The pneumonic and conscious man, that is to say, the cerebral nervous system, the registry where sensory residues are stored. It is united by the senses to the exterior world and to the higher self by certain cerebral pathways. This self can be conscious (sensations perception) however it generally remains in a state of storage for primary ideals (the unconscious of many authors). It produces the reflexive and intuitive moment.

(4:) The higher self is that active, imperious, conscious impulse, the selector that consults the files of the cerebral library, that [----] the pathways, chooses useful and deliberate reactions; attends to sensation, or does not; represses reflexes, moderates instincts and forges ideas and theories changing the sensory material of the mind. This self is the critical self, that sees but is not seen, that in the dream state (hallucinatory orgy of the 2nd self, fed up with contradictions says: Enough; all of this is an illusion, let us awaken.

Believing that a representation is the self is like thinking that a photographic lens depicts itself. Maybe if there were a mirror in front. But in man the self has no mirror. The self is absolutely inaccessible. That which we take for a mirror, consciousness, only shows us the product of the [blank] selection thought to be the object but what is thought to be the object is not what we think, but rather yet another part of our images about which one thinks...

The self is an energy, an invisible pull like a god...

Here I awaken.

Source: The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal by Benjamin Ehrlich, Oxford Univ. Press, 2017, p.93-94.

A FINAL COMMENT

Cajal's dream seems to disagree with his conscious opinion! Dreaming, he finds himself arguing for a layered, rather Jungian self--I'm thinking of Jung's famous dream of a four-story house with an airy top floor, medieval downstairs, Roman cellar, and pit with cave-dweller skulls--corresponding roughly to frontal lobe, main lobes, cerebellum and brain stem. Cajal's more difficult and full of jargon, but the broad parallels are clear. Cajal's dream critiques both camps--both Freud's and Cajal's!

Think this isn't Cajal critiquing Cajal? His own dream, that meaningless thing, is saying dreams mean something! Dream Cajal superficially scorns the dream state as a "hallucinatory orgy"; yet this is dream-Cajal saying this, coherently, laying out his theory of the layered psyche. How can an incoherent Level 2 (dream) mentality discuss higher levels without being smarter than waking Cajal wants to admit?

A few words later, dream-Cajal points out the possibility of lucid (self-aware) dreaming, when the 3rd or 4th level takes over in a dream--or forces you awake, out of dream-foolishness! Dream-foolishness like... this complex theory of personality-layers?

All in all it's a bravura performance by dream-Cajal. But did waking Cajal explore this more flexible model his "meaningless" dream proposed? Well, yes... eventually. Six years after the dream, in his last book, The World as Seen by an Eighty Year Old, he seems to have accepted it:

In each I there are various egos in intimate coexistence... these secondary personalities are not unconscious, as a psychoanalyst might think, but rather subconscious and capable of easy evocation. They form as a the rearguard of the current individual, but they are prepared to replace it as soon as it falters or becomes distracted.

--Chris Wayan

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