“Nineteen Eighty-Four” (Chapter Three) by George Orwell (post 4): Novelists and others with multiple personality have special kinds of dreams.

One of Winston Smith’s dreams is described as being of the following type:

“It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake.”

Orwell’s narrator, apparently reflecting Orwell’s own dream experiences, speaks of the above kind of dream as though it were ordinary. But most people don’t dream that way.

What follows are parts of two past posts about novelists, people with multiple personality, and their special kinds of dreams.

November 15, 2013

George du Maurier’s “Dreaming True”

…George du Maurier—author of Peter Ibbetson and Trilby, two best sellers, the latter with the famous character, Svengali; grandfather of novelist, Daphne du Maurier—“used to feel within himself two persons, the one serious, energetic, full of honest ambition and good purpose; the other a wastrel, reckless and careless, easily driven to the Devil.”

…George du Maurier had a psychological technique that he called "dreaming true." "‘Dreaming true’ was [George du Maurier’s] little secret. My grandpapa George developed the ability to ‘visit’ the past by dreaming true,” wrote Daphne. “He would lie back and in his mind’s eye become the child he once was, and he wrote about this ‘psychic’ ability too, in Peter Ibbetson.” Perhaps Daphne, herself, had been using a similar technique, when she wrote the opening line of her novel, Rebecca, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

“Dreaming true” is not the same as “lucid dreaming.” The latter refers to dreaming in which the dreamer knows he is dreaming and can direct the action of the dream. In contrast, George du Maurier describes dreaming true as being like reality, and not like dreams, in that you can’t fly or jump off cliffs, etc. In Peter Ibbetson, he describes it as a way to visit his true, actual past. Ibbetson could “turn myself into my old self, and thus be touched and caressed by those I had so loved.” Dreaming true sounds like a version of self-hypnotic age-regression. I think it's possible that hypnotic age regression involves switching to a child-age alter.

December 12, 2014

Dreams in Multiple Personality 

Some novelists have spoken of dreams as being part of their creative process. Some of these experiences may be actual dreams (verifiable by EEG). But when we hear a story about a creative insight or inspiration in a dream, we often can’t be sure whether it was a dream or a dreamlike experience. Some people have very vivid, dreamlike experiences.

Whether dream or dreamlike, it may be a message from an alternate personality (alter) to the host personality (host), as seen in the following:

Dream as Clue to Multiple Personality

A person who was not yet in therapy, but who knew that she “lost time” (had memory gaps, amnesia) and heard voices (which later proved to be the voices of her alternate personalities, aka alters), had the following dream:

“I was sitting in a photo booth trying to get it to take a picture of me, but all the pictures that came out showed other people—or at least faint outlines of other people. In the mirror, where you see what will come out, the face kept changing, like ghosts” (1, p. 72).

Dream as Message from Alter to Host

In multiple personality, the host personality usually doesn’t know about the multiple personality. The dream quoted above could have been a message from an alternate personality to the host personality, if an alter had wanted to begin to inform the host about the multiple personality.

As an alter of another person said, “I show her [the host personality] images a lot, even while she’s awake, of memories and things I feel and want to do. But she sees them best if I show them to her while she’s dreaming” (1, p. 77).

Mistaking Real Life for a Dream

A woman with no cats had recurring “nightmares” involving cats. When she awoke from one of these “dreams,” she was surprised to find “the velour jogging suit in which she slept covered with cat hair” (1, p. 72). The real life activity of one her alters had previously been mistaken for a dream.

1. Deirdre Barrett. “Dreams in Multiple Personality Disorder,” pages 68-81 in Trauma and Dreams, edited by Deirdre Barrett. Harvard University Press, 1996.