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As a taster for Bergson’s philosophical style, I decided to read this short essay on Dream interpretation. To me it offered a novel idea, and that made it worthwhile.

From the beginning:

Slosson’s spirited Introduction from 1914, written shortly after Bergson published his essay, offers a potent inoculation against any skeptical dream-interpreter (and they must have been plenty at the time):

When a scholar laboriously translates a cuneiform tablet dug up from a Babylonian mound where it has lain buried for five thousand years or more, the chances are that it will turn out either an astrological treatise or a dream book. If the former, we look upon it with some indulgence; if the latter with pure contempt. For we know that the study of the stars, though undertaken for selfish reasons and pursued in the spirit of charlatanry, led at length to physical science, while the study of dreams has proved as unprofitable as the dreaming of them. Out of astrology grew astronomy. Out of oneiromancy has grown—nothing.

Slosson then goes on to explain what he considers to be Bergson’s original contribution:

Here, too, he [Bergson] set forth the idea, which he, so far as I know, was the first to formulate, that sleep is a state of disinterestedness, a theory which has since been adopted by several psychologists.

Disinterestedness? Let’s see. Perhaps I’m a century too late to appreciate the significance of this idea, or perhaps it is the same as the one that I gained, only titled differently.

Now about the essay: Bergson spends some time convincing the reader that phosphens, or coloured spots that everyone sees when they close their eyes, are the seeds of dream-images. Then he proceeds to sounds, touch, and proprioception, and how external sensations filter into our sleeping mind. In more familiar language, he says that the physical sensations we are subjected to while asleep affect our dreams. How? In the vastness of our subconscious mind roam memories, lively, complete, memories that wish to escape, bubble up to the surface, find their expression. But they have no substance. So they find their substance in the sensations. 

Put differently, (in my words) the sensations represent flesh, while the memories are the soul seeking flesh they can animate. But only certain souls can fill flesh of a certain shape. And so the type of sensation-flesh that is offered at any particular moment determines the type of memory-soul that can fill it. Therefore dreams are a selection of memories determined by the dreamer’s bodily sensations. Of course, Bergson puts it better:

The sensation is warm, colored, vibrant and almost living, but vague. The memory is complete, but airy and lifeless. The sensation wishes to find a form on which to mold the vagueness of its contours. The memory would obtain matter to fill it, to ballast it, in short to realize it.

The disinterestedness element comes in (also) when Bergson seeks to account for the preference given by the dreamer to one memory image rather than others, equally capable of being inserted into the actual sensations.

Indeed why one over another? He claims the memories that are chosen stem from the things we were least interested in during our waking hours:

In normal sleep our dreams concern themselves rather, other things being equal, with the thoughts which we have passed through rapidly or upon objects which we have perceived almost without paying attention to them. 

I’m not sure I believe that, nor am I up to date on the latest dream research. But I do like the idea—be it only a sleek metaphor—that dreams are memories ballasted by sensation.