Abstract

This little essay of Bergson’s was originally delivered as a lecture to the Institut Psychologique in 1901, and published the same year in the Revue Scientifique. The date is significant: it was the year after Freud’s great work, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published. Bergson’s lecture came therefore at the end of the era of the old introspective psychologists, and before the new depth theories had become the commonplace they now are. So Bergson can state: “There is nothing mysterious about the birth of a dream”. Dreams are due to the fact that our senses continue to function in sleep, responding to external stimuli though less accurately than when we are awake, and at the same time responding to what we would now perhaps call the internal spontaneous discharges of the end–receptors themselves.