Revisiting a century-old essay—still cited in the scientific literature—in which one noted Penn scholar dissected the “problem-solving” dreams of two others and showed how they slept their way to insights that eluded their waking selves.
By Dennis Drabelle | Illustration by Lou Beach
The 19th century was not just an era of industrial revolution, thrilling inventions, warfare on an unprecedented scale, and relentless empire building. It was also a bully time for dreaming. To put it another way, 19th-century humans were so productive that even their dreams bore fruit. The Scottish-born writer Robert Louis Stevenson dreamt of a fugitive who quaffed a potion and morphed into a bestial version of himself; this glimpse provided the basis for an unforgettable novella, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The German chemist August Kekule dreamt of a snake that seized its tail in its mouth; on awakening, Kekule interpreted this striking image as a sign that benzene had a ring-like molecular structure—an insight that transformed organic chemistry. And at Penn, a young Latin and philosophy teacher named William Romaine Newbold C1887 gathered and examined his colleagues’ problem-solving dreams in an article that is still regularly cited.
Penn’s contribution to the topic of fecund dreams can be traced to a widespread crisis of faith. As the geology of Charles Lyell and the biology of Charles Darwin sank in, casting grave doubt on the Bible’s literal truth, intelligent men and women had to reassess their beliefs. The Victorian desperation to cling to old-time religion found its ultimate expression in the defense mounted by English naturalist Philip Gosse; he met the new geological findings head-on, arguing that God had strewn fossils far and wide precisely as a test of faith. All those bones and impressions in stone made the Earth look far older than the Biblical 6,000 years, Gosse said, but in fact it was not.
Less ingenious thinkers sought refuge in the occult, a booming realm patrolled by mesmerists, spiritualist mediums, mind-readers, clairvoyants, and the like. But when skeptical critics, Penn faculty members among them, began exposing occult practitioners as charlatans [“Feet and Faith,” Mar|Apr 2006], the public wondered if there was any way to distinguish between the genuine and the fake. Along came a group of British scholars, who in 1882 founded the Society for Psychical Research with a mission of subjecting paranormal claims to the same evidentiary rigor that governed chemistry, geology, and the other sciences. It was in the Society’s organ, The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, that Newbold’s essay appeared.
There’s not much doubt as to where the Society’s sympathies lay. In 1896, the illustrious American psychologist William James pointed the way in an article published just ahead of Newbold’s in the Proceedings. James’s piece, in fact, was his farewell address as president of the Society, which by then had become Anglo-American. In his talk, he applauded the group not just for adhering to the scientific method but also for bridging the gulf between science and folk wisdom:
It is the intolerance of Science for such phenomena as we are studying, her peremptory denial either of their existence, or of their significance except as proofs of man’s absolute innate folly, that has set Science so apart from the common sympathies of the race. I confess that it is on this, its humanizing mission, that our Society’s best claim to the gratitude of our generation seems to me to depend. We have restored continuity to history. We have shown some reasonable basis for the most superstitious aberrations of the foretime.
James, however, was perhaps being disingenuous. Although he might pretend that the Society was in business largely to validate concerns dear to the mass heart, elsewhere in the same address he showed his true colors. Although the Society has generated some promising results, he noted, “we must all share in a regret that the evidence … should not grow more voluminous still. For whilst it cannot be ignored by the candid mind, it yet, as it now stands, may fail to convince coercively the sceptic.” The idea, then, was to keep up one’s hopes for a breakthrough into the other side while continuing to insist that paranormal claims pass the kinds of tests applied to hypotheses in the other sciences.
On the heels of James’s pep talk, Newbold’s 10-page essay, “Sub-Conscious Reasoning,” must have come as a downer. In the first paragraph, the writer announced that the three cases of pregnant dreaming about to be narrated were—paranormally speaking—duds: “The results were … of such a character that they could have been attained by processes of associative reasoning analogous to those of the upper consciousness, and we are therefore not required to ascribe to the suppositious ‘subconscious’ states any supernormal powers.” At this point, supernaturally inclined readers might have frowned and skipped ahead to the next article, but today sleep scientists prize “Sub-Conscious Reasoning” for its insights into the nature of non-occult dreaming.
Newbold led off with a case featuring his colleague William A. Lamberton, a Penn professor of Greek whose first-person account described a dream—or, rather, the aftereffects of a dream—from a few years earlier, when he was teaching classics at Lehigh University. In his spare time, Lamberton had dabbled in math, zeroing in on a knotty geometry problem: “Given an ellipse, to find the locus of the foot of the perpendicular let fall from either focus upon a tangent to this ellipse at any point.” The very wording of that may baffle the semi-numerate (myself included), but Lamberton took it as a challenge, which he tried to overcome by playing around with various equations. No go.
Then one morning he awoke “in possession of the desired solution under circumstances to me strange and interesting … First:—the solution was entirely geometrical, whereas I had been labouring for it analytically without ever drawing or attempting to draw a single figure. Second:—it presented itself by means of a figure objectively pictured at a considerable distance from me on the opposite wall.” Lamberton jumped out of bed and jotted down on paper the writing he’d just seen on the wall. “Needless to say, perhaps,” he added, “that the geometrical solution being thus given, only a few minutes were needed to get the analytical one.”
Newbold’s other two cases both originated in the sleeping mind of Hermann V. Hilprecht, a German-born professor of Assyrian at Penn whom the Gazette has recently presented in an unfavorable light (see “The Rise and Fall of Hermann Hilprecht,” Jan|Feb 2003), which discusses accusations that the professor took credit for archaeological work he hadn’t done, and appropriated artifacts rightfully belonging to the University). In Newbold’s article, however, Hilprecht is simply “another friend and colleague” who happens to be a creative dreamer.
Compared to Lamberton’s elliptical locus-focus, the first problem to which Hilprecht dreamt a solution was simplicity itself: What’s the meaning of Nebuchadnezzar, the name of the legendary Babylonian king? Hilprecht had sided with a colleague who construed the name as a prayer to the god Nebo, asking him protect the bearer’s “mason’s pad, or mortar board”—in other words, his “work as a builder.” But one night Hilprecht awoke from a restless sleep with “a dim consciousness of having been working at his table in a dream,” along with a conviction that Nebuchadnezzar should be translated as “Nebo protect my boundary.” After assuring himself that this answer was etymologically sound, Hilprecht went public with it, and according to Newbold “it has since been universally accepted.”
Material worthy of The Thousand and One Nights gave rise to Hilprecht’s second problem-solving dream, which occurred in March of 1893. A Penn expedition to the temple of Bel at Nippur (in present-day Iraq) had brought back a sketch of two agate fragments with inscriptions in cuneiform. Hilprecht had made a stab at translating these, but the results, he confessed, left him “far from satisfied.” One night a “tall, thin priest of the old pre-christian Nippur” came to Hilprecht in a dream, informing him in either English or German (Hilprecht couldn’t say which) that the fragments were portions of earrings, and that they had a complex provenance. A Babylonian king, Kurigalzu, had sent “an inscribed votive cylinder of agate” to the temple of Bel, along with a command for its artisans to make him a pair of agate earrings. Having no other agate to use, the workmen cut the cylinder itself into three parts, “thus making three rings, each of which contained a portion of the original inscription.” (Why the third earring, the priest did not explain. Maybe it was a spare.) Each of the two fragments depicted on the sketch in Hilprecht’s possession belonged to a different earring. The third earring, the priest finished up, would never be found.
In the morning Hilprecht consulted the sketch and decided that his dream-visitor was right. Put together correctly, the fragments indicated that the votive cylinder from which they’d come had borne this inscription: “To the god Ninib, son of Bel, his lord, has Kurigalzu, pontifex of Bel, presented this.”
But not so fast, Hilprecht cautioned himself. The sketch depicted one fragment as white and the other grey, so how could they be chips off the same cylinder? The artifacts themselves were in the custody of the Imperial Museum in Constantinople, and there Hilprecht betook himself in August of 1893. After locating the fragments in two widely separated cases, he arranged them side-by-side and finally savored his Eureka moment: “they had, in fact, once belonged to one and the same votive cylinder. As it had originally been of finely veined agate, the stone-cutter’s saw had accidentally divided the object in such a way that the whitish vein of the stone appeared only upon the one fragment and the larger grey surface upon the other.”
As scholarly insights go, Hilprecht’s was a pip, but Newbold wasn’t content with simply reporting it. In keeping with the Society’s agenda, he sniffed around for supernatural influences. But after unpacking the dream into an orderly series of propositions, he decided that “not one of these items was beyond the reach of the processes of associative reasoning, which Professor Hilprecht daily employs.”
Newbold’s handling of the three “Penn dreams” is admirably clear-headed. It would be a long time, in fact, before dreams were analyzed with such dispassionate precision again.
A decade or so after the publication of “Sub-Conscious Reasoning,” Sigmund Freud and his followers began incorporating dreams into psychoanalysis. For the Freudians, dreams were akin to plays staged in a country ruled by an uptight dictator. Just as an ingenious playwright tries to slip furtive jabs and veiled references past government censors, so, it was believed, the dreaming self entertains urges that the conscious mind would rather not acknowledge. In this reading, the typical dream has a scandalous latent content, which gets bowdlerized into a more palatable manifest content before the dream lands in the sleeper’s waking memory. Psychoanalysts identified symbols and complexes by which they could help patients decode their dreams, recover latent content, and confront the origins of neuroses, in the process transforming the often amusing, occasionally horrific experience of dreaming into little more than an opportunity for exegesis in aid of therapy. The poor patient was trapped, for if she denied the meaning assigned her dreams, she could stand accused of being doubly repressive.
Although psychoanalytical approaches to dreaming prevailed throughout most of the 20th century, they shed little light on dreams like Lamberton’s and Hilprecht’s. What wish was fulfilled when Lamberton awoke to see the solution to his ellipse-puzzle projected on that wall? Why, the wish to solve the problem, of course—nothing closeted or shocking in that. The same question can be asked about Hilprecht’s dream of the Babylonian priest, who doesn’t appear to have dropped in to indulge some shameful urge but rather to satisfy the dreamer’s straightforward, unrepressed desire to make sense of two tantalizing artifacts.
It took a long time and a lot of toiling in sleep labs, but eventually the psychoanalytic theories of dreaming gave way to less convoluted ones. As psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer notes in his recent book Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind, today it would be hard to find “defenders of the view that dreams are minutely and complexly constructed to hide and yet retain evidence of unacceptable beliefs and feelings.” Using such tactics as interrupting and quizzing sleeping subjects and drawing upon many multiples of the number of dreams Freud had to work with, researchers now tend to view dreams as manifestations, however scrambled, of their owner’s everyday history and experiences. Dreams no longer play a leading role in therapy, and many therapists don’t address them at all unless the patient brings them up herself.
All of which has given Newbold’s article renewed currency. With its broad learning and attentiveness to detail, the piece foreshadows a conclusion stated by the contemporary psychologist Dierdre Barrett: “Creative problem-solving dreams virtually always occur only after the dreamer has done extensive work on the issue awake. Most typically, the dreamer is stuck at one particular step of a multiple phase process and the dream involves that step.” This is true of Kekule, who had been trying to pin down the structure of benzene for some time. It’s also true of the imaginative Stevenson. In an account of the genesis of his famous work, the novelist recalled: “I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle for the strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature.” And it’s certainly true of Lamberton and Hilprecht, both of whom were careful to place their dreams in the context of their recent, conscious mental activity.
As for Newbold himself, he went on to be a star at Penn, where he made a splashy discovery—though no dream appears to have foreshadowed it and subsequent scholarship has overturned it. After returning to his alma mater, he was made an instructor in Latin and soon afterward also a lecturer in philosophy. In 1896, he became dean of the graduate school, and in 1907 he was named the Adam Seybert Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy. In light of the sober, this-world conclusion to Newbold’s “Sub-Conscious Reasoning,” that last appointment is ironic: the Philadelphia plutocrat Henry Seybert had endowed the chair (in honor of his father) in the hope that its occupants might someday confirm the donor’s strong belief in the truth of spiritualism.
According to the University Archives and Records Center website, Newbold’s main scholarly contributions were to the field of antiquities. He thought he’d identified the burial place of Saints Peter and Paul, but later scholars have dismissed his reasoning. His pride, however, was his analysis of the Voynich Manuscript, a coded medieval text over which scholars have long puzzled. Attributing the manuscript to Roger Bacon—a 13th-century friar, scientist, and astrologer—Newbold developed a complex decoding system that held sway until his death in 1926. The website explains what happened thereafter:
Several years later, however, other archeologists began to look at Newbold’s method with a critical eye. They correctly noted that Newbold’s system was faulty, unreliable, and based on a number of unproved assumptions. Newbold’s interpretation of the Voynich Manuscript was eventually completely disregarded by archeologists and now many archeologists do not even believe that Roger Bacon was the author of the manuscript in question.
The Voynich Manuscript remains undeciphered.
Here, then, is the ultimate irony of William Romaine Newbold’s career: theories he probably thought of as his scholarly capstone have gone up in smoke, while an article he likely viewed as a mere diversion—a more formal treatment of the kind of storytelling with which you might regale fellow night owls over brandy and cigars in a drawing room—remains as fresh and vital today as when first published, more than a hundred years ago.
Dennis Drabelle G’66 L’69 is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World.