RICHARD SCHWEICKERT AND ZHUANGZHUANG XI 
RICHARD SCHWEICKERT AND ZHUANGZHUANG XI
An author has an opportunity to adopt a special point of view in a story when one character metamorphoses into another. In the famous opening of The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka immediately immerses the reader into the mind of the central character:
When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He was lying on his back as hard as armor plate, and when he lifted his head a little, he saw his vaulted brown belly, sectioned by arch-shaped ribs . . . His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, were waving helplessly before his eyes. “What’s happened to me?” he thought. It was no dream. (Kafka 3)
The entire story, except the epilogue, is told from Gregor’s point of view: “Magically, the story adopts the victim’s perspective, which produces both brief comic moments and a lasting pathos” (Adler 82).
However, a metamorphosis does not always prompt an author to attend to an accompanying mental change. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson describes Mr. Hyde transforming into Dr. Jekyll as seen by another person, Dr. Lanyon:
He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed: he reeled, he staggered . . . there came, I thought, a change—he seemed to swell—his face became suddenly black . . . I leaped back, my mind submerged in terror . . . What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to set on paper. (Stevenson 75)
The opportunity to tell the reader what Dr. Jekyll experienced is declined. Only the final chapter, the narrative of Dr. Jekyll, is written from the metamorphosed character’s perspective, and there, as Joyce Carol Oates says, “It is significant that the narrator of Jekyll’s confession speaks of both Jekyll and Hyde as if from the outside” (xv).
A character attributing perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and so on to another character is said to be using Theory of Mind (ToM). Recent work by Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine pays close attention to mental activity of characters, and of readers and authors as well, as a way of understanding the function of literature and of enriching the experience of reading.
Authors Stevenson and Kafka were both influenced by their dreams. In “A Chapter on Dreams,” Stevenson says the source for the above scene in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a dream (more precisely, a dreamlike-state, see Karen Goodwin). “For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot . . . on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterwards split in two, in which Hyde . . . took the powder and underwent the change . . . ” (Stevenson 103). For Kafka, dreams do not seem to be a direct source of material, but he reports his dreams in his diaries and letters, and says in the Diaries, “My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background . . .” (qtd. in Corngold xvii).
Metamorphoses of one character or animal into another occur in roughly 1% of dreams (Hall and Van De Castle 168). In a study of metamorphoses in a particular dreamer, G. William Domhoff found the most common type to be human-to-human, but there are also human-to-animal, object-to-object, and so on (131). Studies by David Kahn and J. Allan Hobson and by Kahn, Edward Pace-Schott, and Hobson show that mind reading and other ToM activities frequently occur in dreams. With a metamorphosis of characters, where there was one mind, now there is another. Are mental states of transformed characters attended to in dreams, or do they pass unnoticed? Is one or the other of our two metamorphosis stories more like a dream in this respect?
We can pursue the questions with dream reports from a large collection on a Web site by Adam Schneider and Domhoff at the University of California at Santa Cruz. We find there reports of inner states of a metamorphosed character, for example:
(Hall / VdC Norms: Female: #0288)
I, as my maiden aunt, was standing in the front yard of my home in the country. I was not myself, but my aunt. A car drove by in which were my sister (my mother, my aunt’s sister) and her husband. I did not determine whether her son and daughter were in the car. I felt very sad that I had no husband while she did. I envied her. Immediately, I changed back to myself, although the setting remained the same . . . (Schneider and Domhoff)
In another report the idea of minds transforming when bodies transform seems to be understood in the midst of dreaming:
(Barb Sanders: #1985, 11 / 15 / 91)
. . . Now Troi and I are in bed together cuddling. . . . Troi and I then exchangebodies so I can experience what it is like to be free of my own patterns of thought and feeling I’ve built up since birth, and to experience her way of feeling her own feelings. It’s a delightful experience. Then I see her push a table over and hit her ankle and limp with pain. I go and kneel in front of her and try to be sympathetic. “Does it hurt?” I ask. She grimaces and says, “I’m fine.” (Schneider and Domhoff)
The transformation is brief, and soon the dreamer has to ask about the pain when Troi hits her ankle.
On the other hand, there are also reports indicating that a metamorphosis does not automatically call attention to a possible change in mental experience. A good example is in the following part of a dream report of a woman in her thirties:
(Merri: #032 6 / 12 / 1999):
. . . There was a family and I was the little boy and on Saturdays we had to line up and get a big plastic cup and have it filled with sulfuric acid. Then we had to stick our hand in the acid (my right hand) and scrub—hard. I had to scrub the 4 sides of the light post. It was trapezoid in shape. . . . There was an underwater cave murder. There was a pocket of air in the underwater cave and 3 guys were there. One was the culprit, one was the victim, and one was the survivor. The victim knew the end was coming and he became very calm. . . .(Schneider and Domhoff)
The woman adult dreamer has the form of a male child, but the hand of this child in sulfuric acid produces no comment about inner feelings. A little later, however, the dreamer knows somehow that a different character, the victim, knows the end is near. In this dream report, a ToM event occurs, but quite unrelated to the metamorphosis.
Ignoring a metamorphosis is a little like the phenomenon of change blindness. A rather large change in a scene can pass unobserved unless the observer is attending directly to it, as Daniel J. Simons and Daniel T. Levin have shown. In one of their demonstrations, a male experimenter asks directions from a woman on a street. While they are talking, a person carrying a door blocks the woman’s view for a moment, and, changing places with the experimenter, replaces him in the conversation. The woman continues the conversation, not noticing one person has been replaced by another. This suggests that some metamorphoses in dreams are overlooked. A metamorphosis must have been noticed in a dream for the dream report to mention it, but the consequence that a mind was transformed sometimes passes unremarked.
The examples show that mental states of metamorphosed characters are noted in some dreams but not in others, so The Metamorphosis, which attends to such states, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which ignores them, are each faithful to dreams in this respect, albeit to different dreams. The examples do not suffice to determine whether ToM is typical or not when a metamorphosis occurs in a dream, and we take up this issue now with a sample of dream reports. A frequent and reasonable objection to using material from dream reports is that one must assume the reports are accurate accounts of what occurred in the dreams. Unfortunately, there is no way to test the accuracy of dream reports. Some indirect evidence for accuracy is summarized in Domhoff (40). At this time, if we want to study dream content we have no choice but to study dream reports, with the working assumption that they are accurate.
Description of the study here is necessarily brief; more details are in the paper by Richard Schweickert and Zhuangzhuang Xi. All available dream reports in English from individuals on the Schneider and Domhoff Web site were searched for words and phrases indicating a metamorphosis. Phrases such as “change,” “transform,” and “turn into” were included, in addition to “metamorphosis” (see also Domhoff 132). Dream reports containing such phrases were read and selected for further study if a sentient or robotic entity was involved in a metamorphosis. A report was included if one of the metamorphosed entities was an object, for example, a chair turning into a cat, but not if all metamorphosed entities were objects. Reports were also selected for further study if a group, for example, a flock of sheep, was involved in a metamorphosis, but only dream reports of metamorphoses involving single entities will be discussed here.
More dream reports are available from some dreamers than others, so the number of dream reports in the sample from each dreamer is not the same. To prevent the sample from being dominated by dreamers with a large number of reports, no more than ten dream reports with a metamorphosis were selected from any one dreamer.
The Web site provides a procedure for selecting reports from a dreamer at random, with upper and lower bounds for the word length of the selected reports. Using this procedure, for each of the dream reports with a metamorphosis a control dream report from the same dreamer was selected at random, within plus or minus twelve words of the length of the corresponding report with a metamorphosis. A control report was replaced if it happened itself to contain a metamorphosis. Dream reports were put in a random order and printed with dreamer’s names and word-lengths removed.
One coder (the first author) listed the characters, animals, sentient and robotic entities, and groups of such entities in each dream report. The coding system is a modified version of that of Calvin S. Hall and Robert Van De Castle; see also Schweickert.
Two other coders (one of whom is the second author) coded ToM events in the dream reports. The coding system was developed from ideas of Zunshine, of Kahn and Hobson, and, most directly, from a coding system for children’s literature by Kimberly Wright Cassidy, Lorraine V. Ball, Mary T. Rourke, Rebecca Stetson Werner, Nohr Feeny, June Y. Chu, Donna J. Lutz, and Alexis Perkins. Briefly, each coder looked for phrases referring to internal states of entities. Internal states include what an entity is perceiving, feeling, believing, knowing, thinking, wondering, remembering, wanting, or intending. Each coder also looked for phrases referring to higher order internal states that themselves refer to internal states, for example, “Mary believed Harry was sorry.” Results for higher order ToM events will not be discussed here.
Instructions were to “Underline with one line a word or short phrase identifying the entity whose internal state is referred to,” and “Circle a word or short phrase mentioning the internal state.” For example, if the dream report said “Mary was sad,” the coder was to underline Mary and circle sad. A word or phrase mentioning a higher order mental state was to be circled twice, and the entity with this higher order state was to be double underlined. Coders were not informed that half the dream reports contained a metamorphosis and half did not, but the instructions said “If one entity transforms into another, consider the entities before and after the transformation as different.”
Each ToM event identified by a coder attributes a mental state to a particular character or other entity. The average over the two coders of the number of ToM events attributed to each entity was calculated. There are 65 dream reports from 21 dreamers.
In 10 of the 65 dream reports with a metamorphosis, the dreamer was metamorphosed. For example, a dream report of the adult woman Alta says, “I have turned into a male policeman.”
In these 10 dreams with a metamorphosis of the dreamer, 6.6 ToM events per dream are attributed to the dreamer in one form or another, on average. In the 10 corresponding control dreams, 7.0 ToM events per dream are attributed to the dreamer, on average. These rates are about equal; in other words, the frequency of ToM events referring to a form of the dreamer is about the same, whether or not the dreamer is metamorphosed.
Because each dreamer did not contribute the same number of dream reports, averages were calculated in the following way. The number of ToM events per dream was calculated for each dreamer. Then these numbers were averaged over the dreamers; hence each dreamer contributes one number to the average. All averages reported here were calculated this way.
In the dreams in which the dreamer is metamorphosed there were 21 dreamer forms (sometimes a dream report begins with the dreamer already transformed, and sometimes a dreamer undergoes more than one metamorphosis, so the number of dreamer forms is not exactly twice the number of dream reports). In dreams with a metamorphosis of the dreamer there are fewer ToM events per dreamer form, 4.8 on average, than in dreams without a metamorphosis of the dreamer, 8.1 on average. This happens, of course, because there are more dreamer forms when the dreamer meta-morphoses. To summarize so far, the dreamer, in whatever form, refers to his or her (or its) mental states the same number of times per dream, on average, whether or not the dreamer metamorphoses.
In 55 dream reports the dreamer did not undergo a metamorphosis, but at least one other entity did. For such dreams, there was an average of 2.3 ToM events per dream. This is quite close to the average of 2.4 ToM events per dream for the corresponding 55 control dream reports without a metamorphosis. (Because we have already discussed the dreamer, the dreamer is excluded from these calculations.) For entities other than the dreamer, we reach the same conclusion as for the dreamer. The frequency of ToM events in dreams is the same for nondreamer entities, on the average, whether there is a metamorphosis or not.
When an animate entity in one form changes into another form, followed perhaps by other changes in form, let us call the set of forms a line. When the dreamer changes from one form to another, the number of characters and animals is increased, but there is a single underlying line. Over all dreams with metamorphoses, the average number of forms is 6.2. Over all control dreams this average is smaller, 4.5. But, over all dreams with metamorphoses, the average number of lines is 4.9, about equal to that of control dreams, 4.5. A metamorphosis does not increase the number of lines. Putting this together with our result that the number of ToM events in a dream is the same for dreams with and without a metamorphosis, we conclude that the number of ToM events on a line is the same, whether or not there are metamorphoses along the line.
To summarize, one might expect the dreamer’s attention to be drawn to an entity undergoing a metamorphosis, so the number of ToM events attributed to such entities would be larger than for other entities. However, the number of ToM events per dream is the same, whether or not there is a metamorphosis. Contrary to our initial intuition, the average number of ToM events per entity for metamorphosed entities is less than or equal to that for nonmetamorphosed entities. This is puzzling, perhaps, until we consider that a metamorphosis increases the number of entities, and thus decreases the average. It is as though the dreamer attends to mental states at a certain rate (not necessarily periodically). The focus of attention depends on who is present, but the rate does not. A metamorphosis does not call the dreamer’s attention to the mental states involved, even if it is the dreamer who is metamorphosed.
In dreams mental states of a character are referred to, or not, quite independently of whether the character has undergone a metamorphosis. Stevenson and Kafka drew on different dream experiences and produced two different types of metamorphosis story. The Metamorphosis, one type, presents the feelings and thoughts of a metamorphosed character. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the other type, largely ignores the inner life of meta-morphosed characters.
What does ignoring or attending do for the story? The story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is better served by ignoring the minds of Jekyll and Hyde. In our day “Jekyll and Hyde” is a well-worn phrase, but Stevenson intended the metamorphosis to be a surprise. A contemporary review says “Mr. Stevenson evolves the idea of his story from the world that is unseen, enveloping everything in weird mystery, till at last it pleases him to give us the password” (137). For this to succeed, thoughts of Jekyll and Hyde cannot be revealed, of course. Moreover, because the description of the mind of Hyde is omitted, when Hyde is described as unlikable or evil, the reader fills in details, perhaps more luridly than the author would have dared to.
On the other hand, attention to the mind of the metamorphosed character provides opportunities for comparisons, as in The Golden Ass, when Lucius says, “That wonderful magic of yours has equipped you with an ass’s shape and an ass’s hard life, but not his thick skin” (Apuleius 107). Opportunities also arise for irony, as in The Metamorphosis when Gregor thinks “‘This getting up so early,’ . . . ‘makes one a complete idiot. Human beings have to have their sleep’” (Kafka 4).
What might dreams have done for the authors? It is well known that Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in great haste. He refers to dream images as the sources for Jekyll and Hyde. According to Ernest Hartman, many dreams have a central image that is vivid, emotion laden, and memorable (28). If, as seems to be the case, Stevenson held a dream image in mind while he wrote about the scene the image portrayed, he would feel the emotional impact the image had on him, and would know that a good description of the image would suffice for an impact on the reader. Mental states not accompanying the image need not be invented. The image guides what to write about and what not to write about.
Dreams also may have influenced the description of inner states of metamorphosed characters, when they are described. Not all mental states can be produced by the dreaming brain, because of biological limitations. A dreamer can experience flying because views of the ground from high up, feelings of wind, and so on are available in the dreamer’s memory and imagination. But consider this dream report of Merri:
(Merri: #224 1 / 04 / 2000):
. . . I did a few lines of coke with a girl on the floor. She had a whole lot of coke in a clear plastic round cylinder, the size of a film canister but bigger circumference. We left there. They wanted me to see some other artists’ work at this school I had gotten a scholarship to. . . .
No change of inner state is reported after the dreamer takes coke, perhaps because the dreaming brain cannot produce the experience of being high.
Let us take a closer look at one of the few passages in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where the mental experiences of the main character are described. In Henry Jekyll’s full statement of the case Jekyll says:
. . . I . . . woke the next day in bed with odd sensations. It was in vain I looked about me; in vain I saw the decent furniture and tall proportions of my room in the square . . . something kept insisting that I was not where I was . . . I began lazily to inquire into the elements of this illusion . . . in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my hand. . . . It was the hand of Edward Hyde. (82)
It is curious that Hyde does not notice he is Hyde through his mental state. His inner state hints he is not where he thinks he is, but it does not hint he is not who he thinks he is. He learns who he is by observing the hair on his hand. Hyde is said to be the very embodiment of evil; surely this must be manifest in his own mind. But what exactly could the writer describe of this? The author can conceive of a mind of pure evil, but he cannot produce the experience in his imagination or dreams.
Jekyll learns on waking that he has transformed into Hyde by looking at his hand, just as Gregor learns he has been transformed into a vermin by looking at his legs. No inner feeling informs either character that his mind has undergone a transformation. Kafka does not present the mind of a vermin—what words could he write? The voice is third person narrative. As dream reports are naturally in first person, the voice emphasizes that this is no dream. Kafka presents, as a dream would, a body changed to vermin, with a mind continuing on, half-asleep, but mostly human. Kafka’s talent for describing his dreamlike inner life is shown in maintaining a steady pitiful reasoning through page after page of struggle with an absurd reality.
One might wonder whether in Kafka’s dream reports, metamorphoses are accompanied by descriptions of inner states. In the following dream, the last known of his life, Kafka dreams he is transformed into the woman Milena:
Last night I dreamt about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally, you somehow caught fire. Remembering that one extinguishes fire with clothing, I took an old coat and beat you with it. But again the transmutations began and it went so far that you were no longer even there, instead it was I who was on fire and it was also I who beat the fire with the coat. But the beating didn’t help and it only confirmed my old fear that such things can’t extinguish a fire. In the meantime, however, the fire brigade arrived and somehow you were saved. But you were different from before, spectral, as though drawn with chalk against the dark, and you fell, lifeless or perhaps having fainted from joy at having been saved, into my arms. But here too the uncertainty of transmutability entered, perhaps it was I who fell into someone’s arms. (qtd. in Hall and Lind 124)
The dreaming brain of a man cannot produce the experience of being a woman, so little is said about the inner experience of the dreamer as a woman. There is no report of sensation when her body is on fire, and at the moment of a hint of joy, her inner life is impossible because she has died, or, perhaps, has fainted.
Often we think of dreams as a source of wild ideas. But sometimes in a dream there is an equanimity disproportionate to a strange situation, which, if all is carefully described, can produce a curious effect in a story. The inner nature of Mr. Hyde remains a mystery even after his identity with Dr. Jekyll is revealed. For juxtaposition of the fantastic with the ordinary in The Metamorphosis, dreams are a source for the ordinary as well as the fantastic.
We thank Sonya Basaran for help with coding, and G. William Domhoff, Paula Leverage, Howard Mancing, and Jennifer Marston William for helpful discussion.
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