Philosophy and Dreams
Dreams, of course, have
figured more significantly in philosophy. Being a mode of consciousness –
prompting Aristotle to say that “the soul makes assertions in sleep” (On Dreams
458b) – dreams seem one step up from the mere putting out of zzzs. More to the
point, they place a philosophically interesting question mark against our
confidence in the nature of the world we appear to share with others. Your
dreams as you are dreaming them may be as compellingly real as the fact that
you are reading this article (and possibly dozing off over it). “There are no certain
indications” as Descartes pointed out in his Meditations, “by which I can
clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep.” The glib response to this – that
we should not be looking for mere ‘indications’, because we do not rely on
these kinds of things to find out whether we are awake or sleep – doesn’t work;
and so we are embarked on an endless, and endlessly fascinating, journey in
pursuit of the kind of certainty that only our philosophical selves want, or
pretend to want, or need, or seem to need.
There is a kind of
pathos to our vulnerable, gullible, sleeping selves, and the dreams that
something that is ourself and yet not ourself puts together in order to make
narrative sense of what is going on in our brains and bodies when they are
almost completely disconnected from the world. To meet our insatiable appetite
for coherent meaning, we unpack a whole scene out of a sensation, say, or make
sense of a sudden movement of a limb by inventing a cliff down which we are
falling. The fact that we can make a sort of sense out of whatever is served up
to us is an interesting sidelight on the question of the relationship between
the real and the rational: whatever we can rationalise may seem real to us, and
whatever seems real to us we try to rationalise – with impressive rates of
success. The division within our (mind-constructed) dreams between the ‘I’ that
is making sense of what is there, and the ‘there’ that is made sense of – so
that we can even wait tensely for what happens next – is particularly striking.
The great French poet
and thinker Paul Valéry invented the character Monsieur Teste. ‘A mystic
without God’, Teste was committed to uninterrupted, undistracted thought. His
whole life’s work was “to kill the puppet,” the automaton, inside himself. In
the famous An Evening With M. Teste (1896), Valéry leaves his hero drifting off
to sleep, observing the stages of his own gradual extinction, and murmuring
“Let’s think very closely… You can fall asleep on any subject… Sleep can
continue any idea…” as his self-awareness fades into suspension points. Valéry
himself kept a diary for over fifty years (collected as the Cahiers
[Notebooks]). One of his central concerns was to observe the successive phases
of his awakening, as in the early hours of the morning he annotated his
mind-rise. Naturally, dreams preoccupied him as much as the daily resurrection
of the self. He suggested that dreams might be an attempt to make sense of the
body’s passage from sleep to wakefulness. Like me, he was unimpressed by
Freud’s evidence-impoverished claims about dreams being the ‘royal road to the
unconscious’ – that multi-storied jerry-built word-castle which so many
otherwise intelligent people have taken for a scientific idea. Nor did Valéry
buy the notion that dreams could be prophetic, the mind slipping along loops in
time to enable us to see the future of the world or the will of God.
These nightly
adventures, spun out of a consciousness permitted to free-wheel by disconnexion
from a perceived world, are of compelling interest when we are in the grip of
them as lead actor or as the helpless centre of events. Yet by an irony,
nothing is more sleep-inducing than the egocentric tales of someone else’s
solipsistic dreams. We long to hear that magic phrase “And then I woke up.”
I could go on, but I
won’t, lest I cause your copy of Philosophy Now to fall from your lifeless
hands as you slip from the philosophy of sleep to the thing itself…
Raymond Tallis is a
physician, philosopher, poet, broadcaster and novelist. His latest book In
Defence of Wonder is just out from Acumen.
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