Abstract
The paper argues that dreams (or the recollected experience of dreams) consist partly in an awareness or experience of the conceptual fabric of our existence. Since what we mean by reality is intimately tied to the concepts given in our experience, dreams are therefore also partly an awareness of the fabric of what we mean by being itself and in general, that is, by objective as well as subjective reality. Further, the paper argues that this characteristic of dreams accounts for several other, more specific aspects of dreams and their possible interpretation, and that it allows us to see how these aspects are related to each other. These more specific aspects are the peculiar types of conceptual or logical relations and transitions that occur within dreams, dreams’ distinctive feeling texture, and some dimensions of the grounds and nature of suitable methods of interpreting dreams.
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Notes
That there are such mutually exclusive general outlooks or conceptual frameworks is familiarly argued in philosophy of science (Feyerabend 1993, especially chapter 16; Kuhn 1970; Wittgenstein 1979), political philosophy (Lyotard 1988 [1983]; MacIntyre 1988; Taylor 1985, especially chapters 3–5), and in discussions of the relations between philosophical systems (Collingwood 1940; Hall 1960).
Kant (1929 [1781/1787]) famously argued that “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts” (A51, B75). See also, for example, Winch (1958) for a Wittgensteinian discussion of the same point.
States argues here that this is an experience of felt unity that concepts do not do justice to, but I am proposing that concepts are really part of feelings and vice versa.
On the admissibility of contradictions in formal logic see, for example, Priest 2001; Bremer 2005, esp. pp. 16, 19 ff. For discussion on both sides of this debate, see Priest, Beall, and Armour-Garb 2004. For the acceptability of contradiction in informal contexts, see, for instance, Johnstone, 1978, p. 45.
As Dewey, for example, argues, “indeterminate situations . . . are disturbed, troubled, ambiguous, confused, full of conflicting tendencies, obscure, etc. It is the situation that has these traits. We are doubtful because the situation is inherently doubtful. . . . The notion that in actual existence everything is completely determinate has been rendered questionable by the progress of physical science itself. Even if it had not been, complete determination would not hold of existences as an environment. For nature is an environment only as it is involved in interaction with an organism, or self” (1938, pp. 105–6).
In Barris (2010), I argue more fully on this basis that these kinds of violations of logic in dreams are sometimes legitimate. In this section of this essay, I explore in more detail the nature and variety of these legitimate logical anomalies we find in dreams.
On the sameness of the thing construed in these incompatible ways (although without thinking of it as involving the logical paradox that I argue it does), see also, for example, MacIntyre (1989): “each community, using its own criteria of sameness and difference, recognizes that it is one and the same subject matter about which they are advancing their claim; incommensurability and incompatibility are not incompatible” (p. 190). For further discussion of this issue, see Barris 2014, e.g., chapter 3, section 6.
This theoretically motivated suggestion fits nicely with Rechtschaffen’s empirically based observation that the manifest content of dreams is characteristically “single-minded” or “isolated” in the sense of showing a “strong tendency for a single train of related thoughts and images to persist over extended periods without disruption or competition from other simultaneous thoughts and images” (1978, p. 97).
Boss also argues for the structural simplicity of dreams, but gives an account of it that is the reverse of my own. Where I try to account for the intensity of feeling in dreams on the basis of dreams’ simplicity, he accounts for dreams’ simplicity on the basis of the simplicity and intensity of feeling. He notes that “dreamers so frequently perceive only a single person or very few people and only a very limited number of objects,” and suggests that this is because “the dreamer . . . is frequently, and intensely in a very definite mood. Corresponding to this unequivocal mood, only those objects and people are allowed to enter the respective dream world whose essence and being correspond exactly to the behaviour patterns in which the dreamer himself happens to be moving. . . . Corresponding to his concentrated mood the dreamer can enter into these realms of existence and behaviour all the more vividly. It is for this reason that he feels closer to their things and people, and that they can all be united in a single dream world of the moment, however far removed in time and space they may be in his waking life” (pp. 111–12). I do argue in the next section, however, that feelings are the privileged avenue for interpreting dreams.
Ortega’s description above of the whole of things that is the object of philosophy as itself partial is therefore true but, because the sense of or what we mean by this object is self-canceling in this way, incomplete. Perhaps this is the burden of his qualification that the whole of things is partial “in this sense, but only this.”
Compare again Rechtschaffen’s (1978) discussion of the “single-mindedness” of dreams.
As I noted above, while States argues here that this is a felt, preconceptual meaning that concepts do not do justice to, I am proposing that concepts are really part of feelings and vice versa.
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Barris, J. Dreams as a Meta-Conceptual or Existential Experience. Philosophia 42, 625–644 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-014-9532-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-014-9532-z