IAN HACKING

Dreams in Place

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59:3 Summer 2001

Objectivity has its home in the waking life.Dreams welcome unreason. So much is familiarto all good rationalists in the Western tradition.Yet there are ways to weave dreams into knowl-edge, evidence, and proof, a fabric beloved byAristotle, sought after by the Enlightenment,and respected by a host of small-time, old-timerationalists like myself. How do we do it? Byputting dreams in places, or places in dreams.But it is a slippery operation. I shall end by won-dering if it is not the dreamer who has made theplace for objectivity, and still runs it, behind thescenes.

Dreams are either significant or not—where“significant,” as we shall see, can have manymeanings. Significant dreams, in the culturaltradition with which I identify, are characteristi-cally associated with place, although, as is theway with dreams, the role of place is protean;the place may be the place in which the dream isdreamt, or a place in the dream; “place” is itselfa trope that is freely moved about. There seem tobe no compelling reasons why this should betrue. We do know that reasoners from time im-memorial do dismiss dreams, and fail to locatethem; the antireasoners take dreams seriously,and as part of their strategy seem always to fitthem into place, generously understood. That ishow, in any world with a craving for objectivity,dreams are made “objective”—by embeddingthem in place, or by embedding places in them.Descartes is curiously interesting here, for hewrote down three dreams at the moment of hisepiphany, when he was twenty-three years old.He took them to be highly significant, as por-tents of his future life as a philosopher. I arguethat his dreams fit well into my theme of placeand that Descartes created reason for himself outof this unreason.

I. MY CULTURE

I intend to discuss some aspects of dreams inwhat I will call my culture, namely, relativelyhigh European literate culture, as traditionallyconceived, with Greek and Judaic origins. Morespecifically, for present purposes my culture in-cludes classical Greece, biblical Israel, theRoman de la rose, Descartes, Freud, and theStanford University sleep laboratories. That listlumps together distinct civilizations in a waythat may be traditional but is hardly fashionable.One principle of lumping is that this is a se-quence of groups or individuals that prize writ-ing.

There are now many ethnographic accountsof dreaming. They all emanate from “my” cul-ture. As in so many other social domains, uni-versalism and localism slug it out. Some stu-dents find that features of dreaming are sharedby all peoples. Under the influence of Freud orJung they detect a universal symbolic system.Even structuralist anti-Freudians, taking a cuefrom Lévi-Strauss, discover a logic of scene-switching, a mechanism of the mind or its lan-guages exemplified in all societies.1 Conversely,a great deal of recent ethnographic work ondreams expresses the view that pretty much ev-erything about dreaming differs from culture toculture. I take no stand on such issues, but myopening presumption is that until we are givencompelling reasons to the contrary, a great manyaspects of dreams will be peculiar to the societyin which the dreamer dreams, remembers thedream, tells the dream, acts out the dream, be-haves in the light of the dream, and incorporatesthe dream into waking life (or excludes it). Thatis why I say I am discussing “my” culture, a rag-bag of snippets familiar to most of us. One im-

portant difference between my culture and whatappears to be the case in many others is thatthere is a definitive break between waking anddreaming life. If my dreams and my waking lifeusually flow into each other without my beingable to set them apart, I am held to be mad. Imay have to be put away.

II. WRITING IN DREAMS

I know of my culture because it is a written cul-ture. The peoples of West Asia were peoples ofthe book. Hence we know a lot about dreams inIsrael, in Islam, and even in Mani, the prophetMani being undoubtedly the most dream-in-spired founder of a great religion. Needless tosay, to write is already to put in place. BeforeGutenberg, indeed, each word was inscribed in aspecific place—the page, the parchment, thetablet, the stele.

Writing plays a remarkable role in some clas-sic dreams of my culture. For example, Des-cartes (to whom I shall return several times) hadthree dreams during the night of November 10,1619, when he was twenty-three. Yes, the nightof the poêle. He wrote down these dreams. Thetext itself is lost, but his first biographer, Baillet,did see the text in a notebook, as did Leibniz.The text is called the Olympica.2

There was a bad dream, then a short dream ofsparks that I like to think of as the strobe dream,and then a good dream. I shall say more aboutthe bad dream than the good one. I have nothingto say about the strobe dream, the dream inwhich there is a bolt of lightning and the room isfull of scintillating sparks; anachronistically(and all writing about dreams must be anachro-nistic), I imagine the sparks as like a strobo-scopic light. John Cole attends to another aspectof the dream; he calls this the Thunder Dream.3Descartes had had such dreams before. He hadlearned to blink hard and wake himself up. Thesparking would go away and he would fallasleep.

The third dream was a dream of written words.Some commentators state that the dream is a lit-erary composition, on the ground that dreamslike this are commonly reported around 1600, es-pecially in describing or announcing radicalchanges in one’s life. Hence Descartes hadample literary models on which to draw, in orderto compose his own contribution to this literary

genre of a decisive life choice being enacted orrepresented in a dream. (A Raptus Philosophicusof 1619, by Rodophilus Staurophorus, has beenmentioned in this connection. Boethius is citedas a root source for the genre.) At the strongest:Descartes never dreamt this dream at all; he com-posed it while awake, or at any rate dressed it upwhile awake.

The fact that Descartes told a dream accord-ing to a genre is no proof that he did not dreamthe dream. All the dreams that we tell, we tellaccording to the genres of our time and place. Ofcourse Descartes could have made up the thirddream. But dreams are mimics. Descartes couldequally well (if there is a truth of the matter)have had exactly the dream he wrote down, adream that aped a familiar literary form.

In the third dream Descartes saw a book on atable. He opened it and saw that it was some sortof dictionary or encyclopedia. He was over-whelmed by the hope that it would be very use-ful. But at that moment he found another book tohand. It was an anthology of poetry. Opening thebook he found the verse Quod vitae sectaboriter? (What life shall I lead?) Immediately aman he does not know gives him a piece of versebeginning Est et non. Descartes says this is fromthe Idylls of Ausonius, which are in the anthol-ogy on the table. But now he finds the dictionary(encyclopedia) is less complete than it was atfirst viewing, and he cannot find the verses Est etnon. The words are not in their proper place!

There is much more, including Descartes’s at-tempts, while dreaming, to interpret what he hasjust dreamt, and knows, while dreaming, to be adream. Plato’s debate between poetry and phi-losophy is enacted in the play between theverses and the dictionary. Here I emphasize onlythe role of writing, and the difficulty of locatingthe writing, of finding it in place. Descartes can-not obtain the text he wants in the anthology, heis thrust toward the dictionary, and so on. Thereare also other elements connected with printing,if not writing. Descartes sees certain copper-point plates that he cannot identify. Throughout,there is both the recognition of the word or theimage and yet the inability to grasp exactly whatit is . . .

The same inability appears in the most fa-mous dream of modern times, Freud’s Irmadream of July 23–24, 1895. (Yes, we could havedeveloped a subsidiary theme, that not only are

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dreams in place, but dreams, or at any rate themost memorable dreams, occur at precisely re-corded dates, November 16, 1623, July 23,1895.) “This is the first dream,” Freud wrote in afootnote, “that I subjected to so exhaustive an in-terpretation.” It was the starting point for The In-terpretation of Dreams and, hence, of the psy-choanalytic movement.

We were directly aware, too, of the origin of the infec-tion. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell,my friend Otto had given her an injection of a prepa-ration of propyl, propyls . . . propionic acid . . .trimethylamin (and I saw before me the formula forthis printed in heavy type) . . .

Here we have two dreams, one of which inau-gurates the Enlightenment, and the other ofwhich inaugurates psychoanalysis. In both casesthere is a writing that the dreamer cannot quitelocate or make out. You might say that these arefrustration dreams. Certainly. What is notable isthat the frustration is precisely an inability tomake out a text, to find it in the right place.

I said that Descartes was dreaming in a genreof dreaming, and telling his dream in a genre oftelling. Descartes and Freud are unique, but theirdreams conform to a type. These are not onlyfrustration dreams but also classic inauguratingdreams, initiation dreams, remembered in tran-quillity as the beginning of a career. Yet the ca-reer, in these two cases, is almost superhuman.The genius who begins an age suffers from nofalse modesty. For another example take Words-worth’s Prelude. That was his retrospective vi-sion of the origin of the poet, and, we might say,of the Romantic Movement in Britain. Book Vhas a dream analogous to the two just described.Had he been reading Descartes, of whom he wasto present a pastiche? Certainly he had beenreading Cervantes. “At length/ My senses yield-ing to the sultry air/ Sleep seized me, and Ipassed into a dream.” He dreams an Arab knight,a “semi-Quixote” who holds a stone under onearm and a shell in the other hand. The stone, hecontinues,

Was “Euclid’s Elements;” and “This,” said he,“Is something of more worth;” and at the wordStretched forth the shell, so beautiful in shape,In colour so resplendent, with commandThat I should hold it to my ear. I did so,

And heard that instant in an unknown tongue,Which yet I understood . . . 4

The shell speaks and foretells the destruction ofthe earth by flood. Yet although it speaks, thestone and the shell are “two books” that the Arabwill bury (line 102). The dreamer never“doubted once but that they both were books,”(113) though he saw plainly that one was a stoneand one a shell. The book of geometry “weddedsoul to soul in purest bond/ Of reason,” whereasthe other had the “power/ To exhilarate thespirit, and to soothe, /Through every clime, theheart of human kind.” Philosophy and poetrystrike again! The dreamer begs for the twobooks, but the knight rides off into the “illimit-able waste” with a wild flood pursuing him;once again, frustration, unattainable words inother languages, books that will be buried ordrowned.

III. REALISM AND POSITIVISM ABOUT THE TELLING OF

DREAMS

Almost everything that can be important in adream can also be important, in some changedor even reversed modality, in the telling of thedream. For example, we see not only that writ-ing occurs in these dreams, but also that weknow about them because they have been writ-ten down. One of the constant things, in my cul-ture, is that in order to be preserved, dreamsmust be rehearsed. Otherwise they are lost. Wemust recite the dreams to ourselves. We can tellthem out loud, even to other people, or we canwrite them down upon awakening or after theyare recalled by some chance incident of the fol-lowing day. Otherwise they are lost.

This may not be a universal. Some peopleshave a rather short repertoire of dreams to tell. Itis really not very hard for them to recall whatthey dreamt, because there are relatively fewdreams to tell. Is this small repertoire a narrativeconvention or a fact about their dreams? Thisquestion is useful for distinguishing two ex-treme attitudes to dreams.

Realist: It might be true, although it would behard to find out without interfering with theways in which these people dream, that theirdreams are vastly richer than the reports thatthey give. So these people might have dreams asvaried and unpredictable as mine, but the con-

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ventions of their community determine that theyreport only a small group of rather stylizeddreams. The genre, on this view, is in the tellingof the dream, but not necessarily in the dream it-self.

Positivist: There is simply no fact of the mat-ter as to whether their dreams differ from theirreports. Better: in general it makes no sense toask if the report accurately tells the dream. Ofcourse, on any one occasion, a person may lieabout what was dreamt. But in general, says thepositivist, the way the dream is told is the dream.This is not because people truly report dreams (acontingent matter of fact), but because the reportconstitutes the content of the dream, by andlarge—and this is an analytic truth. NormanMalcolm’s slim volume Dreaming is the author-itative guide to such an attitude.5 Malcolm’sopinion derives from his understanding ofWittgenstein, and it is absolute. There is nomore to the content of a dream than the report(or successive reports) of a dream.6

I feel the force of both extremes. But weshould not limit ourselves to a formal choice be-tween positivism and realism. All dream report-ing is in a larger framework. The Brazilian eth-nographer Eduardo Viveiros de Castro tells meof an Amazonian people with just such a smallrepertoire of narrated dreams. Here is an exam-ple of a type of dream, by no means peculiar tothis group, and cheerfully cited by anti-Freud-ians: A man wants to win a position of socialpower and leadership in the community. This isforetold by his dreaming of copulating with hismother, so he spends some time preparing forthis dream before falling asleep, which is one ofa couple of dozen possible dreams to have.Dreams of incest were generally held to be aus-picious in ancient Greek culture too, Sophoclesnotwithstanding. Plato was the odd man out,holding in Book IX of the Republic (571–572)that such dreams were disgusting and betrayedthe foul instincts of the dreamer.

In the Amazonian group, dreams are integralto the whole of life. Our sharp distinctiondreaming/waking does not make much sense tothem. They plan their dreams before they fallasleep, in the hope that they have the right (for-tunate) dream that bodes well for some futureconcern. When they wake up, they immediatelyrecite what they dreamt—from a small range ofpossible dreams. How different from my own

life! I would be deemed to be a total bore, anddoomed to be one, if I told my dreams everymorning, especially if there was nothing odd orcurious about my dreams.

To return to my culture and Descartes: Somecritics say that the third dream must be a literarycomposition, for there is such and such a genre.The realist says that, assuming Descartes didhave a third dream, there is a real fact of the mat-ter as to the extent to which the actual dream iscorrectly described by what Descartes wrotedown. The positivist says that although, ofcourse, Descartes could have been outrightlying, in general the report given, even if highlystylized according to the conventions of the day,cannot be properly distinguished from whatDescartes dreamt.

IV. LOSING DREAMS

We all know that we lose dreams. That is, wewake up with the conviction of having dreamt,but with only the foggiest recollection of whatwe dreamt. Or we wake up with a goodish mem-ory, but unless we at once rehearse the dream, itis usually forgotten a few moments later. Atbest, an incident during the day may trigger arecollection or reporting of a lost dream. Al-though these facts are so familiar, I should liketo recall the greatest forgotten dream, in Daniel2; it too is dated, if not to the day, at least to theyear, presumably 604–603 BCE.

And in the second year of the reign of Nebuchad-nezzar, Nebuchadnezzar dreamed dreams, wherewithhis spirit was troubled, and his sleep brake from him.Then the king commanded to call the magicians, andthe astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans,for to shew the king his dreams. So they came andstood before the king. And the king said unto them, Ihave dreamed a dream, and my spirit was troubled toknow the dream. Then spake the Chaldeans to theking in Syriack [viz: old Aramaic], O king, live forever; tell thy servants the dream, and we will shew theinterpretation.

The king answered and said to the Chaldeans: Thething is gone from me: if ye will not make known untome the dream, with the interpretation thereof, ye shallbe cut in pieces, and your houses shall be made adunghill. But if ye shew the dream and the interpreta-tion thereof, ye shall receive of me gifts and great

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honours; therefore shew me the dream and the inter-pretation thereof. (Daniel 2:1–6)

“The thing is gone from me.” That is already amost powerful reminder of the fact that we losedreams. We all know that no one can have an-other’s dream, and yet Daniel did pull it off. In a“night vision” he saw what Nebuchadnezzardreamt. (He redreamed Nebuchadnezzar’sdream?) The king accepted what Daniel said.Cynics among us will say that Daniel was agreat confidence trickster. He knew the kingcould not dispute what Daniel said the king haddreamt. So he told the king the king’s dream,and then interpreted it. (And yet Nebuchad-nezzar could have rejected the dream, “It doesnot ring a bell; you are a fraud!”)

The dream of Nebuchadnezzar seems never tobe mentioned by Freud. He would have knownthe book of Daniel, perhaps the greatest book ofwritten-down dreams before The Interpretationof Dreams itself. Is this because there is a lot ofDaniel in Freud, the man who learned to tellother people’s dreams to their faces? It took avery strong will to reply to Freud, “That accountof my dream does not ring a bell; you are afraud!”

Read the book of Daniel for much more fasci-nating material on dreams. Note how words tooplay their role in the book. Daniel’s biggest tri-umph is at Belshazzar’s feast, where the wordsMene, mene, tekel, upharsin appear on the wall.Or rather, some signs that none can read appearon the wall. Daniel both pronounces them andinterprets them. The signs resemble dreams thatonly he can say, and only he can interpret. Herewe do not have a forgotten dream, but letterlikemarks devoid of meaning, terribly scary. (Or arethey part of a dream after all?) In one of his mostmarvelous paintings, Rembrandt dares to paintthe semblance of marks-without-meaning thatDaniel will invest with meaning. Susan Jamesuses a detail from it for the cover of her recentbook about the emotions; I would put the wholeon the cover of a book about Freud.7

The book of Daniel describes events that tookplace about 2600 years ago. It is almost entirelyabout dreams. An unusual idea about it has beensuggested to me in conversation: The book is de-rived from a much older Sumerian tradition thatstarts around 4200 years ago. Dreams played acentral role in Sumerian civilization. The court

made a circuit of the kingdom from dream-siteto dream-site, in order to have dreams at eachsite. If there is some truth in this account, thenDaniel, the most dream-filled book of the He-brew Bible, may in part be an attempt to estab-lish authority by recalling an ancient tradition inwhich the place of the dream is central to its sig-nificance.

V. DREAM-SITES

The way in which dreams are told is an integralpart of the dream. In Greek antiquity there was afairly sharp distinction between significant andinsignificant dreams. That was the solution to aproblem of objectivity. The significant dreamshave some objective character, and help foretellthe future. But the insignificant dreams meannothing; they merely reflect personal concernsof the dreamer.

In a significant dream a god, or goddess, orsome other significant other, stands at the headof the dreamer, and the dream is enacted by thisother, who speaks to the dreamer. Even if youhave never gone further than Book II of theIliad, you will recall that Zeus sends to “Aga-memnon, son of Atreus, / a wooly menace, aDream” that is just such a dream. My descrip-tion is not quite right, for apparently the severalGreek words for dreaming do not take proposi-tional clauses as in our “I dreamt that . . . ” In-stead they take objects; one dreams a person.

The Dream stood above [Agamemnon’s] head. Itlooked

Like Nestor, the old man that AgamemnonRespected most, looked just like Nestor,And this dream that was a god addressed the king.8

You might want, at least occasionally, todream a significant dream. How do you do that?It was widely believed that there were certainsites, sacred sites, suitable for significantdreams. The best known was Epidaurus, favoredby the healer Asclepius. In Epidaurus you mightdream Asclepius standing over you. If he dreamtyou as healed, you would awake with a memoryof that, and be healed.

Many classical scholars take the highly styl-ized character of significant dreams to indicatethat these dream reports are not to be understoodliterally. These reports, they say, simply do not

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have the feel of dreams (viz., of “our” dreams). Ireact differently. I have no trouble imagining mydreaming such a dream, and have recentlytrained myself to dream dreams something likethat. But they are not truly like that, becausesuch dreams have no meaning, no life, withinmy present community. To repeat what I saidabout Descartes: Dreams conform to thedream-genres and genres of dream-narration ofthe day. The realist and the positivist give differ-ent spins to this. The positivist is inclined to say,“These people told what they dreamt, so (in gen-eral, allowing for occasional lies) that is whatthey dreamt.” The realist keeps open the un-knowable option that what was actually dreamtwas different from what was narrated. I do nottake sides on that issue. Instead I emphasize theimportance of place to significant dreams.

VI. THE PHILOSOPHERS

The philosophers have mostly had their ownrather skeptical line on dreams. They reject thepossibility of significant dreams, and they paylittle heed to place, either in or around dreams.Aristotle is the ancient author closest to a mod-ern rationalist sensibility. His texts about sleep,dreaming, and divination in dreams form astrange mix. There is a recent consensus that OnSleep and Waking, On Dreams, and On Divina-tion Through Sleep are among the last of the Ar-istotelian corpus to be composed.9 Even thoughhe is skeptical, Aristotle allows that possiblysome dreams truly foretell the future. This is notbecause they have a divine origin. Even animalsdream; gods would not impart dreams to mereanimals, so that proves that dreams have merelyterrestrial sources. He thus implicitly undoes thedistinction between significant and insignificantdreams. It would have been easy to save the di-vine origin of significant dreams by holding thatanimals dream only insignificant ones.

Aristotle’s rational account of apparentlyprecognitive dreams would serve any modernrationalist. We dream of things that interest us.The images are prompted by recent experience,but dreams reorder events and people. By coin-cidence, some dreams will match the future.Only those dreams that match are later recalled,and so mere coincidence gets turned into clair-voyance. Nothing is significant in itself, andnothing is dreamt in place.10

He does not completely give up on divination.We may be more aware of our bodily stateswhen asleep, so dreams may help a physiciandetect an illness that has not yet become seriousin waking life. We may form intentions whiledreaming, if only by moving our limbs in waysthat foreshadow how we may move them whenwe are later awake. Democritus had thought thatsleepers pick up “emanations” from moving ob-jects, perhaps, on one reading, even the thoughtsof others, a sort of ancient version of the telepa-thy imagined by psychic researchers at the endof the nineteenth century. Aristotle swallowsjust this much of the idea: motions of bodieselsewhere may transmit movements in the air orwater that a sleeper may detect, and, hence,know what is going on elsewhere to a very slightextent. Stupid people with few thoughts will bemore liable to be receptive to such feeble stimu-lation, and so it is that divination, if it doesoccur, is to be had from the mouths of simple-tons. Nowhere is the site of the dream ever men-tioned. And so, my argument goes, no place ismade for significant dreams.

VII. NARRATION

In my culture, dreams have to be told, and, if notwritten down, at least rehearsed, in order to bepreserved. Narration provides stability fordreams. There may be an unexpected depend-ence in the reverse direction. Take Chaucer, theman commonly taken to have given English anew genre, the written-down tale, as opposed toepic, saga, history, myth, or religious founda-tion. We read the Canterbury Tales with suchavidity that we seldom recall Chaucer’s earlier(1370–1380, say) long poems such as The Bookof the Duchess, The House of Fame, and TheParliament of Fowls. These, and others, such asDido, are all dream poems, that is to say, storiesthat are cast in the form of dreams.

This genre was widespread throughout Eu-rope, the most famous model being the Romande la rose. Chaucer’s dream-tellings are full ofphilosophical speculation—said to be stronglyinfluenced by Boethius—about the nature oftruth and objectivity. What can one believe? Thesenses? Dreams? (A question posed within adream?) Books? Revelation? Books in dreams?Written-down revelations that are dreamt? Rev-elations gained by reading a book in a dream?

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The inside/outside play is phenomenal: a regularpressure from outside to tell which dreams areobjective, significant, true predictors. In Chau-cer’s dream poems, this question of objectivityis debated within the dream.

Then Chaucer had a brilliant idea (Boccacciowas there before him). It enabled him, on the oc-casion of being temporarily out of work becauseof a change in patronage, to write down the Can-terbury Tales. He discovered that we can leaveout the framework of telling a dream and simplyhave the telling. The telling is still framed, butnot as dream: Each pilgrim must tell a story.That is where the secular, fictional narrative be-gins in early English. Dreams must be told asnarratives in order not to be forgotten, but, recip-rocally, the genre of telling a fictional story isderived from the telling of dreams.

Chaucer himself may have felt quite liberated.He put only one dream into the Tales: the Nun’sPriest’s Tale. Surely it is deliberate that this is asecondary tale, told by one whose role is to ac-company someone else. In this tale the dreameris a rooster, one Chantecleer, whose favoritehen, Pertelote, is a skeptic about dreams.Chantecleer believes that dreams foretell, a doc-trine that Pertelote ridicules. He then dreams ofdangers, but he does not heed his own theory ofsignification. So he is tricked by a fox, who car-ries him off to a wood. Luckily he tricks the foxat the last moment.

VIII. PAINTING DREAMS

Some schools of psychotherapy encourage a dis-turbed person, especially a child, to drawdreams directly. That too is a way of telling adream. Stepping up one level, how do we repre-sent in a picture that someone is dreaming, andat the same time, the content of what is beingdreamt? We have conventions, as illustrated inthe comic strip or bande dessinée. The speaker’swords are in a bubble coming out of the mouth, abubble with a firm boundary. Thoughts comeout with a less firm boundary, connected to thehead by small soap bubbles. The same conven-tion is used for dreams, but the dreamer is por-trayed as asleep, and in the big bubble there is apicture of what is being dreamt.

What about earlier conventions? FrancescoSalviati (Francesco de’ Rosso), 1510–1563, wasone of the first of the “mannerist” painters, and

also a great admirer of Michelangelo. He hassome pretty striking works, such as a painting ofthe three graces played by three men in drag. InFlorence, Cosimo I started a tapestry factory tomake twenty giant tapestries for the Salle deDue Cento in the Palazzo Vecchio. Salviati washired to do Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dreamof the seven fat years followed by seven leanones. Pharaoh is on a couch (no kidding) withJoseph nearby, manifestly interpreting thedream, but how to portray the dream? In the tap-estry there is a Renaissance window, properlyframed, in which one sees seven lean cattle de-vouring seven fat ones. One corner of the frameis posed just off Pharaoh’s shoulder. In a smallcartoon made by Salviati for the tapestry, thecorner of the frame is posed exactly at Pharaoh’shead.11 Something is made to be a picture of adream by being put in the right place.

The tapestry was hung on May 16, 1548. Ithas been conjectured that it was a contribution tothe great debate about the paragon of the arts,flourishing in Florence in 1547. Which is thegreater art, sculpture or painting? Here is oneway in which painting is superior. You can eas-ily represent a dream in a painting, by putting itin the right place on the entire canvas or cloth.But there is no such way to represent dreamingin sculpture. That is a simple consequence ofphysics and the strength of materials: a sculpteddream attached to Pharaoh’s shoulder wouldbreak off (unless it were on a frieze, which is theinferior mode of sculpture).

IX. A YOUNG MAN AGED TWENTY-THREE

In the first major collection of ethnographic pa-pers on dreams, one editor wrote that in themodern era inaugurated by Descartes, “We haveless need of our dreams.”12 Yet we can see a lossof need for dreams going on long before Des-cartes. (And Aristotle had no need of dreams!There were lots of Aristotelians between Aris-totle and Descartes.) One might say of Chaucerand some of his contemporaries that they in-creasingly had less need of their dreams. And ina literal sense, Chaucer had less need of dreamswhen he stopped writing dream poems andstarted writing tales. Nevertheless Descartes ispivotal. This is not because he introduced skep-ticism with an argument from dreams. Notingthe familiarity of dream arguments, Hobbes

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tartly objected to the first meditation: “I amsorry that so excellent an author of new specula-tions should publish this old stuff.”13

Why then is Descartes pivotal? Because at theage of twenty-three he had those dreams. Hewrote them down in the notebook in which hekept many serious thoughts. I think he took themseriously for the rest of his life. I believe (againstmost commentators) that dream-skepticism is alive skepticism for Descartes, that is, not a merephilosophical position, but genuine doubt.Moreover this is in part because of the content ofthose three dreams, to which I shall return.

What do I mean by live skepticism? All of uscan understand dream-skepticism, but hardlyany of us are genuinely moved by it. Comparesolipsism. Several authors, very different in in-terest and training, have argued that Witt-genstein actually felt or experienced solipsism,which most of us think of as a mere philo-sophical stance.14 I suggest that Descartes anddreaming are comparable to Wittgenstein andsolipsism. Their skepticism was not a mere in-tellectual gambit, intended to clarify concepts ofknowledge and belief. They felt, they experi-enced skepticism as terrifying; they took it seri-ously as a threat to their being.15

In the convoluted replies to the seventh set ofobjections, Descartes observes that he was “thefirst philosopher to overturn the doubts of theskeptics” [AT VII 554]. Well, perhaps this mis-states matters. I agree with Myles Burnyeat,who has argued that Descartes introduced awholly new level of skepticism, unknown in theGreek tradition.16 I add the thought that Des-cartes did not only make this intellectual stepforward (or backward into chaos); he also expe-rienced it as a live doubt, not as a paradoxicalconundrum.

On this view, Descartes was right and Hobbeswas wrong. He was the first to overturn a whollynew skepticism about dreams, his own. Hobbesdid not see the point, because he could not expe-rience the new skepticism. Only at the very endof the Meditations could Descartes laugh at hisworry about dreams. Is it the after-shock giggleof someone who was truly scared?

The exaggerated doubts of the last few days should bedismissed as laughable. This applies especially to theprincipal reason for doubt, namely my inability to dis-tinguish between being asleep and being awake. For I

now notice that there is a vast difference between thetwo, in that dreams are never linked by memory withall the other actions of life as waking experiencesare. . . . When I distinctly see where things comefrom, and when I can connect my perceptions of themwith the whole of the rest of my life without a break,then I am quite certain that when I encounter thesethings I am not asleep but awake and I ought not tohave even the slightest doubt of their reality if aftercalling upon all of the senses as well as my memoryand my intellect in order to check them, I have noconflicting reports from any of these senses.17

Coherence arguments like that are two a pennyin the history of philosophy. What is remarkableis not the argument, but that it comes as thedénouement of one of most powerful Europeantexts of all time.

One does sympathize with Hobbes. Why doesDescartes find dream-skepticism so exciting?Hobbes was fascinated by dreams, but as a ques-tion of physiology and psychology, not as epis-temology and metaphysics. My answer is thatDescartes was that rare thing, a philosopher whoinvents and experiences live philosophical skep-ticism. At the end of the Meditations he recitesthe old stuff, the coherence argument, but onlybecause by then he has convinced himself thathe no longer experiences live skepticism.

X. ANOTHER YOUNG MAN AGED TWENTY-THREE

Descartes had his dreams when he was twenty-three. Spinoza was excommunicated when hewas twenty-three, and dreams were not in theforefront of his thought. But here is what an-other thoroughly modern young man wroteabout dreams when he was twenty-three:Leibniz, in 1669:

We have this criterion for distinguishing the experi-ence of dreaming from being awake—we are certainof being awake only when we remember why wehave come to our present position and condition andsee the fitting connection of the things which are ap-pearing to us, and to each other, and to those whichpreceded. In dreams we do not grasp this connectionwhen it is present, nor are we surprised when it is ab-sent. It is to be noted, however, that now and then thedreamer himself observes that he is dreaming, yet thedream continues. Here he must be thought of as if hewere awake for a brief interval of time, and then,

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once more oppressed by sleep, returned to the previ-ous state. It is also to be noted that some men canwake themselves up, and it is a familiar experience ofmine that, when some pleasing vision presents itself,I notice that I am dreaming and try my eyes and pullthem open with my fingers to admit the light. Weshould also think about the cause of sensations offalling out of bed, which are popularly ascribed tolapses into sin, and which occur sometimes, and tosome people, almost between the limits of sleep andwaking, so that they are suddenly awakened at thevery moment of falling asleep. Sometimes when thishas happened to me, I can scarcely persuade myselfto fall asleep all night. For in the first moment of fall-ing asleep, I suddenly recollect myself, and, sensingthis fact, leap up. Nor ought we to overlook the spon-taneous ejection of semen without any contact insleep; in wakers it is expelled only when they arestrongly agitated, but in sleep the spirits are movedinternally by a strong imagination alone and withoutany rubbing of the members. I have also heard thisconfirmed by a physician.18

Leibniz and Descartes both gave a coherencecriterion to distinguish dreaming from wakinglife. But Leibniz never entertained live skepti-cism about dreaming. He even granted that wecould have a coherent lifelong dream, but then itwould not matter that it was a dream. Thisthought is in the same vein as his seeminglysolipsistic remark in the Monadology—that itwould make no difference to me if there werenothing else in this world except this monad,me; in fact it would make no difference to any-thing, except God.19 Leibniz was completely un-troubled by solipsism or any other kind of philo-sophical skepticism such as dreaming.

Leibniz finds dreams totally ordinary—unsurprisingly—in almost every respect exceptone. He is amazed at the inventiveness ofdreams, the way in which we, or at any rate he,can dream quite extraordinary visions of bril-liant architecture, noble towers, intricate tracery,“While in waking it would be difficult for meand I could succeed only with enormous diffi-culty in framing the idea of the simplest house.”Not to mention “all the wonderful speeches,books, letters, and moving poems which I havenever read but have encountered in my dreams.”The structures that Leibniz dreams are so ex-traordinary, so beautiful, that they must derivefrom the Art of Invention in its most sublime

form, as intimations of the mind of God itself—from which, the young Leibniz seems to haveopined, we ought to be able to construct an argu-ment for the existence of God.20

XI. ANOTHER BUILDING

One building is famous in a poem presented as adream, the most famous poem in English alleg-edly recovered from a dream under opiates. Buteven before the building we have a place. Thedream is not dreamt in a site, but is the dream ofa site, a building site—witness again to the mal-leability of the role of place, consistent withplace having a role.

In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure dome decreeWhere Alph the sacred river ranThrough caverns measureless to manDown to a sunless sea.

Scholars agree that Coleridge crafted KublaKhan when he was stone sober, and they rejectas romantic myth the story of the poem beingwritten down on awakening. That does not pre-clude Coleridge having dreamt the stately plea-sure dome where Alph the sacred river ran, theperfect architectural dream in the perfect site.Even if he made up the whole thing, Coleridgeknew the significance of place to dreams thataimed at significance.

XII. LUCID DREAMS (I)

For some readers the most interesting bit of myquotation from Leibniz will be the mention ofdreams in which the dreamer is aware that he isdreaming. And recall that toward the end of histhird dream Descartes started interpreting theearly parts of the dream, knowing them to be adream. Today this is called “lucid dreaming.” Inthe mid-nineteenth century, Hervey de Saint-Denis, subsequently a Sinologist at the Collègede France, became fascinated by this phenome-non, which for Leibniz is commonplace. I thinkHervey’s profession as scholar of Chinese cultureis relevant, for he thought that there were certainChinese sects who made great use of suchdreams. He tried to cultivate lucid dreams, for hethought they were a profound guide to some otherreality, if only a reality inside ourselves. In 1867

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he published Les rêves et les moyens de lesdiriger.21 The label “Lucid Dreaming” did notbecome entrenched in English until 1913, whenthe Society for Psychical Research in Londonlearned it from a Dutch psychiatrist, Frederickvan Eeden, who was familiar with Hervey’sessay.22 There was then, and there is now, a cult oflucid dreaming that produces a stream of arcanebooks that still intersect with spiritism and para-psychology. How about this title, published in1994: The Lucid Dreamer: A Waking Guide forthe Traveler Between Two Worlds? Or this, from1990: Lucid Dreaming: The Paradox of Con-sciousness During Sleep?23 For Leibniz, ourprototypically modern man, there was nothingparadoxical, and there was a probable explana-tion of the phenomenon.

XIII. THE WIND AND THE MELON

Back to Descartes and dreams that matter. Thestory of Descartes’s three dreams reads like pureBorges. The young man inscribes the dreams inhis notebook. The notebook, much like my ownnotebooks, begins at both ends, with commentson different topics, and has entries, separated byblank pages, on various topics. Who reads thenotebook? His biographer and one other,Leibniz. Leibniz has much of the notebook cop-ied, but barely mentions the dreams. The book islost. We rely on the biographer’s version, al-ready a problem, because the notes on dreamswere in Latin and Baillet published his summaryof the contents of the dreams in French.Cross-checking with Leibniz’s Latin transcrip-tions, we know that Baillet took some mild lib-erties with other parts of the text. To completethe circle of readers, Baillet’s text was sent to theelderly Freud for analysis. Could Borges im-prove on that?

Freud began by being true to psychoanalysis.One had to know the associations that thedreamer would make on the basis of the mani-fest content. There was no way one could dothat, so forget it. But then Freud was untrue tohimself, for the sake of universalism. He sug-gested that some items in dreams have such auniversal significance that one can draw a fewinferences. The first dream caught his attention.

That dream begins with terrifying phantoms.As Descartes tries to drive them away, he experi-ences a terrible weakness in his right side. There

is a great wind and he is whirled around on hisleft foot. He cannot stand up straight, for he isconstantly blown to the left. He tries to get to acollege chapel to pray, but realizes he has passeda man whom he knows but has not acknowl-edged. He is thrown against the chapel wall bythe wind. Someone else calls out to him—“Des-cartes”—and tells him that he should seek M. N.,who will give him something. Descartes thinksthat this something is a melon from a far country.The man is surrounded by people who can standup straight, despite the wind. The wind lessens,he wakes, he feels pain in his left side.

Descartes thought the melon signified thesolitary life. His eighteenth-century readersthought the melon was a capital joke. Freudabandoned his resolve not to comment. The sin-ister bending to the left, while others stand upstraight, the stranger who is bringing the melonfrom afar—these all add up to one thing, Des-cartes’s fear of his homosexual inclinations.When I related the dream to my wife, she saidimmediately, “Oh, that melon. I suppose he hadgotten someone pregnant.” A whole new field forCartesian research opens up. John Cole has of-fered the most convincing chain of associationsbetween the melon and the songs, saws, and say-ings of the day. Here is one of many examples,current between 1585 and 1630, in translation:

Friends in the present dayHave this in common with the melon:You’ve got to try fiftyBefore you get a good one.24

Cole finds two preoccupations in the dream. Thefirst is readily recognized, the break with Des-cartes’s filial obligation to become a lawyer. Thesecond is more personal. Descartes had a deepemotional attachment to his older friend andmentor, Isaac Beeckman. He felt betrayed byBeeckman’s unenthusiastic response to some ofhis sketched mathematics, hence the melon: hismentor was no true friend.

XIV. THE EVIL GENIUS

Something else is more interesting than the an-drogynous melon. Descartes was mercilesslybuffeted by the wind, which thrust him againstthe wall of the chapel. At the end of his dream-ing Descartes (as rendered by Baillet) thought:

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Le vent qui poussait vers l’Église du collège, lorsqu’ilavait mal au côté droit, n’était autre chose que lemauvaise Génie qui tâchait de le jeter par force dansun lieu où son dessein était d’aller voluntairement.

In the margin Baillet wrote what is presumed tohave been Descartes’s original Latin: A maloSpiritu ad Templum propellabar. F. Hallyn re-marks:

The Latin text states that an evil spirit pushes thedreamer towards the chapel, while the French accountmentions an evil Genius. One may well ask what wasthe Latin equivalent of the other occurrences of “ge-nius” in Baillet’s version. For example, Descartesawakes convinced that quelque mauvais génie is thecause of the pain he feels in his left side. Baillet’swords are: que ce ne fût l’opération de quelque mau-vais génie qui l’aurait voulu séduire.25

What were the words of Descartes? Allow meto imagine that Baillet did get things more orless right. Then there is a truly remarkable inver-sion. The first surfacing (of which we know) ofthe evil genius that Descartes uses to create adoubt more hyperbolic than dreaming was actu-ally experienced as the product of the first of thedreams that Descartes himself says set him onhis career.

That is highly contentious. Here is an acerbiccomment by Geneviève Rodis-Lewis:

Whereas malus spiritus clearly refers to the spirit ofevil (l’esprit du mal), Baillet’s translation leads toconfusion with the very much later malin génie, thedeceiver of the Meditations, the instrument of su-preme doubt. This confusion skews the entire inter-pretation offered by J. Maritain, Le Songe de Des-cartes, Paris, 1932.26

Actually Maritain seems to have been moreinterested in the “Spirit of Truth,” identified asthe lightning that sets off the strobe dream andthat, Descartes thought in retrospect, “had fore-cast these dreams to him before he retired to hisbed.” Maritain continues: “The historians of ra-tionalism ought to settle for us once and for all,the identity of this genius. Could it be by anychance a cousin of the Malin Génie of the Medi-tations?”27 Has not the historian answered, inthe person of Rodis-Lewis? She says, in effect,there is not a chance we have even a distant

cousin here. I should say that I have quoted theonly occasion on which Maritain appears tomake a comparison with the malicious demon ofthe Meditations either in the essay called LeSonge de Descartes or in the collection of essaysthat bears that name. I would hardly want to de-fend Maritain in general; his final paragraph inhis final essay (on the Cartesian heritage) be-gins, “I have often said that Descartes (orCartesianism) has been the great French sin inmodern history”—and he urged the Russians to,as people now say, deconstruct Hegel, while theEnglish and Americans should deconstructLocke, each people taking upon itself the sin ofits intellectual father. Not my cup of tea, but it ishardly debunked in its entirety by pointing to asingle question asked by Maritain about whetherthe malin génie is cousin to a benevolent spiritof truth.

I am suggesting something far more radicalthan Maritain ever allowed himself in print, andI am not fully dissuaded by the historian.Rodis-Lewis does not quite convince me that weshould never allow ourselves to speculate thatthe Baillet version, although using a Frenchphrase that Descartes did not use in 1619 (mau-vais génie), did capture Descartes’s thoughtabout his dream, a thought that lasted him therest of his life.

XV. WHY CALL FOR AN EVIL GENIUS?

Why is the evil genius—or, to use a better trans-lation, a malicious demon—needed in the firstmeditation? Why will dreaming not suffice forskeptical doubt?

The trouble seems to be this: “Whether I amawake or asleep two and three added togetherare five, and a square has no more than foursides.” Even in dreams, 2 � 3 � 5 and squareshave four sides. So dreaming skepticism is notenough. But why can I not dream that I go to ge-ometry class and learn that squares have fivesides? In the next class (in my dream), I learnthat 2 � 3 � 4. Moreover, I dream that what Iam taught is correct, and I dream that I myselfsee that 2 � 3 � 4. Why not? I suggest it is be-cause the telling of such a dream ceases to be in-telligible. “You can dream those words, if youwant, but you cannot dream a square with fivesides!” What we have is a constraint less onwhat is dreamt, but on what can be told as

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dream. The evil genius, descendant of that terri-ble wind in the original first dream, is then in-voked to create a new kind of doubt that goeseven deeper than dream-skepticism.

The malicious demon does not enter until thepage after the reflection on the truths of arithme-tic and geometry. He is an all-purpose demonwho can create doubt about anything, particu-larly, the truth that I have a body, that I have ahead and arms. This doubt, about my very body,is in fact strikingly close to some manifestationsof what is called paranoid schizophrenia; reallive felt skepticism is close to genuine madness.

XVI. THE COUCH (I)

Dreams, place, and significance are profoundlyconnected, but never, or almost never, instraightforward ways. I mentioned Epidaurus, aholy place in which the healing cult of Asclepiusencouraged you to dream. That is straightfor-ward. You go to a place to dream. The holy sitefor dreams, in the twentieth century, has ofcourse been the couch. It is not that you dreamon the couch, but you tell your dream on thecouch, and free-associate thereon. Let the prob-lem be this: How can we make a dream signifi-cant? The solution is not to dream in a holyplace, but to tell the dream in a sacred place, inthis case, the couch. And Freud was not satisfiedwith the couch; he insisted that the room inwhich it sat be sealed off from the consultingroom by double doors, each lined with felt. Thetemple at Epidaurus had its altar; the felt-insu-lated room had its couch.

Freud’s couch and the double doors wereunique, but they have become generic as psy-choanalysts have copied the layout of the ana-lytic chamber. Some time before Freud set thepace in analytic interior decoration, he had an-other fixation with a place that he wanted to behallowed, namely, the building in which he firstformed his theory of dream interpretation: 15Bergasse. He wrote to his then-closest friend,Wilhelm Fliess, wondering whether some dayone might read on a marble tablet on that house:

Here, on 24th July, 1895The Secret of the DreamRevealed itself to Dr. Sigm. Freud.

The plaque was duly erected on May 6, 1977.28

XVII. AN EXPERIMENT WITH (SPACE)–TIME

Between the two world wars, the writing down ofwaking memories of dreams was much encour-aged, in the English-speaking world, by astrange and deeply influential (if now almost for-gotten) book by J. M. Dunne, An ExperimentWith Time.29 Dunne, influenced perhaps by theCambridge philosopher McTaggart’s reflectionson time, believed that we live in all time, all thetime, although we are primarily conscious of ashortish (roughly two-day) moving segment oftime; the moments that we are conscious of inwaking life are experiences of the middle of sucha segment. But in dreams we blend togetherevents that we experienced when awake duringthe whole of time surrounding a dream, both pastand future, with events closer in time being moresalient than those further away. We can establishthis by writing down our dreams as soon as wewake (we must keep pencil and paper by the pil-low). A day after recording a dream, we read itthrough as an impersonal account and noticemany events of a purely personal sort (readingabout a volcano in the newspaper, rather than ex-periencing a volcano) that took place either pre-ceding or following the recording of the dream.This is not precognition but cognition in dreamsof the larger segment of time that we experiencewhen dreaming. The middle classes of GreatBritain were much taken by this practice; J. B.Priestley even wrote a successful play for theWest End of London built around Dunne. Dunnealso passes fleetingly across the pages of AgathaChristie. What chord did he strike in the hearts ofthe British middle class? There were intimationsof immortality in his vision, for we are, albeitdimly, aware of events in the whole of time, eter-nity, both past and future. This was a comfortingthought for the myriad aging parents, widows,and spinsters who had lost their sons, husbands,or lovers in the Great War.

Dunne’s writing down of his dreams was aterribly lonely, solitary event, made public andfascinating only when embedded in a bizarretheory about time. Indeed, Dunne wonderfullyfits my theme of dreams in place. He wrote inthe era in which his readers were fascinated byfour-dimensional Minkowsi space–time, even ifthey did not much understand it. Dunne madedreams significant by embedding them in anentirely novel “location” in this new hyper-

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space, the roughly two-day-long segments inMinkowski space–time where events are quasi-experienced.

XVIII. INTERNET DREAMS

I should update my remarks about loneliness andthe writing down of dreams. The telling ofdreams has been totally transformed in the pastdecade. The Internet is now full of dream-sites—bulletin boards and websites in which to writedreams. Apparently, people wake up in the morn-ing and scurry off to write down their dreams.And other people in cyberspace comment, dis-cuss, elaborate, interpret these dreams, and in ex-change present their own. I said that I would bedeemed to be a total bore, and doomed to be one,if I told my dreams every morning. Certainly thatwould be true if I did it to my nearest and dearest,but in the massive impersonality—or is it a newway to have a personality?—of the Internet, I cantell my dreams to everyone, and leave to elec-tronic space itself the question of who is reading,listening, attending, replying. It has been asubtheme of mine that writing moves around inconnection with dreams; it has, in the past de-cade, moved afresh—to writing that is promiscu-ously available to everyone, and to no-one. I hap-pen to find the dream reports, like so much of therest of the unreflective jabber on the Internet thatothers enjoy, incredibly boring. Many people feelotherwise. I said that place is a protean concept,did I not? How is it that all these people, writingdown their dreams on their keyboards, can imag-ine that the dreams are of the slightest signifi-cance? Because they tell them in that new placethat they call cyberspace.

XIX. SLEEP LABORATORIES

Between the couch and the Internet, the mostholy place for dreaming in the twentieth centuryhas been the likes of William Dement’s sleeplaboratory at Stanford. Here we have farstranger practices than were ever conducted atEpidaurus. You are wired up and a whole bunchof electrodes are attached to your face, and oftenother parts of your body, to determine the move-ments of your eyes in sleep. Actually it is not sohard to observe eye movement while watching asleeper in a suitably illuminated room.30 But themovements became visible, let alone significant,

only when a sacred place came into being—asleep lab with a lot of expensive electrical equip-ment wired to your body.

Rapid eye movement or REM, it was claimed,made it possible to date dreams ever more pre-cisely: we could say exactly when in the courseof the night an observed subject was dreaming.The sleep labs produced one of the strongestclaims ever made about dreams. For some time,scientists believed that you are not dreaming atall, unless your eyes are moving in a way thatwould be detected in the sacred place, the sleeplab.

The simplistic identity of periods of REM andperiods of dreaming has not fared very well. Theidea of REM was established just when psycho-analysis was at its heyday among American psy-chiatric teaching hospitals. There was hope thatwe would even be able to identify the content ofa person’s dream on the basis of more precisemeasurements of eye movements. The positivistaccount of dreaming would collapse, and a firmscientific realism about the time and content of aperson’s dreams would be demonstrated. Thathas not happened. REMs have chiefly been re-turned to their proper field of study, namely,physiology. A number of physiological statesduring sleep have been distinguished. Correla-tions between the character and content ofdreams reported, when sleepers are arousedfrom these various states, have become increas-ingly suspect.

The more we have found out, the less closelyis REM associated with dreaming. REM is mostcommon in the fetus. If it were a sure mark ofdreaming we would have to grant a more vigor-ous prenatal dream life to the fetus than we findin adults. After birth, REM is only a little lesscommon in the newly born infant. Amongadults, movements are most rapid late in thesleep cycle. A recent lecture may explain this.31

It appears to establish that rapid eye movementscirculate the aqueous material so as to enableoxygen to get to the cornea when the eyes areclosed. Hence, the fetus needs constant washingof the cornea, because its eyes are never open toair; infants need a lot, because they sleep much;and adults need REM after they have had theireyes closed for a long time. That does not provethat dreams are not associated with rapid eyemovement. It does, however, take REM out ofthe domain of dreaming into ordinary experi-

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mental physiology. The core phenomenon is thatour corneas need oxygen all the time, and sleep-ing eye movements, which can be determined inmany ways, are useful for bathing the eye whenit is shut. Dreams drop out and so does the origi-nal sleep lab, the sacred place.

XX. LUCID DREAMS (II)

The sleep lab, or its descendants, has not disap-peared for people who take dreaming seriously.The lucid-dream folk have always favored somesort of holy site, but have not agreed what itshould be. The REM detectors may be a god-send. Thus a Keith Hearne, who describes him-self as “the world’s leading researcher in ‘lucid’dreaming,” has a sleep laboratory in Manchester.He has gone one step further than the early en-thusiasts who held that you dream when andonly when you have REMs. He has adapted thetechnology to determine times at which you arehaving lucid dreams. Suitable simple electronicseither wake you up (because telling luciddreams is an overwhelmingly profound experi-ence) or reward you in sleep by reinforcement sothat you will go on dreaming lucidly.32

The lucid-dream people adapt the technologyof the sleep lab. Their labs are a simulacrum ofthe laboratory. Amusingly, some maintain thatthe easiest way to identify REMs is by certainchanges in the moisture in the nose. Devices inthe nostril are now used to detect these changesand to wake up the dreamer when the changesindicate REMs and “hence” that dreaming isgoing on. All this is to serve the ends that thelucid-dream people think of as a path towardwhat they call (using the very word) enlighten-ment. This enlightenment is patterned on someill-understood and romantic model of the wis-dom of the East. That is, dreams are systemati-cally worked upon, using the seeming parapher-nalia of reasoned experimental science, in orderto provide an antiscience, an antireason. We getthe Janus-faced sense of the word “enlighten-ment”: the enlightenment of the East that tran-scends reason, and the Enlightenment of West-ern Europe that elevates reason.

XXI. THE COUCH (II)

I am no Freud-basher, but I put that superb dia-lectical reasoner, Sigmund Freud, on the side of

antireason. Dreams are interpreted to uncover,among other things, the repressed drives that areat work in the unconscious, the very drives thatreasonable and civilized humanity will not ownup to. Freud is not provoking an antiscience, buta science of antireason. He used that sacredplace, the couch, to indulge the free associationsarising from dreams. That is the deliberate culti-vation of incoherence, of breakdown in pattern,in order to create a pattern. Dreams, and the useswe have made of them since 1619, are not somuch the mirrors of reason as they are mimics ofreason, which use the simulacra of reason tobring unreason to the surface.

XXII. THE STOVE

We do not commonly attend to the sites of phi-losophy. Yes, there is old Kant taking his dailyconstitutional in Königsberg, by which peopleset their watches. And so on with other mani-festly accidental anecdotes. Perhaps only inPhaedrus do you get a true sense of place, andeven that is because the place is a large prop, astage setting, what the Japanese, in describingsacred sites, call “borrowed scenery.” But onesite in the whole of philosophy is different: thepoêle. I put it to you that this, the site of Des-cartes’s dreams, was wittingly constructed as asacred place, so that his dreams should be signif-icant. The man who would vanquish the skepti-cal threat that we might be dreaming had thatplace for the dream in which the evil genius con-stantly tried to knock him over—and then foundthe way to a base from which even the genius ofevil could not knock him over into unreality. Allthat required a place. How we would like it if theCartesian room with the stove were still there ina village on the banks of the Danube! There wecould erect a plaque to the following effect:

Here, on 10th November, 1619The Secret of MethodRevealed itself to René Descartes.

Part of Descartes’s entire project was to putdreams behind us, outside of us, forever. We feelthat he succeeded with a vengeance. But dreamshave a habit of creeping back in. The Enlighten-ment view, or the enlightened view, is thatdreams are nothing, physiological productionsthat at most jumble up some recent memories.

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They are, at most, chance weavings of images orthoughts, many of which are connected to eventsof the preceding day. The essence of the dreamis incoherence. But dreams have a habit of mim-icking the coherent life, making a mockery of it.If the coherent life is the life of reason, thendreams are antireason. But suppose reason gotthere by anti-reason?

XXIII. THE DREAMER

My remarks about dreams have, with some de-liberation, mimicked dreamscapes themselves,abruptly switching from scene to scene. Thinkof them as the work of a dreamer. My view ofdreams, at least in my culture, is that each of ushas a dreamer, or perhaps many dreamers—thisuse of the word is Freud’s. Dreamers play withus, as I have (slightly) played with the reader.Play? When I asked a class of first-year under-graduates to keep a dream diary for a month,they came back amazed. Not one of them had adream for weeks. Their dreamers did their work,playing tricks that the innocent students did notexpect. But when I, in company, tried to keep adream diary myself, my dreamer, who knows Iknow all about dream censorship, maliciouslycounterattacks as an anticensor, allowing me towake up with enough fully remembered dreamsthat it would take me an entire day to write themall down.

It is a commonplace that Freud’s patientsdreamt Freudian dreams (and Jung’s, Jungian).It is much more complicated than that. Mydreamer deliberately plants Freudian puns, mostof which are quite funny, to get me to focus onthem and to not listen to what else is beingdreamt. The dreamer, for me, filches Freud’sbaton, while for another person it filches theholy electrodes and plays games with them. Thedreamer, one might say, is always one step aheadof the culture, making fun of it. It was the bril-liance of Descartes to trick his dreamer, revers-ing the reversal of roles, turning the malus spiri-tus, the wind, into a hyperbolic trickster in orderto demolish him.

Many are happy to say that the era of Des-cartes brought in a gamut of new types of dem-onstration, tests, and proof; it brought in a newsense of objectivity and a new feel for what issignificant. It is part of that objectivity thatdreams are ruthlessly excluded from real life,

and cease to be signifiers at all. But the dreamermay have won after all. If that objectivity aroseby reversing a dream held in a sacred place, isnot the dreamer still in charge of objectivity?

IAN HACKINGCollège de France11, place Marcelin Berthelot75005 ParisFrance

INTERNET: ian.hacking@college-de-france.fr

1. Adam Kuper, “A Structural Approach to Dreams,” Man(N.S.) 14 (1979): 645–662; “Symbols in Myths and Dreams:Freud v. Lévi-Strauss,” Encounter 73 (1989): 26–31; AdamKuper and Alan Stone, “The Dream of Irma’s Injection: AStructural Analysis,” American Journal of Psychiatry 139(1982): 1225–1234.

2. Two recent publications contain the texts of the dreamsand much scholarly information: John Cole, The OlympianDreams and Youthful Rebellion of René Descartes (Univer-sity of Illinois Press, 1992), and Romanica Gandensia XXV,Les Olympiques de Descartes, ed. Fernand Hallyn (Geneva:Librairie Droz, 1995). The latter, which has all the relevanttexts of Descartes’s dreams plus a number of scholarly pa-pers, is the product of a conference at the Université deGand, March 5, 1993.

3. Cole, The Olympian Dreams and the Youthful Rebel-lion of René Descartes, p. 146.

4. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, V, ll. 89–93.5. Norman Malcolm, Dreaming (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1959).6. Freud, in contrast, was merely what we may call a

methodological positivist: “We can help to overcome the de-fect of the uncertainty of remembering dreams if we decidethat whatever the dreamer tells us must count as his dream,without regard to what he may have forgotten or altered inrecalling it.” Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans.and ed. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Com-plete Psychoanalytical Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 15(London: Hogarth Press, p. 85).

7. Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions inSeventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon,1997).

8. Homer, Iliad, II, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapo-lis: Hackett, 1997), p. 21.

9. David Gallop, Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams(Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1990).

10. There is a good deal of medical lore in Aristotle’s dis-cussion of dreams. The state of one’s digestion and theamount of wine one has drunk affect the content of dreams.There is also the bizarre side discussion (459b 28–460a 24)intended to show how there can be a two-way interaction be-tween the perceiver and the perceived—when we perceive,we may also affect what we perceive. A menstruatingwoman looking at a mirror produces a great red stain on theface of the mirror. The stain is easier to remove from old andpitted mirrors than from new ones, a fact for which Aristotlegives an explanation.

Hacking Dreams in Place 259

11. London, private collection; reproduced in CatherineMonbeig Goguel, Francesco Salviati ou la Bella Maniera(Paris: Electa, 1998).

12. Roger Callois and G. E. von Grunebaum, eds., Lessonges et leurs interpretation (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).

13. That is the racy translation by G. E. M. Anscombe andPeter Geach: Descartes: Philosophical Writings (London:Nelson, 1964).

14. David Pears, The False Prison: A Study in Witt-genstein’s Philosophy, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987,1988). Louis Sass, The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein,Schreber and the Schizophrenic Mind (Cornell UniversityPress, 1994). Pears argues only that Wittgenstein took solip-sism seriously. Sass goes further. Schreber was the Saxonhigh court judge whose report of his own madness servedFreud as the paradigm of paranoid schizophrenia. Sass com-pares the mental conditions of Schreber and Wittgenstein, afeat already accomplished in Thomas Bernhardt’s one-para-graph novella, Wittgensteins Neffe, translated as Witt-genstein’s Nephew (London: Wiedenfield and Nicholson,1986). Sass’s idea is that Wittgenstein’s terror of solipsism isclose to a well-justified terror of madness in the form ofschizophrenia.

15. I have elaborated this thought in an essay about an-other kind of skepticism. See my “On Kripke’s and Good-man’s Uses of ‘Grue’,” Philosophy 68 (1993): 269–295.

16. Myles Burnyeat, “Idealism and Greek Philosophy:What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed,” PhilosophicalReview 91 (1982): 3–40, esp. 35–37.

17. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, inDescartes: Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. E.Anscombe and P. T. Geach (London: Nelson, 1954), p. 124.

18. G. W. Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften, ([Reihe VIof Sämmtliche Schriften und Briefe]) Berlin: Akademie derWissenschaft, 1975), pp. 276–278.

19. In his first draft, Leibniz forgot about God and addedhim almost as an afterthought!

20. The dream of Descartes that interested Leibniz most,it seems, is the very one that interests me least—the strobedream. He seems to have thought that the scintillatingsparks, like nothing on earth, might be one of those intima-tions of divinity.

21. Marie-Jean-Lyon Marquis Hervey de Saint-Dénis,Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger (Paris: Amyot, 1857);trans. by N. Fry as Dreams and How to Guide Them (Lon-don: Duckworth, 1982).

22. Frederick van Eeden, “A Study of Dreams,” Proceed-ings of the Society for Psychical Research 67 (1913): 413–461. Van Eeden, like Hervey, was able to direct his dreams.He told the SPR in London how he directed his dreaming

self to meet with a number of dead people. Van Eeden was apsychiatrist by profession. Not surprisingly, he was cautiousin explaining his experiences, so he first wrote them up as anovel, De Nachtbruid (1909), translated as The Bride ofDreams (London: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913). The practiceof directing one’s dreams was seldom explored, at least inprint, but see Georges Dumas, “Comment on gouverne lesrêves,” Revue de Paris 16 (1909): 344–367. Now it is all therage and makes use of the latest (pseudo-)technology (seethe next note).

23. Malcolm Godwin, The Lucid Dreamer: A WakingGuide for the Traveler Between Two Worlds (Shaftsbury,U.K.: Element, 1994). Celia Green, Lucid Dreaming: TheParadox of Consciousness During Sleep (London: Rout-ledge, 1990).

24. Cole, Olympian Dreams, p. 142.25. Hallyn, Les Olympiques, p. 63.26. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Biographie

(Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1992), p. 328, n. 29.27. Jacques Maritain, The Dream of Descartes (London:

Editions Poetry, 1946), emphasis added.28. Jeffrey Masson, The Complete Letters of Sigmund

Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Cambridge, MA:Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 417–418.

29. J. M. Dunne, An Experiment With Time (London:Macmillan, 1927). There were a great many subsequent edi-tions, and the book is still in print. Dunne was among otherthings an engineer who built one of the first flying machines,and certainly the first swept-wing or “delta” aircraft, in thefirst decade of this century. He tried to sell it to the Britishmilitary. They seem not to have been interested. He thenflew the machine to France and apparently sold it to theFrench government. I owe this information to KentonKröker.

30. In his recent PhD thesis, From Reflex to Rhythm: Re-search on Sleep 1850–1950 (University of Toronto, 2000),Kenton Kröker includes recorded interviews in which re-searchers assert that it is currently quite easy to see REMwith the naked eye. Researchers are slightly bemused by thefact that it was a breakthrough when Eugene Asherinsky inChicago first demonstrated REM by using cutting edge elec-trical technology adapted from the electroencephalogramand ultimately from the electrocardiogram.

31. David Maurice, “The Von Sallman Lecture, 1996: AnOphthalmological Explanation of REM Sleep,” Experimen-tal Eye Research 66 (1998): 139–145.

32. Keith Hearne, The Dream Machine: Lucid Dreamsand How to Control Them (Wellingborough, U. K.: Aquar-ian, 1990).

260 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism