Markku Roinila

PHILOSOPHY OF DREAMS AND SLEEPING

Dear participants, We are going to discuss what

dreams are, how contemporary psychology explains them, what are the philosophical questions concerning dreams, how philosophers in the past have discussed these questions and finally, how contemporary philosophy can provide an alternative to the physiological approach to dreaming.

The lectures will take place on Wednesdays 10-12 U40 lh 12 and Thursdays 10-12 U40 lh 8. The locations may change due to the number of participants. I’ll keep you posted.

Preliminary program 30. 10. Introduction to dreams, practicalities 31. 10. Physiological matters; history of dream sciences and contemporary dream science; Reading Malcolm: “Temporal Location and Duration of Dreams”, in Dreaming, pp. 70-82 6. 11. Philosophy and dreams; dreams of philosophers: Reading Leibniz’s Philosophical Dream (http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rutherford/Leibniz/dream.htm) 7. 11. Philosophical questions of dreams and sleeping 13. 11. Ancient views on dreaming; Reading ? 14. 11. Cont.; medieval philosophy of dreaming 20. 11. Descartes and Hobbes on dreaming; Reading Descartes, 6th Meditation 21. 11. Some other Early modern views (Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke); Reading Leibniz: Fragment on dreams 27. 11. 18th and 19th century philosophy of dreaming (Kant, Voltaire, Bergson etc.) 28. 11. Contemporary philosophical views on dreaming (Wittgenstein, Malcolm and his critics); Reading Malcolm: “Judgements in sleep”, in Dreaming, pp. 35-44 4. 12. Cont. (Flanagan, Dennett, Revonsuo, Sutton, Phenomenology etc.); Reading ? 5. 12. Cont. 11. 12. General discussion: Dream Science & The future of philosophy of dreams; Reading John Sutton: Dreaming (http://www.academia.edu/313903/Dreaming) 12. 12. Course examination

Study points As you can see, I’ve added some reading to some dates (more to

come). I thought to ask you to read one short paper each week which we can discuss. In addition, there is a compulsory reading for the whole course which is Norman Malcom: Dreaming, a short collection of papers on dreaming. Some of the weekly readings are from that book.

To gain 3 study points you should attend lectures, read the texts and discuss them and read Malcolm’s book.

The course examination is 12. 12. If you cannot make it, it is possible to participate general examination of the Faculty in January.

Alternatively, you can write an essay of ten pages concerning the philosophy of dreams (a theme discussed in the lecture course) to gain the study points.

Reading material As there are only two copies of Malcolm’s book available in libraries, I will

upload it to Moodle where you can also find other material to the course and slides I have used. In addition, there is news and hopefully discussion of dreams and sleeping.

I would like to ask you to enroll yourself to the course.

The address for the Moodle course area is https://moodle.helsinki.fi/course/view.php?id=11249&notifyeditingon=1 Alternatively, you can go to http://moodle.helsinki.fi/ and find the course under category Arts>Dreaming (or https://moodle.helsinki.fi/course/search.php?search=Dreaming)

One you do the self-enrolment, the key to the course is “Dreaming”. For information, see http://wiki.helsinki.fi/display/moodle/Moodle+Manual+for+Students

In case you cannot enroll yourself or you have any other problems or questions concerning the course, please write to mroinila (at) gmail.com

I have added a bibliography on dreaming to Moodle.

What is a dream?

“Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 2000).

David Foulkes: “Dreaming is the awareness of being in an imagined world in which things happen.”

“Mental activity occurring in sleep characterized by vivid sensorimotor imagery that is experienced as waking reality despite such distinctive cognitive features as impossibility or improbability of time, place, person and actions; emotions, especially fear, elation, and anger predominate over sadness, shame and guilt and sometimes reach sufficient strength to cause awakening; memory for even very vivid dreams is evanescent and tends to fade quickly upon awakening unless special steps are taken to retain it.” (J. Allan Hobson)

“I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.” (René Descartes)

Some characteristics of dreams They are different from waking experience, have a logic of their

own

If we are awake, we usually remember fairly accurately places, times and people. In dreams it is typical that we accept things which would seem peculiar to us in our waking state.

For example, the time goes very slowly or very quickly in dreams, the people we know look different from what they are, the places can be familiar but strange and there may be connexion of things which usually are not in one place at the same time. Things merge into each other in a way which nver happens when we are awake.

A more scientific list: loss of awareness of self, loss of orientational stability, loss of directed thought, reduction in logical reasoning, poor memory within and after the dream.

Questions about dreams

Hobson: Dreaming. A Very Short Introduction.

1) Why is dreaming so rarely self-reflective, when waking

consciousness is so often the opposite?

2) Why is almost all dreaming forgotten?

3) Why are dreams so bizarre?

All of these question can, and have, been treated by both

psychologists (old and contemporary) and philosophers

(especially question no. 2 & 3). In this course I will discuss both

approaches with emphasis on philosophy.

Hall analysis of dream content Calvin Hall and Van De Castle published The Content Analysis of Dreams in 1966 in which they outlined a coding system to study 1,000 dream reports from college students. It was found that people all over the world dream of mostly the same things. The following characteristics can be distinguished:

Visuals The visual nature of dreams is generally highly phantasmagoric; that is, different locations and objects continuously blend into each other. The visuals (including locations, characters/people, objects/artifacts) are generally reflective of a person's memories and experiences, but often take on highly exaggerated and bizarre forms. People who are blind from birth do not have visual dreams. Their dream contents are related to other senses like auditory, touch, smell and taste, whichever are present since birth.

Emotions The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety. Other emotions include abandonment, anger, fear, joy, and happiness. Negative emotions are much more common than positive ones.

Sexual themes The Hall data analysis shows that sexual dreams occur no more than 10% of the time and are more prevalent in young to mid-teens. Another study showed that 8% of men's and women's dreams have sexual content. In some cases, sexual dreams may result in orgasms or nocturnal emissions. These are colloquially known as wet dreams.

Color vs. black and white A small minority of people say that they dream only in black and white. A 2008 study by a researcher at the University of Dundee found that people who were only exposed to black and white television and film in childhood reported dreaming in black and white about 25% of the time.

Different kind of dreams There are several kinds of dreams. For example:

Frightening

Exciting

Magical

Melancholic

Adventurous

Sexual

Lucid

All except lucid dreaming is independent from the control of the dreamer.

Dreams vs. delusions & hallucinations

Essential condition to dreaming is that one is sleeping. Although there may be bizarre or strange dreams, they are not delusions or hallucinations because they disappear once we are awake. Thus one cannot cause one’s dreams – they are involuntary except lucid dreaming when we are aware that we are dreaming.

However, delusions or hallucinations can reminds us of dreams as they are similarly illlogical and seem to be independent of reality.

A light version of this is daydreaming which is visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, experienced while awake.

Some facts The scientific study of

dreams is called oneirology.

It is likely that all mammals dream.

Dreams can last from a few seconds up to 20 minutes.

An average person has 3-5 dreams per night – some can have 7 dreams during one night.

Other dream-related phenomena Incorporation of reality A sound heard (for example, phone

ringing) when sleeping can become a part of a dream – the brains incorporates it the stimulus to the dream in order to continue the sleeping state. The same happens if we wet the bet and we dream of urination. This can be developed, however. We can be trained to be awaken if we are in danger or hear a baby crying. This also happens when the events during the day or even a week before can become part of the dream.

Predictive dreams It is common that people feel that they can predict future events in dreams. This is usually explained by selective and distorted memory. When in an experiment men were asked to write down their dreams, it became clear that they did not predict future at all.

Other dream-related phenomena Lucid dreaming is the conscious perception of one's state while

dreaming. In this state the dreamer may often (but not always) have some degree of control over their own actions within the dream or even the characters and the environment of the dream. Dream control has been reported to improve with practiced deliberate lucid dreaming, but the ability to control aspects of the dream is not necessary for a dream to qualify as "lucid" — a lucid dream is any dream during which the dreamer knows they are dreaming.The occurrence of lucid dreaming has been scientifically verified.

Lucid dreaming is hold important among Tibetan Buddhist monks who use it for visiting places, communicationg with Yidam or enlightened being, flying etc.

DAMT or Dreams of absent-minded transgression. These are dreams wherein the dreamer absentmindedly performs an action that he or she has been trying to stop. For example, quitting smokers have dreams of lightning a cigarette.

Some early history of the dreams

As dreams are part of the life of everybody, they have interested men from the very beginning. Most of the history men have been interested in the interpretation of dreams.

There are evidence of Sumerians in Mesopotamia recording of dreams from 3100 BC. These show that Gods and kings paid close attention to dreams.

Mesopotamians belived that the soul, or part of it, moves out from the body of the sleeping person and visits the places and persons the dreamer sees in their sleep. Sometimes the God of dreams is said to carry the dreamer. This picture is familiar from films as we will see later.

Babylonians and assurians thought that good dreams are sent by Gods and bad dreams by demons. Dreams are thought to be omens and prophecies.

Early History of Dreams Egyptians wrote down their dreams to papyrus and thought people with

vivid dreams special and significant persons. Dreams were thought to be as kind of oracles, bringing messages from Gods. Dreams were a source of divine revelation and for this reason egyptians tried to induce dreams by sleeping on special dream beds in sanctuaries. When a person was having troubles in their life and wanted help from their god, they would sleep in a temple, when they would wake the next morning a priest, which was then called a Master of the Secret Things, would be consulted for the interpretations of that night's dreams.

In Chinese culture, as in Babylonia, men were thought to leave their body when dreaming

Indian classic text Upanishads (900-500 BC) emphasizes two meaning on dreams. The first is that dreams are merely expressions of inner desires. The second is the belief of the soul leaving the body and being guided until awakened.

Early History of Dreams

In Greek culture conception of dreams was similar to the Egyptians – they tried to induce dreams which were seen as messages from Gods.

Dreams also aided in their practice of medicine, sending sick people to particular temples in those places where the "gods of the body" had their shrines. The ailing Greeks would visit these temples, perform various religious rites, sleep, and hope to have a dream that assured a return to good health.

The God of dreams was Morpheus who sent warnings and prophecies to those who slept at shrines and temples.

In very early Greek thought the Gods were thought to visit the sleepers, entering through keyhole.

Early History of Dreams

Antiphon wrote the first

book on dreams in the 5th

century BC. He argued that

the soul leaves the sleeping

body.

Hippocrates thought that

during the day the soul

receives images; during the

night, it produces images.

Early History of Dreams In Judaism dreams are discussed in Talmud and they were thought to be

part of the experience of the world which can be interpreted. Dreams were connected heavily to the religion: dreams were thought to be the voice of God. Good dreams come from God and bad dreams from evil spirits. Similarly to Egyptians and Greeks, men tried to induce revelatory dreams.

Christians followed the Hebrews: dreams are a supernatural element because the Old Testament has many stories of dreams with divine inspiration.

In Islam dreams play an important part in the history of Islam. Interpretating dreams is the only way Muslims can receive revelations from God after the death of the last Prophet Muhammed. Mohammed himself “received" much of the text of the Koran from a dream he had, as well as interpreting dreams of his disciples.

Early History of Dreams In America some tribes and Mexican

civilizations believed that dreams are a way of visiting and having a contact with their ancestors. They used rites of passage, fasting and praying to incude such dreams and shared them with the other tribe after waking up.

Meanwhile in Europe, in Middle Ages dreams were seen as evil, and the images as temptations from the devil. Many believed that during sleep, the devil could fill the human mind with corrupting and harmful thought. Luther continued this tradition. However, some catholics such as St. Augustine argued that the direction of their lives was affected by dreams.

Dreams in 19th century

In the beginning of 19th century along with the romantic movement dreams became fashionable. Comte’s positivism also encouraged the study of dreams.

Robert Cross Smith was one of the first to start this "dream craze" under the pen name "Raphael“. He published a popular book called The Royal Book of Dreams.

French doctor Alfred Maury studied over 3,000 different dreams. He believed that external stimuli is the catalyst to all of our dreams.

Soon this theory was overcome by Freud who called dreams as “royal road to the unconscious”. His theory was that although dreams may be prompted by external stimuli, wish-fulfillment was the root behind most of our dreams. Freud's idea was that our dreams were reflection of our deepest desires, especially sexual ones, going back to our childhood. To Freud, no dream was of entertainment value, they all held important meanings.

Jung disagreed on the theory that erotic content was the basis behind most of our dreams. Jung believed that dreams reminded us of our wishes, which enables us to realize the things we unconsciously yearn for, and helps us to fulfill our own wishes. These dreams were messages, Jung believed, from ourselves to ourselves and that we should pay attention to them for our own benefit. Thus from the idea that dreams are God’s messages they turn to internal messages. Dreams present the dreamer with revelations that can uncover and help to resolve emotional or religious problems or fears. Of special interest are recurring dreams.

Representation of dreams Dream documentation has

been and still is an important activity of mankind.

Dreams have also been inspiration for artistic work. I will return to the interpretation of dreams later – now let us discuss a little of representations of dreams in various art forms.

Myths & dreams In Greek mythology the God of

dreams is Hypnos, later Hermes was the one who brought dreams. Hypnos is presented as a benevolent God.

In Roman mythology Morpheus is a God of dreams who appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses, book XI. Morpheus has the ability to take any human form and appear in dreams. His true semblance is that of a winged daemon, imagery shared with many of his siblings. Starting in the medieval period, the name Morpheus began to stand generally for the god of dreams or of sleep.

” The God, uneasy 'till he slept again,

Resolv'd at once to rid himself of pain;

And, tho' against his custom, call'd aloud,

Exciting Morpheus from the sleepy crowd:

Morpheus, of all his numerous train, express'd

The shape of man, and imitated best;

The walk, the words, the gesture could supply,

The habit mimick, and the mein bely;

Plays well, but all his action is confin'd,

Extending not beyond our human kind.

Another, birds, and beasts, and dragons apes,

And dreadful images, and monster shapes:

This demon, Icelos, in Heav'n's high hall

The Gods have nam'd; but men Phobetor call.

A third is Phantasus, whose actions roul

On meaner thoughts, and things devoid of soul;

Earth, fruits, and flow'rs he represents in dreams,

And solid rocks unmov'd, and running streams.

These three to kings, and chiefs their scenes display,

The rest before th' ignoble commons play.

Of these the chosen Morpheus is dispatch'd;

Which done, the lazy monarch, over-watch'd,

Down from his propping elbow drops his head,

Dissolv'd in sleep, and shrinks within his bed.”

- Ovid: Metamorphoses, book XI

Dreams in litterature Homer, in his Iliad, describes a scene wherein Agamemnon receives instructions from

the messenger of Zeus in a dream.

Genesis – dream places (Gen 20:3 writes, “God came to Abimelech in a dream by night”); divine messages (Through a dream, Jacob first received the divine covenant and promises directly from God about him and his offspring (Gen 28:13-15)); revelation (God reveals God’s will to Abimelech, Jacob, and Laban through dreams (Gen 20:3-7, 28:12-15, 31:11-16, 31:24); God’s intervention into the world (The dream of Abimelech and Laban (Gen 20:3-7, 31:22-29) clearly show God’s proactive action and protection through dreams for God’s people) etc.

Nebuchadnezzer, the King of Babylon who died in 562 BC, had an interesting dream reported in the Book of Daniel. It was in this dream that he dreamed of a beautiful tree with green foliage that the birds nested in and beasts took shelter underneath. But one day a messenger from Heaven ordered the tree to be cut down and the King to be chained to the stump. The King was left alone to feed on the grass as a beast would. Nebuchadnezzer summoned Daniel, an expert on dreams, who told him that the tree represented the King's power and glory. When it was cut down he became nothing but a beast, living off the grass. Daniel explained that this dream was to teach him to acknowledge the heavenly power above him in the same way as he was above the beasts in the field. The dream was, as it turned out, thought to be prophetic.

Dreams in litterature In Medieval times dream frame was

frequently used in allegories to justify the narrative – one of the most famous of these is the Vision concerning Piers Plowman. The sama idea had been used already by Cicero earlier.

In this litterary device a dream or vision is recounted as having revealed knowledge or a truth not available to the dreamer or visionary in a normal waking state.

In both its ancient and medieval form, the dream vision is often felt to be of divine origin. The genre reemerges in the era of Romanticism, when dreams were regarded as creative gateways to imaginative possibilities beyond rational calculation.

This genre typically follows a structure whereby a narrator recounts his experience of falling asleep, dreaming, and waking, and the story is often an allegory.

The dream-vision convention was widely used in European literature from late Latin times until the 15th century.

Dreams in litterature Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland

and Through the Looking-Glass

Remarkable in these is that the logic of the story is dream-like with transitions and flexible causality.

”But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad." "How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Dreams in litterature In modern science

fiction/phantasy litterature dreams have been a popular topos.

H. P. Lovecraft: Dream Cycle and The Neverending Story include places like the desert of lost dreams, the sea of possibilities.

Philip K. Dick: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; Ubik.

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Lathe of Heaven

Dreams in litterature Jorge Luis Borges: The Circular Ruins

Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s dream // characters change to other and even into animals.

Shakespeare: Macbeth (sleepwalking); Richard III (anxiety dream)

Homer: Iliad

In classic Russian novels there are vivid descriptions of nightmares: As dreaming returned, for example, in Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina as well as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

Other novels: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, August Strindberg's A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, Franz Kafka's The Trial and The Castle, and James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.

Dreams in music Many classical composers have reported having inspired by dreams. For example, On February 17, 1854,

a choir of angels sang to Robert Schumann as he slept. In the middle of the night he woke from the dream and rushed to his desk to write down what he had heard. The angels’ ethereal music would become the basis of his Ghost Variations, a work which seems to wander between waking and dreaming states. Other composers include Anton Bruckner, Wagner and Stravinsky (Rite of Spring).

In later 60’s psychedelic rock dreams were a common theme. The music was dream-like, reflecting not only dreams, but also psychedelic drugs. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-kVFfKezVo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGF7o_I4mAw

Bob Dylan introduced a surrealist/psychedelic style of lyrics in various dream-named songs where the logic is dream-like, for example in his Bob Dylan’s #115th Dream includes lines like this: I went into a restaurant Lookin’ for the cook I told them I was the editor Of a famous etiquette book The waitress he was handsome He wore a powder blue cape I ordered some suzette, I said “Could you please make that crepe” Just then the whole kitchen exploded From boilin’ fat Food was flying everywhere And I left without my hat

Pictorial representations In art dreams have been a

popular theme.

The bizarre qualities have been popular and especially nightmares have inspired many artists

Sometimes the catholic/lutheran doctrine of dreams as the work of the devil are related to paintings of nightmares, especially in the work of Goya and Hieronymus Bosch

Some examples

Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Dalí: Dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate a second before awakening

Some examples

Picasso: La rêve Bosch: The garden of earthy delights

Dream sequences in films

In films, dreams are often presented in the Freudian sense, as expressions of the dreamers deepest wishes, fears or desires. Hitchcock’s films are good examples of this.

Alfred Hitchcock: Spellbound (dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzxlbgPkxHE

Alfred Hitchcock: Vertigo: http://movieclips.com/cmRo-vertigo-movie-scotties-nightmare/

Dream sequences in films

Sometimes dreams in films are just wild ride of imagination with some occurring themes (such as sexual wishes).

For example, Fellini: 8½

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmEqBdde5H0

Dream Sequences in films Anxiety and stress can also be represented in

films. In Keaton’s film lucid dreaming is

represented. In horror movies the content of

nightmares is presented as part of the film

without us knowing whether it is a dream or

not. The attack of dark forces can be dream-

like. Compare Carrie, Friday the 13th and An

American Werewolf in London.

Trumbo: Johnny Got His Gun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pla

yer_embedded&v=OTHDvhKyS6o#t=15

Buster Keaton: Sherlock Jr.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8zMV0-

NMug

More dreams in films Kurosawa: Dreams

David Lynch: most of his films

Kubrick: Shining

Nolan: Inception

Disney: Fantasia

Gondry: Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind

Tarkovsky: Stalker

Fellini: City of women, Casanova …

Andy Warhol: Sleep

Joel and Ethan Coen: The Big Lebowski

Huston: Freud http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du8F1NzBiXU

Wachowski bros: Matrix

Bergman: Smulltronstället

Weir: The Last Wave

Several films of Jean Cocteau

Dwarfs & dreams http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4je71Tz_9IE

More examples of dreams in popular

culture Cartoons: Neil Gaiman: Sandman

Dreams can be part of video games. Mario & Luigi: Dream Team (Nintendo) follows an adventure through Luigi’s dreams.

Music videos:Foo Fighters: Everlong (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBG7P-K-r1Y#t=41); Björk: Hyperballad (Michel Gondry) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CSiU0j_lFA); Metallica: Enter Sandman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD-E-LDc384); Chemical Brothers: Let forever be (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5FyfQDO5g0)

Nightmares are especially popular in music videos. For example, Michael Jackson: Thriller (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOnqjkJTMaA; Venom:Nightmare (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwaXl4ncRL8); Alice Cooper: Welcome to My Nightmare (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQE0pfBAYQ8)

Markku Roinila

PHILOSOPHY OF DREAMS AND SLEEPING:

Physiological theory of dreams

J. Allan Hobson and his group J. Allan Hobson has been the foremost

researcher on dreams in modern neuropsychological science.

Has a large group of researchers with a sleep lab.

Argues for brain-activation model of dreaming which surpasses all interpretative claims of dreams. It is a strongly eliminative theory.

Works: The Dreaming Brain, New York: Basic Books, 1988. Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002.

A concise and polemical introduction to his views is Dreaming. A very short introduction. Oxford 2002.

Definition of dreaming Hobson et. al.: Dreaming is…

[m]ental activity occurring in sleep characterized by vivid sensorimotor imagery that is experienced as waking reality despite such distinctive cognitive features as impossibility or improbability of time, place, person and actions; emotions, especially fear, elation, and anger predominate over sadness, shame and guilt and sometimes reach sufficient strength to cause awakening; memory for even very vivid dreams is evanescent and tends to fade quickly upon awakening unless special steps are taken to retain it.

Pre-history of modern brain activation model of

dream psychology

Freud is the most important psychological theorist of dreams in the early stages of the discipline

Most important works: Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895); The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

Modern scholars often think that Freud was looking for a scientific experimental method for the research of dreams, but he was 100 years too early. For this reason he was forced to resort to speculative philosophy.

Differences between Freud and

modern psychology of dreams Dream phenomena Psychoanalysis Activation–synthesis

Instigation Repressed unconscious

wish

Brain activation in sleep

Visual imagery Regression to sensory

level

Activation of higher

visual centres

Delusional belief Primary process

thinking

Loss of working memory

resulting from DLPFC

inactivation

Bizarreness Disguise of wishes Hyperassociative

synthesis

Emotion Secondary defensive

response of ego

Primary activation of

limbic system

Forgetting Repression Organic (Physical) amnesia

Interpretation Needed Not Needed

Problems of interpretation of dreams Thus the main difference to

contemporary brain research method-employing psychology is that whereas in Freud’s model interpretation is always needed, in modern psychology the test results are what counts.

Hobson is right that interpretation of dreams is difficult to validate scientifically.

Interpretations are necessarily subjective and can be used to wrong purposes. For example, if dreams are thought to represent the sickness of the body the can be read as an encoded message about the future from Gods (pagan or christian). In this ways medicine men can mislead people, gain power etc.

Freud’s position This was no problem for Freud who thought

himself as a professional who could interpret dreams and show how they represented the psychological problems of a patient. The professional could tell the patient things they could not know themselves as unconscious in dreams is in a constant war with the consciousness.

Hobson argues that this kind of system is really a religion (despite the fact that Freud was an atheist himself). It is based on faith in an agency that gives hidden directives, which can be understood only through the the intervention of someone who could interpret the ”message”.

Hobson is right, but the same could be said about anyone trying to interpret the dreams as long as scientific methods cannot do the task.

Further criticism by Hobson According to Hobson, Freud’s work suffered from two fatal scientific defects.

First, an absence of relevant brain science and Freud was aware of that

Second, Freud’s data was insufficient and focus narrowly fixed. Freud made no

attempt to collect dream reports himself (other than his own dreams and there

are not many, around 40). He could have collected more.

Furthermore, Freud ignored two important predecessors. David Hartley

thought that dreaming served to loosen associations that otherwise inclined to

become obsessively fixed, that is, woud lead to madness. Herman Hemholtz

took a formal approach to dreams.

Dreams and sexuality Freud attributed dreams to

sexual content. They

represent a displaced sexual

desire. These are unconscious

wishes, which come up when

the ego is weakened by sleep.

For example, flying in dreams

(remember Fellini’s 8½ and

Hitchock’s Vertigo) represent

this kind of sexual wish.

Some admissions Robert Stickgold (who has studied

especially remembering dreams and is

part of Hobson’s dream-team): Freud

was 50% right and 100% wrong.

Hobson: Freud understood rightly that

dreams have a primitive emotional

character which are loosely connected

to mental content. In dreams we can

find elation, joy, happiness, love, fear,

anxiety, panic as well as primitive

actions such as fighting, assaulting,

shooting, sex, escape.

Dreaming reminds us that we have

powerful instincts, emotions and even

inclinations to madness that must be

held in check during waking hours.

No sex, please, we’re neuroscientists But the modern view is that Freud was wrong: dreams are not wish fullfilment

and there is a lot less sex and positive emotions than he thought.

It is also objected by Hobson that Freud saw the unconscious as compelling, but

sneaky and devious element which was trying to overcome the conscious

elements in the mind and which therefore has to be suppressed.

However, if it is supposed that dreams reveal rather than conceal emotion and

instinct, cencorship of the unconscious is misleading and erroneous. Thus

dreams are not symbols of something else like sexual wishes. Dreams are what

they are.

In this respect it is interesting that the dreams of men and women are found in

sleep lab tests to be strikingly similar to each other. One would perhaps think

that men’s dreams would be more aggressive and women’s dreams more

emotional and tender, but this is not the case. In fact, emotions are equally

important in the dreams of men and women.

Hobson’s critique in a nutshell

We do not dream because our unconscious wishes or drives

would, if undisguised, wake us up. We dream because our

brains are activated during sleep, and we do so even if our

primitive drives are turned on by that activation. It is the

specific neurophysiological details of that activation process,

not psychological defense mechanisms, that determine the

distinctive nature of dream consciousness. We need to accept

our dreams, our fears, and our rages for what they are:

expressions of brains activation in sleep and in waking that

have their own deep and compelling reasons for being.

Implications

This has naturally larger implications than just the philosophy

of dreams. Hobbes and his colleagues strive to argue that the

development of brain research will significantly alter not only

psychology, but also philosophy of mind. One wonders: what

is left for the philosophy of mind discuss if it is accepted that

all phenomena of the mind can be reduced to brain activation

or inactivation?

This is in fact one of the leading ideas of this course – how to

have a philosophy of dreams if dreaming is just reduced to

brain activation.

Modern scientific psychology on

dreams For modern scientific psychology, research of dreams is all about the activities of the

brains. Therefore it is more interested in the form than the content of dreams. The approach is formal and analytic rather than interpretetive.

In a way, however, it approaches the classic philosophical question of what distinction can be found between the dreaming and the waking state of man as we will see.

When something is especially vivid, certain parts of the brains are activated and when something is confused (for example, if a person has features from two different persons), there is a certain amount of inactivity of some parts of the brains. Thus in dreaming (compared to waking) some mental functions are enchanged while others are diminished.

Within this paradigm, dreams are defined as mental activity occurring in sleep. This is indeed hard to object: it is clear that when we are sleeping, what happens is mental, not bodily, although it might be that bodily movements affect the dreams.

The mental activities vary a a lot. For example, we may have the feeling that we are moving (for example, driving a jetplane) although we are immobile in bed when sleeping. We may have anxiety dreams (for example, related to work or upcoming social event). Or the dream may be hallucinatory, having no apparent relation to reality.

Development of modern method Although the development of

modern scientific psychology would have advanced with only direct observation, the invention of EEG (recording of brain waves-technology) revolutionized the sleep research. It was invented by the German Adolf Berger.

With EEG-graphs one can study the activation and inactivation of brain neutrons. To put it plainly, in modern dream science waking and dreaming are two states of consciousness, with differences that depend on chemistry.

Sleep basics: NREM and REM-sleep Through the EEG-graphs it was found that there

are two kinds of sleeping: NREM and REM-sleep.

An anxiety dream has to do with emotions and is a typical example of a NREM-dream which is a low-level brain activation dream and takes place often when there is only a short time between falling sleep and waking up. The term NREM means that there is no rapid eye movement during sleep (non-REM sleep).

A hallucinatory dream is a typical example of a REM-sleep which involves rapid eye movement. It is dramatic and complex, bizarre and hallucinatory and may contain delusions. It is also a long dream, about eight to ten times as long as the two other dreams. The REM-sleep fully includes the elements we attribute to dreams: rich and varied perceptions and hallucinations, delusional acceptance of the wild events as real despite their improbability and physical impossibility, bizarreness following from discontinuity, emotional intensity (fear, elation, and exuberance) and poor reasoning and logical invalidity.

Sleeping and waking In previous times it was thought the

brain is just switched off during sleep. Sometimes, but not very often we do indeed sleep without seeing any dreams.

In times of stress the mental activity continues all the night. It is also that we can see dreams almost the whole time when we are sleep, not only just because we wake up as has often been thought.

It is true that nightmares or other unpleasant dreams can wake us up.

Modern brain research has also shown that although external stimuli such as a sound, smell or suchlike can affect our dreams, but not necessarily and the dreams are certainly not dependent on those influences.

Sleeping animals The brain activation is similar in all mammals, so in sleep laboratories

one can study with animals, such as cats on sleeping and dreams. It is a more difficult question whether animals have dreams or not.

This is related to the question, popular since specially 17th century, of whether animals have a consciousness or not. I will return to the philosophical views later, here it suffices to say that most contemporary scientists think that animals have some kind of limited consciousness which is very different from men as they lack language and the capacity for propositional or symbolic thought. On everyday experience, it would seem that animals do have dream as their behavior sometimes looks like reflecting dreams in the same way as humans do. But so far, science does not provide answer to this question.

However, what is known is that Rem-sleep always involves intense brain-activation and occurs in all mammals.

Sleeping babies It is good to observe babies because REM-sleep

starts in them immediately as they start sleeping and the brain activation is more intense and less inhibited than in adults.

We don’t know if babies dream. It seems possible, though. If babies do dream, their subjective experience cannot possibly be of the same quality as that of adults.

According to empirical tests, the accounts of dreaming that are similar to those of adults start to appear at about age three, when the infant is acquiring language and propositional thought. This would suggest that children start to dream when they start forming propositions which again would hint that there is a connection between reason and dreams. Thus brain activation would perhaps not be quite enough to produce full-scale dreams.

However, the dreams might be important to the development of the the child – the frequency of REM-dreams in babies would seem to point at that direction. However, it takes until around the age of seven when most of the formal adult dream characteristics are reported.

Sleeping proportions The proportion of sleeping changes in our lifetime, as does the proportion of REM and

NREM-sleep. The REM-sleep takes place most of the time in fetuses and new-born babies. The idea may be that the brain is developed exactly in these stages of the development. After 26 weeks, waking increases progressively until the death.

How much sleep is needed, then? This varies very much from person to person. Some need 4-6 hours sleep per day (for example, Thomas Edison, the inventor) and some 8-10 (many writers, for example Proust & Graham Greene who have written on dreams), the average is 6-8 hours.

Sleep deprivation show in that one has difficulties in being attentive and being efficient. In addition, one tends to have intense, bizarre dreams more often than when one has slept well.

Sleep deprivation may cause mental problems and therefore it is difficult to measure – the scientists would not want to experiment with mental sanity, at least if they are themselves sane. However, many have found that in extraordinary circumstances men can survive for a surprisingly long period without sleep or with reduced amount of sleep although in the long run sleep deprivation will without doubt produce various problems even to a very healthy and mentally strong person.

Functions of sleep Sleep is essential to life itself.

About two weeks of severe sleep-deprivation will produce serious problems to our functioning normally.

Our skin starts to break down and we feel cold. We lose weight however much we eat. Eventually, within a month, we start dying because of infections.

Sleep is essential in refreshing our body, in maintaining its resistance towards bacteria and to maintaining our body temparature.

Functions of sleep Philosopher Owen Flanagan has argued in his Dreaming Souls that dreams

do not have any real function in human life. We know already by experience that we have a vivid emotional life and it seems to be the fact that dreams do not have much effect to our waking life.

Many psychologists (and some philosophers such as Locke) argue that sleeping and dreams help us to organize our cognitive material and to refresh our cognitive abilities. In this sense dreaming help us to update and clean our hard disk, so to speak, clean unnecessary memories, integrate new experiences to old ones, update memories and so on. In addition, brain activation during sleep may have a developmental role which goes on all through the life.

According to Hobson, also the most important survival instincts (which involve emotions and memory) are also connected to sleeping. We need to know how to approach the opposite sex, when to mate, when to be afraid, when to run for cover. These are the skills that sleep refreshes every night of our lives by activating our brains, with no regard for the details of our conscious memory.

Nightmares Nightmares and generally frightening

or negative dreams (such as running away from some monster) contain strong and intense negative emotions. If we spontaneously wake up from a dream, it usually contains predominantly anxiety, fear or anger. Therefore the nightmares are simply caused by the intense negative emotions in dreams.

The physiological answer to nightmares is that there is an area in the brain called limbic brain which is activated when this happens. So there is an area in the brain which, when activated, produces nightmares in the same way as activation of some other areas in brain produce pleasure and positive dreams.

Nightmares take place mostly in the REM-phase of sleep, so the nightmares are usually very vivid and often bizarre or surrealistic.

´

Night terror Difference between nightmares and night

terror.

Night terror is a pure emotional experience

which takes place when we awaken from sleep.

They are usually associated with NREM-sleep

and can be related to post-traumatic stress.

Night terror affects the body very strongly: the

heart starts pounding, breathing rate increases

and the blood pressure arises. We wake up

sweating and in terror without remembering

any dreams. These kind of night terrors are

typical in ex-soldiers, for example.

The nigtmares, in contrast to night terrors, are

perfectly normal. They are normal phases of

REM-sleep, suggesting that the maintenance of

these emotional systems of the brain help us to

develop our survival skills and thus may be one

of the functions of brain activation in sleep.

Other disturbances of sleep In addition to nightmares and night terrors,

there are other disturbances such as sleep walking, sleep talking and tooth grinding.

They are called as parasomnias, movement behavior that occur during sleeping. Also these phenomena are functions of the activation of brains, this time because of activation in subcortical brain tissue which is related to motor systems of a human.

These parasomnias take place during NREM-sleep – they are normal human functions except that instead of taking place while we are awake, they happen when we are sleeping.

They are not dreaming in a proper sense – their cause is partial brain activation which is enough to support movement, but not enough to support waking. In this sense sleepwalking and sleep-talking have features of both sleeping and waking.

Sleep and movement Motion takes place also when the areas of the brain are not activated. For

example, in REM-sleep there is not a lot of motion (except the eyes under the eyelids). But then the activation of motor area of the brains are actively blocked exactly to prevent motion. This makes sense as it is impossible to fall to sleep if we are not immobile. Try falling to sleep while walking!

Movement is controlled by several levels of the brains. The upper level of the brain which gives us voluntary control over movement during waking, is pretty much out of the loop during sleep. The lower structures, of which many are necessary for movement, may however be activated while the upper brain is inactive. This leads to a kind of automatic movement which is what happens, say, when the need to go to bathroom makes one sleepwalking and trying to urinate in a garden or in some other place which is not the toilet where we in the waking state do this kind of action.

A fairly newly found sleep disorder is REM sleep behavior disorder. In this strange syndrome the person enacts his or her dreams through movement. For example, one may dream of being swimming and five away from the bed or throw ball throw moving one’s hands. This happens in the REM-phase of the sleep. Apparently many persons who have this disorder are inclined to suffer the Parkinson disease later on.

Dreams and indigestion

In the past it was thought that dreams are the result of bodily affections such as

indigestion. According to modern brain science, this is simply wrong. Of course, if one has a stomach ache, or has eaten or drunk too much, the processing of the food and resulting chemical disturbances are likely to lead to awakenings, and these awakenings may be associated with dream recall. When one is lying asleep in such states of gastrointestinal brain activation, it is not unlikely that mental content will be related to the dietary indiscretion.

In fact the day’s external events have very little place in the genesis of dreams. Freud thought that dreams were triggered by recent memories, but the modern psychologists find that recent memory enters into dreaming very little. Fragments of episodic memory of biographical events are incorporated, but whole recollections are never reproduced as such. Instead, only partial fragments of recent memories enter into dream construction and, along with other materials from remote memory, become part of scenarios created entirely from scratch as brain activation proceeds.

Sleep and mental illness Hobson argues that dreaming is a psychotic

state as much the psychotic states we experience while being wake.

The internally generated perceptions have the hallucinatory power needed to make us hopelessly delusional.

Dream halluzinations make it impossible for us to realize that we are in the grasp of an altered state of consciousness. We are sure that we are awake and believe our senses and the associated emotions despite the bizarreness, incongruities and discontinuities which would immediately disturb us if we were awake.

“Pinch me, I’m dreaming!”

Formally speaking, severe mental illnesses and dreaming are identical. In both the question is of brain activation, physical changes in brain states.

But there is an easy cure: just wake up!

Sleep and mental illness Psychosis is a mental state characterized by hallucinations and/or delusions.

Delusions are possible without hallucinations. Dreams, again are most like organic mental illnesses, for example deliriums which follow from drugs or high fever. We may not know what day it is or where we are. We may have huge gaps in memory. Thus in a sense we are delirious when we are dreaming. This would, again, lead to the conclusion that dreams are only confused noise, not having any significant meaning or cognitive information.

Hobson: ”Going to sleep entails the enabling of a distinctive brain activation process akin to delirium: delirium is state that we thought we could get only be being bad or by taking drugs such as alcohol, amphetamine, or atropine, or by outliving our brains – in the senile conditions of old age. Suddenly we find out that it happens to all of us, every night of our lives, and probably more when are being good than when we are being bad, and more when we are younger than when we are old!”

Delusions are sort of chemical imbalance

Dreams, memory and learning The common

misconception that our dreams are black and white is due to poor memory.

We dream in color. In the thousands of lab dream reports, there is not a single instance of well-recalled dream being in black and white, as would be expected if this were indeed normally the case.

Dreams and Learning There is a theory according which the function of dreaming is to re-organize

memory during the sleep. The most well-known theorist in contemporary psychology is Robert Stickgold.

The idea in this theory is that dreams are composed of memory fragments which seems to be supported by recent experiments with REM-sleep although even more recent experiments show that NREM-sleep is equally important to men.

The research in this area is developing: the learning and memory processes that sleep may affect have been better characterized and differentiated. Also, thanks to progress in basic sleep neuroscience, the brain dynamics that appear to support the differentiated aspects of learning and memory are now known in enough detail to allow modelling of the sleep learning process.

So although there is an interpretation that dreams do not really have any significant function in human life other than maintaining our self-survival behavior, there are also views according to which dreaming can help us in learning and memory. However, this learning and memory reorganization does not necessarily have to be conscious – it may happen without us ever being aware of it.

Memory re-organization in sleep So far, the modern science does not know the rules of the

memory re-organization. We can only hope that advances in technology and brain science can some day reveal the rules to us.

Experiments with animals (especially with rats who are quick learners) show that REM sleep increased when rats were exposed to new learning. Preventing REM-sleep, again, impaired learning. However, however quick learning can be, it can take several days and possibly a week until new information is used to change one’s methods of doing things. Learning is simply not a very quick process and it is typically unconscious.

Recurrent dreams We may have recurrent dreams

concerning exams or teaching or any other activity which includes performance to other people.

They usually contain strong emotions or anxiety which is related to the feeling that one is not prepared properly to do what one is supposed to do. Thus it is no wonder that we have anxiety about performing – if we can’t remember what to do or say, we fail in the performance.

Another kind of recurrent dream may be related to learning. For example, when one is learning something new, say, a game (tetris, for example), one may see in dreams fragments of the learning activity.

Lucid dreaming Sometimes dream events are so incredible as to

make us wonder if we are awake or not. This disbelief

can be increased and converted into the recognition

that we are, in fact, dreaming.

When we are awake, we can check on our knowledge

very easily. We are able to make voluntary movements;

we are able to control our thoughts; we can pinch

ourselves and see that we feel things and are

behaving in relation to external stimuli.

In dreaming, we normally lose this self-reflective

awareness; we are unaware of the state that we are in;

we are unable to control our thoughts; and we are

unable to make critical judgments.

During dreaming, some individuals become

spontaneously aware that they are dreaming. This

occurs naturally in children who are aged eight

and above, and continues through adolescence.

Later, it is difficult to rely on spontaneous

occurrence of self-awareness during dreaming sleep.

Inducing lucid dreams Lucidity can be induced by techniques that anyone can follow.

I put a notebook by my bedside along with a pen to record dream experience and then, before going to sleep, I tell myself that, being a normal human being, it is likely that I will have two hours of absolutely fabulous dreaming tonight. To tune in on some of it I am going to notice when bizarreness occurs.

I tell myself to notice things that could never occur in waking but typically occur in dreams, namely the changes of times, places, and people (especially the unusual occurrence of unidentified characters, characters with the qualities of one person who suddenly have those of another, and so on). This fluidity of the orientation functions – time, place, and person – is what is going to tell me that I am dreaming.

When I am successful, a part of my brain–mind wakes up and I am able to notice that I am dreaming and say so to myself. Having done so, I have created a kind of dissociation: part of my brain is in the waking state and part is in the dreaming state. And then I can have a lot of fun. I can watch the dreams, I can induce awakenings so as to increase my recall, and, best of all, I can influence the dream content. I can do whatever I please; well, almost whatever. I can certainly fly and can have whatever sorts of intimate relationships I choose with my other dream characters. This is usually enough to make people quite proud and pleased to have achieved lucid dreaming.

Does this sound believable? Have anyone tried?

Criticism of Hobson Although Hobson has refined his theory

over time, it is still basically reductive in the sence that all the phenomena of the mind have a corresponding scheme of brain activation.

Sometimes Hobson argues as the brain is the object of mind phenomena

This would make the mind redundant – if all we think, reason, will etc. Is nothing but brain activation, where do we need the mind for?

Arguably the dreams present us with interesting things – one might think that they are something more than just neurochemistry

What else?

Other psychological theories

We have discussed the views of Allan J. Hobson and his team.

Although Hobson is by far the foremost theorist of dreams in

modern psychology, there are some alternative theories

which are founded on the same kind of experimental science.

I will briefly discuss alternative theories such as evolutionary

psychology theory, psychosomatic theory, expectation

fulfilment theory and the theories of Solms and Foulkes.

Solm’s criticism Mark Solms is a clinical

neuroanatomist, so he shares Hobson’s basic approach.

However, he has shown that there are dreams also in NREM-phase of sleep (Hobson earlier thought there was only REM-dreams) and that they are not always dependent on brain activation.

The basic approach however is that brain activation is the explaining cause of most dreams. Solms is not interested in the content of dreams.

Difference with towards Freud: whereas Hobson thinks dreams are related to psychosis, Solms argues that they are wish-fullfillment.

Adler: Dreams are emotional

preparation A pioneer for the

evolutionary psychology theory of dreams (discussed next) was perhaps Alfred Adler (1870-1937) who suggested that dreams are often emotional preparations for solving problems, intoxicating an individual away from common sense toward private logic. The residual dream feelings may either reinforce or inhibit contemplated action.

Evolutionary psychology theories of

dreams Many (incl. Philosopher Owen Flanagan and Hobson) argue that dreams serve no

specific purpose. They are just epiphenomena (In philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism is the view that mental phenomena are epiphenomena in that they can be caused by physical phenomena, but cannot cause physical phenomena; In medicine, an epiphenomenon is a secondary symptom seemingly unrelated to the original disease or disorder.). Hobson argues that the substance of dreams have no significant influence on waking actions and most people get on well without remembering their dreams.

This view is objected by evolutionary psychologists who believe that dreams surve some adaptive function for survival.

Deirdre Barrett describes dreaming as simply "thinking in different biochemical state" and believes people continue to work on all the same problems—personal and objective—in that state. Her research finds that anything—math, musical composition, business dilemmas—may get solved during dreaming (we will see that some Early Modern philosopher anticipated this view).

In a related theory by Mark Blechner, titled “Oneiric Darwinism," dreams are seen as creating new ideas through the generation of random thought mutations. Some of these may be rejected by the mind as useless, while others may be seen as valuable and retained.

Antti Revonsuo: threat simulation theory Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo posits

that dreams have evolved for "threat simulation" exclusively.

According to Threat Simulation Theory much of human evolution physical and interpersonal threats were serious, giving reproductive advantage to those who survived them. Therefore dreaming evolved to replicate these threats and continually practice dealing with them.

In support of this theory, Revonsuo shows that contemporary dreams comprise much more threatening events than people meet in daily non-dream life, and the dreamer usually engages appropriately with them.

It is suggested by this theory that dreams serve the purpose of allowing for the rehearsal of threatening scenarios in order to better prepare an individual for real-life threats.

Psychosomatic theory of dreams

Tsai developed in 1995 a 3-hypothesis theory that is claimed to provide a mechanism for

mind-body interaction and explain many dream-related phenomena, including hypnosis, meridians in Chinese medicine, the increase in heart rate and breathing rate during REM sleep, that babies have longer REM sleep, lucid dreams, etc.

Dreams are a product of "dissociated imagination," which is dissociated from the conscious self and draws material from sensory memory for simulation, with feedback resulting in hallucination. By simulating the sensory signals to drive the autonomous nerves, dreams can affect mind-body interaction. In the brain and spine, the autonomous "repair nerves," which can expand the blood vessels, connect with compression and pain nerves.

Repair nerves are grouped into many chains called meridians in Chinese medicine. When some repair nerves are prodded by compression or pain to send out their repair signals, a chain reaction spreads out to set other repair nerves in the same meridian into action. While dreaming, the body also employs the meridians to repair the body and help it grow and develop by simulating very intensive movement-compression signals to expand the blood vessels when the level of growth enzymes increase.

Expectation fulfilment theory of dreams

Joe Griffin (1997): expectation fulfilment

theory of dreams.

Dreaming serves to discharge the emotional arousals (however minor) that haven't been expressed during the day, thus freeing up space in the brain to deal with the emotional arousals of the next day and allowing instinctive urges to stay intact.

The expectation is fulfilled, i.e. the action is 'completed', in the dream but in a metaphorical form, so that a false memory is not created.

The theory satisfactorily explains why dreams are usually forgotten immediately afterwards: as Griffin suggests, far from being "the cesspit of the unconscious", as Freud proclaimed, dreaming is the equivalent of the flushed toilet.

David Foulkes on child dreaming Foulkes and his team have researched the dreams

of children around twenty years.

He rejects the common idea that children have dreams from infancy in the same form as later. This is supposed to be because children have more REM-dreams than adults and formerly it was thought that we can see dreams only in REM-phase of the sleep.

Foulke’s results show that younger childre (3-5 years old) dream very little – around 15% of REM-awakenings elicited dream reports

Until 9-11 years only about 30% of REM-awakenings resulted in dream reports

Years 12- frequency increases swiftly to typical adult rate of 80%

The results seem not to be dependent on verbal skills - Foulkes argues that it is not likely that the younger children were having rich dreams but failed to remember or describe them well.

Consequences Instead, along with the development of narrative memory and theory-of-mind

capacities, the gradual development of a rich visual-spatial imagination may be among the key cognitive prerequisites for a fuller dream life.

Therefore Foulkes would conclude that we learn dreaming as we develop: “Dreaming is an organizing, constructive process which requires cognitive sophistication, and is continuous with waking cognitive and emotional life.”

Foulkes argues that dreaming is at heart an organizing process, a high-level symbolic skill, and a form of intelligent behaviour with cognitive prerequisites. The virtual world we inhabit in dreams is one which we have constructed, though usually without either voluntary control or current sensory input.

This would naturally go against Hobson and Solms – one cannot “learn” brain activation – it is there at least in an early age if not in infancy.

Foulkes has been critisized on the test conditions – do children dream in the same way in the laboratory as in home? Etc. Problems with reliability of dream reports in children etc.

Markku Roinila

PHILOSOPHY OF DREAMS AND SLEEPING:

Philosophical questions about dreaming & Dreams of

Philosophers

Introduction Philosophy of dreaming is nowadays usually thought to be part of

the philosophy of psychology.

As a topic it is very much underdeveloped area of study despite the fact that it very interesting and has illuminating relations to many other areas of philosophical studies such as epistemology, philosophy of mind (especially consciousness), philosophy of psychology, metaphysics, scientific methodology and ethics.

Philosophy of dreaming also combines in a very interesting way the physiology (modern neuroscience) with phenomenology (our dream experiences).

It is also naturally interesting to the learned public outside academic circles.

Philosophical questions about dreaming

The history of philosophy of dreaming is almost as old as philosophy itself. In ancient philosophy Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, among others, were interested in the dream-world which was so different from the normal waking life. This created a metaphysical question: how do I know I am awake? Maybe all of this I experience is a dream? Can I trust my senses?

The idea was led to the utmost by George Berkeley who argued that we have knowledge only on what we perceive. So if we perceive in dreams unicorns, they exist.

Traditional philosophical question are mostly related to the content of the dreams as there was no way of thinking about the form of the dreams (brain functions, that is). However, there are some ancient philosophers like Democritus and Aristotle who thought about the physiology of dreams.

For this reason, the contemporary philosophy of dreaming has partly different questions about dreaming, as it is impossible to ignore the development and results of the modern neuroscience.

Some traditional philosophical questions of dreaming

Four classical problems about dreams (Flanagan: Dreaming Souls)

1) Whether it is possible to know for certain that one is awake and not dreaming and vice versa (e. g. Plato, Descartes, Bergson, Russell); can I feel pain while sleeping? 2) Whether dreams are experiences we have while sleeping or fabrications that we make up after we awake ( > remembering-problem, e. g. Leibniz, Kant, Hume,) 3) Whether we can be immoral in dreams (important for St. Augustine & medieval theologians, for example, but also contemporary ethics); morality in lucid dreaming 4) Whether my self disappears when I go to sleep (does the continuity of consciousness disappear) (e.g.Locke, Malcolm, Dennett); are dreams conscious mental states? One can add Flanagan’s own question: Does dreaming have an evolutionary function? (Freud, Jung, Flanagan, Revonsuo); Does dreaming have a function in the first place?

Remembering dreams

Controversy between Descartes and Hobbes

Locke: Dreams are mixtures of memory fragments of waking life

Flanagan: Even though we don't remember all our dreams, they may have a role in our psychological life – some event seen in dreams may affect our waking life (for example, my own death, an accident etc.). Psychological tests confirm this: one can remember things which were told to the person when he or she was sleeping.

Do dreams affect my development?

What biological ends, if any, was dreaming designed to serve? What psychological or cultural end? Or are there such ends at all?

Do dreams have a meaning? > religion, art, psychology, predictions (astrology)

Flanagan: Even if it is rare for dreams to express the true and the sensible, this is no objection to the idea that some dreams contribute to making me who I am, are self-revealing and are possibly worth for self-exploration. Thus the answer to question “Can dreams help in seeking self-knowledge?” is yes. > Personal identity.

If dreams have this function, one would be able to argue against neuroscientists that it is not only a question of brain activation. In fact, this view would be closer to the one of David Foulkes.

Creativity & Dreams Leibniz: Dreams in a way show us

possibilities we can reach if we really try – kind of platonic forms or pretaste of the joys of heaven

Many artists report having been inspired by dreams (for example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein)

This can be related to the idea that dreams are a kind of thinking and certain thoughts are more inspiring than others.

In some cases one could even say that dreams are a sort of philosophical process which can give you new thoughts, be they in artistic or philosophical form.

Judgment & dreams Do we make judgements in

dreams – in other words, can one perform valid inferences while sleeping?

This is related to the sceptical problem and the problem of consciousness, that is can we be conscious of ourselves when sleeping.

According to Norman Malcom, one cannot judge ”I am now sleeping”

Malcolm’s view has been challenged many times in various ways.

Questions by John Sutton The following are from Sutton: ”Dreaming” (I will return to these in the last lectures)

What are the best metaphysical and methodological approaches to understanding relations between the phenomenology and the neurophysiology of dreams? (combining experience of dreams to results of sleep labs)

What room is there for an integrated cognitive level of analysis through which accounts of representation and computation can interlock with more general theories in cognitive science? (What can the study of dreams tell us about consciousness in general?)

What are the theoretically and empirically plausible roles of motivation, emotion, imagination, and memory in dreaming? (contents of dreams)

Are there conceptual suggestions that might help clarify or resolve the scientific disagreements over the extent and nature of bizarre mentation in dreaming, and over children’s dreaming? (NREM vs. REM-sleep; do we learn dreaming?; )

Do individually and culturally variable beliefs about dreaming only influence dream reports, or is the form of dreams themselves in certain respects also malleable? (reliability of dream reports)

Most broadly, is dreaming a quasi-perceptual hallucination or an imaginative construct? (are the dreams based on waking imagery or are they imagined?)

Recent philosophical work on dreams The question of scepticism of our empirical experiences

(appearance vs. reality) has long been the most common touching-point of philosophy of dreams (in epistemology) – for example Dunlop (ed.), Philosophical Essays on Dreaming (Cornell, 1977)

In philosophy of mind dreams have not raised much interest despite the close relationship with consciousness.

Only very recently the results of neuroscience have started to affect to the theory of dreams in philosophy. For example: Dennett: ”Are Dreams Experiences?” Philosophical Review 73: 151–71; Churchland, “Reduction and the Neurobiological Basis of Consciousness,” in A. J. Marcel and E. J. Bisiach (eds), Consciousness in Contemporary Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 273–304 Flanagan: Dreaming Souls (2000) Sutton: “Dreaming” (2009; http://philpapers.org/rec/SUTD)

Complaints by Sutton John Sutton laments in his

article ”Dreaming” that although there is some recent development in the philosophy of dreaming, the discipline is in a very primitive state compared to, for example, philosophy of emotions, memory, colour vision etc.

However, there is now The International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) and journal Dreaming. (Available as e-resources in HELKA)

Subjectivity of dreaming One basic difficulty in achieving ”scientific”

results of dream content is the subjectivity of dreaming. We have to trust on dream reports which are subject to various verbal skills, sleeping conditions etc.

Thus prevents us to combine the ”phenomenology” of dreaming to the latest neuroscientific results.

According to Flanagan, a robust theory of the nature and function of dreams will need to bring into play philosophy, phenomenology, neuroscience, pscyhology, psychiatry, evolutionary biology, sociology, anthropology, literature etc.

I will discuss the prospects of the future of philosophy of dreaming in the last lecture of this series.

Famous philosophical dreams There are a number of interesting

dreams with philosophical content, either reported or fabricated by philosophers in various times.

However, there are actually surprisingly little dream reports by philosophers (not to mention contemporary philosopher Owen Flanagan (see Dreaming Souls) and it is often impossible to tell whether the dreams reported were actually seen or not.

Sometimes these dreams reflect the philosophical questions the philosophers were working with or even inspired them in their strivings for solutions. For this reason they are interesting and worth looking at.

Dream of Socrates In dialogue Crito Plato presents Socrates as telling a dream (44a-b). The context in the dialogue is that Socrates is

sentenced to death and his friends are trying to persuade him to escape.

Soc. What! I suppose that the ship has come from Delos, on the arrival of which I am to die? Cr. No, the ship has not actually arrived, but she will probably be here to-day, as persons who have come from Sunium tell me that they have left her there; and therefore to-morrow, Socrates, will be the last day of your life. Soc. Very well, Crito; if such is the will of God, I am willing; but my belief is that there will be a delay of a day. Cr. Why do you say this? Soc. I will tell you. I am to die on the day after the arrival of the ship? Cr. Yes; that is what the authorities say. Soc. But I do not think that the ship will be here until to-morrow; this I gather from a vision which I had last night, or rather only just now, when you fortunately allowed me to sleep. Cr. And what was the nature of the vision? Soc. There came to me the likeness of a woman, fair and comely, clothed in white raiment, who called to me and said: O Socrates- "The third day hence, to Phthia shalt thou go." Cr. What a singular dream, Socrates!

Socrates’ dream is predicting the future and the information is given by a Goddess or such-like figure. Thus Plato’s description (or Socrates’ – it is hard to tell which) follows the common Egyptian and Greek practice where messages are received from Gods concerning the future.

Augustinus’ Confessions In Confessions, X, ch. 30 St. Augustine talks to God of his problem of dreams:

” You commanded me not to commit fornication, and though you did not forbid me to marry, you counselled me to take a better course. You gave me the grace and I did your bidding, even before I became a minister of your sacrament. But in my memory, of which I have said much, the images of things imprinted upon it by my former habits still linger on. When I am awake they obtrude themselves upon me, though with little strength. But when I dream, they not only give me pleasure but are very much like acquiescence in the act.”

“The power which these illusory images have over my soul and my body is so great that what is no more than a vision can influence me in sleep in a way that the reality cannot do when I am awake. Surely it cannot be that when I am asleep I am not myself, O Lord my God? And yet the moment when I pass from wakefulness to sleep, or return again from sleep to wakefulness, marks a great difference in me.“

St. Augustine is in a sense Freudian model example – the sexual wishes are repressed when we are awake, but when we sleep, they come to haunt us. He is concerned that he commits sin in his dreams and laments this to his creator.

The three dreams of Descartes On 10. 11. 1619 René Descartes (in

the age of 23) saw three dreams which have become famous despite the fact that he decided not to include them in his short autobiography in Discourse on the Method 20 years later.

Despite this, they were reported by many to be elemental to his intellectual development and Descartes contemplated pilgrimage because of the dreams.

In the background was a mental crisis or nervoud breakdown and search for a new direction. Descartes was disappointed with scholasticism and was trying to find a meaning in his life. Thus he concentrated to meditation, reaching a kind of delirious state and this is where the dreams occurred.

Stove-heated room In the autobiographical note in Discourse Descartes

does not mention dreams, but talks about a stove-heated room which would no doubt make one sleepy. After this description Descartes goes on to describe the new method of thinking he developed which lead to the sceptical foundation of his philosophy (teh cogito-argument; see his Meditations on the First Philosophy).

” I was then in Germany, attracted thither by the wars in that country, which have not yet been brought to a termination; and as I was returning to the army from the coronation of the Emperor, the setting in of winter arrested me in a locality where, as I found no society to interest me, and was besides fortunately undisturbed by any cares or passions, I remained the whole day in seclusion, with full opportunity to occupy my attention with my own thoughts.” (Discourse, part II)

Baillet’s story Descartes’s first biographer, Adrien

Baillet has another version of this important day in 1619 which became known when Baillet’s published his biography Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes in 1691.

Baillet argued that the vision Descartes saw was in fact founded on dreams. He found a narrative of three dreams by Descartes was written in Latin (titled Olympica), but was never published and later lost.

For this reason, there simply is not any reliable knowledge of the dream reports, whether they were genuine or not. However, most scholars think they are.

First dream Descartes saw three dreams during one night and he woke up after each dream to contemplate it.

The following narrations are from Baillet’s book; on this topic, see Michael Keevak: ”Descartes’s Dreams and Their Address for Philosophy” (Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 53, 3 (1992), pp. 373-396; Sebba: The Dream of Descartes, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987); Challenger: Somnia, ergo sum (http://wrt-brooke.syr.edu/courses/760/hypertxt/dlc.somnio/somnav.html); Gaukroger: Descartes. An Intellectual Biography, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 106-109.

In the first dream (AT X, 181-182) Descartes imagines that he is trying to walk in the midst of a whirlwind, escaping from phantoms or ghosts and must turn to a college church for refuge. He had pain on his right side and because of this he was forced to lurch to the left. Before Descartes was able to enter to the church to pray, he realized that he had just passed a man whom he recognized but had failed to acknowledge. Attempting to retrace his steps, he was thrown against the wall of the chapel by the wind. At the same moment, he saw someone else who called him by name and told him that if he wanted to seek out Monsieur N. he would give him something. He imagned this to be a melon which had come from a foreign country. The man was surrounded by people, who to his surprise were able to stand up straight whereas he was still only able to stand leaning to the side. Finally, he noticed that the wind was becoming less and less violent, and at that point he awoke, feeling a sharp pain in his left side.

The dream is clearly a sort of nightmare – there is a storm which is real for only him, not for others, there are bizarre elements (melon) and external stimulus (pain in the left side).

Second dream After the first dream Descartes prays shelter for

evil spirits for two hours before falling in sleep again. Immediately he saw a second dream.

In the second dream (AT X, 182) Descartes hears a piercing noise which he takes for thunder and he opened his eyes to find that his room is full of sparks. He is not sure if he is awake or sleeping. The sparks prevent him seeing the things in his room.

He is upset, but by alternatively opening and closing his eyes and looking at the objects made visible around the room, he is able to get rid of the sparks, calm himself and return to sleep. So this time he trust to reason rather than God (medieval vs. modern), finding a way to remedy the situation.

This second dream can perhaps be described as night terror.

Third dream The last dream (AT X, 182-186) is the longest and different from others. In Olympica

Descartes notes that the last dream was not frightening. In fact, he found it very soothing. Here it is told by Stephen Gaukroger:

Descartes began by noticing a book on a table. He opened it and was pleased to see that it was an encyclopaedia or dictionary, which he believed might prove useful. At the same time, he also discovered a second book, a collection of poems entitled Corpus Poetarum [Collection or anthology of poetry in Latin]. Opening this book, he chanced upon the words Quod vitae sectabor iter? (what road in life shall I follow?).

As he was reading, a stranger entered and gave him some verses beginning with the words est et non (it is and is not). The man told Descartes of the excellence of the poem, and Descartes replied that he knew it well: it came from the Idylls of Ausonius, whose poems were included in the anthology on the table.

He looked through the volume to find these poems, and the man asked him where he had got the anthology from. He was unable to tell him, and then noticed that the book had disappeared. It was now at the other end of the table, and the dictionary had changed into a slightly different one. He found Ausonius' poems, but not the one beginning est et non. Turning to the man, he told him he knew an even better poem beginning Quod vitae sectabor iter? On opening the book he noticed several copperplate portraits in it, which he thought he recognized. At this point, the man and the book both disappeared.

Lucid part After these dreamings, while remaining asleep, Descartes asked himself

whether he was imagining all this or whether it was real, and he began to ask about its significance. The dictionary is taken to represent all of the sciences, and the Corpus the union of philosophy with wisdom. Poets, he tells us, often have more profound things to say because of the divine nature of their inspiration, 'which makes the seeds of wisdom, which are found in the minds of men like the sparks of fire in flints, emerge with much more ease and clarity than can be accomplished by the reasoning of philosophers'. The words Quod vitae sectabor iter? he interprets as wise counsel, possibly even a moral maxim.

At this point Descartes wakes, but continues to interpret the dreams along the same lines. The Corpus represents revelation and inspiration, while the est et non is interpreted as the 'yes and no' of the Pythagoreans, standing for truth and error. The third dream he sees as enlightenment about the future, the other two as a form of reprimand for his earlier life. The melon he takes to symbolize the charms of solitude. The pain in his left side represents the devil trying to prevent him from going where he wants, and God does not let him enter the chapel because it is the devil who is pushing him there. The terror experienced in the second dream is a kind of remorse for his sins, and the thunderclap a sign that the spirit of truth is about to descend. These do not help us much, but are interesting as curiosities and from the point of view of intellectual history.

Some reflections It is clear that the first two dreams are

”real” dreams, in this case nightmares.

The third dream is partly lucid as Descartes starts to interpret his dream and the preceding two dreams. At the same time is stylized and probably not very true to the dream itself. The narrative seems to have a purpose, to illustrate his later invention (common device of litterature of the time).

The last dream is seen as representing a new direction whereas the first two were describing his earlier life. Indicative of this is the question in the poem anthology: ”What road in life shall I follow?”

So one can see a connection to the intense meditations Descartes was undertaking.

Some views by Donald Challenger in Somnio, ergo sum: http://wrt-brooke.syr.edu/courses/760/hypertxt/dlc.somnio/somnav.html

Reactions As Descartes’s dreams are the most famous in the history of philosophy, there

have been several comments in them.

Baillet, his biographer wrote: ”This last thought (the signal of the spirit of truth) surely contained a bit of enthuasiasm, and it might incline us to believe that M. Descartes had been drinking the evening before he went to bed…But he assures us that he had passed the evening and all the preceding day in complete sobriety, and that for three whole months he had drunk no wine” (AT X, 186).

Leibniz saw the dreams belonging to the Rosicrucian tradition.

Freud declined to speculate on the meaning of these dreams, pointing out that the content of the 3rd dream was mostly symbolic in a way more characteristic of conscious processes than the two others and that without some association of ideas on the part of Descartes the interpretation of the unconscious elements in the dreams was impossible.

Others psychologists have interpreted the first two dreams as result of sexual guilt and the third as an intellectual dream. But they all seem to be connected to the intellectual discovery has was about to make.

What direction? So what was the direction Descartes found in the 3rd dream or was inspired to

find because of the dream?

There is no certain answer, but it is probable that it was the sceptical method (remember, the story plays a central part in his Discourse on the method).

As we remember, the method is systematical doubt Descartes decribes in his first Meditation:

” Some years ago I was struck by how many false things I had believed, and by how doubtful was the structure of beliefs that I had based on them. I realized that if I wanted to establish anything in the sciences that was stable and likely to last, I needed—just once in my life—to demolish everything completely and start again from the foundations. It looked like an enormous task, and I decided to wait until I was old enough to be sure that there was nothing to be gained from putting it off any longer. I have now delayed it for so long that I have no excuse for going on planning to do it rather than getting to work. So today I have set all my worries aside and arranged for myself a clear stretch of free time. I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself, sincerely and without holding back, to demolishing my opinions > Cogito, ergo sum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6EHgYXcm1Q

Spinoza’s black, scabby Brazilian Michael A. Rosenthal: ”The Black, Scabby Brazilian: Some Thoughts on Race and Early

Modern Philosophy”, Philosophy of Social Criticism 31 (2005)

Spinoza’s letter to Balling 1664:

”When one morning just at dawn I awoke from a very deep dream, the images which had come to me in the dream were present before my eyes as vividly as if they had been real things, in particular the image of a black, scabby Brazilian whom I had never seen before. This image disappeared for the most part when, to make a diversion, I fixed my gaze on a book or some other object; but as soon as I again turned my eyes away from such an object while gazing at nothing in particular, the same image of the same Ethiopian kept appearing with the same vividness again and again until it gradually disappered from sight.”

Spinoza’s uses the narrative to argue that dream visions are illusionary. In fact, he uses a similar technique as Descartes in his second dream, fixing attention to something else. Thus the dream can be called lucid.

Spinoza attributes the cause of the dream to corporeal causes, to a kind of delirium. Rosenthal interprets the content of the dream to show that Spinoza had racial prejudice.

Leibniz’s philosophical dream

Translation by Donald

Rutherford

(http://philosophyfaculty.

ucsd.edu/faculty/rutherfo

rd/leibniz/dream.htm).

The text was found in

Leibniz’s philosophical

papers, so it should be

genuine. The text is

probably from 1680’s.

Leibniz’s philosophical dream “I was satisfied with what I was among men, but I was not satisfied with human nature. I often considered with chagrin the hardships to which we are subjected, the shortness of our life, the vanity of glory, the improprieties that are born of sensual pleasure, the illnesses that overwhelm even our spirit; finally, the annihilation of all our greatness and all our perfections in the moment of death, which appears to reduce to nothing the fruits of our labors…”

Leibniz was an Enlightenment thinker before Enlightenment, so the topic is very common in him – how to help mankind and promote perfection and advance of science. In a Cartesian manner, he meditates on difficult problems and as we soon see, dreams on related topics.

“These meditations left me full of melancholy. I naturally loved to act well and to know the truth. Yet it appeared that I punished myself unnecessarily, that a successful crime was worth more than an oppressed virtue, and that a madness that is content is preferable to an aggrieved reason. However, I resisted these objections and directed my spirit on the right course by thinking about the divinity who must have given a proper order to everything and who sustained my hopes with the expectation of a future capable of redressing everything. This conflict was renewed in me by the sight of some great disturbance, either among men, when I saw injustice triumph and innocence chastened, or in nature, when hurricanes or earthquakes destroyed cities and provinces and caused thousands to die without distinguishing the good from the wicked, as though nature cared no more for us than we trouble ourselves about ants or worms that we encounter in our path. I was greatly moved by these spectacles and could not stop myself pitying the condition of mortals… “

This passage anticipates Theodicy, Leibniz’s great work on divine justice where it is shown that our efforts will be rewarded and the wicked will get their punishment in the long run.

Leibniz’s philosophical dream cont. “One day, being fatigued from these thoughts, I fell asleep and found myself in a dark place which resembled an underground cavern. It was vast and very deep and everywhere there swarmed men who strangely rushed into the darkness in pursuit of luminous trifles they called "honors," or glittering little flies they called "riches." There were many who searched the ground for bright bits of rotten wood they called "sensual pleasures." Each of these evil lights had its followers; there were some who had changed parties and others who had quit the chase altogether because of exhaustion or despair. Some of those who ran blindly and often believed they had reached their goal fell into crevasses, out of which only moans were heard. Some were bitten by scorpions and other venomous creatures that left them wretched and often mad. Yet neither these examples nor the arguments of persons better informed stopped others from chasing the same hazards and even entering into fights in order to forestall rivals or keep themselves from being forestalled.”

It is clear that Leibniz’s dream is not really a dream, but rather an allegory following the medieval tradition. Anyway, here Leibniz “dreams” of rat-race where people strive for honour, wealth or sensual pleasure. And the game is merciless. One can also interpret this as the Hobbesian state of nature.

Leibniz’s philosophical dream cont. “In the vault of this huge cavern there were little holes and almost imperceptible cracks. Here a trace of daylight entered; yet it was so weak that it required careful attention to notice it. One frequently heard voices which said, "Stop you mortals, or run like the miserable beings you are. Others said, "Raise your eyes to the sky." But no one stopped and no one raised their eyes except in pursuit of these dangerous trinkets…”

Light was a common metaphor for reason in Early Modern times.

“I was one of those who was greatly struck by these voices. I began often to look above me and finally recognized the small light which demanded so much attention. It seemed to me to grow stronger the more I gazed steadily at it. My eyes were saturated with its rays, and when, immediately after, I relied on it to see where I was going, I could discern what was around me and what would suffice to secure me from dangers. A venerable old man who had wandered for a long time in the cave and who had had thoughts very similar to mine told me that this light was what is called "intelligence" or "reason" in us. I often changed position in order to test the different holes in the vault that furnished this small light, and when I was located in a spot where several beams could be seen at once from their true point of view, I found a collection of rays which greatly enlightened me. This technique was of great help to me and left me more capable of acting in the darkness.”

Light of the soul was used by philosophers to signify reason and often innate ideas, too. Here Leibniz also shows how more reason helps us to act in our daily lives.

Leibniz philosophical dream cont. “After testing many positions, I was at last led by my good fortune to a place which was unique and the most advantageous in the cave, a place reserved for those whom the divinity wished to remove completely from this darkness. ..”

Typically for Leibniz, there are unique optimums, in this case the kind of divine location for mortals.

“Hardly had I begun to look upward than I was surrounded by a bright light shining from all sides: the whole cave and its miseries were fully disclosed to my eyes. But a moment later a dazzling clarity surprised me. It soon expanded and I saw before me the image of a young man whose beauty enchanted my senses. There seemed a majesty about him, which produced a veneration mixed with apprehension; yet the gentleness of his gaze reassured me. I began, however, to be aware of myself weakening and was about to faint, when I felt myself touched by a bough imbued with a marvelous liquor. I could compare it to nothing I had ever felt before and it gave me the strength to endure the presence of this celestial messenger. He called me by name and spoke to me in a charming voice: "Give thanks to the divine goodness which releases you from this madness."

This passage brings to mind the Greek theories of divination where the Gods and their messengers visit the dreams.

Leibniz philosophical dream cont. “At the same time he touched me again and at that instant I felt myself rise. I was no longer in the cavern; I no longer saw the vault above me. I found myself on a high mountain, which revealed to me the face of the earth. I saw at a distance what I only wanted to consider in general; yet when I studied some spot in a determined way, it at once grew and I needed no other telescopic vision than my own attention to see it as though it were next to me. This gave me a marvelous pleasure and emboldened me to say to my guide: "Mighty spirit--for I cannot doubt that you are of the number of those celestial figures who make up the court surrounding the sovereign of the universe--since you have wanted to clarify so my eyes, will you do as much for my mind?“

Dream-like elements: flying, superhuman sight

Leibniz philosophical dream cont. “It seemed to me that he smiled at this speech and took pleasure in hearing of my desire. "Your wish is granted," he said to me, "since you hold wisdom above the pleasure of those vain spectacles the world presents to your eyes. However, you will lose nothing that is substantial in those same spectacles. You will see everything with eyes clarified in a completely different way. Your understanding being fortified from above, it will discover everywhere the brilliant illumination of the divine author of things. You will recognize only wisdom and happiness, wherever men are accustomed to find only vanity and bitterness. You will be content with your creator; you will be enraptured with the vision of his works. Your admiration will not be the effect of ignorance as it is with the vulgar. It will be the fruit of knowledge of the grandeur and marvels of God. Instead of scorning with men the unravelled secrets, which in earlier times they regarded with astonishment, you will find that when you are admitted into the interior of nature your raptures will go on growing the farther you advance. For you will only be at the beginning of a chain of beauties and delights that go on growing into infinity. The pleasures that enchain your senses and that Circe of your legends who changes men into beasts will have no hold on you, so long as you attach yourself to the beauties of the soul, which never die and never disappoint. “

As a reward for giving up the rat-race of power, money or sensual pleasures, Leibniz is promised by the messenger Enlightenment and wisdom which help is seeing the world as it is. In addition, there will be happiness which follows from knowledge of God. Once Leibniz learns the beauty and marvels of divine nature, there is no end for intellectual pleasures. Once one develops the beauty of the soul, one is never discontent.

Leibniz’s philosophical dream cont. “You will belong to our fold and will go with us from world to world, from discovery to discovery, from perfection to perfection. With us you will pay court to the supreme being, who is beyond all worlds and fills them without being divided. You will be at once before his throne and among those who are distant from it. For God will establish his seige in your soul and heaven follows him everywhere. Go, therefore, and raise your spirit above all that is mortal and perishable, and cleave only to the eternal truths of the light of God. You will not always live here below, this mortal life which sufficiently approaches that of beasts. There will come a time when you will be delivered entirely of the chains of this body. Use well, therefore, the time that providence gives you here, and seek that your perfections to come will be proportional to the cares you give yourself here in achieving them."

But this can happen only in the city of God, in the court of the supreme being. So if one continues to develop virtue, there is a promise of heaven in the afterlife – it is the reward for wisdom.

Leibniz’s fictional dream has some similarities with Descartes’ dreams which Leibniz knew about. It follows from meditation, there is an idea of a new way for foundation of life, there are some supernatural elements. But it is much more fictionalized and the typical dream-elements are rare. In addition, there is a theological element although certaintly theist-like, not Christian. The last part is similar to much later last point §90 of Monadology (1714). The text shows influences from medieval tradition and was perhaps written for court ladies.

Swedenborg’s Dreams 1744 the well-known Swedish visionair, philosopher

(?) and writer Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) traveled to the Netherlands. Around this time he began having strange dreams. Swedenborg carried a travel journal with him on most of his travels, and did so on this journey. It was published in 1859 as Drömboken, or Journal of Dreams (See https://archive.org/details/emanuelswedenbor00swed)

Swedenborg experienced many different dreams and visions, some greatly pleasurable, others highly disturbing. The concerned heavenly visions, but there was also erotic dreams. This is the reason the Dream journals took a long time to publish.

The period in his life was related to publication of his work Regnum animale. This difficult process continued for six months.

Kant: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Early Kant was puzzled by Swedenborg’s

mysticism and wrote a strange humorous commentary called Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Träume eines Geistersehers ,1766) (https://archive.org/details/dreamsofspiritse00kant)

Kant’s approach is ironic and the book is very funny at times. He termed Swedenborg a "spook hunter”"without official office or occupation.

However, there are two opinions. Most Kant scholars regard the work as a skeptical attack on Swedenborg's mysticism. Other critics, however, believe that Kant regarded Swedenborg as a serious philosopher and visionary, and that Dreams both reveals Kant's profound debt to Swedenborg and coneals that debt behind the mask of irony.

The mystical dreams Swedeborg recorded are in a central role, as apparently because of them Swedenborg got into the spiritual visions.

Diderot: D’Alembert’s Dream (1782) There are three versions of this dialogue. In two dialogues

Diderot and D’Alembert (French mathematician, physicist and philosopher) Discuss on philosophical matters, especially materialism. In one D’Alembert who is dreaming and his mistress and some of his friends discuss.

Diderot was able to put some outrageous and heretic stuff to a mouth of a sleeping man, so this is why the text is constructed like this. These include the cellular structure of matter and an anticipation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

For example, Diderot makes D’Alembert to say: ” The original shape of a creature degenerates or perfects itself through necessity and habitual functioning. We walk so little, work so little but think so much that I wouldn't rule out that man might end by being nothing but a head.”

Thus dreaming is used as a fictional device much in the same way as in Leibniz. The real-life characters of the dialogue were not amused. See also: http://www.strangescience.net/didalem.htm

Theodor W. Adorno’s Dream notes Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969; one of the

founders of critical theory, so-called Frankfurt school) was fascinated by his dreams and wrote them down throughout his life. He planned publishing a collection of them although only a few of them appeared in his lifetime. Several collections have since been published such as Dream Notes (Polity Press, 2007). See also Halley, “Theodor W. Adorno’s dream transcripts”, The Antioch Review 55 (1997), 57-74.

Dream notes consist of an amazingly frank and uninhibited account of his inner desires, guilt feelings and anxieties. Brothel scenes, torture and executions figure prominently. They are presented straightforwardly, at face value. No attempt is made to interpret them, to relate them to the events of his life, to psychoanalyse them, or to establish any connections with the principal themes of his philosophy.

An example “A ceremony in which I had been solemnly installed as head of music in a high school. The repulsive old music teacher, Herr Weber, together with a new music teacher danced in attendance on me. After that, there was a great celebratory ball. I danced with a giant yellowish-brown Great Dane – as a child such a dog had been of great importance in my life. He walked on his hind legs and wore evening dress. I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I. Woke up feeling extremely satisfied.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dream From his very late years Wittgenstein recorded a dream to

his diary (in Denkbewegungen: Tagebücher 1930-32, 1936-37) (MS 183); in Finnish: Ajatusliikkeitä, Niin & Näin-kirjat, 2011).

In the dream W. was leading a mule and had the impression that he was its caretaker. First this happened in a street (apparently in an oriental city), then in a office, where they had to wait in a large room. Before that was a smaller room with a lot of people. The mule was restless and stubborn. W. held it in a short rope and thought that he wanted it to hit its head to the wall next to where they were sitting in order to calm down. W. was talking to the mule all the time and called it ”inspector”. W. had the feeling that this was the common name for mules in the same way as horses or cat are called in another words. W. thought that if he should have horses, he would call them ”inspectors” as well (as he was accustomed to call mules when he was with them). Only when W. woke up he realized that mules are not called as ”inspectors”.

Markku Roinila

Philosophy of Dreams and Sleeping:

Ancient and Medieval views

Greek philosophy Greeks followed the traditions of

Mesopotamia and Egypt in thinking that dreams were of divine origin. Compare Homeros’ Odyssey where there are two gates from the underworld admitting dreams to mortals, one of horn and one of ivory, representing truthful and deceptive dreams. Dream-oracles were common in Ancient Greece.

The ancient Greeks never spoke of having a dream, but always of seeing a dream. Thus the dreamer was a passive in the process – thus the dreamer is receiving messages or vision from Gods (the same was thought by Romans).

Widely discussed was the morality in dreams, the consensus being that moral character had an effect on the content of dreams.

An introduction to Greek and Roman views on dreaming: Joseph Barbera: “Sleep and dreaming in Greek and Roman Philosophy,” Sleep Medicine 9 (2008), pp. 906-910

The pre-socratics Influenced by Thales, early Greek philosophers tried to understand

natural phenomena in their own terms without the hypothesis of Divine intervention although the Divine voice-tradition also continued.

The most well-known of the presocratics are the views of Heraclitus “the obscure” (535-475 BC). He emphasized the subjective nature of dreams in his phrase “for those who are awake there is a single, common universe, whereas in sleep each person turns away into his own private universe”. This can be interpreted to say that a person's dream world was something created in their own mind.

The Pythagoreans seem to have supported the idea of Divine origin of dreams as they believed the that the air was “full of souls” capable of affecting dreams.

More presocratics Empedocles (490-430 BC)

thought that dreams depended on the dreamer and described sleep as occurring from a moderate cooling of heat in the blood with death being the result of a total cooling.

This view was followed by Parmenides and Leucippus, the first atomist, who also described sleep as something that happened to the body, and not the soul, and which occurred when ”the excretion of fine-textured atoms exceed the accretion of psychic warmth.”

Democritus Democritus of Abdera (460-370 BC) developed the first systematic and naturalist theory

of dreaming. He was an atomist, according to which the universe consisted of an infinite number and variety of immutable (one cannot change it after it is created) atoms whose continual motion and interaction were responsible for the varied and ever changing nature of the world.

According to Democritus, the universe consists of an infinite number of tiny atoms, which interact and gather to constitute visible, ordinary objects. These objects emit a continuous stream of images, or films, or effluences. Perception arises from the impact of these images on the sensory organs, whereas thought occurs when images penetrate the pores of the body, bypassing the senses, and directly act on the soul. The direct impact of images on the soul is also the explanation of dreams. He states that images can display all sorts of attributes of the objects which emit them. This is why we can have dreams, for example, of other people thinking, feeling and acting.

”The eidola penetrate bodies through their pores and when they come up again cause people to see things in their sleep; they come from things of every kind…but especially from animals, because of the quantity of morion and heat they contain.”

In addition, dreams are affected by each person’s psychic motions, desires, habits and emotions. Basically emotions are, however, caused by external phenomena as the eidola received from other persons contains traces of their attributes.

Democritus was the most influential philosopher of dreams in the Ancient world although today the views of Aristotle are much more valued.

Plato Plato (427-347 BC) followed mostly the divine tradition (for example, Charmides and

Socrates’ dream in Crito). Also, in the Phaedo, he tells how Socrates studied music and the arts because he was instructed to do so in a dream.

However, Plato also offered a naturalistic theory of dreaming in Timaeus. It is related to his theory of vision which is a product of a non-burning, light-giving ”pure fire” which streams out from the eyes and strikes external objects.

“When the cognate fire is gone at nightfall, the visual stream is cut off. For when it encounters something different from itself, it is changed and quenched, as it is no longer of the same nature as the adjoining air inasmuch as the air lacks fire. Therefore it stops seeing and gives rise to sleep.” (Plato, Timaeus 45d3–7)

Thus movement produced by this are transmitted back to the soul where visual perception occurs. At night the ”external and kindred fire” departs with a subsequent cessation of vision and a resultant induction of sleep.

With the eyelids closed the ”internal fire” is directed inwards to equalize the ”inward motions”. Where such equalizations occurs there is quiet sleep and where it does not, there is dreaming. In addition, there can still be divination and when this happens, the site of dream prophecy is the liver.

Psychological component of dreams In Republic Plato discusses the terrifying

content of dreams:

”…in all of us, even the most highly respectable, there is a lawless wild beast nature, which peers out in sleep.”

Plato’s discussion sounds Freudian: in dreams there is bestiality, even incest which is normally repressed when awake.

The difference is that in Plato these are uncovered while in Freud the desires or wishes are disguised.

Plato also uses dream fantasy to chracterize his own enterprise in the construction of an ideal state. Especially the sexual roles are presented in this manner. The ideal state is presented as Socrates’ day-dream (458a).

Are we awake or sleeping? Plato formulates the essential metaphysical question of philosophy of dreaming

in Republic 476c2-d4:

”- As for the man who believes in beautiful things but not in the existence of Beauty itself, nor is able to follow one who leads him to the knowledge of it, do you think that he lives in a dream or in a waking state? Consider: is this not dreaming, namely, whether asleep or awake, to think that likeness is not a likeness but the reality which it resembles? - I certainly think that the man who does this is dreaming. - The man who, on the contrary, believes that there is such a thing as Beauty itself, who can see both it and the things which share in it, and does not confuse the two, does he seem to you to live in a waking state or in a dream? - In a waking state certainly, he said.” Plato is arguing that if we cannot see how the appearances are related to the forms, we must be sleeping. Later Descartes, Hobbes and Malcom, for example, discuss this same question from a different point of view.

Theaetetus (157e-158e) Socrates examines and argues against a

subjectivist doctrine of Protagoras who holds that all appearances are true for the subject to whom they occur. Socrates mentions dreams, illusions, hallucinations, delusions as counter-examples to this theory.

Socrates asks whether he and Theaetetus are awake or asleep and argues that dreaming illustrates his theory. If one cannot separate between awaking and sleeping state, one cannot argue that dreams are not true for the sleeping subject. What is the criterion to argue that the appearances of the waking person are more true to the sleeping person? The dream-objects are thus, according to Protagoras, true to the dreamer while Socrates opposes the view. Aristotle was not intersted in this question.

Plato & moral questions in dreams

Plato divided in the Republic the soul into three different parts: the desiderative, the spirited, and the rational.

According to him, a vicious person is unable to restrain his sensual desires in sleep because the rational part of his soul is at rest.

However, these desires do not disturb a virtuous person in sleep, since he has prepared himself against them by arousing his rational part and by soothing the desiderative and spirited parts before falling asleep.

Aristotle Provides the most systematic and

largest discussion of dreams and sleeping in Ancient philosophy.

Three essays on the topic:

1) On Sleep and Waking (De somno et vigilia)

2) On Dreams (De Insomniis)

3) On Divination Through Sleep (De divination per somnum)

Litterature:

David Gallop: Aristotle: On Sleep and Dreams (including essays, introduction, notes)

Mika Perälä: Aristotle on the Perception of Perception: Seeing, Remembering, and Sleeping (Diss., HU 2010)

Rational approach Aristotle rejected the Platonic divination-doctrine. He began to study

dreams and the dreaming process in a rational way. In On Sleep and Waking he identifies sleep and waking as diametrically opposed phenomena characterized by the absence of perception. Dreams are a sort of misperception and thus to be inherently deceptive in a way that ordinary perception is not. Dreams are on non-existent things or situations.

“Waking and sleep belong to the same part of a living being, for they are opposites, and sleep appears to be a kind of privation of waking” (On Sleep and Waking, 435b25-7)

In On Divination through sleep, he states, "most so-called prophetic dreams are to be classed as mere coincidences, especially all such as are extravagant," and later includes that "the most skillful interpreter of dreams is he who has the faculty of absorbing resemblances. I mean that dream presentations are analogous to the forms reflected in water."

Dreams & Perception On Dreams // Aristotle suggests that dreams are neither the work of judgement nor of

perception in an unqualified way. Instead, dreams are the work of perception, but only of its imagining (phantastikon) capacity. Thus dreams are the work of imagination.

What does this mean? Appearances or impressions that characterize dreams are the result of the perceptual mechanisms being activated, but in the absence of external stimulation. Thus when are having no external stimulation, our perceptual mechanisms produces the phantasmas or imaginations we call dreams.

Sensory stimulation in wakefullness produces ”movements” within the body (probably bloodstream) which persists for a time after the external stimulation has ceased. Such prolonged sense impressions may give rise to delayed or false perceptions in wakefullness, particularly in emotional states or illnesses (compare illusions). These are exactly those that give rise to dreaming. Later Hobbes had a similar doctrine (decaying sense in Leviathan, ch. 2).

Although Aristotle rejects the Platonian forms, he uses a similar method in arguing that one is sleeping, saying that in dreaming ”what is like something is judged to be that very thing” (461b29) Thus we think that the dream object is a real object. The dreaming subject mistakes a mere likeness for a genuine sense-impression and believes to be perceiving a real thing. But there cannot be judgement in dreams as there is no perception and this explains the acceptance of strange phenomena in dreams.

On Dreams ”…It is plain that the movements arising from sense impressions,

both those coming from outside and those from within the body, are present not only when people are awake, but also whenever the affection called sleep comes upon them, and that they are especially apparent at that time. For in day-time, while the senses and the intellect are functioning, they are pushed aside or obscured, like a smaller fire next to a larger one, or minor pains and pleasures next to big ones, though when the latter cease, even the minor ones come to the surface. By night, however, owing to the inactivity of the special sense and their inability to function because of the reversal flow of heat from the outer parts to the interior, they are carried inward to the starting-point of perception, and become apparent as the disturbance subsides.”

Dreams from blood Thus dreams are in fact the result of

persistant sense impressions travelling in the blood stream, activating perception in the heart. Thus Aristotle is trying to give a naturalistic theory of dreams (he is joined in this by Democritus and Lucretius).

This happens all the time, but it is much more powerful during the sleep when the normal perception is suspended.

As the stream of blood behaves differently in different times, the dreams may be life-like or bizarre.

Because judgement is suspended during sleep, we accept bizarre elements in dreams as normal.

Distinction between dreams and hallucinations – the cause is the same, but latter take place when awake.

More Physiological theory According to Aristotle, sleep and waking result from the disabling

and activation of the body’s primary sense-organ, that is, heart.

Sleep is induced by by the “exhalations” of ingested food which thickens and heat the blood, rising to the brain where the are cooled before coalescing in the heart.

Similar effects are ascribed to soporific agents, states of fatigue an certain illnesses.

Aristotle distinguishes sleep from temporary incapacities of perception, such as fainting, and describes sleep as a form of “seizure”.

With this theory Aristotle helped advance the theory that dreams reflected a person's bodily health. It suggested that a doctor could diagnose a person illness by hearing a dream that they had.

Hippocratic-Galenic-tradition Aristotle’s essays influenced Ancient medicine and the later tradition.

Hippocrates, the founder of modern medicine supported his theory, and it is still practiced by some doctors of today. Dreams were seen to be signs of our internal conditions in the Hippocratic tradition. It was customary that a skillful physician interpreted dreams as part of his diagnostic and prognostic practice.

Galen of Pergamum, a Greco-Roman physician, picked up where Aristotle had left off. A patient of his dreamed that his left thigh was turned into marble and later lost the use of that leg due to palsy. A wrestler, he had treated, dreamed that he was standing in a pool of blood that had risen over his head. From this dream Galen concluded that this man needed a bloodletting for the pleurisy which he labored. By this means of treatment the man was cured.

“ … when the brain itself wishes to have rest on account of excessive activity, it induces to the animal a natural sleep, and especially whenever the nutritive capacity is in a position to take advantage of abundant moisture in itself…Dreams indicate for us the condition of the body. If someone sees a conflagration in sleep, he is troubled by yellow bile. If he sees smoke or mist or deep darkness, he is troubled by black bile. And a storm of rain indicates an excess of cold moisture, while snow, ice and hail indicate cold phlegm” (Galen, De symptomatum causis)

On Divination Through Sleep The belief that dreams have some significance is common and it does in fact make some

sense. But the idea that God sends us these dreams is absurd and if that is denied, there is

not much left in the belief of divination in dreams.

Therefore the divination is really sign or cause of an event or co-incidences.

Often dreams are signs of bodily condition.These signs are more easily noticed during

sleep because even small movements seem to be big because there is less information

from other senses.

Dreams can be causes – we rehearse situations in dreams and that can affect our

subsequent action (compare the Threat Simulation Theory by Antti Revonsuo)

Most dreams, however, are co-incidences. The predictions they include are very often not

fulfilled, especially in cases where the dreamer does not have the causal iniative.

In these kind of cases movements of air or water towards sleeping persons. Aristotle

critisized the views of Democritus, arguing basically the same as above – movements are

more readily noticed during the night. Especially ordinary people are subject to these as

they respond more easily to external stimuli.

More Aristotelian views Aristotle thought that the external stimuli affects the content of the dreams. For

example, if someone is feeling hot, one may dream that one is walking through fire. Perhaps this can also be explained through blood stream – perhaps the blood would turn hotter and affect the appearances which feature in the dreams.

In On Divination Through Sleep Aristotle rejects the view that dreams have predictive power – foretelling of future events based on dreams are just co-incidences. However, there are few exceptions.

The most important is that dreams act as early signs of medical illness. The physical changes produced by such illnesses lead to movements or abnormal sensory impressions from within, impressions that can be better observed during dreaming. The same view (that dreams are indicative of humoral imbalance was held by Hippocrates and Galen).

It is usually held that dreams have no telelogical function in Aristotle (such as divination), which is surprising as in Aristotle’s philosophy almost everything is teleological. There are other views, too. See Mor Segev: ”The Teleological Significance of Dreaming in Aristotle”, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 43 who discusses just the humoral inbalance as something which the dreams can bring up and which could be seen as their purpose.

According to Aristotle, animals do dream (for example, a dog whines while sleeping), but the dream has no content (De Somno 1, 454a19-29)

Malcolm on Aristotle’s views Norman Malcolm: Dreaming

For Aristotle, a dream is a certain sort of appearance presented to during sleep. In this is included the idea that the subject is aware of their dreaming, otherwise the dream would not exist.Thus dream is a mental experience that occur during sleep.

Malcom argues that this idea is misguided. Our concept of dreaming is derived not from any such experiences, but from the familiar practice of telling dreams when we wake up. The waking report of a person is the only criterion to judge that the person has slept. In addition, the report is the only criterion to discuss what the person has dreamed about.

Therefore there cannot be mistakes – one cannot remember wrongly one’s dreams.Malcolm argues that it is absurd to think that the persons is aware while being asleep.

If Malcolm is right, most of the traditional philosophical questions about dreams would be misguided as dreams are usually seen as kind of movies inside one’s head, independent of the waking state.

Problems for him: if animals dream, how can they report their dreams? Sleepwalking – one can demonstrate that someone is sleepwalking although the person does not remember this.

Remembering dreams In De Somnio Aristotle asks whether it be the

case that people always dream when asleep, but do not remember (453b19).

He does not accept that people always dream and that would be in contradiction with his physical views.

Aristotle is just arguing that our waking memory should be able to distinguish dream images from waking images. But of course they can err.

Gallop’s judgement: ”Malcolm was right to give dreamer’s reports a special status in the determination of what they have dreamt. But he was wrong to suggest that waking impressions or reports of dreams could not be mistaken, or that for someone to be properly said to have dreamt, nothing need to have happened in sleep at all” (Gallop, Aristotle On Sleep and Dreams, p. 56)

Epicureans

Epicurus (341-270 BC)

rejected the divination-

theory. Following

Democritus, he thought

dreams are caused naturally

by the effluences or films

penetrating the sensory

organs.

However, dreams are not

independent reality as

Democritus argued.

Lucretius Lucretius (94-49 BC) continued Epicurus’ theory in his On the Nature of the

Universe. The bizarre nature of dreams arises from the intermingling of surface films in the air prior to their entering the mind. For example, the image of a Centaur arises from the amalgamation of surface films from a man and a horse. The succession of images in dreams may be affected by waking preoccupations.

Sleep is caused by the vital spirit (the soul atoms diffused throughout the body) becoming bombarded from without by the air to which it is exposed and from within by respiratory motions. As a result the vital spirit is fragmented with part of it ”forced out and lost” and part of it ”compressed and driven into the inner depths”. The result is a weaking of the limbs and loss of senescence. It is the part of the spirit forced inward that prevents outright death, with its rekindling producing wakefullness.

“In principle, sleep occurs when the power of the spirit is scattered around the body, and part has been expelled and gone away, and part is compressed and has retreated into the innermost. For only then the limbs loosen and relax. (Lucretius, De rerum natura IV.916–919)

The Stoics & Cicero Cicero (106-43 BC): On divination – discusses the divinatory power

of dreams and other forms of divination in the Ancient world such as astrology, haruspicy (predicting from remains of sacrified animals) and augury (predicting from omens and signs).

“Posidonius maintained that people dream under the influence of gods in three ways. First, the soul foresees by itself because it bears affinity to the gods. Secondly, the air is full of immortal souls in which what one might call distinctive marks of truth are visible. Thirdly, the gods themselves converse with people when they are asleep.” (Cicero, De divinatione 1.64)

Cicero argues that the Stoics, such as Chrysippus (280-207 BC) or Posidonius (153-51 BC) supported the divination view – thus dreams represents connection with Gods.

He follows Aristotle in showing that the predictions in dreams are often co-incidences.

Cicero rejects the view of Democritus and argues that dreams are the result of ”an intrinsic internal energy”, in other words slackening of the tension in the pneuma [pneuma makes an animal capable of perception and movement].

An active cognitive component: various memories and daytime preoccupations come to bear on the mind during sleeping.

Roman philosophers The Oneirocriticon or The Interpretation of Dreams by the Roman

Artemidorus (c. AD 150) is the first comprehensive book on the interpretation of dreams. In this five-volume work, Artemidorus brought out the idea that dreams are unique to the dreamer. He believed that it was the person's occupation, social status and health would affect the symbols in a dream. The interpretations were often extremely strange.

Macrobius (late 3rd century AD): Commentary of the Dream of Scipio. Macrobius classifies dreams into five cathegories: 1) enigmatic dream 2) prophetic vision 3) oracular dream (oracle-like dream) 4) nightmare 5) apparation (quasi-perceptual). The first three are predictative, the latter two not. Nightmares are caused by mental and physical distress or anxiety by future and apparations are close to lucid dreaming.

Medieval philosophy of dreams The Ancient thinkers formulated

the basic ideas of dreaming – one can even say that it took until the neuroscience until the questions changed. Thus the medieval philosophers continued along the same lines.

Macrobius was thought to be the leading authority on dreams in the middle ages. This was probably because he supporte the divination-view which was compatible with the scholastic christian philosophy.

Another important influence was the Aristotelian physiology of dreams.

Prelude: Augustinus Church Father St. Augustine is in fact part of Ancient world, but as he is the first

Christian thinker who wrote about dreams, I will discuss him here.

Augustinus is foremost known from the moral problem of dreams: sinful

content in dreams (Confessions, book X) which we talked about earlier

Another quote: ”A question sometimes arises about the consent gven by those

who are asleep when they think they have sexual intercourse either contrary to

their goo resolutions or against what is lawful. This does not happen unless there

is something tha we also though while awake, not by consenting to an opinion,

but in a way in which we also speak of such things for some reason” (De genesi ad

litterarum XII.15.31)

Augustinus is following the Greek tradition: good moral character produces

better dreams. We can battle against sinful dreams by purifying our thoughts

and desires while awake with the help of God.

Sleep and digestion

A new theme in the history of philosophy of dreams is the idea that the origin of sleep in corporeal processes is related to digestion.

This view was included in the medical treatise called Pantegni which was the most used in Western Europe.

In the treatise the vapours of digestion rise to the brain as the cause of termination of the sensory operations in sleep. The theory has some similarities to Aristotle’s physiological theory, but the medieval theory was explained on a brain-centered view of perception although Thomas Aquinas argued that there are two organs related to sleep: brains and heart and the definition of sleep depends on which one is considered central.

Brain-centered view:

”This fine and sweet fume ascends from digestion and gently touches the brain and fulfils its small cavities so that all its activities are tempered down. This is sleep. In this state all powers of the soul cease to act and only the natural power is active, its acts more intensively when it is not preventedby nature. The inner soul which has excluded all functions of the senses presents to itself past, present and future things. These are dreams.” (William of Saint-Thierry, De natura corporis et animae I.11-12.)

Jean Buridan on causes of sleep(heart-centered view)

”Sleep comes as follows: when one has eaten, the food is heated and digested by

heat which originally comes from the heart. This heating makes some vapours

come from the food. Because of its warmth and fineness, the vapours ascend

into the head and then, because of the coldness of the brain, they become colder

and coarser and, therefore, they turn naturally back downwards. When they

meet the heat of the heart they are diffused to exterior parts of the body and

they push the heart of the heart and the spirit to the seat intensifying the heat in

the digestive area so that the digestion of food will be completed.” (De somno et

vigilia q. 5)

In this theory the brains have only a cooling function in sending the digestive

vapours back down towards the heart. The actual ceasing of the sensory

operations takes place when the internal heat and sensory spirits do not flow

from the heart to the sense organs as in waking state.

Types of dreams

In anonymous treatise De spiritu et anima, based on Macrobius’s theory distinguishes between five types of dreams:

1) Oracular saying (in dream some authority (father, priest, God) says that something is to take place, something is to be done etc.)

2) Vision (something occurs exactly as it had happened in a dream)

3) Dream (something enveloped in figures which cannot be understood without interpretation)

4) Nightmare (something has worried a waking man and return to him when he is asleep)

5) Apparition (one has barely begun to sleep, and still thinks he is awake; sees men rushing down upon him or sees differing forms wandering about, which may be either pleasing or disturbing.

Character and physiology Everyone dreams according to

one’s pursuits, and the skills of individual arts recur in dreams as they are imprinted in the mind.

Dreams differ according to one’s infirmities. They also vary according to the diversity of one’s customs and humors. The sanguine dreams different dreams than the choleric, phlegmatic or melancholic.

Others see red and coloured dreams, while melancholics dream in black and white

Dreaming and prophecy Thomas Aquinas (Questiones

disputatae de veritate 12.3)

Two kinds of prophecy: natural and supernatural

When person is sleeping, we call this kind of dream apparition and the person is awake, a prophecy is vision.

In both cases the soul is kept away completely or partially by phantasms.

In vision there is need to understand while in apparition we just experience the prophecy

Markku Roinila

Philosophy of Dreams and Sleeping:

Renaissance and Early Modern

Philosophy views

Renaissance philosophy of dreams Most Renaissance

philosophers followed more or less the Ancient views, especially Aristotle and the medical accounts of sleep.

Marsilio Ficino’s neoplatonist philosophy // sleep does not affect the highest spiritual part of the soul – this was a popular view from many of thinkers in the occultist natural philosophy from Paracelcus to Fludd.

Ficino on the higher spheres “If this is so, why should not also the higher minds that are conjunct with our mind always move it? We are not aware of this impulse when our middle part is so much occupied with its own acts that the influence of the mind does not reach it. But when it is empty, what would stop some angelic thinking from entering our rational powers, although we cannot see where it comes from? This is evident in those who, without a teacher, only by the intention of emptied reason or even in a calm state, have often discovered many outstanding things even without looking for them, as though the light of the sun were suddenly and spontaneously diffused through the serene air.” (Ficino, Theologia Platonica XIII.2

According to Ficino, the highest soul can be in contact with higher spheres and be informed by them when lower levels do not interfere; such cases can occur during sleep.

Paracelcus “Thus nothing is idle in nature. All things are at work from hour to hour, from day to day, from night to night. Only human beings rest at night and do not work at Sabbath because of the divine command. But the day of rest has not been ordained for the spirit which must not be idle and rest; it is established only for the rest of the body, as of the beasts of the field and whatever pertains to it. The spirit must always be at work, and neither sleep nor Sabbath can make it still and quiet. The same goes for all creatures. Even though their body rests, their spirit never stands still and continues to work each day.” (Paracelsus, Werke I.13)

The idea of spiritual progress in sleep, when the disturbing external effects are excluded, fascinates Paracelsus and other authors who combine mysticism with natural philosophy. This view is unique to Renaissance thinkers and have no predecessors in Ancient or Medieval tradition.

Early Modern Philosophy of Dreams

A general theme in Early Modern philosophy (around Descartes to Kant) is appearance vs. reality: can we perceive the world as it is? What is real and what is illusion? This was reflected in the philosophy of dreams, although the continuation to Ancient and Medieval tradition is clear. Early modernists were interested in perception, the knowledge of reality. All agreed that dreams are perceptual.

Secularization, trying to find natural causes for dreams instead of relying to divination-explanations

Nevertheless, the Early Modern period is perhaps the foremost period in the history of philosophy when dreams were discussed. The discussion was started by René Descartes and the other philosophers continued the discussion.

Central themes in

Early Modern Philosophy of Dreams

General division between rationalists (we can have knowledge without sense experience) vs. empiricistst (sense experience is necessary in order to gain knowledge).

Is there cognitive activity in sleep? This is a continuation from Aristotle. Descartes argued that the soul always thinks, but many empiricists thought this was absurd.

How can we know that our perceptual experiences are not dreams and the reality is not mere dream? (dream-scepticism) This problem was raised already by Plato, but made popular again by Descartes in his Meditations.

What causes the content of dreams? Most thought that they follow naturally from the physical and mental states of the organism. This means that divination as the Stoics had it disappears from the dream theories. Some Early Moderns (Hobbes, for example) discussed on the effects of external stimuli to the dreams.

Descartes on dreams René Descartes (1596-1650) was the

most important and the most controversial philosopher on dreams in the Early Modern philosophy and probably of all time.

He continued the Ancient tradition, but combined with the Ancient views the idea of dreams as perceptions and the idea of appareance vs. reality.

Descartes established dream scepticism, perhaps the most well-known argument concerning dreams (compare, for example, the film Matrix).

There are discussion of dreams in most central philosophical works of Descartes: Discourse on Method, Meditations on the First Philosophy and Principles of Philosophy.

The soul is always thinking One of Descartes’ most controversial claims is that the soul is always thinking,

even in sleep.

”The reason why I believe that the soul is always thinking is the same that makes me believe that light is always shining even though there are no eyes looking at it, that heat is always warm even though it heats no one, that the matter or extended substance always has extension, and in general, that what constitutes the nature of a thing always belongs to it as long as it exists. Therefore it would be easier for me to believe that the soul ceases to exist when it is said to cease thinking than to conceive that it exists without thought. And I see no difficulty here, unless it is regarded as superfluous to believe that it thinks in case no memory of it remains in us afterwards. But if we consider that every night we have a thousand thoughts, and even awake a thousand thoughts in an hour, which leave no more trace in our memory and seem no more useful than the thoughts we may have had before our birth, it is easier to be convinced of this than to judge that a substance whose nature is to think can exist without thinking.” (Descartes, Letter to Gibieuf, 19 January 1642, AT III, 479)

Objections Gassendi thought the claim absurd in his objections to Descartes’s Meditations, but D.

defended himself as follows: ” ‘You say you want to stop and ask whether I assume the soul always thinks. But why should it not always think, when it is a thinking substance? Is it so strange that we do not remember the thoughts that the soul had in mother’s womb or in deep sleep?”

This claim puzzled the followers of Descartes. For example, Arnauld asked if it would not be enough that the soul preserves its ability to think at every moment, but Descartes emphasized that actual thought is necessary (Letter 4 June 1648, AT V, 193).

Locke’s ridicule: “Who can find it reasonable, that the Soul should, in its retirement, during sleep, have so many hours thoughts, and yet never light on any of those Ideas it borrowed not from Sensation or Reflection, or at least preserve the memory of none, but such, which being occasioned from the Body, must needs be less natural to a Spirit? ...I would be glad also to learn from these Men, who so confidently pronounce, that the humane Soul, or which is all one, that a Man always thinks, how they come to know it; nay, how they come to know, that they themselves think, when they themselves do not perceive it.” (Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding II.1.17 and 18)

Locke argues that every drowsy nod shakes this argument; later Kant followed Decsartes’s argument, saying that a sleeper must always dream.

Dream argument This is the old problem from Plato in

Theatetus: ”I am awake or am I dreaming?”Is reality only an illusion?

Descartes differs from Plato and Aristotle in supposing that dreams are actual perceptions and his followers and enemies followed this idea.

In other words, when we are awake we perceive and when we are asleep, we continue perceiving. Because of this, it may be diffult to separate the waking and sleeping state from each other.

In short, Descartes’s answer is that the waking life is more consistent than dreaming life.

Dream argument in the 1st Meditation “As if I were not a man who sleeps at night, and who often has all the same experiences in dreams as madmen do when awake, or sometimes even less likely ones. How many times has it happened that I have been convinced, in nightly rest, that I am in this place, dressed in gown, sitting by the fire – when in fact I am lying undressed in bed! Yet at this moment I am certainly looking at this piece of paper with vigilant eyes; this head that I move is not asleep; I stretch out and feel my hand deliberately and knowingly. What happens to someone asleep would not be so distinct. But do I not remember that I have also been deceived in other occasions by similar thoughts while asleep! Thinking about this more carefully, I see so plainly that there are no sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep, that this astonishes me, and this very embarrassment almost reinforces the thought that I may be asleep.Let us suppose then that we are dreaming, and that these particulars – that we open our eyes, that we are moving our heads and stretching out our hands – are not true. Perhaps, indeed, we do not even have such hands nor such a whole body at all. (Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia I, AT VII, 19)

Some dimension of the Dream argument The argument has been very popular. It became one of the central sceptical hypothesis – one can doubt

everything, considering it all as a dream. The argument has influenced the idea of virtual reality. The ability of the mind to be tricked into believing a mentally generated world is the "real world" means at least one variety of simulated reality is a common, even nightly event. Those who argue that the world is not simulated must concede that the mind—at least the sleeping mind—is not itself an entirely reliable mechanism for attempting to differentiate reality from illusion.

The dream argument has similarities to some views in Eastern philosophies. This type of argument is well known as "Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly”. One night, Zhuangzi (369 BC) dreamed that he was a carefree butterfly, flying happily. After he woke up, he wondered how he could determine whether he was Zhuangzi who had just finished dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who had just started dreaming he was Zhuangzi. This was a metaphor for what he referred to as a "great dream":

”He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt. While he is dreaming he does not know it is a dream, and in his dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman - how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle. Yet, after ten thousand generations, a great sage may appear who will know their meaning, and it will still be as though he appeared with astonishing speed.”

Some schools of thought in Buddhism (e.g., Dzogchen), consider perceived reality literally unreal. As a prominent contemporary teacher, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, puts it: "In a real sense, all the visions that we see in our lifetime are like a big dream [...]". In this context, the term 'visions' denotes not only visual perceptions, but appearances perceived through all senses, including sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations, and operations on received mental objects.

More dimensions Many philosophically-influenced films

or novels are related to the argument. Think Alice in Wonderland, Matrix (see http://matrix.cultzone.com.br/Philosophy%20Dream%20Skepticism.htm), Inception, Blade Runner etc.

Some litterature: Peter J. Markie: ”Dreams and Deceivers in Meditation One”, The Philosophical Review, vol 90, 2 (1981), pp. 185-209.; Robert Hanna: ”Descartes and Dream Scepticism Revisited”, Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 30, 3 (1992), pp. 377-398; Brad Chynoweth: ”Descartes’ Resolution of the Dreaming Doubt”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91 (2010), pp. 153-179

Distinction between dreams and waking life in the 6th Meditation

”For I know that in matters regarding the well-being of the body, all my senses report the truth much more frequently than not. Also, I can almost always make use of more than one sense to investigate the same thing; and in addition, I can use both my memory, which connects present experiences with preceding ones, and my intellect, which has by now examined all the causes of error. Accordingly, I should not have any further fears about the falsity of what my senses tell me every day; on the contrary, the exaggerated doubts of the last few days should be dismissed as laughable. This applies especially to the principal reason for doubt, namely my inability to distinguish between being asleep and being awake. For now I notice that there is a vast difference between the two, in that dreams are never linked by memory with all other actions of life as waking experiences are.” (CSM II, 61)

The solution and an example Thus whereas in the 1st Meditation Descartes admits that dreams are sometimes difficult

to distinguish from waking state, in the 6th Meditation he argues that in waking state we can trust that our memory connects things to each other, as we can trust the benevolence of God to such an extent that our perceptions are equivalent to reality. In dreams this is not the case and the things and event in the dreams are not connected to each other, making the dreams strange and bizarre with no apparent relation between cause and an effect and having no apparent connection to my life. This is why our memories of dreams are inconstant and fragmentary. Descartes gives an example:

“If, while I am awake, anyone were suddenly to appear to me and then disappear immediately, as happens in sleep, so that I could not see where he had come from or where he had gone to, it would not be reasonable for me to judge that he was a ghost, or a vision created in my brain, rather than a real man. But when I distinctly see where things come from and where and when they come to me, and when I can connect my perceptions of them with the whole of the rest of my life without a break, then I am quite certain that when I encounter these things I am not asleep but awake. And I ought not to have even the slightest doubt of their reality if, after calling upon all the senses as well as my memory and my intellect in order to check them, I receive no conflicting reports from any of these sources.For from the fact that God is not a deceiver it follows that in cases like these I am completely free from error.” (CSM II, 61-62).

Remembering dreams

Because the dream images

are so scattered, bizarre

and there seem not to be

cause and effect, our

memories of dreams are

very fragmentary.

We can remember just

some vivid images which

are often very different

from our everyday

experience.

Objections by Bourdin and Hobbes According to Bourdin, even

seemingly self-evident principles could be mere dreams. Descartes seems to think the kind of self-evident principles he regards essential to waking life are related to innate thoughts, that is, they are related to God.

In his objections to Meditations (3rd objections), Hobbes gives interesting arguments against Descartes’s views.

Hobbes on dream argument Hobbes starts with the dream argument, doubting that memory and waking state are connected:

”Consider someone who dreams that he is in doubt as to whether he is dreaming or not. My question is whether such a man could not dream that his dream fits in with his ideas of a long series of past events. If this is possible, then what appears to the dreamer to be actions belonging to his past life could be judged to be true occurences, just as if he were awake. Moreover, as [Descartes] himself asserts, the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends solely on our knowledge of the true God. But in that case an atheist cannot infer that he is awake on the basis of memory of his past life. The alternative is that someone can know he is awake without knowledge of the true God.” (CSM II, 137)

Thus one can, by using the coherence-method judge that one is not dreaming when in fact one is dreaming.

A more serious objection by Hobbes concerns the validity of Descartes’s sceptical method. First Hobbes argues that if dream fits well with the history of the dreamer, that is, remembered events, one cannot distinguish between dreaming and waking state. Many dreams are not extravagant.

What if one does not believe in God? Then God as the great connector of events to other cannot be brought to help and ends up to a situation where one cannot know if one is awake or not or one can know that oneis awake independently of God which would question the whole foundations of Descartes’s metaphysics.

Descartes’s answer Descartes answers to Hobbes that a

dreamer can indeed connect the dream to his earlier experiences, but this is an illusion. The dreamer dreams about these connections and when he wakes up, he finds that he has made a mistake. In other words, one find that the dream images are so scattered that he infers having seen a dream.

What about the atheist? An atheist can rely on his or her earlier memories and infer that one is awake – he is just no aware of the fact that the continuity and the consistency is actually God’s doing. But God is really the great connector.

Malcolm on Descartes’ argument According to Norman Malcolm, Descartes is in fact saying that if I can’t

connect things I see in dreams to the events of my life, I have to conclude that I am dreaming. Against this one could say that it makes no sense to suppose that a person who is fast asleep to make judgements or connecting things. Ergo: Descartes’s solution is not valid.

However, Descartes is not saying that the connecting things or judgement takes place in sleep. Instead, in the 6th Meditation he says that the deliberation takes place when we are awake and we recall the dream. When we are awake and we recall the dream, we note that there are gaps and incoherence and therefore one can conclude that it has been a dream.

According to Bernard Williams, Descartes says that we can have judgements in dreams, but as a rule they are incorrect. But in waking state we are capable of valid reasoning and explain the sleeping state. But when we are asleep, we cannot do this. Therefore Malcolm’s objection is mistaken.

Leibniz’s admission Leibniz argues in De modo distinguendi

phaenomena reali ab imaginariis that the distinction cannot in fact be demonstrated:

“It must indeed be admitted that the criteria of real phenomena thus far offered are not demonstrative, even taken together, although they have the greatest probability, or popularly speaking, they provide moral certainty, but do not establish metaphysical certainty so that the contrary claim would imply a contradiction. Thus it cannot be absolutely demonstrated by any argument that bodies exist, and nothing prevents certain well-ordered dreams from being the objects of our mind, which we judge to be true and which, as regards practical matters, are equivalent to truth because of their accord with each other.” (A VI, 4, p. 1502)

Thus there cannot be a demonstration of the distinction, but Leibniz does not see it as a serious problem.

Thomas Hobbes on Dreams Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

was a British philosopher, most famous for his political theory (Leviathan, 1651).

He was also perhaps the most profilic theorist of dreams in England.

Besides writings the objections to Descartes, he developed his own views on dreams in The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (1640), especially in the first part (Human Nature).

Dreams as imagination Hobbes followed Aristotle in thinking that in sleep the dreams are products of imagination. In

Hobbes they are a special type of imagination:

“The imaginations of them that sleep, are those we call Dreams. And these also (as all other Imaginations) have been before, either totally, or by parcells in the Sense. And because in sense, the Brain, the Nerves, which are the necessary Organs of sense, are so benummed in sleep, as not easily to be moved by the action of Externall Objects, there can happen in sleep, no Imagination; and therefore no Dreame, but what proceeds from the agitation of the inward parts of mans body; which inward parts, for the connexion they have with the Brayn, and other Organs, when they be distempered, do keep the same in motion; whereby the Imaginations there formerly made, appeare as if a man were waking.” (Hobbes, Leviathan I.2)

Thus Hobbes does not give dreaming a metaphysical role – sleeping is the lack of sense perception. Like Aristotle, he is arguing that the images in sleep are clear and vivid because the sense organs which cause confusion are shut down in sleep: “…the organs of sense being now benummed, so there is no new object, which can master and obscure them with a more vigorous impression, a Dreame must needs be more clear, in this silence of sense, than are our waking thoughts.” (Hobbes, Leviathan I.2)

Whereas Descartes saw dreams as scattered, weak and illogical images, Hobbes considers the dream images as clear and powerful. We do not wonder strange images in dreams without a relevant cause because wonder requies comparision with past events whereas in dreams everything is as it were present at the same time.

Hobbes also says that in dreams we always think that we are awake.

Physical causes of dreams Although Hobbes sees dreams as products of special kind of imagination, there is a physical

cause behind it. Imaginations take place when the internal organs press the brains:

“The causes of dreams (if they be natural) are the actions or violence of the inward parts of a man upon his brain, by which the passages of sense, by sleep benumbed, are restored to their motion.” (Human Nature, III, 3).

Again like Aristotle, Hobbes saw dreams often related to illnesses and distempers in the body. Different distempers produce different kinds of dreams.

“The signs by which this appareth to be so, are the differences of dreams proceeding from the different accidents of man’s body. Old men being commonly less healthful and less free from inward pains, are thereby more subject to the dreams, especially such dreams as be painful: as dreams of lust, or dreams of anger, according as the heart, or the other parts within, work more or less upon the brain, by more or less heat.” (Human Nature, III, 3).

According to Hobbes, the bizarreness of dreams is not related to memory as in Descartes. According to Hobbes, there is no consistency in dreams and if there is, it is a co-incidence.

The reason for the bizarreness is the fact when the internal organs press the brains, the parts of the brain do not return to motion at the same time during sleep. Thus there are powerful images, but are not usually consistent.

The somatic theory of Hobbes According to Hobbes, somatic impulses often affect the content of our dreams.

Not only the illnesses, but also external conditions may affect the dreams. In Leviathan he says:

”...And seeing dreames are caused by the distemper of some of the inward parts of the Body; divers distempers must needs cause different Dreams. And hence it is, that lying cold breedeth Dreams of Feare, and raiseth the thought and Image of some fearfull object (the motion from the brain to the inner parts, and from the inner parts to the Brain being reciprocall:) And that as Anger causeth heat in some parts of the Body, when we are awake; so when we sleep, the over heating of the same parts causeth Anger, and raiseth up in the brain the Imagination of an Enemy. ... In summe, our Dreams are the reverse of our waking Imaginations; The motion when we are awake, beginning at one end; and when we Dream, at another.” (Hobbes, Leviathan I.2)

This somatic theory was influential for a long time, but the modern psychology has shown that it is incorrect. These conditions can affect our sleeping, but not the content of dreams.

Decaying sense As in Aristotle, Hobbes argues that

imagination is an image or decaying perception which gradually changes more and more confused.

Like in imagination, our memory decays with time, like when we are in a foreign city and our memories of it turn more and more confused when time passes.

For this reason there is no criterion that will tell us whether we are dreaming or not. One can dream of doubting is this a dream or not [> lucid dreaming], but it is certain that images are much more detailed and clearer in dreams than in waking life.

Apparitions According to Hobbes, men often describe their past dreams as apparitions if the dream

concerned ordinary things. Hobbes seems to think that we can remember dreams better than waking life images – the dream-images are experiences that are powered-up by the ceasing of other senses.

In Leviathan Hobbes has a long discussion on apparations [lucid dreaming] and visions. He says that sometimes, for example, when we are full of fearful thoughts, we do not observe that we have slept. We sleep clothed, nod off in public. Often in these cases there are apparations or visions.

For example, Brutus tells about Philippi who in the night before a great battle saw a fearful apparation which is often thought to be a vision (happening while awake), but Hobbes thinks it was a short dream caused by the anxiety of the battle. Philippi thought he saw a vision.

God can make unnatural apparitions, but this is so common that there is nothing to be feared for in these.

Hobbes uses the distinction between apparition and vision to critisize past primitive religions who believed in fairies, ghosts etc. He thinks withches are invented to glorify the crosses, holy water etc. of the holy men. Utilizing superstition, some use apparations to mislead common men. In other words, he rejects the Stoic divination-tradition.

”If this superstitious fear of spirits were taken away, and with it, prognostiques from dreams, false prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civill obedience.” (Leviathan, II, 7)

Pascal on dreams In Penseés (1658-62) Blaise

Pascal (1623-1662) argues that if we saw similar dreams each night, we would get used to them:

”If we were to dream every night the same thing, it would probably have as much effect upon us as the objects which we see daily…but because our dreams are all different, what we see in them affects us much less than what we see when we are awake, on account of its continuity…”

Malebranche on remembering dreams Malebranche has a more positive attitude to remembering dreams than

Descartes and he is especially concerned by sinful visions:

”It is fairly common for certain people to have dreams at night vivid enough to be exactly recalled when they awake, even though the subject of their dream is not in itself very terrible. And so it is not difficult for people to persuade themselves that they have been to the witches’ sabbath, for it is sufficient for this that their brain preserve the traces caused there during their sleep” (Malebranche, The Search After Truth, II, 3, 6)

However, his basic view is similar to Descartes: ”The chief cause that prevents us from taking our dreams for reality is that we cannot connect our dreams with the things we have done while awake, for this is how we recognize that they are only dreams. Now imaginary witches cannot recognize by this means that their witches sabbath is a dream, for they go to the witches sabbath only during the night, and what happens at the sabbath cannot be connected to other actions during the daytime. Hence, it is morally impossible to disabuse them in this way…” (Malebranche, The Search After Truth, II, 3, 6)

Spinoza on dreams Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) had a

necessitarian metaphysical system where the mind and the body are attributes of God or nature.

As in many other respects, he followed Hobbes’s views on dreams. However, he argues that when we are dreaming, we are more adventurous and do things which we would not do when we are awake (especially sleepwalkers). Despite necessitarianism, the decisions made in dreams seem to be free to the dreamer although they are actually not free.

Spinoza on dreams and body Spinoza seems to follow the somatic theory

of Hobbes. For example, as we remember, he explained the cause of seeing in dreams a black brazilian as a consequence of a delirium or sickeness of a body.

According to Spinoza, when we are asleep, the body does not register or react to our decisions (for example, decision to go to the lecture).

A problem follows: if memory is connecting those ideas that are outside of the body or affects of the body (Ethics II, p18, scholium), it would seem that there cannot be memories about dreams as without the body we cannot remember anything (E5p21). Yet in his letter Spinoza argues seeing a dream.

Perhaps the problem can be helped by arguing that we can remember some vivid images but not decisions (on the other hand, Spinoza says that there is no thinking in dreams, either).

Dreaming & Thinking Contra Descartes, Spinoza does not allow thinking while sleeping. But in the Ethics III,

p2, note he says:

”Does not experience…teach that if…the body is inactive, the mind is at the same time incapable of thinking? For when the body is at rest in sleep, the mind at the same time remains senseless with it, nor does it have the power of thinking, as it does when awake.”

In E IIp49 he discusses dreaming in more detail. He says that we should conceive a child imagining a winged horse and not perceiving anything else (that is, dreaming). This would mean that the child regards the horse as present although he cannot be sure that it exists.

Spinoza says that we find this kind of situation daily in our dreams: ”We find this daily in our dreams, and I do not believe there is anyone who thinks that while he is dreaming he has a free power of suspending judgment concerning the things he dreams, and of bringing it about that he does not dream the things he dreams he sees. Nevertheless, it happens that even in dreams we suspend judgement, viz. when we dream that we dream.”

What is he saying here? Apparently dreams and imaginations in general just come to us, we cannot help seeing them. A winged horse is a vivid image (although it does not exist) and we cannot question it. The child lacks the knowledge that would tell him or her that this image could not possibly exist. As an exception, he mentions lucid dreaming (dreaming that we dream).

Leibniz’s fragment on dreams Leibniz (1646-1716) had a large

project in his early years called Demonstrationes catholicae, including a short fragment on dreams (it is to appear in Finnish with an introduction in Niin & Näin 4/2013)

In the fragment (1668?) he seems largely to agree with Descartes, but also presents his own views on dreams.

The fragment is published in Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters (ed. Loemker), pp. 113-115.

Leibniz on lucid dreaming Leibniz has a comment on lucid

dreaming: ”…now and then the dreamer himself observes that he is dreaming, yet the dream continues. Here he must be thought of as if he were awake for a brief interval of time, and then, once more oppressed by sleep, returned to his previous state.”

Related to this is the phenomenon of trying to wake oneself up: ”Some men can wake themselves up, and it is a familiar experience of mine that, when some pleasing vision presents itself, I notice that I am dreaming and try my eyes and pull them open with my fingers to admit the light.” // here Leibniz is probably referring to the Augustinian problem – the pleasing vision is related to sense pleasure which is related to sin.

Other sinful problems of sleep Related to the same Augustinian question is the phenomenon of

falling out of bed which, according to Leibniz, are popularly

ascribed to lapses into sin. ”Sometimes when this has happened to

me, I can scarcely persuade myself to fall asleep all night. For in

the first moment of falling asleep, I suddenly recollect myself, and

sensing this fact, leap up.”

Leibniz also comments the so-called wet dreams: ”Nor ought we

to overlook the spontaneous ejection of semen without any

contact in sleep; in wakers it is expelled only when they are

strongly agitated, but in sleep [animal] spirits are moved internally

by a strong imagination alone and without any rubbing of

members. I have also heard this confirmed by a physician.”

Cartesian argument According to Leibniz, when we are awake all our actions and thoughts are

directed at least impilicitly to the ultimate goal, that is, perfection, but when we are dreaming ”there is no relation to the whole of things”.

Waking up is to remember oneself, that is, to connect the present state to our other events in life. In this sense Leibniz differs from Descartes: not only memory, but also self-consciousness is required to be awake.

For a general criterion between sleeping and being awake Leibniz presents that we can be certain of our waking state only when we remember how we have arrived to our present state and see how the things that appear to us are connected to each other. In dreams we cannot see these connections and the causes of our present state and we are not surprised by the lack of them.

To Bayle Leibniz wrote: “God could have given each substance its own phenomena, independent of all others; but in so doing he would have made as many unconnected worlds, so to speak, as there are substances – rather as we say that when dreaming one is in a world of one’s own, and one enters the common world on awakening.”

Comment on Hobbes Leibniz also comments the remark by Hobbes where he says that in dreams

everything seems to appear without our finding them not at all strange or bizarre.

Objection: ”But, you say, surely we often experience judgment or reflection in dreams, or at least a knowledge of the past which involves judgment, for we both deliberate and remember.”

Leibniz: This is because making judgements requires memory and if we do judgements in our sleep, it is founded on our previous experiences although we are not always aware of it. ”For entire conversations occur to us which are certainly not without judgements about them, but because judgements already made recur with the experiences themselves.”

Therefore in dreams our judgements are founded only to impressions received therein ja all the memory-images are blocked out. Because of this we accept everything as normal – we cannot compare the dream images to waking images.

Content of dreams Leibniz is especially interested in the

bizarre content of dreams.

”There is one very remarkable thing in dreams, for which I believe no one can give a reason. It is the formation of visions by a spontaneous organization carried out in a moment – a formation more elegant than any which we can attain by much thought when we are awake.”

In dreams our imagination is more free than in waking state:

”To the sleeper there often occurs visions of great buildings which he has never seen, while it would be difficult for me, while awake, to form an idea of even the smallest house different from those I have seen, without a great amount of thought.”

Inspired by dreams Leibniz brings out the creative effect of dreams – which we often do not

remember:

”I wish I could remember what marvellous discourses, what books and letters, what poems beautiful beyond all doubt, but never previously read, I have read in dreams without my shaping them at all, just as if they had just been composed and offered to my sight.”

These seem to arise without effort whereas when one is awake, a lot of work is needed to produce them. Even such monstroties as flying man are more difficult to picture when one is awake: ”They are sought by the waker, they offer themselves to the sleeper”.

Leibniz speculates that there must be some architectural or harmonious principle in the mind which, when freed from separating ideas by judgement, turns to compounding them.

Finally, Leibniz says: ”A reason must be given why we do not remember waking expriences in dream but do remember the dream when awake.” On this, Locke disagreed, as we will see next.

Leibniz’s letter to Sophie Charlotte 1702 Leibniz gives a special case concerning

dreams.

He argues that if in a dream one finds a demonstrative truth (for example the Pythagorean theorem where in a right triangle the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides), it would be equally certain than if we were awake.

According to Leibniz, this shows that a distinct truth is independent of the sensible and material things outside of us. Although the dream images are, as a rule, fragmentary, some distinct truth can hit us in dreams and because it is so vivid, we can remember it once we wake up.

John Locke on Dreams John Locke (1632-1704) was the founder of

British empiricism. He argued that our mind is like an empty drawing-table (tabula rasa) when we are born, so we learn everything about the world through experience.

For Locke, dreaming is illogical: images following each other as in Hobbes or Descartes. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding II, I, §16-17 he sees dreams perceptions as incoherent series of images.

However, contra Descartes, we do not think when we are sleeping and therefore we cannot be happy or in misery during sleep as this would require consciousness.

“Thus, methinks, every drowsy nod shakes their doctrine, who teach that the soul is always thinking” (E II, I, §13).

Dreaming and thinking Locke discusses a case when we the soul thinks during the sleep, but we just do not

remember it. But he is very sceptical of this:

”For who can without any more ado, but being barely told so, imagine, that the greatest part of men, do, during all their lives, for several hours every day, think of something, which if they were asked, even in the middle of these thoughts, they could remember nothing of it?”(E II, 1, §14)

Locke argues that most men pass a great part of their sleep without dreaming.

He presents a different criterion than Descartes dream-argument: in the waking-state we use the materials of the body when we think and our thinking leaves memory traces in the brain, but in the sleeping state we do not use the bodily organs and therefore there is left no memory traces in the brain and consequently we cannot remember the thoughts in the dreams > there is probably do thinking in the sleeping state

Instead, we can remember some of the perceptions of the dreams. Joining party with Descartes, he says:

”How extravagant and incoherent for the most part they are; how little conformable to the perfection and order of a rational being, those who are acquinted with dreams, need not be told.” (E II, 1, §16).

As on example of this he mentions duration: we very seldom have any ideas of duration in dreams.

Dreams as waking man’s ideas Because the soul does not think

during sleep, dreams are really fragments of our waking life:

”The dreams of sleeping men, are, as I take it, all made up of the waking man’s ideas, though for the most part, oddly put together.” (E II, 1, §17)

The idea looks to be the following: in the waking state we think and employ the organs of the body in this thinking. They leave memory traces to our brain. When we are sleep, these traces are mixed together and produce the dreams but as they are only traces, not the original thoughts, the dreams can be strange.

Dreaming as having ideas In the end, Locke’s theory of dreams is not too far from Hobbes:

”Dreaming itself, is the having of ideas (whilst the outward senses are stopp’d, so that they receive not outward objects with their usual quickness) in the mind, not suggested by any external objects, or known occasion; nor under any choice or conduct of the understanding at all. And whether that, which we call Extasy, be not dreaming with the Eyes open, I leave to be examined.” (Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding II, 19, §1

As there is no thinking in the sleeping state, the dreams are ”leftovers” from the waking state which are more vivid in the sleeping state as bodily sensory organs are closed.

Locke is not continuing Aristotle’s view of dreams as product of imagination as Hobbes did, but rather dreams are memory traces or memory fragments mixed together.

Locke also agrees with Hobbes that external things can affect our dreams: if we hear a bell sound off, it can become part of the dream, likewise our movement during the sleep (although there is no memory trace of these, so they are exceptions although not a result of thinking while sleeping).

This can happen also in another direction: when we dream having a fight, we can ”feel” a punch although there is not one in the first place and according to Locke, we cannot feel pleasure or pain in the dreams.

No criterion Although Locke in certain aspects agrees with Descartes, he does not admit that there is

a general criterion to distinguish dreams from the waking state. He seems to think that the ideas or memory traces we have in dreams can be of various strength and for this reason, more or less vivid.

Because of this, he cannot agree with Hobbes that the waking experience is in principle similar with the sleep experience. Supposing this would only make us suspicious towards our own senses.

Locke’s view of dreams as a sort of puzzle of material from the waking state has a striking similarity to some contemporary brain-research-orientated psychology. Robert Stickgold who is part of Allan J. Hobson’s team has showed through his experiments that during the REM-phase of the sleep the brains are activated and dreams consist of memory fragments. In other words the memory in a way reorganizes itself during the sleep.

This has interesting relations to learning: we can learn in dreams without being conscious of it – thus Stickgold would hold against Locke (and agree with Descartes) that we in fact ”think” in dreams. Sofar, there is no certain knowledge of this, but it is probable that there will be in few years.

So someone should tell Hobson and Stickgold about Locke’s views!

George Berkeley on Dreams Bishop Goerge Berkeley’s (1685-1753) views on dreams

have to be looked in the framework of the Descartes-Hobbes-discussion. Like Malebranche, he largely agreed with Descartes.

In his Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713) Berkeley argued that images produced by imagination are weak and confused and are wholly dependent on the will. The ideas which are perceived by the senses are much more vivid and clear, because they are brought to us by a separate entity from us (God) and they are not dependent on our will. In some sense, for Berkeley, life is a dream as he supports a view, according to which only that exist that we perceive (esse est percipi).

Compare, for example, the difference between dreaming that one is looking at the sun and really looking at the sun.

Therefore it is easy to distinguish the waking images from dreams which are incoherent and strange. Berkeley does not comment on remembering dreams.

Thus the real thing is always better than the dream-version of the same thing.

Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous

Hylas. But according to your notions, what difference is there between real things, and chimeras formed by the imagination, or the visions of a dream, since they are all equally in the mind? Philonous. The ideas formed by the imagination are faint and indistinct; they have besides an entire dependence on the will. But the ideas perceived by sense, that is, real things, are more vivid and clear, and being imprinted on the mind by a spirit distinct from us, have not a like dependence on our will. There is therefore no danger of confounding these with the foregoing: and there is as little of confounding them with the visions of a dream, which are dim, irregular, and confused.

Hume on dreams David Hume (1711-1776), a famous sceptic and

Scottish Enlightenment thinker had some interesting remarks on dreams.

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) he says that popular religion is « sick man’s dream »

In an essay «Of Suicide » he continues this theme: a superstitious man is miserable in every scene, in every incident of life. This concerns even sleep itself, which banishes all other cares of unhappy mortals, affords to him matter of new terror; while he examines his dreams, and finds in those visions of the night, prognostications of future calamities. Thus for “normal” people dreams are helpful in restoring their strength, but for superstitious they are terrible, predicting future horrors.

In an Essay ”Of the immortality of the soul” he says that sleep which is a very small effect on the body, is attended with a temporary extinction, that is, a great confusion in the soul. By this he probably means epistemic confusion.

Early Modern natural explanations of dreams All early modern thinkers seem to agree that dreams

really occur in sleep; thus they are not errors of memory, as some recent philosophers suggest. The problem is what brings about such events.

The traditional received view claims that there are exceptional dreams of supernatural origin, but that most dreams are naturally caused: they either have simple organic or physiological causes, or they result from recent mental states. In this they follow Aristotle.

There are some exceptions, however. Supported by biblical evidence, there persisted a more or less occultist faith in the possible supernatural information of dreams. For example, the Rosicrucian Andreae wrote: “Finally, I took my usual and surest way of escape, and went to bed, after true and eager prayer that divine providence would let my good angel to appear, and instruct me in this troublesome case, as had many times happened before, and this, praise God, also took place to my best and to the true and hearty warning and improvement of my neighbours.” (Andreae, Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz)

Bodily causes of dreams The Galenic tradition doctrine of four

humours was still influentical and in general Early Modern Thinkers were interested in physiological causes (such as diets and bodily humours) and dreams.

Books of dream interpretation were popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and ancient works of Galen, Artemidorus and Synesius were consulted for that purpose.

One good example of this tradition is Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night (1594): “A dreame is nothing els but a bubbling scum or froath of the fancie, which the day hath left undigested, or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations.”

Dreams and mysticism As we saw, in his tale of his dreams

Descartes includes some mystical elements, not far from Rosicrucians.

Very often, religious mystical writers affected the Early Modern conception of dreams (this continued in the era of Romanticism) – dreams were seen as ecstatic visions where truths are disconcealed.

Sleepwalking had a special role. It was thought that the soul leaves the sleeping body and travels about, often in the form of an animal, fighting the evil spirits. This views was held, for example, by Henry More in his Antidote Against Atheisme.

Markku Roinila

Philosophy of Dreams and Sleeping:

18th-early 20th century views

Continuation and variation Whereas the Early Modern philosophers discussed more

or less of the same problems posed by Descartes, in Enlightment and German idealism there are really not new themes. Philosophers discussed various old problems, sometimes giving them new solutions and variations to old solutions.

A good example is the divination-theory. Being secular philosophers, the Enlightenment thinkers opposed the idea and tried to explain the dreams by natural causes.

For this reason one common theme is the somatic theory of dreams. Many Enlightenment thinkers and Kant thought, following Hobbes, that dreams follow from somatic impulses like stomac problems or digestion.

Hobbes (and Aristotle) was also central influence in that dreams were seen as product of imagination. For example, Hartley wrote: ”Dreams are nothing but the imaginations, fancies or reveries of a sleeping man” (Observations, I.iii.5) – they are founded on somatic impulses, the state of the body.

Excess of imaginations was commonly seen as madness – so if the dreaming continues in waking state, there is a mental illness.

Voltaire Voltaire (François-Marie

Arouet, 1694-1778) thinks that predictive or prophetic conception of dreams is pure superstition and bullshit.

Supported the somatic theory of Hobbes – argues that often dreams result from the excess of the passions of the soul.

Keyword ’Somnabulists and Dreamers’ in Philosophical Dictionary (1764)

Voltaire on creative dreams However, Voltaire has a seemingly contradictory view to the somatic theory: he argues

that we often utilize in the dreams our highest rational abilities.

Like Leibniz, Voltaire thought that one can make judgements in dreams and once can be creative in dreams. In ’Somnabulists and Dreamers’ he describes a theology student:

“You, Mr. Seminarist, born with the gift of imitation, you have listened to some hundred sermons, and your brain is prepared to make them: moved by the talent of imitation, you have written them waking; and you are led by the same talent and impulse when you are asleep. But how have you been able to become a preacher in a dream? You went to sleep, without any desire to preach. Remember well the first time that you were led to compose the sketch of a sermon while awake. You thought not of it a quarter of an hour before; but seated in your chamber, occupied in a reverie without any determinate ideas, your memory recalls, without your will interfering, the remembrance of a certain holiday; this holiday reminds you that sermons are delivered on that day; you remember a text; this text suggests an exordium; pens, ink, and paper, are lying near you; and you begin to write things you had not the least previous intention of writing.”

Voltaire is sceptical against Descartes’s dream argument: “Explain to me an animal who is a mere machine one-half of his life, and who changes his nature twice every twenty-four hours.”

Voltaire: ’Letter On Dreams To The Editor Of The Literary

Gazette, August, 1764’.

” Every dream of a forcible nature is produced by some excess, either in the passions of the soul, or the nourishment of the body; it seems as if nature intended to punish us for them, by suggesting ideas, and making us think in spite of ourselves.”

“We must acknowledge, with Petronius, “Quid-quid luce fuit, tenebris agit.” [what happens in the light, continues its existence in the darkness]. I have known advocates who have pleaded in dreams; mathematicians who have sought to solve problems; and poets who have composed verses. I have made some myself, which are very passable. It is therefore incontestable, that consecutive ideas occur in sleep, as well as when we are awake, which ideas as certainly come in spite of us. We think while sleeping, as we move in our beds, without our will having anything to do either in the motive or the thought.”

‘Of Dreams’

“Dreams have always formed a great object of superstition, and nothing is more natural. A man deeply affected by the sickness of his mistress dreams that he sees her dying; she dies the next day; and of course the gods have predicted her death.”

Kant As Immanuel (1724-1804)

Kant created a systematic new kind of philosophy of his own, he had something to say about dreams also.

We have already discussed his early commentary on Swedenborg, the Dreams of a spirit seer which also includes some original views on dreams.The most original one concerns the role played by the mind in dreaming.

Kant and the Somatic Theory Like Voltaire, Kant did not believe in the divination-theory. We do not

see prophetic visions or holy enthuasism in dreams.

In the Dreams of the Spirit-Seer he followed Hobbes (and Aristotle) in thinking that dreams can be more vivid than waking thoughts because the senses are closed down.

He also followed Hobbes in thinking that the dream images are more vivid than images in the waking life. On the other hand, he followed Locke in thinking that when one is asleep, one is separated from the body.

According to Kant, when one wakes up, one cannot recall the dream images as being part of the same person.

Kant seems to think that because in the sleeping state the body is not disturbing the active mind, we can think better. He says in Dreams that those who are sleepwalking have more intelligence than normally, although they cannot remember anything when they wake up.

Dreams are not really sleeping Kant says that when we are seeing dreams, we dot not sleep completely. We are

perceiving distinctly and turn our inner actions to impressions from outer senses.

In this way one can remember them afterwards, but they are considered as wild and irrational imaginations, because the fantasies and perceptions by outer senses are mixed together.

In other words, the soul is projecting itself to the dreams where inner images and sensible external images are mixed with each other. Because of this mixture the dreams seem strange to the waking person. In this way it seems that the mind is active in the process. Thus Kant seems to agree with Descartes that we are always thinking.

In Kant’s critical philosophy, dreams are not fully determined by the categories, but they are connected to the understanding: to dream or to hallucinate is necessarily to have experience expressible in judgemental form – the intentional objects of dream are dependent on the categories in the end. In this way dreams objects of inner sense.

Some other 19th century views Goethe thought that in dreams we

heal our problems, gain consolation and once we wake up, we are joyful and ready to face the new day (compare Hobson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasized the connection between dreams and character. Dreams reflect our character, especially those characteristic which are not notable in the behavior of the waking life. We can also recognize in the dreams of other persons their hidden forces which affect their behavior and in this way we can often predict their future actions (compare Freud).

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) on dreams Close to Locke’s theory – he thinks that

there is a vast reservoir of memory fragments in us which form the content of dreams. But Bergson gives it a Freudian twist – these fragments are forgottent, latent content of dreams.

According to Bergson, our memories form at all times a sort of pyramid and its point penetrates to our current activities. We will forget nothing. When I am dreaming, all these memories rise from the cellar of our mind.

Therefore there is a great difference between the sleeping and waking state.

In dreams we are indifferent and we are interested in only somatic impulses.

Markku Roinila

Philosophy of Dreams and Sleeping:

Contemporary philosophy

Some guidelines As is the case with all philosophy, difference between analytical and

phenomenological philosophy is clear.

The development of brain research and experimental psychology started

to provide challenges to philosophy of dreams and latest philosophy of

dreams is trying to find philosophical ways to discuss the results of

brain-research-orientated modern psychology.

The most important event in the philosophy of dreaming was Norman

Malcolm’s Dreaming (1959) which rejected traditional views. It was in

many ways counter-intuitive and received a lot of criticism.

In addition to discussing the essence of dreams, the topic of morality in

dreams and creativity in dreams have gained some attention.

Dream-argument: early 20th century views The central problem in 20th century philosophy of dreams is related to Descartes’s

dream-argument. Some early 20th century reactions:

Henri Bergson (1859-1941)holds that contrary to waking life, dreams are a peculiar union of memories and sensations, combined with the dreamer’s lack of will.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) argues that Descartes incorrectly suggests that dreams occur as an apprehension of reality. For Sartre, the dream is more like the composing of a story: ”The dreams is not fiction taken for reality, it is the odyssey of a consciousness dedicated by itself, and in spite of itself, to build only an unreal world”

F. H. Bradley (1846-1924) is questioning whether the ”real” world is real. We assume that the waking world is real because it is more rational and the wider and more comprehensive of possible worlds and he accepts this assumption for practical purposes. But philosophically we have no good reason to deny that there are other, more real worlds that we might enter when dreaming.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) believes we have experiences in dreams, but that the sense datea of these experiences are privata, having no objetive correlate, as opposed to the public data of experiences in waking life.

It was common among analytic philosophers to think that it is useless to study dreams as they cannot be verified by objective means (private sense-data), that is, dreams are not experiences which can be shared. The phenomenologists, on the other hand, tried to describe dreams as what they are, peculiar sort of expriences.

Norman Malcolm on dreams Norman Malcolm (1911-1990) is the most influentical

(and controversial) analytic philosopher of dreams in 20th century.

Malcolm was a student of Wittgenstein and he is clearly influenced by Wittgenstein’s later philosophy – his approach is to study how language is used to describe events.

In the book Dreaming (1959) Malcolm opposes the Cartesian dream argument.

Malcolm’s view was the paradigm view of the analytic philosophy until 1970’s, but then he started to receive a lot of criticism – a whole collection of articles called Philosophical Essays on Dreaming, edited by Charles E. M. Dunlop (1977) was published to critisize Malcolm.

Starting from Malcolm, there is a decline in the interest to dreams – the reason for this is partly the development of modern psychology and partly because Malcolm’s devastative take on traditional problems of philosophy of dreaming.

Malcolm’s criticism of the dream argument in a nutshell

Malcolm’s starting-point is the dream-argument by Descartes. He thinks Descarte’s argument, according to which one has deceptive experiences while asleep, is senseless.

Following Russell, Malcolm argues that dreams cannot be experiences, deceptive or otherwise, because experiences require awareness, that is, conscious experiences.

Furthermore, conscious experiences require language (the capacity to declare ”I am having this experience”), and the use of language also shows that the speaker is awake and therefore not dreaming. Thus there can be only waking experiences.

Ergo: because dreams are not experiences which can be shared, there is nothing interesting in them and they are not worth studying.

Malcolm’s challenge to traditional view Malcolm’s most important influence in his criticism is Wittgenstein’s Philosophical

Investigations (1953) where he says

”…must I make some assumption about whether people [when telling their dreams] are deceived by their memories or not; whether they really had these images while they slept, or whether it merely seems so to them on waking? And what meaning has this question? – And what interest? Do we ever ask ourselves this when someone is telling us his dreams? And if not – is it because we are sure his memory won’t have deceived him? (And suppose it were a man with a quite specially bad memory?)”

Malcolm’s article ’Dreaming and scepticism’ (Philosophical Review 65 (January):14-37 (1956))was the starting-point of the book Dreaming where he continues to elaborate the argument in short chapters.

I will go through the basic arguments by following the presentation of Ben Spriggett (http://www.iep.utm.edu/dreaming/#SH3b) and some other sources.

Spriggett divides Malcolm’s criticism into three arguments: 1) dream reports are unveriable 2) sleep and dreaming have conflicting definitions 3) communication and judgements cannot occur during sleep

One cannot verify dream reports We cannot trust dream reports – they are insufficient to show that there is conscious dreaming taking place

during sleep. The dream reports are not the same as the dreams themselves, but there is no other way to check the claim (of Descartes) that dreams are consciously experienced during sleep.

The most important criterion to tell us that we have been dreaming is that one awakes with an impression of having dreamt (memory of dreaming) and then tells about the dream. However, there is no way to verify that the memory actually corresponds with the conscious experience of seeing the dream. We can only believe what the dream reports tell us.Therefore dreams are only grammatical illusions – they do not really exist.

The only way to verify the dream reports would be observe behavior during the sleep, but that is insufficient to show that one is having a conscious experience in the sleeping state. In fact, it would not suffice to show that there is any mental activity in the sleeping state.

In sum, one cannot claim ”I dreamed that I was flying” because that would mean that I had a conscious experience in the dream that I was flying (I believed in the dream that I was flying). So we really cannot know if we are dreaming during the sleep at all. Also, we cannot know how long the dream would take > dreaming does not take place in space and time.

According to Malcolm, Descartes’s view is founded on the idea that when we remember dreams we recall the same content of the earlier experience: ” Descartes thinks not only that a man might have thoughts and make judgements while sleeping, but also that if those thoughts are clear and distinct they aretrue, regardless of thefact that he is sleeping.” (Here he was wrong – Descartes is saying that our memories of the dreams is fragmentary – he is not saying that we can recall the dream exactly; he is also not saying that we can have conscious dreams; that is, make judgements – in that case the dreams would be coherent).

Sleep vs. dreaming The Cartesian claim that dreams could

consciously occur during sleep is incoherent or even contradictory.

Sleep is defined as lacking experiences; dreams are said to involve conscious experience.

This contradiction is seen when verifying the dream reports: if one can show that one is having a conscious experience, one is not sleeping.

Objection: there is a storm and the dreamer reports hearing thunder. Malcolm: one was not fully asleep if one was able to perceive the environment. So Malcolm is referring to being sound asleep by his concept ’sleeping’ where we do note what happens around us.

Making judgements during sleep For Malcolm, communication is required for verifying that the mental state has been

exprienced. This argument is related to two others – if we are making a judgement in sleep that I am now flying (I believe that I am now flying) and communicate it to others, I can show that I am having a conscious experience.

But I cannot say ”I am asleep” without the statement being false. If one talks in sleep and says I am asleep, this is a co-incidence, not an assertion.

If the person was actually sleeping, then he would not be aware of saying the assertion. And if he was aware of saying the assertion, he would not be sleeping. Thus Malcolm concludes that communication between a sleeping individual and individuals who are awake is logically impossible. Therefore Any talk about mental states that could occur during sleep is meaningless.

Behind this view is Wittgenstein private language-argument – there cannot be a mental state which only one individual could privately experience and understand.

And since men cannot communicate during sleep, they cannot make judgements in sleep. One cannot judge that I am now sleeping. (compare lucid dreaming – for Malcolm that would not be proper, sound sleeping).

In a way, Malcolm is continuing Locke’s argument: there cannot be thinking in dreams like Descartes says.

Criticism of empiricist dream science Malcolm discusses a study by Dement and Kleitman where they try to show that

people woken from a REM-dream could remember accurately the duration of

the dream.

He thinks dream science has a wrong starting-point: ”The interest in a

physiological criterion of dreaming is due, I believe, to an error that

philosophers, psychologists and everyone who reflects on the nature of

dreaming that a dream must have a definite location and duration in physical

time.” (p. 75)

Even if dream is an event, it does not have to be in time and place in the

physical sense. The times and places in dreams are very obscure and they are

superadded to to events when people wake up (”just before”, ”right after”)

Sometimes there seems to be a time-structure, but this can be explained by

somatic reasons – for example, blanket is taken away would introduce ”then it

became very cold”.

A few quotes from Dreaming p. 7 ”It would not occur to anyone to conclude that a man is sleeping from his saying ’I am asleep’ any more than to conclude that he is unconscious from his saying ’I am unconscious’, or to conclude that he is dead from his saying ’I am dead’. He can say the words but he cannot assert that he is asleep, unconscious or dead. If a man could assert that he is asleep, his assertion would involve a kind of self-contradiction, since from the fact that he made the assertion it would follow that it was false.”

p. 37 ”No physiological phenomena will be of any use as evidence that a man made a judgement while asleep. If it were established, for example, that whenever a person makes a judgement the electrical output of a certain region of his brain rises or falls in some characteristic way, the occurence of this electric phenomenon in a sleeping person would not provide any probability that the sleeper was making a judgement.” (> compare Hobson – the content of dreams is irrelevant).

p. 51-52 ”If a man had certain thoughts and feelings in a dream it no more follows that he had those thoughts and feelings while asleep, than it follows from his having climbed a mountain in a dream ´that he climbed a mountain while asleep.”

Problems for Malcolm To sum up, Malcolm thinks that what

we do when awake and when we are

sound asleep are two different things

and they cannot be compared. In sleep

we do not have the same experiences,

images, impression, thinking etc. as

when awake.

Dreaming was thought to be a major

work, but it created a lot of opposition.

If its doctrines were taken for real,

philosophers should forget dreams

altogether. But they are a major part of

our lives – why should we not think

about them?

What are experiences? For many who claim to have experiences in

dreams, Malcolm’s claims were simply

counterintutive.

This is in fact included in the dream reports

where we run, chase, are having romantic

encounters etc. Are these not experiences?

In dream reports there can also be

conversations and their content is

remembered. In addition, there are strong

images related to these dream-images.

Thus one main counter-arguments is that

even if I am not able to communicate the

dreams to another person, that does not

mean that I am not having them. There are

even scientific evidence on behalf of this

view (EEG-graphs).

More problems Dream reports have also their problems. As we discussed in the beginning of the lecture series,

some are better at describing their experiences than others. Dunlop also objects that if there

are no states of consciousness in dreams, the dream reports are not descriptions of experiences

at all (as Malcolm seems to think they are). When we tell about the dreams, they usually seem

to concern experiences where we have been conscious (dialogue, for example).

Malcolm would reply perhaps that he is trying to say what dreams are not instead of saying

what they are. Malcolm would say that the question ”What is dreaming?” is simply

unintelligible. > Malcolm’s Wittgensteinian background.

We can, of course, follow Malcolm’s advice and just quit: ”If we cease to ask why it is that

sometimes when people wake up they relate stories in the past tense under the influence of an

impression, then we will see dream-telling as it is – a remarkable human phenomenon, a part

of the natural history of man, something given, the foundation for the concept of dreaming.”

(Dreaming, p. 87) So dreams are like stories to be told (compare Sartre).

Another kind of objection is that one should not relate dreams with epistemology since

discussion about dreams is appropriate in the context of philosophy of mind (mental events,

mental function, mental content).

Putnam on the Conceptual Analysis of Dreaming

Hilary Putnam: “Dreaming and ‘Depth Grammar’,” in Butler (Eds.) Analytical

Philosophy Oxford: Basil & Blackwell, 1962.

According to Malcolm’s charge, supporters of the traditional view do not understand the

concept of dreaming. This was crucial for his attempt to undermine all empirical work

on dreaming. Instead of relying on an individual’s waking report scientists may now try

to infer from rapid eye movements or other physiological criteria that the individual is

asleep and dreaming. For Malcolm, these scientists are working from a new conception

of “sleep” and “dreaming” which only resembles the old one.

Putnam objects to Malcolm’s claim, stating that science updates our concepts and does

not replace them: the traditional view seeks confirmation in empirical work. In general,

concepts are always being updated by new empirical knowledge.

If Putnam’s attack is successful then the work that scientists are doing on dreaming is

about dreaming as the traditional view understands the concept, namely, conscious

experiences that occur during sleep. If Putnam is right that scientists are not invoking a

new conception of sleep and dreaming, then we can find other ways to verify our

understanding of dreaming and the traditional view is continuous with empirical work.

David Rosenthal & Consciousness David Rosenthal: “Explaining Consciousness” in Philosophy of Mind: Classical

and Contemporary Readings, (eds) David Chalmers, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Distinction between ”creature consciousness” and ”state consciousness”: “Creature

consciousness” is what any individual or animal displays when awake and responsive to

external stimuli. “State consciousness,” on the other hand, refers to the mental state that

occurs when one has an experience. This may be either internally or externally driven.

Malcolm evidently thinks that any form of state consciousness requires some degree of

creature consciousness. But it does not seem to be conceptually confused to believe that

one can be responsive to internal stimuli (hence state conscious) without being

responsive to external stimuli (hence creature unconscious).

If, by “sleep” all we have meant is creature unconsciousness, then there is no reason to

believe that an individual cannot have state conscious at the same time. An individual can

be creature unconscious whilst having state consciousness, that is to say, an individual can

be asleep and dreaming.

Dennett: Are Dreams Experiences? Most objections to Malcolm tend to

critisize his views rather than offer

alternative versions of philosophy of

dreaming. But there are a few.

The best known is Daniel Dennett in his

article ’Are Dreams Experiences?’(The

Philosophical Review, vol. 82, 2 (1976),

151-171.

As we remember, the received view (the

traditional view) is that dreams are

experiences that occur during sleep,

experiences which we can often recall upon

waking. And Malcolm denies this. Dennett

is more or less defending the traditional

view with some new arguments while

agreeing with Malcolm in some points.

Dennett’s approach Dennett is trying to link philosophy of dreaming to the brain research: ”The most

scandalous conclusion that Malcolm attempted to draw from his analysis of the concept

of dreaming was to the effect the contemporary dream research by psychologists and

other scientists was conceptually confused, misguided, ultimately simply irrelevant to

dreaming” (p. 151; Malcolm p. 82).

His starting-point is to see how would the traditional view cope if it was seen from the

perspective of the modern scientific psychology.

First, it is clear that EEG patterns show that there are dreams during the sleep. (and

everyone has them). Dennett is optimistic that there are even some signs that in this

method there can be some understanding of the contents of the dreams [Hobson is more

careful in this respect]. ”…we might be able to predict from certain physiological events

observed during sleep that the subsequent dream reports would allude to, for example,

fear, falling from a height, eating something cold etc.” (p. 152)

Cassette-theory of Dennett Dennett is interested in cases where the dream merges into the waking life (for

example, looking for a goat, finding one and the the Baa-aa-a of the goat

changes into the buzzing sound of the alarm clock.

Perhaps there is a library of dreams with various themes: ”Perhaps…dreams are

composed and presented very fast in the interval between bang, bump, or buzz

and full consciousness, with some short delay system postponing the full

”perception” of the noise in the dream until the presentation of the narrative is

ready for it. Or perhaps in that short interval dreams are composed, presented

and recorded backwards and them remembered front to back. Or perhaps there

is a ”library” in the brains of undreamed dreams with various indexed endings,

and the bang, or bump or buzz has the effect of retrieving an appropriate dream

and inserting it, cassette-like, in the memory mechanism.” (p. 158)

According to the cassette-theory, our pre-cognitive dreams are never dreamed

at all, but just spuriously recalled on waking.

Nature of experience Dennett present one of these views as an

alternative to the traditional theory. If

that is right, ”dreams are not what we

took them to be – or perhaps we would

say that it turns out that there are not

dreams after all, only dream

”recollections”” (p. 158)

If the ”cassette-theory” is accepted, the

nature of experience would change.

Dream-recall is like déjá vu- it only

seems that I have experienced it before.

Once this is believed, it would no longer

seem as strongly that I am really recalling

the dream. I only have a feeling that I

have experienced something.

A generalization ”Suppose we generalize the cassette theory to cover all dreams: all dream narratives are

composed directly into memory banks; which, if any, of these is available to waking

recollection depends on various factors – precedence of composition, topicality of waking

stimulus, degree of repression and so forth.” (p. 159-160)

If this is supposed, there is no representation. The dreams are just composed and showed.

Composition of dreams can take place during waking hours during a long time, even

before our birth.But more probable is that the composition takes place during the REM-

phase of the sleep where there is clearly a lot of brain activity.

The latter would be supported by that fact that often dreams include recent events, so

the composed dreams would have to change often.

Dennett’s explanation for lucid dreams: although the composition and recording

processes are entirely unconscious, on occasion the composition process inserts traces of

itself into the recording via the literary conceit of a dream within a dream.

Dennett thinks that this view can be challenge for the received view: it is compatible

with modern brain-research and avoids most of Malcolm’s criticism.

Cassette-theory and experience The cassette-theorist would say that we do not

consciously experience our environment, but our

unconscious experiences are recorded for later

use (for short-term memory or composing

dreams, that is). (> compare Locke’s theory of

memory traces mixed together).

One can discuss whether these are experiences

or not and indeed it is not clear (on the basis of

sleep science) whether dreams are experiences at

all or not. If this recording is unconscious,

dreams would not be experiences.

Recurrent dreams – this would fit well to the

cassette-theory; but also in these cases the

process seems to be unconscious.

Deciding whether dreams are experiences or not

is a theoretical question and cannot be solved by

empirical data. Thus Dennett leaves the question

open.

Problems for Dennett Dennett takes the empirical view and does not really discuss the relation

between theoretical and empiral theories. Also, he does not allow experiences

to be conscious during sleeping, but he seems to accept it in the sense that there

are dreams.

Main problem: how to distinguish the cassette-theory from the traditional

theory? Dunlop: ”If ”the dream one ’recalls’ on waking was composed just

minutes earlier”, then we still have the question of how dream content managed

to merge with the waking stimulus…one possibility is that an environmental

stimulus can come to represent many different things as it is worked into dream

content.” (Dunlop (ed.), Philosophical Essays on Dreaming, p. 34-35)

Lucid dreaming: empirical tests by Stephen La Berge show that Dennett’s

explanation of lucid dreaming is not accurate – test persons were giving certain

eye-movement signs when they were having lucid dreaming and this worked in

most cases. Thus one can communicate without language contra Malcolm.

Eliminative materialism According to Paul and Patricia Churchland,terms like

belief, imagination, experience, desire and dream

belong to our everyday ”folk psychology”, which will

eventually be replaced by scientific neuropscyhology.

Thus the concept of dream will be eliminated by

science in the long run. Instead, we start thinking

about certain kind of brain activation or something

like that. The concept of dream is like the concept of

witch – it will belong to past times.

In a way this project comes to the same conclusion as

Malcolm – science should not be interested in

dreams.

Against this one could say that dreams are subjective,

experienced events independently from whether they

are conscious experiences or not.

After Malcolm Norman Malcolm’s attack to traditional views was provocative and objecting his claims

seems to have taking strength from the philosophy of dreaming. After this discussion died down in the end of 70’s, there are only a few new beginnings.

Sutton lists as reasons for the ongoing decline of philosophical studies in dreaming the following: widespread suspicion of Freud, ongoing obsession with Cartesian doubt (dream-argument), fragmentation and professionalition of the sciences of sleep physiology (Hobson and his team etc.), which encouraged their divorce from the psychology of dreaming, and the uneasiness about consciousness which long characterized the cognitive sciences.

Sutton reflects that in addition the problem may just be the difficulty of the whole enterprise. Integrated, multilevel theories of dreaming are unsusually hard to develop because our access to the phenomena is unusually indirect, so that it is unusually difficult to manipulate postulated mechanisms and identify the causally relevant components of the dreaming mind or brain system.

Owen Flanagan is hoping for interdisciplinary studies for this reason and he has a larger scale than Sutton: all kinds of different sciences can contribute to the philosophy of dreaming.

Owen Flanagan’s Dreaming Souls Flanagan’s monograph Dreaming Souls (2000) is

the only philosophical book on dreams so far to

utilize the empiral sleep science.

He says: ”My theory is neurophilosophical one. I

have tried to follow out the implications of

recent work in the sciences of the mind on the

nature and function of sleep and dreams while at

the same time trying to fit dreams into a general

philosophical theory of the conscious mind and

the nature of persons.” (p. 8)

Flanagan is especially interested in the function of

dreams with respect to consciousness and its

evolution. Thus he takes a fresh start from the

Malcolm-orientated problems.

Flanagan adopts a holistic approach: he combines

the neuroscience to both analytical (development

of consciousness) and phenomenological

tradition (creativity in dreams).

Holistic theory of dreams Flanagan is calling out for a holistic

theory of dreams in his natural method

of dreams.

”Anthropology, sociology, and social

psychology are also important in providing

a complete picture of dreams. This is

because the uses, if any, to which dreams

are put depend on local customs and

habits.” (p. 16-17)

”A robust theory of the nature and function

of dreams will need to bring into

equilibrium insights from philosophy,

phenomenology, neuroscience, psychology,

psychiatry, evolutionary biology, sociology,

and anthropology.” (p. 17)

Pluralist evolutionary view In contrast to Hobson and his colleagues, Flanagan thinks that sleep and consciousness

are products of evolution.

Dreams, however, are not directly products of evolution, but consciousness during sleep

(dreaming) is merely an accident of nature, a side effect of sleep and consciousness.

”Can dreams fail to have an adaptationist evolutionary explanation but still make sense…and

thus worth attention in the process of seeking self-knowledge? The answer is yes.” (p. 25)

Thus for Flanagan, dreams do not really have any biological purpose per se, but they are

useful to human life all the same. They are a side-effect of adaptation that human beings

have learned to use in creative and helpful ways.

Dreams do matter, for they sometimes possess meaningful structure, are sometimes self-

expressive, and sometimes provide insights into one's own mind and one's relations with

others. Dreams reflect and reveal our inner selves in ways that waking thought and

behavior cannot. In dreams, we experience memories, thoughts and emotions that might

never come to the surface in waking life. Thus dreaming can be an important tool for

self-discovery and self-understanding.

Flanagan critisizes Freud in that dreams are not disguised signs, they have to be taken at

face value.

Flanagan’s physiological theory According to Flanagan, brains work both during when we are awake and when we are

sleeping.

During sleep, the brain stocks up neurotransmitters that will be used the next day. By

accident, pulses that originate from this stockpiling chore (coming from the brain stem)

also reactivate more or less random parts of memory. Unaware that the body is actually

sleeping, the sensory circuits of the cerebral cortex process these signals as if they were

coming from outside and produce a chaotic flow of sensations. With an analogy from

architecture Flanagan show that dreams are just the noise the brain makes while working

overnight.

Dreams can be compared to heartbeat which does not really have a biological function.

Like Malcolm, Flanagan seems to think that dreams are pointless from the point of view

of science.They are just redundant effects of brain activity. In this sense Flanagan

continues the doctrine of Locke where dreams are a product of waking state activity.

Contra modern neurophysiological view by Hobson, where dreams are seen to fullfill a

purpose of restoring the brains for the waking state, Flanagan sees them as just noise,

leftovers.

Objection by Revonsuo Antti Revonsuo: “The Reinterpretation of Dreams: An Evolutionary Hypothesis of

the Function of Dreaming,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2000), pp. 793 – 1121. )

Flanagan’s view is opposed by Antti Revonsuo who thinks that dream is an adaptation.

His threat simulation theory argues that dreams fulfill a practicing purpose in human life

– we practice for difficult situtations in waking life.

According to Revonsuo, the actual content of dreams is helpful to the survival of the

organism because dreaming enchances behaviors in waking life such as perceiving and

avoiding threat. This requires that dreaming is similar to waking life and is experienced as

waking life at the time of the dream.

Threat simulation theory is well supported by empirical tests – during REM-phase

anxiety is the most common emotion and anger third.

Flanagan answers by asking why animal-like instincts have to be continually rehearsed by

humans, but Revonsuo is emphasizing that the instinct rehearsal concerns animals (like

lab-rats). Flanagan also objects Revonsuo in arguing that if the instinct-like rehearsal is

important, why is there so few sexual dreams? Revonsuo says that survival dominates

over reproduction.

Creativity and dreams

Dreams are wellsprings of creativity.

This because dreams are produced by

activity originating in the brainstem

that awakens stored or semi-stored

thoughts and memories that are then

put into some sort of narrative

structure by higher brain sectors that

are designed to make sense of

experience by light of day, but continue

to work, less efficiently, when the lights

go out.

While dreams sometimes don't mean

much of anything, the images and

memories activated in our sleep are our

own, and it is we ourselves who give

them narrative shape.

Dreams and self-expression Since the content of our dreams comes primarily from within, dreaming is in

some sense the purest form of self-expressive action. Thus some dreams are

self-expressive.

Self-expression is not directly related to personal identity. According to

Flanagan, “it is perfectly plausible that I might dream about flying to the moon

without that desire’s being a strong, central, or standing desire of mine –

perhaps without its being a desire I possess at all, just mere noise.” (p. 134)

Rather, self is conscious fiction (compare autobiography) whereas in dreams

associations are free and uncontrolled.

While many dreams are just noise, some dreams are meaningful, interpretable

and self-expressive. Although Flanagan does not agree with Freud, some dreams

can be difficult to interpret (which is in fact why they can promote our

creativity).

Morality & Dreams St. Augustine thought that dreams are happenings, not actions and one is not responsible

for involuntary thoughts in dreams.

Flanagan tends to say that only behavior can be seen as morally problematic. It does not

make much difference whether a morally evil is voluntary or involontary. This view

would avoid excessive moralism. Problem is that I can commit evil actions if no one

notices them.

Flanagan thinks that dreams can be volontary. It is common to try to continue a nice

dream or stop an unpleasant dream. But there may be problems. Flanagan tells about his

pleasant dream involving Marilyn Monroe which he could continue by will. Problem is,

while it was pleasant, it also involved a notional adultery.

This kind of one’s influence to one’s dreams takes place in lucid dreaming. Certain

people can actually work on plot revisions as the dream occurs and the action unfolds.

Therefore lucid dreams are robustly voluntary.

Voluntariness marks a moral accountability or moral evaluation. Thus, we can be

immoral in dreams.

Indirect approach In addition, there can be morally

objectionable states of mind like hatred,

jealousy, anger etc. These can be

influenced indirectly, by developing

one’s character (comp. Plato &

Augustine), work on oneself and these

character traits.

Thus, “if dreams express aspects of my

personality or character that I helped

form or could have worked to

transform, then don’t I bear some

responsibility for my dreams? I think

the answer is “yes”.” (p. 182)

John Sutton on dreaming Sutton: ‘Dreaming’ (https://www.academia.edu/313903/Dreaming)

In his encyclopedia-article, Sutton presents the latest psychological theories on

dreaming. He also calls for original new viewpoints, of which he mentions the learning

in dream-theory of David Foulkes.

Sutton asks good questions, of which I mention here two:

1) Do individually and culturally variable beliefs about dreaming only influence dream

reports, or is the form of dreams themselves in certain aspects also malleable? In other

words: do cultural differences influence the content of dreams? In philosophical accounts

this is not usually thought to be a problem. Sometimes the age of the dreamer can be an

issue or the quality of memory, but not ethnical or racial background. Would need more

study.

2) Most broadly, is dreaming a quasi-perceptual hallucination or an imaginative construct?

Sutton’s other question gives the dividing-lines between analytic and phenomenological

approach which he reflects a bit.

Sutton on perceptual and imaginative approach to

dreaming

John Sutton asks: How clear a consensus can

we obtain about the details of the

phenomenology of dreaming? How good is

our access to our own experience? And of

course, how well can we remember our

dreams? Sutton argues (p. 538) that the

imaginative dreaming has even more gaps

and is more fragmentary that the perceptual

view.

According to some experiments by Foulkes,

only a small number of dreams were

experienced in a “see-oneself-mode” where

“I” is the one who wittnesses or experiences.

Often in dreams we see images from other

person’s point of view (‘field memories’ vs.

‘observer memories’). These perspectives

can often change during the dream,

especially in lucid dreaming. As we saw, lucid

dreaming can be learned which enables us to

change viewpoints at will.

Dreaming as hallucination/perception

In psychological litterature dreams are thought to be hallucinations (> Descartes). As the

content of a dream reveals, we are always on the move. Apart from the bodily paralysis,

physiologically the body acts as though it perceives a real world, and continually reacting

to events in that apparently real world. The claim that dreams are hallucinations can find

support in the further claim that dreaming replicates waking consciousness.

Empirical evidence suggests that pain can be experienced in dreams, which is perceptual

in nature and which the imagination can arguably not replicate. So dreams must be

hallucinatory, according to this line of reasoning.

We seem to have real emotions during dreams which are the natural reaction to our

perceptions. According to the percept view of dreams, we dream that we are carrying

actions out in an environment, but our accompanying emotions are not dreamed and

play out alongside the rest of the dream content. The intensity of the emotions, actually

felt, is what the percept theorist will take as support for the content of the dream not

being merely imagined, but the natural response of realistic, perceptual-like experience.

Dreaming as imagination Some philosophers (Ichikawa, Sosa, McGinn) believe that dreaming is just the imagination at work

during sleep (> Aristotle, Hobbes). Any conscious experiences during sleep are imagistic rather

than perceptual.

McGinn: The Observational Attitude: if we are perceiving (or hallucinating), say, two individuals

having a conversation then we might need to strain our senses to hear or see what they are

discussing. During dreams of course, the body is completely relaxed and the sleeping individual

shows no interest in his or her surroundings.

Dreaming is the natural instance of shutting out all of our sensory awareness of the outside world,

arguably to entirely engage the imagination. This suggests that the dreamer is hearing with their

mind’s ear and seeing with their mind’s eye. They are entertaining images, not percepts.

Recognition in dreams. In dreams we seem to already know who all of the characters are, without

making any effort to find out who they are (without using any of our senses). This might suggest

that in dreams we are partly in control of the content (even if we fail to realize it) because we

allegedly summon up the characters that we want to. We recognize who dream characters are, such

as relatives, even when they look drastically different.

Revonsuo on modelling dreams

Revonsuo: Inner Presence (2006)

Visual awareness has been used as the model

system in consciousness research. Revonsuo

argues that dreaming should also have a

place alongside visual awareness, as a special

instance of consciousness and therefore a

worthy model to be studied. The dreaming

brain also captures consciousness in a

“theoretically interesting form”.

Agreeing with Hobbes and Locke, Revonsuo

argues that dreaming is an unusually rare

example of “pure” consciousness, being as it

is devoid of ongoing perceptual input and

therefore might deserve special status in

being scientifically investigated.

Lucid dreams are an exception, but they are

rare.

Dreaming as pure conscious experience

But it is clear that subjectivity is pure in dreams. They reveal the especially subjective nature of

consciousness: the creation of a “world-for-me”. Thus there is a phenomenological aspect to

them – one can see here an attempt to combine the analytical and phenomenological approach

to dreaming.

Modelling dreaming can also help brain research. During dreaming the phenomenology is

demonstrably not ontologically dependent on any process missing during dreaming. Any parts

of the brain not used in dreaming can be ruled out as not being necessary to phenomenal

consciousness.

Malcolm had argued that dreaming was worthy of no further empirical work for the notion

was simply incoherent, and Dennett was sceptical that dreams would turn out to even involve

consciousness. The radical proposal now is that dreaming ought to be championed as an

example of conscious experience, a mascot for scientific investigation in consciousness studies.

It is alleged that dreams can recapitulate any experience from waking life and for this reason

Revonsuo concludes that the same physical or neural realization of consciousness is

instantiated in both examples of dreaming and waking experience.

A dream of a dream? Despite suggestions from Revonsuo and others, dreaming being used as a

model has simply not yet taken place. But his book is fairly new.

An alternative view on dreaming and

consciousness

Windt, J. M., & Noreika, V. “How to Integrate Dreaming into a General Theory

of Consciousness—A Critical Review of Existing Positions and Suggestions for Future

Research,” Consciousness and Cognition, 20(4) (2011), pp. 1091 – 1107.

Windt & Noreika reject dreaming as a model system but suggest it will work better as a

contrast system to wakefulness. This is because there are many views on dreams, but

wakefullness is pretty self-explanatory. In addition, Scientists do not even directly work

with dreams themselves, but rather descriptions of dreams.

Revonsuo simply assumes his conception of dreaming is correct. He believes that

dreaming can be a model of waking consciousness because dreams can be identical

replicas of waking consciousness involving all possible experiences. Windt & Noreika

believe that dreams tend to be different to waking life in important ways (compare

analytical vs. phenomenological approach) > Windt & Noreika have similar suspicions as

Malcolm.

A modest approach The contrast analysis does not ignore dreaming, but proposes a more modest approach.

With research divided between waking consciousness, dreaming and a comparison of the

two states, this more practical approach will yield better results, argue Windt and

Noreika.

By using the proposed method, we can see how consciousness works both with and

without environmental input. Both are equally important. After all, both are genuine

examples of consciousness.

This approach also means that the outcome will be mutually informative as regards the

two types of consciousness with insights gained in both directions. It is important to

compare dreaming as an important example of consciousness operating with radically

changed neural processing to waking consciousness.

With the contrastive analysis there is the prospect of comparing dream consciousness to

both pathological and non-pathology waking states, and there is thereby the promise of

better understanding how waking consciousness works and how it can also malfunction.

Phenomenological/Existential

views on dreaming

Prelude: Marcel Proust: Rememberance of Things Past 2,

p. 1013-1014 – dreaming life is very different from

waking life.

“Perhaps every night we accept the risk of experiencing,

while we are asleep, sufferings which we regard as null

and void because they will be felt in the course of a sleep

which we suppose to be unconscious.”

”[sleep] has noises of its own…the time that elapses for

the sleeper, during these spells of slumber, is absolutely

different from the time in which the life of the waking

man is passed.”

”From these profound slumbers we awake in a dawn,

not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born,

ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which

was life until then.”

Husserl: World as a dream Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) continued the

Cartesian tradition.

Descartes’s scepticism provided a model of how

to suspend our natural commitment to our

epistemic beliefs in order to bring to light the

fundamental features at work in belief as such.

Descartes’s hyperbolic doubt which puts in

question the very existence of the world is

the most radical of these forms of

suspension of belief.

Similarly, for Husserl, phenomenology must be

able to cope with the most radical denial of

the world, with the challenge of the most

radical hyperbolic doubt which sees the

whole world as a dream or even as non-

existent, what Husserl calls ‘empty seeming’

or the ‘nullifying illusion’(Phänomenologie

des nichtigen Scheins).

Surrealists and dadaists The surrealists and dadaists were consciously using

the characteristics of dreams (such as irregularity,

unpredictability, space-time discontinuity) in the

theoretical writings and artistic experiments.

Andre Breton’s Manifesto (1924) argues that dreams

are more intersting than waking life and one can

express oneself more freely when dreaming:

”Within the bounds in which they operate (or are

thought to operate), dreams, to all appearances, are

continuous and show signs of order.”

“When will there be sleeping logicians, sleeping

philosophers!”

“Can the dream not also be applied to the solution of

life’s fundamental questions?”

“They say that every evening, before he slept, Saint-Pol-

Roux (the Symbolist poet) used to have posted on the

door of his manor house at Camaret, a notice which

read: POET AT WORK.”

Jean-Paul Sartre A similar view of dreams as free

expression was maintained by Jean-Paul

Sartre (1905-1980) in his L’imaginaire

(1940).

Against Descartes, Sartre argued that

unlike perceptions, dreams are

associated with a special type of ”belief ”

or ”fascination without existential

assumption”.

Dreams are adventures like stories in

novels, close to consciousness without

an essential relation to reality.

”The dream is not fiction taken for reality,

it is the Odyssey of a consciousness

dedicated by itself, and in spite of itself, to

build only an unreal world.”

Merleau-Ponty on temporality in dreams

In Le problem de la passivite Maurice

Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) discusses

the time in dreams in a little same way

as Malcolm:

“The dream is not an act circumscribed

temporally. Hence, the ubiquity of the

dream, thanks to [its] symbolic matrices.

But it is also trans-temporal. Awakened

consciousness entails the time of

consciousness and the time of its object .

Oneiric consciousness … does not contain

this cleavage. Concerning a dream, the

question arises whether it is meaningful to

say: it began at such a moment and finished

at such a moment.”

Binswanger and Foucault on dreams and

existence

Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966) was a Swiss psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of existential

psychology.

In 1928 Wandlungen in der Auffassung und Deutung des Traumes (Transformations in the view and

interpretation of the dream) was issued and in 1930 Binswanger published a short treatise Traum und

Existenz (Dream and existence).

Binswanger was an important early influence to Michel Foucault (1926-1984) In an introduction to

Binswager’s Dream and Existence, in an essay “Dream, Imagination, and Existence” (1952) Foucault

thinks that Binswanger’s existential-psychological prioritizing of dreams is justified and completed

in the two-fold operation of first prioritizing the imagination over perception, and then founding

the imagination in dreams. We can only regain the rigorous goals of phenomenology if we recognize

that dreams, rather than being an effect of the imagination, are the source of the imagination.

Moreover, since dreams have a symbolic structure of their own, by analyzing dreams we analyze the

fundamental structures of perception.

However, the Malcolmian problem occurs: once Foucault has paired ontology with an investigation

of the imagination through dream analysis, however, he has eliminated the possibility of the

description and adequation of the contents of consciousness. The image, created in reflection and

recollection, does not present us with truth, rather it isolates us from the expressive authenticity of

the structured associations of the imagination. For truth we must turn to poetry, art, and the

imaginative play of the id.

Postmodernist reality

Some postmodernist thinkers like Jean

Baudrillard (1929-2007) have argued that

reality has disappeared – there are only

fleeting images which make up a dream-like

hyperreality: neon-lights, tv-screens, social

media, movies, videos, computer games etc.

This can also be experienced in virtual

reality where our perceptions are produced

by computers and we live in synthetic

cyberspace.

However, these takes place when we are

awake – the dream is produced artificially.

Ilkka Niiniluoto has reformulated the

Cartesian question: how do we know

whether we are just living in the real world

or in virtual reality?

Wolfson: A Dream Interpreted

Within A Dream

“In A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, Elliot

Wolfson guides the reader through

contemporary philosophical and scientific

models to the archaic wisdom that the dream

state and waking reality are on an equal

phenomenal footing--that the phenomenal

world is the dream from which one must

awaken by waking to the dream that one is

merely dreaming that one is awake. Wolfson

draws on psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and

neuroscience to elucidate the phenomenon of

dreaming in a vast array of biblical, rabbinic,

philosophical, and kabbalistic texts. To

understand the dream, Wolfson writes, it is

necessary to embrace the paradox of the

fictional truth--a truth whose authenticity can

be gauged only from the standpoint of its

artificiality. “

Malcolm and phenomenology Windt and Metzinger in their paper ’The Philosophy of Dreaming and Self-

Consciousness: What Happens to the Experiential Subject during the Dream State?’

(2007) have tried to answer Malcolm from the phenomenological point of view.

They argue that from a purely phenomenological point of view, dreams are simply the

presence of the world. On the level of subjective experience, the dream world is

experienced as respresenting the here and now. And even though it is a model

constructed by the dreaming brain, it is not recognized as a model, but is experienced as

reality itself. In philosophical terms, the reality-model created by the dreaming brain is

phenomenally transparent: the fact that it is a model is invisible to the experiential

subject. (p. 3)

Dreams are very complex, not only fairytale stories as Malcolm argues. Dreams

integrate several different types of imagery into a complex, multimodal, and sequentially

organized model of the world (p. 4).

They highlight lucid dreaming which gives a full phenomenal world. At the same time, it

is conscious of itself, it realizes that it is, so to speak, in a vat.

Ethics of dreaming We have already seen that St. Augustine

was concerned about sinful sexual

thoughts in dreams. His views were in

some respect shared by Owen Flanagan

in Dreaming Souls.

Are we morally responsible for our

actions in dreams?

Are we morally obliged to not entertain

certain thoughts, even if these thoughts

do not affect our later actions and do

not harm others?

Consequentialism vs deontologism Empirical question for a consequentialist: are dreams, fantasies and video games are really without

behavioural consequence towards others? (Driver: dreams do have consequences, but it is a

different matter whether they can be evaluated ethically; one has to produce good systematically in

order one’s actions to be ethical – dream actions do not do this.)

Consequentialist theories may well argue that, provided that dreams really do not affect my

behaviour later, it is not morally wrong to “harm” other dream characters, even in lucid dreaming.

Deontological theories, in stark contrast to Consequential theories, believe that we have obligations

to act and think, or not act and think, in certain ways regardless of effects on other people.

According to Deontological moral theories, I have a duty to never entertain certain thoughts

because it is wrong in itself. Deontological theories see individuals as more important than mere

consequences of action.

Since dreams are often actually about real people, I am not treating that individual as an end-in-

itself if I chose to harm their “dream representative”. The basic Deontological maxim to treat

someone as an end rather than a means to my entertainment can apply to dreams.

Julia Driver: ‘Dream Immorality’, Philosophy 82 (2007), pp. 5- 22 – supports consequentialism (in

her terms externalism in contrast to internalism)

Virtue ethics on dreaming Follows the ancient/Augustinian view of developing one’s moral character.

This moral approach considers an individual for his or her overall life, how to make it a good one

and develop that individual’s character.

The question “can we have immoral dreams?” needs to be opened up to: “what can I get out of

dreaming to help me acquire virtuousness?”

Has also a Freudian trait as dreams arguably put us in touch with our unconscious and indirectly tell

us about our motives and habits in life (compare Flanagan)

In order to achieve happiness, fulfilment and developing virtuousness we owe it to ourselves to

recall and pay attention to our dreams.

Certain changes people make in waking life do eventually “show up” in dreams. Dreams, as

unconsciously instantiated, capture patterns of thought from waking life.

Emphasis on lucid dreaming - new modes of thinking can be introduced and this is the process by

which people learn to lucid dream. By periodically introducing thoughts about whether one is

awake or not during the day, every day for some period of time, this pattern of thinking eventually

occurs in dreams. By constantly asking “am I awake?” in the day it becomes more likely to ask

oneself in a dream, to realize that one is not awake and answer in the negative. Lucid dreaming

invokes our ability to make choices, often to the same extent as in waking life.

Future of philosophy of dreaming? Christopher Dreisbach (’Dreams in the

History of Philosophy’, Dreaming 10, 1

(2000)) distinguishes three ways to pursue

philosophical study of dreaming:

1) Historical // we can set the past views on

dreaming into context with the help of

other disciplines and examine

contemporary thought about dreams in

light of those developments.

2) Regard dreams in the context of main areas

of philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology,

ethics, aesthetics, logic). Possible topics in

metaphysics are, for example, whether God

reveals himself in dreams, dream characters

have minds, the dream world constitutes its

own universe, dream characters have

substance . In logic one could research

”dream-logic”

Interdisciplinary approach 3) Dreaming can be researched by co-operation of various discplines such as

pscyhology, anthropolgy, theology, art and philosophy.

Four basic questions to all disciplines concerning dreaming:

a) What is the source of a dream? Is it the self or outside the self? If the self, is it the

mind? The brain? The spirit? If it is outside self, is it God? Other minds or spirits?

(cf. Rosen & Sutton, ’Self-representation and Perspectives in Dreams’, Philosophy

Compass 8/11 (2003), 1041-1053)

b) What is the location of a dream? Is it the mind or brain? Is there a dream world

to which the dreamer or part of the dreamer travels during the dream?

c) What about the content of the dream? What is the stuff of dreams? Is it physical?

Mental? What about the veracity of dreams? Are they real or fiction? How do

dreams differ from waking life?

d) What about the value of dreams? Do they have practical value, as many

psychotherapists argue? Do they have moral or aesthetic value?