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DreamingBrian O'ShaughnessyPublished online: 06 Nov 2010.

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Dreaming

Brian OShaughnessyKings College, London

The aim is to discover a principle governing the formation of the dream. Nowdreaming has an analogy with consciousnes s in that it is a seeming-consciousness .Meanwhile consciousnes s exhibits a tripartite structure consisting of (A)understanding oneself to be situated in a world endowed with given properties , (B)the mental processes responsible for the state, and (C) the concrete perceptua lencounter of awareness with the world. The dream analogues of these three elementsare investigated in the hope of discovering the source of the kinship between dreamand consciousness . The dream world (A) proves to be a logically impossible world,limited by nothing more than sheer narratability . The internal world (B) of thedreamer is notable for the limitlessness of the scope allotted to the imagination(exactly taking over the offices of rational function) , together with the presence oftwo important phenomena encountered in waking consciousness : a measure ofinteriority , and the positing of a world. Finally (C), the dream further replicatesconsciousnes s in so far as we seem in dreaming concretely to experience ourphysical surrounds in the form of perceptua l imagining. These properties play theirpart in enabling the dream to be a seeming-consciousness . At the same time they aresuch as to necessitat e its not being consciousness . It is proposed that in the light ofthese properties, and those composing the state of consciousness , the dream simply isthe imagining of consciousness .

How light the sleeping on this soily star,How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.

Dylan Thomas

(1) What is dreaming? It is the mind creating out of its own resources anunreal replica of waking consciousness at least. This article is an attempt toanswer the question by delimiting the properties of the dream, and byuncovering a governing principle that accounts for their existence. Then theanalogy between the dream and consciousness suggests a structure for thearticle. When a person is conscious he (i) understands himself to be situated ina world that is endowed with certain properties, (ii) brings to bear in relationto that world an internal life of a kind peculiar to consciousness, and (iii)encounters the world in concrete mode in sense-perceptual experience. Thesethree main ingredients of the wakeful conscious situation are each re ected indreaming. Thus, the dreamer dreams of a domain which has properties of aspecial dream variety; has an inner life in relation to that dreamed worldwhich is to be found only in dreaming; and in the dream seems to encounter

Inquiry, 45, 399432

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that world through perceptual and generally visual imagining. Then since Isuspect that the analogy between dreaming and consciousness is an importantlead to the nature of dreaming, I have chosen to divide the article into thefollowing sections: (A) The dream world, (B) the inner world of the dreamer,(C) perceptual imagination in the dream, and (D) the relation betweendreaming and consciousness. My hope is that a closer inspection of the centralelements of the dream situation may shed light on the kinship between dreamand consciousness, and thereby on the underlying nature of the dream.

(2) Before I begin the discussion, it seems desirable that I say a few wordsconcerning the existential status of the dream. Wittgenstein asked: do wedream, or do we wake with memories of what never was? At rst one mightbe inclined to shrug off this question on the grounds that the second state ofaffairs is unreal. But in fact it is no more than an unusual possibility. In aword, we dream. Had it been the case that seeming-memory was the onlyconceivable evidence of dreaming, one might well reject the distinction: ineffect, endorse a veri cationist analysis which reduced dreaming out ofexistence. However, other evidences do in fact exist, even though memory isevidentially in a privileged position in that those alternative evidences dependultimately upon memory. Why suppose that rapid eye movements (REM)have anything to do with dreaming, if it were not because of the associationwith recollection? On the other hand, if no other evidence of dreaming couldbe discovered besides seeming-memory, then I think we should have to facethe possibility that dream-memory was no more than a post-sleepphenomenon: Wittgensteins second alternative. After all, spurious recollec-tions are a real phenomenon indeed, one which might sometimes occur insubjects who mostly remembered their dreams so that Wittgensteinsdisjunction cannot even be dichotomous in character, let alone unreal. Whilethe natural tendency of experiences to leave memories of themselves makesthe second theory unlikely from the start, it should be noted that someexperiences are rarely remembered, e.g. somnambulist experience.The discussion which now follows falls under the aforementioned

headings.

A. The Dream World

1. Unity

(1) What goes into the making of a dream?What is the constitutive analysis ofthis phenomenon? The following items frequently occur in the course ofdreaming. (i) Seeming visual experience of a physical setting. (ii) Seemingperceived events in that setting. (iii) Seeming facts, mostly relating to thatsetting. (iv) Beliefs, mostly relating to that setting. (v) Ones seeming

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presence in that setting. (vi) Seeming physical actions of ones own in thatsetting. (vii) Occasional seeming mental actions. (viii) Thoughts andemotions, mostly relating to that setting.Now while we might describe phenomena of this kind as parts of a dream,

are we really entitled to believe they are parts of a single phenomenon? Whynot construe them as no more than a concatenation of phenomena occurringduring sleep? What reason have we to believe that there is any one somethingthat is the dream?

(2) One reason consists in the fact that there is much cross-reference amongstthe above elements, and irreducible cross-reference at that. For example, onehas a thought in the dream about some X one seemingly sees in the dream, andthere is no acceptable description of this thought-event which omits referenceto that X-element. Here the essential description of one dream-item involvesreference to a second dream-item, so that although these phenomenalelements are numerically two, one is essentially linked to the other.This property is intimately related to another feature of dreams which is

also indicative of unity: their narratability. How could the object of acontinuous narration be a mere concatenation, a fragmentary sequence ofexperiential splinters, the unintelligible phantasmagoric object of a wordsalad? And how could the time-order posited in the narrative reveal itsexistence to the dreamer if the dream consisted of mental bric-a-brac of thiskind? Presumably not through the relational properties of those fragments,nor recollectively either. A narrative of dream experience which takes theform of a continuity must have as its object an experiential continuity acrosstime, involving persisting items which reappear at intervals, and must assumetherefore the existence of a continuous temporally extensive framework inwhich the various dream elements are positioned. While a dream mightsurvive the existence of a temporal gap a sort of temporal blind-spot whichis not experienced somewhat as a lm survives an interval narratabilityof the kind which characterizes dreams is inconsistent with a break-up intotemporal instants. It necessitates experiential continuity and the persistence ofelements.

2. Presumptions

(1) Once again: what goes to make up a dream? Tautologically one mightanswer: as much as is experienced. I express myself in these circular terms fora reason. The literary critic L. C. Knights once wrote a famous articleironically entitled How many children had Lady Macbeth? At one point inthe play Lady Macbeth speaks of having given suck ... , and one naturallyassumes she is referring to children of her own. Here we have a perfectlylegitimate presumptive inference from the text. Nevertheless, there seems to

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be something illicit in pursuing the question, unless there are speci c pointersin that direction. As soon debate whether Venus was or was not 5 6 inheight. It is not that these matters are hidden by lack of data: we offend aprinciple in pursuing the question. We shall see that a closely reminiscentprinciple holds concerning dreams, a principle that establishes a kinshipbetween dream, myth, legend, fairy story, etc.Consider some of the characteristics of two familiar kinds of narratives.

First, a report in a newspaper to the effect (say) that a woman was robbed ofher jewellery in Trafalgar Square. How would we interpret such a report?Well, I think we would all naturally endorse the (highly unlikely) claim thatthe woman must have either been 5 6 in height, or more, or less, and do soeven if nothing in the report mentioned her height. Likewise we would allaccept the (equally improbable) claim that the jewellery is either somewherewithin the Solar System or has ceased to exist. Now consider further a novelin which (say) the hero is at one time in Paris, and then a few days later inMarseilles or Tierra del Fuego. If in Tierra del Fuego, and the novel is set in1895, then the reader is at a loss and is forced to assume the novelist hasblundered. If on the other hand he is in Marseilles, he must assume either thatthe hero took a train and that the novelist has not seen t to mention thematter, or else that the novelist is just plain sloppy.

(2) It is all very different in dreams. Why? It turns upon the presumptionswhich we bring to the situation. Thus, in the real domain of physical naturethe principle of physically suf cient reason governs all: there is a physicalreason for everything physical. And this principle has no application indreams. By contrast, it is automatically assumed to be operative both in thedomain of being described by the newspaper report and in the imaginedsubject-matter of the novel. Why the difference? Well, in dreams there isgenerally no reason given why anything happens. Strangely enough it followsfrom this simple fact that generally in dreams there is no reason why anythinghappens; that is, generally reasons form no part of dreams. This paradoxicaland seemingly tautologous truth suf ces to disengage the normal physicallogic from the dream. Thus, a third person listening to a report of a dreamwhose content resembled the aforementioned novel could not complain: buthow in 1895 could one be in Tierra del Fuego just after being in Paris? If Idream that in 1895 I am in Paris and then a moment later that I am in Tierradel Fuego, and if there is no reason given for the change of place, then interms of the dream there is simply no reason for the not, move but,alteration in place. It simply happens: not an event of movement, but a changeof site. And yet there is an explanation of the fact that in the dream I was inTierra del Fuego immediately after being in Paris, even though in the dreamthis fact is wholly without explanation: the reason lies in whatever mentalphenomena led to my dreaming of such things at such times as I did.

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I must now qualify the claim that presumptions lapse in dreams thoughnot very seriously. If I dream of (say) Hume, it can be assumed I dreamed ofan entity that can be conscious, and yet this was not explicitly part of thedream. The reason is that in dreaming of Hume one must be dreaming of somesomething, and therefore of a certain type, and one must be in a position in theveridical report to inject a determinate meaning into Hume. Therequirements of sense and reference must be met in that narrative, and itcan be assumed that I dreamed of a sentient being and not of a cabbage. Bycontrast: we all know that Humes do not uctuate wildly in colour, yet ifnothing relating to Humes colour is dreamed so that we can say in the dreamhe did not change colour, we can do so only in the sense it is no part of thedream that he did and this is not the same as dreaming that he preserved asteady colour. Thus, the presumption of steady colour lapses, that of being aconscious entity remains. Indeed, even if Hume turns into a cabbage in adream, it is still a conscious being who has become a cabbage. It seems thatthose properties which are essential to the preservation of a sense in thenarrative report must be presumed to be conserved: they alone.

(3) Even though we dream, not of some fantastic metaphysical realm, but ofthe physical world, and therefore of a world in which the rationality of thereal governs, the dreaming representation of that domain fails to honour theprinciple. Reason does not operate in dreams, since nothing that isencountered explains anything else unless it is dreamed to do so. Thisholds even when the subject-matter openly conforms to the laws of physicalnature. I dream of copper, of nitric acid, of an encounter between the two, andof nitrogen peroxide coming from the solution. Then whereas concerning anovel we can say Andre Bolkonsky died from wounds received at the Battleof Borodino, irrespective of whether it is explicitly stated that he did, wecannot say that in my dream the gas was caused by the encounter between thetwo reagents unless it is an explicit part of the dream. And even if it were, Imight very well have embellished the report with the further detail that the gaswas caused by the encounter of those reagents only because it was Sunday.Thus, it is not that the dream has strayed into the realm of law in explicitlyintroducing an explanation linking nomically related events. Nothingexplains anything unless it is dreamed to do so, and even when it is thusdreamed it is not as if the dreaming mind has managed to carve out a rationalnook in a non-rational domain.The inapplicability of the normal physical logos to the subject-matter of

dreams is apparent in the persistence conditions for physical objects indreams. In the real physical world, material objects do not simply go out ofexistence. They either persist, for good reason (e.g. attraction between micro-constituents), or else destruct, again for good reason (e.g. A-bomb radiation).This principle is operative in Nature, and is an application of a wider principle

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of rationality. And in the average realistic novel it is intended by the author tobe part of the framework of the world described. By contrast, even in a dreamin which explicit re-identi cation of an object occurs across time, as in I sawan orange on the table and walked over and picked it up, we have no right toinsist that since it refers to the orange which was just then seen, so that oneand the same object appears at two separate times in the same dream, thatobject must have continued to exist between the two recorded incidents.Conservation principles have no place in dreams. For to repeat: there is asmuch to the dream as the experience contains, and no more.

3. Conservation

(1) Like an orchid which seems as if it lives off air, so the dream springs forthfully formed out of nothing (somewhat as Wagners famous Prelude to Act IIIof Lohengrin appears like re suspended in mid-air, a dazzling auditoryapparition supported by itself). This quasi-miraculous onset is repeated atevery instant of the dreams existence, and repeated in reverse in the momentof termination. It is nothing but the inapplicability of the rationality of thereal across time. One would search in vain for reasons within the dream forits perpetuation, since no conservation principles govern the subject-matter ofthe dream, and equally fruitlessly look for an explanation of its ending at thepoint it did.It might seem to be the same in the case of (say) a painting. As soon look

within the painting for reasons for its beginning on the left at a church,continuing through a wood, and ending on the right at a stream. So one mightsay mistakenly; and here we come across one reason for the imagery of theorchid. While the church in the painting does not cause the presence of thewood in the painting and the painters mind does, just as the mind of thedreamer causes the sequential stages of the dream, there is none the less apresumption that (say) the horizon behind the church will continue as wemove to the right, based upon the uniformity of physical nature. Moreover,the painting may be presumed to represent a scene which continues beyondthat depicted. We can therefore produce physical explanations of thedevelopment of the painting cast in terms of its subject-matter as in: thehorizon is one inch from the top to the right of the church because it is almostan inch from the top to the left of the church and a real physical horizon wouldgenerally continue in that way. But we cannot do so in the dream. Hence itsprogression through time is wholly without explanation in dream terms and isin that sense quasi-miraculous, whereas the paintings progression throughspace is amenable to explanation in terms of its physical subject-matter. Nodream logic explains the dreams appearing either at all, or at the point inthe narrative at which it did, or for continuing as it does, or for lapsing without

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warning into non-existence when it did. Here we have one reason why theimage of the orchid is so appropriate.Another determinant of that image, and divergence from the principle of

development of the painting, is this. The advance of the painting throughspace is known by the painter to derive from his own mind, and understood toobserve the laws governing the domain depicted. But the dream comes intothe mind for reasons unknown to the dreamer, and advances through timeseemingly as self-sustaining as is the physical world itself in the minds of thewaking conscious. The causes lie elsewhere, as they do in the painting, butwhereas in the painting they are overtly given as located in the self, in thedream all appears external and autonomous. The illusion is total. Thanks tothe conjunction of the above two properties, the apparently autonomous realmof the dream unfolds a sequence of seeming external phenomena which aretaking place there and then without rhyme or reason: no reasons being hidden,for none are there. And all of this is accepted without reservation by theseemingly conscious being who is experiencing it. For him it is neitheruntoward or toward: it simply is.

(2) Let me summarize the situation. Whether in novel or dream the real reasonone event follows another lies in the minds of their creators. And it does soeven if the two cited events are nomically related in physical nature: forexample the aforementioned encounter between nitric acid and copper andthe occurrence of nitrogen peroxide. Nevertheless, if in a novel these sameevents were merely cited, it would normally be understood that the author isrepresenting not merely events but a causal relation as well. By contrast, ifthey are merely cited in the full dream report, then the dreamer did not dreamof two causally related events. If, however, he dreams in addition that they arecausally related, so be it. But he might also at the same time have dreamedthat the causal relation occurred only because it was Sunday. Thus, dreamingof a causal relation is not dreaming of a natural physical relation that issusceptible of depth physical explanation unless that too is dreamed. In thissense the dreamed causal relation does not lean upon physical realities. It ismerely a causal relation and not even for whatever reason. Thus, despiterepresenting a realm where law governs, this feature of reality is notrepresented in dreams. To be represented, nomicity would need to beexplicitly represented, yet even then would not govern in the dream, sinceagain one would need to dream the application of the dreamed nomicity.There is therefore a kind of inertia dogging the footsteps of any attempt torestore the missing presumptions, including the explanatory presumption. Itstems from the fact that all additions are merely ad hoc, which in turn derivesfrom the principle: there is as much to the dream as the experience contains and no more.In short, the novel does not need to mention a causal relation, and yet it is

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understood, as in he put the kettle on the re, and when the water had boiledhe ..., and understood that it is part of physical nature and susceptible ofdepth physical explanation. By contrast, unless causality is explicitlymentioned it will generally not be true that the dreamer dreamed of a causalrelation, and even when it is explicitly present, none of the normalpresumptions hold. It is ad hoc all the way.

4. Explanation

(1) The dreaming subject is in a non-rational state. What is the reason for thisjudgment? It is not because the dreamer is attentively out of touch withphysical reality. And no doubt it is because the mental will, and thus also thecapacity for thinking, is unavailable. But the non-rationality of the dreamer ismost apparent in the phenomenon in which rationality or its absence directlymanifests itself, viz. belief-formation. In so far as beliefs occur in dreams,they occur somewhat as moods or inclinations occur in the conscious: theysimply happen to one, we have no jurisdiction over their arrival or departure.We encounter here a phenomenon noteworthy for its absence in waking life:just-believing. For rather as in waking consciousness we may just feel likesinging, or just feel happy, so in dreams we just believe . Neither in thecase of dream-belief, nor simple inclinations or moods at any time, do I knowwhy I just , and in each case the phenomenon is not rational. Moodscannot be rational, and therefore cannot be irrational either, for moods cannotbe contrary to reason. But because dream beliefs happen to us from causesoutside our ken and beyond our jurisdiction, and beliefs can be and putativelyare rational, dream beliefs must be deemed both non-rational and irrational.The state of mind of the dreamer is therefore not rational, since the world ofwhich the dreamer is seemingly aware is not determined by that whosefunction it is to determine the way reality appears to us: reason.

(2) What is the explanation of the inapplicability in dreams of the principle ofthe rationality of the real? Why the absence of the normal presumptionsconcerning subject-matter of just this kind? Why cannot we assume that if anobject makes an appearance at two distinct times in the one dream, then itmust have been at some determinate place at some given time in between?The explanation cannot lie in the fact that in the narration of the dream nomention is made of the object at that time. After all, the same is true of thenewspaper report of the jewellery. Equally, the explanation cannot be that thedream is a work of the imagination, since the same is true of the novel. And itcannot be that whereas both newspaper and novel purport to represent reality,the dream does not, for each may be said to do so, albeit in a different way.The newspaper literally so; the novel a pretence of reporting reality, so that

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reality is what it is pretending to report; while dreaming is dreaming thatreality is a certain way. In each case reality is the intentional object.

(3) Does the explanation lie in the non-rational state of the dreamer? Thefollowing arguments might be advanced against this suggestion. First, there isno reason why a fairy story should not be invented on the spot by someone ina rational state. But the principle of the uniformity of nature is no part of theframework of the world of the fairy story: magic is rife, thought can wreakhavoc in the physical domain without physical mediation of any kind, actingupon matter out of the blue as one might say. Here we have a non-rationalworld conjured up by a rational mind in a rational state, and this demonstratesthat the explanation of the non-rationality of the dream world cannot lie in thenon-rational state of the dreamer. The second argument grasps the nettle ofthe dream itself. For even if one supposes the fairy story to be incapable ofsome of the feats open to dreaming, why should not a wakeful rational beingsimply at will imagine all that occurs in a dream: for example, imagine that heis in Paris on a Tuesday in 1895 and in Tierra del Fuego on the followingThursday? The description of the conscious phantasy may well beindistinguishable from that of the dream. What can the one do that the othercannot? And the same conclusion is drawn in this second argument as in the rst.Consider the rst of these arguments. I shall not debate whether a world in

which magic exists is rational or not some might claim that all that happensdoes so for a good reason, natural or supernatural. Nevertheless, in such arealm reasons of a kind are obligatory: the fairy story world is rule-observing.If the wizard is in two places at once, this is because this is the kind of thingwizards can do, it is one of the powers that come with wizardry. Reason of akind is assumed for everything (no doubt because these narratives areintended for beings in a rational state). But as we have seen this is not true ofdreams. Reasons may be quoted only if explicitly dreamed as reasons, aswhen one dreams that because it is Tuesday the ocean is burning, and eventhen there is no presumption that the ocean has a power to burn which hasbeen used: rather, it burns simply because it is Tuesday, for that whollyparticular reason alone. Nothing like law governs what happens, so that noneof the presumptions that allow us to extrapolate beyond reports of events inother realms (physical reality, novelistic reality, mythic reality, etc.) andfurther to characterize them apply in the case of dreams.Consider the second argument. It is important that we distinguish the

activity of reporting a dream from the dream itself, and this argument fails todo so. That the narratives of dream and conscious phantasy are identical doesnot entail that the narrated phenomena are the same: that what one imagines isthe same does not entail that the imaginings are the same. After all, oneimagining may be active and the other inactive, and the world conjured up in

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one imagining may not be that of the other. And in fact this is the situationhere. And how in any case is one supposed rationally to create a world likethat of the dream? Invent a narrative which might easily be mistaken for adream, and instruct ones listeners that it is to be understood as exhibiting theproperties of dreams? For example: he turned him into a frog, proffered insuch a modality that there is no presumption that he is exercising a power?Well, one can invent such a narrative, and have phantasies with such content,but the latter step is simply not open to one. There is no way one couldactively or inactively have wakeful phantasies with such a property. Thereason being that necessarily we cannot shake off our rationality when awake.

(4) The question we must settle is whether the fact that the dreamer is in anon-rational state determines that the domain of which he dreams does notobey the rule of law. Is it because there is no reason for dream-beliefs, that nodreamed x can be a reason for some dreamed y in the sense Hamletsfathers death is a reason for Hamlets grief? Now one signi cant property ofdreams is the absence of any determining intention. This marks the dream offfrom myth, legend, fairy story, etc. Thus, even though myths and legends(etc.) scarcely derive from single intentions, they are none the lessintentionally promulgated down the ages. By contrast, once we distinguishthe intentional wakeful narration of the dream from the experiential process itdescribes, it becomes obvious that there can be no determining intention atwork in a dream. The dreamer does not mean his dream in any way. Thensince the dream simply happens to one, and (not being meant in any way)does not lend itself to interpretative intentional re-description, might this bewhy there is as much and no more to the dream as is explicitly present? And isit therefore this that explains the inapplicability of the presumptions whichordinarily apply to the physical subject-matter of the dream? Well, I do notsee how it could be. After all, when a conscious person perceives his physicalenvirons he has no intentional control over the broad range of events, yetexperiences everything as taking place in a law-governed domain.It seems to me that the real explanation is to be found where we initially

supposed it might lie, viz. in the non-rational state of the dreamer. Theinherence of this particular form of mental deprivation carries the implicationthat in his experiences the dreamers understanding is not observing theprinciple of suf cient reason: no presumptions deriving from his dormantrational powers nd themselves automatically applied by his mind to thephysical objects of those experiences, which as a result are not experienced bythe subject as set in a rational or comprehensible domain. For the moment Ishall have to settle for this rather blunt and simple explanation. It should benoted that it is a negative trait of which we have been speaking: it is not thatthe absence of rationality in the dreamer guarantees the occurrence of eventswhich are in nature contrary to law. Rather, there is simply no guarantee that

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they follow it: for example, if an object appears in a dream at time t1 andreappears at time t2, we cannot assume that it did not go out of existence ordid. We have what we have, and no more. It is a consequence of the almosttotal sleep of reason during dreaming.

5. The Limits of Content

Few of us dream of metaphysically different worlds such as a Leibnitziancolony of monads. Instead, we dream of Reality: things are merely differentfrom how in reality they are. And they are different because the dream is aninvention of the mind: to be exact, of the non-rational mind (where no holdsare barred). In the novel things are different too, the novelist shuf ing realand imagined items around in imaginary situations, but in the dream thingsare different only more and radically so. To be sure, one ought not overstatethe difference. Many dreams are mundane in the extreme, and we should notrepresent dreaming as a phenomenon in which the imagination cuts adriftfrom normal life and soars off into an Arabian Nights of untrammelledphantasy. Nevertheless, it is of great importance that dreams canaccommodate events which could not conceivably happen in reality: forexample, a stone turning into a man. While dreams are mostly unlike fairystories and myths, all that could happen in such works of the imaginationcould in principle be dreamed: the resemblance is not so much in content as inthe range of possible ways things can be. In dreams boundaries persist, butalso dissolve; sense and non-sense of a kind co-exist; a sort of logic is de ed,and a sort observed.What are the limits, if any, so far as dream-content is concerned? What

kind of non-sense may it not include? It seems that dreams can break lawswhich even fairy stories and myths must observe. One can dream that 1 and 1make 3, that one is looking point blank at a surface which is red and blue allover, and it is doubtful whether possibilities of this kind could beaccommodated by (say) a fairy story. If a story included a magician whocould construct an object which was red and blue all over, something in uswould I think protest: but what is it, this fantastic thing, that he is supposed tobe able to create? A certain level of the understanding needs to be intact if weare to so much as discover what it is that is imaginatively entertained. Thatsame level is not called upon in the dream, which must in this respect beviewed as the work of a mind functioning (so to say) on fewer cylinders.Thus, one misidenti es an event in the understanding when one describes adream experience as grasping for the very rst time in my life that 1 and 1make 3. While one understands what it is the wizard is supposed to haveaccomplished in turning the prince into a frog, rather as we understand (say)that a caterpillar turned into a butter y, it seems to me that if he is creditedwith the capability of (say) making 1 and 1 equal to 3 then one understands no

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more than the separate words and the logical form of the sentences in whichthose words are embedded. In sum, dreams can break a priori laws as myths,legends, and fairy stories cannot.Then does nothing limit dream content? Well, one could not accept as a

dream report the following: if is to next thing; and therefore one could notdream if is to next thing. Nor do I think one could accept a dream report to theeffect that at that moment he entered the room and did not enter the room. A agrant contradiction of this kind, which visibly breaks the laws of logicrather than the rules of sentence-formation as in the previous example,reaches the limit we have been seeking. In reporting such a putative dream thenarrator is giving with one hand what simultaneously he is taking back withthe other: the result being that no transfer of informational content is effected,and the narration breaks down. This is not to say that dreams cannot embracethe contradictory. One could have a dream report in which at one point one(say) endows a person with the property of being born in 1900, and somewhatlater in the dream with the property of not being born in 1900. What cannot beaccommodated is the evident contradiction, something which simply halts thenarration. In a word, the limits of dream content are the same as the limits ofdream narratability. And this is the same as the point at which occurs thedemise of referential function, the limiting case where we are left withnothing but words. That is, where we do not even nd ourselves in a positionto ing up our hands in protest with the response: impossible! It seems a neline between red and blue all over, and evidently p and not-p; yet ne or not, aline is there. All that one needs for something to be dreamable is that it is away the World might be claimed to be however impossible, howeverincomprehensible, however inconceivable.Narratability is the outer perimeter of the dreamable, which is the point at

which referential function reaches its limit, and thus also where representa-tional function does the same. The World is being said to be a certain way,that is all that is needed. Then why is it that we can accept that 1 and 1 mightmake 3 in a dream, but not in a myth or fairy story? The answer I think is thatit is through our belief at the time that 1 and 1 might make 3 in a dream, andthe mental state of the dreamer is a wholly non-rational state in which one canbelieve anything. By contrast, in the fairy story or myth the world is presentedto a presumed rational reader through the mediation of words constituting anarrative, rather than through the beliefs or mental state of that reader. Thesetwo factors impose constraints not present in the dream.

6. A Dif culty

(1) A problem is posed by dreams, which is reminiscent of Moores Paradox.Can one dream that p without in the dream believing p? Can a propositionhang in mid-air as it were, part of the given world the dreamer inhabits,

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without at the same time his endorsing that proposition? Is the following anintelligible dream-report: I dreamed that it was raining but I was convinced itwas not raining? Now the parallel waking report in the past tense like it wasraining but I was convinced it was not raining poses no special problem(even though the present-tense wakeful version of this statement lands us inMoores Paradox). And the dream has the following special property: allreports of dreams are of necessity in the past tense (by contrast with wakingaccounts of present experience). Then this fact can mislead us. It may causeus to think of the dream as somehow essentially past, leading us to supposethat the contentious dream-report must be acceptable (like the waking past-tense report). But in fact the dream does not happen in the past, nor even in thepresent: it merely happens when it does. Then the question I am asking is: cana proposition p be presented as fact in a dream, even as one personallyrepudiates it? And I have to say that I do not see how it could. For how elsecould p exist in a dream? What other mode of presentation is there?

(2) This conclusion raises a dif culty for the account I am giving of dream-content. If I cannot dream that 1 and 1 make 3 without in the dream believingit is so, then conversely I should be capable of dreaming that Mr X entered theroom and did not enter the room, provided I can believe such a proposition ina dream. And why should I not do so, seeing that I can dream that 1 and 1make 3? Then why cannot I have a dream whose description includes andthen Mr X entered the room and did not enter the room?Why cannot I believethis proposition in a dream, and thereby dream it?Consider the dream-report and then Mr X entered the room and did a

dance. How is this to be understood? It is a report of an experience in which Iwas seemingly aware of a dance. And how is that to be understood? It is not, Ithink, merely a propositional awareness that is being recorded. Rather, it isseemingly an example of the familiar relation in which we stand to ourenvironment when awake: that is, a perceptual and generally visualawareness, conjoined with belief in the object-content of the perceptualexperience. This familiar relation is reproduced in the dream in the form ofvisual imagining conjoined with belief in the object-content of the latter.Accordingly, if I report that and then Mr X entered the room and did not enterthe room, I should by rights be taken to be reporting that and then I seemed tosee him enter the room (and believed so) and seemed to see him not enteringthe room (and believed so). But this report is unacceptable, though notbecause it might appear to endorse a contradiction: rather, it is because there isno such thing as seeing someone not enter a room. However, since there issuch a thing as seeing that someone did not enter the room, the report may wellbe understood to say I saw him enter the room and simultaneously saw that hewas not entering the room. And this report is perhaps acceptable, for I mighthave seen him enter the room just as I saw his shadow cross the door, which I

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perceived as indicative of his departure. Either way, this account leavesunscathed my claim that there is no such thing as having a dream whosedescription includes and then Mr X entered the room and did not.

B. The Inner World of the Dreamer

I began this article by noting that consciousness possesses a tripartitestructure, consisting of (i) understanding oneself to be situated in a worldendowed with given properties, (ii) the internal processes one brings to thesituation, and (iii) the concrete phenomenal interaction with the containingworld. In short, a whole containing the elements: posited world, world-constitutor, and the concrete interaction of mind and world. Then dreamingrealizes an analogous structure, the rst element of which (Dream World)has just been examined in Section A. It emerged that the world posited in thedream is logically incapable of being realized, and not just because one mightdream that 1 and 1 make 3. Then since consciousness is awareness of Reality,and reason our sole access to Reality, dreaming can of logical necessity occuronly in states other than consciousness. There is no possible world in whichthe dream is the stream of consciousness of a conscious being. No worldmatching a dream world is waiting there in narrative space in the hope ofbeing contacted by a conscious subject. The world of the dreamer observes nolimits: it is limited neither by reason, logic, the past, the future. Anything ispossible in the dream world.I pass now in this present Section B to an examination of the second

element of the above dream-structure. Then the element in consciousnesswhich corresponds to this particular dream element is what might be calledthe properly internal sector of the mental life of the conscious, that which isthe object of so-called inner sense. I propose here in Section B to inspect itsdream analogue, the inner world of the dreamer, the sector of the mind whichmust harbour those mental faculties whose operation throws up the dream. Ido so in order to nd out what it is in that inner world which creates thisphenomenon, and discover in so doing what in the dreaming mind constitutesthe explanation of the dreams being a seeming consciousness. This last mustbe a matter of some importance, since it is surely a necessary property of thedream that it replicates consciousness, natural to suppose that this property isa key to the inner nature of dreaming, and reasonable to assume that theexplanation must lie in the dream-making powers of the mind. For I shouldlike to stress that in writing this article my overall purpose is something morethan discovering the essential properties of the dream; it is a search for adeeper factor: a principle which accounts for their existence. Thenremembering the scope of the imagination in the constituting of the dreamworld, the imagination seems the most likely internal source of the kinship

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between dream and consciousness. For the imagination is par excellence animitator, indeed an imitator whose model is the Real, and in the dream theimagination seems to have the power and scope to conjure up a domain that isan analogue of the Reality given exclusively to waking consciousness. Weshall see that this theory has a dif culty to face.

1. Imagination

(1) It emerged in Section A that the dream resembles the fairy story and myth,not so much in its content as in the range of possibilities it can encompass.Indeed, it extends the range to the very limiting point at which narratabilityalong with representational function break down. Then one might supposethat this property was not merely necessary to dreams, but uniquely so aswell. Here, however, one would be mistaken. For we encounter the sameproperty in a state of consciousness which falls well outside the range ofstates compatible with dreaming. Thus, it is a notable fact that the hypnotictrance is a state in which one can believe anything; indeed, not just believeanything, but in a situation in which veridical perception is something of anorm seemingly perceive anything. For example, believe that 1 and 1 make3, or really see an orange and yet see that orange as red all over and blue allover. Whatever is describable is in principle believable in this state, and ananalogous rule holds for seeming-perceivings, even though the latter takeplace in a situation where perception typically occurs. The workingassumption I am making in this discussion is that in the hypnotic trancewhatever way the hypnotizer says the World is and perceptually appears, is away the hypnotizee believes and experiences it to be. Then we can clearly seehow in this state the limits of content coincide with the limits ofrepresentability: the representable or merely sayable precisely de nes thatlimit, since all that the hypnotizer need do to determine experiential content issay things are a certain way. In short, here as in the dream being a way is thetouchstone.The above examples of belief and seeming perception are exercises of the

propositional and perceptual imagination, respectively. Precisely the same istrue of belief and seeming perception in the dream. Thinking of thiscommonality, one might wonder how it is that the dream and the imaginative(suggested) experiential life of an hypnotizee can differ. Both occur inbeings in non-rational states: one (the dreamer) having his beliefs simplyhanded up to him by his mind, the other (the hypnotizee) having his beliefssimply handed down to him by another: two wholly non-rational methods ofbelief-acquisition; and both experiences are exercises of the imagination. Andyet on consideration it is clear that these two varieties of experience must bedifferent, and in an interesting way that points up an important property of

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dreaming. In particular, it brings to our notice an important property of thedreaming use of the imagination.

(2) An hypnotic subject is in a state such that a command from the hypnotizertends to propel him into motor-perceptual behaviour. Then at such times heuses his senses to perceive, may well believe for good rational reasonwhatever they reveal, and perform acts guided by those rational beliefs.Meanwhile he believes for no reason whatsoever all that he is told by thehypnotizer, and is ready to disbelieve the evidence of his senses: for example,to believe that the white paper before him is black or that the lighted room isplunged in darkness. And so the faculty of reason must be at once operativeand inoperative in this condition. And a comparable schizoid-like divideholds so far as a subjects contact with the environment is concerned. Thus, anhypnotizee who believes it is dark might obey an order to walk over to a tableand pick up the one ripe orange in a group of green oranges. Indeed, were heto be told that the orange was (say) an elephant, he would still need ordinaryvisual clues to identify it. The order would need to be couched in somethinglike the following terms: walk over to the table and pick up the elephant thatlooks like a ripe orange. In other words, the phantastic working of anhypnotizees perceptual and propositional imagination takes place ofnecessity upon a realistic base or ground of actual psycho-physical contactwith the environment: indeed, it takes place within such a realistic setting,rather than the reverse. It embellishes that setting with cognitive andperceptual imaginings, rather than the reverse.The relation of a dreamer to his environment is totally different. Dreamers

are perceptually, rationally, cognitively, and actively cut off from physicalreality as hypnotic subjects are not. Typically, dreaming subjects neither see,reason about, learn about, nor walk around in their environment: instead theyimagine a physical setting, frequently imagine they are visually perceiving it,and often enough imagine they are moving about somehow in that imagineddomain. Real perceptual experiences do not occur, neither do real bodilywillings, and the power of reason as determinant of belief is almost totallylost. And while the dreamer does not imagine his own existence, he none theless generally imagines he is in that imagined environment, not so much in theform of a belief to that effect, but in so far as he seems perceptually andactively to be on the spot. Thus, there can be no question of his being intouch with Reality in the merely local perceptual-cognitive senseexempli ed in the hypnotic subject. And neither is it possible that hisimaginings should occur within and be integrated into a real and concretelygiven physical ground which is constituted in his own mind through thepower of reason. The dreamer inhabits a purely imaginary world, theconstituting of which owes nothing to the use of rational function andeverything to the imagination.

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(3) What is the signi cance of this difference between these two states? Itconcerns the fundamental question: what is it about the inner world of thedreamer that makes dreaming a seeming-consciousness? Thus, since theconcept experience is not the concept experience when seeminglyconscious, experiences might occur which are not embedded in a seeming-consciousness: the experiences of a somnambulist presumably are not. Andneither are those of an hypnotic subject (as we shall later see). However,dream experiences do occur in such a context. Then how does dreaming cometo have this property? The most likely explanation is to be found in the partplayed by the imagination in constituting the dream. In the dream theimagination is continually active and observes no limits, and in thisun agging and limitless creative power we seem to have the wherewithal tocreate a containing domain that is the analogue of the Reality posited in thestate of waking consciousness. One might naturally suppose that in this powerwe have the source of the dream and of its kinship to consciousness.Then it is here that the relevance of the hypnotic trance becomes apparent.

The discussion of the trance was undertaken to help delineate the precise roleof the imagination in dreaming, and in so doing explain why the dream is aquasi-consciousness. For the trance is of special interest in this regard, sincethe imaginings of an hypnotizee seem to observe no more limitation than dothose of a dreamer, the imaginings of an hypnotizee being free to roam as faras the language of the hypnotizer can transport them. But the unlimitedimaginings of the trance do not take place in the context of a quasi-consciousness. It follows that the projected explanation of the fact that thedream is a quasi-consciousness, which located the answer in the limitlesscharacter of dream imaginings, cannot as it stands be sustained. Then oughtwe to abandon the theory? And does this show that the imagination cannot bethe dream-making agency in the inner world of the dreamer? In my opinionnot, as I hope now to demonstrate.

(4) One feature of the imaginings of an hypnotizee which emerged was thatthey take place within a context of psycho-physical cognitive and activecontact with the environment which is at once rationally constituted andnecessary. And so it turns out that in the trance the imagination has after all toobserve limits of a special kind: it can operate only if the mind posits anouter unimagined and fully objective containing domain for the unlimitedworkings of the imagination to embellish. Therefore while it can imagineanything whatsoever within that containing context, it is unable to imaginethe containing context itself, and there must therefore also in addition be thatin the mind constituting that objective context which of necessity is not animagining. These limits to the scope of the imagination in the trance imply acorresponding scope for reason. For since the sole access to Reality availableto self-conscious beings is reason, it follows that in the trance reason must

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have a certain scope. Accordingly, in the trance the rule of the imaginationmust be far from total.The contrast in these respects with the dream are noteworthy. Unlike the

trance, in the dream the imagination is the source of all that appears in thecontaining domain, generating all outer seeming cognition. Thus, it createsthe context and its contents entire, and is altogether unlimited in scope.Accordingly, the state must be wholly non-rational: the imaginationcompletely replacing reason in physical cognitive matters. In sum, the dreamemerges as wholly irrational, wholly imaginative, wholly interior, andperhaps also as wholly inactive. It remains prima facie plausible that thedream property of being a replica of consciousness owes its existence to thealmost unlimited rule of the imagination in the dream and the correspondingtotal sleep of reason.

2. Interiority

(1) In so far as an hypnotized subject relates concretely with his environmentin motor-perceptual response to commands, he relates concretely with the realWorld. In this sense he may be said to live within or psycho-physically toinhabit the World. By contrast, a dreamer lives in a world of his own, a purelyimagined world. Paradoxically, this loss makes possible a measure ofinteriority which is not found in the trance. The involuted character ofdreaming preserves an inwardness which is lost in the de-personalizingexternalization of the mind of the hypnotizee, as I hope soon to show.We have seen that the dream reproduces the tripartite structure of

consciousness, which is a necessary condition of the dream being a seemingor quasi-consciousness. The second element of that structure, the distinctiveinner life of the dreamer, is the subject-matter of the present Section B. Itemerged in B(1) that the imagination may well be the prime internal source ofthe kinship between dream and consciousness. Here in B(2) I examineanother feature of the inner life of the dreamer, a factor of a different kind. Forwe are concerned here, not with a causal agency of that kinship but astructural parallel which holds between the two states, in other words withone of the elements of the kinship. What I have in mind is the preservation indreaming of a fundamental divide which runs through the experiential life ofthe conscious. Once again we shall nd in the trance an illuminatingcontrasting phenomenon. But before I consider these states I must say a littleabout the divide in question.

(2) The stream of consciousness of the self-consciously conscious is in asense a two-tiered structure, in that perception and bodily action occur on thefrontier of consciousness, at the point where mind and extra-mind meet,whereas all other experiences take place within that perimeter. Thus, behind

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our immediate epistemological and active contact with physical reality runsan experiential stream, an array of internal phenomena which for the mostpart are directed to items in the outer world, a contact which is effectedthrough the mediation of concepts rather than via the concrete causal relationsof perception and bodily action. It is through this distinction that the conceptof inwardness which I appeal to in this discussion is to be explicated. Theexperiential sector of that part of the self-conscious mind that is singled outunder objects of inner sense is roughly what I mean. Thus, the divide ofwhich I speak is that between the outer experiential perimeter and the abovevariety of experience. It is a divide in the mind between the experientialouter and the realm of true experiential interiority.When we come to examine the trance and dream, we nd a signi cant

dissimilarity between the two states on this particular count. Consider in thisregard the trance (which takes either quiescent or activated form). Thecondition of hypnotic quiescence is a sort of mental suspended animation:experience stilled, no trace of an inner life of any kind, not even a state ofcontinuous expectation, nothing but a continuous openness to thesuggestions of the being who caused him to be in this vacuous state. Thesecond alternative mental posture of automatistic behaviour is equally devoidof interiority. It is true that experience has returned here to the mind, but it is amental desert for all that, an inner emptiness. We nd no sign of the mentalwill, and so of the active thinking will, and therefore of self-determination;nor any form of mental response, whether of a thinking or even affective kind,to what is presented perceptually to consciousness; and thus no evidence ofthe fundamental divide between outer and inner, between outer senseand the experiential object of so-called inner sense. The precipitating cause ofall that happens in the experiential sector of the subjects mind lies outside ofhim and is distributed between the mind of another and the environment,which is to say that the generating locus of his inner life is altogether external.Accordingly, in each of the above two conditions the hypnotized subject maybe said to be outside of himself. He is at once in the mind of another anddispersed in the environment.

(3) I hope now to show how much closer to normal consciousness is thedream in this respect. But I emphasize that it would be a futile and indeedcontradictory enterprise to seek to demonstrate that the dream actuallyreproduces the stream of consciousness of the conscious. Rather, if Naturemay be said in the dream to have a primary project of merely seeminglyreproducing consciousness, then my purpose is to show how much of theinner life of the conscious is conserved in the dream without interfering withthat natural project (which is what one should expect if the one state isseemingly the other). By way of justi cation of this contention I appeal tophenomena of the following kind. In place of the steady groundbass of

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thinking, which is of the essence of the conscious stream of consciousness, we nd in the dream the occurrence of stray thoughts, sometimes even the oddsporadic chain of reasoning, and over it all a puzzling semblance of mentalfreedom. And we encounter emotion, wholly untarnished by the loss ofconsciousness, or desire equally as real as in waking life, each provoked bythe cognitive content of the dream. Then whereas the events and facts andobjects given to the dreamer in his outer world are no more than products ofthe imagination, and his experience of them mostly forms of perceptualimagining which are unreal versions of the perceptual reality, these latteraffective or conative phenomena are neither. Such thoughts and emotions anddesires are real examples of their kind, in contrast with the seemingperceptions and seeming physical actions that populate dreams. Thus, there ective divide of consciousness is preserved intact in dreaming. It is agenuine reality in the dream, and in no way merely imagined.Now one might have expected all along that a measure of interiority would

obtain in the dream, bearing in mind the sheer continuity between wakingconsciousness, pre-sleep semi-conscious phantasmagoric inner life, anddream. And in fact it has proved to be so. While dreaming is not a form ofthinking, which is the main locus of interiority, it exhibits certain other marksof inwardness, albeit in lesser measure than in waking consciousness.Whereas the experiences of the hypnotizee face immediately outwards to thebody and environment in perception and action, and the objects of perceptualand propositional imaginings take their place within such a wholly externalsetting, the perceptual and propositional imaginings of the dream integrateinto an imagined and altogether internal scene and dream-situation. Thefundamental divide between the outer (i.e. imagined environment) andinner (e.g. thinking and affective responses to the latter) is preserved indreaming. In the phenomenon of interiority we have part of the explanation ofthe fact that the dream is a seeming consciousness and the trance not.

3. World

(1) We have seen that the dreamer imagines a containing environment inwhich he is situated, and that the hypnotic subject does not. In fact there is asense in which the dream involves the creation of a containing world and thehypnotizee does not. Then in this respect the dream mirrors an importantproperty of waking consciousness. And it is a necessary condition of thedream being a seeming-consciousness that it do so.What does it mean to create a world? I shall take it stipulatively to be

equivalent, not to any activity on the part of a subject, but to a particular stateof the mind: namely, that in which the mind ranges in its objects across adomain marked by certain properties conferred by the inherence of thecapacity for thought. We see these properties in the domain given to the

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understanding of an awake rational being. Such a being at such a timeunderstands himself to be situated at a speci c point in space-time; knows thattemporally behind him there is a vast stretch of time and the same before himin the future, and likewise around him spatially in all directions; understandsthat the existent takes place in such a framework, and realizes that thingsmight have been different from how in contingent fact they are; and so on.This much at least is present in the mind of the rational conscious. And it is acondition which cannot exist in beings incapable of thought, whetherconscious or not. The peculiar powers of thought whereby the mind can crossfrontiers of time and space and actuality to elsewhere in space and time andinto the realms of the might-have-been (etc.) is the source of this frameworkwithin which the awake and rational mentally lead their lives.

(2) Consider in this regard the state of mind of one in a trance. While anhypnotic subject is capable of perceiving and learning about the environment,his mind does not range across the reaches of spatio-temporal and modalreality in the ways just mentioned. The mind of an hypnotizee seems strandedin parochiality, entirely localized: spatially reaching as far as the eye can see,temporally as far as the termination of his present occupation, all else out ofsight and out of mind. The framework of which a conscious rational subjectis aware, in which physical quasi-in nitude and contingency and modality nd representation, is neither present nor needed in the trance. As a result, theobjects of experience are positioned in no more than a region. Such a state ofaffairs is all of a piece with the loss of interiority that characterizes the trance:the power of thought arrested, the affective life all but completely dormant. Inthe mentally constricted condition I am assuming there is no psychologicalspace available for spontaneous thought, (say) for re ection upon thesituation in which the subject nds himself, or for emotion following uponsuch thought, and so on. Meanwhile the imagination is called upon only whenthe hypnotizer conjures up counter-realities in his mind, for the rest of thetime being inactive. Then while the range of reference would here coincidewith that of normal consciousness, this is merely at the behest of another mindand is inserted into a mind which is otherwise stranded in a spatio-temporalregion, and cannot count as an exercise of the power of re ection on his part.In sum, this subject constitutes neither the real world, nor a world of his own,nor a world of the hypnotizer. He is stranded wholly in the here and now, in amere region. In bartering the limitless sway of reason for a measure ofimagining, he loses a World and gains a region.What of the dream? If I dream that 1 and 1 make 3, the object of such a

dream cannot be a possible world. In addition, the negative presumptionprinciple operative in dreams forbids our supposing that the dreamerunderstands that spatio-temporal quasi-in nitude and contingency character-ize the domain in which he nds himself, which seems to con rm that dreams

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are not of possible worlds. None the less there are reasons which might inclineone stipulatively to say that the mind of the dreamer posits a world. It is notjust that the imagination plays a central part in constituting the dream. Themain consideration is that the dream ranges as far and wide, across space andtime and actuality, as the mind of a wakeful thinking being. Here we have astark contrast with the trance, where reference beyond the region is possiblebut no part of the frame of reference, being inserted from outside. Thus, in thedream we imagine real or imagined people, real or imagined places, counter-factual situations (he is alive after all!) without limit, exactly as whenawake. If we express the concept of a world in terms, not of what the subjectunderstands but the type of the mental canvas upon which occur therepresentations of the dreamer, then in that sense it coincides with that of awakeful rational being. In dreams thought and the imagination have the samerange of operation as in waking consciousness.

(3) The properties of dreaming listed in this present second Section B go someway to explaining why we are deceived in the dream as to our state ofconsciousness, why in the dream we seem to ourselves to be awake, why inother words it is a seeming-consciousness. While the dream cannot entirelyreproduce the inner experiential life of consciousness, for it is not a replica ofconsciousness in the sense in which one painting replicates another, the dreaminvolves the occurrence of phenomena which approach as near as possible toreproducing the phenomena peculiar to consciousness without actually doingso. For example, one is experiencing. And a measure of interiority obtains.And one nds oneself in a seeming World. And an apparent freedom seems toreign. In addition, an absolute single-mindedness characterizes the dream inthat it is wholly given over to the unreal, in contrast with the schizoid-likecharacter of the trance, where experience splays with ease across reality andthe imaginary. This all or nothing character mirrors that of wakingconsciousness, which likewise is devoid of compromise, in that in this staterationality and thinking and perceptual power (etc.) inhere withoutquali cation, constituting the unquali ed contact with reality which isde nitive of the condition. Such an uncompromising mental posture is thebreeding ground for the world-making quasi-in nitudes characteristic of boththe dream and consciousness.

C. The Perceptual Imagination

I began by saying that dreaming realizes an analogous tripartite structure tothat of consciousness. Then in Sections A and B I examined the rst twoelements of that totality, viz. the world of the dreamer (in A) and the inner lifeof the dreamer (in B). I come now in the present Section C to the third

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element, which is the dreaming analogue of the perceptual encounter withphysical reality that is part of the phenomenon of waking consciousness.While it might seem that this third element ought to include the apparentbodily willings of dreamers, since physical action is one half of the concretephenomenal encounter of consciousness with the world, the seemingperceptions of the dream completely overshadow seeming physical actionsin that context. This is because seeming physical action plays no part inconstituting the dream world, whereas by contrast the perceptual imagining ofdreams seems to be centre-stage in the process.

1. Dreaming and Words

(1) Whereas thought is completely translatable into language, which is itscompletely adequate tool, dreaming is not: no dream comes to us purelyverbally, nor for that matter purely conceptually. So, at any rate, I should say.But I think we need to take a closer look at this claim, even though thephenomenological facts lend it some support. For example, when we recall adream we mostly recall a phenomenon involving visual imaginings alongwith imagined willings, etc. While if we were non-visual creatures it seemslikely that our dreams would lean rather heavily upon tactile imaginings. Andif we lacked both sight and touch, we might perhaps dream of a voice whichdescribed a world: that is, we might hear a voice and dream that things areas the voice says they are, thereby putting to use the auditory together with thepropositional imagination.These suppositions raise two questions. First, could one dream merely that

the world was a certain way? Could one have a dream whose entire contentwas propositional? It would be a dream whose descriptive narrative tted itsobject with the exactitude with which a sentence ts the content of a passingthought, which it describes without remainder. And a closely related secondquestion: could one dream of a voice speaking a narrative, whose contentone discovered and dreamed in the double process of deciphering andbelieving the sense of those words?

(2) There are dif culties in either suggestion. To begin, while there is nothingto prevent one from having an experience during sleep which consisted inones entertaining the thought and belief that a certain proposition was true,and while this might be accounted a dream by some, such a phenomenon isnot an apparent reproduction of consciousness. In a word, it is an entirelydifferent phenomenon from the phenomenon under investigation. In any case,it should be noted that I am assuming the dream is a continuous experientialprocess which endures across time. Then how could an intelligibly linkedcontinuous sequence of propositions come before the mind except through asequence of words coming into ones mind, and how could that happen except

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through ones dreaming a seeing or hearing of words, which is to saythrough use of the perceptual imagination? What other mode is there in whicha connected series of thoughts could be transmitted continuously across timeto a receiving mind? How else other than through the piecemeal gathering of astructured linguistic formation? Here we have one dif culty, raised by thesupposition that a pure sequence of propositions might be the entire content ofa dream. A second dif culty is raised by the supposition that even assuminglanguage were to be given to a dreaming consciousness in whatever way, thatones mind should in the dream reach through those words to their contentthrough the use of ones understanding of that language, believe what thosewords are saying as they occur, and in the twin processes of understandingand believing be dreaming that content.The situation in which one thinks aloud on ones feet, slowly fashioning in

vocal terms the linguistic statement of a gathering thought, and thinks variousunuttered thoughts in so doing, has a close parallel in the minds of thelisteners to this audible thinker. They hear with understanding somethingwhich resembles the developing stages of a building which is being erectedthrough the use of bricks and other parts. Word-edi ces appear before themind, which at each stage are susceptible of a diminishing multiplicity ofinterpretations, all of which nally get closed off until the listener is left withone unambiguous interpretation, at which point the speaker is said to havethought a thought and his listeners to have grasped a thought. Then just as thisthinker was thinking on his feet, so his hearers were thinking in theirarmchairs. Therefore if we suppose such a thing to be going on during thecourse of a dream, we in effect postulate a phenomenon in which thinking istaking place simultaneously with a dreaming use of the perceptual andpropositional imagination. This hybrid is not a dream.

2. Dreaming and Perception

(1) It is because I cannot think of anything answering to the abovespeci cations that I do not think one could have either a purely verbal or apurely propositional dream. This nds corroboration in the following thought.A proper or acceptable characterization of the dream is that in dreaming themind merely through its own resources seemingly but unsuccessfullyreproduces waking consciousness and its objects. Then in wakingconsciousness the world is not given to us purely propositionally: it is notknown of purely in thought, nor sub specie aeternitatis like (say) thetheorems of algebra. The normal situation is that we encounter Reality from astandpoint in space and time and concretely perceptually. Waking toconsciousness we nd it all palpably and visibly around us, given not merelyin thought and proposition, but actually and concretely. And by that I mean,not just that one is conscious-that or aware-that it is there, even though this is

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certainly true. Rather, I mean that one is simply aware-of, or conscious-of, orhas experiences-of, the things amidst which we ourselves are situated.Waking to consciousness is coming into a state in which our physicalsurrounds and body are direct objects of awareness. Through perception wedirectly experience those phenomenal realities. And concepts play second ddle to psycho-physical causality in this phenomenon: the perceptualencounter with the environment is as concrete as a blow between the eyes.But the worlds concrete presence to consciousness does not just consist in

perception of the environment. Even before that it takes the form of theawakeness of the perceptual attention, together with present knowledge ofthe reality of the sector of the world that lies outside our own mind, which isthe potential direct object of the awake attention. When conscious (i) oneknows of the existence of the sector of the world lying outside our own mind,(ii) one is possessed of the power perceptually to respond to incoming datafrom outside, which is to say that the perceptual attention is awake or on,and (iii) one has perceptual awareness of sectors of that domain, whetherpositively (e.g. hearing sound) or negatively (e.g. hearing silence). Themental presence of the outer world is thus more than cognition and/orperception: it consists pre-eminently in the continuous readiness-to-respondon the part of the attention to the causal impact of the already known-ofphysical environment in which one is placed.

(2) Typically, the dream is an attempted reproduction of all this, since thedream is an attempted reproduction of consciousness. The speci c faculty ofdreaming consists in the power imaginatively to conjure up a World in whichwe nd ourselves, in ways which are modelled upon the above. That we canrespond internally to these imagined phenomenal objects, in the form ofthought-about or affective responses-to them, seems to be no more than theminds normal powers being put to use in a dream context: a mentalphenomenon which is undoubtedly part of the dream, but secondary to theexercise of the primary dream power, which is an imaginative powerconstituted out of perceptual and propositional imaginings. These latterpowers take speci cally dream form: the perceptual power having much incommon with hallucinatory power, while dream propositional imagining is animagining-that which is a special case of belief-in.Thus consciousness involves more than either knowledge or perception of

physical reality. In consciousness the physical World is a continuing concretepresence to the mind, a phenomenon which takes the form of a steadyawakeness of the attention to an already known-of outer World. This ispart of the normal conscious condition. Then how is this feature ofconsciousness to be reproduced by the imaginative powers of dreaming? Howdo we manage to imagine the concrete presence of the physical environment?How imagine it simpliciter so to say? I ask, because there are reasons for

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thinking that there can be no such thing as imagining-of a physical or indeedany other object. So how do we imaginatively reproduce the aforementionedfundamental element of waking consciousness?It is achieved through imaginatively reproducing what occurs in waking

consciousness, viz. perception of the environment. That is, through the use ofthe perceptual imagination. For example, through an imaginative seeming-seeing. For whereas there is no just imagining-of an object, there is justvisual imagining-of an object, as in mental imagery. This is the main reasonour dreams are mostly visual dreams. But there is also a secondary reason forthis fact. In sight alone we are concretely aware-of, have experiences-of,objects at a distance. Thus, the sound in hearing is not its object-source, anymore than the light in seeing is its object-source, but whereas the perceptualattention does not in hearing pass on from sound to source, in the case of sightit passes not through but on from the visible light mediator to the physicalobject causes which then generally nd themselves intentionally representedin the experience (seeing as ...). Hence in sight alone we are aware of thephysical environment stretching away into the distance. Then if in a dream weare to imaginatively conjure up so extensive and spatially organized anobject, we have no alternative but to avail ourselves of the power of visualimagining. This is the subsidiary reason our dreams take visual form. If wewere blind from birth, to achieve an imagining of a concretely present worldwe would no doubt have to make use of the imaginative varieties of seeming-feeling or seeming-hearing, augmented in each case by extensive use ofpropositional-imagining.

(3) Given such a seeming concrete presence, the propositional imaginationjoins it in constituting the dream, for in the dream we tend to believe muchof what we see (though not necessarily because we see). These delusivebeliefs are imaginings-that, intrinsically and indexically bonded to theproducts of the visual imagination. In the previous Section (1) I rejectedthe supposition that the mind might in a dream be capable of conjuring upa seemingly concretely present environment simply by calling upon ourpowers of imagining-that such and such obtained. That judgment wasbased on the assumption that this experiential process across time cannottake the form of deciphering words given either (somehow) inthemselves or else auditorily since that would count as a form ofthinking and be inconsistent both with the non-rational state in whichdreaming occurs and in any case with dreaming itself. The question I wasleft with was: whether one might, experientially across time, without directuse of the perceptual imagination, and without deciphering language in aprocess of thinking, create in ones mind a dreaming purely propositionalrepresentation of a here and now present Physical Reality. My answer atthe end of this discussion is, no.

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Thus, any dreamer who is endowed with the power of visual perception isalmost inevitably going to dream in visual terms, which is to say through theuse of the visual imagination, which is in turn aided and abetted by thepropositional imagination in constituting the dream. In this way an imaginarydomain, modelled upon physical reality, stretches around and encompassesthe dreamer, who proceeds to respond mentally to and conduct himselftowards that world in ways which likewise are modelled upon normal life.

D. Dreaming and Consciousness

1. The Sense of Seeming Consciousness

(1) I have been describing the dream as a seeming or as if or quasi-consciousness. Why so? The following considerations suggest it: that in thedream we seem to ourselves to be conscious, that we are in a sense deceivedat the time by the experience, that on waking we discover that the world isnot like that (so that consciousness acts here as a corrective presumably ofsomething that was passing itself off as precisely that corrective agency rather as a man might unmask an imposter posing as himself by appearing inperson upon the scene). Furthermore, we have the expression I dreamed ,whose place- ller can be occupied by absolutely any episode in the consciousexperiential life of subjects. And the fact that we sometimes nd ourselveswondering: did I really experience that, or did I only dream it? And so on.But a problem now presents itself. For it is also natural to describe certain

other phenomena as seeming examples of some exemplar phenomenon. Forexample, the visual hallucination, the visual mental-image, the mere visualexperience itself, are all naturally described as seeming-seeings. And yet ineach case these phenomena stand in a different relation to the seeing which insome sense they seem. This implies that the sense of seeming - must varyfrom case to case. Then the questions we should now consider are: what is thesense of seeming, quasi-, as if that is applicable to the dream in thedream is a seeming (etc.) consciousness? And: will discovering that senseenable us to de ne the phenomenon of dreaming? Will it enable us to saywhat dreaming is?

(2) It is tempting to opt for a re exive-cognitive analysis of seemingconsciousness, to take it to signify the property of seeming cognitively to beconsciousness. That is, to believe that dreaming is seeming cognitively to beconscious. After all, it may well be that one does believe such a thing at thetime, and legitimate therefore to predicate being a seeming consciousness(in that sense) of dreaming. However, if by the dream is a seemingconsciousness we purport rather to be descriptively characterizing thephenomenon of dreaming which is what the above considerations argue,

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and how I have understood the sentence throughout this article then there exive-cognitive reading must be rejected, since the one property isdescriptive and the other relational.An additional and equally decisive reason for rejecting that reading is to be

found in the dreams of non-rational animals. For non-rational animals areboth conscious in precisely the sense humans are stunned meaning thesame of man or beast, and dream in the same sense their dreaming beingequally a quasi-consciousness , yet do not entertain beliefs concerning theirdreaming. After all, the claim I am attempting to analyse is that when onedreams it is as if one is conscious, and this is surely a different claim from theassertion that when one dreams one believes one is conscious. Indeed, sinceconsciousness itself is not in the nature of a belief, it is evident that aphenomenon which at the time is experienced as consciousness cannot takethe form of a belief.

(3) One other theory concerning the particular sense of seeming underconsideration should be examined. When we describe a visual experience as aseeming-seeing we mean, not that we believe it a seeing, but thatexperientially it is the same: we mean it is the same experience. Then onemight be inclined, perhaps in the spirit of DescartessMeditations, to say sucha thing of dreaming, to claim it is experientially the same as waking.However, this theory cannot be correct. One reason is that the stream ofconsciousness of the conscious is a suf ciency for consciousness, andconsciousness is inconsistent with dreaming. Consciousness is an internallyself-validating phenomenon, an internal state suf cient unto itself. Thus, thephenomenal condition consciousness is not re-describable as conscious-ness, consciousness being essentially consciousness. For example, con-scious