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What, to the Writer, Are Dreams?

Lauren acampora on the mythic links between dream life and creativity.

“Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream.” –Joseph Campbell

One morning, when I was younger, I gave a detailed description of my previous night’s dream to my mother. When I finished, she said, “I’m going to tell you something. Don’t ever share your dreams with anyone except your spouse. It’s boring to listen to other people’s dreams.”

I was offended at first. How could anyone, not to mention my own mother, fail to find my dreams as fascinating as I did? But of course she was right; it’s almost always deadly to hear other people talk about their dreams. As a rule, dreams die in the glare of the waking world, their shimmering aura evaporating in the harsh air outside the psyche. And yet, paradoxically, it’s the emotional aura of dreams that makes them feel so urgently worth sharing in the first place.

Needless to say, I didn’t listen to my mother. That is, I still share my dreams promiscuously—just not verbally.

Like so many other writers and artists, I employ dreams in my creative work. They’re an engine, a lending library. It’s a thrill to awake with a strange, arresting image in mind, or still grasping the thread of an allegorical dream story. Sometimes, a vision or scenario arrives as a package deal: the story is encased within the vision, packed up tight with a certain mood. For me, entire short stories have sprung from such vision: a woman alone in a pool, a finger touching a brain, a blindfolded child. A haunting dream of orange curtains in a hotel room has rolled into an entire novel (in which orange hotel curtains do not ever appear). And the power and mystery of dreams themselves inspired my novel The Paper Wasp , in which the narrator illustrates—and ultimately enters—her vivid, seemingly premonitory dreams.

There’s no shortage of literature and art that we know to have sprung from dreams. As legend has it, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge transcribed the first lines of “Kubla Khan” from a dream; the idea for Frankenstein came to Mary Shelley in her sleep; Robert Louis Stevenson conceived of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a consumptive fever dream; Stephen King came up with the idea for Misery while napping on a plane ; William Styron had a dream that inspired Sophie’s Choice . One of the most prolific dream miners of all was Edgar Allen Poe, who used his frequent nightmares in much of his work. And famously, Paul McCartney dreamed the tune for the song “Yesterday.” Upon waking, he asked his friends if they knew it. “It’s a good little tune,” he said, “but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it.”

Dreams can feel like messages from another place, so it’s no surprise that many ancient cultures believed dreams to be transmissions of divine knowledge. The Ancient Egyptians considered dreams to be oracular and held vivid dreamers in high regard. They practiced dream incubation and lucid dreaming, and employed dream guides called the “Masters of Secret Things” who lived in dream temples. The Greeks, too, incubated dreams, and thought that gods came to dreamers through a keyhole to deliver messages. The Aboriginal Australians and the Iroquois started their day by sharing dreams, which were considered a source of guidance for both the individual and the community. The Hindu religion, too, believes that in dreams one is given a glimpse of Vishnu, whose own dreaming mind creates our reality. It isn’t difficult to understand where such beliefs come from if you’ve ever dreamed of reading a book, sentence after lucid, elaborate sentence. “I couldn’t have written it,” you might think, “because I dreamt it.”

Brain science validates this phenomenon. Dreaming occurs during REM sleep, when the frontal lobe, the executive area of the brain, is shut down. Dreams are the mysterious activity of another part of the brain, beneath the scrutiny of the frontal lobe. Neurologically speaking, we really are receiving transmissions from a foreign entity; the unconscious, unobserved self slips through the keyhole when the guard is off duty.

Even during waking hours, the human brain is divided: the executive-desk frontal lobe and the inscrutable, intuitive limbic system are strangers to each other. In sleep, they are incommunicado. Because of this deep rift, the great majority of our dreams go unremembered, except on a buried emotional level. It’s difficult, even paradoxical, to try to bear total witness to them, akin to pinning down the present moment, halting the slippage of time. Just as the present can only be considered in retrospect, the unconscious mind can only be discerned via the remembered scraps of dreams. Any glimmers of awareness that may come during sleep, when a dream is fleetingly apprehended, are instances of the conscious half of the brain briefly observing and translating the activity of the submerged half: interpreting the enigmatic message of a stranger. These glimmers are rare and fleeting, occurring only during the hypnogogic and hypnopompic states, the liminal states between wakefulness and sleep.

In siphoning dreams for their work, writers and artists are tapping a valuable well. Dream logic and imagery carries an uncanny, allegorical quality that resonates deeply with readers and audiences. And it’s possible that dream recall actually enhances artistic output during waking hours. Scientific studies have confirmed a correlation between dream recall and creativity; those who recall dreams actually perform better on creativity evaluations. This may be because creative people are naturally better at recalling their dreams. It’s a chicken or egg situation: do creative people have more vivid and memorable dreams because they are innately creative, or can a brain become more creative through strengthening dream recall? Whatever the case, making use of dreams in art is a powerful way to reflect our foreign selves back to ourselves, while projecting that mystery self out to the world as archetypal image and story—dream as personalized myth, myth as depersonalized dream.

For writers, plugging into the unconscious provides a direct line to the human imagination in all its splendor and darkness. Indeed, in the midst of composing, it’s often unclear where the words are coming from. Sentences and imagery sometimes bubble up from a hidden well that surprises the conscious, transcribing mind. Some writers will tell you that they write in order to exorcise their demons, cleanse their psyches, to bring their fears and darkness into the light. Some will tell you that it’s better than therapy.

Writing at full tilt can be a euphoric state, tantamount to lucid dreaming. It’s half-awareness—one foot in, one foot out—a balance on the brink of consciousness. It’s not just in dreams that we can experience the ecstasy of flight and the exhilaration of omnipotence, but also when writing, when the words are flowing, the images appearing. Just as in a lucid dream, this exhilaration is paired with the knowledge that it can’t last, that it’s a temporary spell. Soon, we’ll become too aware of flying, and the spell will break and drop us to the ground. Still, we endeavor to capture and recapture this ecstasy of creative freedom, the ability to travel lightly anywhere at will, the bliss of floating to the treetops.

If writing fiction is analogous to dreaming, the experience of reading fiction can be, too. When we’re reading, another person is able to intrude into our psyches through the use of words alone, remotely projecting imagery onto the screens of our minds, suffusing them with atmosphere and mood. We are, in a way, sharing a dream with a stranger. And fiction, at its best, places a mirror before us, evoking terror and wonder. It affects us on an emotional level beyond language, and brings a frisson of recognition. There’s a momentary astonishment to encounter the familiar within the strange, something of our own inner lives on the page. There’s the eerie sense that the author has somehow entered and seen into us. The best art carries this sense of inevitability, of allegory, myth, dream—a truth that has always been there, that we already know in some deep part of ourselves.

This flare of astonishment is arguably the purpose of art. It’s the sudden thinning of the distance between us, the erosion of barriers that have been built and propped up by our conscious, waking lives. Like a flash of lightning, great art illuminates the human landscape in its breathtaking entirety and shows that the barriers are flimsy, false, only temporarily there. All at once, we are taken outside ourselves and given a glimpse of the Jungian collective unconscious, the subliminal wholeness of life, the enveloping dream of Vishnu. What is the purpose of all art, if not to puncture the illusion of fragmentation, to reveal the commonality of human experience, to return us—if briefly—to those collective waters?

__________________________________

The Paper Wasp   by Lauren Acampora is out now via Grove Atlantic.

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On Dreams and Literature

Related Books:

“We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep.” — William Shakespeare , The Tempest (1611)

“A candy-colored clown they call the sandman/tiptoes to my room every night/just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper/’Go to sleep, everything is alright.’” — Roy Orbison , “In Dreams” (1963)

“A marvel befell me of fairy, methought./I was weary with wandering and went me to rest/Under a broad bank by a brook’s side,/And as I lay and leaned over and looked into the water/I fell into a sleep for it sounded so merry.” Good close readers that we are all supposed to be, it’s imperative that we don’t read into the poem things that aren’t actually in it, and yet I can’t help but imagine what that daytime nocturn was like. The soft gurgle of a creek through English fields, the feeling of damp grass underneath dirtied hands, and of scratchy cloak against unwashed skin; the sunlight tanning the backs of his eyelids; that dull, corpuscular red of daytime sleep, the warmth of day’s glow flushing his cheeks, and the almost preternatural quiet save for some bird chirping. The sort of sleep you fall into when you’re on a train that rocks you to sleep in the sunlight of late afternoon. It sounds nice.

Dante famously claimed that his visions — of perdition, purgatory, and paradise — were not dreams, and yet everything in The Divine Comedy holds to the genre’s conventions. Both Langland and Dante engage the strange logic of the nocturne, the way in which the subconscious seems to rearrange and illuminate reality in a manner that the prosaicness of overrated wakefulness simply cannot. Dante writes that the “night hides things from us,” but his epic is itself proof that the night can just as often reveal things. Within The Divine Comedy Dante is guided through the nine circles of hell by the Roman poet Virgil , from the antechamber of the inferno wherein dwell the righteous pagans and classical philosophers, down through the frozen environs of the lowest domain whereby Lucifer forever torments and is tormented by that trinity of traitors composed of Cassius, Brutus, and Judas. Along the way Dante is privy to any number of nightmares, from self-disemboweling prophets to lovers forever buffeted around on violent winds (bearing no similarity to a gentle Malvern breeze). In the Purgatorio and Paradiso he is spectator to far more pleasant scenes (though telling that more people have read Inferno, as our nightmares are always easiest to remember), whereby he sees a heaven that’s the “color that paints the morning and evening clouds that face the sun,” almost a description of the peacefulness of accidentally nodding off on an early summer day.

Both The Divine Comedy and Piers Plowman express verities accessed by the mind in repose; Langland’s poem, for not beginning in a dark wood but rather in a sunny field, embodies mystical apprehensions as surely as does Dante. A key difference is that Langland’s allegory is so obvious (as anyone who has seen the medieval play Everyman can attest is true of the period). Characters named after the Seven Deadly Sins, or called Patience, Clergy, and Scripture (and Old Age, Death, and Pestilence) all interact with Will — whose name has its own obvious implications. By contrast, Dante’s characters bear a resemblance to actual people (or they are actual people, from Aristotle in Limbo to Thomas Aquinas in Heaven), even while the events depicted are seemingly more fantastic (though in Piers Plowman Will witness both the fall of man and the harrowing of hell). Both are, however, written in the substance of dreams. Forget the didactic obviousness of allegory, the literal cipher that defines that form, and believe that in a field between Worcestershire and Hertfordshire Will did plumb the mysteries of eternity while sleeping. What makes the dream vision a chimerical form is that maybe he did. That’s the thing with dreams and their visions; there is no need to suspend disbelief. We’re not in the realm of fantasy or myth, for in dreams order has been abolished, anything is possible, and nothing is prohibited, not even flouting the arid rules of logic.

A danger to this, for to dream is to court the absolute when we’re at our most vulnerable, to find eternity in a sleep. Piers Plowman had the taint of heresy about it, as it inspired the revolutionaries of 1381’s Peasant Rebellion, as well as the adherents of a schismatic group of proto-Protestants known as Lollards. Arguably the crushing of the rebellion led to an attendant attack by authorities on vernacular literature like Piers Plowman, in part explaining the general dismalness of English literature in the fifteenth-century (which excluding Mallory and Skelton is the worst century of writing). Scholars have long debated the relationship between Langland and Lollardy, but we’ll let others more informed tease out those connections [. T] he larger point is that dreaming can get you in trouble. That’s because dreaming is the only realm in which we’re simultaneously complete sovereign and lowly subject; the cinema we watch when our eyes are closed. Sleep is a domain that can’t be reached by monarch, tyrant, state, or corporation — it is our realm.

Whether it’s the thirteenth or the twenty-first centuries, dreaming remains bizarre. Whether we reduce dreams to messages from the gods and the dead, or repressed memories and neurosis playing in the nursery of our unconscious, or simply random electric flickering of neurons, the fact that we spend long stretches of our life submerging ourselves in bizarre parallel dimensions is so odd that I can’t help but wonder why we don’t talk about it more (beyond painful conversations recounting dreams). So strange is it that we spend a third of our lives journeying to fantastic realms where every law of spatiality and temporality and every axiom of identity and principle of logic is flouted, that you’d think we’d conduct ourselves with a bit more humility when dismissing that which seems fantastic in the experience of those from generations past who’ve long since gone to eternal sleep. Which is just to wonder that when William Langland dreamt, is it possible that he dreamt of me?

Even with our advancements in the modern scientific study of the phenomenon, their mysteriousness hasn’t entirely dissipated. If our ancestors saw in dreams portents and prophecies, then this oracular aspect was only extended by Sigmund Freud ’s The Interpretation of Dreams . He who inaugurated the nascent field of psychoanalysis explained dreams as a complex tapestry of wish fulfillment and sublimation, an encoded narrative that mapped onto the patient’s waking life and that could be deciphered by the trained therapist. Freud writes that there “exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state.” Not so different from Will sleeping in his field. The origin may be different — Langland sees in dreams visions imparted from God and Freud finds their origin in the holy unconsciousness, but the idea isn’t dissimilar. Dreaming imparts an ordered and ultimately comprehensible message, even though the imagery may be cryptic.

Freud has been left to us literary critics (who’ve even grown tired of him over the past generation), and science has abandoned terms like id, ego, and superego in favor of neurons and biochemistry, synapses and serotonin. For neurologists, dreaming is a function of the prefrontal cortex powering down during REM sleep, and of the hippocampus severing its waking relationship with the neocortex, allowing for a bit of a free-for-all in the brain. Scientists have discovered much about how and why dreaming happens — what parts of the brain are involved, what cycles of wakefulness and restfulness a person will experience, when dreaming evolved, and what functions (if any) it could possibly serve. Gone are the simple reductionisms of dream interpretation manuals with their categorized entries about your teeth falling out or of showing up naked to your high school biology final. Neuroscientists favor a more sober view of dreaming, whereby random bits of imagery and thought thrown out by your groggy chemical induced brain rearrange themselves into a narrative which isn’t really a narrative. Still, as Andrea Rock notes in The Mind at Night: The New Science of How and Why we Dream , “it’s impossible for scientists to agree on something as seemingly simple as the definition of dreaming.” If we’re such stuff as dreams are made of, the forensics remain inconclusive.

Computer scientists at Google have investigated what random images are produced by a complex artificial neural network as it “dreams,” allowing the devices to filter various images they’ve encountered and to recombine, recontextualize, and regenerate new pictures. In The Atlantic , Adrienne LaFrance writes that the “computer-made images feature scrolls of color, swirling lines, stretched faces, floating eyeballs, and uneasy waves of shadow and light. The machines seemed to be hallucinating, and in a way that appeared uncannily human.” Artificial Intelligence has improved to an unsettling degree in just the past decade, even though a constructed mind capable of easily passing the Turing Test has yet to be created, though that seems more an issue of time than possibility. If all of the flotsam and jetsam of the internet could coalesce into a collective consciousness emerging from the digital primordial like some archaic demigod birthing Herself from chaos, what dreams could be generated therein? Or if it’s possible to program a computer, a robot, an android, an automaton to dream, then what oracles of Artificial Intelligence could be birthed? I can’t help but thrill to the idea that we’ll be able to program a desktop version of the Delphic Oracle analyzing its own microchipped dreams. “The electric things have their life too,” Dick wrote.

We’ve already developed AI capable of generating completely realistic-looking but totally fictional women and men. Software engineer Philip Wang invented a program at ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com which does exactly what its title advertises itself as doing: it gives you a picture of a person who doesn’t exist. Using an algorithm that combs through actual images, Wang’s site uses something called a generative adversarial network to create pictures of people who never lived. If you refresh the site, you’ll see that the humans dreamt of by the neural network aren’t cartoons or caricatures, but photorealistic images so accurate that they look like they could be used for a passport. So far I’ve been presented with an attractive butch woman with sparkling brown eyes, a broad smile, and short curly auburn hair; a strong jawed man in his 30s with an unfortunate bowl cut and a day’s worth of stubble who looks a bit like swimmer Michael Phelps; and a nerdy-looking Asian man with a pleasant smile and horn-rimmed glasses. Every single person the AI presented looked completely average and real, so that if I encountered them in the grocery store or at Starbucks I wouldn’t think twice, and yet not a single one of them was real. I’d read once (though I can’t remember where) that every invented person we encounter in our dreams has a corollary to somebody that we once met briefly in real life, a waitress or a store clerk whose paths we crossed for a few minutes drudged up from the unconscious and commissioned into our narrative. I now think that all of those people come from ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com.

One fictional person who reoccurs in many of our dreams is “This Man,” a pudgy, unattractive balding man with thick eyebrows, and an approachable smile who was the subject of Italian marketer Andrea Natella ’s now defunct website “Ever Dream This Man?” According to Natella, scores of people had dreams about the man (occasionally nightmares) across all continents and in dozens of countries. Blake Butler, writing in Vice Magazine, explains that “His presence seems both menacing and foreboding at the same time, unclear in purpose, but haunting to those in whom he does appear.” This Man doesn’t particularly look like any famous figure, nor is he so generic that his presence can be dismissed as mere coincidence. A spooky resonance concerns this guy who looks like he manages a diner on First Avenue and 65 th emerging simultaneously in thousands of peoples’ dreams (his cameo is far less creepy after you’re aware of the website). Multiple hypotheses were proffered, ranging from This Man being the product of the collective unconscious as described by Carl Jung to Him being a manifestation of God appearing to people from Seattle to Shanghai (my preferred theory). As it turns out, he was simply the result of a viral marketing campaign.

Meme campaigns aside, the sheer weirdness of dreams can’t quite exorcize them of a supernatural import — we’re all looking for portents, predictions, and prophecies. Being submerged into what’s effectively another universe can’t help but alter our sense of reality, or at least make us question what exactly that word means. For years now I’ve had dreams that take place in the same recurring location — a detailed, complex, baroque alternate version of my hometown of Pittsburgh. This parallel universe Pittsburgh roughly maps onto the actual place, though it appears much larger and there are notable differences. Downtown, for example, is a network of towering, interconnected skyscrapers all accessible from within one another (there’s a good bookstore there); a portion of Squirrel Hill is given over to a Wild West experience set. It’s not that I have the same dreams about this place, it’s that the place is the same, regardless of what happens to me in those dreams when I’m there. So much so that I experience the uncanny feeling of not dreaming, but rather of sliding into some other dimension. An eerie feeling comes to me from a life closer then my own breath, existing somewhere in the space between atoms, and yet totally invisible to my conscious eye.

Such is the realm of seers and shamans, poets and prophets, as well as no doubt yourself — the dream realm is accessible to everyone. As internal messages from a universe hidden within, whereby the muse and oracle are within your own skull. Long have serendipitous missives arisen from our slumber, even while we debate their ultimate origin. Social activist Julia Ward Howe wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic” when staying at Washington D.C.’s Ward Hotel in 1861, the “dirtiest, dustiest filthiest place I ever saw.” While “in a half dreaming state” she heard a group of Union soldiers marching down Pennsylvania Avenue singing “John Brown’s Body,” and based on that song Howe composed her own hymn while in a reverie. Howe’s dreaming was in keeping with a melancholic era enraptured to spiritualism and occultism, for she commonly was imparted with “attacks of versification [that] had visited me in the night.” The apocalyptic Civil War altered peoples’ dreams, it would seem. Jonathan White explores the sleep-world of nineteenth-century Americans in his unusual and exhaustive study Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams During the Civil War , arguing that peoples’ “dream reports were often remarkably raw and unfiltered… vividly bringing to life the horrors of the conflict; for others, nighttime was an escape from the hard realities of life and death in wartime.”

Every era imparts its own images, symbols, and themes into dreams, so that collective analysis can tell us about the concerns of any given era. White writes that during the Civil War people used dreams to relive “distant memories or horrific experiences in battle, longing for a return to peace and life as they had known it before the war, kissing loved ones that had not seen for years, communing with the dead, traveling to faraway places they wished they could see in real life,” which even if the particulars may be different, is not so altered from our current reposes. One of the most famous of Civil War dreamers was Abraham Lincoln , whose own morbid visions were in keeping with slumber’s prophetic purposes. Only days before his assassination, Lincoln recounted to his bodyguard that he’d had an eerily realistic dream in which he wandered from room to room in the White House. “I heard subdued sobs,” Lincoln said, as “if a number of people were weeping.” The president was disturbed by the sound of mourning, “so mysterious and so shocking,” until he arrived in the East Room. “Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments,” the body inside being that of Lincoln. Such dreams are significant — as the disquieting quarantine visions people have had over the past two months can attest to. We should listen — they have something to tell us.

Spearing writes that “from the time of the Homeric poems down to the modern novel, it is surely true that the scene of the great bulk of Western literature has not been the internal world of the mind, in which dreams transact themselves, but the outer, public world of objective reality,” but this misses an important point. All novels actually occur in the internal world of the mind, no matter how vigorous their subjects may be. I’ll never be able to see the exact same cool colors of Jay Gatsby’s shirts that you envision, nor will I hear the exact timber of Mr. Darcy’s voice that you imagine, in the same way that no photographs or drawings or paintings can be brought back from the place you go to when you sleep. Dreaming and reading are unified in being activities of fully created, totally self-contained realities. Furthermore, there is a utopian freedom in this, for that closed off dimension, that pinched off universe which you travel to in reveries nocturnal or readerly is free of the contagion of the corrupted outside world. There are no pop-up ads in dreams, there are no telemarketers calling you. Even our nightmares are at least our own. Here, as in the novel, the person may be truly free.

Dreaming is the substance of literature. It’s what comes before, during, and after writing and reading, and there can be no fiction or poetry without it. There is no activity in waking life more similar to dreaming than reading (and by proxy writing, which is just self-directed reading). All necessitate the complete creation of a totally constructed universe constrained within your own head and accessible only to the individual. The only difference between reading and dreaming is who directs the story. As in a book as in our slumber, the world which is entered is one that is singular to the dreamer/reader. What you see when you close your eyes is forever foreign to me, as I may never enter the exact same story-world that you do when you crack open a novel. “Life, what is it but a dream?” Carol astutely asks.

We spend a third of our day in dream realms, which is why philosophers and poets have always rightly been preoccupied with them. Dreams necessarily make us question that border between waking and sleeping, truth and falsity, reality and illusion. That is the substance of storytelling as well, and that shared aspect between literature and dreaming is just as important as the oddity of existing for a spell in entirely closed off, totally self-invented, and completely free worlds. What unites the illusions of dreams and our complete ownership of them is subjectivity, and that is the charged medium through which literature must forever be conducted. Alfred North Whitehead once claimed that all of philosophy was mere footnotes to Plato — accurate to say that all of philosophy since then has been variations on the theme of kicking the tires of reality and questioning whether this exact moment is lived or dreamt.

The pre-Socratic metaphysician Gorgias was a radical solipsist who thought that all the world was the dream of God and the dreamer was himself. Plato envisioned our waking life as but a pale shadow of a greater world of Forms. Rene Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy forged a methodology of radical doubt, whereby he imagined that a malicious demon could potentially deceive him into thinking that the “sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.” So, from the assumption that everything is a dream, Descartes tried to latch onto anything that could be certain. Other than his own mind, he wasn’t able to find much. In dreams there is the beginning of metaphysics, for nothing else compels us to consider that the world which we see is not the world which there is, and yet such philosophical speculation need not philosophers, since children engage in it from the moment they can first think.

When I was a little kid, I misunderstood that old nursery rhyme “Row Your Boat.” When it queried if “life is but a dream,” I took that literally to mean that all which we experience is illusion, specter, artifice. In my own abstract way I assumed that according to the song, all of this which we see: the sun and moon, the trees and flowers, our friends and family, are but a dream. And I wondered what it would be like when I woke up, who I would recount that marvelous dream too? “I had the strangest dream last night,” I imagined telling faces unknown with names unconveyed. I assumed the song meant that all of this, for all of us, was a dream — and who is to know what that world might look like when you wake up? Such a theme is explored in pop culture from the cyberpunk dystopia The Matrix to the sitcom finale Newhart, because this sense of unreality, of dreams impinging on our not-quite-real world is hard to shake. Writing about a classic metaphysical thought-experiment known as the Omphalos Argument (from the Greek for “navel,” as relating to a question of Eden), philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in The Analysis of Mind that “There is no logical impossibility… that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that ‘remembered’ a wholly unreal past.” Perhaps we’ve just dozed off for a few minutes then? Here’s the thing though — even if all of this is a dream — it doesn’t matter. Because in dreams you’re innocent. In dreams you’re free.

Image credit: Pexels/ Erik Mclean .

Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine and a staff writer for The Millions. A contributor at dozens of sites and the author of several books, this fall his contribution to Ig Publishing's Bookmarked series will be released, Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost .

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7 Novels About Dreams that Reveal Hidden Desires or Dark Fears

Reading Lists

Martine fournier watson, author of "the dream peddler," explores the symbolism of dreams in literature.

When I started working on what is now my debut novel, The Dream Peddler , I never gave much thought to how a book riddled with dream sequences might be received. I had no idea how many readers are turned off by dreams in fiction, although I can’t blame them if they don’t respond well to a long passage or chapter ending abruptly with the trick of “and then I woke up.” Dishonesty aside, though, I’ve always found that when used carefully, dream sequences can be a fascinating way to enrich a story, and I certainly loved incorporating them into my own book.

The Victorians, for instance, were fascinated by dreams, and Victorian authors instinctively understood that while dreams are often a jumble of things we experience during the day, they may also reveal our deepest fears or hidden desires. As such, they can provide a useful tool for an author to reveal more about their characters to the reader, and often a way to reveal things to us that the characters themselves don’t yet consciously realize.

I’ve done a little research on the long tradition of using dreams in literature, and I’m delighted to present this list of books whose authors have used the dreamworld ingeniously to mirror and explore the waking lives of their characters.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

This is one of my all-time favorite Victorian novels, and one from which I even drew an epigraph for my own book. Brontë uses dreams sparingly in her classic tale of lost love, but the ones she does employ pack a punch. Frightening or foreboding dreams are the perfect device for Gothic literature, with its haunted mansions and lowering skies.

Very near the start of Wuthering Heights , our narrator, Mr. Lockwood, experiences a harrowing dream when he is forced to spend the night in the room that once belonged to the now long-dead Catherine. Towards the dream’s end, the child Catherine tries to get in at his window, and he is violent in his attempts to keep her out. Lockwood later describes the encounter to Heathcliff as a dream, yet Heathcliff’s fearful reaction makes us wonder if, in fact, Catherine’s ghost might be more than just a figment of Lockwood’s imagination.

The novel’s second dream comes from Catherine herself, as she describes it to Nelly in the kitchen shortly after accepting Linton’s proposal of marriage. In her dream, she chooses to be cast out of heaven and lands on the moor where she and Heathcliff spent so much of their childhood together. Her joy at being tossed back to earth by the angels speaks to her of her heart’s preference for Heathcliff over Linton. What is most interesting about this dream, however, is its timing, as her description of it sets off the biggest turning point in the book: Heathcliff, hiding in the shadows, only overhears Catherine saying that it would degrade her to marry him, and runs away before she goes on to describe the depth of her love for him.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Emily Brontë’s equally famous sister, Charlotte, uses dreams freely in Jane Eyre . One of the overarching themes of this book is Jane’s ability, despite a difficult childhood during which she she was prone to tempestuousness and outbursts of feeling, to become the ideal Victorian woman—outwardly calm, strong feelings always suppressed or hidden. Because of this, dreams offer the reader a valuable glimpse beyond Jane’s guarded demeanor and into the fears and longings she keeps hidden.

In keeping with common superstitions of the day, dreams in Jane Eyre are also instruments of foreboding. Whenever one of the characters dreams about children, for instance, they receive news of a death in the family soon afterward. When Jane dreams of children, which she does repeatedly over the course of a week, it also points the reader to her secret wish to marry Rochester and become a mother.

Jane’s dreams almost always center on this relationship and its doom, as she dreams of Rochester walking so far ahead of her that she can’t catch up, or, on another occasion, that she is climbing among the ruins of Thornfield (another apt premonition) while Rochester remains only a tiny speck in the distance. She also dreams that Blanche Ingram, the woman she believes for a time has Rochester’s heart, has shut the gates of Thornfield against her.

Even after her wedding is ruined and she runs away, Jane is still plagued by dreams of being in Rochester’s arms. Despite her outward resolve to cast him off forever, she can’t stop loving him and can’t forget him.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

Since Du Maurier’s masterpiece is in many ways a retelling of Jane Eyre, it seems fitting that it, too, should open with an ominous dream and that famous line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The dream, to which nearly the entire first chapter is devoted, does a fabulous job of setting the novel’s dark mood, of forecasting the narrator’s troubled journey as the drive to the house in the dream is choked with forest encroaching upon it.

Dreams are used sparingly in this book, but to great effect. The first time Maxim leaves his wife alone overnight, for instance, her dreams are troubled. Just as Jane Eyre dreamt of Rochester, Mrs. de Winter dreams that she is walking with Maxim in the woods but can’t keep up, his face always turned away from her.

Her dreams are also an effective device in revealing to us how impossible it is for the narrator to escape Rebecca’s haunting. As she puts it, “Even in my thoughts, my dreams, I met Rebecca.”

And the book ends with a series of dreams, as it began. Pages before the climax, Mrs. De Winter spends a long drive toward Manderley swimming in and out of consciousness, and in these dreams her connection to Rebecca is further tightened to a stranglehold. In one, she looks down to see that her own tiny handwriting has been replaced with Rebecca’s long, slanted letters. She looks in the mirror and sees that she looks like Rebecca, too.

This final series of dreams serves to recall the long dream of the opening, and reminds us that Mrs. De Winter will never truly be able to leave this ghost behind—she is still dreaming of Manderley after the events of the book are long past.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

In Rhys’s brilliant postcolonial retelling of Jane Eyre from Bertha’s (Antoinette’s) point of view, each of the book’s three parts contains one important dream. Antionette’s first dream is short, consisting simply of walking in a forest, followed by the heavy footsteps of someone who hates her. It serves not merely to reflect her childish understanding that the recently emancipated black people of Jamaica harbor ill-will for Antoinette and her white Creole family, but also to hint at her future unfortunate relationship with Rochester.

Later on, when her stepfather informs her that a suitor is coming to visit her, she dreams of the forest again. This time, the dream is more complex, and her premonition of her marriage is no longer veiled: led through the forest by a strange, hateful man, Antionette is frightened yet feels she has no choice but to follow him.

By the time Antionette has her third and final dream in the attic at Thornfield, a dream of running through the house knocking lighted candles to the ground and setting curtains ablaze, we know her descent into madness—whether predestined or forced upon her by circumstance—is complete.

1984 by George Orwell

In the Victorian and Gothic traditions, dreams allow the subconscious of a narrator who is caged by her time and circumstances to run free, and they can be used to the same effect within the similar constraints of dystopian literature. In Winston Smith’s world of Oceania, history is constantly rewritten in order to meet the needs of the present, and any sort of dissent is known as thoughtcrime against The Party. In this environment, Winston’s dreams offer him an occasional chance for freedom.

For instance, they often serve as the place in which some form of his repressed memories manages to surface. In one, he dreams of watching his mother and sister on a sinking ship; from another, he wakes with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips but without any memory of what it means. Eventually, this dream freedom triggers a conscious memory, and he wakes from a dream of his mother to remember hiding with her and his sister in underground shelters during the war.

Many of Winston’s dreams are also prophetic. He dreams of his love interest, Julia, casting off her clothes in a sunlit field that he thinks of as The Golden Country, and when he finally meets with her, that dream comes true in every detail. Seven years before the events of the novel, he dreams of a voice telling him they will meet in the place where there is no darkness, and over time he becomes convinced the voice belongs to O’Brien, the man he believes is part of an underground resistance. Unfortunately, this dream becomes reality in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is tortured. Even here, however, his dreams give evidence of the tenaciousness of hope within him: his continued dreams of being with his mother and Julia in The Golden Country offer him respite and help him heal.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s famous handmaid, Offred, dreams not of the future, but the past. Her life, of course, is even more repressive than Winston Smith’s, and because of this she actively tries to avoid remembering the family and friends she once had. Naturally, her former life still sometimes haunts her in her sleep. She dreams of being in the old apartment she once shared with her husband, but all the furniture is gone and none of the clothes in the closet fit her. She is also plagued by a recurring nightmare that recalls her attempt to flee with her daughter, dragging her through the bracken of a forest, pulling her down and trying to shield her, then watching her carried away, still holding her arms out toward her mother.

Offred is an openly unreliable narrator, trying to construct a life that is bearable out of one that is not. She sometimes recounts an event and then starts over, admitting the lies she has told us even as she continues to spin more of them. And this tendency, too, is reflected in dream sequences. In one instance, she has a lucid dream of waking in the morning and hugging her daughter, but is overcome with sadness because she knows it’s not real. Then, she dreams of waking from that dream to her own mother carrying a tray of food into her room. Eventually, she wakes a final time into her real life, but even then, she wonders if everything she experiences might be a delusion.

The Manual of Detection by Jebediah Berry

In this exceedingly clever, Kafkaesque detective novel, Berry leads us into a world where spies have learned to sleuth through people’s dreams. In fact, this entire book operates with a dream-like logic (it’s always raining, buildings are full of secret passages and tunnels), and it’s not always certain when one is asleep or awake.

When clerk Charles Unwin is mysteriously promoted to detective at The Agency where he works, he’s certain a mistake has been made, but in order to correct it he’ll have to hunt down his own missing boss, detective Travis T. Sivart. Eventually, it becomes apparent that Sivart may have become trapped in a dream he entered to catch a thief, and Unwin is forced to go in after him.

I don’t think there has ever been a book that uses dreaming as cleverly as this one. Lucid dreams, dreams from which one believes one has woken even as they continue, and shared dreams all play a role. In this world, dreams can even be recorded and played back to the mind of another. A most unusual take on the gumshoe detective genre!

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

In Thompson Walker’s latest gorgeous book, a small university town is hit with a mysterious sleeping sickness that appears to cause unusually vivid dreams in the infected. It begins with one student, then quickly spreads through the school and eventually, the town, with no experts able to determine how it originated, how to cure it, or how long it might last.

Thompson Walker uses many, many dreams to explore the lives of these characters alongside their waking hours, but in an interesting twist, most of the dreams we read about belong to those who are still healthy. Mei, the college student who happened to be roommates with the very first girl to fall ill, dreams of being in church with her family because she feels guilty about her behavior away from home. Ben, the young professor and new father, has nightmare after nightmare about his wife leaving him, his daughter dying. And a much older professor, Nathaniel, dreams of his partner, Henry, who no longer lives with him due to dementia.

Eventually, we do become privy to some of the dreams of the sick, and this is when things really get interesting. Thompson Walker plays with the idea of precognitive dreams and even the notion that a whole life might be lived in a dream, more real to the dreamer upon waking than the one left behind.

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Dreams and Dreaming

Dreams and dreaming have been discussed in diverse areas of philosophy ranging from epistemology to ethics, ontology, and more recently philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This entry provides an overview of major themes in the philosophy of sleep and dreaming, with a focus on Western analytic philosophy, and discusses relevant scientific findings.

1.1 Cartesian dream skepticism

1.2 earlier discussions of dream skepticism and why descartes’ version is special, 1.3 dreaming and other skeptical scenarios, 1.4 descartes’ solution to the dream problem and real-world dreams, 2.1 are dreams experiences, 2.2 dreams as instantaneous memory insertions, 2.3 empirical evidence on the question of dream experience, 2.4 dreams and hallucinations, 2.5 dreams and illusions, 2.6 dreams as imaginative experiences, 2.7 dreaming and waking mind wandering, 2.8 the problem of dream belief, 3.1 dreaming as a model system and test case for consciousness research, 3.2 dreams, psychosis, and delusions, 3.3 beyond dreams: dreamless sleep experience and the concepts of sleep, waking, and consciousness, 4. dreaming and the self, 5. immorality and moral responsibility in dreams, 6.1 the meaning of dreams, 6.2 the functions of dreaming, 7. conclusions, other internet resources, related entries, 1. dreams and epistemology.

Dream skepticism has traditionally been the most famous and widely discussed philosophical problem raised by dreaming (see Williams 1978; Stroud 1984). In the Meditations , Descartes uses dreams to motivate skepticism about sensory-based beliefs about the external world and his own bodily existence. He notes that sensory experience can also lead us astray in commonplace sensory illusions such as seeing things as too big or small. But he does not think such cases justify general doubts about the reliability of sensory perception: by taking a closer look at an object seen under suboptimal conditions, we can easily avoid deception. By contrast, dreams suggest that even in a seemingly best-case scenario of sensory perception (Stroud 1984), deception is possible. Even the realistic experience of sitting dressed by the fire and looking at a piece of paper in one’s hands (Descartes 1641: I.5) is something that can, and according to Descartes often does, occur in a dream.

There are different ways of construing the dream argument. A strong reading is that Descartes is trapped in a lifelong dream and none of his experiences have ever been caused by external objects (the Always Dreaming Doubt ; see Newman 2019). A weaker reading is that he is just sometimes dreaming but cannot rule out at any given moment that he is dreaming right now (the Now Dreaming Doubt ; see Newman 2019). This is still epistemologically worrisome: even though some of his sensory-based beliefs might be true, he cannot determine which these are unless he can rule out that he is dreaming. Doubt is thus cast on all of his beliefs, making sensory-based knowledge slip out of reach.

Cartesian-style skeptical arguments have the following form (quoted from Klein 2015):

• If I know that p , then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that p .
• U is a genuine ground for doubting that p .
• Therefore, I do not know that p .

If we apply this to the case of dreaming, we get:

• If I know that I am sitting dressed by the fire, then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that I am really sitting dressed by the fire.
• If I were now dreaming, this would be a genuine ground for doubting that I am sitting dressed by the fire: in dreams, I have often had the realistic experience of sitting dressed by the fire when I was actually lying undressed in bed!
• Therefore, I do not know that I am now sitting dressed by the fire.

Importantly, both strong and weak versions of the dream argument cast doubt only on sensory-based beliefs, but leave other beliefs unscathed. According to Descartes, that 2+3=5 or that a square has no more than 4 sides is knowable even if he is now dreaming:

although, in truth, I should be dreaming, the rule still holds that all which is clearly presented to my intellect is indisputably true. (Descartes 1641: V.15)

By Descartes’ lights, dreams do not undermine our ability to engage in the project of pure, rational enquiry (Frankfurt 1970; but see Broughton 2002).

Dream arguments have been a staple of philosophical skepticism since antiquity and were so well known that in his objections to the Meditations , Hobbes (1641) criticized Descartes for not having come up with a more original argument. Yet, Descartes’ version of the problem, more than any other, has left its mark on the philosophical discussion.

Earlier versions tended to touch upon dreams just briefly and discuss them alongside other examples of sensory deception. For example, in the Theaetetus (157e), Plato has Socrates discuss a defect in perception that is common to

dreams and diseases, including insanity, and everything else that is said to cause illusions of sight and hearing and the other senses.

This leads to the conclusion that knowledge cannot be defined through perception.

Dreams also appear in the canon of standard skeptical arguments used by the Pyrrhonists. Again, dreams and sleep are just one of several conditions (including illness, joy, and sorrow) that cast doubt on the trusthworthiness of sensory perception (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers; Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism) .

Augustine ( Against the Academics ; Confessions) thought the dream problem could be contained, arguing that in retrospect, we can distinguish both dreams and illusions from actual perception (Matthew 2005: chapter 8). And Montaigne ( The Apology for Raymond Sebond ) noted that wakefulness itself teems with reveries and illusions, which he thought were even more epistemologically worrisome than nocturnal dreams.

Descartes devoted much more space to the discussion of dreaming and cast it as a unique epistemological threat distinct from both waking illusions and evil genius or brain-in-a-vat-style arguments. His claim that he has often been deceived by his dreams implies he also saw dreaming as a real-world (rather than merely hypothetical) threat.

This is further highlighted by the intimate, first-person style of the Meditations . Their narrator is supposed to exemplify everyone’s epistemic situation, illustrating the typical defects of the human mind. Readers are further drawn in by Descartes’ strategy of moving from commonsense examples towards more sophisticated philosophical claims (Frankfurt 1970). For example, Descartes builds up towards dream skepticism by first considering familiar cases of sensory illusions and then deceptively realistic dreams.

Finally, much attention has been devoted to several dreams Descartes reportedly had as a young man. Some believe these dreams embodied theoretical doubts he developed in the Discourse and Meditations (Baillet 1691; Leibniz 1880: IV; Cole 1992; Keefer 1996). Hacking (2001:252) suggests that for Descartes, dream skepticism was not just a philosophical conundrum but a source of genuine doubt. There is also some discussion about the dream reports’ authenticity (Freud 1940; Cole 1992; Clarke 2006; Browne 1977).

In the Meditations , after discussing the dream argument, Descartes raises the possibility of an omnipotent evil genius determined to deceive us even in our most basic beliefs. Contrary to dream deception, Descartes emphasizes that the evil genius hypothesis is a mere fiction. Still, it radicalizes the dream doubt in two respects. One, where the dream argument left the knowability of certain general truths intact, these are cast in doubt by the evil genius hypothesis . Two, where the dream argument, at least on the weaker reading, involves just temporary deception, the evil genius has us permanently deceived.

One modernized version, the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, says that if evil scientists placed your brain in a vat and stimulated it just right, your conscious experience would be exactly the same as if you were still an ordinary, embodied human being (Putnam 1981). In the Matrix -trilogy (Chalmers 2005), Matrixers live unbeknownst to themselves in a computer simulation. Unlike the brain-in-a-vat , they have bodies that are kept alive in pods, and flaws in the simulation allow some of them to bend its rules to their advantage.

Unlike dream deception, which is often cast as a regularly recurring actuality (cf. Windt 2011), brain-in-a-vat-style arguments are often thought to be merely logically or nomologically possible. However, there might be good reasons for thinking that we actually live in a computer simulation (Bostrom 2003), and if we lend some credence to radical skeptical scenarios, this may have consequences for how we act (Schwitzgebel 2017).

Even purely hypothetical skeptical scenarios may enhance their psychological force by capitalizing on the analogy with dreams. Clark (2005) argues that the Matrix contains elements of “industrial-strength deception” in which both sensory experience and intellectual functioning are exactly the same as in standard wake-states, whereas other aspects are more similar to the compromised reasoning and bizarre shifts that are the hallmark of dreams.

At the end of the Sixth Meditation , Descartes suggests a solution to the dream problem that is tied to a reassessment of what it is like to dream. Contrary to his remarks in the First Meditation , he notes that dreams are only rarely connected to waking memories and are often discontinuous, as when dream characters suddenly appear or disappear. He then introduces the coherence test:

But when I perceive objects with regard to which I can distinctly determine both the place whence they come, and that in which they are, and the time at which they appear to me, and when, without interruption, I can connect the perception I have of them with the whole of the other parts of my life, I am perfectly sure that what I thus perceive occurs while I am awake and not during sleep. (Meditation VI. 24)

For all practical purposes, he has now found a mark by which dreaming and waking can be distinguished (cf. Meditation I.7), and even if the coherence test is not fail-safe, the threat of dream deception has been averted.

Descartes’ remarks about the discontinuous and ad hoc nature of many dreams are backed up by empirical work on dream bizarreness (see Hobson 1988; Revonsuo & Salmivalli 1995). Still, many of his critics were not convinced this helped his case against the skeptic. Even if Descartes’ revised phenomenological description characterizes most dreams, one might occasionally merely dream of successfully performing the test (Hobbes 1641), and in some dreams, one might seem to have a clear and distinct idea but this impression is false (Bourdin 1641). Both the coherence test and the criterion of clarity and distinctness would then be unreliable.

How considerations of empirical plausibility impact the dream argument continues to be a matter of debate. Grundmann (2002) appeals to scientific dream research to introduce an introspective criterion: when we introspectively notice that we are able to engage in critical reflection, we have good reason to think that we are awake and not dreaming. However, this assumes critical reasoning to be uniformly absent in dreams. If attempts at critical reasoning do occur in dreams and if they generally tend to be corrupted, the introspective criterion might again be problematic (Windt 2011, 2015a). There are also cases in which even after awakening, people mistake what was in fact a dream for reality (Wamsley et al. 2014). At least in certain situations and for some people, dream deception might be a genuine cause of concern (Windt 2015a).

2. The ontology of dreams

In what follows, the term “conscious experience” is used as an umbrella term for the occurrence of sensations, thoughts, impressions, emotions etc. in dreams (cf. Dennett 1976). These are all phenomenal states: there is something it is like to be in these states for the subject of experience (cf. Nagel 1974). To ask about dream experience is to ask whether it is like something to dream while dreaming, and whether what it is like is similar to (or relevantly different from) corresponding waking experiences.

Cartesian dream skepticism depends on a seemingly innocent background assumption: that dreams are conscious experiences. If this is false, then dreams are not deceptive experiences during sleep and we cannot be deceived, while dreaming, about anything at all. Whether dreams are experiences is a major question for the ontology of dreams and closely bound up with dream skepticism.

The most famous argument denying that dreams are experiences was formulated by Norman Malcolm (1956, 1959). Today, his position is commonly rejected as implausible. Still, it set the tone for the analysis of dreaming as a target phenomenon for philosophy of mind.

For Malcolm, the denial of dream experience followed from the conceptual analysis of sleep: “if a person is in any state of consciousness it logically follows that he is not sound asleep” (Malcolm 1956: 21). Following some remarks of Wittgenstein’s (1953: 184; see Chihara 1965 for discussion), Malcolm claimed

the concept of dreaming is derived, not from dreaming, but from descriptions of dreams, i.e., from the familiar phenomenon that we call “telling a dream”. (Malcolm 1959:55)

Malcolm argued that retrospective dream reports are the sole criterion for determining whether a dream occurred and there is no independent way of verifying dream reports. While first-person, past-tense psychological statements (such as “I felt afraid”) can at least in principle be verified by independent observations (but see Canfield 1961; Siegler 1967; Schröder 1997), he argued dream reports (such as “in my dream, I felt afraid”) are governed by different grammars and merely superficially resemble waking reports. In particular, he denied dream reports imply the occurrence of experiences (such as thoughts, feelings, or judgements) in sleep:

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. (Malcolm 1959/1962: 51–52)

What exactly Malcolm means by “conscious experience” is unclear. Sometimes he seems to be saying that conscious experience is conceptually tied to wakefulness (Malcolm 1956); other times he claims that terms such as mental activity or conscious experience are vague and it is senseless to apply them to sleep and dreams (Malcolm 1959: 52).

Malcolm’s analysis of dreaming has been criticized as assuming an overly strict form of verificationism and a naïve view of language and conceptual change. A particularly counterintuitive consequence of his view is that there can be no observational evidence for the occurrence of dreams in sleep aside from dream reports. This includes behavioral evidence such as sleepwalking or sleeptalking, which he thought showed the person was partially awake; as he also thought dreams occur in sound sleep, such sleep behaviors were largely irrelevant to the investigation of dreaming proper. He also claimed adopting a physiological criterion of dreaming (such as EEG measures of brain activity during sleep) would change the concept of dreaming, which he argued was tied exclusively to dream reporting. This claim was particularly radical as it explicitly targeted the discovery of REM sleep and its association with dreaming (Dement & Kleitman 1957), which is commonly regarded as the beginning of the science of sleep and dreaming. Malcolm’s position was that the very project of a science of dreaming was misguided.

Contra Malcolm, most assume that justification does not depend on strict criteria with the help of which the truth of a statement can be determined with absolute certainty, but “on appeals to the simplicity, plausibility, and predictive adequacy of an explanatory system as a whole” (Chihara & Fodor 1965: 197). In this view, behavioral and/or physiological evidence can be used to verify dream reports (Ayer 1960) and the alleged principled difference between dream reports and other first-person, past-tense psychological sentences (Siegler 1967; Schröder 1997) disappears.

Putnam noted that Malcolm’s analysis of the concept of dreaming relies on the dubious idea that philosophers have access to deep conceptual truths that are hidden to laypeople:

the lexicographer would undoubtedly perceive the logical (or semantical) connection between being a pediatrician and being a doctor, but he would miss the allegedly “logical” character of the connection between dreams and waking impressions. […] this “depth grammar” kind of analyticity (or “logical dependence”) does not exist. (Putnam 1962 [1986]: 306)

Nagel argued that even if one accepts Malcolm’s analysis of the concept of dreaming,

it is a mistake to invest the demonstration that it is impossible to have experiences while asleep with more import than it has. It is an observation about our use of the word “experience”, and no more. It does not imply that nothing goes on in our minds while we dream. (Nagel 1959: 114)

Whether dream thoughts, feelings or beliefs should count as real instances of their kind now becomes an open question, and in any case there is no conceptual contradiction involved in saying one has experiences while asleep and dreaming.

To ask about dream experience is also to ask whether there is something it is like to dream during sleep as opposed to there just being something it is like to remember dreaming after awakening. Dennett’s (1976, 1979) cassette theory says dreams are the product of instantaneous memory insertion at the moment of the awakening, as if a cassette with pre-scripted dreams had been inserted into memory, ready for replay. Dennett claims the cassette theory and the view that dreams are experiences can deal equally well with empirical evidence for instance on the relationship between dreaming and REM sleep. The cassette theory is preferable because it is more parsimonious, positing only an unconscious dream composition process rather than an additional conscious presentation process in sleep. For Dennett, the important point is that it is impossible to distinguish between the two rival theories based on dream recall; the question of dream experience should be settled by independent empirical evidence.

While Dennett shares Malcolm’s skepticism about dream experience, this latter claim is diametrically opposed to Malcolm’s rejection of a science of dreaming. For Dennett, the unreliability of dream recall also is not unique, but exemplifies a broader problem with memory reports: we generally cannot use retrospective recall to distinguish conscious experience from memory insertion (Dennett 1991; see also Emmett 1978).

An earlier and much discussed (Binz 1878; Goblot 1896; Freud 1899; Hall 1981; Kramer 2007:22–24) version of Dennett’s cassette theory goes back to Maury’s (1861) description of a long and complex dream about the French revolution that culminated in his execution at the guillotine, at which point Maury suddenly awoke to find that the headboard had fallen on his neck. Because the dream seemed to systematically build up to this dramatic conclusion, which in turn coincided with a sudden external event, he suggested that such cases were best explained as instantaneous memory insertions experienced at the moment of awakening. Similarly, Gregory (1916) described dreams are psychical explosions occurring at the moment of awakening.

The trustworthiness of dream reports continues to be contentious. Rosen (2013) argues that dream reports are often fabricated and fail to accurately describe experiences occurring during sleep. By contrast, Windt (2013, 2015a) argues that dream reports can at least under certain conditions (such as in laboratory studies, when dreams are reported immediately after awakening by trained participants) be regarded as trustworthy sources of evidence with respect to previous experience during sleep.

Unlike Malcolm, many believe that whether dreams are experiences is an empirical question; and unlike Dennett, the predominant view is that the empirical evidence does indeed support this claim (Flanagan 2000; Metzinger 2003; Revonsuo 2006; Rosen 2013; Windt 2013, 2015a).

A first reason for thinking that dreams are experiences during sleep is the relationship between dreaming and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Researchers in the 1950s discovered that sleep is not a uniform state of rest and passivity, but there is a sleep architecture involving different stages of sleep that is relatively stable both within and across individuals (Aserinsky & Kleitman 1953, 1955; Dement & Kleitman 1957). Following sleep onset, periods of non-REM (or NREM) sleep including slow wave sleep (so called because of the presence of characteristic slow-wave, high-voltage EEG activity) are followed by periods of high-frequency, low-voltage activity during REM sleep. EEG measures from REM sleep strongly resemble waking EEG. REM sleep is additionally characterized by rapid eye movements and a near-complete loss of muscle tone (Dement 1999: 27–50; Jouvet 1999).

The alignment between conscious experience on the one hand and wake-like brain activity and muscular paralysis on the other hand would seem to support the experiential status of dreams as well as explain the outward passivity that typically accompanies them. Reports of dreaming are in fact much more frequent following REM (81.9%) than NREM sleep awakenings (43%; Nielsen 2000). REM reports tend to be more elaborate, vivid, and emotionally intense, whereas NREM reports tend to be more thought-like, confused, non-progressive, and repetitive (Hobson et al. 2000). These differences led to the idea that REM sleep is an objective marker of dreaming (Dement & Kleitman 1957; Hobson 1988: 154).

Attempts to identify dreaming with mental activity during REM sleep have not, however, been successful, and many now hold that dreams can occur in all stages of sleep (e.g., Antrobus 1990; Foulkes 1993b; Solms 1997, 2000; Domhoff 2003; Nemeth & Fazekas 2018). In recent years there has been renewed interest in NREM sleep for the study of dreaming (Noreika et al. 2009; Siclari et al. 2013, 2017). This suggests the inference from the physiology of REM sleep to the phenomenology of dreaming is not straightforward.

A second line of evidence comes from lucid dreams, or dreams in which one knows one is dreaming and often has some level of dream control (Voss et al. 2013; Voss & Hobson 2015; Baird et al. 2019). The term lucid dreaming was coined by van Eeden (1913), but Aristotle ( On Dreams ) already noted that one can sometimes be aware while dreaming that one is dreaming.

Scientific evidence that lucid dreaming is real and a genuine sleep phenomenon comes from laboratory studies (Hearne 1978; LaBerge et al. 1981) showing lucid dreamers can use specific, pre-arranged patterns of eye movements (e.g., right-left-right-left) to signal in real-time that they are now lucid and engaging in dream experiments. These signals are clearly identifiable on the EOG and suggest a correspondence between dream-eye movements and real-eye movements (as predicted by the so-called scanning hypothesis ; see Dement & Kleitman 1957; Leclair-Visonneau et al. 2010). Retrospective reports confirm that the dreamer really was lucid and signalled lucidity (Dresler et al. 2012; Stumbrys et al. 2014).

Signal-verified lucid dreams have been used to study muscular activity accompanying body movements in dreams (Erlacher et al. 2003; Dresler et al. 2011), for advanced EEG analysis of brain activity during lucid dreaming (Voss et al. 2009), and imaging studies (Dresler et al. 2011, 2012). Eye signals can also be used to measure the duration of different activities performed in lucid dreams; contrary to the cassette theory, lucid dreams have temporal extension and certain dream actions even seem to take slightly longer than in waking (Erlacher et al. 2014). There have also been attempts to induce lucidity through non-invasive electrical stimulation during sleep (Stumbrys et al. 2013; Voss et al. 2014). The combination of signal-verified lucid dreaming with volitional control over dream content, retrospective report, and objective sleep measures has been proposed to provide controlled conditions for the study of conscious experience in sleep and a new methodology for investigating the relationship between conscious experience and neurophysiological processes (Baird et al.2019).

A third line of evidence (Revonsuo 2006: 77) comes from dream-enactment behavior (Nielsen et al. 2009), most prominently in patients with REM-sleep behavior disorder (RBD; Schenck & Mahowald 1996; Schenck 2005; Leclair-Visonneau et al. 2010). Due to a loss of the muscular atonia that accompanies REM sleep in healthy subjects, these patients show complex, seemingly goal-directed outward behaviors such as running or fighting off an attacker during REM sleep. Retrospective dream reports often match these behaviors, suggesting that patients literally act out their dreams during sleep.

While persuasive, these lines of evidence might not satisfy skeptics about dream experience. They might worry that results from lucid dreaming and dream enactment do not generalize to ordinary, non-lucid dreams; they might also construe alternative explanations that do not require conscious experience in sleep. There are also methodological concerns, for instance about how closely sleep-behaviors actually match dream experience. A key issue is that to support the experiential status of dreams, evidence from sleep polysomnography, signal verified lucid dreams, or sleep behavior requires convergence with retrospective dream reports. This means trusting dream reports is built into any attempt to empirically resolve the question of dream experience – which then invites the familiar skeptical concerns. Again, an anti-skeptical strategy may be to appeal to explanatory considerations. In this view, the convergence of dream reports and objective polysomnographic or behavioral observations is best explained by the assumption that dreams are experiences in sleep, and this assumption is strengthened by further incoming findings. This strategy places dream reports at the center of scientific dream research while avoiding the contentious claim that their trustworthiness, and with it the experiential status of dreams, can be demonstrated conclusively by independent empirical means (Windt 2013, 2015a).

Even where philosophers agree dreams are experiences, they often disagree on how exactly to characterize dreaming relative to wake-state psychological terms. Often, questions about the ontology of dreaming intersect with epistemological issues. Increasingly, they also incorporate empirical findings.

The standard view is that dreams have the same phenomenal character as waking perception in that they seemingly put us in contact with mind-independent objects, yet no such object is actually being perceived. This means dreams count as hallucinations in the philosophical sense (Crane & French 2017; Macpherson 2013). Even if, in a particularly realistic dream, my visual experience was exactly as it would be if I were awake (I could see my bedroom, my hands on the bed sheets, etc.), as long as my eyes were closed during the episode, I would not, literally, be seeing anything.

There is some controversy in the psychological literature about whether dreams should be regarded as hallucinations. Some believe the term hallucination should be reserved for clinical contexts and wake-state pathologies (Aleman & Larøi 2008: 17; but see ffytche 2007; ffytche et al. 2010).

The view that dreams involve hallucinations is implicit in Descartes’ assumption that even when dreaming,

it is certain that I seem to see light, hear a noise, and feel heat; this cannot be false, and this is what in me is properly called perceiving ( sentire ). (Descartes 1641: II.9)

It also lies at the heart of Aristotle’s ( On Dreams ) assumption that dreams result from the movements of the sensory organs that continue even after the original stimulus has ceased. He believed that in the silence of sleep, these residual movements result in vivid sensory imagery that is subjectively indistinguishable from genuine perception (see also Dreisbach 2000; Barbera 2008).

The assumption of phenomenological equivalence between dream and waking experience can also be found in Berkeley’s (1710: I.18) idealist claim that the existence of external bodies is not necessary for the production of vivid, wake-like perceptual experience. Similarly, Russell defended sense-data theory by noting that in dreams,

I have all the experiences that I seem to have; it is only things outside my mind that are not as I believe them to be while I am dreaming. (Russell 1948: 149–150)

Elsewhere, he argued dreams and waking life

must be treated with equal respect; it is only by some reality not merely sensible that dreams can be condemned. (Russell 1914: 69)

Hume was less clear on this matter, proposing that dreams occupy an intermediate position between vivid and largely non-voluntary sensory impressions and ideas, or “the faint images of previous impressions in thinking and reasoning” (Hume 1739: 1.1.1.1). On the one hand, as mere creatures of the mind, Hume wanted to categorize dreams as ideas. On the other hand, he acknowledged that in sleep, “our ideas can approach the vivacity of sensory impressions” (Hume 1739: 1.1.1.1). Dreams do not fit comfortably into Hume’s attempt to draw a dichotomous distinction between impressions, including perception, and ideas, including sensory imagination (Ryle 1949; Waxman 1994; Broughton 2006).

Phenomenologists often focus not so much on the quality of dream imagery as on the overall character of experience, noting that dreams are experienced as reality; as in waking perception, we simply feel present in a world. This also sets dreams apart from waking fantasy and daydreams (Husserl 1904/1905; Uslar 1964; Conrad 1968; Globus 1987: 89.

At its strongest, the hallucination view claims that dreaming and waking experience are identical in both the quality of sensory imagery and their overall, self-in-a-world structure (Revonsuo 2006: 84). This claim is central to the virtual reality metaphor , according to which consciousness itself is dreamlike and waking perception a kind of online hallucination modulated by the senses (Llinás & Ribary 1994; Llinás & Paré 1991; Revonsuo 2006; Metzinger 2003, 2009).

This seems to be empirically supported. Neuroimaging studies (Dang-Vu et al. 2007; Nir & Tononi 2010; Desseilles et al. 2011) show that the predominance of visual and motor imagery as well as strong emotions in dreams is paralleled by high activation of the corresponding brain areas in REM sleep, which may exceed waking; at the same time, the cognitive deficits often thought to characterize dreams such as the loss of self-awareness, the absence of critical thinking, delusional reasoning, and mnemonic deficits fit in well with the comparative deactivation of frontal areas (Hobson et al. 2000). Hobson (1988, Hobson et al. 2000) has argued that the vivid, hallucinatory character of dreaming results from the fact that in REM sleep, the visual and motor areas are activated in the same way as in waking perception, the sole difference being dreams’ dependence on internal signal generation. Horikawa and colleagues (2013) used neuroimaging data from sleep onset to predict the types of objects described in mentation reports, which they took to support the perceptual equivalence between dreaming and waking.

Generally, versions of the hallucination view that suggest dreams replicate all aspects of waking perception are too vague to be informative. Especially for subtle perceptual activities (such as visual search), we might not know enough about dream phenomenology to make any strong claims (Nielsen 2010). Specifying points of similarity leads to a more informative and precise, but likely also more nuanced view. Dreams are heterogeneous, and some might be more perception-like while others resemble imagination (Windt 2015a). There might also be differences between or even within specific types of imagery. For example, visual imagery might be quite different from touch sensations, which tend to be rare in dreams (Hobson 1988). Visual dream imagery might overall resemble waking perception but lack color saturation, background detail and focus (Rechtschaffen & Buchignani, 1992). Classifying dreams as either hallucinatory or imaginative is further complicated by the fact that there is strong overlap in cortical activity associated with both visual imagery and perception (Zeidman & Maguire, 2016). This means even a strong overlap in cortical activity between, say, visual dream imagery and visual perception does not necessarily set dreaming apart from waking imagination.

This is also true for evidence on eye movements in dreams. LaBerge and colleagues (2018) recently showed that eye tracking of objects is smooth in lucid dreaming and perceiving, but not in imagining. Drawing from this evidence, Rosen (forthcoming) suggests many dreams mimic the phenomenology of interacting with a stable world, including eye movements and visual search. Others argue we should not analogize dream imagery to mind-independent, scannable objects and that eye movements might instead be implicated in the generation of dream imagery (Windt 2018).

Another way to make sense of the claim that dreaming has the same phenomenal character as waking perception is to say some kinds of dream imagery are illusory: they involve misperception of an external object as having different properties than it actually has (cf. Smith 2002; Crane & French 2017). The illusion view disagrees with the hallucination view on whether dreams have a contemporaneous external stimulus source.

The illusion view has fallen out of favor but has a long history. The Ancients believed dreams have bodily sources. This idea underlies the practice of using dreams to diagnose illness, as practiced in the shrines at Epidaurus (Galen On Diagnosis in Dreams ; van de Castle 1994). Aristotle ( On Dreams ) thought some dreams are caused by indigestion, and Hobbes adopted this view, claiming different kinds of dreams could be traced to different bodily sensations. For instance, “lying cold breedeth Dreams of Feare, and raiseth the thought and Image of some fearfull object” (Hobbes 1651: 91).

Appeals to the bodily sources of dreaming became especially popular in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Many believed specific dream themes such as flying were linked to sleeping position (Macnish 1838; Scherner 1861; Vold 1910/1912; Ellis 1911) and realizing, in sleep, that one’s feet are not touching the ground (Bergson 1914).

There were also attempts to explain the phenomenology of dreaming by appealing to the absence of outward movement. The lack of appropriate feedback and of movement and touch sensations was thought to cause dreams of being unable to move (Bradley 1894) or of trying but failing to do something (Gregory 1918).

Some proponents of the “ Leibreiztheorie ” (or somatic-stimulus theory) of dreaming attempted to go beyond anecdotal observations to conduct controlled experiments. Weygandt (1893) investigated the influence of various factors including breathing, blood circulation, temperature changes, urge to urinate, sleeping position, and visual or auditory stimulation during sleep on dream content (see Schredl 2010 for details). Singer (1924) proposed experiments on stimulus incorporation in dreams can inform claims on the ontology of dreaming: If dreams are sensations, a particular auditory stimulus should increase the frequency of dreams in nearby sleepers as well as the frequency of sound in their dreams, and it should decrease the range of quality and intensity of these dreams, making them overall more similar and predictable.

Newer studies provide evidence for the incorporation of external stimuli in dreams, including light flashes, sounds, sprays of water applied to the skin (Dement & Wolpert 1958), thermal (Baldridge 1966), electrical (Koulack 1969), and verbal stimuli (Berger 1963; Breger et al. 1971; Hoelscher et al., 1981), as well as blood pressure cuff stimulation on the leg (Nielsen et al. 1995; Sauvageau et al. 1998).

Muscular activity also often leaves its mark on dreams. It occurs throughout sleep but is especially frequent in REM sleep, mostly in the form of twitching but occasionally also in the form of larger, seemingly goal-directed movements (Blumberg 2010; Blumberg & Plumeau 2016). The relation between outward and dream movements is complex: in some cases, outward movements might mirror dream movements, while in others, sensory feedback might prompt dream imagery (Windt 2018).

Generally, it seems external and bodily stimuli can be related to varying degrees to dream and sleep onset imagery (Nielsen 2017; Windt 2018; Windt et al. 2016). Some of these cases appear to fit the concept of illusion, as in when the sound of the alarm clock is experienced, in a dream, as a siren, or when blood pressure cuff inflation on the leg leads to dreams of wearing strange shoes (Windt 2018; for these and other examples, see Nielsen et al. 1995). In other cases, such as when blood pressure cuff stimulation on the leg prompts a dream of seeing someone else’s leg being run over, describing this as illusory misperception might be less straightforward.

Saying that dreams can be prompted by external stimuli and that in some cases these are best described as illusions is different from the stronger claim, sometimes advanced by historical proponents of somatic-stimulus theory, that dreams generally are caused by external or bodily stimuli. As an example of the stronger claim, consider Wundt’s proposal that the

ideas which arise in dreams come, at least to a great extent, from sensations, especially from those of the general sense, and are therefore mostly illusions of fancy, probably only seldom pure memory ideas which hence become hallucinations. (Wundt 1896: 179)

This claim is likely too strong. It is also likely that appeals to external or bodily stimuli on their own cannot fully explain dream imagery, including when and how external stimuli are incorporated in dreams. Sensory incorporation in dreams is often hard to predict and indirect; associated imagery seems related not just to stimulus intensity, but also to short- and long term memories. A full explanation of dream content additionally has to take the cognitive and memory sources of dreaming into account (Windt 2018; Nielsen 2017; cf. Silberer 1919).

The most important rival to the hallucination view is that dreams are imaginative experiences (Liao & Gendler 2019; Thomas 2014). This can mean dream imagery involves imaginings rather than percepts (including hallucinations or illusions; McGinn 2004), that dream beliefs are imaginative and not real beliefs (Sosa 2007), or both (Ichikawa 2008, 2009). An important advantage is that by assimilating dreams to commonplace mental states such as waking fantasy and daydreaming, rather than a rare and often pathological occurrence such as hallucinations, it provides a more unified account of mental life (Stone 1984). However, the reasons for adopting the imagination view are diverse, and dreams have been proposed to resemble imaginings and differ from perception along a number of dimensions (e.g. McGinn 2004, 2005a,b; Thomas 2014). This issue is complicated by the fact that there is little agreement on the definition of imagination and its relation to perception (Kind 2013).

One way is to deny dreams involve presence or the feeling of being in a world, which many believe is central to waking perception. Imagination theorists compare the sense in which we feel present in our dreams to cognitive absorption, as when we are lost in a novel, film, or vivid daydream (Sartre 1940; McGinn 2004; but see Hering 1947; Globus 1987). Some argue that reflexive consciousness or meta-awareness (as in lucid dreams) interrupts cognitive absorption and terminates the ongoing dream (Sartre 1940), essentially denying lucid dreams are possible.

Another issue is whether dreams are subject to the will (Ichikawa 2009). Imagination is often characterized as active and under our control (Wittgenstein 1967: 621, 633), involving “a special effort of the mind” (Descartes 1641: VI, 2), whereas perception is passive. Because dreams just seem to happen to us without being under voluntary control, they present an important challenge for the imagination view. Ichikawa (2009) argues lucid control dreams show dreams are generally subject to the will even where they are not under deliberate control.

Dreams are widely described as more indeterminate than waking perception (James 1890: 47; Stone 1984). In scientific dream research, vagueness is regarded as one of three main subtypes of bizarreness (Hobson 1988; Revonsuo & Salmivalli 1995). An example are dream characters who are identified not by their behavior or looks, but by just knowing (Kahn et al. 2000, 2002; Revonsuo & Tarkko 2002). Dreams are also attention-dependent and lack foreground-background structure (Thompson 2014); while it is tempting to construe the dream world as rich in detail, there is no more to dreams than meets the eye, and many think dream experience is exhausted by what is the focus of selective attention (Hunter 1983; Thompson 2014).

Indeterminacy is also related to the question of whether we dream in color or in black and white. Based on a review of historical and recent studies, Schwitzgebel (2002, 2011) argues there has been a shift in theories on dream color that coincides with the rise first of black-and-white and then color television. He argues it is unlikely that dreams themselves changed from colored to black and white and back to colored, proposing that a change in opinion is a more plausible explanation. Maybe dreams were either black and white or colored all along; or maybe they are indeterminate with respect to color, as may be the case for imagined or fictional objects; were this the case, it would strengthen the imagination view (Ichikawa 2009). Schwitzgebel’s main point is that reports of colored dreaming are unreliable and our opinions about dreams can be mistaken (but see Windt 2013, 2015a). This relates to Schwitzgebel’s (2011; Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel 2007) general skepticism about the reliability of introspection.

The issue of dream color has led to a number of follow-up studies (Schwitzgebel 2003; Schwitzgebel et al. 2006; Murzyn 2008; Schredl et al. 2008; Hoss 2010). They suggest most people dream in color and a small percentage describe grayscale or even mixed dreams (Murzyn 2008) or dreams involving moderate color saturation (Rechtschaffen and Buchignani 1992). Indeterminacy is rarely reported.

The imagination view has consequences for Cartesian dream skepticism. If dream pain does not feel like real pain, there is a fail-safe way to determine whether one is now dreaming: one need only pinch oneself (Nelson 1966; Stone 1984; but see Hodges & Carter 1969; Kantor 1970). As Locke put it,

if our dreamer pleases to try, whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace, be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man’s fancy, by putting his hand into it, he may perhaps be wakened into a certainty greater than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination. (Locke 1689: IV.XI.8)

If dreaming feels different from waking, this raises the question why we tend to describe dreams in the same terms as waking perception. Maybe this is because most people haven’t thought about these matters and they would find the imagination view plausible if they considered it (Ichikawa 2009). Or maybe

it is just because we all know that dreams are throughout un like waking experiences that we can safely use ordinary expressions in the narration of them. (Austin 1962: 42)

Some authors classify dreams as imaginings while acknowledging they feel like perceiving. For example, Hobbes describes dreams as “the imaginations of them that sleep” (Hobbes 1651: 90), and imagination as a “ decaying sense ” (Hobbes 1651: 88). Yet he also uses the concepts of imagination and fancy to describe perception and argues “their appearance to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming” (Hobbes 1651: 86).

In the scientific literature, the imagination view is complemented by cognitive theories. Foulkes (1978: 5) describes dreaming as a form of thinking with its own grammar and syntax, but allows that dream imagery is sufficently perception-like to deceive us. Domhoff’s neurocognitive model of dreaming (2001, 2003) emphasizes the dependence of dreaming on visuospatial skills and on a network including the association areas of the forebrain. The theory draws from findings on the partial or global cessation of dreaming following brain lesions (cf. Solms 1997, 2000), evidence that dreaming develops gradually and in tandem with visuospatial skills in children (Foulkes 1993a, 1999; but see Resnick et al. 1994), and results from dream content analysis supporting the continuity of dreaming with waking concerns and memories (the so-called continuity hypothesis ; see Domhoff 2001, 2003; Schredl & Hofmann 2003; Schredl 2006; see also Nir & Tononi 2010).

A number of researchers have begun to consider dreaming in the context of theories of mind wandering. Mind wandering is frequent in waking and involves spontaneous thoughts that unfold dynamically and are only weakly constrained by ongoing tasks and environmental demands (Schooler et al. 2011; Smallwood & Schooler 2015; Christoff et al. 2016). Based on phenomenological and neurophysiological similarities, dreams have been proposed to be an intensified form of waking mind wandering (Pace-Schott 2007, 2013; Domhoff 2011; Wamsley 2013; Fox et al. 2013). This basic idea seems to have been anticipated by Leibniz, who noted that the spontaneous formation of visions in dreams surpasses the capacity of our waking imagination (Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters , Vol. I, 177–178).

The analogy between dreams and waking mind wandering has been discussed in the context of cognitive agency. Metzinger (2013a,b, 2015) describes dreams and waking mind wandering as involving a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy, or the ability to deliberately control one’s conscious thought processes. Dreams and waking mind wandering are not mental actions but unintentional mental behaviors, comparable to subpersonal processes such as breathing or heartbeat. Because dreaming and waking mind wandering make up a the majority of our conscious mental lives, he argues that cognitive agency and mental autonomy are the exception, not the rule.

This raises the question of how to make sense of lucid control dreams, which involve both meta-awareness and agency. Windt and Voss (2018) argue that in such cases, spontaneous processes including imagery formation co-exist alongside more deliberate, top-down control; they also argue metacognitive insight and control themselves can have spontaneous elements. This suggests spontaneity and control are not opposites, but a more complex account is needed. Possibly, certain dreams and instances of waking mind wandering can be both spontaneous and agentive.

The analogy with mind wandering might help move forward the debate on the ontology of dreaming. In this debate, a common assumption is that dreams can be categorized as either hallucinatory or imaginative. Yet the application of these terms to dreams quickly runs into counterexamples and it is unclear they are mutually exclusive. One option is pluralism (Rosen 2018b), in which some aspects of dreaming are hallucinatory, others imaginative, and yet again others illusory. Another is that dreams are sui generis, combining aspects associated with wake states such as hallucinating, imagining, or perceiving in a novel manner without mimicking them completely. Windt (2015a) proposes that mind wandering, which describes a range of mental states loosely characterized by their spontaneous and dynamic character, might be particularly suitable for the characterization of dreaming precisely because that term leaves open more specific questions on the phenomenology of dreaming, allowing for variation in control, determinacy, and so on. This might be a good starting point for describing what is unique about dreaming while also acknowledging continuities across sleep-wake states and capitalizing on the strengths of the hallucination, illusion, imagination, and cognitive views.

The second strand of the imagination view argues that dream beliefs are not real beliefs, but propositional imaginings. This may or may not be combined with the claim that dream imagery is imaginative rather than perceptual (Sosa 2007; Ichikawa 2009).

Denying that dream beliefs have the status of real beliefs only makes sense before the background of a specific account of what beliefs are and how they are distinguished from other mental states such as delusions or propositional imaginings. For instance, Ichikawa (2009) argues that if we follow interpretationist or dispositionalist accounts of belief, dream beliefs fall short of real beliefs. He claims dream beliefs lack connection with perceptual experience and fail to motivate actions; consequently, they do not have the same functional role as real beliefs. Moreover, we cannot ascribe dream beliefs to a person by observing them lying asleep in bed. Dream beliefs are often inconsistent with longstanding waking beliefs and acquired and discarded without any process of belief revision (Ichikawa 2009).

This analysis of dream beliefs has consequences for skepticism. If dream beliefs are propositional imaginings, then we do not falsely believe while dreaming that we are now awake, but only imagine that we do (Sosa 2007). It is not clear though that this protects us from deception. If dream beliefs fall short of real beliefs, this might even make the specter of dream deception more worrisome: in mistaking dream beliefs for the real thing, we would now be deceived about the status of our own mental states (Ichikawa 2008).

It is also not clear whether the same type of argument extends to mental states other than beliefs. As Lewis points out, a person might

in fact believe or realize in the course of a dream that he was dreaming, and even if we said that, in such case, he only dreamt that he was dreaming, this still leaves it possible for someone who is asleep to entertain at the time the thought that he is asleep. (Lewis 1969: 133)

Mental states other than believing such as entertaining, thinking, or minimally appraisive instances of taking for granted might be sufficient for deception (Reed 1979).

The debate about dream beliefs is paralleled by a debate about whether delusions are beliefs or imaginings (see Currie 2000; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; McGinn 2004; Bayne & Pacherie 2005; Bortolotti 2009; Gendler 2013). Both debates might plausibly inform each other, especially as dreams are sometimes proposed to be delusional (Hobson 1999).

3. Dreaming and theories of consciousness

Dreams are a global state of consciousness in which experience arises under altered behavioral and neurophysiological conditions as compared to standard wakefulness; unlike other altered states of consciousness (such as drug-induced or deep meditative states) and pathological wake states (such as psychosis or neurological syndromes), dreams occur spontaneously and regularly in healthy subjects. For both reasons, many regard dreams as a test case for theories of consciousness or even an ideal model system for consciousness research (Churchland 1988; Revonsuo 2006).

Existing proposals differ on the phenomenology of dreaming: referring to dream bizarreness, Churchland describes dream experience as robustly different from waking, whereas Revonsuo argues dreaming is similar to waking and the purest form of experience:

the dreaming brain brings out the phenomenal level of organization in a clear and distinct form. Dreaming is phenomenality pure and simple, untouched by external physical stimulation or behavioural activity. (Revonsuo 2006: 75)

Revonsuo argues dreaming reveals the basic, state-independent structure of consciousness to be immersive: “dreaming depicts consciousness first and foremost as a subjective world- for-me ” (Revonsuo 2006: 75). This leads him to introduce the “world-simulation metaphor of consciousness”, according to which consciousness itself is essentially simulational and dreamlike. This is taken to support internalism about conscious experience.

This latter claim is also contentious. Noë (2004: 213) argues that phenomenological differences between dreaming and waking (such as greater instability of visual dream imagery) result from the lack of dynamic interaction with the environment in dreams. He proposes this shows that neural states are sufficient for dreaming but denies they are also sufficient for perceptual experience.

A possible problem for both views is their reliance on background assumptions about the phenomenology of dreaming and its disconnection from environmental stimuli and bodily sensations. Windt (2015a, 2018) argues both internalism and externalism mistakenly assume dreams to be isolated from external sensory input and own-body perception; she believes both the phenomenology of dreaming and its correlation with external stimuli are complex and variable. She argues the analysis of dreaming does not clearly support either side in the debate on internalism vs externalism (but see Rosen 2018a). Generally, in the absence of a well worked out theory of dreaming and its sleep-stage and neural correlates, proposals for using dreaming as a model system or test case run the risk of relying on an oversimplified description of the target phenomenon (Windt & Noreika 2011).

Recent accounts appealing to generative models and predictive processing (Clark 2013b; Hohwy 2013) suggest a new, unified account of perception, imagination, and dreaming. In these accounts, different mental states, including perception and action, embody different strategies of hypothesis testing and prediction error minimization. Perception is the attempt to model the hidden external causes of sensory stimuli; action involves keeping the internal model stable while changing the sensory input. Clark argues that on such a model,

systems that know how to perceive an object as a cat are thus systems that, ipso facto , are able to use a top-down cascade to bring about the kinds of activity pattern that would be characteristic of the presence of a cat. […] Perceivers like us, if this is correct, are inevitably potential dreamers and imaginers too. Moreover, they are beings who, in dreaming and imagining, are deploying many of the very same strategies and resources used in ordinary perception. (Clark 2013a: 764)

Predictive processing accounts have also been used to explain specific features of dreaming. Bizarreness has been associated with the comparative lack of external stimulus processing, implying dream imagery is relatively unconstrained by prediction errors (cf. Hobson & Friston 2012; Fletcher & Frith 2008; Bucci & Grasso 2017). Windt (2018) suggests a predictive processing account of dream imagery generation that links bodily self-experience to own-body perception and subtle motor behaviors such as twitching in REM sleep (Blumberg 2010; Blumberg & Plumeau 2016). She argues that movement sensations in dreams, in relation to REM-sleep related muscle twitching, involve a form of bodily self-sampling in which coordinated muscular activity contributes to the generation and maintenance of a body model. This is important because in predictive processing accounts neither the bodily nor the external causes of sensory inputs are known; at the same time, having an accurate body model is a prerequisite for action, requiring the system to disambiguate between self- and other generated changes to sensory inputs. Especially in early development, sleep might provide the ideal conditions for exploring one’s own body via subtle but coordinated muscular activity while processing of visual and auditory stimuli is reduced.

Dreams have also been suggested as a test case for whether phenomenal consciousness can be divorced from cognitive access (e.g., Block 2007; but see Cohen & Dennett 2011). Sebastián (2014a) argues that dreams provide empirical evidence that conscious experience can occur independently of cognitive access. This is because during (non-lucid) REM-sleep dreams, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) as the most plausible mechanism underlying cognitive access is selectively deactivated (see also Pantani et al. 2018). This would challenge theories linking conscious experience to access, such as higher-order-thought theory (Sebastián 2014b). However, both the hypoactivation of the dlPCF in REM sleep and its association with cognitive access have been debated. Fazekas and Nemeth (2018) suggest that certain kinds of cognitive access may be independent of dlPFC activation, necessitating a more complex account.

Dreaming has been suggested as a model system not just of waking consciousness in general, but also of psychotic wake states in particular. The analogy between dreaming and madness has a long philosophical history (Plato, Phaedrus ; Kant 1766; Schopenhauer 1847) and finds particularly stark expression in Hobson’s claim that “dreaming is not a model of a psychosis. It is a psychosis. It’s just a healthy one” (Hobson 1999: 44). Gottesmann (2006) proposes dreaming as a neurophysiological model of schizophrenia. There is a rich discussion on the theoretical and methodological implications of dream research for psychiatry (see Scarone et al. 2007; d’Agostino et al. 2013; see Windt & Noreika 2011 as well as the other papers in this special issue) and a number of studies have investigated differences in dream reports from schizophrenic and healthy subjects (Limosani et al. 2011a,b).

Rather than likening dreaming to waking in general or specific wake states such as psychosis, there have also been attempts to compare specific dream phenomena to wake-state delusions. Gerrans (2012, 2013, 2014) focuses on character misidentification in dreams and delusions of hyperfamiliarity (such as the Frégoli delusion, in which strangers are mistakenly identified as family members, and déjà vu ) to argue that anomalous experience and faulty reality testing both play a role in delusion formation. Rosen (2015) analyzes instances of thought insertion and of auditory hallucinations, which are key symptoms of schizophrenia, to raise broader questions about the altered sense of agency in dreams as compared to waking.

Philosophers have focused almost exclusively on dreaming, largely leaving to the side questions about dreamless sleep including whether it is uniformly unconscious. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the possibility of dreamless sleep experience and foundational issues about the definition of sleep and waking. This has been paralleled by growing interest in dreaming in NREM sleep.

Conceptually, interest in dreamless sleep experience has been facilitated by the precise definition of dreaming offered by simulation views (Revonsuo et al. 2015). If dreams are immersive sleep experiences characterized by their here -and- now structure, it makes sense to ask whether this is true for all or just a subset of sleep-related experiences and whether non-immersive sleep experiences exist. By contrast, if dreaming is broadly identified with any conscious mentation in sleep (Pagel et al. 2001), there is no conceptual space for dreamless sleep experience.

Following Thompson's (2014, 2015) discussion of dreamless sleep in Indian and Buddhist philosophy, Windt and colleagues (2016; see also Windt 2015b) introduce a framework for different kinds of dreamless sleep experience ranging from thinking and isolated imagery, perception, or bodily sensations, where these lack integration into a scene, to minimal kinds of experience lacking imagery or specific thought contents. A possible example of minimal phenomenal experience in sleep are white dreams, where people report having had experiences during sleep but cannot remember any details. Taken at face value, some white dream reports might describe experiences that lack reportable content (Windt 2015b); others might describe forgotten dreams or dreams with degraded content (Fazekas et al. 2018). Another example are reports of witnessing dreamless sleep, as described in certain meditation practices. This state is said to involve non-conceptual awareness of sleep, again in the absence of imagery or specific thought contents, and loss of sense of self (Thompson 2014, 2015). Some schools in Buddhist philosophy explain claims of deep and dreamless sleep by saying we never fully lose consciousness in sleep (Prasad 2000, 66; and Thompson 2014, 2015).

Empirically, interest in dreamless sleep experience is paralleled by increasing interest in experiences in NREM sleep (Fazekas et al. 2018). Most researchers now accept that dreaming is not confined to REM sleep, but also occurs at sleep onset and in NREM sleep. The deeper stages of NREM sleep are particularly interesting as they involve roughly similar proportions of dreaming, unconscious sleep, and white dreams (Noreika et al. 2009: Siclari et al. 2013, 2017). In the search for the neural correlates of dreaming vs unconscious dreamless sleep, this makes comparisons within the same sleep stage possible and avoids confounds involved in comparing presumably dreamful REM sleep with presumably dreamless NREM sleep. Findings suggest that activity in the same parietal hot zone underlies dreaming in both NREM and REM sleep (Siclari et al. 2017).

Where sleep and dream research have traditionally tried to identify the sleep stage correlates of dreaming, newer research suggests local changes occurring independently of sleep stages might in fact be more relevant. Traditionally regarded as global, whole-brain phenomena, there is now increasing evidence that sleep itself is locally driven, and local changes in sleep depth might be associated with changes in sleep-related experience (Siclari & Tononi 2017; Andrillon et al. 2019). While sleep and dream research are often considered as separate fields, changes in how sleep in general and sleep stages in particular are defined appear closely associated with changes in the theoretical conception of dreaming and its empirical investigation.

Historically, discoveries about dreaming have precipitated changing conceptions of sleep (for an excellent history of the study of sleep and dreaming, see Kroker 2007). Following Aristotle ( On Sleeping and Waking ), sleep was traditionally defined in negative terms as the absence of wakefulness and perception. This is still reflected in Malcolm’s assumption that “to a person who is sound asleep, ‘dead to the world’, things cannot even seem” (Malcolm 1956: 26). With the discovery of REM sleep, sleep came to be regarded as a heterogeneous phenomenon characterized by the cyclic alteration of different sleep stages. REM sleep was now considered as “neither sleeping nor waking. It was obviously a third state of the brain, as different from sleep as sleep is from wakefulness” (Jouvet 1999: 5). The folk-psychological dichotomy between sleep and wakefulness now seemed oversimplified and empirically implausible. At the same time dreaming, which had previously been considered as an intermediate state of half-sleeping and half-waking, came to be regarded as a genuine sleep phenomenon, but narrowed to REM sleep. Today, the framework for describing dreams and other sleep-related experiences is more precise, but dreaming has also been cast adrift from REM sleep.

A closely associated issue is how to define waking. Crowther’s (2018) capacitation thesis casts waking consciousness as a state in which the individual is fully switched on to their environment, but also to their own epistemic (cf. O’Shaugnessy 2002) and agentive potential; the waking individual is empowered to act and think in certain ways, though this potential need not be actualized. By contrast, dreaming is an “imagining-of consciousness” (O’Shaughnessy 2002: 430) and consciousness is conceptually tied to wakefulness. Because in lucid dreams, the epistemic and agentive profile of waking is at least partly realized, they might, according to Crowther, be regarded as closer to waking than nonlucid dreams.

This account of waking and sleep may also have consequences for the imagination model of dreaming and dream skepticism (Soteriou 2017). As in the imagination model, dreaming would be passive and action, including cognitive agency, would be tied to waking. If dreaming nonetheless involved passive episodes of imagining oneself to be active, one would be unable to tell that one were dreaming and imagining, as this insight would require the exercise of real agency. The sceptical consequence would be that when dreaming, one would lose agency as well as the capacity to gain insight into one’s current state. Yet our ability to know we are waking when waking would be unscathed; according to Soteriou, waking would thus have an epistemic function connected to the capacity to exercise agency over our mental lives.

Finally, definitions of consciousness themselves are bound up with conceptions of sleep and dreaming. As dreaming went from a state whose experiential status was doubted to being widely recognized as a second global state of consciousness, consciousness sometimes came to be defined contrastively as that which disappears in deep, dreamless sleep and reappears in waking and dreaming (Searle 2000; Tononi 2008). In light of dreamless sleep experience, such definitions are problematic (Thompson 2014, 2015; Windt 2015b; Windt et al. 2016). Dreamless sleep experience has been proposed to be particularly relevant for understanding minimal phenomenal experience, or the conditions under which the simplest kind of conscious experience arises (Windt 2015b). The investigation of dreamless sleep might thus shed light on the transition from unconscious sleep to sleep-related experience.

We almost always have a self in dreams, though this self can sometimes be a slightly different (e.g. older or younger) version of our waking self or even a different person entirely. Dreams therefore raise interesting questions about the identity between the dream and waking self. Locke (1689) invites us to imagine two men alternating in turns between sleep and wakefulness and sharing one continuously thinking soul (Locke 1689: II.I.12). He argues that if one man retained no memory of the soul’s thoughts and perceptions while it was linked to the other man’s body, they would be distinct persons. His position is that personal identity depends on psychological continuity, including recall: in the absence of recall, as illustrated by the toy example of two people sharing one soul, continuous conscious thinking does not suffice for identity. Locke also rejects the possibility of unrecalled dreams and the idea that we dream throughout sleep, remembering only a small proportion of our dreams (Locke 1689: II.I.19).

Valberg distinguishes between the subject of the dream (i.e., the dream self) and the sleeping person who is the dreamer of the dream and recalls it upon awakening (Valberg 2007). He argues that awakening from a dream involves crossing a chasm between discrete worlds with discrete spaces and times; it does not make sense to say that “the ‘I’ at these times [is] a single individual who crosses from one world to the other” (Valberg 2007: 69). According to Valberg, this is relevant to dream skepticism because there is no simple way to make sense of the claims that it is I who emerge from a dream or that I was the victim of dream deception.

Vicarious dreams, or dreams in which the protagonist of the dream seems to be a different person from the dreamer, are particularly puzzling with respect to identity. They may even raise the question of whether the dream self has an independent existence (Rosen & Sutton 2013: 1047). Such dreams are superficially similar to cases in which we imagine being another person, but according to Rosen and Sutton require a different explanation: in the case of dreaming, the imagined person’s thoughts are not framed as diverging from one’s own and one does not retain one’s own perspective in addition to the imagined one; in nonlucid dreams, only the perspective of the dream’s protagonist is retained.

The dream self is also at the center of simulation views of dreaming, which define dreaming via its immersive, here and now character as the experience of a self in a world. This leads to further questions about the phenomenology of self-experience in dreams and how it is different from waking self-experience. Different versions of the simulation view focus on different aspects of self- and world experience in dreams, ranging from social simulation (Revonsuo et al. 2015) to the typical features of selfhood in dreams (Revonsuo 2005, 2006, Metzinger 2003, 2009) to the minimal conditions for experiencing oneself as a self in dreams and what this tells us about minimal phenomenal selfhood in general (Windt 2015a, 2018). Yet these different versions of the simulation view are largely complementary and together have forged unity in a field that was previously hampered by lack of agreement about the definition of dreaming. They also integrate the philosophy of dreaming and scientific dream research.

As so often in debates about dreaming, there is disagreement about basic phenomenological questions. Revonsuo (2005) describes self-experience including bodily experience in dreams as identical to waking, whereas Metzinger (2003, 2009; see also Windt & Metzinger 2007) argues that important layers of waking self-experience (such as autobiographical memory, agency, a stable first-person perspective, metacognitive insight, and self-knowledge) are missing in nonlucid dreams. He argues this is due to the cognitive and mnemonic deficit that characterizes nonlucid dreams (cf. Hobson et al. 2000). Windt (2015a) analyzes the range of cognitive and bodily self-experience in dreams, both of which she describes as variable. She argues that in a majority of cases, dreams are weakly phenomenally embodied states in which bodily experience is largely related to movement sensations but a detailed and integrated body representation is lacking; instead, bodily experience in dreams is largely indeterminate (for an attempt to test this empirically, see Koppehele-Gossel et al. 2016). She proposes this is because dreams are also weakly functionally embodied states, in which the specific pattern of bodily experience reflects altered processing of bodily sensations (as in the illusion view). She also analyzes instances of bodiless dreams, in which dreamers say they experienced themselves as disembodied entities, to argue that self-experience can be reduced to pure spatiotemporal-self-location (Windt 2010); she proposes these cases can help identify the conditions for the emergence of minimal phenomenal selfhood (Blanke & Metzinger 2009; see also Metzinger 2013b).

How the phenomenology of dreaming compares to waking and what to say about how the dream self relates to the waking self bears on questions about the moral status of dreams. For Augustine ( Confessions ) dreams were a cause of moral concern because of their indistinguishability from waking life. What particularly worried him about dreams of sexual acts was their vividness, as well as the feeling of pleasure and seeming acquiescence or consent on the part of the dreamer. He concluded, however, that the transition from sleep to wakefulness involves a radical chasm, enabling the dreamer to awaken with a clear conscience and absolving them from taking responsibility for their dream actions.

What exactly Augustine thought the chasm between dreaming and waking consists in allows for different interpretations (Matthews 1981). Firstly, if the dream and waking self are not identical, then waking Augustine is not morally responsible for dream-Augustine’s actions. Secondly, actions performed in dreams might be morally irrelevant because they did not really happen. And thirdly, assuming that moral responsibility requires the ability to act otherwise, dreams provide no grounds for moral concern because we cannot refrain from having certain types of dreams.

The issue of dream immorality may also present a choice point between different accounts of moral evaluation. Where internalists assume the moral status of a person’s actions is entirely determined by internal factors such as intentions and motives, externalists look beyond these to the effects of actions. Driver (2007) argues that the absurdity of dream immorality itself should count against purely internalist accounts; yet she also acknowledges this absurdity is not a necessary feature of dreams.

Central to the question of dream immorality is the status of dreams as actions rather than mere behaviors. Mullane (1965) argues that while we don’t have full control over our dreams, they are not completely involuntary either; as is the case for blushing, considerable effort is required to attain control over our dreams and in some cases they can even be considered as actions. That lucid dream control is, to some extent, a learnable skill (Stumbrys et al. 2014) lends some support to this claim.

6. The meaning of dreams and the functions of dreaming

Philosophical discussions of dreaming tend to focus on (a) dream deception and (b) questions about the ontology of dreaming, its moral status, etc., that tend to intersect with dream skepticism. By contrast, the main source of interest in dreams outside of philosophy traditionally has been dream interpretation and whether dreams are a source of knowledge and insight. Historically, the epistemic status of dreams and the use of prophetic and diagnostic dreams was not just a theoretical, but a practical problem (Barbera 2008). Different types of dreams were distinguished by their putative epistemic value. Artemidorus, for instance, used the term enhypnion to refer to dreams that merely reflect the sleeper’s current bodily or psychological state and hence do not merit further interpretation, whereas he reserved the term oneiron for meaningful and symbolic dreams of divine origin.

The practice of dream interpretation was famously attacked by Aristotle in On Prophecy in Sleep . He denied that dreams are of divine origin, but allowed that occasionally, small affections of the sensory organs as might stem from distant events that cannot be perceived in waking are perceptible in the quiet of sleep. He also believed such dreams were mostly likely to occur in dullards whose minds resemble an empty desert – an assessment that was not apt to encourage interest in dreams (Kroker 2007: 37). A similarly negative view was held by early modern philosophers who believed dreams were often the source of superstitious beliefs (Hobbes 1651; Kant 1766; Schopenhauer 1847).

In Freudian dream theory, dream interpretation once more assumed a prominent role as the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious. This was associated with claims about the psychic sources of dreaming. Freud (1899) also rejected the influence of external or bodily sources, as championed by contemporary proponents of somatic-stimulus theory.

In the neuroscience of dreaming, Hobson famously argued that dreams are the product of the random, brain-stem driven activation of the brain during sleep (Hobson 1988) and at best enable personal insights in the same way as a Rorschach test (Hobson et al. 2000). Dennett (1991) illustrates the lack of design underlying the production of dream narratives through the “party game of psychoanalysis”, which involves an aimless game of question-and-answer. In the game, players follow simple rules to jointly produce narratives that can seem symbolic and meaningful, even though no intelligent and deliberate process of narration was involved.

Even if we grant that dreams are not messages from a hidden entity in need of decoding, this does not imply that dream interpretation cannot be a personally meaningful source of insight and creativity (Hobson & Wohl 2005). Whether and under which conditions, and following which methods, dream interpretation can lead to personally significant insights is an empirical question that is only beginning to be investigated systematically (see Edwards et al. 2013).

Finally, throughout history, views on the epistemic status of dreams and the type of knowledge to be gained from dream interpretation (e.g., knowledge about the future, diagnosis of physical illness, or insights about one’s current concerns) often changed in tandem with views on the origin and sources of dreaming, which gradually moved from divine origins and external sources, via the body, to the unconscious, and finally to the brain.

Different theories on the functions of dreaming have been proposed and the debate is ongoing. An important distinction is between the functions of sleep stages and the functions of dreaming. Well-documented functions of REM sleep include thermoregulation and the development of cortical structures in birds and mammals, as well as neurotransmitter repletion, the reconstruction and maintenance of little-used brain circuits, the structural development of the brain in early developmental phases, as well as the preparation of a repertoire of reflexive or instinctive behaviors (Hobson 2009). Yet none of these functions are obviously linked to dreaming. An exception is protoconsciousness theory, in which REM sleep plays an important role in foetal development by providing a virtual world model even before the emergence of full-blown consciousness (Hobson 2009: 808) .

Numerous studies have investigated the contribution of sleep to memory consolidation, with different sleep stages promoting different types of memories (Diekelmann et al. 2009; Walker 2009). However, only a few studies have investigated the relationship between dream content and memory consolidation in sleep (for a review, see Nielsen & Stenstrom 2005). Dreams rarely involve episodic replay of waking memories (Fosse et al. 2003). The incorporation of memory sources seems to follow a specific temporal pattern in which recent memories are integrated with older but semantically related memories (Blagrove et al. 2011). Nielsen (2017) presents a model of how external and bodily stimuli on one hand and short- and long-term memories on the other hand form seemingly novel, complex, and dreamlike images at sleep onset; he proposes these microdreams shed light on the formation and sources of more complex dreams. There is also some evidence that dream imagery might be associated with memory consolidation and task performance after sleep, though this is preliminary (Wamsley & Stickgold 2009, 2010; Wamsley et al. 2010).

Prominent theories on the function of dreaming focus on bad dreams and nightmares. It has long been thought that dreaming contributes to emotional processing and that this is particularly obvious in the dreams of nightmare sufferers or in dreams following traumatic experiences (e.g., Hartmann 1998; Nielsen & Lara-Carrasco 2007; Levin & Nielsen 2009; Cartwright 2010; Perogamvros et al. 2013). Based on the high prevalence of negative emotions and threatening dream content, threat simulation theory suggests that the evolutionary function of dreaming lies in the simulation of ancestral threats and the rehearsal of threatening events and avoidance skills in dreams has an adaptive value by enhancing the individual’s chances of survival (see Revonsuo 2000; Valli 2008). A more recent proposal is social simulation theory, in which social imagery in dreams supports social cognition, bonds, and social skills. (Revonsuo et al. 2015).

An evolutionary perspective can also be fruitfully applied to specific aspects of dream phenomenology. According to the vigilance hypothesis , natural selection disfavored the occurrence of those types of sensations during sleep that would compromise vigilance (Symons 1993). Dream sounds, but also smells or pains might distract attention from the potentially dangerous surroundings of the sleeping subject, and the vigilance hypothesis predicts that they only rarely occur in dreams without causing awakening. By contrast, because most mammals sleep with their eyes closed and in an immobile position, vivid visual and movement hallucinations during sleep would not comprise vigilance and thus can occur in dreams without endangering the sleeping subject. Focusing on the stuff dreams are not made of might then be at least as important for understanding the function of dreaming as developing a positive account.

Finally, even if dreaming in general and specific types of dream content in particular were found to be strongly associated with specific cognitive functions, it would still be possible that dreams are mere epiphenomena of brain activity during sleep (Flanagan 1995, 2000). It is also possible that the function of dreams is not knowable (Springett 2019).

A particular problem for any theory on the function of dreaming is to explain why a majority of dreams are forgotten and how dreams can fulfill their putative function independently of recall. Crick and Mitchinson (1983) famously proposed that REM sleep “erases” or deletes surplus information and unnecessary memories, which would suggest that enhanced dream recall is counterproductive. Another problem is that dreaming can be lost selectively and independently of other cognitive deficits (Solms 1997, 2000).

Some of the problems that arise for theories on the functions of dreaming can be avoided if we do not assume that dreaming has a specific function, separate from the function(s) of conscious wakeful states. This depends on the broader taxonomy of dreaming in relation to wakeful states. For example, if dreaming is continuous with waking mind wandering, imagination, and/or own-body perception, we should not expect it to have a unique function, but rather to express a similar function as these wakeful states, perhaps to varying degrees. Nor should we expect dreams to have a single function; the functions of dreaming might be as varied and complex as those of consciousness, and given the complexity of the target phenomenon, the failure to pin down a single function should not be surprising (Windt 2015a).

Questions about dreaming in different areas of philosophy such as epistemology, ontology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and ethics are closely intertwined. Scientific evidence from sleep and dream research can meaningfully inform the philosophical discussion and has often done so in the past. The discussion of dreaming has also often functioned as a lens on broader questions about knowledge, morality, consciousness, and self. Long a marginalized area, the philosophy of dreaming and of sleep is central to important philosophical questions and increasingly plays an important role in interdisciplinary consciousness research, for example in the search for the neural correlates of conscious states, in conscious state taxonomies, and in research on the minimal conditions for phenomenal selfhood and conscious experience.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Philosophy of Dreaming , entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Dreams , PhilPapers collection.
• Dreams and Skepticism , PhilPapers collection.

belief | Berkeley, George | delusion | Descartes, René: epistemology | imagination | Locke, John | perception: the problem of | personal identity | personal identity: and ethics | Plato: on knowledge in the Theaetetus | sense data | skepticism | skepticism: and content externalism

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Regina Fabry and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and constructive criticism on an earlier version of this manuscript. And as always, I am greatly indebted to Stefan Pitz for his support.

Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer M. Windt < jennifer . windt @ monash . edu >

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Theme of Dreams in Literature Essay Example

“Nothing happens unless first we dream, '' states Carl Sandburg. Though most people will view this quote in a positive light and as nothing more than the average “chase your dreams” inspirational saying, which is most definitely not a “wrong” interpretation, the saying can be read as a warning against dreaming and as “nothing bad can happen to you until you begin to dream.” In Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and “Harlem” and “Dreams” by Langston Hughes, their contrasting theme of dreams provides a blueprint on how people should approach their dreams by showing the extremities of both sides of “dream-chasing” and their effects.

In Of Mice and Men, the theme of dreams being positive is flipped on its head and is shown in a more negative light. Dreams are portrayed as these unrealistic but mentally soothing goals, that allow the characters to escape into the possibilities of what could have been, though when chased, results in only failure and misfortune.  In the book, George and Lennie’s dream is the most highlighted. Their dream of this fabled “farm”, free of suffering or hardship is simply unachievable. As the book progresses, the duo experiences hardship after hardship, with events like Lennie crushing Curley’s hand, their dream seems to get further and further away the closer they get to being able to materialize it, despite their cling to it. Lennie even asks George to repeat it in his last conversation with him, showing the immense connection Lennie had with this one goal. Though the most focused upon, Lennie and George are not the only two characters with dreams in the novel. A more sidelined but noticeable character with aspirations of her own is Curley’s Wife. She explains her conversation when asked to join a group of actors as a child to Lennie, “But my ol’ lady wouldn’ let me. She says because I was on’y fifteen…” she continues in saying, “... If I'd went, I wouldn’t be living like this, you bet”. (88) From this, we can see how Curley’s Wife believes that her mother’s decision of not allowing her to go become an actress is partially to blame for her current situation where she is completely lonely and isolated with nobody to talk to. We see how she holds on to her dreams, questioning the decisions of her past, holding on to them as they keep her company when nobody else will. In our society today, many people are overwhelmed with “inspirational” messages telling them to chase their dreams” and not to give up on them. Of Mice and Men demonstrates how this can be a fruitless and harmful path in life. When envisioning their dreams today, people are often only able to see the favorable outcome and are blind to the monsoon of failure that envelops them when pursuing their dreams. Though this take on dreams is more negative, it is not necessarily worse as it forces people to be more realistic with themselves and their pursuits in life.

Contrarily, in the poems “Dreams” and “Harlem” Langston Hughes paints the picture of a person with no aspirations, and the life of someone with no dreams to chase and no goals to work towards. Hughes demonstrates the negative effects of the lack of dreams, while Of Mice and Men demonstrates the negative effects of the possession of dreams. In “Harlem” Hughes talks about what happens to a dream that is ignored and the effects it has on the mind of the individual. He guesses, “Maybe it sags. Like a heavy load” (“Harlem”). Hughes implies that a “Dream Deferred” (“Harlem”) can be burdening for the person it lingers in, weighing them down mentally, and sagging their mind, occupying their every thought. This shows the importance of dreams, showing how ignoring them can be detrimental to a person's mental state. Thus giving the reader an incentive to continue to chase their dreams, a reason to pursue their goals. Demonstrating the positivity that can come from “dream-chasing”. In Hughes’ other work, “Dreams” he writes about what happens when one simply forgets about their dream entirely. In the poem, he shows what happens when dreams “go” warning that, “When dreams go. Life is a barren field. Frozen with snow.” (“Dreams”). Hughes is saying that when you let your dreams go and forget about them, your life becomes stagnant, frozen. Saying how without dreams, a person’s life has nothing to it, a lifeless field, with no crops or life. Hughes implies that dreams provide the warmth that will melt the frost that has stagnated your life and will allow you to forge your own goals, your own aspirations to pursue, giving meaning and populating the field of your life. This hopeful outlook on the possession of dreams is inspiring to people and is what motivates people in our society today to keep pursuing their ambitions to become successful in life. The way of viewing dreams can be beneficial but is not entirely positive as shown with Of Mice and Men with how completely banking your life on your dreams is unwise and risky.

In both Of Mice and Men and the poems, “Dreams” and “Harlem” by Langston Hughes the pursuit of dreams is a common theme, their connotation in both media differs with one being positive and one being negative. In Of Mice and Men we see how the pursuit of dreams is portrayed as this fruitless endeavor that only leads to disappointment and hardship. As said best by Crooks when speaking to Lennie of his dream of the farm, “Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head.” (74) In the book, Crooks has an interesting perspective into the subject of dreams, since as the only African American in the book, he never really even got a chance to chase his “American Dream.” So, this quote can be viewed as someone with firsthand experience giving us his insight of facing this aimless venture that will result in nothing coming of it. Crooks also represents the overall theme of dreams for the rest of the characters in the story, since (like him), everybody else’s dreams amount to nothing, whether that be Lennie and George’s dream of the farm or Curley’s Wife’s dream of becoming an actress, all these characters end up back where they began or end up worse off from where they originally started. On the flip side though, in the poems, “Dreams”, and “Harlem” dreams are idealized and the consequences of not having any are shown. In “Dreams” we see that, “For if Dreams Die. Life is a broken-winged bird. That cannot fly.” In the poems, instead of the author portraying dreams as these pointless goals that are foolish to pursue, Langston Hughes demonstrates the results of not having any dreams, in saying how life cannot go on, it cannot “fly” without the assistance of dreams. Showing how the theme of dreams in the poems is very much not the same theme of dreams in Of Mice and Men.

Although almost polar opposites, these two opposing views from both works have benefits to people in our lives today, with one being uplifting and one being grounded, people these days would do better to incorporate a blend of the two, to chase your dreams, but only once you are in a stable position in your life to do so. These principles on living life allow people to make more intelligent decisions, while still being able to work towards their pursuits in life. Heeding to the words from Carl Sandburg, nothing in your life can happen whether that be positive or negative, can happen until first, you dream. 

Works Cited

Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York :Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1994.

Sandburg, C. (n.d.). Carl Sandburg quotes. BrainyQuote. Retrieved February 1, 2022, from https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/carl_sandburg_163595 

Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 1994. Print.

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Dave Astor on Literature

Short essays about novels and other fictional works, dreams are among literature’s themes.

My goal: to discuss dreams in fiction before I go to sleep tonight.

This topic is not my idea. I was reading Elisabeth van der Meer’s great “A Russian Affair” literature blog a week or so ago when she brought up a memorable dream sequence in Alexander Pushkin’s “novel in verse” Eugene Onegin (a work, serialized between 1825 and 1832, that I haven’t read). I commented under Elisabeth’s post, and she said dreams in fiction might perhaps be a good subject for me.

So, I decided it would be sort of a nightmare to ignore a fascinating topic like that. After all, dreams can reveal a lot about a character, can help drive a plot, can be very interesting in of themselves, and can give writers a chance to show off some impressive prose pyrotechnics.

Of course, dreams in novels may or may not be literal dreams (as in the character being asleep). They might be hallucinations, visions, fantasy sequences, etc.

Staying with Russian literature, there’s the famous scene in The Brothers Karamazov in which Ivan Karamazov meets the devil. Perhaps more an hallucination than a dream, what Fyodor Dostoyevsky conjured up is harrowing and hilarious.

Fictional works with ghostly visitations can certainly fit this topic, with the assumption that the visitations are dreamed or imagined — maybe. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol , in which Ebenezer Scrooge encounters various ghosts, is one of literature’s most famous examples of this.

Dream or ghost? We wonder about that near the start of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights when Mr. Lockwood stays in the room of the late Catherine and sees the child version of Catherine try to get in the window. Lockwood experiences this as a terrifying dream, while Heathcliff wonders if Mr. L has seen the actual ghost of his deceased love.

Also in the 19th century, we have Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass , in which Alice might be dreaming or imagining various quirky characters and situations. Or perhaps it’s more a fantasy approach on the part of Lewis Carroll. (One of John Tenniel’s famous Alice illustrations is on top of this blog post.)

Moving to the 20th century, Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf ends with an eye-popping scene in “The Magic Theatre” — a place that seems both real and dream-like at the same time.

There are a number of visions in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, most notably when Harry’s mind involuntarily focuses on Lord Voldemort and that uber-villain’s thoughts.

One of modern literature’s most shocking uses of dreams — or imagined scenarios — is revealed at the controversial conclusion of (Ms.) Lionel Shriver’s novel Big Brother . To avoid any spoiler risks, I’ll leave it at that.

Some characters in time-travel novels do the time-traveling in a way that’s almost a dream. For instance, the protagonist of Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand uses a powerful drug to transport himself from a 20th-century town to the same town in the 14th century. Is he sort of dreaming those experiences in the 1300s? And the protagonist in Jack Finney’s Time and Again goes from 20th- to 19th-century New York City via self-hypnosis, a dream state of sorts.

Novels you remember with elements of dreams, hallucinations, and such?

And now for a famous “Dreams” song:

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time .

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest piece — about my town’s upcoming election and (alliteration alert!) somewhat-secretive schools superintendent search — is here .

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97 thoughts on “ dreams are among literature’s themes ”.

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(Spoiler alert) Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” could be considered the dream or hallucination of a condemned man.

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Dave, please put quotation marks after the word Bridge in my comment on “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. Thanks.

True about that Ambrose Bierce story — a VERY powerful, memorable tale.

Dave, please remove that remark that has my e-mail address, I re-entered that remark under Tony. Thank you for your kind attention.

In C.S. Lewis’ novel “The Great Divorce,” the unnamed narrator travels from hell to heaven by bus and finally wakes up in Britain during World War 2.

Thank you, Tony! That is quite a journey!

In John Bunyan’s well known Christian allegory “The Pilgrim’s Progress” the whole book was written as if it was the dream of the author.

Interesting, Tony! I haven’t read the book, so I didn’t know that. Thanks!

While it was not written as a dream sequence, the scene in “Jane Eyre” where Bertha Mason first confronts Jane while she was just waking up has a nightmarish, hallucinatory quality. This is probably the most spine tingling passage in the novel.

Thank you, Tony! That great “Jane Eyre” scene was indeed nightmarish and hallucinatory. (The scene in which Rochester dressed as a gypsy was also dream-like in a way.)

Thank you for putting this out there. I agree with your opinion and I hope more people would come to agree with this as well. Romance is the genre that consistently publishes bestseller books. Despite the myriad of genres, you will find many people prefer reading romance books. This article Provocative Techniques to Develop Romance in Your Story will provide you with techniques to help you build true romantic chemistry that readers will love and can believe in. Hope this will help. Thanks

Cheers, Monique

Thank you for the comment, Monique. While I have not read a lot of romance novels, I know that it’s indeed a popular genre. And, like many other genres, I imagine it has its share of dream sequences and such.

Hello. Something that might interest you, Dave. A lecture (free) by Salley Vickers, author of “Miss Garnet’s Angel,” discussing “Dreams in Literature,” Sept. 18, 2021. Details at jungstlouis.org

Thank you very much, Ed! Sounds like it will be an interesting lecture from an accomplished writer.

A Dream Draws A Drowsy Dreamer Doomward:

A “Twilight Zone” episode, written by host Rod Serling, has to do with a beguiling dream that ends badly, though that end is unknown to the dreamer. An ad man, harried at home and work, falls asleep on the train home and dreams of a stop on his suburban commuter line which is somehow stuck in the late-19th century, a little town with a band shell and straw-hatted boys returning from fishin’ holes, etc. Before the ad man can exit, the train moves on.

It seems so real he asks the conductor about the stop, and is told it does not exist. Another a day, another dream of the 19th century stop. Another day, same thing, only this time the ad man forces himself to get off there. The results are not what he anticipated they would be, except insofar as he is free from work and wife.

I’d recount the end, only there may yet be someone among the readers here who haven’t seen the episode and would like to, without knowing how things turn out. Hint: Weirdly. The title? “A Stop At Willoughby”.

I remember that episode, jhNY, and also the short-story version of it in a Rod Serling paperback collection that I still own. Fabulous, evocative story — and the ending, like a lot of “Twilight Zone” endings, packs a real wallop. Terrific summary of the episode by you!

Fruitful, if fitful, dreaming is an enduring trope of crime fiction, though occasionally induced by forced drug intake or a good bonk on the noggin. Sometimes, as is often the case with Inspector Montalbano (Camillieri’s character) and Commisario Brunetti (Leone’s), it’s more often a matter of a fellow taking his work to bed with him. In all cases, some version of events and clues and strange foretellings seem to show up in a timely manner and inspire the way forward in a case, if not the solution itself. Chandler and Ross MacDonald may be depended on to employ devices of the second type, by means of saps and gunbutts and quack doctors with capacious narcotic cabinets.

Thank you, jhNY! Loved the vivid, colorful comment! Writing worthy of some of the best crime fiction. Yes, the subconscious mind does seem to have a role in solving the cases in a number of mysteries.

“The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare” was written by GK Chesterton (nowadays, of mostly “Father Brown” fame, though he was, in his day, a public intellectual and an able and artful defender of Catholicism) at the turn of the 20th century. Kingsley Amis (author of “Lucky Jim”), in the introduction to the paperback copy I own, called this novel “the most thrilling book I have ever read.” I cannot concur, as I’ve had bigger thrills other places, but I can say that it does manage to propel the reader through a fantastic paranoiac world of spies, secret societies, false identities, people in motorcars chasing manned balloons across the countryside, underground chambers, and suddenly it’s all but a dream.

Chesterton’s great achievement: the rhythm and speed of events, the abrupt moving of one scene to another, the development of the twisting metamorphic plot, are most dreamlike. Once the reader has recovered his surprise at feeling he has been led through surrealism as if real, the story and the telling satisfy in retrospect, if not quite in the reading– it is after all a nightmare, as titled, and as such, accurately rendered.

I’ve never read Chesterton, jhNY. I’m intrigued! Thanks for the descriptive comment!

Apart from “The Man Who Was Thursday”, and a Father Brown or two, me either! Though I always did like a quote of his: “The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.”

Ooh, that’s a great quote!

(Some honorable wealthy exceptions to that rule.)

Dave, out of topic, with the killing of this unarmed young black man by two smiling white men brings tears to my eyes, blood boil. This is a famous Poem by Rabindranath Tagore translated by William Radice.

” God, again and again through the ages you have sent messengers To this pitiless world; They have said, Forgive everyone’, they have said,Love one another- Rid your hearts of evil.’ They are revered and remembered, yet still in these dark days We turn them away with hollow greetings from outside the doors of our houses.

And meanwhile I see secretive hatred, murdering the helpless Under cover of night; And justice weeping silently and furtively at power misused, No hope of redress. I see young men working themselves into a frenzy, In agony dashing their heads against stone to no avail.

My voice is choked today; I have no music in my flute: Black moonless night Has imprisoned my world, plunged it into nightmare. And this is why, With tears in my eyes I ask: Those who have poisoned your air, those who have extinguished your light, Can it be that you have forgiven them? Can it be that you love them? ”

~~ Translation by William Radice

Voice of Tagore

bebe, it’s infuriating what happened to that poor man. 😦 😦 Things like that occur again and again and again in this US of A filled with so much racism.

That’s a relevant, powerful, angry, superb poem by Tagore. And amazing to hear his voice! Thank you.

Unbelievable Dave, where is the humanity ! ( If you get time could you correct my typos above ? Thanks )

No humanity. 😦 😦

(Will fix typos.)

The slave patrols continue by other means and other names in our own times. The elder of those two is a former police detective. Protect whom and serve what?

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So sad an so disturbing, what is happening to this Country which was known to be a melting pot at one time 😦

There are far too many here who have never questioned the quaint notion that American was a gift from God to white Christians, all others contingently welcome to build the Shining City, then scram.

Right now through Trump and his party’s intention or indifference, people of color are dying via COVID-19 in greater numbers than whites, and there’s no end in sight, and insufficient national will to rationally contain the disease or care about those most vulnerable to its ravages.

Welcome to the Untied States of America!

Thank you for the continuing of that sad conversation, bebe and jhNY. Yes, vicious white supremacy has continued through the centuries, changing form in certain ways — and some law-enforcement people, whether retired or active, are a big part of that. I guess white ethnic groups were/are eventually fully welcomed into “the melting pot,” but others unfortunately remain seen as…”others.” And, yes, people of color (and the less-affluent in general) are disproportionately suffering during this pandemic.

As the WASP population became smaller relative to the population of others, they began, I’d imagine subconsciously, to include among their own kind whites formerly thought by them to be of a lower sort into an expanded definition of ‘white’, so as to outnumber the lower darker orders. Until JFK’s election, it’s been said here in the Northeast that the Irish were somehow less than properly white. Until diMaggio and Sinatra, Italians were not quite, and neither were Jews, till the horrible shame of the Holocaust made such exclusion untenable as a matter of public opinion.

It is no small irony that Stephen Miller and Ken Cuchinelli have such racist and exclusionary goals here in modern US, since generations before, they might be expected to have suffered exclusion from what was considered white society at the time. But it’s all part, historically, of proving one’s bona fides here– pull up the ladder after your people get in and prove your solidarity with fellow whites by attacking those with whom you once would have been lumped.

Totally agree with your very wise and astute comment, jhNY. Perfectly stated. (There has to be a special place in hell for young Stephen Miller a few decades from now…)

True…and normally I don`t take about someones appearences…but white Stephen Miller , is the ugliest person there ever is.

Miller’s internal evilness shows through externally…

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/08/mike-pence-staffer-tests-positive-for-coronavirus-244816

Things may be becoming more real for Trump’s villainous inner circle…

And now…hard working people of color, who worked in farms have no jobs no insurance, nowhere to go. The results ? Yesterday I go to Kroger…and had no Brussels sprout, I say what ? They say to me , we ordered but still waiting…

Welcome to Amrica where hard working people have no jobs, no insurance, no money to feed their family.

Well said, bebe, and so sad. 😦 This pandemic is devastating on MANY levels. Enormous unemployment, and nowhere near enough of a social safety net for non-rich people.

Just by reading this post, I realized I can learn a good-style fiction language from you, as well as English language by itself:) Will continue reading, from now with bigger involvement:) Thank you

Thank you, Alan! Very glad this post was helpful to you in a small way. 🙂

Hey Dave! First of all, I love your puns! 🙂 What about Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”? It was an hallucination — or was it? — after getting bonked on the head, but dreams are technically hallucinations, wouldn’t you agree? Have a wonderful week, Dave!

Thank you, Pat! 🙂

Yes, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” very much fits this topic!

Twain was definitely among the earlier authors to depict time travel — along with people such as Poe, Edward Bellamy, and H.G. Wells. Wells put his protagonist in a machine, but Poe (“A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” story) and Bellamy (“Looking Backward” novel) also used a dream or an hallucination or hypnosis or some such thing.

Have a wonderful week, too!

Back in my younger days, my escapist fiction was mainly focused on romantic mysteries written by authors such as Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Whitney. I was particularly enamored of Barbara Mertz, who wrote under the pseudonyms of Elizabeth Peters (more traditional cozy historical fiction, especially starring her Victorian archaeologist Amelia Peabody) and Barbara Michaels (more gothic suspense with a supernatural bent). I loved most of Mertz’s novels: she featured heroines of a feminist and quite liberal persuasion; she was an ardent animal lover, mainly cats; and her novels were generally set in older homes, with antiques, vintage clothes, flowers, etc. She herself had obtained a PhD in Egyptology from the University of Chicago and wrote a couple of books about Egypt that are still in print today (I think).

Her novel having the most to do with this column is “Patriot’s Dream,” which was written in 1976. I’m not necessarily recommending it, as I haven’t reread it for years, but it certainly is very interesting. The heroine is a young teacher from NYC who goes to spend the Bicentennial summer with her great aunt and uncle in Williamsburg, for a rest. They own a historical home there, which has already been sold to the Williamsburg Foundation. but they can stay there for life. Our heroine, Jan, definitely gets more rest than she bargained for, by dreaming about characters who lived in that same house during 1776, in particular two very close male friends (one of whom she falls in love with) and a young slave from Senegal, Leah. The novel itself alternates chapters between Jan’s life in 1976 and her extremely vivid dreams of 1776. Is it time-traveling by dream? All in all, Dave, as I was paging through my old paperback copy, it made me think of the “Outlander” series you’re now reading.

Sorry to go on so long, but this was such a fascinating topic that I’ve been pondering for the last few days! Thanks to you and Elisabeth. 🙂

Thank you, Kat Lit! “Patriot’s Dream” sounds fascinating (and definitely published in an appropriate year 🙂 ). I just put it on my post-library-reopening list. Time-travel books can be so fascinating, and the transition from one time to another almost always seems dream-like, even if it’s not literally a dream. Barbara Mertz sounds like an impressive author and person, with an incredibly wide variety of interests.

Speaking of the 18th-century South, I’m now reading “Drums of Autumn” — the fourth of Diana Gabaldon’s eight “Outlander” novels. Another excellent installment of the series, and set in the Carolinas during the pre-Revolutionary War 1760s. (The protagonists left Scotland for “The New World.”)

Yes, Mertz was quite a an impressive woman. She was honored with a grandmaster award from the Mystery Writers of America, a lifetime achievement award from Malice Domestic, and other awards from important organizations. I probably knew this before, but I’ve learned that her feminism arose mostly because she was unable to get a job in academia after earning her PhD from the prestigious Oriental Institute at the U of Chicago — which is why she took up writing mystery novels, luckily for me and all her fans! 🙂

Sexism is despicable. I’m glad Barbara Mertz sort of overcame it by successfully switching professions, but still so unfair… 😦

Yes, it was quite unfair. She apparently overheard a professor say that at least they didn’t have to find her a job, because she was going to get married. Ugh!

Ugh indeed. 😦 Such backward thinking — thinking that’s still around way too much today. 😦

Oops, I didn’t catch my a/an mistake in the first line of my reply. I hate when that happens!

Not a problem, Kat Lit. A bonus word! 🙂

I was also going to mention Manderley until thepatterer beat me to it 🙂

I feel like I’m due a bit of a Dark Tower rave. Stephen King uses a lot of dreams and visions in his epic series. There are often multiple characters in multiple worlds, and sometimes even the same character in different worlds, and King superbly uses dreams to allow the characters to communicate with each other and show each other things of importance.

I didn’t quite get a chance to comment last week. My reading habits haven’t drastically changed. I do have more time now that I’m working from home, but I seem to need more sleep than normal, and I’m also watching a lot more TV. I’ve finally, about thirty years after everybody else, started watching Twin Peaks . A quirky show with one (so far) incredibly weird dream sequence. Sorry, I know that’s not literature, but it is kind of on topic, right?

Me personally? I still keep dreaming that I’m out in public and people are breathing on me

Thank you, Susan! The great Stephen King, in various works, is indeed very adept at depicting dreams, hallucinations, visions, etc. Certainly the case in two novels of his I read most recently: “Gerald’s Game” and “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” both from the 1990s.

The urge to get more sleep and watch more TV are definitely understandable when we all have to mostly stay home. I’ve never watched “Twin Peaks,” but, from what I’ve read, it seems to be more literary than many TV series.

Your last line sounds like the nightmare category of a dream! 🙂 😦

Oh, Dave. It’s awful that I can’t escape it even in my dreams. They are getting better though and I seem to be avoiding the shops when I’m asleep now, so that helps 🙂

Gerald’s Game has GREAT dreams and visions and maybe hallucinations. Can’t believe I didn’t think of it. This feels like one of those topics where I’ll make a comment six weeks from now and say I’ve thought of the perfect example!

Hard to avoid dreaming pandemic thoughts when in a pandemic. 😦

Well, SO many novels can fit this topic! We can only name a few. 🙂

Dave, I don’t know if this is silly, but your comment actually makes me feel a little better. I have been known to get into a panic over nothing before. But I guess freaking out, either consciously or subconsciously, during a pandemic is probably a sensible reaction.

It’s funny, I was watching the news the other day and they said something about pandemic, and I thought no, it’s been upgraded from a pandemic for a while now, and then I realised, no, pandemic is about as bad as it gets. It’s just that I’ve heard or said the word so many times in the last couple of months that it just doesn’t sound the same anymore

Thank you, Susan! Hmm…interesting thought. The now-oft-used word “pandemic” does seem to have become too minimal-sounding these days. “Uber-pandemic”? “Pandemic on steroids”? “Pandemical disaster”? “Pandemicaust”?

Ooh, I like “Pandemicaust” 🙂 How long before that starts to sound kind of banal though?

Not at all on topic, but at least literature related, I am making my way through Lionel Shriver’s So Much For That . I guess I’m enjoying it (if that’s the right word for such traumatic stories) but it’s nowhere near as good as We Need To Talk About Kevin . I’m not sure if that’s because I read Kevin first and so had higher expectations this time around, or if it’s just because I can’t relate to any of the characters, but I am finding myself a little disappointed.

Sorry you’re not liking “So Much for That” as much as I did. It IS a rather depressing novel. But, if you stick with it, I think you’ll find the ending memorable. I need to read “We Need To Talk About Kevin”!

Another fun theme for novels, Dave. I’d definitely include Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy but can’t remember exactly whether the woman dreamed, time-traveled or was having visions. Perhaps it was all three 🙂

Thank you, Mary Jo! Excellent mention of “Woman on the Edge of Time”! I’m also not remembering the exact way one would describe Connie Ramos’ sci-fi-ish experiences, but dreams and/or time travel and/or visions work for me. 🙂

What a very interesting theme this week Dave! 🙂 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass have always been favorites (in both book form and Disney animated, wasn’t so crazy about the live action ones), so I loved the photo and mention. I also have House on the Strand cued up on my Kindle, I hope to get to it very soon. I’ve recently read some books that have dreams revealing a significant truth to the main character about a mystery – such “the Guest House” by Sarah Blake. Then I also read a lot of works where dreams about past traumas haunt the characters – both fact and fictional reads. As we all try to sleep better at night in these troubling times, I enjoyed this topic very much!

Thank you, M.B.! Glad you enjoyed the topic.

Yes, those two “Alice” books are SO entertaining, as is John Tenniel’s incredible 19th-century artwork. I’ve never seen any of the screen versions of “Alice,” in animated or live form. (I wonder if an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s work ever appeared on “The Alice Network.” 😉 )

Hope you end up liking “The House on the Strand”! I found it pretty riveting.

I agree that dreams in literature can help reveal significant truths, whether or not a mystery is involved. And dreams about past traumas can indeed be haunting — or therapeutic, or both.

Oh I would LOVE it if someone adapted the Alice Network for the screen! I would be first in line for tickets 🙂

I agree, M.B. — it would be GREAT to see Kate Quinn’s novel on the screen!

Hi dave, nw can`t go to the Library, this latest on by John Grisham is out in Amazon to buy, I have to think about it.

Thank you, bebe! I enjoyed “Camino Island” after you recommended it to me. This novel sounds good, too, but it’s a shame the Mercer Mann character gets a bit sidelined (from what the review says). Good luck deciding whether to buy it or not. 🙂

I loved camino Island, so I1ll wait and think if I want to buy it.

Sounds like a plan!

Thank you so much, Dave, for using my suggestion. A Christmas Carol is a fantastic example of a famous literary dream. Dreams can be a powerful source of inspiration. Having just read Rebecca’s post about Vincent van Gogh, I’m thinking of his words: I dream of painting and then I paint my dreams.

You’re very welcome, Elisabeth! And thank you again for suggesting the idea. 🙂

Creators’ dreams are indeed a powerful source of inspiration for their novels, paintings, and other creations. Those words of Van Gogh were memorable, and that was a great post by Rebecca!

Very interesting piece Dave! I was just reading about how some of our fears manifest in our dreams, especially abstract fears like the current pandemic in NYtimes. to quote the author Caity Weaver, “Dangers and threats that are difficult to visualize — such as abstract fears, or real invisible hazards like a poison gas attack — often cause similar metaphors to appear across the sleeps of concerned dreamers, she said. Tidal waves are common, as are monsters.” I wonder how many works of literature have been directly influenced by writers experiencing similar things over the past century or so.

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Thank you, dutifulnotemotional! Very well said! I’m sure many works of literature have directly or indirectly been influenced by what you note. Abstract fears and various other kinds of emotions are all potential ingredients in the stew of a writer’s imagination — influencing what she or he creates.

I am going a little off topic, but I cannot help myself. Did you know that “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” was written because Robert Louis Stevenson had a dream about a doctor with a split personality? Evidently, he woke up, jotted down the particulars and wrote non-stop in a creative, frantic, frenzy. His first draft was completed in less than 3 days and the entire manuscript was completed in 10 days. Dreams are powerful. I’m so glad that you responded to Elisabeth’s suggestion – another brilliant post and equally brilliant discussion.

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Thank you, Clanmother! Glad you liked the post, and I’m glad Elisabeth suggested it. 🙂

I didn’t know that a dream inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel! And that he then wrote the book in such a quick frenzy! Fascinating.

Dreams are indeed powerful. I’ve read that “La Villa Strangiato” — one of Rush’s best and most intricate songs — was thought up in a dream by that Canadian band’s guitarist Alex Lifeson.

The moral of the story (there is always a moral) is that we need to pay attention to our dreams, for they come from hidden thoughts deep within us. It’s like going on a treasure hunt when we are asleep!

Eloquently and wisely said, Clanmother! Wish I could remember my dreams… 🙂

That reminds me of “Evening,” by Susan Minot. The main character is dreaming/delirious on her deathbed. Through her thoughts and memories, readers learn all about her early life, including a major tragedy. It’s a lovely book and so well-done!

Thank you, Becky! Sounds like a great storytelling approach — starting the novel near the end of a life and working back from there.

Going to my bookcase to try and refresh my memory, the book that caught my eye as fitting the bill was Tinkers by Paul Harding. The dreams are the hallucinations of a dying man as his family gathers for the death watch.

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Thank you, Liz! That sounds like a very intense book.

I can’t think of another specific example offhand, but I’m remembering death scenes where the dying character’s mind goes elsewhere, whether in a positive or negative way. This can include seeing a vision of a positive afterlife in heaven; might have been the case with the young Helen in “Jane Eyre.”

It’s very good. I highly recommend it. Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”does something similar.

“Tinkers” is now on my growing when-the-library-reopens list. 🙂

Oh, good! I know you’ll enjoy it.

Last night i dreamt i went to manderley again

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That’s the one that immediately came to my mind as well!

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“Rebecca”! Of course! Thank you, thepatterer and Liz! I seem to have mentioned a less-relevant-to-the-topic du Maurier novel. 🙂

I am reading “the Strand” as we speak!

One of my most favourite – I stayed up all night to finish the book. So there were no dreams for me. I was mesmerized. And here is my confession – I rather liked “Rebecca”.

Thank you, Clanmother! Staying up all night to read a novel is about the highest recommendation a book can be given. 🙂 And Daphne du Maurier is a fantastic author. “Rebecca” of course, and “The House on the Strand” is one of my favorite time-travel novels. Hope you’re enjoying it! “My Cousin Rachel” is quite interesting, too.

Heading over to the virtual Vancouver library to check out “My Cousin Rachel”

Hope you like it, Clanmother! Rachel is a rather enigmatic character; the reader wonders if her motives are good or bad.

Found the book, started to read and checked out some quotes. This looks like a marvelous narrative. “It is strange how in moments of great crisis the mind whips back to childhood.” Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel

Daphne du Maurier sure could write — and had a lot of insights.

Staying with Dostoevsky, in ‘Crime and Punishment’ there are a few, the most memorable of which is the dream Raskolnikov has of being a child and witnessing a lame mare being beaten to death. He has a few throughout the novel. Also, I believe Svidrigailov has a dream in which he seduces a little girl. After that dream he wisely kills himself.

Then there’s Nikos Kazantzakis’ ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’. The entire “last temptation” of the title is a dream that Jesus has of avoiding execution on the cross to live a normal life, get married, have children, until the dream disciples track him down to scold him for avoiding the purpose for which he was put on Earth. The dream encompasses a lifetime of 50 more years in which he lives to be an old man. In the temporal time, it only takes a couple of seconds as he returns to Earth to accept his fate. I’ve always wondered if Kazantzakis was influenced by ‘A Christmas Carol’ or the film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ or both.

Thank you, bobess48! You’re right about there being some significant dreams in “Crime and Punishment,” one of my favorite novels.

As for “The Last Temptation of Christ” (which I haven’t read), the plot of that book is also reminiscent of Ambrose Bierce’s amazing 1890 short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Great description of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel!

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The Dream and the Text

Essays on literature and language, alternative formats available from:.

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Table of contents

Foreword by Norman N. Holland

Acknowledgements

1. Reading Yourself to Sleep: Dreams in/and/as Texts Carol Schreier Rupprecht and Kelly Bulkley

Part I Foregrounding Theory

2. Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions Bert O. States

3. Real Dreams, Literary Dreams, and the Fantastic in Literature Laurence M. Porter

4. In Defense of Nightmares: Clinical and Literary Cases Jane White-Lewis

Part II Historical, Political, Cultural, and Social Aspects

5. Dreams, Divination, and Statecraft: The Politics of Dreams in Early Chinese History and Literature John Brennan

6. Talmudic Dream Interpretation, Freudian Ambivalence, Deconstruction Ken Frieden

7. Divinity, Insanity, Creativity: A Renaissance Contribution to the History and Theory of, Dream/Text(s) Carol Schreier Rupprecht

8. Dreaming of Death: Love and Money in The Merchant of Venice Kay Stockholder

Part III A Dreamer and a Text: Case Studies

9. The Evil Dreams of Gilgamesh: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Dreams in Mythological Texts Kelly Bulkley

10. Hermia's Dream Norman N. Holland

11. Self and Self-validation in a Stage Character: A Shakespearean Use of Dream Joseph Westlund

12. A Challenge to Apollonian Mastery: A New Reading of Henry James's "Most Appalling Yet Most Admirable" Nightmare Suzi Naiburg

Part IV Dreams in Texts

13. The Marqués de Santillana: Master Dreamer Harriet Goldberg

14. Xerxes and Alexander: Dreams of America in Claramonte's El nuevo rey Gallinato Frederick A. de Armas

15. Variations of the Prophetic Dream in Modern Russian Literature C. Nicholas Lee

Contributors

Description

This book partakes of a long tradition of dream interpretation, but, at the same time, is unique in its cross-cultural and interdisciplinary methods and in its mix of theoretical and analytical approaches. It includes a great chronological and geographical range, from ancient Sumeria to eighteenth-century China; medieval Hispanic dream poetry to Italian Renaissance dream theory; Shakespeare to Nerval; and from Dostoevsky, through Emily Brontë, to Henry James. Rupprecht also incorporates various critical orientations including archetypal, comparative, feminist, historicist, linguistic, postmodern, psychoanalytic, religious, reader response, and self-psychology.

Carol Schreier Rupprecht is Professor of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College.

"The book offers wonderful and important commentary about the interface between dreams and texts of various sorts, about how they can inform each other, and about mutual shaping of dreams and culture." — Johanna M. King, California State University, Chico