The logical structure of dreams and their relation to reality

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The logical structure of dreams and their relation to reality The logical structure of dreams and their relation to reality

Jeremy Barris

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The Logical Structure of Dreams and Their Relation to Reality

Jeremy Barris

Philosophy Department

Marshall University

Huntington, WV 25755

U.S.A.

Telephone: (304) 696-2704

Email: [email protected]

Word count: 10,781

Abstract

The contradictions and non-sequiturs often found in dreams (or, equivalently, dream-

narratives) are not in fact logical errors, but express and work with a type of logic that

characterises the deepest dimensions of our waking reality. These are the dimensions in

which we deal with ourselves as a whole, our lives as a whole, or with the sense of reality

as a whole. We do so, for example, in situations of deep personal transformation, or of

recognition of deep difference of outlook. The paper argues that the logic of these

situations is validly one of contradiction and non-sequitur, that dreams sometimes express

and work with these kinds of situation, and that these kinds of dreams therefore validly

involve the same kind of logic. These kinds of dreams consequently also express insight

into the sense that our lives or existence as a whole has for us. In achieving that insight,

they actively orient, situate, or re-situate us in our relation to our lives or existence as a

whole. In this respect they are in themselves a practice of philosophy.

Logic of Dreams

The Logical Structure of Dreams and Their Relation to Reality

Dream narratives are very often thought to be full of contradictions—for example,

of shifts in identity as one thing suddenly turns out to be another—and of non-sequitur

leaps in continuity. These are the most basic ways of being illogical, of violating the

conditions for making sense. Although, as I shall discuss below, a lot of dream

researchers and theorists defend dream thinking as not typically violating sense in these

ways, I shall endorse the view that dream narratives do often contain contradictions and

non-sequiturs. In doing so, however, I am not accusing dream narratives of the kinds of

irrationality from which those theorists aim to defend them. For I propose, first, that

dream narratives are nonetheless perfectly logically valid, and that they are so not despite

but in these violations of sense. More accurately, I shall try to show that these violations

are logically valid in dream narratives at least in some respects, leaving open whether

there are not also ways in which these narratives are simply nonsensical. Second, I shall

try to show that these violations of sense are logically valid because they accurately

express the logic of certain very deep kinds of issue, and that dreams involving these

otherwise illogical dimensions sometimes deal precisely with these kinds of issue.

In the rest of this paper, I shall refer to dreams rather than dream narratives. This

may give rise to two sorts of objections. First, it is true that there are all sorts of possible

problems, both epistemological and semantic, with the idea of dreams’ existing

independently of our reports of them. So far, however, this debate is far from concluded,

and reference to dreams themselves is still certainly defensible (see, for example, the

essays responding to Norman Malcolm’s seminal book [1959] on this issue in Dunlop,

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1977). In any event, it does not affect my claims or argument here if we replace “dreams”

with “dream narratives.” If dream reporters can identify with or become caught up in the

attitudes and feelings articulated in the narratives they present, then what I have to say

about dreams applies just as well to those narratives of the dreams. (This has the result

that narratives of other kinds, like artistic fictions or even other people’s dream reports,

can have exactly the same status for these purposes as the person’s own dream reports. I

see no problem with that result.)

If, then, the reader is convinced that reference to

dreams themselves is illegitimate or too problematic, she or he may take my use of the

term “dream” as convenient shorthand for “dream report” without affecting the purport of

the discussion.

The second possible objection is that, for those who are committed to the idea that

logical relations characterize only collections of propositions and not the world of events

and things, the claim that dreams are contradictory or contain non-sequiturs is incoherent,

since dreams are events or perhaps “thing”-like experiences or states. These readers, too,

may replace the references to dreams with references to dream narratives without

affecting the gist of the argument. It is not, however, clear to me that dreams are simply

objective events or states, rather than consisting partly in a point of view on things. A

point of view, presumably, can be contradictory or involve non-sequiturs. Further, I do

not believe that this very widespread view of the field of application of logic is tenable. It

is by now a commonplace in a host of philosophical traditions that facts and events are

“theory-laden,” that what we mean by our references to things and events presupposes a

grammar of usage of the terms we are using to refer to them. In other words, anything we

can mean by things and events, including what we can mean by their objectivity and

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independence of us and of our language, is exactly a matter of grammatical meaning.

Consequently, things and events are not ultimately separable from the relations of the

propositions in which we articulate them, and so from the logic that characterizes those

propositional relations.

My claim that there are logically valid violations of sense may give rise to another

possible immediate objection, that in principle or by definition contradictions cannot

contribute to or be a form of making logical sense. But this is no longer un-

controversially the case even in formal logic. On the formal admissibility of

contradictions see, for example, Priest (2001), and on the formally admissible existence

of true contradictions see, for example, Bremer (2005, pp. 16, 19ff.) and Priest (2001,

e.g., pp. 67ff., 151). For useful discussion on both sides of this debate, see Priest, Beall,

and Armour-Garb (2004).

Despite how formal logic has at times been seen, however, it is not a

representation of the essence of valid inference and so is not the final arbiter of questions

about sense and its violations. On the contrary, it is only one limited model in which to

frame these questions. As Johnstone (1978) argues, ‘in formal systems . . . the axioms

and rules of inference are unambiguously stated and it is irrelevant to consider the

meanings of the symbols. But clearly the assertion of a philosophical thesis is not like

this, for the meanings of the symbols in terms of which the assertion is made are clearly

essential to the enterprise of making the assertion’ (p. 45). What is more, logical systems

are themselves developed and justified on the basis of philosophical considerations,

which are therefore more ultimate arbiters than they are. As Johnstone notes, ‘the very

notion of inconsistency is itself subject to philosophical interpretation’ (p. 45).

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Philosophical thought occurs at a level before formal systems and their principles acquire

their force. Even where formal systems of logic do forbid contradiction, then, they

meaningfully do so only within their own systems. (For a defense and exploration of

legitimate contradiction in the context of concrete, non-formalized philosophical issues,

see, for example, Priest [2002].)

To see this more clearly, one might ask on what principle, legitimated by what,

can contradictions never conceivably contribute to logical sense? Would this be the

principle of non-contradiction, magically validating itself? If, on the other hand, one says

the principle is self-evident, one is relying on a psychological and therefore empirical fact

– the fact of what people happen to find obvious – as somehow able to support a principle

that recognizes no empirical circumstances as affecting its validity (see, for example,

Haack, 1978, pp. 235-236). Given the status and difficulties of this debate, it is certainly

legitimate at least to explore the possibility that contradictions may be part of logical

sense. In what follows, therefore, I shall do so.

I now return to my thesis. As I mentioned, I propose that this paradoxical logic of

legitimate violations of sense does not only characterize dreams, but also characterizes

certain very deep kinds of issue. In fact, as I shall argue, it characterizes the deepest, most

meaningful dimensions of our sober, waking reality. And I propose that dreams involve

this type of logic because they accurately express and work with the logic of those real

and deepest dimensions of our lives. These are the dimensions in which we deal, not with

this or that aspect of our selves, our lives, or the world, but with our selves as a whole,

our lives as a whole, or with the sense of reality as a whole.

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Currently, there are both an influential postmodern and an influential neo-

Wittgensteinian skepticism about the sense of the idea of “things as a whole” or “oneself

as a whole” and so of a view of things or oneself as a whole. On the genuine sense of this

idea, however, see, for example, Nagel (1979, pp. 11-23) and Derrida (1981, p. 6). The

view Derrida expresses in this connection is in fact central (as he insists repeatedly

throughout his work) to the entire project of his version of “deconstruction”: that

traditional metaphysical concepts like that of the “totality of things” are essential, but just

not the last word. Consequently, Derrida’s version of postmodernism is what he calls a

‘double writing,’ always both a ‘most faithful’ reading ‘inside’ the metaphysical tradition

and a reading ‘outside’ it (p. 6). On the sense of an idea of “things as a whole” or

“oneself as a whole” specifically in connection with dreams, see, for example, States

(1988), who writes, ‘my dream . . . is the pulse and direction of my existence. . . . Just as

a child cannot possibly detect the moment at which it became aware of the world . . . the

dreamer cannot detect the beginning of his dream because for that interval the dream is

all of his consciousness that exists. The dream is the center and the horizon of his world’

(p. 85). Another dream theorist, Gendlin (1986), points out that we may have a need ‘to

grow as a whole,’ when it is not enough to ‘keep trying to fix only the situation’ (p. 188,

italics in original). Valberg (2007) focuses specifically on this dimension of dreaming,

and actually uses the all-embracing ‘horizon’ of dreams to demonstrate the necessity of

the idea of a view of the world or one’s life as a whole (e.g., pp. 69-70).

Taking the idea of a view of “things as a whole” as legitimate, then, the kind of

situation in which we deal with our selves or our lives as a whole arises when, for

example, we grow in an overall way, our entire sense of ourselves becoming transformed,

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or when we lose our sense of ourselves. And we deal with our sense of reality as a whole

when, for example, we encounter, in other people or cultures or subcultures, ideas about

reality that do not fit with our sense of what reality can include. (I should note that the

fact that ideas which do not make sense in our terms belong to a different culture or

subculture does not automatically make them valid. They may in fact be simply and

absolutely nonsense. But an encounter even with mistaken ideas about reality that do not

fit with our own overall ways of making sense can produce, by their contrast with our

sense of reality, an awareness of that sense of reality in general, or as a whole.)

I shall argue, then, that dreams express and work with the logic of gaining a sense

of and a relation to ourselves, our lives, or our sense of reality as a whole. These three

senses of things as a whole have in common that they are self-inclusive, or self-reflexive.

For example, the sense that we might have of reality as a whole is itself included in

reality as a whole: this sense is therefore, in at least some respect, partly a sense of itself.

I shall try to show that, because of this self-inclusion, the logic of these senses of things

as a whole, in waking reality as in dreams, is validly one of contradiction and non-

sequitur. (On the theme of the relation between self-reference and true contradiction, see

Priest [2002, e.g., p. 4].)

As I mentioned at the start of the paper, there are researchers or theorists who

argue that dreams are no less logical than waking life, and who show how the apparently

bizarre logic of dreams can be translated into the logic of waking life. Cavallero and

Foulkes (1993), for example, argue that ‘Dreams are not, in general, wildly implausible,

vaguely experienced, or full of nonsensical images or image sequences. They are, rather,

reasonable projections of what we might expect if waking cognition were operating under

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the somewhat dissociated circumstances generally accompanying sleep’ (p. 11). See also

States (1993, especially chapter one). But given that I do not take waking life to be

essentially describable in keeping with the criteria of standard logic, I do not think these

views are necessarily incompatible with my own.

I agree that dreams show the same

basic logic as everyday life, but I also think that everyday life involves dimensions that

are only and legitimately describable in contradictions and non-sequiturs. Consequently,

while dreams do share the same logic with waking life, it is partly a logic of legitimate

violations of sense. In any event, I think these theorists can agree that there are at least

some dreams that involve genuine contradictions and non-sequiturs. With that restriction,

I would be content to argue that, while many dreams may reflect the standard logic of

everyday life, the illogical dreams (at least sometimes or in some part) express the

deeper, paradoxical kind of logic I have proposed belongs to the sense of our lives as a

whole.

Even if there is real and intractable disagreement between these theorists and

myself, however, I do not wish to say that they are wrong. I find their arguments

persuasive and thought-provoking. I am only proposing a possible way of making sense

of dreams and a possible role they play in our lives, with, I hope, enough justification to

show that this proposal is worth exploring further. There is room here to explore

conflicting explanatory proposals without deciding which of them is right.

I shall not explore here whether there are in fact valid methods of dream

interpretation. I shall take it as at least arguable that some of the widely used methods

(say, Freudian, Jungian, Gestalt, or Focusing methods) are valid, so that dreams possibly

express something at least in some way meaningful for the dreamer’s life. What I shall

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really try to show, then, is that if dreams can be interpreted at all, if they have any

meaning at all, then they are logical in this paradoxical way. This assumption may of

course be wrong, but it is not obviously or un-controversially so.

In the first section, I shall explain why, in those waking situations that involve

dealing with our lives or reality as a whole, logic, or the way sense works, must be

contradictory and discontinuous. (I shall discuss dealing with our selves as a whole in the

second section, as part of an illustration from an actual dream.) In the second section I

shall try to show that dreams do deal with these situations. In the third section I shall

briefly discuss how it follows from this proposal that dreams are not only expressions of

a sense of our lives or reality as a whole, but are at the same time dynamic

transformations of our lives or our relations to reality as a whole. In other words, they are

a form of what we might call existential practice. In the final section I shall try to show

that some of the classical theories of dream interpretation offer partial or indirect support

for my proposal.

1. The Same Logic in Waking Life

To start with an easily recognisable example, when we are depressed, everything

in the world is felt in keeping with that low mood. The blue sky and sunshine are

annoying because they remind me how depressed I am, they rub it in that I cannot enjoy

the beautiful weather. The piece of good news brings into relief how unsatisfying

everything else in my life is, and even makes me feel worse because I cannot enjoy it

properly. When, on the other hand, we are in a good mood, everything in the world is felt

in keeping with our cheerfulness. The gray, rainy weather makes a nice, cosy contrast

Logic of Dreams

with the warmth inside; the bad news is a challenge to be overcome, or is only one part,

not especially important, of a basically likeable world.

Now, if we want to explain how one shifts from one of these moods to another, or

how one might debate the truth or value of these two views of reality, we cannot point to

anything in the world. Everything in the world, all of reality, reality itself, is understood

as miserable in the one mood, and as cheerful in the other. Each of these two overall

senses of things includes all the same entities and events, and interprets all of them in

opposed ways. As Wittgenstein pointed out, ‘the world of the happy man is a different

one from that of the unhappy man’; in moving from one to the other it ‘becomes an

altogether different world’ (1961, p. 72, prop. 6.43). There is no way, then, to have a

rational debate between these senses of reality, or to undergo a rationally motivated

transformation of one into the other. Anything one might refer to in the debate or in

motivating the change is already understood by each sense of reality to the exclusion of

the other. As a result, as soon as one refers to or specifies what one means, the ‘debate’ is

already decided. The contrasting version of things one wants to justify is already

excluded as senseless, as not part of the world, as unreal by definition. And there is no

neutral ground that either sense of reality needs to acknowledge. They each already

include everything, reality as a whole. There is nothing left over to be neutral ground.

But one mood does become transformed into another. And the person in each

mood can be (and usually is) aware that the sense given by the other mood exists, that

s/he has felt before and can feel again in ways that are not accessible to her at the

moment. But it still remains true that the two moods grasp the whole of reality

differently, and that there is therefore nothing left out of each sense of reality. As a result,

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the awareness that both moods are possible can only consist in understanding exactly the

same thing—the world as a whole—in different, and in fact in mutually exclusive ways,

at the same time. In other words, this awareness involves contradiction and discontinuity.

The fact of the transition itself from one mood to another is also significant here.

This transition can only consist in one sense or understanding of things itself giving rise

to an incompatible one. There is nothing left out of each sense of the world, so that one

sense of reality can only give rise to the incompatible one out of itself. In other words, it

itself gives rise to the sense it also excludes. In this situation, transformation too, then,

involves contradiction and discontinuity.

It may be objected, and rightly, that standpoints that grasp the whole of reality

differently in this way cannot conflict with each other and therefore cannot contradict

each other. Such standpoints cannot mean and so share the “same” things to disagree

about. But, given that I am arguing that in this kind of situation of understandings of the

whole of things contradictions are both necessary and true, this point is not an objection

to what I am saying, but part of it. One way of expressing my proposal is that wholly

mutually exclusive standpoints both have nothing in common at all and are standpoints

on all the “ same” things. In other words, the objection is true and the contradiction of it

is true. Wholly mutually exclusive standpoints are not about the same things and so

cannot contradict each other, and yet they also are and do. As I have argued, first, since

we understand the whole of everything in each of the two mutually exclusive ways, this is

at least in some sense exactly the same thing we are understanding in each case: there is

nothing left over, nothing else, we can be re-understanding. Second, such standpoints do

become transformed into each other: the unhappy world itself becomes transformed into

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the happy world. Again, there is nothing else, nothing left over, to undergo this

transformation. It is a shift of one and the same thing into the new sense of it.

Consequently, while the two standpoints cannot refer to the same things and so cannot

conflict with each other, they also cannot but refer to the same things and so cannot but

conflict with each other.

This meta-contradiction, then, about the occurrence of contradiction in cases

involving understandings of the whole of things, is one expression of the type of

contradiction I am defending in general here.

It may be objected even more fundamentally that it is simply not meaningful to

compare two such different ways of making sense at all, so as to say they are in some

sense interpretations of the same thing. Consequently it is literally without meaning to

say that they can conflict with and so contradict each other. But in that case, it is equally

meaningless to compare them so as to say they are in some sense not interpretations of

the same thing, and so equally without meaning to say they cannot contradict each other.

(For a detailed discussion of the implications of this outcome, see Barris [2006], where I

respond to Donald Davidson’s well-known rejection of ‘the very idea of a conceptual

scheme’ or overall framework of sense, and so of whatever lines of thought may be based

on this idea.)

Let me note, then, that if I am wrong about the possibility of contradiction in this

kind of situation, it is not because we already know that “incommensurable” standpoints

(as they are often called, after Kuhn, 1970) cannot contradict each other. I know this too,

and am insisting on it. If I am wrong about the relation between these standpoints, it is

because I fail to demonstrate that this contradiction, as well as not occurring, also, in

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contradiction to what we know, does occur in this case. And that needs to be judged on

the basis of the discussion supporting it in this section, not on the basis of preconceptions

about what can be said on this issue that miss the point this discussion defends. In fact,

even if these presuppositions were relevant, I have already given explicit reason to

question them in the discussion of contradiction above; there is no justification for taking

them for granted here.

To move from moods to the world of ideas and developed knowledge, it is a

familiar argument in philosophy of science (Feyerabend, 1993, especially chapter 16;

Kuhn, 1970; Wittgenstein, 1979), political philosophy (Lyotard, 1988; MacIntyre, 1988;

Taylor, 1985, especially chapters 3-5), and in treatments of disagreements between whole

philosophical systems (Collingwood, 1940; Hall, 1960), that conflicting understandings

of what reality itself is, of what reality can include, cannot rationally debate with each

other. These kinds of understandings or frameworks do not only see this or that piece of

reality differently, but see reality itself and in general differently. Consequently, as with

moods, anything they might point to, in order to resolve the debate, is already understood

differently in the other framework. More specifically, it is understood in the context of

the other framework’s sense of what reality can include, so that each piece of evidence

already depends on the decision about reality that the debate is supposed to decide.

One cannot appeal, either, to the broad rules of logic or sense-making to decide

between the frameworks. These rules can only work with meanings as they are given to

them, and here the meanings are exactly what are in conflict, exactly what need to be

decided. And, in any event, the rules of sense-making themselves can differ between very

different frameworks of the sense of things.

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For example, in debates between evolutionists and creationists, evolutionists tend

to have a view of reality as consisting in matter and energy, and of the reality outside our

bodies as having basically reliable connections with our senses. Creationists, by contrast,

tend to have a view of reality as including divine revelation and spiritual dimensions, in

comparison with which our senses and independent human reasoning are entirely fallible.

Now, it is logically impossible for scientific method to prove that there is matter and

energy, since the sensory observations that are essential to its method depend on there

being a material world that can make them sensory observations, at all (rather than, say,

self-produced dream images). And it is logically impossible for revelation to prove the

spiritual world exists, since it depends on the reality of that world to give it any meaning

as revelation in the first place (rather than, say, chemical imbalance).

But, whether or not either or both of these views is true, we are capable of

understanding both. And, as in the case of understanding the possibility of conflicting

moods, this means we understand exactly the same thing—the world as a whole or in

general—in mutually exclusive ways at the same time. Further, we are rationally required

to gain an understanding of both views (assuming both are at least intelligible): we cannot

decide which is true without entertaining both of them. Consequently, at least one phase

of rational thinking about these issues requires us to think about the same things in

mutually exclusive ways at the same time. Again, then, this is a necessary kind of

awareness that involves contradiction and discontinuity.

In fact, one cannot have even one understanding of or perspective on reality as a

whole without automatically also having the idea of possible contrasting alternatives

(Davidson, 1984; as I discuss below, Davidson in fact takes this in the opposite direction

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from mine). The idea that reality as a whole is to be understood one way implies a

contrast with other possible ways of understanding it, ways that it rejects. Otherwise the

“one way” is not distinguished from any other, and so has no particular content. And

since these are contrasting ways of understanding the sense of things as a whole, they are

mutually exclusive with our current sense of what can be real or of what makes sense.

This means that even a single perspective or sense of reality-as-a-whole necessarily

involves the idea of logical contradictions to or discontinuities with itself.

These kinds of situation are not simply a matter of entertaining conflicting

possibilities about the same thing. In that case, there would be no contradiction, since

possibilities, by definition, do not assert themselves as the unique state of affairs: they

make room for conflicting alternatives. Here, however, there is no sense to the idea of an

“actual thing” apart from each interpretation. As a result, in each case we are

understanding the thing with all its possibilities—in fact, everything that might be meant

by that thing—in mutually exclusive ways. We are understanding the “same” thing

simultaneously in ways that exclude each other even as possible ways of understanding

“it.” Or, to put the same point differently, because reality itself, as a whole, is what is

differently understood in these two frameworks, with nothing left out in each case, each

interpretation of reality is the unique state of affairs, allowing no meaning to the idea of

conflicting alternatives.

The idea that such different understandings of reality are really possible has often

been challenged, perhaps most powerfully by Donald Davidson (1984) and Richard Rorty

(1991). Very roughly, Davidson’s argument is that it is self-contradictory to claim to

conceive contrasting understandings of reality as a whole, since any conception we have

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can by definition only occur within our understanding of reality as a whole—and this

includes conceptions of contrasting understandings of reality as a whole. I cannot begin

to do justice to their objections here (for a detailed response to their objections on this

issue, see Barris, 2006), so I shall take the fact that the debate is still running strongly as

warrant at least for continuing to explore the idea that such different frameworks are

possible.

I note, however—and, in the absence of providing the opposing arguments in

detail, I can only do so extremely tentatively and provisionally—that the objections to

this idea are ultimately based on the principle that logical contradiction is always

unacceptable. In that light, any idea that leads to endorsing logical contradiction, as the

idea of such different frameworks does, must have something wrong with it. But, as I

have noted, the exclusive principle of non-contradiction cannot be taken for granted in

this way. And as I have argued, this principle is not, itself, something that can be

defended by the kind of logic that endorses it: that kind of logical argument depends on

it. It is one of the standards for sense-making on which it relies in order to produce its

arguments, including its justifications of the principle itself.

In other words, the exclusive principle of non-contradiction is part of just another

one of those ways of understanding the sense of reality as a whole and in general, that

cannot rationally debate with contrasting frameworks. This principle on its own, then,

cannot justify rejecting a framework that is based on accepting some kinds of

contradiction. And since the argument that we need such a framework is partly based, as I

hope I have illustrated, on implications of non-contradictory sense-making itself, there is

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reason for adherents of the no-contradiction framework to make room for the legitimacy

of at least exploring the viability of the some-contradiction framework.

Now, assuming that different understandings of reality itself are possible, or even

that one can have an understanding of reality as a whole (and as I have argued, these

come to the same thing), engaging with such understandings is not just a matter of

intellectual vision. Since the self that is doing this understanding is part of reality as a

whole, if this self understands reality in contradictory ways then it automatically

understands itself, as a whole, in contradictory ways. (This is also and more obviously

true, of course, if the understanding is of the self’s life as a whole, rather than of reality in

general as a whole.) That is, its sense of itself as a whole, and so it as a whole, is

automatically caught up in the contradiction.

2. The Logical Structure of Dreams

I shall now try to show that dreams express and work with this kind of situation of

dealing with our selves, our lives, or reality as a whole. If this is true, then at least part of

their contradictory and non-sequitur character expresses the legitimate logic of some

kinds of real situations.

Like different moods or different global understandings of reality in relation to

one other, dreams and waking life deal with all the same particular events and entities as

each other, and consequently grasp them differently only as a whole. The old problem

raised by sceptics, of how we can know whether we are dreaming or awake, is very hard

if not impossible to answer, exactly because we can take everything in waking life to be

equally part of a dream.

And when we are dreaming, we can and often do take

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everything in our dreams as waking reality. In other words, no part of dream life

establishes that it is different from waking reality, and vice-versa. If we want to pinpoint

what makes dreams different, then, we need to look at dream life and waking life with

respect to their sense of the whole of things. And this means that dreams do involve a

sense of the whole of things.

Even some of the kinds of logical impossibilities that are commonly taken to be

parts of dream life that distinguish it from waking reality, are, as I have argued, also

found in waking life. (Whether or not they express the same situations as those in waking

life is a separate issue, which I am only now in the process of discussing.) And Medard

Boss (1957), as I shall discuss in the final section, argues that all the apparent oddities of

dreams are equally present in waking life.

But even without these arguments, it is clear that dreams need not, and often do

not, contain any oddities of sense at all, and yet (at least as we think of them on waking)

would still be radically different from waking life. As a result, even if the presence of

illogic could establish that they are dreams, their dream character is independent of it.

There is still no particular part of dream life, then, that explains its difference from

waking life. The difference must lie in the sense it makes of things as a whole.

Perhaps this is a way of understanding Fechner’s description, made famous by

Freud, of dreams as occurring in a ‘different scene of action’ (Freud, 1953, p. 112). There

is no other setting or place beyond the settings or places in waking life: if there were, it

would be just another place included among the places in waking life. But dreams are

clearly not locatable in the waking world of places. And they deal with all the same

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events and entities. As a result, the setting of dreams can only be the same whole world

of settings and places as the waking world, experienced differently.

In principle, then, dreams must be understood to be another view or experience of

reality as a whole, or of a life as a whole.

But let me give a concrete illustration of this kind of sense of a whole, and of its

contradictory and non-sequitur logic, within an actual dream of my own. One of the

paradoxes inherent in the contradictory and non-sequitur character of a relation to the

whole of things is that one can engage with the whole even while still in many ways

being within it. As I argued in the previous section, even a perspective on a single “whole

of things” involves logical discontinuities with itself. Differently expressed, the sense of

the whole involves something like its being outside itself. That is, since it is outside itself,

its very inside is outside itself. Consequently, one can engage with the whole even while

still in many ways within it. Equally, one can engage with limited wholes within the

greater whole, each having its own integrity as a whole because it is logically

discontinuous in the relevant respects with the rest of the whole.

Here, the dream involves the case I have not discussed very much so far, the self’s

relation to itself as a whole. I dreamed that someone was sneering at me, being

confidently judgmental. I became angry in the dream, and successfully rejected the

appropriateness of his attitude. When I woke, I realized that I was angry with myself for a

recent failure that was a result of circumstances beyond my control, and that the dream

was expressing my feelings in the context of this situation.

It is not important for our purposes here whether or not this particular

interpretation is accurate. It is a kind of interpretation that is often made of dream images

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and events, and, on the assumption that there are valid ways of interpreting dreams, it is

therefore enough to illustrate the logic that typically belongs to them.

If the combination of the person who is judging and the person who is judged

expresses my being angry with myself, then each person expresses myself. And if it

expresses my self, it expresses my whole self. It is not, in this case, that part of myself is

angry with another part of myself, but that I am angry with my self—that is, with my self

as a whole. Otherwise there is no reflexive, self-referring anger, but, instead, the different

case of one part of a person’s being angry with another part, or of one person’s being

angry with another, separate person. But where the dream figures express my actually

being angry with myself, they express one and the same thing—my self as a whole—as

two different things, two different ones of myself as a whole.

And, as I shall try to show, they do so rightly. They express a situation in which

one and the same thing really also is, in the same respects, two different things.

Now, it is certainly possible for a part of the self to be angry with other, different

parts of the self. One could, for example, be angry with oneself only for a specific issue,

and then be angry with oneself only for feeling that anger. In these cases there is no self-

including conflict to give rise to contradictions or incompatible identities. But these are

not the cases we are dealing with. It is still possible to be angry with oneself, and not just

with specific aspects of oneself. And my proposal is that it is those kinds of situation that

make sense of the contradictions and incompatible identities we find in dreams.

That, on this interpretation of the dream as being about anger with myself, it is

right to understand the dream figures as in some sense fully expressing the whole self in

each of the two selves, can also be seen by reflecting on the logic of the possible

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interactions between the two persons in the dream. If, for example, I had quailed in the

face of the judging person’s rejection, I would have been enacting the substance of that

very rejection. To give a parallel, if I condemn myself, and accept the validity of the

condemnation (for example, I feel badly because of it), both the condemnation and the

acceptance of it are the same act of condemnation. They are both my attitude, and they

are both the same attitude, and they are about the same subject, myself. They are, then,

simply different expressions of one and the same thing. In this case, since it is my act of

rejecting my same self, and equally my quailing in the face of my same self, my quailing

is my carrying out of that same rejection: my quailing is continuous with and expresses

that very same act of rejection.

Similarly, if I as the judged self had rejected or condemned the judging self as a

whole for condemning me (rather than just rejecting its condemnatory attitude), then my

rejected or condemned self would have been again, or still, rejecting or condemning

itself. It would have been carrying out the very activity of condemnation of itself that it

was reacting to in the “other” person. This activity would not just have been the same as

the other’s, but would have been one and the same activity.

This continuity between the different expressions of the same self as a whole

applies in waking life as well as in dreams: the same examples and arguments I have just

given apply equally in both contexts. But because of this real continuity between the

expressions of the self, there is a real contradiction—again in waking life as well as in

this kind of dream—when a self is in conflict with itself as a whole. For example, the

attitude of rejecting or condemning the worthiness of the self as a whole is itself included

in the self as a whole: that is, what it rejects includes itself, so that the attitude rejects its

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own worthiness to reject. And for the same reasons of self-inclusion or self-continuity, a

self that is in conflict with itself as a whole is rightly understood contradictorily as one

and the same thing that is also two different things. Each side of the conflict includes the

whole, and as a result leaves nothing out to be another “thing.” And yet, since it is a

conflict, there are two sides to it, each consisting in the one and only “thing.” Here, then,

we have logically necessary—that is, valid—contradictions, of exactly the kind that

dreams express.

Now, in resolving the situation in which a self rejects itself, it cannot accept itself

as a whole if it rejects its self-rejection, since its self-rejecting attitude is part of itself.

Consequently, if it is to resolve the situation, it must shift to self-acceptance without

rejecting its self-rejection. What is more, since it is rejecting itself as a whole, it excludes

self-acceptance altogether. For both reasons, it must therefore shift to an understanding of

itself the possible sense of which its current understanding entirely excludes. And here

we have a logically necessary moment of non-sequitur, expressing the logic of real

situations in which we do in fact shift our attitudes towards ourselves as wholes (just as

our moods do in fact change).

There is another relevant side to this kind of resolution. In achieving that shift to

acceptance the self must accept all of itself: and this includes accepting its rejection of

itself (to achieve acceptance of itself). The non-sequitur, then, also involves another kind

of contradiction.

In fact a week later I had a dream in which I was appreciatively delighted by

someone’s silliness. Here, if this dream expressed self-acceptance (and, again, this is a

typical kind of interpretation, and in that way is enough to illustrate the point), the

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accepting self judged the accepted self as silly, a judgment that is a form of rejection, or

is at least in some sense negative. But I was delighted by that silliness. And, following

the sometimes contradictory logic of a self as a whole, since I was accepting myself, that

is, myself as a whole, which includes the attitudes of the accepting self, I was accepting

my act of negative judgment too. I was accepting myself together with my silliness and

my judging myself as silly.

At least part of the contradictory and non-sequitur logic of dreams, then, is a valid

expression, enactment, and re-working of our sense of ourselves as a whole, or, as the

first part of this section argued, of our sense of reality as a whole.

In the next section I shall explain why I use the language here of “enactment” and

“working.”

3. Dreams as Simultaneously Expression and Transformation

In this section, I shall try to show that if my proposal is right so far, it follows that

dreams are not only expressions or reflections of a sense of our lives or reality as a whole,

but are at the same time dynamic transformations of the sense of our lives or of our

relations to reality as a whole. In other words, they are a form of what we might call

existential practice.

As I argued at the end of the first section, if different understandings of reality as

a whole are possible, then, since the self that is doing the understanding is part of reality

as a whole, if this self understands reality in contradictory or otherwise conflicting ways

then it automatically understands itself, as a whole, in contradictory or otherwise

conflicting ways. (This is also and more obviously true, of course, if the understanding is

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of the self’s life as a whole, rather than of reality in general as a whole.) That is, its sense

of itself as a whole, and so it as a whole, is automatically caught up in the contradiction

or conflict. This in turn automatically means that this self is actively engaged, as a whole,

in challenging the sense or meaning of its own nature and in the struggle of that

challenge. In other words, this kind of understanding is in itself an active unsettling and

re-settling, a re-working, of the sense and nature of the self that is doing the

understanding. This re-working consists, for example, in either a transformation of the

self or in gaining a fresh relation to itself as its old self.

In fact, as I have argued, even a single awareness of things as a whole

automatically involves awareness of alternative views that it also entirely excludes, and

so engages the person, as a whole, in a contradiction, in an unsettling and re-working of

her/his sense of things. Differently put, registering our existing sense of things as a

particular sense of things, rather than as just a perception of how things simply are, is

already an unsettling of it. Even if we then come to accept our existing sense of things as

the right one again, we now hold it with a deeper perspective on it. There is

transformation of one’s standpoint even if its substantial content remains entirely

unchanged.

If dreams also involve this kind of understanding, they too are not simply passive

ways of seeing, of being a spectator of, these challenges to and transformations of our

sense of ourselves or of things as a whole. They are also active processes of establishing

or enactments of this re-working understanding and its logic; they are acts and processes

of unsettling and re-working the dreamer’s self as a whole or her/his relation to the sense

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of reality as a whole. That is, they are in themselves transformations of ourselves or of

our relations to the sense of reality as a whole.

If my proposal is right, then, dreams, whatever else they may be, are ways of

asking and dealing with what are sometimes called existential questions. And this means

that dreams are in themselves a practice of philosophy. They establish and express insight

into the sense that our lives as a whole have or existence as a whole has for us. And in

achieving that insight, they are in themselves an activity, a practice, of orienting,

situating, or re-situating ourselves in our relation to our lives or to existence as a whole.

As Alderman (1977) writes, ‘The dream . . . is one horizon through which the

dreamer comes more securely—or insecurely—into the presence of his world. To

interpret a dream is to act as a Socratic midwife, assisting at the birth of the dream and at

the re-birth of the dreamer’s world’ (p. 118).

4. Partial and Indirect Support in Some Classical Theories of Dream Interpretation

That dreams have this kind of logical structure finds partial and sometimes

indirect support in some of the well-known theories of dream interpretation.

In Freud’s framework, the dream as we experience it, with its mixture of sense

and nonsense, consists in what he calls the manifest dream thoughts. But these are a

compromise between perfectly intelligible latent dream thoughts, and perfectly

intelligible waking thoughts that exclude or censor the latent ones (or that exclude the

entirely intelligible unconscious wishes that the latent thoughts express or with which

they engage). ‘Two separate functions may be distinguished . . . during the construction

of a dream: the production of the dream-thoughts, and their transformation into the

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content of the dream. The dream-thoughts are entirely rational . . . On the other hand, the.

. . product, the dream, has above all to evade the censorship’ (1953, pp. 649-650). The

censorship expresses what one’s waking thinking or attitude regards as unacceptable. The

irrationality of dreams, then, is the result of combining incompatible ways of making

sense of or evaluating the same things.

The conflicting ways of making sense in Freud’s framework, however, are not

necessarily ways of understanding reality or oneself as a whole. In the cases he discusses,

consciousness generally rejects a particular idea of piece of reality for reasons that

emerge from its particular experiences. This rejection of particular things is contingent. It

could have been otherwise: it is not part of or a result of the ultimate sense of things—

that is, the sense of things as a whole—itself. As a result there is no logical necessity (that

is, no necessity following from the very sense of the ideas involved) to its incompatibility

with the latent thoughts or unconscious wishes, and so no logical necessity to the

resulting incoherence.

Freud’s model, then, only partly coincides with my proposal. But it does support

the view that the illogic of dreams is really a combination of two (or perhaps more)

logical sets of ideas, rather than simply having no connection with coherence at all. And

for the rest, the particular focus of the censorship, and Freud’s procedures and model for

working with it, are not incompatible with the framework I am suggesting. There is no

difficulty understanding the two types of conflict, global and particular, between modes

of thought, as simply different dimensions of dreams, neither interfering with the

occurrence of the other.

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Jung, by contrast, does see dreams as most deeply expressing and working

towards the coherence of the self as a whole. ‘The ego-conscious personality is only a

part of the whole man, and its life does not yet represent his total life’ (1974, p. 78).

Through the analysis of dreams there is a process of ‘assimilation of unconscious

contents’ that ‘finally reaches completion in the restoration of the total personality’ (p.

108).

On the other hand, he does not see dreams as ultimately structured as or

expressing a contradiction in the dreamer’s sense of things. It is true that for Jung the

total personality includes a balance of contradictory opposites, including a balance

between rationality and irrationality. Development of any one side of one’s personality

will necessarily be accompanied at another level by the development of its opposite

(1953, p. 71). But, first, these opposites are included in the same ‘total personality,’

making up its opposite poles. As a result, the contradiction is contained within a bigger

picture, and so is not a contradiction of or in the ultimate sense of things. Second—and,

really, another expression of the same issue—there is a balance between ‘rationality’ and

‘irrationality’ (p. 71), and not an ‘irrationality’ of ‘rationality’ itself. Finally, Jung’s idea

of balance here is not that of a balance between conflicting understandings of the whole

of things, but between different dimensions of what he takes to be the one and only

whole. As a result, while his approach involves the self as a whole in relation to reality as

a whole, it really does not properly raise the issue of the sense of the whole, but takes for

granted the exclusive validity of one particular construal of that sense, which it then

explores.

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His theory does, however, give a kind of indirect or implicit support to the view

that dreams express an ultimate contradiction in consciousness. There is a central element

of incoherence or contradiction in his theory, though as far as I know not recognised as

such by Jung or Jungians, that flows necessarily from the idea that dreams engage with a

sense of the self as a whole. That the self has to achieve the wholeness of itself means

that it is not yet itself. That is, it is not yet what it is: it does not coincide with itself. And

this is a contradiction. (I should clarify that in my view we can meaningfully speak of

achieving and of not yet having achieved “the whole of ourselves,” so that this is what I

have been arguing is a valid contradiction: but it is still a contradiction.)

This contradiction emerges in his theory in a variety of ways. For example, the

self communicates the achieved sense of its wholeness to itself, in the form of motifs like

the mandala image, and it does so prior to achieving that sense of its wholeness. Jung

describes these motifs as ‘“images of the goal,” as it were, which the psychic process,

being goal-directed, apparently sets up of its own accord, without any external stimulus’

(1974, p. 295). And in his framework the self must communicate with itself in this way,

so that it can know to move towards itself, and know that it is genuinely itself that it is

moving towards. In other words, it knows, and must know, where to go and what it is

before it (the “itself” it is communicating with) knows where to go and what it is.

Jung does point out that the self communicates this sense of itself to a part that is

artificially separated from it, the persona, or the fragment of ourselves that we falsely

identify with as our self. There is therefore no real contradiction: the whole

communicates to a part of itself, which need not coincide with or know everything in the

whole. But it is also Jung’s view that the whole is the real thing, from which the persona

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arises as only a fake separate entity, one that we take, ‘altogether wrongly, for something

individual’ (1953, p. 276). And this view is necessary to his framework, since the goal is

to work towards the wholeness of the parts: the self is the wholeness or self of the

persona. If this were not so, the persona could not find and would have no need to find its

own completion in the self. This means that the whole is necessarily the true reality of the

persona, which therefore necessarily has no genuinely separate reality. But, if the whole

is the only real thing, the contradiction re-emerges in a different way. The self itself has

produced a part of itself that is discontinuous with and not privy to itself. This is

equivalent to going about hiding something in a place one does not know about. (On the

contradictions in Jung and their re-emergence, see also Binswanger, 1963, p. 246.)

My own proposal might help to articulate and explore the validity of this

contradiction implicit in Jung’s framework. But it would also result in undermining the

current nature of Jungian dream therapy. The goal of that kind of therapy is to be guided

by the coherent sense of the self that awaits and unfolds. ‘The archetype is, so to speak,

an “eternal” presence,’ that ‘only appear[s] more and more distinctly and in increasingly

differentiated form’ (1974, p. 295). On the view that there is a real and central

contradiction in what the dreams express, however, that coherent sense of the self is

necessarily capable of being understood in contradictory ways. That is, that particular

sense of the self is necessarily only one among conflicting senses of the self as a whole,

none established in advance as more legitimate or more real than the others. The goal of

dream analysis would then be to hold in suspense and balance the contradictory senses of

self in order to find out, after the fact, which one turns out to be (or, perhaps better, turns

out to have been) the self’s commitment. The persona, for example, might need to be re-

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understood as possibly one of the alternative, legitimate senses of the self in its full

reality and in all its wholeness. And all the archetypal motifs might need to be re-

understood as signifying and enacting points of decision, or phases of decision, between

different and potentially equally legitimate understandings of oneself or of reality, rather

than as signposts to or communications from the pre-given, right understanding of

oneself or reality.

Differently expressed, where Jung takes individuation into selfhood to be the

solution to the problem of our relation to ourselves and to existence as a whole, I take it

to be a first, more or less complete, articulation of the problem. To put the kind of

contradiction I have discussed differently, in the process of settling our relation to

ourselves and to existence as a whole we stand outside the whole of which we are part. In

the case of our relation to ourselves, achieving our identity with a previously unknown

self would be the kind of thing that would allow us to recognise, by contrast, the

contradiction or incoherence in our previously not having achieved that identity, not

having been what we have always been. It would allow us to see that part of the nature of

being a self is that it is possible for us not to be what we are, and, for that matter, that in

some ways we also have been or are actually not what we are. This is an element of

incoherence that eludes settled understanding, and that only properly emerges in

establishing one’s selfhood, or, analogously, one’s sense of the whole of things.

Medard Boss, in his phenomenological framework for understanding dreams,

maintains as I do that dreams reflect and engage the deep structures that constitute the

sense of our life or our world as a whole. ‘[M]an when dreaming, no less than when

awake, always exists in his relationships with things and with people,’ relationships that

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‘go to make up his entire existence’ (1957, p. 122), and that express ‘the total and

original essence of things as such’ (p. 101).

Phenomenology aims to describe the structures of our experience as we live it,

without arbitrarily giving one dimension of it or any particular basis for explanation

greater weight or validity than another. For example, when we feel close to someone who

is physically far away, that person is both physically far and emotionally close, and

neither needs to be the truer or more basic state of affairs, or the one in terms of which

the other is explained. Consequently, if we dream, for instance, that a person who was far

away is suddenly next to us, this is not a distortion of the nature or truth of distance, but

an accurate expression of one dimension of its truth: we suddenly feel close to that person

(Boss, 1957, pp. 88-89).

Boss notes the varied kinds of sense that phenomenological description identifies

as structuring our world, and argues that our dream experiences consist in this variety of

sense structures, rather than in senselessness. And because these are the structures that

give the senses of our world, that is, that constitute its meanings, existential analysis, as it

occurs through dream interpretation, can lead to ‘a new and true relationship with the

essence of all things’ (p. 121).

On the other hand, Boss does not account for the contradictory and non-sequitur

features of dreams. In fact he denies that they have these features, since dreams share the

deepest sense-making structures of waking life. The logic of dreams only appears

mysterious, in his view, because these structures are ‘possibly hidden in daily life’ (p.

89), so that we may not initially recognize their sense when dreams force them on our

attention. But, as I have argued, the waking awareness of ‘the total and original essence

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of things as such,’ that he argues dreams share, is itself necessarily and legitimately

contradictory and discontinuous.

And while Boss does see dreams as expressing the structure of our sense of reality

as a whole, he only focuses on their expression of particular dimensions of that structure,

rather than on their expression of the sense of the whole of things simply and in its own

right. These two kinds of focus, however, are at least not incompatible. There is no

difficulty in understanding them as just giving insight into different, and in fact closely

related, dimensions of dreams.

Still, in this respect my proposal is closer to Ludwig Binswanger’s understanding

of the existential analysis of dreams. In his view, for example, ‘the dream . . . is nothing

other than a particular mode of human existence in general’ (1963, p. 227), and ‘our

whole existence moves within the meaning matrix’ of the dream (p. 223). Binswanger,

however, is like Boss in seeing no need to account for the contradictory character of

dreams. And while he does see dreams as involving conflict, it is a conflict between the

sense of things as a whole and a lack of that sense (p. 247), and not between alternative

senses of the whole of things. Consequently, his view only allows a limited variety of

ways for the details of dreams to be significant (as Boss also points out, in a different

connection [1957, pp. 82-83]). For Binswanger, there is only one sense of things as a

whole that dreams can express, and they only express it in the form of a contrast with the

lack of that kind of sense.

In conclusion, I propose that we need to acknowledge and account for the very

non-standard kind of logic found in dreams, and that we need to do so not simply to

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identify and work with what characterises dreams, but to identify and work with their

significance for waking reality.

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Notes

Hall (1966) comments, conversely, that if we dismissed dreams because they are

hallucinations, ‘we would have to dismiss all of the great works of art, of literature, and

of music, everything in fact that has been created out of the mind of man. For dreams,

too, are creative expressions of the human mind. They are the portals through which we

can view the workings of the mind’ (p. 9).

I am grateful to Steve de Wijze for drawing my attention to this intriguing book.

Fromm (1951) argues that dreams do operate with a logic that would be bizarre in

waking life, but that this logic is appropriate for the context of non-action that goes with

sleep. In that context, there are no consequences of my thoughts for what I could

realistically do to or with the things I think about, so that many kinds of constraints

crucial for waking thinking are irrelevant (p. 28). This view is more unambiguously in

conflict with my own proposal.

Very briefly in response: since the inactivity of sleep is registered within the

waking perspective, and the events of dreams mostly do not occur within that perspective

(except very ambiguously in lucid dreaming, and as remembered but no longer occurring

upon waking), it is not clear to me that the inactivity of sleep has any bearing on the logic

appropriate to the activity or otherwise that occurs within dreams.

For descriptions and accounts of the detailed structure of the partly nonsensical (or, as I

have described it here, contradictory and involving non-sequiturs) relation between

different perspectives on reality as a whole, or of the process of shifting from one to

another, see Barris (2003; 2005, especially p. 208; 2008).

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Valberg (2007) rejects this version of dream skepticism, but defends an alternative

version that still results in the view that dreams involve a different sense of the world as a

whole from that of waking life (pp. 105-108).

A distinct conceptual or semantic area constitutes a limited whole in this sense. The

concept constitutes or frames the whole of the sense of its content, of that semantic area.

This is evident in that grasping the concept means acquiring something new and unique,

and describing its content in terms of other concepts is to engage in conceptual confusion,

or category mistakes. The shift from understanding something in terms of one conceptual

order to understanding it in terms of another, then, shares the same violations of logical

sense as a shift from one comprehensive framework to another. (Further, both also share

the violations of sense belonging to category mistakes.) As a result, gaining a new

perspective on an element of one’s life, where that perspective involves acquiring a new

concept, involves a passage partly consisting in these violations of sense. I suggest that

these partly nonsensical transitions are often part of what happens in dreams, as in

waking life. See note 4 above for references to accounts of the detailed structure of these

kinds of passages.