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CHAPTER VI
PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF DREAMS
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CHAPTER VI
PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF DREAMS
Dreams and sleep-mentation have been discussed by several philosophers. Malcolm (1959) examined the previously stated opinions of philosophical writers on dreams and claimed they were mistaken. Essentially Malcolm challenges the idea that dreams represent mental activity in sleep and that they may be consciously experienced. The matter is raised here not only for its relevance to dream study generally but because a scientific study of lucid-dreams might resolve the philosophical issues.
Descartes (see 1934) considered that
a human mind is constantly conscious, even in sleep - consciousness being the 'essence' of mental substance. On dreams he says : 'all the same thoughts and conceptions which we have while awake may also come to us in sleep'. Malcolm quotes several other writers on this point :
Kant : 'In deepest sleep perhaps the greatest perfection of
the mind might be exercised in rational thought. For we have no reason for asserting the opposite except that we do not remember the idea when awake. This reason however proves nothing.'
Moore : 'We cease to perform (mental acts) only while we are asleep, without dreaming ; and even in sleep, so long as we dream, we are performing acts of consciousness.'
Russell : 'What, in dreams, we see and hear, we do in fact see and hear, though, owing to the unusual context, what we see and hear gives rise to false beliefs. Similarly, what we remember in dreams we do really remember; that is to say, the experience called 'remembering' does occur.'
Freud : 'Obviously, the dream is the life of the mind during sleep.'
Malcolm approaches the problem systematically. He points out first that it is absurd and self-contradictory
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for a person to assert or to judge that he or she is asleep, unconscious or dead. A person might say that he or she is asleep when actually asleep, but the remark would not be taken seriously since awareness would be absent. Malcolm says :
'In order to know that when a man said 'I am asleep' he gave a true description of his own state, one would have to know that he said it while asleep and that he was aware of saying it. This is an impossible thing to know because whatever showed that he was aware of saying that sentence would also show that he was not asleep. The knowledge required is impossible because it is self-contradictory.'
He further states that 'having some conscious experience or other, no matter what, is not what is meant by being asleep.'
Malcolm also considers states resembling sleep and concludes that hypnosis, for instance, is not sleep. Also, neither is a nightmare where a person is threshing about and talking. In the case of differential discrimination of external sounds (e.g. a baby’s cry may wake a person whereas continual road traffic noise does not) the lack of perception of some stimuli satisfies the criteria for sleep.
Analysing further the question of judgements in sleep he considers possible ways of determining whether a person made a judgement in sleep :
1. The person might state an awareness of being asleep at the time of the judgement - but this is self-contradictory Malcolm asserts.
2. The person infers being asleep because :
a. The judgement was cotemporaneous with, say, a burst of thunder -but in that case the sleeper was not fully asleep says Malcolm.
b. The person knows the judgement was not made before or after sleep
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so it must be during sleep - but the conclusion does not follow and the truth is theoretically unverifiable.
c. At the time the person was having a certain experience that only occurs in sleep - but it cannot be verified that this experience ever does occur in sleep.
d. The person made the judgement whilst dreaming - but the assertion cannot be made that the judgement was made at the same physical time of dreaming - there are no grounds. Additionally, there are questions as to how the person knows dreaming occurred during sleep and how the person knows a dream was experienced.
3. No physiological phenomena can be used as evidence that a judgement was made in sleep. For instance, if ,on making a judgement a particular brain-wave occurs its presence during sleep is not proof that a judgement was made since the correlation was established in persons who were awake : it might be true or false.
The arguments propounded by Malcolm also apply to other mental phenomena, he states, such as thinking, reasoning, perceiving, imagining and questioning , as well as 'passivities' such as fear, anxiety, joy and imagery. Dreaming though is an exception he says. The schema of proof against judgements in sleep does not apply. Claims of making judgements or having imagery in dreams he says are meaningless because they cannot be verified whereas what establishes that a person dreamt is the telling of a dream. Malcolm at one time held that since it is theoretically impossible to verify that someone had images, say, in his sleep, but possible to verify that he dreamt, then a dream cannot be identical with, nor composed of, images experienced during sleep. He thought it proof that dreaming is not a mental activity or a mental phenomenon or conscious experience. However, he now considers these terms vague, so instead, he opines that dreams are not composed of thoughts, feelings and so on.
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Malcolm states that he does not maintain that a dream is the waking impression that one dreamt. He does not know what dreaming is but we determine whether a person had a dream by receiving a dream report.
Commenting on the link between REM sleep and the great number of dream reports obtained on waking from that Stage compared to others, he points out that eye-movements should not be used as a criterion for having dreamt. The assumption for instance that a person who showed a long REM period but could only report a short dream, had forgotten part of the dream does not follow. Malcolm believes that the error of psychologists and others is to assume that a dream must have a definite location and duration in physical time - an example of what Wittgenstein termed a 'prejudice' caused by 'grammatical illusions'. The dreamer's assertion that he dreamt 'just before waking' is unverifiable. Similarly, the connection between events in the dream report and external stimuli does not mean the two events were simultaneous. The link is between waking reports of dreams and physical occurrences. The 'length' of a dream, too, has no clear sense.
What Malcolm says about sleep applies for most of the time and his comments on the dreaming / REM correlation are clearly sensible. However, his approach generally seems to be too simplistic. How could he explain for instance the case of a person in a state of 's1eep paralysis' where the person struggles (without actually moving) whilst being perfectly conscious of the situation? Physiologically the person is still in REM sleep, yet consciousness is present (Rechtschaffen et al, 1963). In particular, the matter of lucid-dreams could demolish his stand if the dreamer could convey information from the lucid-dream to the external world and respond
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intelligently to questions from the real world. This would show the presence of thought in sleep and if the dream report on waking faithfully reflected information signalled from REM sleep, it would surely be the simplest and most intelligent step to regard the experience during which the signalling occurred as a dream if that is what it was later described as. Clearly, the study of lucid-dreams could exert a profound influence on great philosophical questions.
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It has been the purpose of this Introduction to establish the particular area to be studied - the lucid-dream - and to illustrate how the phenomenon relates to the general backcloth of dreams and sleep-research. A thorough search of the literature indicated that no previous electro-physiological studies specifically on lucid-dreams had been published, therefore much useful information might be potentially discovered if an adequate methodology could be developed. The next section of this Thesis describes the whole course of experimentation.