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In this episode, Megan and Frank investigate dreams and dream interpretation. Are dreams random hallucinations? Hidden desires? Messages from the gods? What, if anything, can dreams tell us about ourselves, and how might media shape our dreaming experiences? Thinkers discussed include: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Artemidorus of Daldianus, Rene Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Norman Malcom, Eric Schwitzgebel, and David Lynch.
Hosts' Websites:
Email: philosophyonthefringes@gmail.com
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Bibliography:
Genesis 41 ESV - Joseph Interprets Pharaoh's Dreams - Bible Gateway
Daniel 2 NIV - Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream - In the - Bible Gateway
Sirach 34 GNT - Dreams Mean Nothing - Foolish people - Bible Gateway
Artemidorus' Oneirocritica - Daniel E. Harris-McCoy - Oxford University Press
Peter Thonemann - An Ancient Dream Manual: Artemidorus' The Interpretation of Dreams
The Internet Classics Archive | On Dreams by Aristotle
The Internet Classics Archive | On Prophesying by Dreams by Aristotle
LacusCurtius • Cicero — De Divinatione: Book I
Plato's Republic Book 9 [Allan Bloom's translation]
Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams
Dreaming | Norman Malcolm | Taylor & Francis eBooks
Scientists entered people’s dreams and got them ‘talking’ | Science | AAAS
Human Behavior and Psychology | The Great Courses (Episode 14)
Eric Schwitzgebel - Why did we think we dreamed in black and white?
Dreaming, Philosophy of | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Descartes - Meditations on First Philosophy
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Cover Artwork by Logan Fritts
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Philosophy on the Fringes'
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange. We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera. On today's episode, we're talking about dreams.
00:00:15
Speaker
Are dreams random hallucinations? Hidden desires? Messages from the gods? And what, if anything, can dreams tell us about ourselves?
Personal Dream Experiences
00:00:39
Speaker
Hey, everyone. It's good to be back for our regularly scheduled episode 31 on dreams. Today, we're talking about dreams. I've got my like ah my dreamy late-night radio host voice on to lull you into a relaxing conversation.
00:00:58
Speaker
About dreams. Frank, you had any dreams lately? i used to always ask you about your dreams. You remember and you'd always be like, I don't know. I don't remember them. But now you kind of do remember them.
00:01:10
Speaker
I do because I've been thinking about dreams a lot for the preparation of this podcast. ah One dream I had recently was about coming up with an argument that I'm gonna talk about in this podcast. Shut up. Yes, for real. Oh, man. Another dream I had recently was about in our backyard, you know, a maintenance man was fixing something.
00:01:29
Speaker
Our daughter was lying in the grass. Pretty mundane. Yeah. ah How about you? I know your dreams are a lot more exciting in a good way sometimes and also in a bad way sometimes. Didn't you tell me you recently dreamed about nachos?
00:01:43
Speaker
That was set a few weeks ago. Yeah, the dream was just an image, a vignette about nachos, some really good nachos. I mean, that could derive from the fact that in one of the books we read to our three-year-old, there's really good nachos. That's the the mouse iPhone. app Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It wasn't like a narrative or or a story. It was just an image of really good nachos. but huh Okay, that sounds great. No, that does sound better than my dreams. I usually remember my dreams every night. Up until a couple years ago, I think, I would say like the majority of dreams I had were horrific nightmares.
00:02:18
Speaker
um Just really the kinds of things where I would tell you them and you'd be like, what's wrong with you? Yes. Yeah. I won't even repeat them on this podcast. But yeah, no, they got pretty dark. yeah This is a family friendly podcast, so we can't tell you what these dreams are. Yeah, I'd have to give like a content warning. um But i think in like the last couple of years, they've really chilled out. And i I don't know if maybe it's just because I'm just like exhausted.
00:02:43
Speaker
Like all my resources are spent now at the end of the day. That might be it. um But yeah, now ah now I mostly dream about like also pretty mundane things. A lot of dreams about the past, like hanging out with people I haven't seen since like junior high.
Recurring Nightmares and Freud's Theories
00:02:58
Speaker
Yeah. You know, that kind of thing, which is kind of nice. And then I wake up and i'm like, oh, I miss them.
00:03:03
Speaker
We have a lot of material to get into, but I do want to ask, do you have any recurring dreams? We will come we can come back to these. This is going be material we can use to analyze dreams and all of that. i Do you have any recurring dreams? I do. Yeah. And they're all nightmares. um Yeah. But one of them is, I've told you this one, um but one of them is I'm walking on a trail in the woods. I'm walking through the woods just by myself and someone passes me on the trail. But then a few minutes later, they pass me again and they pass me again. And I realized that they're like circling around like off the trail to come back and like run ahead of me and then come back and pass me again. And like somehow I know like it's not part of the content of the dream, but somehow I know that they're going to kill me. Yeah.
00:03:43
Speaker
And then another one is where I'm driving in the car with my family and one of my parents is driving. They just decide to drive off a cliff. Yeah, as you can see, here's a glimpse of the kinds of dreams Megan has. Yeah, those are pretty tame, though. um But yeah, those are my two ones that i have that have been recurring like since I was a kid.
00:03:59
Speaker
One of those sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone. it's I'm thinking of the one where the woman is driving in the car and she sees the hitchhiker. And it's death. And it's death. Yeah, it kind of sounds like that one. Do you have recurring dreams? Not anymore, but I did when I was a youth. One of them was that there was a secret passage in my house and that led to a place in the woods. Again, we can come back to that when we get to Freud. like is Is there something deep going on there? oh But I did have that one a lot. I really like secret passages in houses, and I often dreamed of there being one in my house. so the but You hate to see what Freud might do with that. Yeah.
Ancient Cultures and Dream Interpretation
00:04:32
Speaker
Okay, so I think in dividing up this episode, we should start with the ancient world. so So there's a lot of discussion of dreams nowadays and modern scientific theories of dreams. But let's start in the ancient world. And then we'll and then we'll get to the modern contemporary world, scientific accounts and dreaming and all of that.
00:04:52
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, back in my childhood as a little kid Sunday school, you hear these like Sunday school stories that involve dreams and they seem really cool. One of the ones that probably everyone is familiar with is the story of Joseph, not Mary's husband, Old Testament Joseph. The guy that had the colorful coat. Correct, from Genesis, exactly. And and his story in the Bible, so he gets he gets sold into slavery by his brothers, to into Egyptian slavery, right? And he kind of rises in the ranks um among the Egyptians until he is in this place where he's in communication with the Pharaoh and he's like interpreting his dreams for him, right? God has given him the power to interpret the pharaoh's dreams. And the pharaoh's dreams, I mean, to be fair, they're pretty overt metaphors. Yeah. I think one of them is there's like seven fat cows and then seven lean cows and then the lean cows eat the fat cows. And that's supposed to signify what? Seven years of plenty and seven years of famine. Right. Yeah. And then there's seven. There's also seven. um Good years of corn. Yep. And then seven bad years of corn. Yep.
00:06:07
Speaker
Yeah. That's it also what what I initially thought of, too, when I was thinking about dreams in the ancient world. Dreams are divine messages or things things sent from God or the gods that need to be interpreted. Yeah. And in fact, we can go back even further than than Genesis. One of the earliest texts we have from third millennium B.C. Sumeria is about ah dream a dream guy had, a ruler of a city-state named Lagash, called Gudea, and he had a dream that it that he was supposed to build some temple.
00:06:38
Speaker
um We see dreams from the gods in the Iliad, too. Zeus sends a a false dream to Agamemnon to satisfy some plea from Achilles, who's mad at agam um Agamemnon for something. and And then this sort of sets back the Greek war against Troy. um So dream interpretation was a pretty big deal in in the ancient world. It wasn't just something that occurred in in a one-off occasion. There were people whose job it was to be dream interpreters. We have this really interesting tablet from Memphis in Egypt. It's from the the third century. And it's it's a sign, a kind of a placard for a dream interpreter. It says, I judge dreams, having the mandate of God, to good fortune. The one judging these is a Cretan. So this is a guy in the marketplace who's interpreting dreams. He'll sell you his skills for a price. I think I saw a thing on Facebook going around where people were like, look, this is proof of Joseph or something like that. Like Joseph from the Old Testament. Yeah. This is his this is his sign. His dream placard. Yeah. his dream interpreting. Yeah.
00:07:43
Speaker
Yeah. um Probably not. But this was this was just sort of a a job one might have that or maybe like a trick you turn. I don't know where they considered more like snake oil salesmen or. I think it was taken very seriously. i mean do you see I mean, you can see what people did and ah in order to get messages from the gods that would help them and improve their well-being. They would sleep in temples, for instance, the temple of Asclepius, in order to get a dream that would tell them what the cure for their ailment would be. So I think they did take it seriously. I'm sure there were, as we will get to, there were some skeptics. But there was there is a long tradition of trying to interpret dreams in the ancient world and thinking them as messages from the gods. This culminated in this really interesting text that I came across that want to talk a lot about here.
Artemidorus' Dream Analysis
00:08:30
Speaker
um It's a text by a second century AD Greek living in the Roman world called Artemidorus. He's from Ephesus. And he wrote this text called The the Interpretation of Dreams. that's That's the translation to English. But it's called the Onerocritica. And it's a really cool document because it kind of tells us a lot about the dreams that ordinary people were having. It tells us the hopes and fears and whatever of people that didn't have elite status. A lot of the texts we have from the ancient world, they are written by elite folks, philosophers, politicians, and that sort of thing. um So by all accounts, this guy was also an elite guy, but he tells us a lot about the dreams that ordinary people have. Right. He he says he spent a lot of time with those guys in the marketplace and he learned a lot from them. He learned a lot of dreams from them and a lot of ways of interpreting dreams.
00:09:23
Speaker
So what kinds of dreams were like, you know, teenage dirtbags like us just having back then? Well, now that you ask, I have a nice list of things that he dreams that he mentions and their interpretations.
00:09:36
Speaker
So here's a few. here's There's a lot of fun ones. So if a sick man dreams of plants growing out of him, he will die because plants are of the earth. Yikes. If you dream that you have the head of a bird, then you will leave your hometown.
00:09:51
Speaker
You're going to become an an immigrant. huh um The mouth is the household and the upper teeth are the superiors and the lower teeth are the inferiors. right so you have a dream about teeth, that that that's how you're supposed to interpret it. the the The teeth at the top are you know the master of the house, maybe you and the and the people who are ah who are important. And the teeth the other teeth at the bottom, they stand for those that aren't those people that aren't important. I mean, the only kind of teeth dreams people have is teeth falling out. Yeah, so the tooth from the top falls out. then that means that's pretty bad news for one of the ah the the superiors in the household. um So if you are a runner who dreams you will go blind, you will win because you won't be able to see your competitors, your head, as blind people can't see. No. A politician dreaming of extra ears is good because more people will listen. Sure.
00:10:44
Speaker
a poor old woman dreaming of lactation means she'll get money. A rich old woman dreaming of lactation means she'll have lots of expenses. Obviously. A boy dreaming of a beard before his time means death.
00:10:55
Speaker
The poor dreaming of wearing purple, color of royalty. That's bad. That's not appropriate. Wait, what do you mean that's bad? Like they messed up? Yeah, they're they're stepping out of bounds. If you're rich and you dream that you're wearing purple, that's good. Maybe fortune lies ahead for you. But if you're poor and you dream you're wearing purple, that's really bad. That's contrary to the way of the world, but the order of things. Sure. You're discontent with your law in life.
00:11:18
Speaker
And you should expect bad things. If you dream of being bald, that's bad because that's you know unnatural. Unless you're a clown or an Egyptian priest. That's what I would have said. So, yeah. So, yeah. So, the text is cool. You have lots of fun dreams. But also, the beginning is interesting because he tells us a lot about his principles and and his theory here. So, he distinguishes between these dreams that he thinks of as prophetic, dreams that and are to be interpreted, from ones that are just ordinary dreams that concern our waking life preoccupations. Right. So I had a dream about preparing for this podcast. That's because it was on my mind a lot. So he recognizes that there are dreams like that. Someone who's fearful will dream of what they're afraid of. Someone who's in love will dream of their beloved. And those aren't prophet prophetic. But the ones that are prophet prophetic, they have the kind of character of the examples that I just gave.
00:12:09
Speaker
Okay, so like the kind of weird ones, those are probably prophetic. Yeah. But if if it's obvious to you that it's just like it's just like brain clutter. You should be able to figure out if it's a, what he calls an inhypion, that's the one that's not prophet prophetic, and or an oneros, that's one that is prophet prophetic. ah hu So his methods of interpretation rely very heavily, as we saw in the examples, on analogy, similarity, conceptions of what's natural or unnatural, conceptions of what's orderly, sometimes puns and wordplay. There's one example where he says if you dream that you're going to get ah like a haircut or something, that's good because the the word for haircuts is similar to the word for happy or things like that. That might not be the the right details, but you get the point. Yeah. He did lots of fun wordplay. ah Numerology and also facts about you gender and social status matter. right Something might be good for a rich woman that's bad for a poor person. Something might be good for a slave that's bad for a free person. right And I think that it's this way of thinking that really makes...
00:13:11
Speaker
texts like artemidorus's right or even stories like you know the stories from genesis or the stories from the iliad about dreams just strike us as strange when at the time it it wouldn't have been but we have this kind of modern way of seeing the world that is really different from how the ancients saw the world right so like teeth or the mouth symbolizes the household, but not just, you know, a modern might be like, right, that's because of these like social conventions or whatever. But like the ancient would be like, no, there's a real like objective out there relationship that holds between the image of the mouth and the image of the household. And that's just like a part of nature and we recognize it, but we don't make that be the case, right?
00:14:02
Speaker
Yeah, we tend to think of those things as projections of
Philosophical Critiques of Dreams
00:14:06
Speaker
our mind. Yeah. But that's not really how he's thinking about these things. Right. And it's not how anyone at the time would have thought about it. um You put it away. i liked at one point that to in the in the ancient mindset, the world is like a text to be read yeah or to be interpreted. Right. Where we are going out there and we can.
00:14:26
Speaker
read it kind of like a cryptic message, but we're not the ones writing it. It's written into the world itself. And that is why i think they saw dreams as these really rich sources of, you know, hidden meaning or prophecy or whatever, you know, just like the rest of the world, just ah that we can go out and observe, you know, we we can observe the things in our minds and and read those as well.
00:14:53
Speaker
ah Yeah, so it definitely does seem very different from the way we think about things. So we we definitely like to interpret dreams in some respects. We'll get to that soon. right And even if we don't take Freud very seriously, it's fun to be like, Megan, what do you think this dream meant? but But there we're talking about our own psychology. What is it? What did that reveal about me and how I think and how I feel and whatever? We don't tend to think that dreams reveal the future events that are about to unfold. Yeah. To the modern mind, dreams have meaning insofar as they are like effects of particular maybe psychological neuroses or physical conditions. But they don't have meanings insofar as they're, I don't know, our our our mind is being given some kind of important objective information about the world or the future. Yeah. so So there are lots of people in the ancient world who thought that dreams were, that revealed the future, that they were to be interpreted in that way. But there were some dissenting voices too.
00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah, actually, so there's this really great text in the book of Sirach, which is, um it's not in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, but it is in the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament in the ancient world.
00:16:13
Speaker
And it's still in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, but it's technically not part of the canon. But anyway, it's a super fascinating book, Sirach. And there's a passage about dreams where the author's sort of like, eh, I don't care about dreams. He goes, foolish people are deceived by vain hopes and dreams get them all excited.
00:16:34
Speaker
a person who pays any attention at all to dreams is like someone who tries to catch shadows or chase the wind. What you see in a dream is no more real than the reflection of your face in a mirror.
00:16:46
Speaker
What is unreal can no more produce something real than what is dirty can produce something clean. Dreams, divination, and omens are all nonsense.
00:16:57
Speaker
You see in them only what you want to see unless the Most High has sent you the dream. So I guess there's the caveat for people like Joseph and Daniel and et cetera. Wow. Wow.
00:17:11
Speaker
dreams have misled many people they put their faith in them only to be disappointed the law is complete without such falsehood wisdom as spoken by the righteous is also complete without it wow What a word. Yeah, it's really I like that passage a lot. It's a very clear cut. ah Yeah, so and and it it kind of, as you said, it it does the work of trying to square the fact that there are some really important people in in the Bible that do interpret dreams. And i think even Daniel or Joseph says like, hey, I'm not a dream interpreter. God's just helping me out here. It's all him. Glory God. Yo, man, this isn't my job. Yeah, yeah. I'm not i'm not a diviner, right? I'm not doing anything bad. yes This is the one-off thing. because you don't want to be a diviner because that's like that's like harnessing like power from bad places or something. It can also be really dangerous. if you I read the beginning of Daniel where Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Oh, he i think a lot of people got killed. he's The king is very unreasonable about the interpretation of his dream. Not only does he want his sorcerers and enchant and enchanters and whatever, to magicians, to interpret his dream, he he also wants them to tell him... him what the dream was. Because he needs to make sure they're legit. He's like, I want you to not only interpret it, but I want you to tell me what it was. yeah And they can't. So he kills them. all So he kills them. Exactly. Yeah.
00:18:30
Speaker
You're right. that That does seem like an overreaction. It's a little unreasonable. yeah ah So not only in the Hebrew tradition is there a Criticism of divination by dreaming. We also see this in, unsurprisingly, the Greek philosophical tradition. So I took a look at some lesser known works of the great Aristotle on dreams. He has two short works on dreams, at least two. I think there's a third one, but two that I read. um One's called On Prophesying by Dreams and the other one's just called On Dreams.
00:19:01
Speaker
What didn't this guy write about for real? Yeah, I mean, these are really good. These are really good. We mostly read Aristotle's ethics. We don't take a look at Aristotle's natural philosophy too much in these days, you know. Even though I'm a philosopher science, I don't really read this stuff too much. We read parts of animals in grad school. Yeah. I don't know.
00:19:16
Speaker
Yeah, so in his work on dreams, he sketches out a theory of dreams that's that I guess we would call naturalistic. right He rejects the idea that dreams are messages from the gods to be interpreted. Rather, he adopts the view that dreams are purely psychological. Now, he puts it in language that sounds a little bit different from how we would put it. But he says something like this, that the dreams that we have, that we see even when we're asleep, They are kind of the residue of this the sense experience that we undergo in our waking life. They're the residual impressions that are moving around our sense organs as we sleep. And he he makes an interesting analogy to after images. You know, if you stare at a light too long and then look away, you'll still see the after image. He says dreams are kind of like that, but the sense impression is still hanging out in your sense organ, even though the external stimulus is no longer there. He also points out that ah dream that that people who are asleep can sometimes incorporate external stimuli that they experience, like loud noises or whatever, into their dreams. They hear a loud noise or ringing in their ear, and they think they dream that it's thunder. This actually does happen, and there's a term for this in the psychological literature. It's called incorporation. This happens to me, or it has, I remember back before we had kids, and our cats would sleep in bed with us, right? Oh. And yeah and and ah whenever Moses, might my one cat, would sleep by my head, whenever his claws would like catch my head, and like scratch my head, I would dream that something was happening to my head. like yeah I hit my head or I scratched it on a tree branch or something. There's famous example, I forget the guy's name, this French guy, 19th century, philosophers who work on dreams, like Daniel Dennett ah wrote about him. he dreamed that he So he dreamed that he was being guillotined. French makes sense. But he dreamed it because the headboard of his bed fell on his neck. oh And so he incorporated that into his dream. yeah So Aristotle mentions this. This is also a kind of a cause of dreams. And interestingly, he anticipates a topic we'll get to soon. He mentions lucid dreaming. He says, sometimes things occur to us in our dreams and we realize it's a dream.
00:21:24
Speaker
So I think there's a lot of stuff in here that most contemporary scientists who work on dreams would be like, yeah, that's basically right. You know, Aristotle got a lot of this right. So it's it's fashionable to say that Aristotle's science was all, you know, bunk, its superseded by folks like Newton and all that. But here I think we would recognize what he says here is fairly sensible, fairly modern and whatever.
00:21:47
Speaker
Yeah. So in general, Aristotle didn't think dreams were that cool. Like they're generally not telling us the future or telling us some really important information about ourselves. And they're definitely not from God or from the gods. And he has a really funny argument for this, yeah right? Several. though Yeah, I know what you're getting at. um So I'll just read this passage. He says, um in addition to its further unreasonableness it's absurd to combine the idea that the sender of such dreams should be god
00:22:17
Speaker
with the fact that those to whom he sends them are not the best and the wisest but merely commonplace persons if however we abstract from the causality of god none of the other causes assigned appears probable So he's like, look, these people having these weird dreams that they you know think signs from the future or, i don't know, hidden secret information.
00:22:43
Speaker
They're just like bums. Yeah. They're dumb or they're poor or they're slaves. there there is There's ah Aristotle's elitism. Walmart.com. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the gods wouldn't send this important divine information to commoners.
00:22:56
Speaker
Yeah, and and so Aristotle is right here about this sociological fact that these kinds of dreams were had by people of all strata of society. We hear this from Artemidorus's book, which mentions lots and lots of dreams. I mean we know this from talking to beloved friends and family.
00:23:12
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Also that. So yeah, we have two kind of problems here Aristotle mentions. The first one is that if God or the gods sent dreams as messages to us, they wouldn't use commoners as their vehicle. He also says that ah animals have dreams, and so that also shows it's not divine. That's really interesting too. Why does Aristotle think animals He doesn't really elaborate. And and it's kind of kind it's kind of still controversial whether animals have dreams nowadays. I mean, you can definitely see. you saw the dog. dogs Yeah. Like when dogs. This happens in Cinderella.
00:23:43
Speaker
You remember the dog Bruno is like dreaming that he's chasing the cat and catching the cat and he's like thrashing around. But dogs do that. So I don't know. Maybe. i mean, i guess I wouldn't find it crazy to think dogs dream.
00:23:56
Speaker
Yeah. We see a similar sort of objection in Cicero's on divination. So we we've talked about this text a lot on this podcast because I wrote a paper on it once and it's useful. Cicero is the biggest hater about anything like cool or magical. So yeah, he he cites Aristotle's on dreams in this text, so I'm sure he's influenced by it. But yeah, he raises similar sorts of points. Why do the gods send, it if it's true that they're trying to communicate with us, why do they send these obscure messages? Why do they use like weird imagery? For instance, he cites an example where someone dreamed of an egg and that was interpreted as there's a treasure over there. And Sisero's like, why is that the image? it seems really weird. He says that these kinds of dreams are utterly inconsistent with the dignity of the gods. it's a kind of theological objection almost, like God is rational, God is not arbitrary, God would never use these kinds of mechanisms to communicate with us. And because that, there is no good mechanism. I mean, it seems like it it entails a lot more than that too, like the gods wouldn't communicate cryptically at all or through metaphors, secret message or whatever. Which has to be like, I don't know, a real minority view, especially at the time.
00:25:07
Speaker
i can imagine a lot of philosophers saying similar sorts of things, right? If like the gods exist and care about us, they would want to you know send messages that are clear, right? You know, that's kind of interesting. And it sort of is like, I don't know if anyone's ever talked about this before, but this seems like ah like a proto-divine-hiddenness argument.
00:25:27
Speaker
Sort of, yeah. i think that's that I think that's right. That's a good way of thinking about it. Hmm. Yeah, maybe you can write a paper on that. ma yeah So arison to be fair, Aristotle does start out the text by saying we cannot lightly either dismiss it with contempt or give it implicit confidence. He doesn't want to be too hard on divination about dreams because he says lots of people do it. Lots of people believe in it. um So it does have some show of reason, but ultimately he thinks it should be rejected. I wonder why he said this kind of thing. My hypothesis is that because it's common for rulers to say they have dreams that show they're going to win battles and stuff like that. So maybe he'd want to get on the wrong side of Philip Macedon or something.
00:26:04
Speaker
ah Notably, Alexander the Great had dreams that he would win battles. And this occurred after Aristotle wrote this text. But something like that was probably going through his mind. He doesn't want to be too too edgy.
00:26:17
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, he did obviously end up being too edgy yeah in his life. Yeah. this name They sent him out, right? Yeah. Additionally, Aristotle says that ah these kinds of apparent fulfillments of prophecies are just coincidences. So another kind of modern sort of argument. Yeah. I feel like I'm like on like R slash, I don't know,
00:26:38
Speaker
I love science. I love science. Yeah. He says, most so-called prophetic dreams are, however, to be classed as mere coincidences, especially all such as are extravagant. Many dreams have no fulfillment, for coincidence does not occur according to any universal or general law. So we would probably class this as a kind of confirmation bias. We remember the one dream that did come true. We don't think about all the other ones that that did not come true. And Aristotle is basically saying the same thing here. so Similarly in Cicero.
00:27:06
Speaker
For who, if he shoots at a mark all day long, will not occasionally hit it. It's all just a coincidence. Yeah. Broken clocks are right twice a day, et cetera, et cetera. Perhaps the person that was most favorable to dreams among the famous Greek philosophers was Plato.
Plato's and Freud's Theories on Dreams
00:27:22
Speaker
So so Plato has Socrates in the dialogue, Crito, for instance, have a prophetic dream about when he's going to die. And there's a passage in the beginning of Book Nine of the Republic where Plato's kind of suggesting that maybe if the soul is set aright, if its appetites and spirit are quiet and satisfied but not
00:27:45
Speaker
oversatisfied that the soul will see the truth while it sleeps So he says stuff like that, which later philosophers in the Neoplatonic tradition picked up and were like, yeah, when you're asleep, the soul ascends and sees the intelligible realm. But for Plato, it's got to still be that the person, like surely it still has to be like a virtuous person. definitely. Like this, I mean, this is, you know, this is Socrates having this dream. It's not like, you know, Glaucon having this dream. Yeah, definitely. So he's that he's he's more favorable to divination by dreaming, but he was probably he would probably say it's very, very rare. so He's still on board with Cicero's elitism. He's just like, no, actually the ones getting the dreams from the gods are the elite. Yeah.
00:28:24
Speaker
So, all right, we've talked about the ancients on dreams for a long time, and fair enough, because they had really cool dreams. There was much more to say, but we have to move on. We have to move on, and obviously we need to move on to the person that people probably think of the most when you think about dreams, right, which is, of course, Sigmund Freud. Yeah, we already mentioned Freud because it's almost impossible not to when you're talking about this topic. Right. This was the most obsessed person with dreams maybe in the history of humans ever. Yeah, I set myself the task of reading a little bit of his major work on this. I had no idea how long it was. The Interpretation of Dreams. And it's 100,000 words. That's pretty long. All right. I think we forget that for Freud and his whole psychoanalytic framework, dreams play like an essential role. Yeah. I forget that at least myself sometimes. That dreams are like where the thing gets started. Because the whole point of psychoanalysis is to, I'm going to get like hate mail for probably saying something wrong. But like ah say it so getting to like who you are at this like really deep down level. Yeah. The unconscious. Right. Right. Uncovering the unconscious, seeing what it says, dealing with it.
00:29:31
Speaker
And a good way to get there, one might think, yeah is when your mind is completely uninhibited and running wild like it is in dreams. Yeah. So Freud's main idea when it comes to dreams is that dreams are about wish fulfillment. And he's very clear that every single dream is some disguised, maybe thinly disguised wish. This is an absolutely wild claim, especially for like me, who has had dreams that are so deeply horrifying that they have like scarred me for life. Right. Well, he has a he guys and a has a way out of that. OK. So, yeah. So everything is about trying to satisfy some wish. How he came about this theory is really interesting. And this is one interesting aspect of this text. is that he analyzed a dream of his his own. You might think this is kind of dubious scientific methodology. like isnt Shouldn't you be analyzing other people's dreams? You might worry about like bias and being able to study yourself and come up with a universal theory that applies everybody. But Freud didn't care about that. He analyzed a lot of his own dreams. And one dream he analyzed in coming up with this theory was a dream about a patient of his named Irma.
00:30:35
Speaker
So Irma is a patient that troud ah Freud didn't treat very well. you know his His treatments didn't work very well, and he kind of felt bad about that. He kind of felt like it was his fault. And he dreamed about Irma. And in his dream, ah Irma is still suffering from various maladies. But in the dream, it's somebody else's fault. Some other doctor gave her a bad injection, and some other doctor used a dirty needle.
00:30:57
Speaker
And so Freud thinks that the obvious interpretation of this, or maybe not so obvious, is that he was trying to clear his conscience. He felt guilty about not doing right by Irma. And in his dream, it's somebody else's fault. He wants it. he To be someone else's fault. Yeah, I see that. And that's the meaning of the dream. And that's what he wanted. And he yeah he analyzes, i didn't read that much of his work. So you know take this with a grain of salt. He analyzes a bunch of other dreams. And he thinks that every dream can fit in this framework. Every dream is a kind of desire.
00:31:31
Speaker
that you want fulfilled. And it might be a desire that you don't know you have in your waking life or some desire that you're embarrassed the about, you want to keep secret. And that's why the dream is maybe couched in strange imagery or dances around the issue. There's a distinction, Freud says, between the manifest content of the dream, um what images you see, the narrative structure of the dream and all that, And the latent content, what it really means. So the manifest content in Freud's Irma dream was he sees Irma at a party, he talks to her, someone injects some substance in her with a dirty needle. But the latent content, what it meant was that Freud felt guilty and he wanted to try to spread the guilt to somebody else.
00:32:16
Speaker
Maybe we should just really quickly, just for people who only have a loose idea of these figures, say, um so Sigmund Freud um spans the turn of the 20th century, right? He's born in 1856, dies in 1939, and he writes the interpretation of dreams in 1899. So right at the turn of the century. But interesting little factoid about this. So it was finished in 1899, but he said to his publisher, slap on the date 1900 of this, because this is new fangled stuff. and I want it to belong to the 20th century. Absolutely incredible. So he wrote it. He wrote the future. Yeah.
00:32:48
Speaker
Another aspect of Freud we should mention is this kind of like tripartite structure of of the mind. ah do you want to explain that, Megan? Yeah. So he has the idea that the the psyche, right, the yeah the human mind is composed of, divided into. i know I'm going to get some kind of message from some people into like psychoanalysis who are like, screw you. Well, you know what? There's going be other psychoanalysts that disagree with them. so That's true. Don't worry. It is divided into or composed of these three different parts. There's the id, the ego, and the superego.
00:33:26
Speaker
So the superego is the you who has been cleaned up for polite society. You conform to the social norms and you know have some kind of like moral conscience that is in line with the moral conscience of your peers, roughly.
00:33:42
Speaker
The id is the deep down latent appetitive drives, yeah right? Your like animal self. Which for Freud is mostly like sex and aggression. Yeah. And maybe like food stuff. i don't know. Yeah. Is he into food stuff?
00:33:59
Speaker
I don't know. um But you're like animal appetites and drives. yeah And then the ego is the mediator of these two parts of you. It's the thing that holds you together as a singular you, despite the disparity between your id and your superego.
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah, you can't do everything your id wants you to do because then you'd end up in jail. and you can't really do everything the superego wants you to do too because you can't just – You'd be a pod person. Yeah, you can't do exactly everything that society wants you to do. right so you can think of the superego the embodiment of the social norms that you think ought to govern your life. So you have to kind of synthesize the two aspects – It's how you live with these two other warring factions that want to pull you in opposite directions. Yeah.
00:34:46
Speaker
I kind of think of parenthood in that way a little bit sometimes, too. Like, you know, the id is them. We're the super ego. And then the self is going to the ego is going to be who they are when they the the id, those drives combine with our rules and they become who they are. Yeah, the the ego is like our kitchen chairs being covered in marker, but like we're okay with it or something.
00:35:10
Speaker
but um So yeah, so that's how Freud thinks about dreams. ah Other psychoanalysts think about dreams in that way too. We talked about Jung, Carl Jung a lot, kind of disciple, descendant of Freud. Not descendant, disciple, but also dissenter of Freud. It'd be funny if he wasn't. Yeah.
00:35:27
Speaker
ah And yeah, he had this idea of the collective unconscious, which is includes all these images and motifs and symbols, these archetypes that show up in myths and that affect us and affect our psyche and our unconscious. Yeah, we're all combined in this abstract realm of the collective unconscious. for You can go listen to the myth episode if you want to hear more about Jung. But his idea dreams are supposed to help us deal with our unconscious right begin and develop a psychological stability and whatever. one One concrete example is if you recall from the myth episode, or if you don't, you should go check it out. He thinks that we all have a kind of shadow opposite gender self. There's like a shadow animus of you for you. It's like a male and like an anima for me. And like that person shows up in dreams and you got to try to you know come to terms with that. And, you know, come.
00:36:17
Speaker
Yeah, I know it sounds silly. You'd be Francis with an E. Yeah, right. Yeah. And and i don't know, you'd be Negan. ah Like the guy from Walking Dead. Yeah, that guy. ah so that's Freud. ah He still has a lot of followers these days. We have a friend who got his dreams interpreted by his therapists.
00:36:36
Speaker
Yeah. Who's a Freudian? I didn't know that like Freudian therapists still were out there. They're still running around. They are. Yeah. And, you know, so most dream researchers don't take Freud very seriously anymore. And the critiques of Freud have been many and sundry. It's it's unfalsifiable. It's contentless, et etct cetera, et cetera. I won't rehearse those here. But there have been kinds of little vindications of Freud here and there. I listen to many lectures and podcasts about dreams, and every now and then one of the neuroscientists is like, yeah, Freud said this, and that's kind of right. For instance, Freud thinks that a lot of our things that we try to suppress show up in dreams. And there have been studies trying to test this kind of thing. If you try to suppress a thought, will that show up in dreams more than control groups? And in fact, it does. And there's a name for this phenomenon. It's called dream rebound. like The group of research subjects were that were told to not think about something, and make sure you don't think about that. They did dream about it more than people that were told to think about it.
00:37:39
Speaker
That's kind of paradoxical, but that is kind of Freudian. So stuff like that. Also in dreams, various ah parts of the brain are deactivated and various parts are activated. So unsurprisingly, the the part of the brain that deals with critical judgment is deactivated and the part of the brain... that deal with the motion and aggression, the limbic system, the amygdala, that stuff is active. That's kind of Freudian too. You think of the the limbic system as the id and yeah the neocortex, the prefrontal cortex as the superego if you want. you Kind of, right? So in these experiments with dream suppression, or sorry, with um dream rebound, yeah I'm curious about if the suppressed thought, so like for the purposes of the experiment, did they just take some random thing and they're like, okay, now suppress it? Or did they ask people about like, I'm i'm wondering like where they got the suppressed content from because if it's something that is like emotionally salient.
00:38:38
Speaker
And they were they they were already trying to suppress it actively. That makes sense why it would come out in dreams. But if it was just something that they'd been told for the sake of the experiment to suppress, and then it came back in dreams, that makes it seem like your dream state is just like a rebel.
00:38:54
Speaker
Like it's just trying to break the rules. Yeah, I don't remember the details of the study, but I don't think it was something personally significant. And it was the same thing for ah for both groups. and That just makes it seem like when you're asleep, your your brain wants to like, it wants to rebel. Yeah, there's various explanations for this kind of thing, like the the monitoring system of the brain can sometimes generate the thing it's monitoring for, that kind of thing. Interesting. Yeah, it's similar like- Like when the people are like, oh, don't don't think about a carrot. Don't think about a carrot. Exactly, right? Exactly. It's kind of like that. Okay. Yeah. ok yeah
00:39:26
Speaker
ah One interesting aspect of dream research is just defining what a dream is.
Contemporary Theories and Debates on Dreaming
00:39:32
Speaker
So on its surface, it seems like we have a really good grasp of this kind of thing. You go to sleep, you hallucinate, you see a bunch of stuff that's not there, you wake up and you remember it, right? Pretty much. But when you start to really get down to the brass tacks and think about what exactly a dream is, try to have a definition of it.
00:39:50
Speaker
Things get a little bit difficult. I've heard some definitions of dreams that in my research that are like wholly inadequate. you know Dreams are any mental activity that occurs when you're asleep. That's not going to work because lots of stuff's going on in your brain while you sleep. And we kind of get into almost a paradox if you start to think about what a dream is. So let's start with something that seems like a truism.
00:40:13
Speaker
You're unconscious when you sleep. That seems almost necessarily true. Sleep is the lack of consciousness. But dreams are experiences. So what is it then? Is a dream an unconscious experience? That almost sounds like a kind of contradiction. Because we you mean because we think of consciousness or unconsciousness as the lack of experience. Yeah, yeah but those seem so closely related, conscious experience, to make the idea of an unconscious experience almost contradictory. You dream when you sleep, you're unconscious when you sleep, you experience when you dream. So you're conscious when you dream? That seems kind of strange. I remember when you brought this up to me and I found it like I was confused about why that was confusing.
00:40:55
Speaker
And I think I still feel that way. i think paradigmatic uses of the term experience are ones where you're conscious. I just, well, I, so my thinking goes the other way. Paradigmatic instance of being unconscious is being asleep.
00:41:07
Speaker
But obviously you have experiences when you sleep. So those two things don't seem intentioned. Yeah, I mean, there might be a way to resolve the tension. There better be, because it does seem like we experience things when we dream. One way to try to resolve the tension, which I don't think is very popular anymore, was to say that dreams are not really what we think they are. So seems like a dream is experience, and then you wake up and you remember it. But for one 20th century philosopher, mean, Norman Malcolm, who wrote influential stuff on dreams, he thinks that the concept of dreaming, quote, is derived not from dreaming, but from descriptions of dreams. So really, the phenomenon is the recall. Like, you wake up and you have the experience of doing all these things, but that's it. You didn't have an experience while you were asleep because you were asleep. The dream just is the recall. Like, for That seems more confusing to me because when we recall things, we're recalling experiences. It's a quasi memory. It's a memory. It's a memory. So it's a false memory. Yeah, I guess so. Dreams are false memories. I guess so. Yeah. And he gave basically gave the kind of argument that I just went through minute or so ago. You can't dreams can't be experiences because you're unconscious when you sleep. Like, that's it. So I'm not sure the best way to deal with this kind of thing. Sometimes getting bogged down in definitions is not worth the trouble. Maybe we should introduce the idea of being semi-conscious, right? You're semi-conscious when you're dreaming. I don't know. Well, in our episode on near-death experiences...
00:42:36
Speaker
Which if you haven't listened, go check that one out. I like how we're just plugging all the past episodes today. But we talk about a kind of a similar theory yeah of and NDEs in that episode, which is the idea that maybe your subconscious collects all this information about what's going on in the room around you or or what your subconscious thinks your family members might be doing at the time. And then when you start to regain consciousness or come back to life or whatever, you know, exit ah cardiac arrest, then your brain compiles this into something that seems like a memory of something that just happened.
00:43:12
Speaker
And then you're flooded with the consciousness when you wake up. Right. Yeah. So the philosopher Daniel Dennett had this kind of theory of dreams. He called it the cassette theory of dreams or it was called the cassette theory
Lucid Dreaming and Dream Control
00:43:22
Speaker
of dreams. Basically, the the information that is the content of the dream is encoded in a kind of non-conscious way. And then you wake up and you access it and it's played. right But I mean, so here's a piece of evidence that just seems to just really definitively eliminate that as a possibility.
00:43:37
Speaker
We can see people reacting to dreams while they are still unconscious. Right. People can yell out during a nightmare or thrash, right know talk in their sleep. Our daughter does that. Yeah, right. And I think ah lucid dreaming, which we'll get to soon, basically refutes this kind of view because surprisingly, scientists have found a way to communicate with people while they're lucid dreaming. Maybe we should talk about that now, right? Like lucid dreaming. this is This is when you dream and you know you are dreaming.
00:44:06
Speaker
Aristotle recognizes phenomenon. It's not super duper common, but most people have had one lucid dream in their lifetime. I had one according to my iPhone note in May 20th, 2017. And ah some people can have it once a week, but there are very few of those. You can train yourself to lucid dream better. There are certain things you can do to trigger this state where you realize you're dreaming. And for some people, they can control aspects of the dream. They're not just sort of passive recipients of the the sense data. So, and and there's ways scientists have discovered to communicate with people. Basically, the idea is they agree upon eye movements.
00:44:44
Speaker
The scientists and the research subjects agree on eye movements beforehand. And then they say, when you're in a lucid dream, you move your eyes in this sort of way. And they can recognize these movements on the electroencephalogram, the EEG. Wow. And then they they can solve math problems. They ask them what 2 plus 2 equals and and they get it right. It rates greater than chance. They don't always get it right. But yeah, we can communicate with people in lucid dreams. That's pretty crazy. See, like I feel like I'd fail that experiment even though I've had lucid dreams because I've had lots of dreams where I realize I'm dreaming, but I still can't make myself control anything. Yeah.
00:45:18
Speaker
um I still am like completely powerless to even like move. And in fact, the more I realize I'm dreaming, it seems the less control I have almost over what happens yeah Yeah, not everyone can control it, right? There's definitely control and non-control lucid dreams. But lucid dreams raise a lot of like philosophical questions or raise a lot of points to think about. If you know it's something we can get better at, should we try to?
00:45:42
Speaker
Maybe we could lucid dream more and solve more of our problems. Maybe we could be more productive if we we're not wasting this time anymore. that We could have a 20 hour work day. Yeah. Yeah. It's surprising to me that the bosses haven't tried to foist this upon the workers like, hey, guys, you need to lucid dream. There's all this conscious life that's being wasted. That's not being used toward economic productivity. Go solve some problems in your dreams. That's right. Become better at lucid dreaming. That's right. It's surprising they haven't tried i that yet. Yeah, I don't know. Like, would do you think would you want to try to lucid dream better? I've thought about this myself.
00:46:15
Speaker
No, I actually hate dreaming. I guess because yours are so bad. Yeah, but I also don't really like happy. I just want to black out. Whoa, Megan. Once in a while, once in a great while, because I know it's not good for you, I treat myself to like a sliver of Benadryl before bed when I like really need to get a good night's sleep, yeah right? I'll take like a third of a Benadryl.
00:46:40
Speaker
And i black out like I'm dead for like nine hour block. Like, you know, you could like shoot a gun in our room and it wouldn't, I wouldn't wake up. And I don't have a single dream or like, I don't, I guess, you know, people say you're always dreaming, but I don't remember them. And I wake up feeling incredible.
00:46:59
Speaker
And nights when I have tons of dreams, like when I wake up and I could just tell you like 15 dreams I had, I feel like crap. But there's so much we could do and we could work on our character, virtue ethics. We can become more virtuous. you can I just want to wake up resting. I don't want i don't want to be working in my sleep.
00:47:18
Speaker
Fine. Fair enough. So lucid dreams, really cool. still so Still somewhat of a mystery. Dreams in general. One takeaway I had from my research into the the science of dreaming, which we haven't talked too much about.
00:47:31
Speaker
There's other podcasts you can listen to for that.
Dreams as Emotional and Cognitive Tools
00:47:33
Speaker
But it's still quite a bit of a mystery. There was a kind of received view or is a received view as called the activation synthesis theory. Basic ideas, dreams are just random brain virings that occur when we sleep, especially during the REM stage of sleep, the rapid eye movement stage. So that's the fourth element of the sleep cycle where your eyes dart back and forth and whatever. Recurrent dreams seem like it would be problematic for that view. Yeah, and just also on that view, the content should be more random than it is, but it's not, right? So this view is fairly popular that it's just random, but the dreams don't seem random when you look at the content. And I think in general, a lot of dream researchers want there to be some function. It's something we do lot. So most dreams occur during the REM stage of sleep. Not all of them, but most them do. And we're in the REM stage of sleep like 20% the night, right? And so we're dreaming a lot. And pretty much everybody dreams. When you wake people up during the REM cycle, which they do in controlled settings, pretty much all the time they're dreaming, like 95% of the time. So it seems like there should be some function. And various functions have been put forward. Emotional regulation, memory consolidation, memory erasure. Often analogies are made to computers. You don't want too much
00:48:56
Speaker
stuff on your computer, cluttering it. you need to clean it from time to time. I tell you that all the time, Megan. You got to use that cleaner or your computer is going to slow down. So too with the brain. It needs to clean itself and it does that during the dream. ah Threat simulation. That might explain the fact that many dreams are negative. This is something we haven't mentioned really. And this certainly applies to you. And in many studies, it's been shown that Something like 75% of dreams have negative elements. They're negatively valence. They're not nightmares, but they're not like fun. There's emotional issues going on. You're being chased.
00:49:31
Speaker
You know, you're, you're, you're lost. That kind of thing. My lucid dream that I alluded to earlier was a negative one. So something that this brings to mind, the functionalist theory especially, and kind of what you said about like dreams not being random, it made me think of the director David Lynch yeah and his work, his the movies and shows he's directed. i think almost everyone will be familiar with David Lynch, but um Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and... et cetera Anyway, so he's known for having this style and that sometimes people call like dream logic. And it gives his films a really distinctive style.
00:50:17
Speaker
But the style is is kind of like one where you are in a dream. And the distinct mood that you can't help but feel when you're watching his films is like threatening. Yeah. it's so They're uncomfortable. They're very uncomfortable. You feel like you're being yeah there's some kind of threat to you, but it but it's not you can't articulate it. Yeah.
00:50:40
Speaker
And things don't make sense. they They make sense emotionally, but they don't make sense like rationally. But they're the kinds of things that would happen in dreams where like, you know, you might be having a dream where you're like passionately kissing someone and then you look in your arms. It's like morphed into your mom or something. Yeah. Right. That's what happened to my lucid dream. Yeah. i i I was kissing you and then you more you morphed into my friend and I was mortified. was like, no, no i'm ah I'm a good boyfriend. Where'd Megan Yeah.
00:51:12
Speaker
Yeah, right. So that's the kind of thing that happens in dreams where it's like somebody just becomes someone else. And in the dream, I mean, you don't question it really, but it usually it's usually a bad thing, right? Like things aren't as they're supposed to be. And that gives you this foreboding sense. So there is something about dreams that makes sense. But as people like describe his work, they kind of have their own logic. Mm hmm.
00:51:33
Speaker
Yeah. And they have have narrative structure. That's another kind of thing the activation synthesis theory has a kind trouble with. Like, why there all these rich narratives if it's just random firing? Like, what's up with the narrative? Maybe your nacho dream was just activation synthesis. Yeah. I'm willing believe that some dreams are like that. Yeah, so threat simulation, that might make It's not an either or. It could be both. That's the issue here. We want like a theory of dreams that accounts for all the content. Freud wanted that. That's why you said they're all about wishes. But dreams are so many and varied and the content of it is so many and varied. We probably shouldn't expect universal theory that applies to every act. it's a large chunk of our life. So I think we shouldn't expect every aspect of that part of our life to all, you know, fall under the exact same function or have the exact same cause or whatever. Yeah. All right. So here's a fun fact about dreaming. And in fact, this was something that always confused me as a kid. I would hear people, usually people like my parents' age or older, talking about how, oh, yeah, you know,
00:52:37
Speaker
People dream in black and white.
Historical Changes in Dream Perception
00:52:39
Speaker
heard this all the time. Really? Oh, yeah. And I was like, what are you talking about? i don't dream in black and white. Like, I dream in color. And these people would say, I remember my grandparents specifically saying to me, like, oh well you must have a really good, a really good mind, really good imagination. You know, most people just dream in black and white.
00:52:57
Speaker
And I've asked my parents about this recently and they said like they dream it's like mostly in black and white, but there is some dreams are in color. Some are in black and white. I don't think in my life I've ever had a black and white dream, but apparently people used to.
00:53:13
Speaker
Yeah. During the heyday of black and white media, black and white television, black and white movies, and 50s, the overwhelming majority of American surveyed said they dreamed in black and white. You know, rates are like 80, 85 percent. And if you poll people nowadays, it's it's the opposite. Only like 10 percent of people say they dream in black and white. Younger people. I'm assuming if you poll like younger people. Yeah. Because if you're polling like 90 year olds and they would have... Yeah, but the over general population is like 10%. I'm sure that's clustered around around the the olds. Yeah. And if you go back in time, you know, there's no indication that people are dreaming in black and white. Aristotle mentions color. Descartes, who if we have time, we'll talk about. It mentions dreams that are just as realistic as waking life experience, and they wouldn't be as realistic if they were in black and white. So there's really no indication in the past that people dreamed in black and white. And there's only this small period of time in human history where people dreamed in black and white. This is an extremely puzzling phenomenon, right? The old overwhelming majority of Americans in 1940s and 50s said they dream in black and white. Now they don't. What is going on here?
00:54:20
Speaker
The TV. Yeah. Right. So it's the TV. So they watch too much TV. But like, what's the significance of this? Like what, what went on here? Like, did they actually dream in black and white or were they mistaken about what their dream was? or were they influenced so much by the the black and white television that they, they, they misremembered or they were somehow wrong about their experience. Like it's very strange. So the philosopher Eric Schwitz-Gabel has um this really interesting paper on this. It's called, Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White? And he uses phenomenon to argue that basically our, what we know about the experience of dreaming is not, like we shouldn't be very confident in that. We've been relying a lot on introspection and all that. But he wants to say that this kind of thing shows us we should be a lot more cautious about our introspective reports about dreams and our own mental life in general.
00:55:16
Speaker
Yeah, phenomenon is interesting because, i mean, for many reasons, but there's also this kind of ambiguity. Like, did people actually dream in black and white? Or is that, you know, how they remember it after the fact? Because i don't know, because their imaginings in their waking life are in black and white because of the TV they're consuming or something like that.
00:55:35
Speaker
Well, you mentioned the word imagining, and I think this is kind of a point of contention when it comes to what exactly a dream is. So we've been assuming, and most people do assume that, it's a kind of hallucination. It's it's as if you are seeing the colors and the shapes and whatever, but they're not actually there. But some people, including Schwitzgabel and a few other philosophers, want to say that this kind of phenomenon and others show that we really should reject the idea that a dream is a hallucination. m A dream is more like an imagination than it is a hallucination.
00:56:07
Speaker
And it's like imagining written fiction, Schwitzgabel says and in that article you mentioned. yeah You can imagine a scene that you're reading in a book and you can imagine in such a way that it's neither in color nor black and white, it just sort of indeterminate. And that's how he thinks about this case. And this leads to, I guess, a substantive dispute about conceptualizing dreams. If we should be a little more cautious about our introspection. and there is a distinction between a hallucination, like as if you're seeing a pink elephant, and an imagination, merely imagining one, then maybe dreams are not what we think they are. Maybe they're more like imagination than they are hallucination.
00:56:46
Speaker
So you mentioned Descartes a little while ago. Some people queuing up a philosophy podcast on dreaming might have um had Descartes' dreaming argument from his meditations on first philosophy come to mind, where he argues that we, you know, should doubt, maybe we should doubt everything that we believe, in part because we can never tell for sure if we're awake or asleep. You know, and I'm dreaming most of the time, unless I'm having a lucid dream. I don't know I'm dreaming. I think I'm awake. So maybe I'm dreaming right now that I'm recording this podcast.
00:57:22
Speaker
See, Descartes' view, his argument presupposes that dreams are like hallucinations. So if if they were an imagination, then you would never confuse a dream like with waking life, right?
00:57:34
Speaker
Yeah. um So, we yeah, we didn't talk too much about Descartes. We're running out of time here. I don't know. do you have any thoughts about external world skepticism, this idea you can't ever tell whether you know you're in a dream or whether you're in the matrix? Like, how do you deal with this as a philosopher, Megan? this' Is this something you think about a lot? ah yeah It's something that I think about as as rarely as possible. A starry-eyed undergrad. They want the answer, Megan. what What do you think? You're a philosopher. Tell me. i mean...
00:58:01
Speaker
I don't think I was ever that interested in Descartes. I was just never really compelled by this question at all. But, you know, fair enough. I could be dreaming right now. You know, it's not totally out of the question. it Seems unlikely, but ah but i'll I'll give them that. Can't know for sure. Even in my lucid dream, though, things things were weird, right? things don't Things are bizarre. They don't work right. Can't you always tell that you're in a dream when you're in one I mean, that it's certainly qualitatively different, but normally I don't in my dreams have the thought that I'm dreaming.
00:58:31
Speaker
so but if you will But if you became lucid, that's because your brain's not active enough. If you became lucid, maybe you would. That's true. but you try You try to write on a paper. The words don't work. Well, there is a discrepancy here in, um so when I wake from a dream, I know that past experience was a dream. But when I slip into a dream from waking, I don't think, oh that experience that I just had of getting into bed, you know, that that was a dream. I don't have that thought. So there's, to me, there's like a dissimilarity there that provides pretty good evidence for when an experience was asleep and when it was awake.
00:59:06
Speaker
I don't know. i don't i'm just I'm not saying that I got Descartes, but I think I got him. Locke thought you couldn't feel pain in a dream. you felt pain in a dream? Yes. That's so, man. You hate Locke. I do. Yeah, that must have been one of the things. He didn't play a drys. He just got it straight from his stupid head.
00:59:23
Speaker
You know, if this is a dream, then i i don't ever want to wake up because I just love recording this podcast. Oh my gosh, that's so sweet. I feel the same way. i can stay in this dream forever. It's really nice note to end on too.
00:59:36
Speaker
All right, we're officially out of time. It's late. We got to get to bed and dream stuff. And you do too, if you're listening to this at night. I don't know. Anyway, join us next time for another episode on something cool.