Perchance to Dream

Will “Rationality” Hold?

Editor’s Note: The last drowsy days of summer call for philosophy and searching discussion…just the right time for our in-house philosopher Samuel Kimbriel to explore the strange way that old certainties seem to be fading . . . but into what? 

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It feels like we are gradually slipping into a new age of the dream. For a happy period in the last century, it seemed possible to draw certain strict lines. Domains could be specified: science could tell us about the outer world and neuroscience or psychology about the inner. There were strong distinctions between the clear facts of physics and biology and the expressiveness of the arts. Our interior lives were puzzling, but containable. One could trace out the soul’s patterns and habits, but it stayed where it should — in the realm of sensibility, or personal history or expression. And the objective world also stayed where it should. One could conduct reliable analysis and come to a confidence interval about the state of things. 

It’s not as though a single wave has overflowed this dyke on its own. The power of science and observation, of the idea of “fact” and data, it’s all still there. Clean, definable objectivity still commands powerful social respect and webs of institutions worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Many of the most important political movements of our time are built on this sense of clarity and objectivity. 

And yet, and yet . . . in myself and so many people I know, this line itself — often contrary to our intentions — has begun to flicker. It’s the line which defines what is inside and what is outside. The line that says there is a real world and then there are feelings. The line that says the world is over there, clean, definable, manageable, and me over here, muddled as ever.

This wavering shows up all over: the new popularity of panpsychism, for instance (in two of the most hard-nosed of all academic disciplines, neuro-science and analytic philosophy of mind, no-less). It’s showing up in the rapidly expanding fervor for psychedelics. It’s there in the way that people’s eyes glaze over when one talks about “defending facts” or avoiding a “post truth” age. It’s there in the strange non-linearity of our fragmented post–social-media consciousness.  It’s there in the salivating predictions for artificial intelligence and “the Singularity.” It’s there in the demise of the entire “secularization thesis.” 

If we are renegotiating the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity, so what? For arch-rationalists like Steven Pinker, this possibility is akin to letting the sea flow back over Amsterdam. Rationality, in his strict objectivist sense,

spells the difference between moral force and brute force, between marches for justice and lynch mobs, between human progress and breaking things. And it will be needed to ensure that moral progress will continue: that the abominable practices of our day will be seen by our descendants as slave auctions and heretic burnings seem to us.

The subjective world can be embraced for its pleasures, but it must, in Pinker’s telling, be severely chastened by the rules of rationality so as to keep the true world in view. And yet, despite our best intentions, and for all the moral admonitions from Pinker and the like, somehow the sea seems to be overtaking us nonetheless.

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I’m now 38 years old, and it turns out that I still don’t have any idea what dreams are.

I’ve always dreamed vividly. Some dreams — many — feel terrestrial. A colleague will appear but vaguely transmuted; one will get immersed in an unfamiliar conversation only to realize it’s a re-costumed premonition of a difficult encounter in the coming week; a pulsating mood from an evening concert will continue directly into sleep. 

We now have an increasingly well-developed scientific literature on dreams. We’ve moved beyond the days of Dr. Freud scribbling his notes in pencil. Controlled studies correlate large databases of participant description with highly tuned analysis of neural firing. Much of this scientific literature argues that dreams are explicable. We can trace both biological functions of dreams and their mental functions — for example, simulating the events of ordinary life as preparation for encountering them. 

But dreams remain . . . strange.  I can still feel the experience of a dream I had during a severe fever when I was five or six years old. The sense of space and time had more or less stabilized at that age in normal life, but during the illness it became completely unmoored. The world itself would bend and melt — the rigid lines of the room suddenly expanding to the size of galaxies; rigid walls turning to pools of rubber. It was terrifying, but not because I was afraid of falling into the void. It terrified because my own consciousness was turning and slipping with similar elasticity.

It’s not just fever. I kept a dream journal for a while, I think because of some college assignment — scribbling as much as I could remember in those first moments after waking up. Some dreams track the pattern above — explicable, familiar recombinations of people, places, experiences. But so many others seem completely unanalogical — arising beyond the boundaries not just of experience but of my entire imagination.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge recounts the process that led to writing “Kubla Khan.” He fell asleep, again in the middle of a minor illness and

continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! 

Even amidst his scraping and scratching back for the substance of those lost lines, Coleridge ended up producing what would become one of the finest poems written in the language. Like so many dreams, the poem is just close enough to being understood to make its incomprehensibility intoxicating: 

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

The history of interpreting dreams traces lines that feel familiar elsewhere. So much of antiquity inhabits a consciousness in which categories like objectivity and subjectivity that we fervently keep divided were never even imaginably distinguished. The Mesopatamians had a major cult dedicated to the goddess of dreams, Mamu — for them, dreams seemed to be as much a matter of the real, factual world as crops or weather. Perhaps dreams are the actual intrusion of external creatures, or perhaps we are the ones intruding on a foreign country that we know very little about. 

Our English word “dream” has a confusing etymology. Its early primary sense had more to do with joy and music, only later blending into the sense of sleeping visions. The association with phantoms and falsities appears early as well, but also the sense of straining toward unknown possibilities. Think of the many strange ambiguities in the title A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

The world of dreams is not just alien; it’s also somehow shared. If the lines above were just Coleridge with “an undigested bit of beef,” as Dickens would later put it, then why don’t they remain with him? How could they possibly reach across centuries into my own viscera as well? 

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One of the books I linked above is called The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming: The Where, How, When, What and Why of Dreams. It’s a comforting title. It promises to take perhaps our most uncertain, shifting, obstinately foggy aspect of interiority, and embed it in the clean cool world of rationality. We know finally what objectively, clearly exists — molecular processes, biological triggers, neural firing patterns — and it turns out that the entire inward, snarled mess can be neatly correlated back to that pleasant, sterile map.

But even in that description one can see the problem—sterility. The line seems to be wavering not for people who have simply denied rationality, but precisely for those who have embraced it. It’s among the rationalists and technologists that psychedelics have taken off. It is those who have rejected religion who are now looking for spirit. The stories, scientific and otherwise, all feel too meager, and what does politics need more than new vision?

I’m not sure that a new age in which object and subject get muddled will be entirely safe. And Pinker may be right that cold boring reason has safeguarded us from far darker parts of the human psyche.

But such fears also forget just how recently the hardened lines of subject and object were formed, and how provisionally. The whole of our philosophical tradition has been haunted by the issue of “truth,” but the idea that truth only holds under strict conditions of experimental objectivity would have come as profound shock to the great Platonists and Islamic philosophers; to the Humanists and the Hegelians. 

Humanity has in fact never stopped swimming in the world of the dream. The great quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli was said to make many of his core discoveries while dreaming (as perhaps did Niels Bohr, though those accounts may be more apocryphal). The question of why there is a world, and how we know it was no less mysterious in the previous regime than the one that seems to be emerging.  Even the perception on which science relies requires a kind of courage to feel our hands along the wall as best we can. We confront the world only ever as ourselves, and there is simply no way to circumvent this, no matter how strict our conditions of scrutiny.  

Who knows, perhaps the dykes will hold? But it seems like despite our intentions, they may well be failing.

But if that happens, it doesn’t really seem like Pinkerian apocalypticism—the fear that without strict modern rationalism, society is lost—is the right mood after all. There may well be dangers, but our species has found its way before in waters where subject and object have mingled. And perhaps it will in the end prove to be the way beyond this world that has come to seem clean, but also meager.