The Sleep of Reason; or, Dreams
Upon Awakening
NEW FRANCE, 1671. The reverend father had grown accustomed to beaver meat and squash, and even to the cakes made from maize flour chewed up and spit out by elder women before baking. These were considered a delicacy, though the first time he was made to eat one, he could not keep himself from retching. He had grown accustomed to the sight of prisoners of war, captured and taunted, who seemed to fall into delirious ecstasy as they burned, as the bones of their feet and hands were broken one by one. Could a man train himself to endure such an ordeal with defiant joy, not only tolerating but even relishing the pain? He knew that many of the tribe’s men had been through it. They had not been born to the tribe at all, but were adopted after being taken in war and subjected to long torture. They had been given new names, and then incorporated into families as if nothing could be more natural, and seemed now, though scarred and hobbled, perfectly at home. A man can get used to many things, but one thing that would never leave the priest fully at ease was the way these men reacted to their dreams.
He had come to New France to spread the gospel and to baptize the Iroquois into the Roman Catholic Church, and often he had the impression that he was making a persuasive case to the generous men who had allowed him to come live with them, to hunt with them, and to eat with them. At moments it became clear to him that no matter how persuasive he took his case for conversion to be, in the end whether the natives consented to baptism depended not at all on his gift of persuasion, on logical arguments or even imaginative descriptions of the tortures of hell. They were swayed, rather, only by the dreams they had had, which, they believed, gave them visions of the world beyond this world, from which spirits dictated to them their course of action in waking life.
For the first several months he refused to answer when the men asked him, upon awakening, what he himself had dreamed. He shrugged off their questioning and told them it did not matter. But after a time it became clear to him that the report of a dream worked far better than an argument for winning a person over to one’s own side. These men take their dreams for God himself, he began to think. Dreams are the only God of this country. But the only spirit that comes to them in dreams is the devil, and if one night a dream reveals to them the truth of our faith, the very next night that revelation may be reversed.
The chief had even given his consent to be baptized, and had nodded his head approvingly when he was instructed in the principal mysteries of the faith. But one morning soon after, upon awakening, he called for the reverend father and informed him somberly that these doctrines were nothing but a great deceit, “that he had seen himself in a dream, in Heaven, where the French had received him with howls, as it is their custom to do at the arrival of prisoners of war, and that when he had escaped from them, they had already taken red-hot pokers in their hands with which to burn him.”1 The Jesuit had thought himself successful in portraying Christian salvation as the opposite of the world of suffering and misery that, he believed, was all that the Iroquois knew. And now he saw that this effort had been in vain; heaven looked no different from the fate of a prisoner of war after he had been captured. He worried that the chief might decide to kill him, on the basis of nothing more than a dream: something that just comes to us, passively, a string of pell-mell impressions, not anything attained through active reasoning.
The archaeologist and historian Bruce Trigger wrote a generation ago of early modern Jesuit encounters with the Iroquois’s neighbors and frequent enemies, that “in terms of their beliefs about the supernatural forces that were at work in the world, Jesuit and Huron shared considerably more in common with each other than either does with twentieth century man.”2 Trigger might have been working with an idealized version of what “twentieth century man” was really like, but beyond this—however much both the French Jesuit and the Native American worldviews were in the seventeenth century populated by supernatural beings and forces—on the question of epistemic access to these beings and forces, the French and the Americans could not have been more different. This difference marks out a crucial feature of the emerging identity of the modern West.
Our Jesuit is writing, from what would later be Quebec, to his superior in France. This was thirty years after the publication of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, a work all of the following generation of French Jesuits knew well, even if it was subject to their frequent criticism. In this work, not only does Descartes reject the impressions that come to us in dreams as unreliable reports of how the world really is. More crucially, one of his principal concerns is to demonstrate that the knowledge we have of reality is not merely dreamed, but instead comes from actually existing external things, and that, with the help of philosophical reason, we are able to clearly and certainly distinguish between waking and sleeping. Descartes’s authoritative source of knowledge was nothing other than his own mind. He believed this mind to be endowed with the faculty of reason; it was also, for better or worse, endowed with some lesser faculties, such as imagination and sensation, that arose from the fact that the mind, during this life, is intimately wrapped up with, though ontologically distinct from, the body.
It may be that there is no better measure of an era’s relationship to the faculty of reason than its willingness or unwillingness to pay attention to dreams. By the time of the first contact with Native Americans, European travelers would find the reliance of indigenous peoples on oneiromancy—decisions about future actions made on the basis of dream interpretation—foreign and “savage” in the extreme, characteristic of a distant early stage of human history. The modern European mentality that accompanied the travelers to the Americas was the one most clearly formulated by Descartes, who in his Meditations effectively seeks to provide a convincing argument that life is not but a dream, that we may be absolutely certain of the difference between our waking lives and the hallucinations that come to us in sleep. These hallucinations, for Descartes, are nothing more than a regrettable error, to be regretfully acknowledged and then relegated to their proper corner of human experience.
Even for those who are not canonical defenders of rationalist philosophy, in the modern world there is something at least mildly shameful about sleep. Marcel Proust’s narrator in In Search of Lost Time, published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, tells of the family maid, the blushing Françoise, who would deploy the most implausible euphemisms to avoid openly acknowledging the fact that she had fallen asleep—that she had not only shut her eyes but, in so doing, slipped into another cognitive state in which her usual decorum and faithfulness to rules could no longer be expected to hold. And at around the same time this provincial French maid was slipping into dreams in which she found herself not quite herself, and yet somehow more herself than ever, in which her usual guard was let down and all decorum suspended, a Viennese psychiatrist was developing the idea that it is in dreams that the deepest level of the self comes out. This self, the psychiatrist imagined, is a bubbling cauldron of irrational desires, and the rationality of waking life is but a thin wrapping placed around these desires in the vain hope of keeping them contained. Over the course of the twentieth century, it would become fashionable in many quarters to acknowledge, and even to celebrate, this irrationality, to excuse one’s self-destructive behavior on the grounds that it was only the unconscious at work, and nothing could be done to stop it.
We might say that modern philosophy is born in the seventeenth century at the moment Descartes proves, or claims to prove, that he knows with certainty that our waking experiences are not mere illusions, are not a dream. There follow a couple of centuries in which waking life is the only life that counts, at least for grown men. And then dreams come back with a vengeance, with what their great advocate at the end of the nineteenth century would call “the return of the repressed.” In Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, dreams are not an aberration, not a sequence of mistakes to which we are regrettably subjected each night. They are, rather, the key to understanding who we really are. Freud’s purportedly scientific work would have vast repercussions in nearly all domains of arts and culture throughout the early to mid-twentieth century. In this respect, he ushered in an age of irrationality, one that has been resisted, of course, by sundry species of prudes and squares. But it would pass its electric charge down from the various Dadaists and surrealists and other avant-gardes of the First World War, through to the cultural revolutionaries of the 1960s—and, one might contend, on to the internet trolls of today—sowing discord, disrupting the business-as-usual of rule-governed civil discourse, wreaking havoc, having fun, letting imagination and unreason run wild.
But let us not get ahead of ourselves. There were of course dream interpreters lurking around Paris, Amsterdam, and London when Descartes wrote his treatise as well. Kings and other highly placed people were known to consult them. But by the mid-seventeenth century such consultations were either motivated by a sort of ostentatious irrationalism, when undertaken by the elite, or carried out in semisecrecy, in the back alleys of the city, with a stigma not far from that of prostitution. In fact this hierarchical distinction between waking and sleeping as sources of knowledge begins to be elaborated long before Descartes. In his short treatise On Prophecy in Sleep, Aristotle had acknowledged of dream divination that “it is not an easy matter either to despise it or to believe in it,” and asserted that it has at least “some show of reason.”3 The Greek philosopher would ultimately reduce whatever visionary capacity there might be in sleep, however, either to coincidence, or to the sort of physiological rumblings of a coming illness that might first be felt in sleep even if they are still subperceptible to the waking mind.
Aristotle found it dubious, however, that “the sender of such dreams should be God,” given that “those to whom he sends them are not the best and wisest, but merely commonplace persons.”4 Certainly, among the Iroquois and the Hurons, not just anyone’s visionary dream would carry significant weight. Rather there were people occupying a special role, shamans or seers, who were not merely commonplace people. Jesuit missionaries often noticed the ways in which the significance of dreams was emphasized or downplayed, depending on the practical exigencies of waking life. It was as if the seer was drawing on visions from sleep, but doing so with a full understanding that it was up to him to freely select which parts of which dreams might be invoked as relevant for waking life, and that it is only in waking life that the actions based on our choices have real consequences. But the fact remains that there was no one among the Native Americans attempting to demonstrate, as Descartes was, that what we think of as reality is not just a dream. For the most part they unproblematically included dreams within a unified vision of reality; they understood dreams to be instructive and meaningful as guides to what happens in waking life, and perhaps even connected together with waking life within the same causal web. Dreams mattered and were not to be explained away, or quickly brushed aside and forgotten, once we awaken and turn our attention to the real problems of sober-minded, rational, adult human life.
In Europe dreams would remain unseemly and worthy of repression in the centuries following Descartes, indeed up to the present day, notwithstanding Freud’s earnest attempts beginning in fin-de-siècle Vienna to bring them out into the open, to create a sort of science of them, and to make them part of our rational public discussion. Freud had an impact on culture, particularly in the arts, but even at the height of psychoanalysis’s popularity in the English-speaking world in the mid-twentieth century, it was generally a grave social error to, say, tell your boss about the dream you had last night. Your boss does not want to know about your dreams; your boss wants to know about your “solutions,” and if these came to you in a dream, it were best to leave that part out. This is just part of what it means to be a competent person within our rationally functioning society. Oneiromancy is, for us, countercultural, counterproductive, and alien to a well-ordered life. It goes on, of course, but mostly in milieus that are as obscure as sleep itself.
A number of Descartes’s contemporaries wrote works that they themselves described as “dreams,” not because they were sincerely reporting their own dreams, but because they wished to permit themselves, in their writing, to appeal to the imagination rather more than would be possible in a straightforward philosophical text. Thus in 1608 Johannes Kepler wrote his Somnium,5 in order to relate a number of bold ideas concerning lunar astronomy, in the course of an outlandish science-fiction story of witchcraft, out-of-body travel, and strange lunar beings. In 1692 the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz published El Sueño, a philosophical poem in which the soul takes a voyage through a vivid symbolic landscape in its search for true knowledge of God.6 Descartes’s own Meditations themselves play on the dream genre in philosophical and confessional writing. The work is, among many other things, a flight of the imagination, but rather than embedding this flight in a dream, he presents it as a reflection, in waking life, that may be proved to not be a dream.
In the following century, in 1769, the materialist philosopher Denis Diderot plays with the dream genre in order to present his own philosophical views, in Le rêve de D’Alembert (D’Alembert’s Dream).7 And in 1799 we have one of the most iconic representations of a dream in modern history, not in literature but in figurative art: Francisco Goya’s drawing El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Engenders Monsters). A man has fallen asleep, and owls and bats and other unidentifiable nocturnal creatures flutter out from his head. This is the vision of dreaming that motivates Descartes’s concern to prove that we are not dreaming, or at least not always; for Descartes dreaming is a shutting down of reason, and the productions of the mind, when reason is shut down, are dangerous and dark. Yet a countertradition continues throughout modern philosophy, which recognizes the paradoxical result of the suppression of dreams. “In focusing upon one type of experience,” the iconoclastic French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in 1948, “the philosopher makes himself unresponsive to other types of experience. Sometimes very lucid minds become enclosed in their lucidity and deny the many glimmers given off from more shadowy psychic zones.”8 A theory of knowledge of the real world, he concludes, “which is disinterested in oneiric values, severs itself from certain of the interests that push us toward knowledge.”9
What is it about dreams that makes them irrational, apart from the fact that they are not of reality, that they are, in effect, hallucinated? Geometry, on one influential understanding, is not of reality either, since its objects, triangles and circles and so on, are ideal entities and not physical objects in the world. Geometry, then, is about entities that are “in the head” no less than dreams are. Yet geometry is often taken to be the field in which rationality finds its purest and most perfect expression, while dreams are the field where unreason runs rampant. Thus whatever rationality is, it cannot be a matter of correct or accurate correspondence to the “real” world. That might be what truth is, but rationality, we may say as a first stab, has to do rather with making the correct inferences involving what we know, and we can indeed know quite a few things about imaginary or ideal entities. We can know, to trot out an example familiar to philosophers, that a unicorn is one-horned. This is not a fact that would need to be checked out through an empirical survey of real unicorns, as its truth does not depend on the existence of unicorns at all. It depends only on what is packed into the concept of a unicorn, and it is an existence-independent fact about unicorns that if you add another horn or two, then they cease to be unicorns altogether.
Dreams are not like geometrical proofs involving triangles, nor are they, generally, like our waking reflections upon unicorns. The descriptions we give are highly culturally specific, and what we remember of them is determined in no small measure by our personalities and by what we value. A medieval knight might have a dream of parhelia, and wake up believing it was an omen of an impending battle’s outcome; I tend to have dreams saturated with animated images borrowed from Looney Tunes and antique video games, and when I wake up I think only about how strange it is that my dreams are historically conditioned in this way. I will not attempt a phenomenology of dreams valid for everyone, but it will suffice to say here that everyone’s dreams are, well, weird. One way of fleshing out this strong judgment is to say that in dreams we commit constant and flagrant violations of the law of the excluded middle. This law, many Western philosophers have thought, is the very foundation of human reason. It holds that everything either is or is not the case, that either A or not-A must be true, but not neither or both. Yet in dreams this law typically does not hold: one and the same being, for example, can both be and not be a unicorn. Not only might it sprout an extra horn; it might take on the outer form of a pig, or of our ex-landlord (to cite an example from comedian Mitch Hedberg), or it might be dematerialized into pure, shimmering light. Such metamorphoses do not typically trouble us in dreams. We seem somehow able to track deeper truths about the stable identity of the beings that appear there, truths that are not captured by our waking attempts at essential definitions, of the sort “Unicorns are one-horned, hooved animals,” “Landlords are residential-property-owning bipeds,” and the like.
Now, in order for something to both be and not be a horse—let us take an actually existent animal, not a unicorn, in order to simplify the example—we must reject or suspend a deep-rooted metaphysics of natural kinds. Extending back most importantly to Aristotle, this metaphysics has it that in order for a given being to exist from one moment to another, it must be a being that remains of the same kind from one moment to another. For Bucephalus the horse—to invoke a beloved mascot of medieval Latin logic—to cease to be a horse is for Bucephalus the horse to cease to be altogether. There are some noteworthy natural phenomena that have sometimes been taken to problematize this law, notably the metamorphosis of insects, but such phenomena have generally been held to be marvelous and exceptional precisely because they threaten our general account of how things in nature are supposed to work. For the most part, an individual being can be only the sort of being it is, and if it becomes another sort of being, then it ceases to be the same individual it was before.
The discreteness of kinds and the law of the excluded middle, as two pillars of our conception of rationality, are erected already in the philosophy of Aristotle, for whom, again, to be is always to be a being of a certain sort and not some other. Violation of these rules would of course continue after Aristotle, not only in dreams, but in works of literary imagination too. Ovid’s Metamorphoses would celebrate a picture of the world in which individual beings regularly migrate across natural boundaries, and come to belong to kinds to which they did not previously belong, while still remaining fundamentally the same individual beings. The Latin poet’s work is now canonical, and is not perceived as dangerous or threatening. But its safety is won for it by the presumption that it is a product of the poetic imagination and does not purport, in sharp contrast with Aristotle, to tell us how the world really is. (In chapter 4, however, we will see that this distinction is not always enough to guarantee safety for fantastical flights of the imagination.)
Other, later works in the European tradition have dealt with metamorphosis while playing at the boundary between poetry and literalism. In the twelfth century, the Danish Christian chronicler Saxo Grammaticus wrote in scolding condemnation of the Scandinavian pagan legends that celebrated creaturely transformations, in which, for example, a certain Hardgrep, who wishes to seduce her own foster son, “mutably change[s her]self like wax into strange aspects.”10 The size of her superhuman body is “unwieldy for the embraces of a mortal,” and so she transforms herself, as she puts it, “at my own sweet will.”11 Saxo does not himself believe that such a thing ever happened, yet elsewhere in the same work he casually mentions that the earliest Danish kings are descended from bears. He is writing at a time and place in which the elements of what we think of as “rationality”—such as adherence to the law of the excluded middle and to the metaphysics of fixed substances belonging to natural kinds—are undergoing consolidation, and are strongly associated with the cultural-political project of Christianization.
This process is also inseparable from the expansion of textual literacy—Saxo Grammaticus’s very name may be translated, roughly, as “the Literate Dane,” as if it were a great novelty that these two features should be combined in the same person. But they were, as literacy was an intrinsic feature of the expansion of Christian (i.e., Mediterranean) civilization into the more distant regions of Europe over the course of the Middle Ages. The anthropologist Jack Goody has compellingly argued that it was the technology of writing itself that made it possible to conceptualize the world in terms of logical oppositions, the most basic of which is Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction.12 Goody’s argument would bring us far beyond our central concerns here, but it is worth noting that even if much writing—Ovid, notably—engages in fantastical imaginings that violate the laws of logic, still we might venture that such violations come to be perceived as such, as “fantasy” rather than “truth,” only in cultures that anchor their understanding of how the world is in authoritative written texts.
Saxo is witness to the shift of an outlying region of Europe from one sort of culture to the other. Violations of logic would appear over the next several centuries in fantastical legends and fairy tales throughout Europe; they would play an important role in the political project of romantic nationalism in the nineteenth century, when the Brothers Grimm in Germany,13 Aleksandr Afanasyev in Russia,14 and Elias Lönnrot in Finland15 would gather the very un-Aristotelian lore of their countries’ folk traditions, and would present it as evidence of authentic national culture and as grounds of national pride. From Greece and Rome and France, these countries imported their logic, science, and technology. From within, in turn, they were discovering their spells for warding off bears, their tales of witches who aim to roast children in their ovens and of the children who outsmart them, their talking animals and forest sprites. These defiantly irrational, phantasmagorical expressions of culture were to mark out what was unique and irreducible about particular European nations, while their rational heritage was held in common with at least all of their neighbors in the broader region, and, it was to be hoped, would someday be shared with humanity as a whole. This nineteenth-century partition—between the cherished irrational expressions of one’s own culture and the imported, universal benefits of rationality—was deeply connected both with irrationalist tendencies in philosophy and with the irruption of irrationalism as a political force in Europe in the twentieth century.
But for now our concern is with dreams, and with the question why, beyond the fact that they are the product of hallucination, we have come to be so wary of them. And a large part of the answer seems to be that they are, so to speak, metaphysically incorrect: that they perpetually violate the fixity and order that, we have managed to convince ourselves, reigns in waking reality.
Spirits, Vapors, Winds
“The land of shadows is the paradise of dreamers,” Immanuel Kant writes in the preface to The Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766). “Here they find an unlimited country where they may build their houses as they please. Hypochondriac vapors, nursery tales, and monastic miracles provide them with ample building materials.”16 The German philosopher’s target in this work, the “spirit-seer,” is the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, who claimed that a revelation had given him the power to visit heaven and hell at will, and to communicate with angels and other supernatural beings. Kant begins his work with an epigram from Horace: Velut aegri somnia, vanae finguntur species (Like a sick man’s dream, creating vain phantasms).17 Swedenborg’s writings, in other words, for Kant, are the product of febrile delirium.
In this peculiar and very atypical work of the young Kant, his main target may not really be Swedenborg at all, for whom he seems in fact to have an enduring affection in spite of the apparent scorn. Rather, what Kant wishes to show is that the metaphysicians are in no position to criticize the spirit-seer. Here Kant is using the label “metaphysician” to designate respectable academic philosophers, in contrast with the unhinged speculators and rhapsodists like Swedenborg. The metaphysicians and the seers are equally guilty, Kant believes, of holding forth on topics about which they know, and can know, strictly nothing. Kant is articulating this view of metaphysics at the beginning of a long process that would, by the late nineteenth century, give us the positivist philosophers, who went so far as to denounce “metaphysics” as a bad word, along with colorful characters such as the Theosophist Helena Blavatsky, who were quite happy to see their esoteric projects described by this label. By the end of the twentieth century, a typical nonacademic bookstore would feature works by Shirley MacLaine, on her many past lives, in the “Metaphysics” section. The academic philosophers would by now have nothing to say about this, and if pressed would likely shrug off the classificatory scheme in play at the mall bookstore as lying outside of their realm of governance.
The term had moved centrifugally out into the margins as those at the center of the practice of philosophy grew increasingly uncomfortable with it. At the beginning of this centuries-long flight from the center, when Kant was writing, the source of the discomfort lay in the fact that metaphysics, since Aristotle, had been by definition an exploration beyond the scope of scientific observation and experiment, into the first causes of scientifically observable phenomena. After the seventeenth century, only the unhinged, the Swedenborgs and the Blavatskys, could claim innocently to have undertaken such explorations, while meanwhile the serious, the cautious, as it were the hinged, felt compelled to back up their claims of knowledge gathering beyond the realm of experience by some sort of account of how such an undertaking could be possible.
Our principal concern for the moment is not with metaphysics, but with dreams. Kant’s move is to indict metaphysics, as it is being pursued in his time, by characterizing it as little more than the phantasm produced in a sick man’s dream. Recall, now, Aristotle’s view that a genuinely predictive dream is likely going to be one in which the first symptoms of an illness are initially felt in sleep. A person dreams of an illness to come because it has in fact already come, even if it remains for now subperceptible during waking life. Vivid dreams, typically, were held to be symptomatic of many illnesses, and any ancient reader would have taken for granted Horace’s identification of the dreams of a sick man with “vain phantasms.” The spirit-seer, Kant thinks, is like such a person even when he is awake. His phantasms are constructed out of “vapors,” a literal manifestation of which would traditionally have been implicated in the images produced in the mind of a vivid dreamer. But here Kant uses the term metaphorically: the life of a spirit-seer is in a sense a waking dream, to the extent that he allows the dark shadows of his imagination to play a role in his explanation of reality. He mistakes the phantasms of his imagination for concepts of reason.
Certain English translations of Kant’s work have shied away from a literal rendering of the philosopher’s concluding observation in the third chapter of part 1. Emmanuel F. Goerwitz prefers to allude vaguely to a “disordered stomach,” and then to give the original German in a note, which, he says, is “hardly bearable” in English. But the English is no more scandalous than the German, and what Kant in fact says is this: “If a hypochondriac wind clamors in the gut, it all comes down to the direction it takes: if it goes downward, it becomes a fart, but if it goes upwards, it is an apparition or a holy inspiration.”18 If we think Kant is reaching here for humorous effect, we should note that the German term Eingebung, here translated as “inspiration,” has traditionally been rendered as “afflatus,” as in “divine afflatus.” The conceptual connection in Western thought, between spirit as something exalted and holy, on the one hand, and on the other as mere “wind,” is very deep. The connection exists in popular expressions in many Indo-European languages, and the possibility of a confusion between the two registers of spirit has been a staple of comedy since Greek antiquity. For example, the character of Socrates in Aristophanes’s Clouds mocks the gods by suggesting that thunder, far from being a sign of the superhuman might of these beings, is really nothing more than the atmospheric equivalence of intestinal upset. Such comedy often plays on the misperception that a given character has of the importance of his own words: he takes them to be “spiritual,” in the sense of “lofty” or “important,” while his listeners take them to be spirituous in the sense of just so much “wind.” This is what it is to be a “windbag,” to emit flatus vocis as if they were profound observations. Kant is of course aware of, and playing on, this deep association.
The philosopher also underlines in this chapter the conceptual association not just between “spirit” and “wind,” but between both of these and “vapors.” He is certainly aware, in turn, of the hard effort that Descartes had made before him to eliminate any thought of vapors from the effort to understand mental activity, or indeed minds or souls. Vapors, Descartes had insisted, are not some sort of intermediate principle between the body and the soul, partaking of the properties of both of these ontological regions and moving back and forth freely between them. Rather, for the dualist philosopher, every entity is either mind or body, and because vapor is extended and consists in material particles, however fine or spread out they may be, it simply cannot be considered spirit in any rigorous sense of the term. To conceive of spirit as if it were a wind, gas, or vapor is to allow the imagination to get in the way of rational inquiry into a problem of philosophy where no imagination is necessary or useful: there is nothing to form an image of, nothing to “imaginate.”
“Vapors,” of course, or more correctly “the vapors,” is also the name of a well-known medical condition, one from which upper-class women in particular were long thought to suffer. Upper-class women and those preoccupied with them found “the vapors” useful as an explanation of social behavior such as dramatic swooning or a disinclination to get out of bed. The socially constructed character of this condition was a fairly common theme already in the seventeenth century. Thus in 1676 Leibniz notes that “there is a sort of sickness in Paris of which the women habitually complain, and which they call ‘vapors’ … These blind them as if some thick cloud came and darkened their vision and their mind.” Leibniz observes skeptically that the common comparison of the human head to an alembic, as used in chemical experiments, in which gases rise upward through a narrow passage, is nothing more than a metaphor, an aid to the imagination that captures something about the way we feel when we are light-headed, but that does not properly identify the agents that are in fact responsible.
Vapors are what the British anthropologist Mary Douglas would call a “natural symbol.”20 Fog, mist, candle smoke, and other such liminal entities seem, evidently across all human cultures, to connect earthly reality with some other reality generally more difficult of access. With the dawn of modern philosophy in the seventeenth century, there is a consistent effort, continuing up through the work of Kant, to expose this liminal connection as mere seeming, as simply a bit of folk wisdom that has no place in the rigorous project of clarifying and analyzing concepts, such as those of mind and body. To see vapors or otherwise believe oneself to be affected by vapors is to rush too quickly to a purported explanation of one’s lapse into irrationality, while in fact what is irrational, from the point of view of modern philosophy, is to suppose that vapors are playing a role in one’s mental activity at all.
Of course, sometimes vapors really do affect the mind, notably in the form of inhaled smoke of tobacco, or of opium, the use of which by the Turks was of great interest to the young Leibniz: “The Turks are in the habit of using opium in order to bring about cheerfulness,” he writes in 1671, “they believe that it … revives a man’s soul.”21 The fact that there are such substances, by which people can revive or otherwise transfigure the soul simply by inhaling or ingesting them, speaks strongly in favor of the folk view that the philosophers were arguing against: that the soul itself partakes of the nature of such fine or aery substances. Beyond this, moreover, the very existence of narcotics, of stupefacients and hallucinogens, is itself the source of a number of philosophical questions that did not escape attention in the early modern period, and that are centrally connected to the question of dreams. In Kepler’s Somnium the transit to the moon is brought about by the ingestion of certain unspecified herbal potions, of which, we may presume, Kepler’s own mother Katharina, née Guldenmann, in fact had knowledge. She was, at the time the astronomer wrote this treatise, in a prison in Stuttgart awaiting trial on suspicion of witchcraft.
Is it from her that Kepler got the idea of taking a drug that would send a person to the moon, figuratively speaking? Whether or no, it is significant that Kepler understands a drug-induced quest as a variety of “dream.” A dream or somnium in this expanded sense is not necessarily what one experiences in sleep, but rather what one experiences alone, in one’s mind, even as one’s body stays put in bed, or in a chair, or simply stoned and staring at the wall.
Hearing Voices
We have already seen that a philosopher is not a seer. A philosopher is not, or should not be, a magician, an enthusiast, or a feverish vapor-headed visionary, even if these social roles are all part of the lineage of philosophy, and thus ones that can only be grown out of, rather than dismissed as the eternal opposite of philosophy. This is what Virginia Woolf understood when she asked: “And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars?”22 A philosopher does not divine, or invoke, or simply take dictation from a higher source, real or imagined, but rather thinks through things, step by step, for himself. But things have not always been this way.
According to the bold and influential thesis of Julian Jaynes, the transition from seers to philosophers is one that tracks transformations experienced by humanity as a whole in the relatively recent past. In his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the psychologist argues that until somewhere between three and five millennia ago, human beings “heard voices” pervasively and continually; they thus had waking “dreams” in the expanded sense we have already considered, in the way that today a relatively small number of people classified as mentally ill do. They lived their lives attuned to their inner voices, and it is only when, by some as yet poorly understood evolutionary leap, the bicameral mind breaks down that we begin to engage in individual conscious deliberation.
What is the bicameral mind? Jaynes explains that in it “volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever, and then ‘told’ to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or ‘god’, or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not ‘see’ what to do by himself.”23 Jaynes believes that we can turn to written history, to texts, as evidence for this thesis, and that in particular in the earliest prose writing we see little evidence of individual consciousness. He takes the work of Homer, presumably composed around 800 BCE, as exemplary in this regard. “Who … were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips?” Jaynes asks. “They were voices whose speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients.”24
But what can we really conclude from the strangeness of the world Homer describes? Jaynes looks to texts for evidence of a fundamental difference between the minds of early Greeks and our own; ironically, anthropologists such as Jack Goody and historians of science such as G.E.R. Lloyd have compellingly argued that it was the production of texts themselves, the elaboration of ideas in lists, tabulations, and so on, that gradually led to a closer attention to the possible forms of argument, and to the emergence of explicit accounts of what we now think of as reason. But writing, while it makes this emergence possible, is good at doing a number of other things too, among them capturing the experience of reveries, ecstasies, and other apparent signs of the inner working of “voices.”
Does the earliest writing really reveal a mentality different from our own?25 Or does it simply reveal a writing different from ours? Even in the space of just a handful of centuries that divides our own era’s vivid novels from medieval knights-errant tales, we see a vastly different approach to human interiority. We take our own era’s works to be “superior” in this regard: Proust and Woolf, we suppose, probe more deeply into the human soul, are greater “psychologists”—as Nietzsche said of Stendhal—than, say, the authors of Piers Plowman or of the Norse sagas. Does this mean that there has been yet another evolutionary leap in human history since the Middle Ages? Or does it mean that our expectations as to what sort of things might best be done with a particular technology and a particular creative tradition—namely, writing and literature—have changed? Are we even correct about the greater depth of works of literature closer in time to us, or are we simply more responsive to these works because they are closer to us?
If we suppose that the work of Homer is a sort of transitional fossil between different evolutionary stages of human cognition, should we, moreover, suppose that the genetic mutation that caused the unification of the bicameral mind happened first in the eastern Mediterranean? Other literary traditions with many of the same features (e.g., psychologically flat characters with no apparent interior states, capable only of automatic action) emerge considerably later in other parts of the world; are we then to suppose that the evolutionary leap Jaynes dates to the period of the Mycenaean bards who gradually generated the Iliad happened only centuries later in Scandinavia? Oral poetic traditions that preserve these same features continue to enjoy some vitality today in Serbia, in Yakutia, and elsewhere. Do these cultural survivals mean that the people who practice them are at a lower stage of evolution than other human groups?
Jaynes was a bold thinker, but the legacy of his thesis is severely compromised by his hasty hermeneutical method: he presumed that cultural practices, such as those that left written traces of archaic storytelling, might reveal something to us about intrinsic features of the individual minds implicated in these practices, rather than simply revealing something to us about the cultures these individual minds inhabited. In the West, certainly, there was a significant shift over the past three millennia from revelation to deliberation, from seers to philosophers; indeed the very idea of what we take to be the West is centrally wrapped up with this shift. But to take this as a natural, evolutionary phenomenon, rather than as the product of particular cultural practices—as, for example, Lloyd has done26—is an expression of pure parochialism. Jaynes’s approach is in principle promising: we should not be afraid to look back to textual history as part of our effort to understand the natural history of humanity, back to philology as a part of the full naturalistic account of what it is to be human. But if we are going to use cultural traces to help make sense of the natural, we must be sure that what we take to be natural is not itself in truth a cultural trace.
It may be that we are no more justified in asking why Homer did not seem interested in personal identity or in logical inference, in the way that many of his fellow Greeks would be just a few centuries later, than we would be in asking why James Joyce does not devote any time to the quantum superposition problem, or why Barbra Streisand does not sing about the Anthropocene. It may be that they are unaware of the great conceptual innovations going on during or near the time at which they are creating their work, but it also may be that that’s just not the kind of work they are doing. Homer, like countless Siberian, Balkan, or Australian bards over the past fifty thousand years, is concerned not with originality, but with intonation and delivery: such bards are perfectly attuned to the circumstances of the day, and to the mood and expectations of their listeners. But the work of art is not an improvisation; it is performed from a score, so to speak, one that exists only in intergenerational memory and in the instances of its performance.
The words of the poet himself, as opposed to the scribes who later wrote these words down, could in no way have been anchored in visible signs, in text. And in this the first Homer—the oral Homer who preceded the written Homer by some centuries—shared in the experience of poetry and recitation that is much more common in the history of humanity than the experience of reading from written texts. For the vast majority of the time that human beings have been on Earth, words have had no worldly reality other than the sound made when they are spoken. As the theorist Walter J. Ong pointed out in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, now to imagine how differently language would have been experienced in a culture of “primary orality.”27 There would be nowhere to “look up a word,” no authoritative source telling us the shape the word “actually” takes. There would be no way to affirm the word’s existence at all except by speaking it—and this necessary condition of survival is important for understanding the relatively repetitive nature of epic poetry. Say it over and over again, or it will slip away. In the absence of fixed, textual anchors for words, there would be a sharp sense that language is charged with power, magic: the idea that words, when spoken, can bring about new states of affairs in the world. They do not so much describe, as invoke.
Literacy, then, brings with it a suite of conceptual transformations that ought to be of interest to philosophers and to cognitive historians such as Jaynes. For it may well be that we can explain the apparent brain mutations of the Neolithic not as internal events in the history of hominid evolution, but rather as the consequence of new practices emerging around new technologies of knowledge storage and transmission. Logic, in particular—insistence on making the right inferences about how the world really is, rather than offering poetic invocations of how the world could be—could be simply a side effect of writing. Homer’s epic poetry, which originates in the same oral epic traditions as those of the Balkans or of West Africa, was written down, frozen, fixed, and from this it became “literature.” There are no arguments in the Iliad: much of what is said arises from metrical exigencies, the need to fill in a line with the right number of syllables, or from epithets whose function is largely mnemonic (and thus unnecessary when transferred into writing). Yet Homer would become an authority for early philosophers nonetheless: revealing truths about humanity not by argument or debate, but by declamation, now frozen into text.
Plato would express extreme concern about the role, if any, that poets should play in society. But he was not talking about poets as we think of them: he had in mind reciters, bards who incite emotions with living performances, invocations and channelings of absent persons and beings. It is not orality that philosophy rejects, necessarily. Socrates himself rejected writing, identifying instead with a form of oral culture. Plato would also ensure the philosophical canonization of his own mentor by writing down (how faithfully, we do not know with precision) what Socrates would have preferred to merely say, and so would have preferred to have lost to the wind. Arguably, it is in virtue of Plato’s recording that we might say, today, that Socrates was a philosopher. Plato and Aristotle both were willing to learn from Homer, once he had been written down. And Socrates for his part was already engaged in a sort of activity very different from poetic recitation. This was dialectic: the structured working-through of a question toward an end that has not been predetermined—even if this practice emerged indirectly from forms of reasoning actualized only with the advent of writing. The freezing in text of dialectical reasoning, with a heavy admixture (however impure or problematic) of poetry, aphorism, and myth, became the model for what, in the European tradition, was thought of as “philosophy” for the next few millennia. The place of poetry, aphorism, and myth has often been disputed, and these are frequently cast out of philosophy strictly conceived. But, as Horace said of the nature we ever seek to shut out, they all just keep roaring back.
The emergence of reason as an ideal, and the discovery of the individual self as the locus of reasoning, required no genetic mutation, no internal transformation in the brain causing the voices to go silent and a new, more ordered and logical regime to take over. It required only a change of practices. James C. Scott has compellingly described writing, as it emerged in the early Mesopotamian state, as a “a new form of control,”28 and we may understand this in the dual sense with which we are already familiar from Plato’s Republic: it permits the control of society through administrative record keeping, and it permits the control of the individual mind as a prosthetic to memory and reasoning.
Bitter Little Embryos
E. R. Dodds, in his groundbreaking 1951 book The Greeks and the Irrational, notes that uneasy contemporary scholars have been inclined to dismiss the role of dreams in Homer as so much “poetic convention” or “epic machinery,” rather than revealing to us something important about the place of dreams in early Greek society. For him it is significant that the Greeks speak always of “seeing” a dream, rather than “having” one: the dreamer “is the passive recipient of an objective vision.”29 For the Greeks, “as for other ancient peoples,”30 there was a crucial distinction between significant and insignificant dreams.31 Among significant dreams, there are, as Dodds explains, following Macrobius, three subcategories. First, there are the symbolic ones, which “dress up in metaphors, like a sort of riddles, a meaning which cannot be understood without interpretation.”32 Others fall into the category of the horama, or “vision,” “a straightforward preënactment of a future event.”33 And finally there are the chrematismos, or “oracle” dreams, “when in sleep the dreamer’s parent, or some other respected or impressive personage, perhaps a priest, or even a god, reveals without symbolism what will or will not happen, or should or should not be done.”34
Modern psychoanalysts, one might note, would accept only the first sort of significant dream, the one that requires interpretation; if a dreamer were to encounter a straightforward vision or oracle, they would assume that it only appeared as such, but did not in fact mean what it said. It is easier to assume of the two latter sorts of dreams, as many Greeks did, that they were sent by a god or by some higher source. Dodds notes that such “divine dreams” are common in Assyrian, Hittite, and Egyptian sources, and that they are also well attested among “primitive” people today.35 The Greeks often “incubated” such dreams, by fasting, self-injury, and other harsh techniques to induce an atypical state of mind.
In dreams, Aristotle notes, “the element of judgment is absent.”36 Yet it is in what Freud called the “secondary elaboration” of the dream, in waking, that it becomes incorporated into what Dodds describes as a “culture-pattern.” This is a meaningful cultural nexus where the strangeness of the dream is sloughed off, and what remains is only an eminently meaningful core, ready to be incorporated into pragmatic social action. There is, Dodds explains, a “pattern of belief which is accepted not only by the dreamer but usually by everyone in his environment.”37 The form of the experience of a dream “is determined by the belief, and in turn confirms it; hence they become increasingly stylised.”38 The Victorian anthropologist Edward Tylor saw this as a “vicious circle”: “What the dreamer believes he therefore sees, and what he sees he therefore believes.”39 Dodds sees it rather as a variety of what we might call, following W.V.O. Quine, “meaning holism”:40 the dream is received into a web of significations determined in advance by society, and in which it loses its individual character and takes on a social life. It is in the absence of any shared social understanding of what dream images mean that they seem to us so irreducibly strange, so untranslatable.
Freud, for his part, was hardly able to offer a key for the translation of dreams that might have made dreams part of shared social space rather than remaining our own private baggage—baggage that we carry throughout the day and cautiously keep to ourselves. In his 1899 The Interpretation of Dreams, he aims to lay out a “psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted,” and moreover to establish “that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state.”41 His framework for understanding dreams is largely based upon the idea that we are all living to a greater or lesser degree with neuroses, and that these manifest themselves symbolically in our sleep.
Thus, for example, one of Freud’s female patients dreams that “a man with a light beard and a peculiar glittering eye is pointing to a sign board attached to a tree which reads: uclamparia—wet.”42 We can leave out some of the details in order to zero in on some elements that are exemplary of Freud’s method. He determines that “wet” contrasts with “dry,” and that “Dry” had been the name of the man the woman was going to marry, had he not been an alcoholic. It is also connected etymologically to drei, or “three,” which reveals an unconscious thought of the monastery of the Three Fountains, where she had once drunk an elixir, made from eucalyptus, that was given to her by a monk. The neurosis for which she is consulting Freud had initially been diagnosed as malaria, and the nonsense dream word is in fact a portmanteau of “eucalyptus” and “malaria.” “The condensation ‘uclamparia—wet’ is therefore,” Freud explains, “the point of junction for the dream as well as for the neurosis.”43
Now this may be more or less satisfying as an explanation, likely depending on one’s prior investment in believing in Freudian theory. But it is important to note that it hardly places the patient within a community of publicly accepted and shared dream meanings, as had been the case, say, for the Iroquois. Rather, she shares her private story with the expert, and gets a private account of its real significance, and then, most likely, she keeps this significance strictly to herself, while the analyst keeps her money.
Vladimir Nabokov would level, in spectacular fashion, the complaint that psychoanalysis is in the end only “oneiromancy and mythogeny,” that Freud’s world is “vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval,” with its “crankish quest for sexual symbols.”44 He denounced Freud’s patients, like the one whose dream we’ve just considered, as “bitter little embryos spying … upon the love life of their parents.”45 What Nabokov could not abide is the idea that we might be mysteries to ourselves, that we might not be fully in command of our own lives, but rather are all driven by strange tics and hang-ups that we must turn to someone else, a purported expert, to discern. What is interesting to us here is the accusation that Freud’s work advances not at all beyond the divinatory practices of what is often held to be a more benighted age. But Freud is in an important sense less ambitious than the soothsayers. He does not want to have statesmen making decisions on the basis of dream symbolism. At most he would want to help statesmen, or at least the Viennese haute bourgeoisie, to gain sufficient psychological well-being to make sound and adequately reasoned decisions.
In any case Freud did not by and large succeed, and dreams remain for the most part on the margins of our society. In most countries psychoanalysis is relatively less successful today than more focused psychotherapies. The latter seek to train people to overcome concrete aspects of their behavior with which they are unhappy, rather than attempting in some way to reveal the truth about the causes of these behaviors and thereby to enable them to better know themselves. Psychological therapy today in most parts of the world is less philosophical, and far more effective, than psychoanalysis.
Even if Freudianism had proved more enduring than cognitive behavioral therapy and similar approaches, dreams would not have been part of our shared public life, but only part of our psychoanalysts’ confidential files on us. There is no shared culture-pattern in Dodds’s sense enabling us to incorporate them. Thinkers from Descartes to Tylor did their best to keep dreams excluded. In spite of Freud’s labor, for the most part the keys to their interpretation will be found not in the psychology section of the bookstore, but on the shelves labeled “occult” (or again, which is often the same thing, “metaphysics”). Here, we may wonder whether this approach is in fact the most rational. Or is the society—such as the Iroquois or the Greek—with an established process for receiving its members’ dreams into shared waking experience in fact the one that is better at managing a human experience that is, in any case, irrepressible and ineradicable?
The reverend father awakens at dawn and sees a few remaining embers glowing in the campfire. The Huron men are still asleep around him; a few of them are twitching and muttering. Just a moment earlier he had been in Rouen, or so he thought, stroking an orange cat in an alleyway between his boarding school and the home of the old maid with the wandering eye. The cat looked at him and communicated, somehow, without speaking, the message that God does not exist. Then it suddenly darted away, as if in fear. The alleyway smelled like asparagus. He woke up. He knew right away his comrades would soon be asking him, as they always did upon awakening, if he’d had any significant dreams. What could he possibly tell them? Who can know what signifies what in that mad storm of phantasms? If it means anything at all, then the meaning comes only from the order we impose upon the dream after we wake. In itself it is just madness. Cats do not hold forth on theological matters. And in any case God does exist. There are incontrovertible proofs of this, and any man who has the use of his faculty of reason can study them and convince himself that they are true. There is, moreover, no asparagus in America, the Jesuit thinks. To smell it on this side of the sea is to conjure a sensation directly out of one’s own desire. There is power in the madness of dreams, he thinks. Altogether too much power.