Sigmund Freud, On Dreams (1901), translated by M.D. Eder
"'Dreams mean nothing," Crick croaks, "just neural housecleaning. The quicker we forget our dreams the better." He's telling me my dreams, where I get my best sets and characters are meaningless. Meaningless to whom, exactly? They can't even think straight. As if "meaning" floats about in a vacuum, with no relation to time, place, or person.'
William S. Burroughs, from My Education: A Book of Dreams (Picador, 1995)
'Homer was aware that dreams are ambiguous and that it was not easy to distinguish between reliable ones, which reach us "through the gate of horn", and misleading ones that come "through the gate of ivory".'
Robert Flaceliere, from Devins et Oracles Grecs
'Dionysian metamorphoses are the scintillations of nature's high-energy perpetual-motion machine. Sparagmos and metamorphosis, sex and violence flood our dream life, where objects and persons flicker and merge. Dreams are Dionysian magic in the sensory inflammation of sleep.'
Camille Paglia, from Sexual Personae (Yale University Press, 1990)
"In ages of crude, primordial cultures, man thought he could come to know a second real world in dreams: this is the origin of all metaphysics. Without dreams man would have found no occasion to divide the world. The separation into body and soul is also connected to the oldest views about dreams, as is the assumption of a spiritual apparition that is, the origin of all belief in ghosts, and probably also in gods. "The dead man lives on, because he appears to the living man in dreams." So man concluded formerly, throughout many thousands of years."
Friedrich
Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Humam (1878), translated by Helen Zimmern,
1909-1913)
Dreams and
culture.
The utter clarity of
all dream-ideas, which presupposes an unconditional belief
in their reality, reminds us once again of the state of
earlier mankind in which hallucinations were
extraordinarily frequent, and sometimes seized whole
communities, whole nations simultaneously. Thus, in our
sleep and dreams, we go through the work of earlier mankind
once more.
Friedrich
Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human (1878), translated by Helen Zimmern,
1909-1913)
'When the dream appears openly absurd, when it contains an
obvious paradox in its content, it is so of purpose.
Through its apparent disregard of all logical claims, it
expresses a part of the intellectual content of the dream
ideas.'
Sigmund
Freud, On
Dreams (1901), translated by M.D. Eder
'The casual connection between two ideas is either left
without presentation, or replaced by two different long
portions of dreams one after the other. This presentation
is frequently a reversed one, the beginning of the dream
being the deduction, and its end the hypothesis. The direct
transformation of one thing into another in a dream seems
to serve the relationship of cause and effect. The dream
never utters the alternative "either/or", but accepts both
as having equal rights in the same connection. When
"either/or" is used in the reproduction of dreams, it is to
be replaced by "and".
Sigmund
Freud, On
Dreams (1901), translated by M.D. Eder
'There seems to be no "not" in dreams.'
Sigmund
Freud, On
Dreams (1901), translated by M.D. Eder
"Islam is probably the largest night-dream culture in the
world today. The night dream is thought to offer a way to
metaphysical and divinatory knowledge to offer clarity
concerning action in the world."
Iain Edgar, (social anthropologist, Durham University)
Dream
If dreaming really were a kind of truce
(as people claim), a sheer repose of mind.
why then if you should waken up abruptly,
do you feel that something has been stolen from you?
Why should it be so sad, the early morning?
It robs us of an inconceivable gift,
so ultimate it is only knowable
in a trance which the nightwatch gilds with dreams,
dreams that might very well be reflections,
fragments from the treasure-house of darkness,
from that timeless sphere that does not have a name,
and that the day distorts in its mirrors.
Who will you be tonight in your dreamfall
into the dark, on the other side of the wall?
Jorge Luis
Borges, from
Selected Poems (Penguin, 1999)
Translation © Alastair Reid, 1999
The logic of
dreams. When
we sleep, our nervous system is continually stimulated by
various inner causes: almost all the organs secrete and are
active; the blood circulates turbulently; the sleeper's
position presses certain limbs; his blankets influence
sensation in various ways; the stomach digests and disturbs
other organs with its movements; the intestines turn; the
placement of the head occasions unusual positions of the
muscles; the feet, without shoes, their soles not pressing
on the floor, cause a feeling of unusualness, as does the
different way the whole body is clothed after its daily
change and variation, all of this strangeness stimulates
the entire system, including even the brain function. And
so there are a hundred occasions for the mind to be amazed,
and to seek reasons for this stimulation. It is the dream
which seeks and imagines the causes for those stimulated
feelings--that is, the alleged causes. The man who ties two
straps around his feet, for example, may dream that two
snakes are winding about his feet. This is at first a
hypothesis, then a belief, accompanied by a pictorial idea
and elaboration: "These snakes must be the causa of that
feeling which I, the sleeper, am having"‑thus judges the
mind of the sleeper. The stimulated imagination turns the
recent past, disclosed in this way, into the present.
Everyone knows from experience how fast the dreamer can
incorporate into his dream a loud sound he hears, bell
ringing, for example, or cannon fire, how he can explain it
after the fact from his dream, so that he believes he is
experiencing first the occasioning factors, and then that
sound'
But how is it that the mind of the dreamer always errs so
greatly, while the same mind awake tends to be so sober,
careful, and skeptical about hypotheses? Why does he think
the first best hypothesis that explains a feeling is enough
to believe in it at once? (For when dreaming, we believe in
the dream as if it were reality; that is, we take our
hypothesis for fully proven.)
I think that man still draws conclusions in his dreams as
mankind once did in a waking state, through many thousands
of years: the firstcausa which occurred to the mind to
explain something that needed explaining sufficed and was
taken for truth. (According to the tales of travelers,
savages proceed this way even today.) This old aspect of
humanity lives on in us in our dreams, for it is the basis
upon which higher reason developed, and is still
developing, in every human: the dream restores us to
distant states of human culture and gives us a means by
which to understand them better. Dream-thought14 is so easy
for us now because, during mankind's immense periods of
development, we have been so well drilled in just this form
of fantastic and cheap explanation from the first, best
idea. In this way dreaming is recuperation for a brain
which must satisfy by day the stricter demands made on
thought by higher culture.
A related occurrence when we are awake can be viewed as a
virtual gate and antechamber to the dream. If we close our
eyes, the brain produces a multitude of impressions of
light and colors, probably as a kind of postlude and echo
to all those effects of light which penetrate it by day.
Now, however, our reason (in league with imagination)
immediately works these plays of color, formless in
themselves, into definite figures, forms, landscapes,
moving groups. Once again, the actual process is a kind of
conclusion from the effect to the cause; as the mind
inquires about the origin of these light impressions and
colors, it assumes those figures and shapes to be the
cause. They seem to be the occasion of those colors and
lights, because the mind is used to finding an occasioning
cause for every color and every light impression it
receives by day, with eyes open. Here, then, the
imagination keeps pushing images upon the mind, using in
their production the visual impressions of the day--and
this is precisely what dream imagination does. That is, the
supposed cause is deduced from the effect and imagined
after the effect. All this with an extraordinary speed, so
that, as with a conjurer, judgment becomes confused, and a
sequence can appear to be a synchronism, or even a reversed
sequence.
We can infer from these processes, how late a more acute
logical thinking, a rigorous application of cause and
effect, developed; even now, our functions of reason and
intelligence reach back instinctively to those primitive
forms of deductions, and we live more or less half our
lives in this state. The poet, too, the artist, attributes
his moods and states to causes that are in no way the true
ones; to this extent he reminds us of an older mankind, and
can help us to understand it.
Friedrich
Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human
(First German Publication, 1878. Translation by Helen
Zimmern Published 1909-1913)
'If I had a world of my own,
everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is,
because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary
wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it
would. You see?'
Lewis
Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland
'Dream long
enough and dream hard enough / you will come to know /
dreaming can make it so.'
William Burroughs, from My Education: A Book of Dreams
(Picador, 1995)