Dreams as a Meta-Conceptual or Existential Experience

Marshall University Marshall University

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Humanities Faculty Research Humanities

2014

Dreams as a Meta-Conceptual or Existential Experience Dreams as a Meta-Conceptual or Existential Experience

Jeremy Barris

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Part of the Continental Philosophy Commons, and the Philosophy of Mind Commons

Abstract

The paper argues that dreams (or the recollected experience of dreams) consist partly in

an awareness or experience of the conceptual fabric of our existence. Since what we

mean by reality is intimately tied to the concepts given in our experience, dreams are

therefore also partly an awareness of the fabric of what we mean by being itself and in

general, that is, by objective as well as subjective reality. Further, the paper argues that

this characteristic of dreams accounts for several other, more specific aspects of dreams

and their possible interpretation, and that it allows us to see how these aspects are related

to each other. These more specific aspects are the peculiar types of conceptual or logical

relations and transitions that occur within dreams, dreams’ distinctive feeling texture, and

some dimensions of the grounds and nature of suitable methods of interpreting dreams.

Key words: dreams, logic, existential, feeling, dream interpretation

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

Dreams As a Meta-Conceptual or Existential Experience

Jeremy Barris

I shall try to show that dreams, or the recollected experience of dreams,

consist partly in

an awareness or experience of the conceptual fabric of our existence. Since what we

mean by reality is intimately tied to the concepts given in our experience, dreams are

therefore partly also an awareness of the fabric of what we mean by being itself and in

general, that is, by objective as well as subjective reality. To be clear, I am not reducing

dreams intellectualistically to concepts, but proposing that concepts themselves must be

understood as organic, inseparable aspects of substantial reality and life, and so also of

the feelings and images that occur in both our waking lives and our dreams.

I try to show, further, that this conceptual experience that partly characterizes

dreams accounts for several other, more specific aspects of dreams and their possible

interpretation, and allows us to see how these aspects are related to each other. These

more specific aspects are the peculiar types of conceptual or logical relations and

transitions that occur within dreams, dreams’ distinctive feeling texture, and some

dimensions of the grounds and nature of suitable methods of interpreting dreams.

Malcolm (1959) argued influentially that we cannot meaningfully refer to dreams

themselves. But see, for example, the essays revisiting his argument and defending this

possibility in Dunlop (1977).

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

1. Dreams As a Meta-Conceptual or Existential Experience

I have argued elsewhere that dreams consist partly in a movement or comparison between

views or interpretations of reality in general, or between understandings of the same

particular thing in terms of wholly incompatible sets of concepts (Barris, 2010). To

sketch that argument briefly here, one reason for thinking of dreams in this way is that we

can plausibly understand them as participating in the deep perplexities and

transformations that occur in waking life. In turn, we can plausibly understand these deep

transformations and perplexities as often involving a comparison or shift between

mutually exclusive general outlooks on things, or between mutually exclusive ways of

understanding the same concern in our lives.

So, for example, when I am depressed, the

whole world is bleak, and even positive events are experienced in the light of that

bleakness: they may make me feel, for instance, isolated in being unable to appreciate

them. But when I am contented with my life, even depressing events are experienced as

manageable and perhaps as background against which the good things of life stand out.

As Wittgenstein noted, ‘the world of the happy man is a different one from that of the

unhappy man,’ and in moving from one to the other it ‘becomes an altogether different

world’ (1961 [1921], p. 72, prop. 6.43).

That there are such mutually exclusive general outlooks or conceptual frameworks is

familiarly argued in philosophy of science (Feyerabend, 1993, especially chapter 16;

Kuhn, 1970; Wittgenstein, 1979), political philosophy (Lyotard, 1988 [1983]; MacIntyre,

1988; Taylor, 1985, especially chapters 3-5), and in discussions of the relations between

philosophical systems (Collingwood, 1940; Hall, 1960).

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

Again, as we mature, or undergo life crises, or come to appreciate perspectives or

cultural frameworks very different from our own, the values and priorities in terms of

which we make sense of our lives may change so that we can no longer identify with our

previous standpoint. The same events, things, and ways of conducting ourselves and

relating to others no longer have the same significance for us. For instance, being

assertive of our goals may strike us as a symptom of shamefully misunderstanding our

place in the world and of failing to appreciate the reality of others and of the

environment, where before it seemed to us to express an admirable and realistic

awareness of these same things.

Since we can plausibly understand dreams as participating in these shifts, it is at

least arguable, then, that the content of dreams often consists partly in a movement or

comparison between incompatible conceptual orders.

A second reason for thinking of dreams as in some respects this kind of

movement between incompatible conceptual orders has to do with the relation between a

dream as a whole and our waking life. Dreams are capable of including everything that

exists or occurs in waking life, in such a way that no part of a dream need establish that it

is different from waking life. This is why the skeptical problem of knowing whether we

are dreaming or awake is so hard and perhaps impossible to answer. Nonetheless, the

elements of the content of dreams are not the same things as their equivalents in waking

life. Since the elements of dreams can all be indistinguishable from those of waking life,

dreams and waking life can therefore in the end only be distinguished each as a whole, or

with respect to their framing of the sense of the whole of things. In Fechner’s words, a

dream is an altogether “different scene” from waking life (Freud, 1976 [1900], p. 112): it

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

doesn’t fit into or directly belong in our waking world, even when its own internal

content is entirely consistent with that world. As a result, the process of recollecting and

working with dreams—in other words, the process by which dreams have meaning for

us—itself involves a movement or comparison between mutually exclusive conceptual

orders, and often between conceptual orders that each re-situate in their own context the

“same” things, events, and concerns as the other.

I shall give further support for this view of dreams in the course of trying to

justify my suggestion that it helps to account for the various aspects of dreams I outlined

above. In addition, that it does help to account for these various dimensions of dreams is

itself, in turn, another kind of support for this view.

If dreams are partly this kind of movement or comparison between different

conceptual orders, they consist partly in our awareness of what makes these conceptual

orders and overall frameworks different. As a result, they consist partly in an awareness

of these orders’ or frameworks’ structuring categories or concepts themselves, which are

the source of the difference. This is what I mean by dreams as a meta-conceptual

experience.

If this kind of awareness of overall conceptual orders is possible, we can also

achieve it more directly, by simply reflecting on our view of things as a whole and so on

its structuring concepts. These two forms of this awareness are two sides of the same

coin. On the one hand, as I have noted, the comparison between different frameworks

necessarily involves awareness of the frameworks themselves. On the other hand,

awareness of our framework as a whole necessarily means that we are no longer situated

within it, that we are no longer governed by its structuring concepts and categories. As a

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

result, we are moving between or comparing a conceptual order and an order

incompatible with it. When dreams involve this kind of awareness, then, they involve

both kinds of experience: movement or comparison between frameworks and reflection

on our own framework as a whole. A particular dream may be concerned more

specifically with one rather than the other, or may be concerned with both of them

equally.

The categories or concepts in terms of which we understand the world, however,

cannot simply be separated from the world and set over against it as an object of

awareness on their own. There is no world for us without the concepts that organize it

into meaning for us, and there are no concepts without the features and details of a world

that make up their content.

Consequently, our most basic or world-structuring concepts

are part of the substance of our world. In fact, since they structure the world, they are

what we might call an anatomy of the world. This is the thesis, for example, of Kant’s

Critique of Pure Reason (1929 [1781/1787]), and is also part of the point of

Wittgenstein’s (e.g., 1958) idea of the “grammars” of concepts as, to put it crudely, the

structures of our concrete activities in the world and of the content of what those

activities make of the world. Consequently, Wittgenstein argues that “the truth of certain

empirical propositions belongs to our frame of reference” (1969, p. 12e): the conceptual

Kant (1929 [1781/1787]) famously argued that “Thoughts without content are empty,

intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our

concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions

intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts” (A51, B75). See also, for example,

Winch (1958) for a Wittgensteinian discussion of the same point.

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

frame in whose terms we interpret the world is partly given as the direct, empirical truth

of the world itself. To say that dreams are a meta-conceptual experience, then, is also to

say that they are an experience of the anatomy, fabric, or structure of our experience itself

and therefore of what we experience as and mean by the world or reality itself. This is not

just subjective: it is the structure of everything we mean and so everything we refer to by

our concepts “reality” or “world.” Dreams are an existential or metaphysical experience,

an experience or awareness of the nature of existence itself.

There are a number of dream theorists who also think of dreams as at least in

some respects a reflection on the nature or structure of our lives as a whole and even of

reality as a whole. Jung (1974 [1934]), for example, sees the analysis of dreams as a

process that “finally reaches completion in the restoration of the total personality” (p.

108). States (1993) argues that dreams allow us to see how the meanings of our world

blend, so that in contrast with grasping “local meaning” we experience “the condition of

meaningfulness that pervades experience in the form of a felt unity” (p. 192).

As a result,

in dreaming “one is always in a state at least slightly outside the world” (p. 191). And

elsewhere he writes, ‘my dream . . . is the pulse and direction of my existence. . . . the

dreamer cannot detect the beginning of his dream because for that interval the dream is

all of his consciousness that exists. The dream is the center and the horizon of his world’

(States, 1988, p. 85). Valberg (2007) in fact focuses on the all-embracing “horizon” of

dreams to help establish the necessity in waking thought of the idea of a view of the

world or of one’s life as a whole (e.g., pp. 69-70). Binswanger (1963 [1930]) insists that

States argues here that this is an experience of felt unity that concepts do not do justice

to, but I am proposing that concepts are really part of feelings and vice versa.

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

“the dream . . . is nothing other than a particular mode of human existence in general” (p.

227), and that “our whole existence moves within the meaning matrix” of the dream (p.

223). Finally, Boss (1957 [1953]) argues that a person’s dreams involve “relationships

with things and with people” that “go to make up his entire existence” (p. 122), and that

express “the total and original essence of things as such” (p. 101).

There is a contradiction in the idea of our becoming aware of our interpretation of

reality in general and as a whole. If what we are talking about is truly our interpretation

of reality as a whole, our framework for the meaning or sense of everything, then we

cannot step outside it to gain a vantage point that allows us to register it as a whole and

still be capable of making sense. And yet, as we grow as human beings, we do move from

one overall view of things to another; and we do learn to understand views that are

globally different from our own and unintelligible in the terms of our own, and

consequently to recognize what characterizes our own framework as a contrasting whole.

Let me suggest baldly, then, that the deeper dimensions of human insight do therefore

work in a way that is partly contradictory.

As I have discussed elsewhere, however, it is no longer uncontroversially the case

that contradiction is always unacceptable (e.g., Barris, 2010, 2014).

And it is a recurrent

theme of philosophical thought that a full account of things requires us to account for

sense itself: in other words, that making sense itself requires us to reflect on sense and so

On the admissibility of contradictions in formal logic see, for example, Priest, 2001;

Bremer, 2005, esp. pp. 16, 19ff. For discussion on both sides of this debate, see Priest,

Beall, and Armour-Garb, 2004. For the acceptability of contradiction in informal

contexts, see, for instance, Johnstone, 1978, p. 45.

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

to a greater or lesser extent to remove ourselves from it or at least from taking it for

granted (in addition to the long tradition of metaphysics both west and east, see, for

example, Derrida, 1981 [1972], p. 6; Jaspers, 1997 [1935], p. 111; Wittgenstein, 1961

[1921]; and, on the need to account for the whole, if not to step outside sense, Nagel,

1979). There are, again, well-known objections to the legitimate sense of the idea of a

“whole” of our sense-making that we can get a grasp of (e.g., Davidson, 1984; Rorty,

1991), but, like the comprehensive rejection of contradiction, these objections are not

uncontroversial (see, for instance, MacIntyre, 1988, p. 374; Putnam, 1990, p. 104).

The particular contradiction I am proposing is limited in its consequences. It does

not affect the sense of the world as we experience it when we are not reflecting on it as a

whole, but only arises in the limited context of this particular kind of experience. And it

is manageable: once we are caught up in the contradiction, it resolves itself. The idea of

being outside all sense includes the sense of this idea itself: as we think it through, it

cancels its own meaning. Consequently it returns us to familiar sense (to the “inside” of

our framework), to a position of being able to start again from the beginning in thinking

about the issues of sense.

Like our basic sense-making categories, this contradiction that sense requires is

not just a conceptual structure simply separated from the world. As a structure of sense, it

is also a structure of the reality of which this is the sense. Reality itself, I am proposing,

includes moments or elements of (self-resolving) incoherence.

Encountering and

On the logic of this process, see, for example, Barris, 2003, 2012, 2014.

As Dewey, for example, argues, “indeterminate situations . . . are disturbed, troubled,

ambiguous, confused, full of conflicting tendencies, obscure, etc. It is the situation that

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

undergoing this contradiction is therefore also both a meta-conceptual and an existential

or metaphysical experience.

As I shall argue, this limited and manageable contradiction helps us to make sense

not only of the recurrent themes of human experience and thought I have mentioned but

also of a variety of puzzling aspects of dreams. It therefore seems that there is good

reason at least to explore ways of working with this contradiction and see where they take

us. Part of what I shall be trying to do in this essay is to identify and map out some of the

details of how this contradiction operates and of how it may manageably be worked with.

2. The Peculiar Logical Relations and Transitions in Dreams

Insofar as dreams consist in a movement or comparison between two comprehensively

different sense frameworks, or between a framework and its “outside,” where the

framework’s sense-making categories comprehensively no longer operate in the same

way, they consist in a transition from one kind of sense or logic to another, incompatible

kind. One and the same experience or thing is now construed according to an

incompatible logic, and therefore means something incompatibly different. In other

words, in terms of the possibilities for sense in either framework or context, this

has these traits. We are doubtful because the situation is inherently doubtful. . . . The

notion that in actual existence everything is completely determinate has been rendered

questionable by the progress of physical science itself. Even if it had not been, complete

determination would not hold of existences as an environment. For nature is an

environment only as it is involved in interaction with an organism, or self” (1938, pp.

105-6).

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

transition or comparison consists in a logical error of some kind: a contradiction, a non

sequitur, or a conceptual confusion. Since, however, each framework is global and so, in

its terms, exhaustive of all possible sense, there are no relevant alternative possibilities

for sense. As a result, the logical error is an objective and necessary part of the sense of

the situation.

It might naturally be objected that if the frameworks are truly globally different,

then it is not a case of one and the same thing becoming incompatibly different, but that,

instead, we are simply not discussing the same thing at all. As a result, there is no logical

error or confusion: it is not the case that one thing means incompatible things, or is being

understood in incompatible ways. But this is exactly the point. It is true that it is not the

same thing at all. And yet, in the case of movement or comparison between frameworks,

it is also true that we have moved into understanding the new framework on the basis of

beginning with the old one or, in the case of comparison, on the basis of the context of

the old one—since the frameworks are global, there is no other basis on which to have

begun and no other context in which to begin to construe. Consequently what we meant

by the one experience or thing in the first framework has itself transformed into or

become taken as the incompatibly meant experience or thing. It both is the same thing

and yet is not in any way the same thing.

Correspondingly, in the case of perspective on

In Barris (2010), I argue more fully on this basis that these kinds of violations of logic in

dreams are sometimes legitimate. In this section of this essay, I explore in more detail the

nature and variety of these legitimate logical anomalies we find in dreams.

On the sameness of the thing construed in these incompatible ways (although without

thinking of it as involving the logical paradox that I argue it does), see also, for example,

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

one’s own framework as a whole, the sense of the framework has itself required

movement beyond the purchase of that same sense. In other words, the principles of sense

that established the framework’s contents as meaning what they do have themselves

produced the movement beyond themselves. As a result, the principles that make each

thing what it is no longer apply in consequence of their own application: that is, they both

apply and do not apply. (Alternatively expressed, the new sense is a result of the self-

transformation of the old sense: the new thing is in some sense continuous with—though

nonetheless also wholly incompatible with—the old thing.) Consequently, one and the

same thing that made sense no longer does. This is a consequence of exactly the

particular contradiction that, I have argued, sense itself requires us to accept and explore

in this kind of context.

Since in this kind of context logical errors are part of sense itself, then, insofar as

dreams involve this transition between different logical orders the peculiarly illogical

relations and transitions that we find in them make sense, or at least they make what we

might call a logically legitimate inadequacy of sense. Dreams typically involve and are

often largely structured by non sequiturs of statement, inference, and setting; by

contradictions as, for example, one thing becomes another, incongruously different one;

and by conceptual confusions as one category of thing seems naturally to operate as

another (say, one’s own sensation of a sweet taste can be directly inspected and explored

MacIntyre (1989): “each community, using its own criteria of sameness and difference,

recognizes that it is one and the same subject matter about which they are advancing their

claim; incommensurability and incompatibility are not incompatible” (p. 190). For further

discussion of this issue, see Barris, 2014, e.g., chapter 3, section 6.

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

by others, as though it were a publicly accessible object). If a dream consists in an overall

movement or comparison between incompatible logical orders, it makes sense that many

of the events within it would consist in immediate relations or transitions between

logically incompatible elements like these.

It also makes sense that the specific character of the overall transition or

comparison in which the dream as a whole partly consists would govern part of the nature

and sequence of the particular transitions or relations within it. (Similarly, the specifics of

the overall transition or reflection in which a series of dreams participates and partly

consists would account for part of the nature and sequence of the experiences from dream

to dream.) So, for example, in the case of a movement between frameworks, it would

make sense that one phase of the movement involves a process well expressed by

journeying, and doing so through, say, a desert without a visible sun in the sky, because

in this kind of transition there are no orientation clues or “landmarks” to tell what the

appropriate direction of travel is. We are between frameworks, and so without a

consistent criterion for how to proceed in making sense of our situation. But once a new

framework has crystallized for us, there are then consistent ways of orienting ourselves,

of making sense of the issues. What is more, there is only one ultimate way of doing so:

when we are simply within a framework, the “outside” of sense simply has no sense or

meaning at all; that idea itself is outside the conditions that structure sense. This situation

would then be well expressed by images and concepts to which both journeying and

fundamental disorientation are entirely irrelevant: say, an image of stirring one’s tea at

home and simply enjoying its swirl and color. A dream that expresses both these phases

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

of the transition would appropriately involve an abrupt shift of context from one set of

images and concepts to another, wholly incompatible set.

In between these two phases, while the new framework is still crystallizing but is

not yet established, is still fragmentary and uncertain, it would make sense that this

situation is well expressed by images and concepts that combine in themselves the

incompatible states of being inside and outside a framework of sense: say, feeling

relieved at having arrived and yet still being preoccupied with trying to find one’s way, or

simply being in a state of having arrived and yet not having arrived, all at once.

On this conception of dreams, then, because the overall movement by its nature

violates logic and conceptual integrity, the direction and sequence of the transitions and

relations must necessarily often be in some ways logically “wrong.” Belonging to neither

framework (or to both), they must violate the criteria for progress and appropriateness

that belong to both. It would make sense, therefore, if they consisted partly in going off at

tangents, or even in the opposite direction to the one that leads to their goal, or in going in

more than one direction at the same time, and if they sometimes carried out their goal by

performing activities completely unrelated to that goal. In other words, it would make

sense if genuine progress and appropriate connection themselves within dreams consisted

partly in non sequiturs, contradictions, and category confusions.

In this kind of context, for example, there are logical peculiarities in the nature of

sequence itself. For instance, in the case where we are moving between incompatible

comprehensive or global conceptual frameworks (again, this “movement” includes our

simply coming to understand a new framework in order to compare the two), we have to

enter the new framework of sense before we can begin to see the sense it makes. The only

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

way we can get to the new framework, however, is on the basis of the resources of sense

we already have in our current framework. We therefore need to begin by construing the

elements of our experience in a way that approximates those of the new framework. But

because our current framework and the new one are globally different, all the relevant

elements or materials for construal in each mean something different in the other, and in

fact exclude the meanings of the other. As a result, there is no common ground, no basis

in our current framework for entering that other kind of sense. We can therefore begin to

re-construe our current sense only by already being within that new framework. In other

words, in order to take the steps that will get us to the new framework, we have to be

there already. And yet, we do get into new frameworks of this kind: which means that

this oddity of sequence, or something like what it describes, must in fact take place. In

this context, then, orderly sequence itself becomes disordered.

We can see the same thing by considering the relations between global conceptual

(or sense) frameworks and particular meanings or concepts. If we are not attending

specifically to the meaning or concept of a thing, but only to the thing’s role in our

immediate concerns, we tend to see it only in the terms that most easily make sense, that

is, in the terms of our current framework. In that kind of context—simply within a

framework—particular things and events are unequivocally what they are, and as a result

are also simply and straightforwardly situated in relation to each other in (among their

other relations) space and sequence. But if we attend to the meaning or sense or concept

of the thing or event, beyond its immediate place in our concerns, we can relevantly

recognize that there are conflicting possible general contexts that can frame its sense, and

that as a result the appropriate concept or sense of the thing is at some points undecided.

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

These are the kind of “border territory” contexts that conceptual analysis often deals with.

(For example, in the early stages of a child’s learning language, there may be a phase

when we cannot decide definitively whether she is uttering words whose meaning she

grasps or whether she is still merely imitating sounds: our criteria for both may apply. Or,

more sharply, a physical entity may behave both definitively as a particle, having clear

boundaries, and also definitively as a wave or process, without clear boundaries: our

criteria for both of mutually exclusive properties may definitively apply to it.) As a result,

in this kind of context the thing is not unequivocally what it is, and so is not

unequivocally situated in its relations to others with respect (among other issues) to

where each is and to which thing or event depends on which, and in what way. In that

kind of context, therefore, the thing is not unequivocally situated in relation to others with

respect to spatial connection and sequence.

Now dreams, as I have suggested, do in fact register conceptual structures, and

therefore concepts or sense themselves, and not only the particulars that are constituted

and structured by that sense. And they do so in a context in which conflicting sense

frameworks are not only relevant but salient. As a result, it is natural for dreams, given

this kind of context, directly to register and portray the disordered sequence (or spatial

relations) occurring at the level of the concepts or meanings of things and events, and not

only the sequence as it appears in the context of the immediate, simply-within-a-

framework functioning of the things and events. For example, in this light it makes sense

for a dreamer both to experience an arrival as occurring before the departure that got the

dreamer there, and yet still also to understand and experience the arrival as dependent on

the departure and so as coming after it. This is not simply a mistake in logic and sense

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(although it is that too). Instead, as I have argued, it is an expression of a logical error or

confusion required by sense itself in this kind of sense-conflicted context, and therefore

inherent in and part of the real situation.

Again, in general, the logical errors I have discussed in this section are not just a

matter of dreams’ being unreal and therefore exempt from the laws of logic. Because this

movement between incompatible orders of sense is real, it is a movement in which sense

itself genuinely changes. As a result, the logical errors that are part of this movement are

also part of reality, of sense as it is actually functioning in this situation. In other words,

these logical errors are logically legitimate or valid.

As I mentioned in the first section of this essay, this kind of movement,

comparison, or reflection between or on sense frameworks as a whole is also part of the

deep growth and perplexities that occur in our waking life. Or, rather, it is partly because

it occurs in our waking life that it also occurs in dreams. In these contexts, the odd logic

of dreams is therefore not really peculiar to them, but belongs equally to the deepest

dimensions of waking life. Rather than being peculiar to dreams, it is peculiar to depth of

meaning and sense. In this respect, dreams are not privileged as a source of insight.

In the next section, however, in discussing the feeling texture of dreams, I shall

argue that their expression and enactment of this transition or comparison between

overall frameworks of sense or of reflection on our overall framework is often more pure,

and so in a sense simpler, than the equivalent experiences in waking life. And in this

respect dreams are privileged as a source of insight. In addition, as I also suggest in the

next section, in dreaming we also often give ourselves over more unreservedly to our

experience than we do in waking life. For both of these reasons, the dream experience

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shows its anatomy or logical structure with less clutter and so more clearly than the

waking life versions of the same deep experience do.

There is a different kind of paradox in the relation and movement between

incompatible conceptual orders that, although it does not necessarily involve meta-

conceptual awareness, is a consequence of the character of conceptual structures and has

many of the same effects on the logic of dreams (and also, in fact, of waking life) as the

ones I have been discussing. It therefore seems worth mentioning here. This paradox

results from the relation between the mutual exclusiveness of concepts and, in contrast

with the meta-conceptual case, the ways in which they are embedded in (as it were, the

face they turn to) the particularities of the world as it is within our sense framework and

within the relevant conceptual orders. Because concepts acquire and have their meaning

within complex forms of life (to use Wittgenstein’s term), these meanings are constituted

in interaction with those of very different concepts. In other words, they are internally

dependent on their relations with concepts whose content, considered on its own, is

external to theirs. For example, the concept of “emotional progress” or “emotional

health” has different content depending on whether the concept of “vulnerability” is

connected with or disconnected from the concepts of “weakness” and “failure” or,

alternatively, say, those of “strength” and “courage.”

As a result, in order to gain a new concept and then also to consolidate our

competence in working with it, we often need to spend time absorbed in the issues

connected with very different concepts, issues that are in themselves irrelevant to those

connected with the concept we are aiming towards and that may even involve movement

in opposite directions from those relevant to that concept. So, for instance, learning to

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regard uncomfortable feelings of helplessness as unqualifiedly acceptable may be

necessary preparation for learning to feel at ease: it may be necessary so that, for

example, we can feel confident that we can handle feeling helpless should it happen, and

therefore need not keep ourselves rigid in order to ward it off or deny it. (This kind of

preparation may be necessary even if at some level we have already learned and come to

accept the relevant insights and so taken up their concomitant attitudes. We can be in

conflict with ourselves, even to the extent of grasping or accepting at one level what we

do not at another.)

Like the paradoxes arising from meta-conceptual awareness, I suggest, these

logically surprising relations between concepts are expressed in dreams, and account for

some of the odd relations and transitions in them. While this kind of paradox is important

and interesting in its own right, however, it expresses a different phenomenon from that

of meta-conceptual awareness. I mention it mainly because of the interesting overlap of

effects. It is also worth noting, however, that there may be more than one kind of reason

why some types of logical errors in dreams (and elsewhere) are, although genuine errors,

also logically legitimate. In this case, the logical paradox lies in the internal constitution

of concepts by other concepts that are nonetheless external to them. This paradox shares

with the meta-conceptual paradox the violation of boundaries of sense, but where the

meta-conceptual paradox consists in a direct interaction of the incompatible concepts

themselves, in this case the direct interaction and conflict is between the consequences,

for our particular issues and experiences, of separate and independent explorations of

each concept. In fact, the presence of a paradox only becomes evident if we trace the

source of the conflict to the mutual dependence of the incompatible concepts that makes

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it necessary. As a result, its actual expression in experience and practice is not

immediately paradoxical, but on the face of it is just a conflict between different concepts

that are relevant at different times or in different respects.

3. The Feeling Texture of Dreams

There is a distinctive texture of feeling that is common in dreams. Within a dream, we

often experience our feelings as unqualified or pure. For example, we experience

unmitigated delight or unqualified horror, or a naked and vulnerable poignancy of

feeling, in which we are caught up without reserve for moments or for the entire dream.

Even when this intensely pure aspect of dream feeling is not part of our awareness of the

experience during the dream, it often becomes evident when we remember the dream

after waking because of the contrast of the dream experience with our typical waking

experience.

Another characteristic of the experience of dreams (related to the first

characteristic, as I shall argue below) is that they often feel uncanny: we are undergoing

the dream experience, and yet somehow it does not fit into what we can conceive. The

experience is made of elements that make sense to us, since we can react to and engage

with them. And yet these same elements seem deeply unfamiliar, do not seem part of the

world as we are accustomed to it. The same elements both fit and do not fit with our

familiar world. In addition, the way the elements connect with each other follows a logic

that does not make sense in our waking context, and yet seems unexceptionable in the

context of the dream. When we remember the dream after waking, this dimension of the

dream experience too makes sense and yet does not make sense. (Towards the end of this

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section I discuss the possibility of registering our intact dream experience within the

context of our waking experience—despite their consisting in wholly incompatible

frameworks of sense, as I argue they do.) This is the uncanny: not what is simply weird

or unintelligible, but what is simultaneously and in the same respects both weird and

familiar, intelligible while at the same time it cannot be.

I suggest that these two characteristics of dream feeling, its unreserved or

unqualified character and its uncanniness, are related in that they are opposite dimensions

or effects of the same thing. It will be easiest to show why this might be so by beginning

with the uncanny dimension of dream feeling, and showing how the meta-conceptual

character of dreams accounts for it.

I have suggested that dreams consist partly in a movement outside the framework

in whose terms we make sense of the world as a whole, of things in general. In fact, for

the same reasons, this can also be a movement outside a particular, more limited

conceptual order within the whole, a movement that reflects on that conceptual structure

itself, compares it another, or moves from it to another. The same considerations apply to

both cases, and so for convenience I shall take discussion of either to stand in for

discussion of the other as well.

I proposed, further, that this movement is either part of a comparison with or

transition to a different general outlook, or of a metaphysical or existential reflection on

one’s life as a whole or on reality as a whole (or on a particular structure within these,

itself as a whole). In either case, however, in reflecting on our sense-making framework

as a whole, the dream consists partly in stepping outside of that framework. But if it were

simply a step into nothing, we would not have the resource of any categories for making

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sense, and would have no meaningful experience at all. (Or, in the case of particular

structures, we would have no experience that is relevantly meaningful.) Instead, it is a

stepping to the specific outside of that particular framework: we are aware of the

categories in which the world makes sense to us, but that awareness involves a distance

from them and so is no longer simply structured and guided by them. We have, as it were,

one foot inside the framework and one foot out.

This directly describes the experience of the uncanny. The world makes the same

sense it always did; all the same elements of sense are exactly as they have always and

familiarly been; and yet it is not the same sense, we have an unfamiliar orientation

towards all of it. And because it is our sense of things in general and as a whole (or, in the

case of particular structures, our sense of relevant things as a whole) that we have

distanced ourselves from, there is no simply familiar ground, left out of this distancing

from familiar sense, on which to stand and get a clear perspective on the experience and

so separate what makes familiar sense from what does not. As a result, everything

indistinguishably both fits and does not fit with familiar sense: in other words, everything

fits and does not fit familiar sense all at once and in the same, or indistinguishable,

respects.

Where the movement in which the dream consists involves a comparison between

more than one general outlook, we also have our “outside” foot inside a specific different

framework, with different, incompatible categories for the sense of things. Here, in

addition to being both within and outside sense simultaneously, we also have a conflict

and confusion between incompatible ways of making definite sense of the same things.

As I discussed in the previous section of the paper, this is part of what accounts for the

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peculiar logical relations and transitions in dreams. Here, though, it gives a second part of

the explanation of the uncanny feeling texture of dreams. The elements of the experience,

in this way too, make familiar sense but at the same time and in the same respects do not.

I suggested above that this same meta-conceptual character of dreams also

accounts for the unreserved nature of dream feeling. More specifically, I suggested that

this characteristic of dream feeling is the opposite effect of the same basic meta-

conceptual structure. In discussing the uncanny aspect of dream feeling, I drew on the

idea that this perspective on or experience outside of the sense of the whole of things is in

contradictory conflict with itself with respect to its own sense. Another aspect of this

perspective or experience, however, is that its content is detached from any of the

particular issues within the whole, and so from all the conflicting and mutually qualifying

variety of considerations that they involve. As Ortega y Gasset (1960 [1929]) argues, “the

Universe, or all there is, is not each one of the things there are, but only the universal

aspect of each thing, therefore only a facet of each thing. In this sense, but only this, the

object of philosophy [that is, all there is or the whole of things] also is partial, in that it is

the part through which each thing is inserted into the whole” (p. 105, my insertion). The

perspective or reflection in which dream experience partly consists is, then, essentially

one-sided in a way that regular within-the-whole experience is not. It is not subject to all

the variety of possible relevant partial perspectives that the surrounding detail of

additional contexts brings.

(Similarly, reflection on a particular, more limited

This theoretically motivated suggestion fits nicely with Rechtschaffen’s empirically

based observation that the manifest content of dreams is characteristically “single-

minded” or “isolated” in the sense of showing a “strong tendency for a single train of

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conceptual order or structure as a whole within the larger whole is essentially one-sided

in a way that reflection on the detailed content within that particular structure is not. So,

for example, reflection on the concept of color in general is indifferent to many of the

considerations involved in reflecting on redness, on greenness, on the contrasts and

complementarities between the two, and so on.)

Further, although the dream is an awareness of the sense of the whole of things

(or of a whole if more limited conceptual structure), it is typically this whole conceived

and therefore experienced only in terms of its relation to and bearing on one or a few

particular issues within it. We exist as parts within the whole, and so we initially

conceptualize the whole in terms of issues that arise in connection with our experiences

among and with its particulars. And, for the same reason, we also think of the difference

the achieved conception of the whole makes in terms of its meaning for particular issues

within the whole. In addition, since the dream is nonetheless a perspective on the whole

and not on the details within the whole, it separates, as I have noted, the particular issues

in whose terms this overall perspective is conceived from all the alternative kinds of

considerations that reflection on within-the-whole issues, being embedded in and

connected with a wider context, might bring.

In other words, then, dream experience is structurally simpler than any of our

experiences within the whole.

It is therefore essentially more capable of being wholly

related thoughts and images to persist over extended periods without disruption or

competition from other simultaneous thoughts and images” (1978, p. 97).

Boss also argues for the structural simplicity of dreams, but gives an account of it that

is the reverse of my own. Where I try to account for the intensity of feeling in dreams on

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and unequivocally absorbing than those within-the-whole experiences, which are more

typical of waking life.

Even more than this, however, as I mentioned above in discussing the uncanny

dimension of dream feeling, because dream experience is partly of the whole of sense or

the whole of things, there is no contrasting ground on which to stand and get a

perspective on this experience in turn. During the course of the experience, it is the only

conceivable experience and set of feelings. In this more radical respect too, then, the

meta-conceptual character of dreams explains why feelings in dreams can be absorbing in

a peculiarly unqualified and unreserved way.

the basis of dreams’ simplicity, he accounts for dreams’ simplicity on the basis of the

simplicity and intensity of feeling. He notes that “dreamers so frequently perceive only a

single person or very few people and only a very limited number of objects,” and

suggests that this is because “the dreamer . . . is frequently, and intensely in a very

definite mood. Corresponding to this unequivocal mood, only those objects and people

are allowed to enter the respective dream world whose essence and being correspond

exactly to the behaviour patterns in which the dreamer himself happens to be moving. . . .

Corresponding to his concentrated mood the dreamer can enter into these realms of

existence and behaviour all the more vividly. It is for this reason that he feels closer to

their things and people, and that they can all be united in a single dream world of the

moment, however far removed in time and space they may be in his waking life” (pp.

111-12). I do argue in the next section, however, that feelings are the privileged avenue

for interpreting dreams.

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It is true that some contrast is necessary for an experience to occur at all. But as I

have suggested, “stepping outside” a whole sense framework really means having, as it

were, one foot in and one foot outside the framework. As a result, in this contradictory

situation of being “outside the whole,” there is both no contrast, since it is the exhaustive

whole and nothing is left over to contrast the experience of it with, and yet there also is a

contrast with either the “inside” (despite the fact this is also, nonetheless, where we

already are) or with another global framework of the sense of things (despite the fact that

each framework is completely and so exclusively exhaustive of the whole). Again, as I

pointed out in the first section above, it is sense itself that requires us to reflect on and so

partially to distance ourselves from sense itself in general and as a whole, and as a result

to come upon and work with this kind of contradiction. The contradiction is part of the

working of sense itself in this kind of context.

I argued at the end of the first section that this contradictory idea of being outside

all sense cancels its own sense and consequently returns us to familiar sense, “within” our

framework. In this connection, another way of expressing this simultaneity of no contrast

and yet contrast in reflection on the whole of things is that, in the context of that

reflection, we are, as it were, wholly “inside” the “outside” itself, and so have no

perspective on it; as a result, it is not yet truly a perspective on the whole of things. That

is, on its own, this reflection does not yet fully make its own sense. It is only the

comprehensive reflection which it is, that is, it is only completely itself, when it has also

“stepped outside” itself and so returned us to the unreflective “inside” of our framework

(which is all that is left out of that reflection on the whole and so is its own “outside”). Its

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contradictory cancellation of itself, then, is not just a negation of it but is genuinely part

of it, of what it successfully is.

This contradictory simultaneity of global and therefore mutually exclusive

frameworks also explains why, in remembering the dream after waking, we can register

the wholly “other” nature of the experience of the dream, its nature as wholly excluding

our waking sense and region of things (and vice versa), while nonetheless also being able

to experience it in contrast with and so in the context of our waking sense of things.

There is another element of this movement partly outside the constraints of sense

as a whole that helps to account for the often unreserved absorption in dream feelings.

This movement partly outside familiar sense means that not grasping the sense of the

experience, not understanding, is an inherent part of the dream experience. This gives a

further explanation for the lack of tempering perspective and so for the open vulnerability

to impressions and the untempered absorption in feelings we often experience in dreams.

Again, as I pointed out in the first section of this essay, this kind of reflection on

or movement or comparison between different senses of the whole of things is also part

of the deep growth and perplexities that occur in our waking life. Both this kind of

waking experience and this kind of dream experience deal with the whole of things (or

the whole of a particular conceptual order or structure), and so are detached from the

complicating variety of particulars “within” our framework and the multitude of

Ortega’s description above of the whole of things that is the object of philosophy as

itself partial is therefore true but, because the sense of or what we mean by this object is

self-canceling in this way, incomplete. Perhaps this is the burden of his qualification that

the whole of things is partial “in this sense, but only this.”

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considerations and perspectives they bring to bear. We might ask, then, how this view of

dreams accounts for the difference in the feeling texture of the waking and dreaming

versions of this kind of experience.

I do think there is some overlap: the waking experiences are in some ways

overwhelming and in those respects absorb us wholly in them, without perspective. It is

also hard to be clear about their validity or reality. But there are also differences in the

two versions of the experience. I suggest that in waking life, when we are caught up in

the view of the whole, we are nonetheless at the same time substantially aware of the

multitude of everyday issues within our lives and world, even if our attention is not or is

only vaguely on them. In dreams, by contrast, we are more wholly and unreservedly

caught up in the experience of the whole, and much more or entirely oblivious to the

competing details of the experience simply “from within” our framework.

As a result,

the dream experience is a more pure version of that experience of the whole. And,

further, because of that purity, as I have argued, we also give ourselves over more

unreservedly to the experience than we do in waking life.

4. Some Dimensions of the Grounds and Nature of Dream Interpretation

I have suggested that dreams are partly an expression and undertaking of a movement

beyond our structuring categories of sense. This is a movement that necessarily also

begins in and is based on those structuring categories, since they structure all the sense

that exists for us, including the sense of all movement and change. These categories are

Compare again Rechtschaffen’s (1978) discussion of the “single-mindedness” of

dreams.

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consequently the basis and means of moving beyond themselves. As a result, dreams are

partly a movement and process of those foundational categories. That is, the experience

in which dreams consist, in all its intimate subjectivity, is not just a reflection on our

fundamental structure of meanings, but partly is that structure itself in process. The

dream experience is we ourselves, or, more precisely, the essentials or anatomy of us

ourselves—the basic truth of us—in process. It is an activity of our being.

Now, our subjective experience of our dreams upon waking, as the experience we

remember and recount, and our further honest subjective reactions (such as associations)

to them are also more or less essential parts of our make-up or substance, of who we are.

And in this context they are responses to and therefore directly connected with the

activity of our being in which our dreams partly consist. They are therefore expressions

and developments of that same activity of our being. As a result, these subjective

reactions are objective guides to the meaning of our dreams. What is more, because

dreams are not merely a reflective awareness but a process of our being, our subjective

reactions to them are indispensable or necessary as objective guides to their meaning.

Since their meaning partly consists in an activity of our being, we miss that meaning if

we replace it with the kind of reflective observation that is not part of that particular

activity. (This is not to say that our subjective reactions are the only important guide to

the dream’s meaning. I shall return to this below.)

I have also argued that the conceptual structure that dreams in some respects

express and enact is not just the structure of our personal being but also of what we mean

by being or reality in general. Here I want to emphasize only that the categories our

dreams express are not just the basics of our subjective views, wishes, and fantasies about

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ourselves, but the foundations of our own true being itself. These categories are the

foundations of, so to speak, the objective reality of our subjectivity. In this connection,

Boss’s (1957 [1953]) phenomenological understanding of dreams also sees our

subjectivity as, further, fully a dimension of reality in general. In that framework, what

we artificially separate as subjective awareness and objective reality are in fact just

different dimensions or poles of the same thing and of each other. Consequently, the

structures of experience and awareness, including our awareness in dreams, are also the

structures of reality in general. As a result, dream interpretation can lead to “a new and

true relationship with the essence of all things” (p. 121).

It is true that, as an awareness, our experience is partly a simply descriptive

reflection to which participating in process and transformation are irrelevant. But in the

case of an awareness that moves beyond our fundamental sense-making categories, the

sense of these descriptions itself is shifting, so that in this context simple descriptive

statements are themselves already participating in a process of transformation or

qualification. On the other hand, this does not mean that their simply descriptive

character is entirely eliminated. As I have discussed, this movement beyond sense occurs

as a movement outside or a distancing ourselves from a specific framework of simply and

stably given sense, and it is therefore based and depends on that stably given sense. We

need, then, to respect both sides of the character of our descriptive awareness: detached

description or reflection, but at the same time a transformative process of the content of

this description.

The structure and resolution of this paradox are the same as those of the

contradiction of becoming aware of our framework as a whole that I discussed in the first

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and third sections. A movement beyond our sense-categories in general is also a

movement beyond the sense of the categories of movement and transformation

themselves, and therefore reaches the point of not excluding what they exclude. As a

result, it comes to cancel their meaning as movement and transformation. In the end, the

very fact that our meanings are shifting turns back on its own meaning and restores our

meanings as stable, unchanging descriptions. But this only occurs fully once we are in the

new framework or restored to the no longer globally reflective “inside” of our original

framework, so that our foundational categories are no longer an issue for the questions

we are asking and so are left unqualified. Until then, both sides of the dream experience

and of our later reactions to the dream—their character as both simple descriptive

meaning and as transformation of meaning and so of being—occur and need to be

respected.

To return, then, to my main theme: I have argued, on the basis of the meta-

conceptual nature of dreams, that the interpretation of dreams needs to be rooted in and

guided by the dreamer’s own honest expressions of and reactions to that experience. It

follows that the necessary core method of dream interpretation is the tradition that Freud

began (at least in the contemporary Western history of dream interpretation) of

privileging the dreamer’s narrative and choice of expressions in describing the dream,

and also her spontaneous associations with its elements.

Since the dream is a process of the dreamer’s being in general, its structure is the

structure of all of the dreamer’s experience during the dream, including her most

immediate experience within it. I suggest that the most immediate aspect of the dream

experience for the dreamer, the aspect of the experience that is most direct and in the

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forefront of her awareness, is the feeling texture of the dream. If this is so, then the

feeling texture is, as it were, the leading edge of the process in the person of whose being

the dream is an activity. Or, approaching this same issue in a different way, because this

is a process of the sense of ourselves and our world and so (at some level) also of our

awareness, and in particular is partly the transforming awareness of our foundational

categories of sense, we might say that the feeling texture of the dream is the direct sense

(in the sense of “sensation”) of the structure of sense (in the sense of “meaning”) itself.

The feeling texture is therefore the most direct access to the meaning the dream has for

the dreamer: to its meaning both as activity of transformation and as the simply

descriptive content and reflections in which this activity, as an activity of awareness, also

consists. The feeling texture, then, is the most basic and so the most important access to

the dream’s interpretation.

That feelings are the primary avenue for interpreting dreams is given some

support by Boss’ argument, noted above, that “the dreamer . . . is frequently, and

intensely in a very definite mood. Corresponding to this unequivocal mood, only those

objects and people are allowed to enter the respective dream world whose essence and

being correspond exactly to the behaviour patterns in which the dreamer himself happens

to be moving” (1957 [1953], p. 112). States, on the basis of exploring how we might

construct our dreams, comes to the similar conclusion that “like the poets we dream about

things whose meaning we already know in an emotional and preconceptual sense, and

that is no doubt why we dream about them and why dreams make a certain kind of

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essentialized sense. The dream is the instantiation of a felt meaning” (1993, p. 169).

This privileging of feeling texture also fits well with Gendlin’s (1986) emphasis on

feeling in his “focusing” approach to interpreting dreams, although he sees bodily feeling

in particular as most important. As will become clearer shortly below, his view fits with

my own as well in that, as he insists, the relevant feeling is not one that we can initially

identify: we “cannot say what it is” (p. 5). It is a feeling whose nature or sense we need to

establish.

The dreamer can helpfully engage the feeling texture of the dream in two ways.

First, she can dwell with it, allow it to “be there” without interference, without trying to

make anything of it one way or another. In this way the process of which it is the

immediate expression can carry out its transformative and insight-granting work. The

dream is a process of and beyond our structuring categories of sense, and actively trying

to make sense of it would necessarily impose the un-transforming constraints of our

current sense framework on it. That is, actively trying to make sense of it would miss

what is essential to the dream. On the positive side, making attentive and non-interfering

room for the feeling texture allows us to register and adjust to whatever shifts occur in the

process that it expresses, including the possible emergence of simply descriptive insights.

Second, the dreamer can give the feeling texture priority as the locus or topic of

reactions and associations. The dreamer helpfully engages these reactions and

associations in turn, too, partly by dwelling with them, letting them work within her as

As I noted above, while States argues here that this is a felt, preconceptual meaning that

concepts do not do justice to, I am proposing that concepts are really part of feelings and

vice versa.

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the sense-emerging process that they are. These reactions, however, are less immediately

expressions of the dream process, and therefore do not all consist most directly in a

feeling texture. As a result, there are other dimensions of them, such as purely descriptive

elements, that become more prominent than they are in the feeling texture, and are

appropriately worked with in other ways.

There are, of course, dimensions of the dream experience itself that are not its

feeling texture, and that therefore need to be worked with in other ways. But I am

proposing that the feeling texture is the most basic and direct access to the dream’s

meaning and work.

With respect to interpretation of the dream, it is beside the point whether or not

the dreamer remembers the dream feeling as it was independently of his current waking

state of mind, or whether or not his reactions and associations capture the experience of

the dream as it was independently of its current narrative and interpretation. Since the

dream is the person’s own essential conceptual or existential experience, the same

process that is the meaning of the dream is also at work in the person’s later attentive

experience of and honest reactions to it.

I argued near the end of the previous section that we can make sense of

registering the wholly “other” nature of the dream experience even in the context of our

waking awareness. I am not retracting this here. The “otherness” remains wholly “other”

to our waking experience in the way I have discussed whether it is registered in the

context of our waking awareness and narrative or registered entirely within the dream. I

am only adding that it is the same “otherness” that we are dealing with in either case.

Another aspect of my account here that may also be puzzling is that this complete

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otherness is what I have been arguing is an experience and activity of the person’s own

being. But I have argued this on the grounds that the experience and direct engagement of

our being involves “stepping outside” our sense framework and so outside our habitual

modes of making sense. As a result, whether in waking life or in dreaming, it is an

experience of occupying a conceptual order that is incompatible with sense as it is for us

within our framework and so in our typical experience.

The outside interpreter (that is, not the person who had the dream), too, can

helpfully engage the feeling texture by giving it priority as the locus of the dreamer’s

reactions and associations. I insisted above that the dreamer’s subjective reactions are

indispensable guides to the dream’s meaning. The outside interpreter, however, is also

extremely important in interpretation of the dream, exactly because she is not caught up

in the dream’s process. The dreamer’s experience is characterized precisely by being

caught up in a movement beyond her conceptual resources, and by being unusually

absorbed in that conceptually disorganized movement. For both reasons, it is very hard

for her to get an unconfused grasp of the concepts at issue and their relations to each

other. (I should note that “unconfused” here may include appropriate confusion in

accurately grasping legitimate logical incoherencies.) The capacity for a clear overview is

exactly what the dream is working towards her attaining once the work of the dream is

done. An outside interpreter, on the other hand, is less caught up both in some aspects of

the dreamer’s habitual, unreflective framework and in the conceptual disarray in which

the dream experience consists. She is therefore in a better position to register and adjust

to the complications or transformations of sense that the dreamer’s account and reactions

communicate.

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Whether it is the dreamer or an outside interpreter who is doing the interpreting,

however, it follows that he needs to allow himself to be guided not by his already-given

ways of making sense, but instead by the unexpected complications in sense that the

dream account offers. The kind of attitude that allows this is, I suggest, what Freud

described as “evenly-hovering attention,” in which the interpreter makes “no effort to

concentrate the attention on anything in particular” (1963 [1912], p. 118). Further,

because the dream consists precisely in working towards an overall sense of things (or a

relation between more than one overall sense of things) that has not yet emerged, it is

also important, as Freud insisted, not to begin with an impression of the overall dream,

but first to work with the dreamer’s reactions and associations to isolated elements of the

dream (e.g., 1976 [1900], p. 673), and on their basis to build towards a sense of the whole

or coordination of wholes. Here too, I suggest, and for the same reasons, the way to let

the unexpected whole emerge is by approaching the collection of these elements with the

attitude of ‘evenly hovering attention’ or, in other words, by dwelling with them in the

way I proposed above in connection with engaging the dream’s feeling texture.

I mentioned in the discussion of feeling texture that, because of the movement

beyond the constraints of sense, not understanding is an inherent part of the dream

experience. This is another way of talking about the incomplete or confused sense of the

dream process, and about the need for the interpreter to focus on and respect what she

does not understand in the dream account and not only what she does. Reik (1948), for

example, has emphasized this dimension of interpretation in the context of

psychoanalytic therapy. In a chapter titled “The courage not to understand,” he points out

that an explanation that is “plausible, rational, and comprehensible” often appears so

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because of our habitual patterns of thought—including those developed by training in

schools of interpretation—rather than because of what the phenomenon, honestly

considered, offers (p. 509). Instead, he writes, we should learn “to postpone judgment and

put up with doubt” (p. 507).

As I discussed in the first section of this essay, a dream is (partly) a transition

between or beyond sense frameworks not only in itself, but also in the relation between

the dream as a whole and waking life. The contrast between the feeling texture of the

dream and the feeling texture or tone of our experience on waking from the dream is

therefore also part of the movement or reflection in which the dream consists and so of

the dream’s meaning. So, for example, on waking, a bad dream experience can feel less

bad or even good in contrast with or in the context of the waking feelings. One can feel,

for instance, relieved that it was just a dream, or pleased to have confronted a fear. And

pleasant feelings within a dream can feel bad in the light of the waking feelings. One

might, for instance, feel ashamed of having enjoyed behaving unfairly in the dream.

Since this contrast occurs after the dream experience, as its own independent

event, has ended, it is not part of the transition or reflection in which the dream’s own

content consists. But, as I have argued, part of what belongs to being a dream is that it is

a comprehensive shift of sense-framework from that of waking life. In other words, its

difference from waking life is part of what makes it internally what it is. In addition,

since for the person waking from the dream the contrast with waking life is a transition

between wholly different sense frameworks, that contrast is, equally with the dream, an

existential experience and process for him, and, what is more, one that is brought about

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partly and substantially by the dream. These features of the dream’s contrast with waking

life therefore situate the dream and its internal content as part of a more general process.

I have discussed the logically legitimate confusions of sense and logic that occur

when incompatible sense frameworks are simultaneously relevant. Here I am suggesting

another of these paradoxes: that what is wholly and exclusively outside the dream, in the

comprehensively different sense framework of waking life, can be part of the sense of

what is wholly and exclusively inside the dream. (In the examples I gave, the contrast

with waking feelings changed the meaning of the feelings that occurred during the

dream.) Given the legitimate simultaneity of contradictory frameworks in this context, we

might even want to say that the contrast between dream and waking worlds both is

already part of the internal process of the dream itself and is simply, entirely, and

permanently outside it, or that it is both a result of the process the dream expresses and so

continuous with the dream and that it is an entirely new and separate context. In fact, in

some cases, part of the way the dream moves (of itself and so as part of its own

continuous movement) to a different conceptual order, rendering its initial materials

irrelevant or no longer meaningful, may be exactly by our waking up and so moving

beyond the whole thing. If so, that is, in these cases the dream itself builds to and brings

about our waking up, and so produces the shift to its own irrelevance in this way. It is

therefore in a sense continuous with its own discontinuity.

A rather neat possible version of this is when we actually forget the dream

immediately, and only later remember it and that we had forgotten it. We then experience

it exactly as something that had seemed important but then literally lost all meaning:

within our current experience, it ceased to have existed at all. Again, in some cases it may

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

be the dream’s own process, as a transition or relation between mutually exclusive sense

frameworks, which brings about this result.

Dreams As Meta-Conceptual Experience

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