The Dream and Metaphysics: Mind and Matter

The following chapter is Part I of a series of essays on the dream and metaphysics.

Introduction

What does it mean to dream? This question has been pondered by philosophers, psychologists, scientists, and the layman since the human mind dreamed itself into self-awareness. It is this same question that led the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, and Egyptians to engrave their dreams onto stone tablets nearly 3000 years ago, and still sways us to fill the pages of bedside dream journals today. The dream has a strange allure. It is always there but never quite here, a flicker in the night, kept illuminated only through the will. Does it even want to be known? It is after all easier to forget, to wake up and face the day, unbothered by the nightworld that lives out in the shadows. But the shadow also casts us, as the psychoanalyst James Hillman has so eloquently stated. Whether we want it or not, the dream is an inescapable part of our lives, and can never be fully ignored.

The modern age has seen great advances in uncovering the physiology of sleep and the precise neural pathways that correlate to dreaming, but we still know little about why we dream. The scientific paradigm has little to offer for an explanation, reducing dreams to a form of nocturnal brain processing, a consolidating of memories and experiences like a computer cleaning up its junk. In other words, it suffices to say that no clear answer has been found, and the nature of dreams remains a mystery that nobody seems pressed to solve. As such, the Western disciplines of knowledge that investigate the modern world have largely ignored dreams. Modern science, which adheres strictly to physicalism, is satisfied with its banal view of dreams as mental processing. Philosophy today is far too concerned with consciousness to engage with dreams directly, at best using them to support a broader theory of mind. The arts and humanities may take some inspiration from dreams, but only insofar as they can be used aesthetically. The only discipline in which dreams have retained some esteem is psychoanalysis. Though the field has come a long way from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, psychoanalysis still treats dreams with some reverence, using them for insight into the workings of the unconscious psyche and general self-development. If there is a modern parallel to the various historical traditions of “dream work”, surely it is psychoanalysis, which has arguably contributed more to our understanding of dreams than the so-called hard sciences.

However, this is not a book about the use of dreams, nor is it necessarily about trying to understand them. Enough has been written on these subjects. On the contrary, I would like to consider a radical phenomenology of dreams, where the dream is not treated as a code to be cracked but a reality to be experienced. The dream, after all, is its own reality, despite being a part of ours. It is as much a part of nature as it is of our individual nature. It therefore deserves to be investigated on its own ground, as its own reality.

But why investigate the dream to begin with? My answer is that the dream may hold clues to understanding our own reality. If we consider dreams to be a part of nature—and they cannot be anything else—then we might consider that the dream’s metaphysics might mirror ours. In other words, the dream may well be the royal road to understanding reality. The world is like a dream, say the spiritual traditions of the East. If the world is indeed like a dream, then maybe the dream is also like the world. If so, a leap into the dream is a leap into reality, one that deserves a proper investigation.

This book is organized by the common themes in metaphysics, the branch of philosophy which explores the fundamental aspects of reality such as time, space, the mind-body problem, and free will, among others. Throughout these topics, I will try to stick to the phenomenology of the dream as closely as possible. That is, instead of making abstract speculations about what reality might be like, I will look at how reality presents itself in the dream, treating the dream both as a reality in itself and a vessel for understanding our broader reality. For in dreams we can play with reality in a way that is unparalleled in waking life. So let us play with the dream, and see where its reality takes us.

1

Mind and Matter

Perhaps the biggest debate in contemporary philosophy is the so-called “mind-body problem”. In short, philosophers today are still deliberating precisely how subjective and seemingly non-physical experience (i.e., mind or consciousness) can arise out of physical networks of neurons (matter). Given that we are conscious beings, the next question in this debate is why subjective experience should exist to begin with. Why is it that we need a complex inner life, as opposed to simply moving through the world like a machine? Machines, after all, have no need for a mind to perform their functions—and they do so quite well. Similarly, it is hard to imagine a machine gaining consciousness no matter how complex its parts. Even the most intricate computer has no inner life, and does not have the slightest need for feeling. And so man and machine are always kept apart by this strange human dimension.

The question of why we need an inner life is often referred to as the “hard problem of consciousness”. Although many different ideas have been put forth to resolve this problem, physicalism (also known as materialism) has taken the spotlight in proposing that consciousness is an “emergent property” of the brain. In other words, physicalism purports that when the material circumstances are right, consciousness emerges naturally, like a lightbulb turning on when a full circuit is created. This provides an answer to how the mind emerges from matter, but the specifics of precisely how subjective experience comes out of otherwise unconscious neurons remains up for debate. Not to mention, physicalism cannot answer why we need consciousness to begin with, as opposed to simply going through the world like a machine.

Because physicalism does not yet have all the answers, various forms of dualism have retained popularity in philosophy of mind. Dating back to Descartes’ separation of body and soul, under dualism mind and matter are conceived of as two separate entities, thereby removing consciousness from the physical realm altogether. This bypasses the hard problem of consciousness, but raises new questions about how mind and matter interact, as it should not theoretically be possible for a non-physical thought to trigger a bodily action if mind is fundamentally distinct from body. So the hard problem remains, simply in a different form.

To combat this, some philosophers have advocated for a form of panpsychism, where consciousness permeates through every material thing in a rudimentary form. Under this view everything is conscious insofar as consciousness is a quality inherent in things (though there exist different degrees of consciousness). Therefore, mind and matter are not necessarily separate, but coexisting aspects of the same phenomenon, like a wave and particle in physics. Of course, this still leaves us with more questions than answers, but is a step closer towards reconciling mind and matter under a less dualistic paradigm.

Although many other frameworks have been proposed to resolve the hard problem, the final worldview I would like to mention is idealism, which abandons the world of things altogether, instead putting mind as the primary source of reality. There is no world outside of human consciousness, according to the idealists: “esse est percipi”, says the famous idealist George Berkeley. In other words, idealism flips the script of physicalism, claiming that “things” cannot exist independently of the mind, or that matter is the result of mind and not its source. That is, matter is ultimately a property of mind and is therefore not distinct from it. In this sense matter as we understand it does not exist—instead of a world of “things”, we live in a world of mental representations, effectively abolishing any semblance of dualism and resolving the hard problem of consciousness by proposing that there is in fact nothing outside of it.

All of these frameworks are interesting, and it is likely that none of them will be proven true in the near future. As such, for the purposes of this book, I will use physicalism as the baseline philosophy of the modern world. Indeed, physicalism is so ingrained into our culture that most would consider it to be reality and not simply a worldview. Therefore, any alternative metaphysics finds itself clashing with physicalism, which has dominated our thinking for at least the last few centuries. I do not mean to implicitly look down upon physicalism; I simply want to make clear that it must be held to the same standard as any other worldview—that is, it must be taken as precisely that: a worldview, and not the objective truth. This is a difficult idea to grasp given how material our culture has become, but we must remember that many cultures before us held different worldviews, and just because physicalism is grounded in the empirical gaze does not make it any less of an ideology. It is simply a very effective ideology that has led to profound advances in science and technology. But when it comes to ontological truth—truth about the nature of things—physicalism can only take us so far, at least for the time being.

With this in mind, let us now turn to the dream and how it presents the problem of mind and body and the representation of matter.

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We may begin our excursion with an example. Consider the following dream:

I am swimming in a big river. There are large fish and other sea creatures beneath the water. I cannot see them, but I know they are there. As I swim I feel their fins touching my legs, which scares me.

This dream is quite generic. What stands out, for the purposes of our investigation, is a clear sense of both mind and body. Let’s break it down.

The dream begins with the dreamer swimming in a big river. The dreamer, clearly embodied, senses large fish (and other creatures) swimming beneath the surface. The fish proceed to touch the dreamer’s legs, leading to both a physical sensation and an emotional response. Here we have a clear indication of both body and mind, which seem to interact with each other. The bodily sensation (fish touching leg) appears to trigger an emotional response (fear), and, like in waking life, there appears to be an immediate experience of both mind and body, or “feelings” and “things”.

However, we are not in waking life. Because this is a dream, we can make the mind/body distinction for practical purposes only, for a dream is a projection of the psyche, and therefore is inherently “all mind”. In other words, everything in a dream is all the same dream “stuff”, even if it is experienced as either mind or matter. The dreamer, of course, is not aware that this is the case. The fear he experiences is genuine, as are the fish beneath the water. Like in waking life, the fear is an internal experience, while the fish are experienced externally, as objects. The dreamer, lacking full awareness, cannot see that the water he is swimming in is his own creation. From this lack of awareness arises the distinction between mind and body.

Let us now briefly diverge to the waking world. Physicalism too proposes that mind and body are not inherently different, and are made from the same “stuff”: matter. The difference between the dream and the waking world is that while our world has its origins in the material, the dream world is fundamentally mental. If we were to treat the above dream as a real scenario, physicalism would frame it as such: world creates object > object touches leg > object triggers bodily response > body creates sensation of fear. Everything takes place in the physical world, including the emotion, which is merely an extension of the physical body. The dream, on the other hand, presents the inverse scenario: mind creates object > object touches leg > object triggers emotional response. Here everything takes place in the dreamer’s mind. Conversely, matter exists only insofar as it is an extension of the dreamer’s consciousness.

The dream appears to clash with our dominant metaphysical thesis. Physicalism says that only matter exists and mind emerges out of body, whereas in the dream there is only mind, and matter is simply one of the forms it takes (i.e., matter is an emergent property of mind). While both of these metaphysical views maintain that the object and the feeling are of the same nature, they simply diverge in the primacy of either mind or matter. When applied to the waking world, ultimately both of these frameworks are nonfalsifiable. As the dream demonstrates, we cannot know for certain that matter exists outside of our minds. Likewise, we cannot be certain that our minds exist outside of the material realm.

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We have now seen through the dream a world where mind is primary. Surprisingly, it doesn’t look very different from the waking world. Even though we can say with some certainty that the dream’s reality is a mental one, the actual experience of the physical/emotional world remains the same. Objects still have a body, they still feel like separate “things” that are a part of the world around us, while feelings still feel like ours. The only fundamental difference is that we can retrospectively discern that dream is “all in our head”, while in the waking world we can only investigate our current reality as it is experienced.

Because we have some distance from the dream, we can say with confidence that the things in a dream are real only phenomenologically, and have no physical basis in the world. This is why we can make the claim that the dreamer above was not really swimming in the river, nor were the fish actually touching his leg. These things only happened in his head, and therefore are not real in the conventional sense. Emotions, however, present a dilemma. After the fish touched the dreamer’s legs, he felt scared. Within the dream, the fear was just as real as the fish or the water. But what about in waking life? It is not hard to imagine that the fear remained upon waking, that the dreamer sat up in bed with his heartbeat elevated, the feeling of slimy fins and scales still on his leg. Indeed, anyone who has woken up from a nightmare can attest to the very real feelings that carry over into the dayworld. Surely then the feelings of a dream are real in any meaningful sense, even if the things are not.

Physicalism would likely support this hypothesis. It could be argued that the dream triggered the body’s stress mechanisms, and while the dream itself was not real, its effects can be detected in the body. While this may be true, it implicitly devalues the dream as something “not real”. When we say a dream is not real, what we actually mean is it has no basis in the material world. Thus the dream fish, for example, is not real, because it has no physical basis. But why should this mean that the fish has no reality of its own? That is, why must things be materially present in order to be real?

An unfortunate consequence of physicalism is that anything subjective is seen as less real than a physical object. This means that in waking life, a subjective feeling is always seen as less real than a thing, even if both are clearly real in some sense. It also means that a subjective dream image—like the fish—is inherently devalued. But only from a material perspective can we deny the reality of the dream fish! The dream does no such thing; it refuses to separate the fish and the dreamer at all. The fish is the dreamer—because the dreamer dreamt it—and in a sense, the dreamer is also the fish, because the fish was imagined as a part of the dreamer, a part that he cannot see but fears nonetheless. Therefore the fish is no less real than any other aspect of the dreamer’s inner life. Only a material worldview taken to its extreme could deny our inner lives reality. Physicalism kills the fish.

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The dream offers an alternative metaphysics to strict materialism. As we have seen, the dream world is often just as convincing as our waking life, and retains its own version of the material world. At the same time, the material world of the dream is a sort of illusion—a projection of our own consciousness. We know it is illusory because we wake up. It was just a dream! The trick is over. But maybe the dream has more to say. Maybe it is not we who break the illusion of the dream, but the dream that breaks our illusion of the material world. How can we be so certain that things exist outside of our own consciousness anyway? The dream fools us every night. I do not mean to advocate for solipsism; rather, we might look at the world as a collective dream—God’s dream—or simply the dream of the “mind-at-large”, to use Huxley’s term. This is more or less what the metaphysics of idealism posits.

If we look at the world through the lens of the dream, then we are forced to reconsider physicalism as the only plausible metaphysics. The dream makes it clear that matter is not the only thing that matters—nor is it the primary source of the world. But this is only one way of looking at the world. The physicalist perspective clearly has its advantages, and has bestowed us with the incredible things of modernity. And even within the dream we cannot escape physicalism. Material things still surround us (or so we think). We seldom stop to think that our consciousness might have created our surroundings, because this does not change the fact that things exist seemingly independently. Physicalism is in this sense intuitive. But the dream asks us to think twice, to consider that the world is not always as it seems. Removing the veil of illusion that the dream shrouds us in, we may find nothing other than eight billion sleeping dreamers, all conjuring up a world together.