On Dreams and dreaming

The expression ’to dream’ and its cognates are examined, and different senses distinguished. Global dream scepticism is rejected. Cartesian dream scepticism is examined and Descartes’s refutation of it is found faulty. Nevertheless the idea that we cannot know whether we are dreaming or waking is repudiated.

Scepticism about dreaming, however, is far more interesting. It raises doubts about whether we ever dream. Is what we call ’dreaming’ not merely a post-sleep mnemonic hallucination ? This idea is explored. It is argued that this is an alternative form of representation. It is not false, but it is not our form of representation. The conclusion defended is that the contention that dreams occur during sleep is not itself an empirical claim. It is in fact a convention of representation, for which a commonly unexamined price is paid.

The ICARUS seminar (Imagination, Creativity, Affect, Reverie, Utopia, Senses) will focus on the interdisciplinary study of the boundary line that separates, for our minds, reality from everything that transcends it. By bringing together philosophy and the cognitive sciences, we will explore the capacities and states (notably imagination and dreaming) that enable us to re-elaborate sensory and affective data and to apprehend the world from new perpectives, even from other worlds or utopias. Drawn into its wanderings and reveries, the mind is capable of producing ideas or objects deemed novel and valuable, in other words, of pispaying creativity. But how far can we take this power that we have received as a species (and perhaps not just us, human beings) ? It is advisable not to fly too close to the sun.