From 201400d58ee98c13ba1661aa3871c3b56d5c9f52 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: grr <grr@lo2.org>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2024 21:32:35 -0400
Subject: breakout 'new modality' essays

---
 essays/dream_reality.tex | 661 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 661 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 essays/dream_reality.tex

(limited to 'essays/dream_reality.tex')

diff --git a/essays/dream_reality.tex b/essays/dream_reality.tex
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..aab289d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/essays/dream_reality.tex
@@ -0,0 +1,661 @@
+\chapter{The Dream Reality}
+
+\section{Memo on the Dream Project}
+
+Original aim: To recreate the effect of e.g. Pran Nath's singing---transcendent 
+inner escape---in direct life rather than art. I needed material which could 
+function as an alien civilization (since the source of Pran Nath's expression is 
+an alien civilization relative to me); yet which was encultured in me and not 
+an affectation or pretense. I decided to use dreams as the material, assuming 
+that my dreams would take me to alien worlds. But mostly they did not. 
+Mostly my dreams consist of long periods of tawdry, familiar life interrupted 
+occasionally by senseless, unmotivated anomalies. In contrast, my original 
+aim required alluring, psychically gratifying material. 
+
+The emphasis shifted to redefining reality so that dreams were on the same 
+level as waking life; so that they were apprehended as what they seem to be: 
+literal reality (and not memory, precognition, or symbolism). The project 
+was still arcane, but in a drastically different way. I was getting into an 
+alternate reality which was extremely bizarre but not psychically gratifying. 
+It was boringly frightful and sometimes obscene. I became concerned with 
+analytical study of the natural order of the dream world, a para-scientific 
+investigation. As I grappled with the rational arguments against treating 
+dreams as literal reality, the project became a difficult analytical exercise in 
+the philosophy of science. The original sensuous-esthetic purpose was lost. 
+
+Now I would like to return to the original aim, but how to do it? Obtain 
+other people's dreams---see if they are more suitable? Work only with my 
+very rare dreams which do take me to alien worlds? Try to alter the content 
+of my raw dreams? Attempt to affect content of dreams by experiment in 
+which many people sleep in same room and try to communicate in their 
+sleep? The most uncertain approach to a solution: set up a transformation 
+on my banal dreams, so that to the first-order activity of raw dreaming is 
+added a second-order activity. The transformation procedure to somehow 
+combine conscious ideational direction---coding of the banal dreams---with 
+alteration of my experience, my esthesia, my lived experience. 
+
+
+\section{Dreams and Reality---An Experimental Essay}
+
+Excerpts from my dream diary which are referred-to in the essay that 
+follows. 
+
+\dreamdate{12/11/1973}
+
+I notice a state between waking and dreaming: a waking dream. I have 
+been asleep; I wake up; I close my eyes to sleep again. While not yet asleep, I 
+experience isolated objects before me as in a dream, but with no 
+background, only a dark void. In this case, there are two pocket combs, both 
+with teeth broken. In the waking world, I threw away one of my two pocket 
+combs because I broke it; the other comb is still in good condition. 
+
+\dreamdate{12/30/1973}
+
+I am chased by the police for one block west on West Market Street in 
+Greensboro. I reach the intersection with Eugene Street, and in the north 
+direction there is a steep hill rather than the street. The surface of the hill is 
+bare ground and grass. I run up the hill, sensing that if I can get over the hill 
+I will find Friendly Road and the general neighborhood of my mother's 
+houses on the other side. The police start shooting. If I can get a few yards 
+farther on the top of the hill I will be past the line of fire. I take a headlong 
+dive and awaken in the middle of the dive to find myself diving forward on 
+my mattress in the front room of my apartment. The action is carried on 
+continuously through waking up and through the associated change of 
+setting. 
+
+
+\dreamdate{1/12/1974}
+
+Just before I go to sleep for the night, I am lying in bed drowsy. I think 
+of being, and suddenly am, at the south edge of the Courant Institute plaza, 
+which is several feet above the sidewalk. The edge of the plaza and the drop 
+are all I see. It is night; and there is only a void where the peripheral 
+environment should be. (Comment: It is of great theoretical importance that 
+while most of the internal reality cues were present in this experience, some, 
+like the peripheral environment, were not. In my dream experiences, all 
+reality cues are present.) The drop expands to twenty or thirty feet, and I 
+start to fall off. Fright jolts me completely awake. I have had something like 
+a waking nightmare and have awakened from being awake. I thought of the 
+scene, was suddenly in it (except for peripheral reality cues), lost control and 
+became endangered by it, and then snapped back to my bedroom. 
+
+\dreamdate{1/1-/1974}
+
+One or two nights after 1/12/74 I was lying in bed just before going to 
+sleep. I could see women standing on a sidewalk. The scene was real, but I 
+was not in it; I was a disembodied spectator. Also, the peripheral 
+environment was absent. The reality was between that of a waking 
+visualization and that of the Courant Institute incident of 1/12/74. 
+Comment: The differences between this experience and a waking 
+visualization are that the latter is less vivid than seeing and is accompanied 
+by waking reality cues such as cues of bodily location. 
+
+
+\dreamdate{1/16/1974}
+
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item I am in an apartment vaguely like the first place in which I lived, at 
+1025 Madison Avenue in Greensboro. I am a spy. I am teen-aged and short; 
+and I am in the apartment with several enemy men, who are middle-aged and 
+adult-sized. My code sheets look like the sheets of Yiddish I have been 
+copying out in waking life. Eventually the men discover me in the front 
+room with the code sheets on a fold-up desk. They chase me out the front 
+door and onto the west side of the lawn, and shoot me with a needle gun. At 
+that moment my consciousness jumps from my body and becomes that of a 
+disembodied spectator watching from an eastward location, as if I were 
+watching a film. 
+
+\item I am living in a dormitory in a rural setting with other males. At one 
+point I walking barefoot in weeds outside the dormitory, and Supt. Toro 
+tells me I am walking in poison ivy. My feet begin to show the rash, but I 
+recognize that I am in a dream and think that the rash will not carry over to 
+the waking state. I then begin to will away the rash in the dream, and I 
+succeed, 
+\end{enumerate}
+
+
+\dreamdate{1/20/1974}
+
+For some reason the dream associates Simone Forti with flute-like 
+music. It is shortly before midnight. In the dream I believe that Simone lives 
+in a loft on the east side of Wooster Street. The blocks in SOHO are very 
+small. If I walk through the streets and whistle, she will hear me. I start to 
+whistle but can only whistle a single high note. I half awaken but continue 
+whistling, or trying to; the dream action continues into waking. But I cannot 
+change pitch or whistle clearly because my mouth is taped. As I realize this, I 
+awaken fully. 
+
+Comments: I tape my mouth at night so I will sleep with my mouth closed. I 
+experimented at trying to whistle with the tape on while fully awake. The 
+breath just hisses against the tape. The pitch of the hiss can be varied. 
+
+
+\dreamdate{2/1/1974}
+
+1. I try to assist a man in counterfeiting ten dollar bills by taking half 
+of a ten, scotch taping it to half of a one, and then coloring over the one 
+until it looks like the other half of the ten. The method fails because I bring 
+old crumpled tens rather than new tens, and the one doilar bills are new. 
+
+
+Comments: There are no natural anomalies in this dream at all. What is 
+anomalous is that this counterfeiting method seems perfectly sensible, and I 
+only begin to question it when we try to fit the crumpled half-bill to the 
+crisp half-bill. Why am I so foolish in this dream? I retain my identity as 
+Henry Flynt, and yet my outlook, my sense of what is rational, is so 
+different that it is that of a different person. More generally, the person I am 
+in my dreams is much more limited in certain ways that I am in waking life. 
+My waking preoccupations are totally absent from my dreams. Instead there 
+is bland material about my early life which could apply to any child or 
+teen-ager. Thus, I must warn readers who know me only from this diary not 
+to try to make the image of me here fit my waking life. 
+
+
+\dreamdate{2/3/1974}
+
+3. I have had several dreams that I am taking the last courses of my 
+student career. (In waking life I have completed all course work.) I am 
+usually failing them. Tonight I dream that I have gone all semester without 
+studying (in a course in English?). Now I am in the final exam and sinking. I 
+will have to repeat these courses. Subsequently, I am sitting in a school 
+office (of a professor or psychologist?), giving him a long list (of words, a 
+foreign vocabulary?). (I mention this episode because I remember that while 
+I retained my nominal identity as Henry Flynt, I had the mind of a different 
+person. I experienced another person's existence instead of mine. Professor 
+Nell also appeared somewhere in this dream; as he has in several school 
+dreams I have had recently. 
+
+
+\dreamdatecomment{2/3/1974}{This is the date I recorded, but it seems that it would have to be later.}
+
+I get up in the morning and decide to have a self-indulgent breakfast 
+because of the unpleasantness of working on my income tax the day before. 
+So I put two slices of pizza in the oven, and also eat two bakery sweets, 
+possibly \'{e}clairs. Then I think that a Mexican TV dinner would have been 
+better all around, but it is too late; I have to eat what I am already preparing. 
+Subsequently, I go with John Alten to a Shoreham Cafeteria at Houston and 
+Mercer Streets. The cafeteria chain is a good one, but this cafeteria is dark 
+and extremely dingy upstairs where the serving line is. John complains that 
+there is no ventilation and that he is suffocating, and he stalks out. 
+
+Comment: When I awoke, my first thought was that the pizza in the oven 
+would be burning. (I assumed that I had arisen, put the pizza in the oven, 
+and gone back to sleep.) But then I realized that the breakfast was a dream. I 
+got up and prepared the Mexican dinner which I had decided was best in the 
+dream, but I also ate one \'{e}clair. 
+
+\dreamdate{7/8/1974}
+
+I am caught out in a theft of money, and I feel that the rest of my life 
+will be ruined. 
+
+Comment: The quality of the episode depended on my 
+strong belief in the reality of the social future and in my ability to form 
+accurate expectations about it. When I awakened, the whole misadventure 
+vanished. 
+
+
+End of excerpts from my dream diary.
+
+\begin{quotation}
+"... It is correct to say that the objective world is a synthesis of private views 
+or perceptions... But ... inasmuch as it is the common objective world that 
+renders ... general knowledge possible, it will be this world that the scientist 
+will identify with the world of reality. Henceforth the private views, though 
+just as real, will be treated as its perspectives. ... the common objective 
+world, whether such a thing exists or is a mere convenient fiction, is 
+indispensable to science ... 
+."\footnote{A. d'Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought (New York, Dover, 1950), pp. 176--7}
+\end{quotation}
+
+
+\textbf{A.} We wish to postulate that dreams are exactly what they seem to be 
+while we are dreaming, namely, literal reality. Naively, we want to get closer 
+to literal empiricism than natural science is. But science has worked out a 
+very comfortable world-view on the assumption that both dreams and 
+semi-conscious quasi-dreams are mere subjective phenomena of individual 
+consciousness. If we wish to carry through the postulate that dreams are 
+literal reality, then we will have to adopt a cognitive model quite different 
+from that of natural science. It is of crucial importance that we are not 
+interested in superstition. We do not wish to adopt a cognitive model which 
+would simply be defeated in competition with science. We wish to be at least 
+as rational, as empirical, and as cognitively parsimonious as science is. We 
+want our cognitive model to be compelling, and not to be a plaything which 
+is easily taken up and easily discarded. 
+
+The question is whether there can be a rational empiricism which 
+differs from science in placing dreamed episodes on the same level as waking 
+episodes, but which stops short of the "nihilistic empiricism" of my 
+philosophical essay entitled \essaytitle{The Flaws Underlying Beliefs}. (In effect, the 
+latter essay rejects other minds, causality, persistent objective entities, past 
+time, the possibility of objective categories and significant language, and so 
+forth, ending up with ungraded immediate experience.) 
+
+As an example of our problem, the waking scientific outlook assumes 
+that a typewriter continues to exist even when we turn our backs on it 
+(persistence of objective entities). In many of our dreams we make the same 
+sort of assumption. In other words, in some of our dreams the natural order 
+is not noticeably different from that of the waking world; and in many 
+dreams our conscious world-view has much in common with waking 
+common sense or scientific pragmatism. On 2/3/1974 I had a dream in which 
+a typewriter was featured. I certainly assumed that the typewriter continued 
+to exist when my back was turned to it. On 7/8/1974 I dreamed that I was 
+caught out in a theft of money, and I felt my life would be ruined because of 
+it. I certainly assumed the reality of the social future, and my ability to form 
+accurate expectations about it. These examples illustrate that we are not 
+nihilistic empiricists in our dreams. The question is whether acceptance of 
+the pragmatic outlook which we have in dreams is consistent with not 
+regarding the dream-world as a subjective phenomenon of individual 
+consciousness. Can we accept dreams as "literal reality"; or must we reject 
+the very concept of "reality" on order to defend the placing of the dream 
+world on the same level as the waking world? 
+
+In summary, the question is whether we can place dreams on the same 
+fevel as the waking world while stopping short of nihilistic empiricism. A 
+further difficulty in accomplishing this aim is that neurological science might 
+succeed in gaining complete experimental control of dreams. Scientists might 
+become able to produce dreams at will and to monitor them. The whole 
+phenomenon of dreaming would then tend to be totally assimilated to the 
+outlook of scientists. Their decision to treat dreams as subjective phenomena 
+of individual consciousness would be greatly supported by these 
+developments. Would we have to go all the way to nihilistic empiricism in 
+order to have a basis for rejecting the neurologists' accomplishments? 
+
+Still another difficulty is presented for us by semi-conscious 
+quasi-dreams such as the ones described in my diary. Semi-conscious 
+quasi-dreams exhibit some reality cues, but lack other important internal 
+reality cues. Science handles these experiences easily, by dismissing them 
+along with dreams as subjective phenomena of individual consciousness. 
+Suppose we accept that the semi-conscious quasi-dreams are illusory reality. 
+But if they can be illusory reality, how can we exclude the possibility that 
+dreams might be also? If, on the other hand, we accept the quasi-dreams as 
+literal reality, what about the missing reality cues? Can we justify different 
+treatment for dreams and quasi-dreams by saying that all reality cues have to 
+be present before an experience is accepted as non-illusory? If we propose 
+to do so, the question then becomes whether we should accept the weight 
+which common sense places on reality cues. 
+
+Why do we wish to stop short of nihilistic empiricism? Because we do 
+wish to assert that dreams can be remembered; that they can be described in 
+permanent records; that they can be compared and studied rationally. We do 
+want to cite the past as evidence; we do want to distinguish between actual 
+dream experience and waking fabrications, waking lies about what we have 
+dreamed; and we do want to describe what we experience in intersubjective 
+language.
+
+As easy way out which would offend nobody would be to treat dreams 
+as simulations of alternate universes. But this approach is a cowardly evasion 
+for several reasons. It excludes the phenomenon of the semi-conscious 
+quasi-dream, which poses the problem of internal reality cues in the sharpest 
+way. Further, we cannot give up the notion that our project is nearer to 
+literal empiricism than natural science is. We cannot accept the notion that 
+we must dismiss some of our experiences as mere illusions, but not all of 
+them. We do not see dreams as simulations of anything. Some of the most 
+interesting observations I have made about connections between adjacent 
+dreamed and waking episodes in my own experience are noticeable only 
+because I take both dreamed and waking experience literally. 
+
+\gap
+
+
+\textbf{B.} Before we continue our attempt to resolve our methodological 
+problem, we will provide more detail on topics which we have mentioned in 
+passing. We begin with the purported empiricism of natural science. The 
+philosopher Hume postulated that experience was the only raw material of 
+reality or cognition. However, he did not content himself with ungraded 
+experience. He insisted on draping the experiential raw material on an 
+intellectual framework in such a way that experience was used to simulate 
+the inherited conception of. reality, a conception which we will call 
+Aristotelian realism. Similarly for the purported empiricism of natural 
+science. In fact, the working scientist learns to think of the framework or 
+model as primary, and of experiences and verification procedures as ancillary 
+to it. The quotation by d'Abro which heads this essay concedes as much. 
+
+What we are investigating is whether experiences can be draped on a 
+different intellectual framework in which dreamed and waking life come out 
+as equally real. Some examples of alternate verification conventions follow. 
+
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item Accept intersubjective confirmation of my experience of the dream world 
+which occurs within the dream as confirmation of the reality of the dream 
+world. 
+
+\item Accept intersubjective confirmation of the past of the dream world which 
+occurs in the dream itself as confirmation of the reality of the dreamed past. 
+
+\item Recognize that there is no infallible way to tell whether other people are 
+lying about their dreamed experience or their waking experience. 
+
+\item Develop sophisticated interrogation techniques as a limited test of 
+whether people are telling the truth about their dreams. 
+
+\item Accept that a certain category of anomalies occurs in dreams only when 
+several people have reported experiences in that category. 
+\end{enumerate}
+
+The principal characteristic of the approach which these conventions 
+represent is that each dream is treated as a separate world. There is no 
+attempt to arrive at an account, for a given "objective" time period, which is 
+consistent with more than one dream or with both dreamed and waking 
+periods. Thus, many parallel worlds could be confirmed as real. As our 
+discussion proceeds, we will move away from this approach, probably out of 
+a sense that it is pointless to maintain a strong notion of reality and yet to 
+forego the notion of the consistency of all portions of reality. 
+
+\textbf{C.} Something that I have learned from a study of my dream records is 
+that while dreams are not chaotic, while they can be compared and 
+classified, it is not possibie to apply the method of natural science to them in 
+the sense of discerning a consistent, impersonal natural order in the dream 
+world. It is not that the natural order is different in dreams from what it is in 
+the waking world; it is that the dream worlds are incommensurate with the 
+discernment of a natural order in the scientific sense. Here are some specific 
+observations which relate to this whole question. 
+
+\begin{enumerate}
+	\item Some dreams are not noticeably anomalous. The laws of science are not 
+violated in them. This observation is important in giving us a normal base for 
+our investigation. Dreams are not all crazy and chaotic. 
+
+\item In some dreams, it is impossible to abstract an impersonal natural order 
+from personal experiences and anecdotes. There are no impersonal events. 
+There is no nature whose order can be defined impersonally. The dreams are 
+full of personal magic which cannot be generalized to a characteristic of an 
+impersonal natural order. 
+
+\item As a special case of (2), in some dreams, we jump back in time and move 
+discontinuously in time and space. Chronological personal magic. 
+
+\item In dreams, the distinction between myself and other people is blurred in 
+many different ways. Also, I sometimes become a disembodied 
+consciousness. 
+
+\item As a generalization of (4), sometimes it becomes impossible to distinguish 
+objects from our sensing and perceiving function. The mediating sensory 
+function becomes obtrusively anomalous. Stable object gestalts cannot be 
+identified. 
+
+\item Sometimes we experience the logically impossible in dreams. My father 
+was both dead and buried, and alive and walking around, in one dream. 
+
+\item The possibility of identifying causal relationships is sometimes lacking in 
+dreams. It is not just that actions have unexpected effects. It is that events 
+are strung together like beads on a string. There is no sense of willful acting 
+on the world or manipulation of the world which can be objectified as a 
+causal relation between impersonal events. 
+\end{enumerate}
+
+The possibility arises of using dreams as philosophical experiments in 
+worlds in which one or more of the preconditions for application of the 
+scientific method is absent. (But in the one case in which Alten and I tried 
+this, we reached opposite conclusions. Alten said that dreams in which one 
+can jump around in time proved that the irreversibility of time is the basis 
+for distinguishing between time and space; I said that the dreams proved that 
+time and space can be distinguished even when the irreversibility of time is 
+lacking.) 
+
+Observation (2) above can lead us to an insight about the waking world. 
+Perhaps science insists on the elimination of personal anecdotes from the 
+natural order which it recognizes because the scientist wants results which 
+can be transferred from one life to another and which will give one person 
+power over another. At any rate, science excludes anecdotal anomalies which 
+cannot be made somehow into "objective" events. As an example, I may be 
+walking down the street and suddenly find myself on the other side of the 
+street with no awareness of any act of crossing the street. 
+
+What dreams provide us with is worlds in which anecdotal anomalies 
+cannot be relegated to limbo as they are in waking science. They are so 
+prominent in dreams that we can become accustomed to identifying them 
+there. We may then learn to recognize analogous anomalies in the waking 
+world, where we had overlooked them before because of our scientific 
+indoctrination. 
+
+Of course, we run the risk that superstitious people will misuse our 
+theory to justify their folly. But the difference between our theory and 
+superstition is clear. When the superstitious person says that he 
+communicates with spirits, he either lies outright; or alse he misinterprets his 
+experiences---embedding them in an extraneous pre-scientific belief system, 
+or treating them as controversions of scientific propositions. We, on the 
+other hand, maintain more literally than science does that the only raw 
+material of cognition is experience. We differ from science in draping 
+experiences on a different organizational framework. The "reality" we arrive 
+at is incommensurate with science; it does not falsify any scientific 
+proposition. As for science and superstition, we headed this essay with the 
+quotation by d'Abro to emphasize that the scientist himself is superstitious: 
+he is determined to believe in the common objective world, even though it is 
+a fiction, because it is necessary to science. The superstitious person wants 
+you to believe that his communication with spirits is intersubjectively 
+consequential. Thus our theory, which tends toward the attitude that 
+nothing is intersubjectively consequential, offers him even less comfort than 
+science does. 
+
+\textbf{D.} We next turn to semi-conscious quasi-dreams. Referring to my 
+experience on the morning of 1/12/1974, I describe the experience by saying 
+that I was on the Courant Institute plaza. But I cannot conclude that I was 
+on the Courant Institute plaza. The reason is that important internal reality 
+cues are missing in the experience. For one thing, the peripheral environment 
+is missing; in its place is a void. Referring to my experience on 1/1-/1974, 
+still other cues are missing. I am awake, and the scene is unstable and 
+momentary. The slightest attention shift will cause the scene to vanish. 
+
+When we recognize that we have disallowed falling asleep, awaking, and 
+anomalous phenomena in dreams as evidence of unreality, a careful analysis 
+yields only two types of reality cues. 
+
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item Presence of the peripheral environment. 
+
+\item "Single consciousness." This cue is missing when we see a 
+three-dimensional scene and move about in it, and yet have a background 
+awareness that we are awake in bed; and lose the scene through a mere shift 
+of attention. Its absence is even more marked if the scene is a momentary 
+one between two waking periods. 
+\end{enumerate}
+
+Let us recall our earlier discussion of the empiricism of science. Science 
+does not content itself with ungraded experience. it drapes experience on an 
+intellectual framework in such a way as to simulate Aristotelian realism. It 
+feeds experience into a maze of verification procedures in order to confirm a 
+model which is not explicit in ungraded experience. It short, science grades 
+experience as to its reality on the basis of standards which are 
+"intellectually" supplied. Internal reality cues are thus characteristics of 
+experience which are given special weight by the grading procedure. The 
+immediate problem for us is that ordinary descriptive language implicitly 
+recognizes these reality cues; one would never say without qualification that 
+one was on the Courant Institute plaza if the peripheral environment was 
+missing and if one was also aware of being awake in bed at the time. (In 
+contrast, it is fair to use ordinary descriptive language with respect to 
+dreamed episodes when our consciousness is singulary, that is, when 
+everything seems real and unqualified.)
+
+For purposes of further comparison I may mention an experience I 
+have had on rare occasions while lying on my back in bed fully awake. It is 
+as if colored spheres whose centers are located a few feet or yards in front of 
+my chest expand until they press against me, one after the other. I use the 
+phrase "as if" because reality cues are missing in this experience, and thus I 
+cannot use the language of stable object gestalts without qualification in 
+describing it. The colors are not vivid as real colors are. They are like 
+visualized colors. The spheres pass through each other, and through me---with 
+only a moderate sensation of pressure. I can turn the experience off by 
+getting out of bed. The point, again, is that it is inherent in ordinary 
+language not to use unqualified object descriptions in these circumstances. 
+Yet the only language I have for such sensory configurations is the language 
+of stable object gestalts-this is particularly obvious in the example of the 
+Courant Institute plaza. (Is "ringing in the ears' in the same class of 
+phenomena?)
+
+An insight that is crucial in elucidating this problem is that when I 
+describe episodes, the descriptions implicitly convey not only sensations but 
+beliefs, as when I speak of a typewriter in a dream on the assumption that it 
+persisted while I was not looking at it. The peculiar quality of a quasi-dream 
+comes about not only because it is an anomaly in my sensations but because 
+it is an anomaly in the scientific-pragmatic cognitive model which underlies 
+ordinary language. If I discard this cognitive model and then report the 
+event, it will not be the same event: the beliefs implicit in ordinary language 
+helped give the event its quality. As a further example, now that I have 
+recognized experiences such as that of 1/12/1974, I am willing to entertain 
+the possibility that they are the basis for claims by superstitious persons to 
+have projected astrally. But to use the phrase "astral projection" is to embed 
+the experiences in a pre-scientific belief system extraneous to the 
+experiences themselves. If we learn to report such experiences by using 
+idioms like "ringing in the ears" and blocking any comparison with notions 
+of objective reality or intersubjective import, we will have flattened out 
+experience and will have moved in the direction of ungraded experience and 
+nihilistic empiricism. 
+
+\textbf{E.} We next take up connections between adjacent dreamed and waking 
+periods. As a preliminary, we reject conventional notions that dreams are 
+fabricated from memories of waking reality; or that dreams are precognitions 
+of waking reality; or that dreams are mental phenomena which symbolize 
+waking reality. We reject these notions because they conflict with the placing 
+of the dream world on the same level as the waking world. 
+
+Connections between dream and waking periods are important in this 
+study because we may wish to create such connections deliberately, and even 
+to attribute causal significance to them. Initially, we define the concept of 
+dream control: it is to conduct one's waking life so that it is supportive of 
+one's dreamed life in some sense. We also define controlled dreaming: it is to 
+manipulate a person "from outside" before sleep (or during sleep) so as to 
+influence the content of that person's dreams. (An example would be to give 
+somebody a psychoactive sleeping pill.) 
+
+A careful analysis of connections between dream and waking periods 
+yields the following classification of such connections. 
+
+\begin{enumerate}
+	\item I walk around the kitchen in a dream, then awaken and walk around the 
+kitchen. Voluntary continued action. 
+
+\item Given a project with causally separate components, voluntarily 
+assembled, I can carry out the project entirely while awake, entirely in 
+dreams, or partly while awake and partly in dreams. 
+
+\item I walk around the kitchen while awake, then sleep. I may then walk 
+around the kitchen in a dream. Also, I draw a glass of water while awake. I 
+may have the glass of water to use in the dream. We could postulate that 
+such connections are not mere coincidences, if they occur. However, we 
+certainly cannot produce such connections at will. We call these connections 
+echoes of waking actions in dreams. Note the case in which I taped my 
+mouth shut before sleeping, and could not whistle in the subsequent dream. 
+
+\item We next have connections from dreamed to waking periods which can be 
+postulated to have causal significance. First, misfortune or danger in dreams 
+is regularly followed by immediate awaking. Secondly, I have had 
+experiences in which a headlong dive or an attempt to whistle continued 
+from dream to waking, right through waking up. These experiences are 
+causally continuous actions. However, I cannot bring them about at will. 
+
+\item We can manipulate a person "from outside" before sleep (or during sleep) 
+so as to influence the content of that person's dreams. The dream is not an 
+echo of the waking action; the causal relationship is manipulative. Examples 
+are to give someone a psychoactive sleeping drug or to create a special 
+environment for sleep. The case in which I taped my mouth shut before 
+sleeping was a remarkable borderline case between an echo and a 
+manipulation. 
+\end{enumerate}
+
+in conclusion, dream control is any of the connections described in 
+(1)--(4). Controlled dreaming is (5). We have analyzed these concepts 
+meticulously because we want to exclude all attempts at magic, all 
+superstition from the project of placing dreamed and waking life on the same 
+level. There must be no rain dancing, no false causality, in this project. 
+
+\textbf{F.} Until now, we have analyzed our experience episode by episode. We 
+could make this approach into a principle by assuming that each episode is a 
+separate and complete world, which has its reality confirmed internally. In 
+particular, the notion of objective location in space and time would be 
+maintained if it appeared in a dream and was intersubjectively confirmed in 
+the dream, but the notion would be purely internal to each episode. The 
+objection to these assumptions, as we mentioned at the end of (B), is that 
+they propose to maintain the notion of objective location, and yet they 
+forego the notion of the consistency of all portions of reality. if we adopt 
+these assumptions and then compare all the reports of our dreamed and 
+waking periods, we may find that we have experienced different events 
+attributed to the same location---and indeed, that is exactly what we do 
+experience. 
+
+One of the main discoveries of this essay has been that dreamed and 
+waking periods are more symmetrical than our scientific-pragmatic 
+indoctrination would have us suppose. The reality of the dream world is 
+intersubjectively confirmed---within the dream. Anecdotal anomalies can be 
+found in waking periods as well as in dreams. Entities which resemble 
+common object gestalts but which lack some of the reality cues of object 
+gestalts can be encountered whicle we are fully awake. Now we can 
+recognize a further symmetry between dreamed and waking life. A dreamed 
+misfortune is usually "lost" when we awaken, and its disappearance is taken 
+as evidence of the unreality of the dream (the nightmare). But we can also 
+"lose" a waking misfortune by going to sleep and dreaming. Further, just as 
+a waking misfortune can persist from one waking period to another, a 
+dreamed misfortune can persist from one dream to another (recurrent 
+nightmares). Thus, we conclude that in regard to the consistency of episodes 
+with each other, there is no basis for preferring any one episode, dreamed or 
+waking, as the standard by which the reality of other episodes will be judged. 
+Of course, rather than maintaining the reality of each episode as a separate 
+world, we can block all attributions of events to objective locations. This 
+approach would alter the quality of the events and bring us closer to 
+nihilistic empiricism. 
+
+A further problem arises if we take the dream reports of other people as 
+reports of reality. Suppose I am awake in my apartment at 3 AM on 
+2/6/1974, but that someone dreams at that time that I am out of my 
+apartment. Multiple existences which I do not even experience are now being 
+attributed to me. (My own episodes also pose a problem of whether 
+"multiple existences" are being attributed to me, but that problem concerns 
+events I experience myself.) What we should recognize is that the problem of 
+"multiple existences" is not as unique to our investigation as may at first 
+appear. Natural science has an analogous problem in disposing of the notion 
+of other minds. The notion of the existence of many minds, none of which 
+can experience any other, is difficult to assimilate to the cognitive model of 
+science. On the other hand, to deny the existence of any mind, as 
+behaviorists do, is to repudiate the scientist's observations of his own mental 
+life. And if the scientist's observations of his own mental life are repudiated, 
+then there is no good reason not to repudiate the scientist's observations of 
+his budily sensations and of external phenomena also; that is, to repudiate 
+the very possibility of scientific observation. Further, when behaviorists try 
+to convince people that they have no awareness, whom (or what) are they 
+trying to convince? And what is the behaviorist explanation of the origin of 
+the fiction of consciousness? Who benefits from perpetuating this fiction, 
+and how does he benefit? 
+
+We must emphasize that the above critique is not applicable to every 
+philosophical outlook. It applies specifically to science---because the scientist 
+wants to have the benefits of two incompatible conceptual frameworks. 
+Some of the common sense about other minds is necessary in the operational 
+preliminaries to formal science; and the scientist's role as observer is 
+indispensable to formal science. Yet the conceptual framework of science is 
+essentially physicalistic, and can allow only for external objects. What this 
+difficulty reveals is that the cognitive model of science has stabilized and 
+prevailed even though it has blatent discrepancies in its foundations. The 
+foremost discrepancy, of course, is that the scientist is willing to have his 
+enterprise rest on a fiction, that of the common objective world. Thus, the 
+example of science suggests an additional way of dealing with the problems 
+which arise for our theory: we can allow discrepancies to persist unresolved. 
+
+There is an interesting observation to be made about one's own dreams 
+in connection with multiple existences. I have found that the person I am in 
+my dreams is significantly different from the waking identity I take for 
+granted, as in my dream of 2/1/1974. As for the problem of other people's 
+dreams, one way of handling them would be simply to reject the existence of 
+other people's dream worlds and of their consciousnesses, and to limit one's 
+consideration to one's own dreams. But perhaps the most productive way to 
+handle the problem would be to construe it as one involving language in the 
+way that the problems concerning quasi-dreams did. Our descriptive language 
+is a language of stable object gestalts, of scientific-pragmatic reality. If we 
+accept reports of other people's dreams in language which blocks any 
+implications concerning objective reality, then our perceptual interpretations 
+will be different and the quality of the events will be fundamentally 
+different. The experience-world will be flatter. But maybe this is a 
+revolutionary advance. Maybe reports of our appearances in other people's 
+dreams, in language which blocks any implications about reality, are what we 
+should strive for. And if ve cease to be stable object gestalts for others, 
+maybe our stable object gestalts will not even appear in their dreams. 
+
+
+\section*{Note on how to remember dreams}
+
+The trick in remembering a dream is to fix in your mind one incident or 
+theme in the dream immediately upon awaking from it. You will then be 
+able to remember the whole dream well enough to write a description of it 
+the next day, and you will probably find that for weeks afterwards you can 
+add to the description and correct it. 
+
+
-- 
cgit v1.2.3

