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8/4/04
First Précis
Everyday, at any given moment there are people that are asleep and conversely
people that are awake. Bound to an enduring cycle of sleep and wakefulness, people
have come to accept with little or no question that we need sleep to survive. Whether
succumbing to the dream world for four hours or more than eight, slumber has become a
vital part of our existence. Always accompanying sleep, but not always remembered, is
the onset of dreams—a second reality woven out of our memory, senses, and
imagination. This state of dreaming is nothing new to the human experience and the
same goes for the state of wakefulness. The distinction between the two has always
assumed to be clear: what one experiences while awake is reality and what one
experiences during sleep is not. However, if humans are truly the sum of their
Dreams often take place in locations that one has already been to or seen and with
people that one has already met or heard of in their waking lives. According to Freud,
the subject and setting of dreams can be influenced by certain factors that the dreamer
The dream that a person has, according to Freud, is a derivative of the experiences that
the person encountered while awake. But if dreams interconnect with our waking lives
impossible to ignore their effect on our daily lives. In fact, a nightmare can be powerful
enough to raise us from sleep and in severe instances cause distress and insomnia.
Everything real is perceived through the senses. A piece of candy to a person who is
awake, is seen in a wrapper, felt on the pallet, heard against the teeth, and tasted and
smelled, therefore it must be real. Now take that same piece of candy and put it into a
dream. A dreaming person who eats a piece of candy still perceives all those things.
that it is not real? If so, then the reality of everything that we perceive while conscious
comes into question too. How can one prove the existence or non-existence of something
if there is nothing else to base its existence on, other than the set of fallible human
senses? “He [Descartes] resolved ‘to assume that everything that ever entered into my
mind was no more true than the illusions of my dreams” (Straus, 108). Descartes
questions the very senses that we use to ascertain what is real and what is not. So
With this revelation that dreams are not as ghostly and immaterial as one would
like them to be, perhaps dreams serve a different purpose than the simple notion of
unconscious entertainment. Because dreams are a derivative and a product of the greater
state of being called the waking world, it plays very nicely into the views of Plato. “…
and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of on another, which the fire throws
on the opposite wall of the cave…” (Plato, 358) The viewing of dreams, much like the
viewing of shadows on the cave wall is simply a lesser form of experience and
perception. In dreams (synonymous with being inside the cave) the dreamer is exposed
to a very limited range of stimuli. A person can only dream about what he has previously
experienced, simply put: he is limited by his own memory. A person in a dream state
cannot dream about things outside his experience. For example, if a person has never
seen a television or heard of such a device, it would be logically impossible for him to
dream about one. Similarly, in the cave, the slaves cannot be expected to think or
converse about anything beyond that of the shadows that they see on the wall. What they
see is deemed as their reality since they know no more than what they perceive. In a
dream, the dream is perceived as reality, the dreamer never questions whether he is
conscious or not, it is simply assumed. Yet, rouse that person from sleep and only after
adjusting into a wakeful state does he realize that he had been dreaming all along. “To
distinguish between dream and wakefulness, one must be awake.” (Strauss, 103-4)
Likewise, in Plato’s allegory, the slave does not find distinction between his experience
in the caves and his enlightenment in the sun until he is actually brought out into the sun.
In a wakeful state—the enlightened state—one is able to look back upon the dream and
say “I was previously dreaming”; one cannot be in a dream and say with total
awake is not essential to dream, it is essential to realize that one had been dreaming.
permissible when one forgoes the trappings of his conscious mind. In the allegory, Plato
discusses that it would be impossible for the enlightened to be fully integrated back into
the pseudo-reality that he had once been a part of. (Plato, 360-1) With respect to dreams
this is true: a dreaming person will often find himself in impossible situations or
performing impossible tasks. Viewed by a conscious person, the entire dream would
seem ludicrous however from the viewpoint of the dreamer, nothing could be more
normal. “The dream world overwhelms the dreamer; it appears real not in opposition to
the unreal but in default of any unreality.” (Straus, 115) The human mind abhors the
absence of reality, so in the dream world, with the conscious mind and knowledge of the
“true” reality out of the picture, the dreamer accepts any reality—for any reality is better
than non-existence. This raises the question of whether the conscious world is actually
what people take it for granted: reality. Aforementioned was the fact that everything real
is perceived through a person’s senses, yet they can easily be tricked and confused. How
can one be so sure of the physical world if the medium that we experience it through is so
faulty; do we really know what we know? “Is there a third condition, besides, dreaming
and being awake, that enables us to judge both of them?” (Strauss, 110) Descartes
believed that there must be another level of consciousness beyond that of what one
experiences while awake. After all, just because one awakens from a dream does not
necessarily mean that he has completed the journey out of the cave. Romanticism
embraces the idea that there is some higher plane of existence beyond that of our current
scope. Unfortunately, the travel package to higher consciousness often comes with a one
Walt Whitman gives the impression that the essence of the individual is immortal. The
most important theme throughout “Song of Myself” is that one makes the most of the
time in his semi-enlightened state (i.e. human form). The individual’s soul has always
existed, and will forever continue to exist, but for one brief infinitesimal moment the soul
forgetting:/The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,/Hath had elsewhere its setting,
[…]” (Mack, 585) Concurring with Whitman’s idea, the soul forgets about its journey
through the higher plane of reality and is re-born into a “sleep”. This sleep is the waking
world that people know now—everyone has forgotten what it was like existing as this
supreme entity. With this realization, all the things that apply to dreams apply to our real
waking lives. One does not realize that there is more to everything than what we can
simply see, touch, hear, smell, and taste. The higher truth that is out there remains
unacknowledged because one cannot perceive it; he simply believes that this world is real
because he cannot accept that it is unreal. Just as in a dreaming state, one assumes that he
is in a real environment; he does not question its absolute realness but simply takes
comfort in that it is there. Hence, our waking world may not be as real and absolute as
With that said, dreams may relate more to our waking lives than previously
thought. No longer are they simply images that come to us when we sleep or the
manifested desires of our unconscious. Dreams become an integral part of who we are,
providing not only a viewpoint for our daily experience but acting as an anchor—a
starting point from where we can mark the beginning of our conscious development.
Dreams even indirectly support the idea of life after death, they support the notion that
despite how rational and thinking we are, there are still levels of cognition that we have
yet to experience. By supporting the concept of the after life do dreams even begin to
prove the existence of Heaven, Hell, and the existence of God? Maybe not, but it is nice
to dream about.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Random House, Inc., 1978
Mack, Maynard, ed 5. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Vol 2. New York:
Straus, Eriwin W. Phenomenological Psychology. New York: Basic Books, Inc, 1966.