Dreaming Life

¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.

¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,

una sombra, una ficción,

y el mayor bien es pequeño;

que toda la vida es sueño,

y los sueños, sueños son.1placeholder

A movie is being shown to me, at the usual, cinematic rate of twenty-four frames per second. But I don’t see individual frames: I see an uninterrupted flow as scenes unfold before my eyes. It is natural to think of this experience as an illusion, and to believe that, in order to reveal it for what it is, it is enough to slow the rate. At ten frames per second, the flow will be lost and reduced to a choppy sequence; at three, I will just see individual frames. So, one might conclude, it was never a flow to begin with: I was deluded if I thought it was.

I want to resist this natural temptation: to forget about the external mechanism delivering frames at the rate of x per second, and to think of the various experiences involved (the ones “naturally” associated with twenty-four, or ten, or three frames per second) as just different—as flowing, choppy, or divided into individual, isolated bits. And I want to ask: assuming that the experience of isolated bits is at one extreme of a spectrum, what would be at the opposite extreme?

In a flowing experience a character moves, so her various positions in space merge into one another; the room where she resides, or the landscape where she travels, also moves as various elements of it become variously relevant, and that also amounts to every element merging into a subsequent phase of itself—when another angle of it shows up, or the whole thing goes through some kind of transformation. This merging contrasts neatly with what goes on in the choppier cases, where I experience not movement but a succession of stages of stopping dead (a key word, as we will see), by the character and her enviromment: correlated with one another, to be sure, but still each on its own, each separate from the others. So suppose we take merging as the factor that organizes the spectrum: that we see the spectrum as going from the most discrete to the most continuous, in the sense in which numbers are discrete, distinct from one another (2 is distinct from 3, but also  √2 is distinct from √3, and any other real number is distinct from all of its peers), whereas spaces and times are continuous (and so cannot be captured by a succession of numbers, however infinitely many those might be).

If that is our organizing principle, it matters that what we have in the scenes I was experiencing is still partial continuity, partial merging. The main character in the scenes is continuous with all phases of herself, merges with all of them; but is not continuous, does not merge, with any other character, or with the door or the table. There is a residual choppiness to the experience: it is still the experience of individual, isolated objects that show up as distinct from each other. What could be the limit of unchoppiness? an experience that had perfect continuity? where no isolation whatsoever took place? which was constituted of no individuals?

At the end of the Meditations, Descartes writes:

“I now notice that there is a considerable difference between […] [dreams and waking experience]; dreams are never joined by the memory with all the other actions of life, as is the case with those actions that occur when one is awake. For surely, if, while I am awake, someone were suddenly to appear to me and then immediately disappear, as occurs in dreams, so that I see neither where he came from nor where he went, it is not without reason that I would judge him to be a ghost or a phantom conjured up in my brain, rather than a true man. But when these things happen, and I notice distinctly where they come from, where they are now, and when they come to me, and when I can connect my perception of them without interruption with the whole rest of my life, I am clearly certain that these perceptions have happened to me not while I was dreaming but while I was awake.”2placeholder

Based on the omnipotence and benevolence of his creator, which by now he regards as established, he takes the consistency of an experience to be proof of its clear difference from dreams: the dream argument is thus undone. But notice that the resolution, and the argument itself, depend on a previous identification of dreams: Descartes knows what dreams are, and just wonders whether what he takes to be waking experiences are not themselves dreams. This point will turn out to have immense significance later. For the moment I point out that a more straightforward account of the original worry, independent of any such identification, would be: within the totality of my experience, how do I know what to trust and what not to trust, what to discard and what to retain? Kant puts it that way in the first Critique:

“If […] my perception is to contain the cognition of an occurrence, namely that something actually happens, then it must be an empirical judgment in which one thinks that the sequence is determined, i.e., that it presupposes another appearance in time which it follows necessarily or in accordance with a rule. Contrariwise, if I were to posit that which precedes and the occurrence did not follow it necessarily, then I would have to hold it to be only a subjective play of my imaginings, and if I still represented something objective by it I would have to call it a mere dream.” (311-312)3placeholder

In experience as a whole, some occurrences show categorial coherence and some do not; calling the latter dreams, and hence not allowing them to challenge the categorial coherence of the rest—of the real world—, is a way of saving that coherence. Though empirically there may be a problem in distinguishing dreams from reality (which is where Descartes’ discussion is situated), transcendentally the concept of a dream is what allows for the solution of a problem: how is the total experience one?

Kant’s point of view makes us look at dreams and waking life as parts of a single experience, where some occurrences look more odd, less categorially coherent, than others. The category brought out in the first Kant passage above was causality; but there are also the categories of quantity—those letting us count objects and decide whether it is one or several that we are dealing with. And here we run into something relevant to our issue of a spectrum. For in the parts of our total experience that we decide to label dreams it doesn’t just happen that someone suddenly appears to me and then immediately disappears, “so that I see neither where he came from nor where he went”—there are not, in other words, only violations of the regularity of causal sequences—: there are also cases of a man turning into a woman, or a snake, or a chest of drawers. In a dream, everything is (potentially, at least) continuous with everything else; there is no telling where something ends and something else begins.

Kant is emphatic that experience be unitary, and that categorial coherence is what is needed to make it so:

“[T]he concept of a cause is nothing other than a synthesis (of that which follows in the temporal series with other appearances) in accordance with concepts; and without that sort of unity, which has its rule a priori, and which subjects the appearances to itself, thoroughgoing and universal, hence necessary unity of consciousness would not be encountered in the manifold perceptions. But these would then belong to no experience, and would consequently be without an object, and would be nothing but a blind play of representations, i.e., less than a dream.” (235)

The blind play, that is, to which Hume reduces the self and its experience:

“[S]etting aside some metaphysicians […], I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”4placeholder

There are, however, (at least) two ways in which a mere bundle or collection can be made to acquire unity. Categorial coherence is one of them; then the unity amounts to making one coherent sense, obeying necessary laws that enable us to manage the experience in a uniform manner, to explain what happened and predict what will happen. But there is also the unity of a flux, of everything merging into everything else, without solution of continuity. The first kind of unity is manifested in what we take to be waking life; the second, as I already noted, is manifested in what we take to be dreams. Dreams, then, are the other extreme of the spectrum we were looking for.

Here is where I get speculative, or, if you will, wacky. For I ask you to identify life with flux, with unbounded continuity, and death with choppiness, with the falling apart of that flux into individual drops, which are distinct from one another and can be counted—whereas life is uncountable. And I ask you to think that it is not all or nothing: life or no-life, unbounded flux or plain death. That there can be, and most often there are, combinations, to different degrees, of one and the other: that we can, and most often do, experience a scene which is life to some extent and death to some other extent, which is in flux to a point and choppy to a different point. Largely for practical reasons, we need a certain amount of choppiness in our experience: we need some objects to detach themselves firmly from the flux and maintain a separate identity, at least for a while. We could not cope with the extreme flux Hume described; we need it to slow down, in ways that feel comfortable and workable. So, in an experience that ranges in principle across all speeds, we privilege those parts (and speeds) we can handle, and call them objective, or veridical, or some other term voicing a positive value judgment. Past a certain point (a certain speed) we give up, and consign that part to the dumpster—the transcendental dumpster, the one labeled “dream,” or “hallucination,” or some other term voicing lack of relevance, of import, of merit. And we adjust to the slim territory we have left, maybe even call that life, or at least real life. Traces of what we have thus lost remain, awkwardly matched with the majority of an orderly, steady existence: the stream of thought (hard as it is to keep it moving, not to have it constantly broken down by intrusive, tangible concerns), the enjoyment of play, the fluidity of music—and of spoken language as music. For some of these footprints of our cowardice we even create “metaphysical” problems of what relation they have with what they deny, as long as we want to call them real, too (and some, of course, deny that).

Now it is just a matter of adding up the various things I said, speculative or otherwise. If life is flux, and what is located at the flux extreme of the spectrum is dreams, then life is dreams—or rather, not dreams in the plural, because that would require counting, but dream, uncountable: life is dream (la vida es sueño). Dreams are also dreams (or dream), of course, as the poet says in his closing line; what we commonly (and misleadingly) call life includes, among them (or it), only the most conservative, timid, choppy, deathlike. And the immense significance of Descartes’ original identification of dreams can now be seen (not that he would have agreed, of course!): dreams are easy to tell; all you have to do is bring out the flux character of them which is life as such; it is far more troubling to discern the ones we would want to live with. For that purpose, it takes at least six meditations, and then some.5placeholder