My fascination with dreams never ends, but it has a wave-like pattern. The subject fades from view for a while until some dream snippet reminds me of the mystery again. One such snipped came this morning. Nothing dramatic is about to be unfolded. In the dream I was simply sitting on a concrete ledge idly playing with little balls made of soot or ashes, playing in a kind of mindless way. In the dream the very mindlessness of that activity surfaced into awareness; but with awareness suddenly present, I promptly woke up. Ninety times out of a hundred this sort of thing fades by the time I’m halfway down the stairs. Today it was still there—they were still there, those little balls of soot. Sometimes I just stand in the still dark kitchen waiting for the water to boil, the only light coming from above the stove; I’m in what is technically known as a “brown study.” (Where did that phrase originate?) And sometimes then I break that state and force the mind to concentrate.
Doing that this morning, and pondering that snipped with a stern frown on my face, it occurred to me that dreams produce splendid samples of consciousness without self-consciousness. What actually happens, I propose, is this:
As it is gradually aroused from deep and entirely unconscious sleep, the sleeping brain begins to process memories. The memories processed tend to be those of recent experiences—quite frequently thoughts of the night before. In this process the brain arranges what it finds lying about into the best possible patterns—almost as if it were trying to orient itself. The brain lacks visual inputs at this moment; the eyes are closed. Consequently it arranges whatever happens to be present into visual images. This arranging is, of course, a sequential process. And that sequence, that movement in time, is presented as a dynamism, as the “action,” of the dream. Whatever materials the brain thus arranges—remembered objects, actions, or thoughts—were accompanied by a mix of feelings when they happened in reality. The brain also integrates those feelings into the dream pattern. And those feelings then become the consciousness of the dream self.
Now the dream itself, of course, is stored in memory too. And when the self actually returns, when we wake up genuinely, we also become aware of that dream. And then it seems to us as a sequence of lived experience. When we tell the dream, we describe ourselves doing this, doing that, going here, driving a car, etc. — indeed much as above I described myself playing with balls of soot.
But what we do not notice in recalling dreams is the absence of self-consciousness in dreams. Or that, if self-consciousness is present, it is almost immediately followed by awakening.
Today’s dream snippet was as instructive as it was precisely because my brain wove a ridiculous picture. I don’t usually sit around for extended periods playing with marbles—much less marbles made of soot. The real self—wherever it might be during sleep—glimpsed this picture. Its incompatibility with my normal state of mind—and actions—aroused it. But when it becomes a presence, then dreams depart.
The real puzzle of dreams, I think, is focused right there. The puzzle is the absence of the self. Materialism has a very simple explanation—which fits the facts very nicely. There isn’t such a thing. The self is simply the top-most layer of the brain. During dreams it’s still inactive; the dream comes from the lower, the more primitive stem. That region can, if not with great precision, detect anomalies in experience—and when it does, it rouses the higher functions so that they can deal with the “emergency.” My cerebellum was thus smart enough to see that playing with soot-balls was not appropriate behavior; therefore it called the frontal lobe to report this misbehavior—and I promptly awoke.
What you see is what you get. All this makes pretty good sense. But I also see something else—experience something else. It is that the waking self is something quite distinctly and sharply different from any other physical experience I have. Consciousness has a unique quality that I simply cannot with any genuine conviction reduce to the same phenomenological basics as being hungry, thirsty, sleepy, sexy, scared, eager, hot, or cold. I’m also intellectually persuaded that all that I experience must in some way be capable of rational integration—thus that consciousness and meaning must have their own adequate explanation—much as biological or inorganic mechanisms do. Therefore the puzzle for me is where the self is when I dream or sleep. Monistic approaches (e.g., body and soul are sides of the same coin) don’t produce in me, as in so many others, a feeling of closure at all. Concerning where we might go in sleep, that subject I've at least tentatively explored here.
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