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Dreaming an Impossible Dream
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
Norman Malcolm wrote:
That something is implausible or Impossible does not go to show that I did not dream it. In a dream I can do the impossible in every sense of the word.
Malcolm nowhere suggests why this remark should be regarded as true. Indeed, many philosophers would regard it is palpably false. After all, it is not at all obvious that one can hope for, intend to do, or believe what is in every sense of the word, impossible. I think, however, that Malcolm's observation is correct; and this paper is devoted to showing why it is correct. In the concluding section I present an account of dreaming that shows why it is that impossible dreams are possible.
“What can a person dream?” This is an odd query; and what it might mean to put this question (if, indeed, it is a sensible question) is not at all transparent. It is not like asking what a person might dream, when this is understood as a request for what someone is likely to dream, or what one may reasonably expect someone to dream, say, on the evening of a day in which one had visited a dentist.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1975
References
* I am grateful to the editors of the Canadian journal of Philosophy, and particularly to Professor john King-Farlow, for several helpful and constructive criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper.
1. Malcolm, Norman Dreaming (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959) p. 57.Google Scholar
2. Malcolm, p. 84: Malcolm, however, appears to be saying that such a case as the one presented here is unimaginable; or, at best, “metaphysical”. He writes: “if one knew that someone was telling a dream in all naturalness and sincerity, one would have to be in a philosophical humour to propound a doubt as to whether a dream had really occurred during his sleep or whether he was mistaken in thinking so”. Malcolm's language is obscure: Does he mean that if someone knew that another was telling a dream, then he could not rationally, question whether the speaker had really dreamt? This, of course, would not be a remark about dreaming, but about the sense of ‘know’; i.e. if a knows that p, a cannot raise a doubt about p. Malcolm, I suggest, does not mean this, but rather, means something like: If one knew that someone was sincerely telling what he believed to be a dream, then one cannot question whether he had dreamt. This however, as the story above shows, is clearly false.
3. Malcolm, p. 84: Malcolm dismisses the question as to “whether dreams take place in logical independence of working impressions” by calling it a “purely metaphysical question that does not arise in the ordinary commerce of life and language.” If Malcolm really believes that such questions are idle, why is he at pains to argue, throughout Chapter 13, that the scientific investigations of rapid eye movements and muscular action currents must fail to produce criteria for the existence (or occurrence) of dreams?
4. Since writing this paper I have come across a somewhat similar idea in Bennett's, Jonathan “Shooting, Killing and Dying”, Canadian journal of Philosophy March 1973CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here Bennett introduces a distinction between immediate and delayed characteristics. (p.317)
5. It may be objected that this view is open to a criticism of Malcolm by Putnam, Hilary (“Dreaming and ‘Depth Grammar’,” in Analytical Philosophy, 1st series, (ed.) Butler, R.J. pp. 225–228)Google Scholar, in which Putnam notes that Malcolm's account runs counter to the “assumption underlying ordinary talk about dreams: namely, that dreams take place during the night.” What I have attempted to do here is to perspicuously display the logic of “having a dream” as a complex event of the sort that cannot be identified with a particular element of the event. By implication, Malcolm denies that “having a dream” is an event in part characterised by an inner occurrence while one is asleep. If Thomson's analysis of “the time of a killing” preserves the sense of such expressions as “the day that Sirhan killed Kennedy”, then my analysis of “having a dream” should, likewise, preserve the sense of “the night I dreamt of golden mountains”.