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‘A Dubious Twilight’: Reflections on Dreams in Patristic Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Patricia Cox Miller
Patricia Cox Miller
Affiliation:
associate professor of religion inSyracuse University, Syracuse, New York.
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Extract

As Wendy O'Flaherty has argued persuasively in her recent book, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, it is possible to falsify the hypothesis that one is dreaming—by waking up; but it is not possible to verify that one is awake by falling asleep. The thought that one cannot verify the fact that one is awake but only only falsify the fact that one is asleep (by waking up) delivers something of a jolt to Western “common sense,” which typically takes for granted the distinctness of such categories as “real” and “unreal,”“conscious” and “unconscious,”“dream” and “waking life.” Yet, as O'Flaherty points out, we know that we cannot see ourselves seeing an illusion, just as we cannot verify the “reality” of ourselves in the moment when we are engaged in testing our reality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 1986 , pp. 153 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1986

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References

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