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Forgetting Dreams
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
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It is a familiar fact that dreams are hard to recall. Because of this, memory alone is not a reliable indication of what they are like.
Consider the following examples. (1) Some people claim that they never dream. The truth is, psychologists assure us, that they do not remember having dreamt. Researchers say that they can tell when someone is dreaming, by his rapid eye movements (REM) and a certain pattern of brain waves recorded on an electroencephalograph (EEG). When a sleeper's eyes move rapidly, and he registers the appropriate pattern of brain-waves on the EEG, and then he is awakened, he almost always reports a dream. By this test, no one has yet been discovered who does not dream at all. In fact, psychologists have established that the average person has four to six periods of dreaming each night. (2) Some people say that they always dream in black and white, never in colour. Again, however, they have apparently forgotten the colours that occur in dreams, as is shown by the fact that most often, if we wake a sleeper in the middle of a dream, when it is still fresh in his mind, he then can report colours. (3) Another claim that some people make is that dreams never last more than a few seconds. This also seems to be a case of forgetting dreams, since periods of REM, together with EEG readings, indicate that dreams take longer than this; in fact they may last as long as thirty-five minutes. (4) Finally, it is a piece of folk wisdom that eating rich foods just before sleep causes nightmares. According to scientists, however, all that eating such foods can do is to cause a person enough bodily discomfort to wake him often during the night. This leads him to remember more of his dreams—and therefore more of their vividness and strangeness—than he usually does.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1979
References
1 Cf. Lippert, Joan, ‘Fascinating Facts about Dreams’, Good Housekeeping (01 1977), 160.Google Scholar
2 An exception, as I understand it, is certain people who are considered incurably insane. I owe this point to M. Quealey.
3 Basic Books Inc., New York, 1955, 43ff. (first published in 1900).
4 In a similar way, the above factors seem incapable of explaining even the presumably less problematic case of what we remember and forget from waking life. In particular, many, perhaps most of the past events we recall—when not under hypnosis—(a) are not vivid or exciting; (b) consist of items encountered only once, or situations never repeated; (c) are relatively incoherent, jumbled or meaningless; (d) are relatively uninteresting to the person remembering at present, and also were uninteresting to him at the time from which he remembers them. For example, I remember details from a streetcar ride I took once in Bucharest, Romania—what one person said, what another answered, what a woman sitting across from me was wearing, etc. (a) None of these things are striking or vivid in themselves, (b) These experiences have not been repeated—e.g. I have not been in Romania since then, (c) As far as I can tell, they are not part of any larger ‘patterns of experience’ that might give them meaningfumess that they do not possess intrinsically, (d) I was not concerned to notice or make myself remember these things at the time; nor do I have a special interest in remembering them now except, again, to supply this example. Nevertheless I remember them.
5 Cf. for example, ibid., p. 170, where Freud illustrates his ‘theory that forgetting is very often determined by an unconscious purpose and that it always enables one to deduce the secret intentions of the person who forgets’.
6 Cf. ibid., p. 96.
7 Cf. for example, Brenner, Charles, An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 167–168.Google Scholar
8 Either that, or less sophistication. For example, if a savage with no previous experience of plays came suddenly into a theatre, he would have no difficulty in detecting the artificiality of what he saw beyond the footlights.
9 Cf. for example, Lubbock, Richard, ‘An Incredible Almanac’, Quest Magazine, (12 1976), 104.Google Scholar
10 Cf. for example, Eggan, Dorothy, ‘Dream Analysis’, in Studying Personality Cross-Culturally, Kaplan, B. (ed.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 562.Google Scholar
11 Cf. for example, Overton, Donald A., ‘State-Dependent Learning Produced by Depressant and Atropine-like Drugs’, Psychopharmacologia 10 (1966), 6–31, especially p. 6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
12 The plot of Chaplin, Charlie's film, ‘City Lights’ turns on just this sort of case.Google Scholar
13 This objection was suggested to me by Morris Eagle.
14 This objection was suggested to me by Barry Fowler.
15 Cf. Hartmann, Ernest L., The Functions of Sleep (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), Ch. 12, 131ff., especially p. 140.Google Scholar
16 Recall a similar remark of Austin, J. L.'s (Sense and Sensibilia, Oxford, 1964, 27)Google Scholar. ‘And what about dreams? Does the dreamer see illusions? Does he have delusions? Neither; dreams are dreams.’ The danger in Austin's approach is that it may merely remind us of various things dreams are not, without ever making it clear what they are, or characterizing them positively. We avoid this pitfall when we recognize that comparisons need not be totally misleading.
17 Thanks are due to Vince Rueter, Rita McCleary and Peter Preuss who made helpful suggestions about earlier versions of the paper.