Some dreams are thought-like, whereas some are foggy and vague, but sometimes dream worlds are so vivid, so authentic, that on waking we have to reason out that “it was only a dream.” We may find ourselves while dreaming thrown amidst a sometimes fantastic yet utterly real world. (“Thrownness” is the sheer finding oneself always already amidst some world or other [Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Emad and Maly1999].) That it only “seems to be real” is something we add in retrospect.
Llewellyn tells us, as did Freud (Reference Freud and Crick1899/1999) more than a century ago, that “the stuff of dreams is the stuff of memory” (abstract) and that hyperassociated memories (cf. Freud's “primary process”) are integrated into compositional wholes that have never been present to the senses. (Freud, too, called his dream theory “compositional.”) Memory elements are “merged and fused to construct visual scenes” (sect. 1, para, 2), which are experienced as realistic.
Hyperassociations wrought between episodic memories through elaborative encoding engender a fabricated visual image. (sect. 8, para. 3)
This often bizarre, composite [dream] image has not been present to the senses; it is not “real” because it hyperassociates several memories. (abstract, para. 2)
That the bizarre composite image is not real is a detached assessment made by a judicious waking self, not by a dream self frantically running for his life from a dream tiger! As Llewellyn states regarding her quicksand dream, “I never doubt that the events portrayed are actually unfolding in ‘real time’ before my eyes” (sect. 4.2.3, para. 1).
But how a relating, binding, integrating, compositing, merging, fusing, constructing, engendering, fabricating, synthesizing process might work on a mishmash of elaboratively encoded memories so as to hoist an authentic seamless world at times indistinguishable from the world of waking life is left unexplained by Llewellyn. To the deconstructive eye, the very proliferation of such terms, all applied by Llewellyn to basically the same idea, signals something awry in her argument: an emphasis on the cognitive at the expense of the perceptual.
Since some dream content is easily seen as a revival of memory traces, the lacuna in the argument is easily passed over. The sun sparkling on the water, children playing on the beach…these she has likely seen previously, and it seems plausible that this part of the dream could be merely revived and composited memory images…but then a grown-up throws a child across the sand; the child lands on his or her ear and disappears into the sand; another child/baby is thrown…so vividly real is the quicksand that Llewellyn wakes up terrified! Surely Llewellyn has never seen such a specific scene in the past. How might one's thrownness amidst an authentic, unique, unified world during dreaming be achieved from a set of episodic disparate memory traces, whatever their hyperassociation?
That world thrownness during dreaming (which may even be consciously created in the case of “lucid dreaming” [LaBerge Reference LaBerge1985] can be indiscernible from that of waking should give us pause: Indiscernibles demand the same explanation. If the dreamer can find herself thrown amidst an authentic world when sensory informing is shut down, then this raises the most peculiar and frightening possibility that there is no world actually out there in waking either, despite our always finding ourselves already amidst one. Both waking and dreaming worlds might be continually created de novo, a “formative creativity” (Globus Reference Globus1987), rather than transformative of sensory inputs and memory traces.
If world thrownness is a formative construction, this need not start us down a slippery slope to a God-dependent idealism along Berkeleyan solipsistic lines (Foster Reference Foster1982) or to an idealistic Borgesian metaphysics (Borges Reference Borges and Hurley1998). I have proposed instead a species of monadology in which physical reality is strictly quantum at all scales, an “abground” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Emad and Maly1999) closed to observation, whereas the presencing world is a “dis-closure” constituted by living dissipative brains operating with quantum degrees of freedom (Globus Reference Globus2003; Reference Globus2009) under the logic of quantum thermofield brain dynamics (Vitiello Reference Vitiello1995; Reference Vitiello2001).
The dream world, I suggest, is not a cognitive compositing by a rapid eye movement (REM)-sleepy bricoleur using the hyperassociated memory trace materials at hand, not a transformative creation but an episodic formative process out of the “unknowable and unspeakable” (Bell Reference Bell1987) abground of the quantum realm. The wake world, too, is a dis-closure, but with the added benefit of an input operator on the disclosive process. In that the fantastic dream world is so ephemeral and quickly forgotten, we take it to be cognitive play and miss its profound significance. The dream is via regia to ontology.
Some dreams are thought-like, whereas some are foggy and vague, but sometimes dream worlds are so vivid, so authentic, that on waking we have to reason out that “it was only a dream.” We may find ourselves while dreaming thrown amidst a sometimes fantastic yet utterly real world. (“Thrownness” is the sheer finding oneself always already amidst some world or other [Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Emad and Maly1999].) That it only “seems to be real” is something we add in retrospect.
Llewellyn tells us, as did Freud (Reference Freud and Crick1899/1999) more than a century ago, that “the stuff of dreams is the stuff of memory” (abstract) and that hyperassociated memories (cf. Freud's “primary process”) are integrated into compositional wholes that have never been present to the senses. (Freud, too, called his dream theory “compositional.”) Memory elements are “merged and fused to construct visual scenes” (sect. 1, para, 2), which are experienced as realistic.
Hyperassociations wrought between episodic memories through elaborative encoding engender a fabricated visual image. (sect. 8, para. 3)
This often bizarre, composite [dream] image has not been present to the senses; it is not “real” because it hyperassociates several memories. (abstract, para. 2)
That the bizarre composite image is not real is a detached assessment made by a judicious waking self, not by a dream self frantically running for his life from a dream tiger! As Llewellyn states regarding her quicksand dream, “I never doubt that the events portrayed are actually unfolding in ‘real time’ before my eyes” (sect. 4.2.3, para. 1).
But how a relating, binding, integrating, compositing, merging, fusing, constructing, engendering, fabricating, synthesizing process might work on a mishmash of elaboratively encoded memories so as to hoist an authentic seamless world at times indistinguishable from the world of waking life is left unexplained by Llewellyn. To the deconstructive eye, the very proliferation of such terms, all applied by Llewellyn to basically the same idea, signals something awry in her argument: an emphasis on the cognitive at the expense of the perceptual.
Since some dream content is easily seen as a revival of memory traces, the lacuna in the argument is easily passed over. The sun sparkling on the water, children playing on the beach…these she has likely seen previously, and it seems plausible that this part of the dream could be merely revived and composited memory images…but then a grown-up throws a child across the sand; the child lands on his or her ear and disappears into the sand; another child/baby is thrown…so vividly real is the quicksand that Llewellyn wakes up terrified! Surely Llewellyn has never seen such a specific scene in the past. How might one's thrownness amidst an authentic, unique, unified world during dreaming be achieved from a set of episodic disparate memory traces, whatever their hyperassociation?
That world thrownness during dreaming (which may even be consciously created in the case of “lucid dreaming” [LaBerge Reference LaBerge1985] can be indiscernible from that of waking should give us pause: Indiscernibles demand the same explanation. If the dreamer can find herself thrown amidst an authentic world when sensory informing is shut down, then this raises the most peculiar and frightening possibility that there is no world actually out there in waking either, despite our always finding ourselves already amidst one. Both waking and dreaming worlds might be continually created de novo, a “formative creativity” (Globus Reference Globus1987), rather than transformative of sensory inputs and memory traces.
If world thrownness is a formative construction, this need not start us down a slippery slope to a God-dependent idealism along Berkeleyan solipsistic lines (Foster Reference Foster1982) or to an idealistic Borgesian metaphysics (Borges Reference Borges and Hurley1998). I have proposed instead a species of monadology in which physical reality is strictly quantum at all scales, an “abground” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Emad and Maly1999) closed to observation, whereas the presencing world is a “dis-closure” constituted by living dissipative brains operating with quantum degrees of freedom (Globus Reference Globus2003; Reference Globus2009) under the logic of quantum thermofield brain dynamics (Vitiello Reference Vitiello1995; Reference Vitiello2001).
The dream world, I suggest, is not a cognitive compositing by a rapid eye movement (REM)-sleepy bricoleur using the hyperassociated memory trace materials at hand, not a transformative creation but an episodic formative process out of the “unknowable and unspeakable” (Bell Reference Bell1987) abground of the quantum realm. The wake world, too, is a dis-closure, but with the added benefit of an input operator on the disclosive process. In that the fantastic dream world is so ephemeral and quickly forgotten, we take it to be cognitive play and miss its profound significance. The dream is via regia to ontology.