Dreams: The Royal Road to Metaphor

Bert O. States

SubStance, Issue 94/95 (Volume 30, Number 1&2), 2001, pp. 104-118 (Article) Published by University of Wisconsin Press DOI: 10.1353/sub.2001.0016

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Dreams: The Royal Road to Metaphor

Bert O. States

I have often wondered if the persistent notion that art is both useful and pleasing might also apply to the dream. I get pleasure out of most of my dreams and Im told by various scientists and therapists that they are useful. We might even say that this is a slightly redundant notion if you consider the biological likelihood that pleasure and usefulness may refer to the same benefit, seen from two different perspectives. To be more specific: the mind obviously delights in such things as discovery, symmetry, resemblance, contrast, the detection of causal series, unity, crescendo, and so on. But all of these delights of mind are obviously indispensable to survival as well. Perhaps from an evolutionary standpoint, we could say that if they werent useful they probably wouldnt be delightful. So how can you separate the two? After all, look at sex. In other words, I suspect that we continue to say that poetry has two functionsto instruct and to delightonly because we have no single word for the wholesale thing it does for us. One of the great joys of the mind is the making and recognition of metaphors. One might think of a metaphor as a synecdoche for art at large, a metaphor being the smallest and most salient unit of artistic, or imaginative energy. If this is the case, it is probably the molecular site of arts capacity to instruct and delight as well. I dont want to defend this claim at great length here, only to suggest that the larger orders of imaginative thinking involve the metaphoric principle, if only in the sense of connecting an imagined and the real world in a blended space, as Fauconnier and Turner might put it (1995). Of course, you need a very versatile conception of metaphor to make such a claim, and I will adopt one here. Like Kenneth Burke, and George Lakoff after him, I am not using the word metaphor in any precise rhetorical way, but, as Burke says, metaphor as a basic strategy for getting at certain kinds of fuzzy truth. My usage of the word also shares some similarities with Lakoff and Johnsons notion of complex metaphors as neural maps on which we shape our thinkingthe conduit, the container, the journey, etc. More broadly, however, I am thinking of metaphor in terms of Richard Dawkinss speculation in Unweaving The 104
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Rainbow that metaphor may be the crucial software advance that propelled human brain evolution over the threshold into a co-evolutionary spiral (1998, 311). To put it in the form of a real metaphor, metaphor is the cognitive fire that ignites when the brain rubs two different thoughts together. The two thoughts might have hidden or preexisting similarities or associations or they might not. In the latter case what emerges isnt a likeness between the two things, but a cognitive expansion of their combined possibilities on which future likenesses may be built. Presumably, any two things, however different in kind or substance, might produce a common denominator, if placed together; or if not that, at least tease the brain into looking for one. I think this happens all the time in dreams in the collision of images, and it happens in art in the form of unplanned errors or slips of the hand or mind that lead to unforeseen developments. As Lakoff and Johnson say, it is often a moot point as to whether the likeness creates the metaphor, or the metaphor creates the likeness (1999, 106). My title is a spinoff from Freuds notion that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. In my view, the unconscious is not the place where the id dwells, but where we do at least 95% of all our thinking. I am also assuming that the cognitive unconscious is the place where metaphors are born, and that metaphorical thinking precedes the arrival of literal meanings in somewhat the way that a hunch precedes the solution to a problem (I will return to this idea later). Metaphor, you might say, is the syllogism of intuition, and it is probably not an accident that a bad syllogism often makes a good metaphor. For example: hummingbirds flit from flower to flower; Sarah flits from project to project; therefore Sarah is a hummingbird. I go into this matter because a major frustration in dream study is that we are unavoidably syllogistic or logical in our approach to dreams; we can study them only when we are awake, in which state we always want things to make the kind of deductive or inductive sense that is needed in the waking world. Thus dreams become dream-like, from the waking point of view, though no such feeling entered the mind during the dream. In fact, the big problem with dreams is that we have no real object of study. We have two sorts of evidence: the memory of having dreamed, and the dream reports of other people, which are woefully incomplete and filled with ellipses and things like . . . and suddenly mother disappeared and I was on this runaway train playing a saxophone with my math teacher. Not the stuff that good science is made of. Let me approach the problem by turning to a dream experiment performed by Allan Hobsons group at Harvard. Hobson is probably the
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most influential (and controversial) neuroscientist working on dreams today. It is his conviction that dreaming is a reaction to random nervous system activity and is nothing more than a marginally successful attempt to make sense of a sequence of images in the visual cortex. These images are brought on by random bursts of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine which has, among other things, the property of causing hyperassociation, or the ability of the brain to jump from one class of images/thoughts to another (Kahn and Hobson, 1993, 158)in short, rampant metaphor. Dreams are, Hobson insists, a weak form of psychosis because they are attended by the same discontinuities and hallucinations that one finds in psychosis and delirium (1994, 199). Briefly, Hobson and his colleague, Robert Stickgold, took dream reports from twenty different people. Each dream had to consist of two episodes, each set in a different scene. Ten of the dream texts were cut in half at the point where the scenes changed, then spliced to another half-dream, heads on tails, heads on heads, tails on tails, and so on. The other ten dreams were left intact as they were dreamed and reported. Both sets were given, unidentified, to the students in Hobsons seminar who were asked to distinguish the spliced from the unspliced dreams. Finding #1: No one in the group could tell the difference, beyond the level of chance, between actual dreams and spliced dreams. Conclusion #1: single episodes of dreams may have a unity, but there is no guarantee of causal connection between episodes. Finding #2, the students had no difficulty detecting coherence in any dream they identified as unspliced, even though many were in fact spliced dreams. Conclusion #2: dr eam integrity is in the eye of the beholder. When integrity does not reside in the text, we impute it, Hobson says (1994, 122-25). My problem with this experiment is that the assumption of coherence or incoherence rests on empirical examination of the dream reports. If we cant see the connectionhow the dream gets from A to Bthere is no coherence. There is no suggestion that the incoherence may be an epiphenomenon of coherence at another level. Moreover, there is an implicit assumption that it would be neuronally possiblewere it not for chemical remodulationfor a dream to be completely coherent in the sense, say, that Hemingways novels are coherent. In fact, waking fictions have become the unacknowledged yardstick for measuring dream coherence. Dozens of articles appear annually measuring the bizarreness of dreams, according to certain tests devised for the detection of coherence, all of them based on standards of empirical probability. If you fly in a dream, thats bizarre; if
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you walk, its perfectly realistic. But it would scarcely occur to anyone reading, say, Hamlet, to find anything bizarre about Hamlet being bound in a nutshell or King Hamlets ear suddenly turning into a porch. Such metaphorical constructions are perfectly natural in literature, however much they flunk the reality test; but when they occur in dreams they are widely considered to be the consequence of chemical modulations. However, what if a dream, so to speak, were a hummingbird? That is, what if the logic of dreams was not to move in a causal lineor not necessarily anyway (because some dreams do this fairly well)but in a series of flits from one thing to another, determined by the strongest mnemonic association aroused by the dream at any point? That would be impossible to determine, even by the most stringent analysis, because there is no way to graph the intensity or priority of associations in a single mind, or what happens when associations collide and produce monstrosities. They are always the property of a unique memory, and tracing the number of possible frames of reference a single image may have in one memory would be like trying to locate the single feather of the hummingbird in California that caused the hurricane in North Carolina. In short, the basic difference between dream and fiction is that fiction is designed for objective understanding according to rules of communication shared by a community of readers; dreams, on the other hand, have no such aim; a dream develops by a kind of catalytic conversion, each image affecting the character and duration of the others with no thought of Aristotelian unity. The dream may be realistic or not, by turns, but there is no reason to believe that dreams are different from any natural dynamic process that may move from stability to near disorder. In this regard, they are different from waking art whichas we encounter itis usually a product rather than a process. Except in certain forms of improvization and performance art, the process that begot it is long since over, as it is in dream reports that dream psychologists are reduced to studying. But in my experience, fictional narrative comes to birth in much the same way as dreams. That is, you dont so much compose the story as stumble upon it by trial and error. If you had a precise mental record of everything that passed through Shakespeares mind as he wrote, say, Hamlets To be or not to be soliloquy, it would probably be filled with far more incoherence and subjective correlatives than a T. S. Eliot could find in the entire play. To me, the more interesting result of Hobsons experiment is finding number two: confronted by texts that may or may not be coherent the students imputed coherence to the texts and found it. They didnt realize it, but they
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were in a sense dealing with what we might term accidental metaphors. That is, a spliced dreampieces taken from two independent dreams works like a metaphor, whether it is one or not. So they are treated as being potential motivated couplings, as having a presumption of coherence. To put this another way, in imputing coherence to a dream, spliced or not, the students were behaving like the dream mechanism itself. For the dream, too, has a habit of imputing coherencein the form of emotional valueto images that are incoherent by waking standards of logic, a simple example being the way dreams convert sirens, leg cramps, ringing phones, and external noises into carriers of the dreams affective theme. Any image at all, as we know from personal experience, can perpetuate the emotion that dominates any dream, emotion being the most consistent feature of a dream. In a dream it is quite possible to fall in love with a casual acquaintence and so deeply that it lasts until lunch of the next day. In short, emotion is a tenacious thing: it can attach itself to any object and endow that object with its peculiar significance for an entire lifetime (Think of the Rosebud image in Citizen Kane.). I would like to illustrate further how this might work in a dream, but to save time let me take a one-sentence text that has all the characteristics of a spliced dream. I refer to Noam Chomskys classic example in Syntactic Structures of a sentence that makes no sense but is still grammatical. It reads, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Chomsky opposes it to a second sentence, Furiously sleep ideas green colorless, which is equally nonsensical but ungrammatical as well (1966, 15). The nonsense in the grammatical sentence is of course the double contradiction of ideas being both colorless and green and asleep and furious at the same time. However, let us think of them as a pair of motivated metaphors, though not to the end that motivated Chomsky to compose the sentence. Are they really self-contradictory nonsense? Let me pretend I am one of Hobsons students and try to endow this double-spliced sentence with coherence, and to state it as maximally as possible. If you take green to mean unripe or immature (as when Polonius calls Ophelia a green girl) or unthought out, ideas can be colorless in the sense of bland, simplistic, or dull, as well as green; as for the second part, if you take sleep as implying dreaming (an adjacent association) you can sleep furiouslyin fact, dream sleep is called paradoxical sleep. As Maurice Blanchot puts it, where I dream, it is awake (1987, xxvii). But even if you dont take it that far, most of us know what it is to have a restless pillow-pounding sleep in which you become furious because you cant sleep.
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Im not claiming that all this would occur to anyone reading the sentence. My point is that its hard to make foolproof nonsense because sense itself is really something that depends on the sub-assumptions you bring to it. Id be curious, for instance, to know why Chomsky chose green instead of, say, orange or brown. Is it possible that his mind was unconsciously trapped into selecting greenthat green occurred to him first because, in several of its dictionary meanings at least (e.g., having a sickly or pale appearance), green is the color that is most colorless? In short, even in consciously planning a nonsensical sentence Chomskys orderly mind was balking at the prospect and flew to a color that would allow him, so to speak, to have his color and do away with it too. It isnt that he was ambivalent in his motive but that his color networks were loaded with submeanings, or meta-metaphors that he could not have been aware of, and the word colorless may have had a more intensive association with green than, say, orange or bluea perfect demonstration of how mentation occurs on several levels and sometimes at cross purposes as well. In the right memory-context, then, green and colorless may be considered as synonyms, not as an oxymoron. And isnt the same attraction at work in the oxymoron sleep furiously? Indeed, the phrase is worthy of Shakespeare who often wrote of sleepless sleep and wicked dreams that abuse the curtaind sleep. The point of oxymoronic combinations, after all, is not to produce nonsense but to introduce a metaphorical meaning that will be understood as a deliberate ambivalence (eg., Miltons darkness visible) or as something that cuts two ways (Addisons Eternity, thou pleasing, dreadful thought). An oxymoron is, lets say, a radical metaphor, or a metaphor that finds its meaning in a deliberate opposition. An oxymoron is a metaphor for indecision, as when we say I am of two minds about the matter. Im being partly facetious about all this. In one sense this is silly literary criticism of the sort few people practice anymore, thank God. My point is only to show what neural networks will do, whether you want them to or not. Moreover, to return to my earlier point about metaphor sometimes producing likeness, consider how in the light of this discussion Chomskys second sentence, the one that is both nonsensical and ungrammatical, now seems a piece of inspired genius: Furiously sleep ideasgreen, colorless. A little rough maybe but it has a cadence and beauty that remind me of Hopkinss line in The Windhover: sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine. Ive never known what that means, but its very nice. Anyway, this is the sort of cognitive liberty that is released by the sleep state. So it isnt so much common sense were dealing with as complex
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sense, or image combinations that could not have been achieved by so-called coherent thought. It is this mechanism, it seems to me, that governs the progress of dreams. A dream is really a first draft of thought. Unlike most first drafts, however, it is also the final draft, having no inclination to please or instruct a waking audienceor even a sleeping audience, for that matter. The big problem, of course, is how the brain goes about creating a dream narrative. It is self-evident that dream mentation occurs on both the conscious and unconscious levels. First, there is the conscious level on which one experiences the dream; then there is the unconscious level on which the dream somehow forms itself beneath any conscious manipulation on the part of the dreamer. By unconscious I mean nothing related to such conceptions as repression, censorship, the seething cauldron of drives, and so on. I refer only to that thought we do not know we are thinking as when I suddenly recall a name that has eluded me in conversation and I blurt out, Stevens! His name was Stevens! five minutes later, without having consciously thought about it in the meantime. However, it is my suspicion that dream consciousness has an unacknowledged hand in the organization of the dream through a process we might call self-interpretation. For example, on innumerable occasions while dreaming I have questioned the identity of a person or the logic of an event that pops into the dream and have found myself saying something like He must be related to Helen, or He looks like Edgar, or Harold probably did that, etc. In other words, I didnt know the reason something had happened in the dream but a reason immediately occurs to me as a speculation within the dream.Thus, as a dreamer I am rather in the position of Hobsons students and the spliced dream texts. If something doesnt quite make sense I will seek the missing link. I have found that in most cases (I have kept no records) my speculation is accepted by the dream and exerts an influence on the narrative, much as actor-improvization exercises continually incorporate spontaneous events and reactions into the narrative (which doesnt really know where its going). How could a dream possibly know where it was going when it hasnt been there yet, even in a raw conception? Perhaps the best visual analogy of the idea is Eschers print of the hands that draw each other into existence. Thus the dream could be thought of as what the mind creates in response to what it has already created, and I assume you can see the possible relevance of this idea to waking art. That is, when the dreamer is confronted by new events or persons they are automatically integrated into the dream by the dreamer who invents their relevance to the dream situation. The relevance does not necessarily exist in advance of the
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image and the image is not necessarily relevant once it has arrived. It may be, as Hobson would say, a random image, brought on by any number of influences, either internal or external; but all such random images have the capacity to assist in the dreams emotional progress. I must say that all images do not belong to this random category, nor are all images so manipulable (try thinking yourself out of a fall from a tall building). But I think we should allow the possibility that some images may occur through extra-psychological influencethat is, as not belonging to psychical pressures or forces at work in the dreamers emotional lifeand once on the scene they participate in the dreams psychic momentum whether they seem (on waking) appropriate or not. The dream has a remarkable tolerance for overlooking unlikelihood, as we know it in the waking world, and drafting whatever image it happens to produce for further service in the dream in progress. The dream doesnt really care: it consumes what memory puts on its plate. On the other hand, some dream images also seem relevant when they appear, in the sense that they fit smoothly into the dreams progress. For example: I am driving at great speed along a country road; suddenly rounding a curve I see a slow-moving hayrake ahead. What happens next will probably be one of several events: I will crash into the hayrake, I will swerve and avoid it, I will crash into a tree, and so on. But it is also possible that I will suddenly find myself piloting an airplane and will simply fly over it, and thats the last Ill see of the hayrake. It is not necessarily the case that the airplane means something to me of a psychic nature; it may simply have been nominated by the dream because of a story from the days newspaper involving an airplane, or because it occurred to me in a split second that it would be best to go over the hayrake, rather than around it. And once airborne in thought, I become airborne in fact. In short, the plotting of the dream is not in the hands of a so-called dream-work author, but in the dreamers natural urge to speculate about the cause and relevance of events that occur. We do this continually in the waking world; the only difference is that in dreams our speculations alter the world itself. The dreamer, in a sense, is a hermeneut-analyst who unfailingly finds the right explanation for all dream eventsright because there is no wrong explanation. If it occurs to the dreamer that a strange man who suddenly appears in the dream knows what the dreamer has done or is about to do, or is privy to the plot in some way, then so be it: that is the persons role in the dream. The dreamer does not ask the analysts question, What does this dream mean? but What is that person doing
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here? or Why has that event happened? and the first explanation is usually the correct answer to the question. Obviously, all of this occurs to the dream mechanism not as a question but as an associational coupling carried out beneath the dreamers awareness. At any rate, this is an extension of the spliced dream problem into the dream proper. It isnt very hard to make sense out of apparent nonsense. As Umberto Eco puts it in his essay on metaphor, it is enough that you establish a contiguity [or metonymical relationship] between two things that the metaphoric process of resemblance-hunting begins (1984, 74). It is what the brain does in self-defense against disorder, and I suggest that this same selfdefense is a major factor in dream formation as well. Are the continuities actually there? It makes no difference. The business of the dream is not to make sense but to allow images to interact under maximum provocation, orif you willunder minimal interference from practical needs. This is the fallacy behind the repressive theory of dreams that has dominated the twentieth century. Repression and symbolic substitution are psychoanalytic concepts used to make sense of strange dream formations; the more likely fact is, the brain creates such formations naturally through a process of association. In fact, give a brain a break from survival routines and it will immediately produce what we call a daydream, or a wild sequence of thoughts and images tied together only by subtle forms of resemblance. What we call bizarreness in dreams seems to me nothing more than a highly special case of what we might call infra-association. By this I mean a process that makes connections among units of thought for which there is no visible or logical evidence of likeness. To say that this is a form of bizarreness may be true from an observers standpoint; but do we know enough about what causes bizarreness, in all its forms, to say that it is always an erratic phenomenon induced by chemical innebriation? Obviously, the difference between such waking thought processes and the dream is that the dream cant revise. What comes to mind goes directly to the visual cortex. What I am suggesting is that bizarreness may be a genus/ species problem. That is, the same associative process is always operating but it does so according to different tolerances and imperatives. The process would be the genus, and dream or the waking literary composition would be differentia of the same process. For example, it strikes me that dreaming is a form of what Lev Vygotsky and others call inner speech, or inner thought. Vigotsky refers to inner speech as speech-for-oneself (1986, 225), which cannot find expression in external speech (230). Its main characteristic trait is its peculiar syntax (235) which
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is disconnected and incomplete . . ., abbreviated and incoherent. The three main semantic peculiarities of inner speech are: first, the preponderance of the sense of a word over its meaning. Sense refers to the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness by the word [or the thought image]. It is a dynamic, fluid, complex whole, [with] several zones of unequal stability (244-5). A word may sometimes be replaced by another without any change in sense. Words and senses are relatively independent of each other (246). Second, inner thought, by its very nature, is heavily combinative, making free use of agglutination, or word fusing, in the manner of German nouns that are composites of several words. When several words are merged into one word, the new word not only expresses a rather complex idea, but designates all the separate elements contained in that idea (246). Third, as a consesquence, in inner speech, a word, or an image, is so saturated with sense that . . . it becomes a concentrate of sense (247); . . . one word stands for a number of thoughts and feelings, and sometimes substitutes for a long and profound discourse. And naturally this unique inner sense of the chosen word cannot be translated into ordinary external speech. Inner sense turns out to be incommensurable with the external meaning of the same word (248). No surprise then that we are drawn more and more to the belief that dreaming is deeply involved in memory or information processing of some sort. This is a complex idea with many variations, ranging from Christopher Evanss computer theory that dreams are off-line operations in which new experience is being converted to long-term memory (1983) to Sir Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchisons idea that dreaming is a form of neural dumping that clears the brain of unneeded information (1986), and most recently to Owen Flanagans argument that dreams themselves are spandrels arising from REM sleep in which the brain stockpil[es] neurotransmitters [it] will need . . . for the [next] days work (2000, 90). Unfortunately, one of the major frustrations in all such theories is that it is impossible to prove them by examining the manifest dream itself. For example: what sort of information, or memory, is being processed as I am riding a tricycle down the freeway at rush hour eating asparagus spears? Moreover, dreams are notorious for avoiding what you think you should be dreaming about. The most we can say is that most dreams involving a problem faced in the day will replicate the structure or frustration of the problem and substitute something ridiculous as the objective (like wallpapering the sofa). What is being done in the way of processing in such dreams? To my knowledge this question remains unanswered, perhaps even unanswerable.
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A possible explanation is that what is being processed isnt to be found in the content of the dream but in the process of dreaming itself, irrespective of the content. What if the real biological work of the dreamand by extension all forms of narrative art (perhaps even all art)isnt to be found in the narrative itself but in the very making of narratives? Bizarre or not, the dream is an ongoing exercise in image-splicing; that is, of the mind, in an almost total state of isolation from world-input, improvising, doing the basic work of putting things together and taking them apart on a first-comefirst serve basis: anything that occurs to the dreaming brain, for whatever remote nuance of association it may arouse, must be processed, irrespective of its value to waking life. It has to be processed because it has occurred, in somewhat the sense in which if I say to you Dont think of a furry little kitten you re obliged to think of one, if only to reject the thought. Otherwise the processing mechanism would break down, or at least be seriously impaired because the brains associative networks had become too selective. By way of drawing out some implications of this idea for waking fictions, let me offer one example that will also serve to get something off my chest: Ive recently read Thomas Harriss novel, Hannibal. I have rarely read a more bizarre ending to a bookbizarre, that is, in the sense of an ending that seems spliced onto a book to which it doesnt belong, and I was happy to hear that Jody Foster has refused to do the film sequel and that the studio has decided to revise the ending. Briefly, it goes like this: Clarisse saves Lector from a slow death by cannibalized swine, but is badly wounded in the process. Lector spirits her away to his lair and nurses her to health with endless doses of designer drugs, in the process re-forming her into a Galatea and permanent dining companion. There is a vivid scene in which they share hors doeuvres (their remaining opponents brain matter) and then, as I recall, go to the opera. It is obviously a matter ofwell, taste, but it seems clear that Clarisse has to kill Lector in the end, not because its her job or because it would satisfy my need to see justice done. She has to kill him because the book promised me all along that she would inevitably be faced with the dilemma of destroying a man for whom she has a deep respect, if not affection. Or if she doesnt kill him, she at least has to put him away, or get killed or foiled in trying her best; otherwise the 400 pages preceding the ending would have to arouse a very different set of expectations than they door did, anyway, for me (and Foster, and the studio). I dont really mind morally that Clarisse goes off with Lector and lives happily ever after. But I do mind that the ending is filled with improbabilities of character and action that make it seem like a forced bone graft that doesnt
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take. Certainly I dont question the idea that novels are based on our moral codes. But finally I think we take up a novel not for that reason but to read what we simply call a good book, a good book being one that sets its stakes as high as possible, produces an engrossing development, and fulfills its promise with maximum involvement of all its parts. The same expectations we have in music, ballet, sculpture, an elegant machine, and art in general. Of course, we all have different conceptions of what good will mean, and good changes over time. But the beauty of artits pleasing usefulnesslies in its high refinement of the possible or the true. Its truth is not that it rewards virtue and punishes evil but that it gives the mind the pleasure of usingand thereby expandingits own resources in ways that are uncommon in waking life. Someone has said that there are only 14 plots in all of literature; someone else that there are 30 or 6, and still another maintains that there are only two, the Iliad plot and the Odyssey plot. It probably depends on whether you are a lumper or a splitter, as Elder Olson would say. If the content of literature is virtually endless, its structure remains stubbornly consistent between Homer and Joyce Carol Oates. We constantly write new stories on the same old models, and never tire of the variations. And somehow, we can always tell when stories dont tell the truth about the possible, even if the story is about the fantastic. It would seem that fictions are doing what some people feel dreams are doing: that is, updating our memory patterns to keep us more resilient. There is, in other words, a proverbial, or archetypal effect in the persistence of certain plot structures in literary fiction whereby each new variation confirms the truth of its avatars at the same time that it makes necessary cultural innovationsfor example, as the dilemma of revenge gets up-dated by stages as we move from the Orestes story to Hamlet, then to Russian nineteenth-century fiction (Notes from Underground),1 and finally to twentieth-century French Hamletism in Camuss Caligula (in which the revenge is no longer against the father-killer, or society, but existence itself). The oneiric equivalent of this persistence of theme is the so-called universal dreamchase/attack dreams, dreams of falling or drowning, poor test performance, naked dreams, being lost or trapped, the unattainable lover, and so ondreams that are dreamed endlessly, in the same structure, all over the world (See Garfield, 1999). This does not contradict my argument that dreams do not obey the laws of good fiction; rather, they obey only the laws of human fear and desireat least some of the time. But they do this differently from literary fiction in that their metaphors are relieved of the responsibility of waking probability. The most intrepid universal dream is subject to fits of
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Hannibalismthat is, of going off the deep or shallow end of expectation. The integrity of a dream, to the extent that we can use the word at all, is invariably that of its moorings in the personal psychology of the dreamer, and when I say that Hannibal suddenly turns into a dream I mean only that its ending seems a wish fulfillment, to use Freuds master term, on the part of its protagonist (Hannibal Lector) at the expense of its aesthetic integrity. The problem with a fiction like Hannibal is not that it could not happen in real life but that, in its ending at least, it falls between imperatives. Imagine Hamletand it suddenly occurs to me that Hamlets mother metaphorically feeds on both her husbands as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed onimagine Hamlet rescued in the end by Fortinbras who arrives from Poland in the nick with a miracle drug that reverses the effect of Claudiuss poison. But dreams might be useful on still another level than playing out universal or personal themes. It may be that bizarre and absolutely nonsensical dreams are just as useful as those dreams in which everything happens in accord with real-world probabilities or psychical preoccupations. That is, as an act of memory-building it may be just as useful to make a connection between green and colorless as it is between, say, green and grass. It isnt the pragmatic sense that matters as much as the seek-and-find operation, or the exercise and detection of nuances of similarity in dissimilar things. To come back to my analogy between the syllogism and the metaphor, we could think of the metaphorical process as the seeking device, or the coupling of things that strike us as being somehow isomorphic, like Sarah and the hummingbird; the syllogistic part would be the hard resultto be either discarded or acceptedthat emerges from metaphorical trial and error. Indeed, coming back to the idea of inner speech, one could make a strong case for all thought beginning in the phenomenon of bizarreness, or to put it more carefully, in an absence of constraint that encourages bizarre image formation, or radical discontinuity. For example, when Einstein was asked by Jacques Hadamard about the nature of his thinking while doing mathematics, he said that the combinatory play [of images] seems to be the essential feature in productive thoughtbefore there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others. . . . [These] have to be sought for laboriously only in the secondary stage, when the . . . associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will. Einstein says that his images are primarily of the visual and some, of [the] muscular type (1954, 142; see also Sokolov, 1972: 31).
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This is hardly a description of bizarreness but it is obvious that the combinatory play of images requires a freedom of mind unconstrained by what we would call deduction, induction, or processes of thought that follow efficient courses. These, for Einstein, come later (and laboriously), when the play of images has, as Polonius says, by indirection found directions out. Thought starts from scratch, which is to say that it has littleas yetto be logical or pragmatic about; at most it has a problem to solve, a guess or a hunch. As Carl Friedrich Gauss described his method of arriving at his theorems, it is a systematic feeling around (Holub, 1997, 151). The mind must wait, as it were, for assistance from intuition and its handmaiden, metaphor. As Hadamard concludes from his study of the psychology of invention in mathematicians, There is hardly any completely logical discovery. Some intervention of intuition issuing from the unconscious is necessary at least to initiate the logical work (112, see also Gibbs, 1994.). A new possibiliy has recently emerged. I have read that there is some experimental evidence that REM sleep keeps the corneas of the eyes moist during the dormancy of sleep. Im sure this isnt the full story, but its so simple that I turn colorless with envy for not having thought of it. We dream so that we wont go blind! It is doubtful that the corneas prefer specific dream plotssay childhood sexual traumas or humiliation scenes; any sequence of images might supply the oxygen, the nutrients and the lubrication to keep the corneas going during the long dry spell in which they have nothing to look at. And the same would go for the psychic value of dreaming: it would hardly matter what specific experience dreams process as long as they lubricate the neural mechanisms by which we continually re-learn what goes with what. And it seems possible to make the same basic claim for waking forms of creativity like fiction, art, daydreaming, storytelling, and gossip. In a way, this seems almost supererogatorya little like saying that new experience of any sort teaches you what goes with what. But perhaps its as simple as that. Dreaming and fiction may simply be highly intensified forms of circuit maintenance: a sort of dry run of the neurons that allows you to have an experience in a safe place rather than a dangerous one. In dreams I get to drive off a cliff into the sea maybe a dozen times, whereas I could do it only once in the waking world. Moreover, in dreams I have given many talks in the nude before large groups of people. And from this virtual experience Ive learned always to check my costume beforehand. So you can imagine what an entire lifetime of reading and dreaming has done for my cognitive skills. University of California, Santa Barbara
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Note
1. Hamlet, of course, is virtually the patron saint of Russian literature of the nineteenth century, beginning with Pushkin and Lermontov (both of whom died in duels) through Chekhov. Indeed, Notes from Underground (1864) was undoubtedly a reaction to Turgenevs essay, Hamlet and Don Quixote which appeared three years earlier. Here is what a real Hamlet is! one imagines Dostoevsky saying.

Works Cited
Blanchot, Maurice (1987). Dreaming, Writing, in Michel Leiris, Nights as Day, Days as Night. Trans. Richard Sieburth. Hygiene, Colorado: Eridanos Press, xvii-xxviii. Chomsky, Noam (1966). Syntactic Structures. The Hague, Paris: Mouton. Crick, Francis, and Graeme Mitchison (1986). The Function of Dream Sleep, Nature 304, 111-14. Dawkins, Richard (1998). Unweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion and The Appetite for Wonder. New York: Houghton Mifflin,. Eco, Umberto (1984). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Evans, Christopher (1983). Landscapes of the Night: How and Why We Dream. New York: Viking. Flanagan, Owen (2000). Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams, and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Gibbs, Raymond. W. Jr. (1994). The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hadamard, Jacques (1954). An Essay on The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field. N.p.: Dover. Hobson, J. Allan (1994). The chemistry of Conscious States: How the Brain Changes Its Mind. Boston: Little, Brown. Holub, Miroslav (1997). Shedding Life: Disease, Politics, and Other human Conditions.Trans. David Young. Minneapolis, MN: Milkwood Editions. Kahn, David. & J. Allan Hobson (1993). Self-organization theory of dreaming. Dreaming, 3, 151-178. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Turner, Mark and Gilles Fauconnier (1995). Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10(3), 183-204. Vygotsky, Lev (1986). Thought and Language. Trans. Alex Kozulin. Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press.

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