Thomas Nagel's Dreaming Argument

I. The Dreaming Argument In What Does It All Mean, Thomas Nagel explains the dreaming argument for skepticism. More precisely, it is skepticism about the outside world. In this paper, I will be arguing against the dreaming argument. The dreaming argument argues that we don’t know if the physical outside world is reality because it may be a dream or hallucination. A part of the dreaming argument is the “dream hypothesis.” which states all the things we see and sense in this “outside world” are really a part of a big dream. In other words, our minds are working hard to create vivid and realistic images and experiences for our dreams. For instance, every day, I may be dreaming about myself going to class and sitting in one of the seats of a big lecture hall at UCSB. Nagel says, “It’s even possible that you don’t

In response, defenders of the dreaming argument may argue that our actions of sleeping and waking up may actually be part of a dream as well. Our mind creates these “images” so they can possibly serve as signals to us, the experiencer, that we will enter a new phase of our dream. In other words, when you dream of yourself going to bed at night and then waking up in the morning is evident to your mind that you have “woken up” from your dream. So, this doesn’t go against the mind’s intuition of what a dream is because we know, or more so, we dream that eventually, we wake up from our sleep. However, such things in our dreams imply the possibility that we can also dream of ourselves having dreams. Hence, won’t we fall into an endless cycle of dreaming ourselves having dreams because within this other dream, we yet again find ourselves dreaming. It becomes impossible to find ourselves out of this big dream and to pinpoint the time when we eventually wake up from our