A Philosophical View of Dreams

Dreams

Although the idea of dreams has always been a psychological one, there is a philosophical side to them. Descartes once said, "For all I know, I might be dreaming" (Bruder/Moore, Philosophy, 81). This conjecture of Descatres was one that explained the concept of dreams. He asked the question, How do we know that we are not dreaming and our whole life is but a dream? There can never be an answer to this question but it proves that there is a philosophical view of dreams.

A dream is a form of mental activity that occurs during sleep. Dreams reveal our inner most secrets and even allow us to emerge our hidden selves. Because they unleash some of our most intimate experiences, every dream is unique. Most dreams are in the form of interrupted stories, made up partly of memories, with frequent shifts of scene. Our ancestors believed that dreams were messages from the gods.

Descartes idea that we are not aware that we could be dreaming is found in the answer of lucid dreaming. This is the idea that you know that you are dreaming. Lucid dreams usually begin in the midst of a dream when they realize that they are not experiencing a physical reality but it is a dream. Being lucid in a dream increases your deliberate influence over the course of events. Once you are dreaming, you are likely to chose some activity that is only possible in dreams. You will always have the choice of how much control you want to exert and what kind. A dreamers ability to succeed at this seems to depend a lot on the dreamers confidence.

Sigmund Freud's dream theory "the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious; it is the secret foundation of psychoanalysis" (Gardner, Skeptical, 10). But earlier efforts have been m...

... middle of paper ...

...s up the best in displaying the concepts of both philosophers and the ideas that they had. A dream is something that we will never fully understand because it is mysterious in itself. For now we will go with the basis that there is a difference between waking and dreaming and that we are fully aware of it.

Bibliography:

Bibliography

Bruder/Moore. Philosophy:The Power of Ideas. London: Mayfield Publishing Company. 1990.

Gardner, Martin. Waking up from Freud's theory of dreams. Skeptical Inquirer. v19:n6. p10. 1995 Microsoft Corporation.

Hartmann, Ernest Louis. "Dreaming", Microsoft Encarta 97 Encyclopedia. 1993-1996 Microsoft Corporation.

Ram-Prasad, C. "Dreams and the coherence of experience: an anti-idealist critique from the classical Indian philosophy", American Philosophical Quarterly. v32:n3. 1995 Microsoft Corporation.