Butterfly Dreams

 

In the 4th century B.C., Chuang-tzu asked the question. “Am I a man who dreamt last night of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?”

Has anyone satisfactorily answered this question?

Descartes asks himself the same question:

“At this moment it does indeed seem to me that it is with eyes awake that I am looking at this paper; that this head which I move is not asleep, that it is deliberately and of set purpose that I extend my hand and perceive it; what happens in sleep does not appear so clear nor so distinct as does all this. But in thinking over this I remind myself that on many occasions I have in sleep been deceived by similar illusions, and in dwelling carefully on this reflection I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep that I am lost in astonishment. And my astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I now dream.”

We pinch ourselves to see if we are awake. But of course this does not work. It should be entirely possible to pinch ourselves in a dream.

Descartes ultimately resolves the question by proposing that God, being by definition all-good, would not delude us; and so what we perceive as clear and distinct must be the reality. And we perceive daily reality, he says, more clearly and more distinctly than we do our dreams.

But does this work?

To begin with, is it obvious that we experience our daily lives more clearly and distinctly than we do our dreams? Or is this just our perception when we are awake? How clearly do we remember how clear and distinct our dreams were, when we are awake? For that matter, how clearly do we remember how clear and distinct our daily life is when we are dreaming? Aren’t dream worlds perfectly clear and distinct while we dream, and our “real” daily life, if we are aware of it at all, vague and distant?

And even if this is so, even if dreams are less clearly perceived than the turnips we had at lunch, doesn’t Descartes’s own logic argue that the world of dreams is also real? Others can lie to us; we can lie to ourselves, causing delusions. We can misinterpret what we see, and mistake a reflection for an oasis. But dreams come neither of our own free will or from others. Nor do they involve the interpretation of some sense perception, introducing human error. While we might also misperceive this or that in a dream, why would God allow them to systematically deceive us?

By Descartes’s logic, he would not. And I do not think anyone else has ever given a batter response to Chuang-tzu. If we accept the world of our senses as real, as referring to a real place, we apparently must accept that the world we perceive in our dreams is also real, referring to a real place. God would not so deceive us.

Most human cultures, at all times and places, have accordingly assumed so. Dreams are either the language in which God talks to us, or they are a window into a real, objectively existing spiritual realm. Or both.

This explains the fact that the images that appear to us in dreams are not arbitrary, but predictable. Although dragons do not occur in the sensed world, the dragon is familiar to cultures all around the world. So is the phoenix, the unicorn, the sea monster, and so forth. Wherever the Greeks or Romans conquered, they had no trouble identifying the local gods as versions of their own gods. Jung traced the same motifs in the dreams of his Zurich patients and in ancient texts from India and elsewhere. He called these archetypes, but never gave a clear and consistent account of where they came from. The structure of the brain?

Why not see them, with Plato, as ideal forms, eternally existent in the spiritual realm?

When Jesus said “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” or “among you,” was he referring to its imaginative perception in dreams? Are we given a foretaste of the afterlife, both heaven and hell, in our dreams? Is this where we will live after the physical world fades away, just as it is where we live every night, when we lose consciousness of the physical world around us?

I think it is the obvious assumption.