Q&A: Dream
Dream
Question
With God’s help
Hello Rabbi,
There is the famous question: who says that everything isn’t a dream, or at least not right now?
Usually we do not tend to entertain a merely negative doubt, as stated in Ein Ayah there. And we are not troubled by all the bad press from the French philosophers.
But the idealists, true to form, try to show that this is actually a positive doubt, based on two main arguments:
I) A dream feels completely like reality, and only “when you wake up in the morning” do you discover that it was a dream. So this shows that it is unreasonable to rely on intuition regarding reality, and that “we are dealing with a defective system.”
To be sure, the questioner can object that this is actually evidence to the contrary, because we all understand that it was merely a dream; and in general, even with a mirage, we make adjustments and continue relying on the senses rather than abandoning everything.
But the idealist will argue that that is only in a rare, isolated case, whereas in a constant and regular case like every 12 hours, it is astonishing to claim that. Rather, we are dealing with a defective system.
II) Following Ockham’s razor, all the properties of reality can be explained by the claim that this is a hallucination. This is a simple theory and posits only one entity (“I”), so it is preferable. True, it does not sound especially intuitive, but it is much simpler and explains all the data in its hallucinatory way.
Answer
This famous question has no answer and cannot have an answer, other than that I know it isn’t so. I also disagree with the assumption (which was also expressed in a similar thread here a day or two ago) that in a dream there is a feeling of reality. Not at all. And even if when we wake up we understand that it is a dream and not reality, that is enough.
There is an even simpler theory: that nothing exists. Simplicity chooses between theories that stand on equal footing. It is not a consideration in and of itself. That is a common mistake regarding the principle of the razor.
Discussion on Answer
A-B. I don’t think so. But even if so, that is only a retrospective report and does not say what one feels while dreaming. And if wakefulness too is a dream, then the waking person’s report about what he experienced in his dream is itself nothing but a dream about a dream. It’s like undermining sight because there are mirages. The fact that we sometimes have bugs does not make us think that everything is a bug. Beyond that, the very concept of actual reality and the distinction between it and a dream is drawn from somewhere, isn’t it? Which means that there is a difference in the experience between dream and reality. In wakefulness, when we feel that the dream is not real, this is done on the basis of comparison to the waking state itself, which is real.
D. Mysticism and kabbalists are not proof of anything. Sometimes they have good intuitions. So what? The determination that they have good intuitions is made by me, someone who is neither a mystic nor a kabbalist.
In short, this is a bizarre discussion that I see no point in engaging in.
Rabbi, I also tend to think that a dream definitely does not feel like actual reality; maybe it has something like one-sixtieth of the feeling of reality. But reality itself feels much more “full,” and thinking too is much, much better… (and even if there are nightmares that feel very, very much like reality, that is no more than a mirage and definitely not the norm).
In any case, I think the Rabbi should one time conduct a full discussion of this topic from beginning to end (or until we’re just grinding water) because until now I think the Rabbi has almost always not lasted beyond 3 messages…
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I didn’t really understand the argument that, insofar as someone accepts that for half his life he imagines that he is living in reality and in the other half it becomes clear to him that it was only a dream, he still has reason to assume that he has the ability to distinguish between dream and reality. Doesn’t that show a totally broken machine that is not worthy of trust?
The only possibility I thought of for distinguishing between the two is that even if in a dream you feel as though you are in reality, you do not have enough ability to understand whether you are in reality at all, because I don’t recall ever managing to do any kind of recursive thinking in a dream. By contrast, in reality itself you actually can ask yourself whether you are sure this isn’t a dream. Then it turns out that you have some way to distinguish between the options (for example, whether your eyes are functioning, etc.)….
As stated, I see no point in discussing this. I wrote here what I had to say. This topic is simply not interesting or relevant in my view.
A. Doesn’t the Rabbi think that if we asked most people who dream to explain how it felt during the dream, they would say that while dreaming they felt they were experiencing actual reality?
B. The fact that after the dream we recognize that it was “only a dream” is not relevant, because regarding “actual” reality there is no point in time at which we can say that it really was actual reality. We do not wake up from it into a different kind of consciousness as long as we are alive. Only after death perhaps will we feel in retrospect what we actually had here (it seems to me that some idealists hold something like this).
C. In my humble opinion, idealists do not deny the existence of reality, but only deny its existence outside consciousness. According to this explanation, reality is understood no less well than according to the realist explanation, so why assume that it also exists “outside”?
D. Additional support for the approach could come from mysticism, kabbalists, and the like. On the face of it, higher perceptions, miracles, and so on seem much more plausible under idealism. It is plausible that private consciousness has the power to change reality or attain higher perspectives (which kabbalists and the like said they experienced) if reality is not separate from it—from consciousness. According to realism this is much less understandable. And even the Rabbi accepts that it is possible that kabbalists and mystics have genuine intuitions.
Thank you