{"id":739,"date":"2012-10-12T01:15:47","date_gmt":"2012-10-12T08:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phenomenologyblog.com\/?p=739"},"modified":"2013-06-04T18:33:59","modified_gmt":"2013-06-05T01:33:59","slug":"phenomenology-of-dreaming-a-dialogue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phenomenologyblog.com\/?p=739","title":{"rendered":"The Phenomenology of Dreaming: A Dialogue"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/fb:like><\/span>

\"\"<\/a>This conversation between philosopher Susi Ferrarello and me began, as is often the case in phenomenology, with an everyday experience: dreaming. My description of a dream led us to reflect on Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of dreaming and waking perception, and Husserl’s active and passive intentionality. The exchange continued over several weeks, and we’ve summarized it here–<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Marc<\/strong>: Last night, I was dreaming\u2026and in the middle of the dream, I remember recognizing, \u201cthis is a dream.\u201d But at the same time, what was occurring in the dream felt compelling to me, even with the thought that I was in a dream\u2026though now, I can hardly remember what the dream was about.\u00a0Last night\u2019s dream suddenly came back to me while you and I were talking about Husserl, and what stands out is that both experiences were present, together: the compelling dream and the recognition, \u201cI\u2019m dreaming.\u201d What do you think about this, as a philosopher?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Susi<\/strong>: I have two questions: would you say you were somehow both asleep and awake? In order to analyze a lived-experience phenomenologically, I need to name it first\u2014to understanding whether it is just one Erlebnisse<\/em> or is it several, interwoven? Then we could ask, “what it the essence of this experience?”<\/p>\n

Marc<\/strong>: Well I\u2019m sure I was not awake in the everyday sense of the word\u2014I experienced everything I just mentioned as occurring “within a dream.” You know when we do descriptive phenomenological psychological research, we ask a question like, \u201cPlease describe in detail a time when you experienced jealousy,\u201d or \u201can experience in which you learned something.\u201d In this case, the question I\u2019m responding to, so to speak, would be: \u201cPlease describe an experience in which you were aware, within a dream, that you were dreaming?\u201d<\/p>\n

The way this experience presented itself to me was not<\/span> that I was dreaming and then suddenly thought, \u201cI\u2019m not dreaming, I\u2019m awake!\u201d Because that would have been an experience of \u201cwaking up\u201d! Instead, in the middle of a dream, I recognized the dreaming, but at the same time, the dream continued. And this is what is so interesting to me now.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I found an excellent article by Morley (1999) about Merleau-Ponty\u2019s writings about dreams. Morley discussed Merleau-Ponty\u2019s critique of mainstream psychology, in which \u201cthe dualistic habit of thinking is extended to a separation of the imaginary and the real, or between the sleeping, imagining mind and the waking, rational mind. As a corollary a hierarchical relation is implicit in that separation, where the imaginary is construed as secondary to or derivative of the real\u201d (pp. 90-91). Merleau-Ponty, Morely points out, challenged this dualistic view of dreams.<\/p>\n

So to answer your question, I\u2019d say that phenomenally two meanings (dreaming and being aware\u2014though not awake) were convincingly present to me. The feeling of interest lingered after I woke, and was reawakened when you and I were talking about Husserl. I\u2019d almost forgotten the previous night\u2019s dream, until it became relevant in our conversation.<\/p>\n

Susi<\/strong>: So, if I follow you, while you were dreaming there was a mental and aware presentation of \u201canother Marc\u201d \u2013 the one you would probably call yourself – who was in the midst of his dream and found this dream compelling? What name could we give to this phenomenon? Who was the dreamer?<\/p>\n

If you were actively aware of what was happening around you, which kind of intentionality was present? Using Husserl\u2019s distinction between active and passive intentionality, I would say that both \u201cactive\u201d and \u201cpassive synthesis\u201d were present, but they were not \u201ctalking to each other\u201d. Neither took center stage, so to speak.<\/p>\n

Marc<\/strong>: I think I follow you\u2014both were somehow present…<\/p>\n

Susi<\/strong>: Yes, in Husserl\u2019s terms we would say that your uninhibited, \u201cpassive\u201d intentions and your \u201cactive\u201d intentions were co-present, but neither subsumed the other. The dream-experience was unfolding through passive intentionality, and as it did, from another perspective\u2014that of active intentionality\u2014you began to see what was \u201creally\u201d occurring, namely that you were dreaming. But this realization did not modify the dreaming itself.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Edmund Husserl<\/p><\/div>\n

From a Husserlian perspective, typically during waking life we are always intending a multiplicity of objects\u2014a free, ongoing stream of passive and active intending. This is always occurring; then, when I focus my attention upon something\u2014for instance I look to see what is the object on my desk\u2014from a Husserlian perspective I am willing<\/em> to choose one out of many passively intended perceptions upon which to focus. When I turn to focus on a particular object that\u2019s been passively intended, like the photograph sitting on my desk, the photograph is actively intended, and so it fully enters my lived-experience.<\/p>\n

In the dream-experience you are describing, it sounds as if your consciousness was performing both kinds of intentions, but almost as if they do not belong to the same person, because once you notice the passively present dreaming, it becomes actively intended, but it seems as if its passive presence continues as well!<\/p>\n

For this reason I first asked you if you could say that you lived both experiences (that of dreaming and being awake), because if so it is almost as if you were two different people at once. Because I imagine that either you were living two different modes of intentionality almost simultaneously, or you were noticing your passive intentions without changing them, so to speak, into active intentions. What do you think?<\/p>\n

Marc<\/strong>: I feel like we\u2019re on the way to something\u2026I didn\u2019t experience two \u201cMarcs,\u201d one who was awake and one who was asleep\u2014so the multiple person metaphor breaks down when I compare it to the experience itself, as I remember it.<\/p>\n

Of course the fact that this is a remembered experience adds another twist! As Merleau-Ponty (1996) pointed out, \u201cThough it is indeed from the dreamer that I was last night that I require an account of the dream, the dreamer himself offers no account, and the person who does so is awake. Bereft of the waking state, dreams would be no more than instantaneous modulations, and so would not even exist for us\u201d (Phenomenology of Perception, <\/em>p. 293). So as he says, a dream\u2019s only present as a dream <\/em>for the one who recalls it, awake. So does that mean there was a kind of wakefulness in the dream, or alongside it? Naturally neuroscience might have something to say about this, but at this stage I\u2019m not interested in the neurological account as much as the experiential one.<\/p>\n

As I recall it, the dream was not an experience of being awake, if I mean \u201cfully awake,\u201d in other words, \u201cin the waking world.\u201d Instead it was an experience of noticing something \u201cas if\u201d awake, but while still dreaming. It\u2019s precisely that the meaning \u201cI\u2019m awake\u201d was not <\/em>present, and that the noticing didn\u2019t <\/em>dissipate the convincing sense of the dream\u2019s vividness that made the experience so interesting to me!<\/p>\n

But it also strikes me as important that my \u201cinterest\u201d in all of this only stood out to me in dialogue with you about phenomenology, later in the day, when I called you, some time after waking. So the horizon upon which the dream-phenomenon was reawakened was our conversation itself\u2014while talking, the dream was suddenly relevant, it was almost as if I had forgotten the dream until the moment it became relevant in our conversation!<\/p>\n

Susi:<\/strong> Dreaming is such an inscrutable experience! You\u2019d reminded me that in the Phenomenology of Perception <\/em>Merleau-Ponty wrote something about dreams which, when I read Morely’s article, seemed important to me. He described the dream-situation as something that is presented to us \u201canonymously\u201d. He also talked about dream perceptions as demonstrating a quality of \u201cdepersonalization\u201d because they\u2019re given to us in a sense \u201cimpersonally,\u201d and I think that for Husserl this is because of the structure of time-consciousness. Of course, this is a complex topic, because it implicates not only time but Husserl\u2019s egology\u2026<\/p>\n

Marc: <\/strong>Yes\u2014when I turn back to that place in his book, in fact Merleau-Ponty (1996) was describing perception in general, not just dreams: \u201cIf I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one <\/em>perceives in me, and not that I perceive. Every sensation carries within it the germ of a dream or depersonalization… \u201c (p. 215). So yes, I agree that we\u2019re on the edges of the phenomenological exploration of personal identity as well\u2026<\/p>\n

About dreams and waking perceptions, as Morley (1999) points out, in The Visible and the Invisible <\/em>Merleau-Ponty (1968) wrote, \u201cthe difference between perception and dream not being absolute, one is justified in counting them both among \u2018our experiences\u2019\u201d (p. 6). Morley writes, \u201cThe waking world is the horizon upon which the dream world is constituted\u201d (p. 94). So the waking world is present in the dream, but in a horizonal way\u2014for Merleau-Ponty the \u201ctwo worlds\u201d of dreaming and waking are not strictly separable.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Susi: <\/strong>And these words of Merleau-Ponty\u2019s remind me of why I mentioned Husserl\u2019s notion of passive and active intentionality. Let me say more about this in order to explain how I\u2019m viewing your dream experience.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In Husserl\u2019s Analysis Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis <\/em>he conducts a sort of archeology of perception using his genetic phenomenological method, and makes the distinction between passive and active intentions. Generally speaking, as you know, every intentional act consists of a noesis<\/em> and a noema<\/em>. Noesis is the \u201csubjective\u201d side of an act, consciousness\u2019s process of intending, and noema is the \u201cobjective\u201d one, in other words that which is intended by consciousness. Another way to say this is that noesis is the field of constituting<\/em> multiplicities, and noema is the field of constituted<\/em> unities.<\/p>\n

If we were to observe a tree, to use an example given by Husserl himself, we would say that from a phenomenological point of view the noesis is not the color of the tree viewed empirically, which from the perspective of physics changes moment-to-moment according to the intensity of the light, but rather my act of perceiving of the color of the tree<\/em>. The noema of the colour of the tree is the colour as it was perceived by the subject\u2014the color as it appears to me, now. This latter is an identical and unchangeable unit encompassing all the data pertaining to the perception of the colour as it was grasped by the noesis.\u00a0 So even if I see the light playing on the tree\u2019s leaves, and the colors of the tree shifting, still the tree is given to me in perception as one unified object for me, resulting from many other passive and active perceptions.\u00a0In this example the passive intention is mainly a perception. The noesis of this perception is an act of uninhibited intending, and the noema is the free fulfillment of several modes of being\u2014in this case, the shifting colors of the light playing on the tree\u2019s leaves.<\/p>\n

Marc: <\/strong>So I think the implication is that in the ordinary flow of perceptual life, I\u2019m constantly receiving, in a passive way, all kinds of perceptions of my surrounding world\u2014and naturally I do not turn my attention to everything I could possibly be aware of, this would be impossible. Active intentionality occurs when I \u201cpay attention\u201d a particular feature of what\u2019s present to me, say the leaves on a tree branch waving in the wind\u2014this is what it means to \u201cactively intend\u201d a feature of the object which had been only passively intended before?<\/p>\n

Susi: <\/strong>Yes\u2014for example I might feel compelled to touch the tree\u2019s trunk; I might just appreciate its shape. All these stimuli are simultaneously present to my consciousness and they can lead my awareness of the tree in any number of different directions. My consciousness, in the mode of attention, can follow only a few of these potential directions and in so doing, a passive intention becomes an active one\u2014what we call \u201cpaying attention,\u201d what Husserl calls a \u201cposition-taking\u201d in relation to the perceived object.<\/p>\n

In this way my passive intention becomes an active one in which the doxic or signitive act holds a primary position\u2014by the way, this is what strikingly didn\u2019t<\/em> happen in an exclusive way, in your experience! Signitive acts are those acts of consciousness that represent what has been given\u2014for example, finding the tree beautiful, or recognizing it as a maple, or in your case, recognizing what you were living as a dream. In your case it seems that the passive intending\u2014being lived by the dream, so to speak\u2014continued even as you partly engaged in a signitive act\u2014recognizing that you were dreaming.<\/p>\n

Marc: <\/strong>I think I see now why you were playfully talking about there being \u201ctwo Marcs\u201d present, and asked what kind of lived-experience this was, because what I\u2019ve said could be read as a simultaneous passive and active intending\u2026<\/p>\n

Susi: <\/strong>And the first step in an active intention consists exactly in the process of validation as confirmation (Bewahrneitung<\/em>) or verification (Bew\u00e4hrung<\/em>) of what Husserl calls \u201cthe perceptual concordance\u201d (Husserl, 2001, 143). In other words, I can say \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno\u201d to what I\u2019m intending. This occurs all the time in ordinary perceptual experience, of course. If while walking in a garden I see a flower, I might feel moved to reach out and touch it, or smell it\u2014these are passive intentions that arise as possibilities. In a certain sense I must choose which intentions to confirm and act upon, because naturally we don\u2019t act upon every possibility that\u2019s given to us. The perceptual concordance is exactly that balance between what is given to consciousness as self-giving and the presentation of what is expected to be presented to the consciousness. In that sense the confirmation which lies behind the very first step of an active intention seems to be essentially a normative act of regulation by which the first balance can be restored.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Marc<\/strong>: I think I follow what you\u2019re saying\u2014since for Husserl worldly objects are presented in an adumbrated way, in partial profiles, when we actively intend an object we are \u201cconfirming\u201d that these adumbrations \u201cadd up,\u201d so to speak, to a unified object that\u2019s present to us. And this \u201cadding up\u201d is what is meant by \u201cconcordance,\u201d I think. I went back to Aron Gurwitsch (1966) who says this nicely when he writes, \u201cAs we move around the thing, looking at it from different points of observation, the aspects change, the perceptual presentations of the same thing undergo variations. However, among the varying aspects there is not only a compatibility but even more a harmony and accordance,\u201d and \u00a0he says, according to Husserl, \u201cthe identity and the very existence of the perceived thing depend on that relation\u201d (p. 149). So the concordance is a perceptual confirmation that the object is present to us.<\/p>\n

Susi: <\/strong>Right, and these signifying and validating acts confirm consciousness\u2019s passage from a passive to active intention. According to Husserl, passive intentionality turns into an active one by a judgment of acceptance and its first noema ends up being what is accepted as valid or invalid. If someone is staring at a tree absentmindedly, after a while her passive intention is translated into the \u201cdecision\u201d to do something\u2014this is the shift to active intentionality. She \u201cdecides\u201d to examine its shape, enjoy its beauty, climb into its branches, et cetera. Different active directions flow from this shift to actively intending.<\/p>\n

Marc: <\/strong>So in a way, the shift to actively intending implicates the person\u2019s relationship to the intended object? The tree is grasped \u201cas something\u201d in relation to the person: for example, as a beautiful object, as something to climb on, as providing shade where I can eat lunch with a friend?<\/p>\n

Susi: <\/strong>Yes\u2014when someone is absentmindedly staring at a tree, she is open to a free horizon of expectations, an open horizon of multiple passive intentions. Then, in shifting to an actively intending relationship with the tree, the ego adopts a position of judging (or loving or talking, or imagining etc.) and as Husserl wrote, \u00a0\u201cappropriates what is now concordantly given as being simpliciter<\/em>. Active acceptance is what carries out a peculiar appropriation, determination, thereby establishing this being as valid for me from now on\u201d(2001, p. 95).<\/p>\n

When I said that in your dream experience the two kinds of intentions were not \u201ctalking to each other\u201d, I meant that this shift from free, passive intentions to the acceptance or validation of one of them did not seem to take place decisively, because in your dream you seemed to be viewing a range of passive free intentions (the dream contents) but they did not stimulate or impinge on your active intending. You were the same subject of two different worlds that usually communicate. For this reason I like Morley\u2019s quotations of Merleau-Ponty\u2019s words about dreams in The Visible and the Invisible,<\/em> when he talks about depersonalization or the world of myth. It seems to me that we have three subjects so far: the one of your dream, the one of your being awake and the one of your talking about it, now. What do you think?<\/p>\n

Marc: <\/strong>Well experientially, I can\u2019t go with \u201cthree subjects\u201d in a literal way, because what stood out so strongly in the experience was precisely that there was only one, the \u201cme\u201d! But then, I suppose you\u2019re asking, \u201cWho is reporting this?\u201d When I shift out of a natural attitude in relation to my dream, this question comes alive for me too.<\/p>\n

It may well be that in the experience there was a shifting of what my colleague Yannis Toussulis would call \u201cthe locus of identity\u201d from one who was passively intending to one who was actively intending\u2014and then of course later to the \u201cme\u201d who recollects the dream while talking to you, and gets interested all over again!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Maurice Merleau-Ponty<\/p><\/div>\n

And it\u2019s probably right for us to say, with Merleau-Ponty, that the dreamer is in a way \u201canonymous,\u201d and in a certain sense only \u201crecognizes himself\u201d as \u201cMarc\u201d retrospectively, in the shift to wakefulness. So maybe there was a shifting from passive intending to partly-actively intending, and then later of course, to a very active intending of the experience and a retrospective narrating in dialogue with you. One of the reasons why I like Morley\u2019s article so much is that he demonstrates clearly how phenomenology opens us up to a kind of ontological multiplicity, living in multiple worlds or living the same world in manifold ways\u2026Morley cites the following from Merleau-Ponty\u2019s Coll<\/em>\u00e8<\/em>ge de France <\/em>lecture notes:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe distinction between the real and the oneiric [dreamlike]\u00a0cannot be identical with the simple distinction between consciousness filled with meaning and consciousness given up to its own void. The two modalities impinge on one another. Our waking relations with objects and others especially have an oneiric character as a matter of principle: others are present to us in the way that dreams are\u201d (1968\/1970, p. 48).<\/p>\n

So this perspective really invites us to openly explore how the multiple worlds we live in interpenetrate each other\u2026not only how wakefulness could enter dreams, but how waking life can be dreamlike.<\/p>\n

Susi: <\/strong>And we haven\u2019t really touched upon the issue of time<\/em>. Maybe in your experience, communication between the two worlds was impossible because they were stuck in a different kinds of \u201cpresent\u201d! While you were dreaming, a part of yourself was living through the dream in a flow of time that was not the ordinary, waking one. Passive intending was stuck in that living instant. Probably the moment of the \u2018acceptance\u2019 and \u2018validation\u2019 of active intending was stuck in another phase of the flow of time that the dreamer was not living. Or maybe, the dreamer is not in the flow of time at all, in a certain way. Were you able to perceive the phases of your perception of yourself dreaming?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Paul Ricoeur<\/p><\/div>\n

Marc: <\/strong>Yes, that\u2019s a very good observation! Talking to you now, I can\u2019t trust that I\u2019m exactly capturing the dream’s temporality, precisely because I\u2019m narrating, and the narration has its own kind of time-structures, as Ricoeur, in Time and Narrative <\/em>(1984) for example, points out. \u201cRemembering,\u201d as we know phenomenologically isn\u2019t a carbon copy of what was lived the way it was lived\u2014it is not a kind of \u201ctime travel,\u201d and it is not a sort of pressing \u201creverse\u201d and backing up to an earlier place on the tape!<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s still given to me still, in the present, is the strong impression of my dreaming being overlapped by my recognition of the dreaming\u2026and there was a sense of the dreaming continuing to unfold for a period of time with this simultaneity, so I was not awake and remembering a past dream, but somehow still living the dream. A kind of liminal experience…<\/p>\n

All of this was different, qualitatively, from another kind of experience I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve had too: waking with the emotional impacts of a dream still present\u2014for example, waking from a nightmare, still feeling emotionally shaken, even though one is decisively awake now! It was this \u201coverlapping\u201d which interests me so much. What do you think? Where have we arrived?<\/p>\n

Susi<\/strong>: Dreaming is a human lived-experience that so many have explored…though I don\u2019t think we arrived at a conclusive understanding of the structure of your dream, we delved into the different layers of our experience, and began to unfold and appreciate the complexity of dreaming and intentionality.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gurwitsch, A. (1966). Studies in phenomenology and psychology. <\/em>Evanston: Northwestern University Press.<\/p>\n

Husserl, E. (2001). Analyses concerning active and passive synthesis: Lectures on transcendental logic <\/em>(A. J. Steinbock, Trans.). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.<\/p>\n

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible <\/em>(C. Lefort, Ed.; A. Lingus, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.<\/p>\n

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1996). Phenomenology of perception <\/em>(C. Smith, Trans.). New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n

Morley, J. (1999). The sleeping subject: Merleau-Ponty on dreaming. Theory & Psychology 9(1) 89-101.<\/p>\n

Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative: Volume I<\/em> (K. McGlaughlin and D. Pellauer, Trans.).\u00a0 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Credits<\/p>\n

Sleeping face photo credit: Victor Bezrukov<\/a> via photopin<\/a> cc<\/a><\/p>\n

Tree branches photo credit: Denis Collette…!!!<\/a> via photopin<\/a> cc<\/a><\/p>\n

Wildflowers photo credit: Denis Collette…!!!<\/a> via photopin<\/a> cc<\/a><\/p>\n<\/fb:like><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This conversation between philosopher Susi Ferrarello and me began, as is often the case in phenomenology, with an everyday experience: dreaming. My description of a dream led us to reflect on Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of dreaming and waking perception, and Husserl’s active and passive intentionality. The exchange continued over several weeks, and we’ve summarized it here–

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