On Dreams (Ancient Greek: Περὶ ἐνυπνίων; Latin: De insomniis) is one of the short treatises that make up Aristotle's Parva Naturalia.
The short text is divided into three chapters. In the first, Aristotle tries to determine whether dreams "pertain to the faculty of thought or to that of sense-perception."[1] In the second chapter, he considers the circumstances of sleep and how the sense organs operate.[2] Finally, in the third chapter he explains how dreams are caused, proposing that it is the residual movements of the sensory organs that allow them to arise.[3][4]
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Transcription
There’s a whole lore about dreaming. In fact, Sigmund Freud wrote a book called The Interpretation of Dreams which many people think is the foundation of psychoanalysis. Well scientists now have looked at Freudian psychology and the brain using all these modern techniques. And first of all we realize that perhaps Sigmund Freud wasn’t totally wrong. There are many textbooks which simply dismiss Freudian psychology calling it nuts. That is nothing but the sexual fantasies of a repressed Venetian scientist of the last century. But now we realize there’s more to it. First of all the unconscious mind. We can actually see the brain in motion and we realize that much of the activity is totally unconscious. Just like what Freud predicted. And Freud also said there is the ego, the id and the superego, that we are in a constant battle with our desires and our conscious. And we see that now with brain scans. The ego is basically your prefrontal cortex. That is who you are. When you wonder where am I anyway. Well, you’re right there. You are sitting right behind your forehead. And then your desires. We see the pleasure center right there at the center of the brain. That is the libido. We see where the pleasure center is located. And then your conscience is right behind your eyes. The orbital frontal cortex right behind your eyes is where your conscience is. And so we actually see that in motion. If you were to see a chocolate cake you would see these three parts of the brain going zippity back and forth like a ping pong ball because you’re constantly debating the pleasure of eating a chocolate cake versus how fat you’re gonna become and all the sugar and the calories that you don’t really need. So we see the beginnings of Freudian psychology coming out of brain scans. And now dreams. Freud had a whole collection of interpretation of dreams. Scientists have looked at and said, “Nonsense.” Now we understand the physiology of the dreaming process. And we realize that it comes at the back of the brain, the very primitive part of the brain and that certain parts of the brain are shut off when you dream. First of all your prefrontal cortex is basically shut off, it’s quiet. Your orbital frontal cortex that is your conscience is also shut off. But that part of the brain is your fact checker. The part of the brain that said, “Hmmm, that’s not right. Something’s wrong” is right behind your eyes. That’s shut off. What is active when you dream is your amygdala. Now what does your amygdala govern? Fear and emotions. And so right then you know that when you dream the active part of the brain is not the fact checker, not the rational brain – it’s the emotional brain, the fearful brain that is active when you dream. And then there’s some superstition called lucid dreaming where you can actually control the direction of the dream. Well that superstition last year became science fact. At the Max Planck Institute in Germany they were able to show once and for all that lucid dreaming is testable, reproducible – it is real. And here’s how they did it. They took a person who was about to go to sleep and told them that when you dream clench your right fist and then clench your left fist. Now when you dream you are paralyzed. You cannot move when you dream. Otherwise we’d be able to carry out all sorts of horrible things and destroy ourselves. So we are paralyzed when we dream. But when this person went into a dream state you can clearly see that the brain initiated orders to clench your right fist and your left fist. In other words, he was conscious while he was dreaming. There are many Buddhist texts, many texts hundreds of years old that give you the outlines of how to control dreams. Lucid dreaming. We now know that it’s not hogwash that you can actually do this. You can actually direct the course of your dream. And then one day we may be able to brain scan the brain as you dream and put it on a screen. In which case somebody will be able to see you dream and know the direction of the dream and you are conscious of the process. In other words, the movie Inception is not totally hogwash.
Content
Aristotle explains that during sleep there is an absence of external sensory stimulation. While sleeping with our eyes closed, the eyes are unable to see, and so in this respect we perceive nothing while asleep.[5] He compares hallucinations to dreams, saying "...the faculty by which, in waking hours, we are subject to illusion when affected by disease, is identical with that which produces illusory effects in sleep."[6] When awake and perceiving, to see or hear something incorrectly only occurs when one actually sees or hears something, thinking it to be something else. But in sleep, if it is still true that one does not see, hear, or experience sense perception in the normal way, then the faculty of sense, he reasons, must be affected in some different way.[7]
Ultimately, Aristotle concludes that dreaming is due to residual movements of the sensory organs.[3][4] Some dreams, he says, may even be caused by indigestion:[8]
We must suppose that, like the little eddies which are formed in rivers, so the movements are each a continuous process, often remaining like what they were when first started, but often, too, broken, into other forms by collisions with obstacles. This gives the reason why no dreams occur in sleep after meals, or to sleepers who are extremely young, e.g., to infants. The movement in such cases is excessive, owing to the heat generated from the food. Hence, just as in a liquid, if one vehemently disturbs it, sometimes no reflected image appears, while at other times one appears, indeed, but utterly distorted, so as to seem quite unlike its original; while, when once the motion has ceased, the reflected images are clear and plain; in the same manner during sleep the images, or residuary images are clear and plain; in the same manner during sleep the images, or residuary movements, which are based upon the sensory impressions, become sometimes quite obliterated by the above described motion when too violent; while at other times the sights are indeed seen, but confused and weird, and the dreams are incoherent, like those of persons who are atrabilious, or feverish, or intoxicated with wine. For all such affections, being spirituous, cause much commotion and disturbance.[9]
Aristotle also describes the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, whereby the dreamer becomes aware that he is dreaming.[4][10]
Legacy
The 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes generally adopted Aristotle's view that dreams arise from continued movements of the sensory organs during sleep,[8] writing that "dreams are caused by the distemper of some inward parts of the Body." He thought this explanation would further help in understanding different types of dreams, for example, "lying cold breedeth Dreams of Feare, and raiseth the thought and Image of some fearfull object."[11]
The neurologist Sigmund Freud cited Aristotle in his 1899 work, The Interpretation of Dreams, as the first to recognize that dreams "do not arise from supernatural manifestations but follow the laws of the human spirit." He held Aristotle's definition of dreams to be "the mental activity of the sleeper in so far as he is asleep."[12]
References
Notes
- ^ Aristotle, On Dreams, 1.458b1-2
- ^ Aristotle, On Dreams, 2.459a23-28
- ^ a b Aristotle, On Dreams, 3.461b7-22
- ^ a b c Windt 2017, §2.3
- ^ Aristotle, On Dreams, 1.458b7-9
- ^ Aristotle, On Dreams, 1.458b26-28
- ^ Aristotle, On Dreams, 1.458b30-459a8
- ^ a b Windt 2017, §2.5
- ^ Aristotle, On Dreams, 3.460b28-461a24
- ^ Aristotle, On Dreams, 3.462a3-8
- ^ Hobbes 1651, p. 95
- ^ Freud 1899, pp. 36–37
Sources
- Barnes, Jonathan, ed. (1984). The Complete Works of Aristotle (6th printing, with corr. ed.). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. pp. 729–735. ISBN 978-0691016504.
- Freud, Sigmund (1899). The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by Strachey, James (2010 ed.). New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465019779.
- Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan (1985 ed.). Penguin. ISBN 9780140431957.
- Windt, Jennifer M. (2017). "Dreams and Dreaming". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 7 February 2018.
External links
Works related to On Dreams at Wikisource
Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article: Περὶ ἐνυπνίου
Parva Naturalia public domain audiobook at LibriVox- On Dreams, translated by J. I. Beare
- HTML Greek text: Mikros apoplous
This page was last edited on 9 May 2024, at 12:50