Yeah, running down a dream, that never would come to me
Working on a mystery, going wherever it leads…
— ‘Running Down a Dream’ by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Our dog, Frida, lies stretched out on her side, in her favorite spot in my office, beside the full-length glass door where the sun warms a space on the rug during mid-afternoon. She appears to be asleep. She’s dreaming.
Or, at least, I assume she’s dreaming. Her eyes are closed, but she making a soft barking sound, almost a whisper: “Wuff… Wuff…” and her legs are twitching as if she were running. Running across a meadow, perhaps?
I’ve been having some dreams myself, lately, with an odd theme. In several recent dreams, I have been tasked with packing up my house because my family is moving to a new home. But I’m having a hard time of it.
The items that I am tasked with packing, in these dreams, are not possessions that I actually own in my waking life; often, they include a large number of children’s toys, beds, boxes, and furniture — far too many possessions for the undersized (and unfamiliar) vehicle into which I am trying to fit my family’s entire household. I am frustrated by the situation, but I can’t stop, because I am facing some kind of deadline… and it’s becoming ever more obvious I am going to fail to meet the deadline.
Then I wake up.
These recent dreams strike me a bit odd, because I don’t have any plans to move anywhere. I’m content here in Pagosa. If I never move again, it will suit me just fine. Also, I got rid of numerous possessions during my divorce… and my children are all adults, with children of their own… so, why am I packing children’ toys?
One morning, during my marriage to Clarissa, she awoke from a dream, very upset. In the dream, she had run into one of our local acquaintances, Steve Rausch, on the stairway leading up to our hillside home. Steve was not a person we knew well; Clarissa would certainly not include him in a list of her ‘close friends’, and we’d not even run across him, for at least the past year.
The unsettling part of the dream, Clarissa explained, was that Steve — although he moved and spoke in a familiar way — looked like a half-decayed corpse, like something you might find in an exhumed coffin.
Why would a casual acquaintance appear so dramatically in someone’s dream, as a walking cadaver?
A few weeks later, we heard from a friend that Steve had contracted AIDS and was on his dead bed.
This was not the only time Clarissa reported dreams that proved, days or weeks later, to have some apparently-prescient connection to events in our waking world. It happened often enough, in fact, to cause me to question my deeply-held beliefs about the world as something that could be explained by ‘science’.
Last week, I ran across an article by Thomas Nagel in The New York Review of Books entitled, “Is Consciousness an Illusion?” The review discussed a book by Daniel Dennett published in 2018: From Bacteria to Bach and Back.
I have my own ideas about what the word ‘consciousness’ means. And I think I know what an ‘illusion’ is. Apparently, Dr. Dennett had discovered a connection between the two concepts?
From Mr. Nagel’s review:
For fifty years the philosopher Daniel Dennett has been engaged in a grand project of disenchantment of the human world, using science to free us from what he deems illusions — illusions that are difficult to dislodge because they are so natural. In ‘From Bacteria to Bach and Back’, his eighteenth book (thirteenth as sole author), Dennett presents a valuable and typically lucid synthesis of his worldview. Though it is supported by reams of scientific data, he acknowledges that much of what he says is conjectural rather than proven, either empirically or philosophically.
Skimming the review, I wondered if this might be a book worth reading. (I’ve been doing a lot of idle reading during the pandemic.) I generally enjoy books that present a unique worldview, that challenge my assumptions, and make me think outside the box.
The review continues:
The task Dennett sets himself is framed by a famous distinction drawn by the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars between the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” — two ways of seeing the world we live in. According to the manifest image, Dennett writes, the world is…
…full of other people, plants, and animals, furniture and houses and cars…and colors and rainbows and sunsets, and voices and haircuts, and home runs and dollars, and problems and opportunities and mistakes, among many other such things. These are the myriad “things” that are easy for us to recognize, point to, love or hate, and, in many cases, manipulate or even create…. It’s the world according to us.
According to the scientific image, on the other hand, the world…
…is populated with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks, and who knows what else (dark energy, strings? branes?).
This, according to Dennett, is the world as it is in itself, not just for us, and the task is to explain scientifically how the world of molecules has come to include creatures like us, complex physical objects to whom everything, including they themselves, appears so different.
Many people — maybe most people — view the world as two sides of an unsolvable argument.
“Us” vs “Them”
“Progressive” vs “Conservative”
“Good” vs “Evil”
“Trustworthy” vs “Deceitful”
“Biden” vs “Trump”
Has Dr. Dennett fallen into the same dualistic trap?
And why have I been dreaming about packing up children’s toys?