In this article, I return to the ‘over-interpreted anxiety dream’ of ‘Irma’s Injection’ to make a wider claim concerning an unacknowledged investment in structure that I understand to return to Žižekian appeals to the disruptive structure of the Real. I begin with the analysis of Freud’s first specimen dream, and Lacan’s response to this, offered by Joan Copjec, Žižek’s fellow traveller in theory. My concern is with Copjec’s staging of the encounter with the Real, both in its imaginary and symbolic (...) modes, and the extent to which a renewed focus on the narrational frames of psychoanalytic accounts of ‘Irma’s Injection’ can help bring to light their otherwise neglected appeals to structure.. Rather than a simple deconstructive evasion of the Real, I argue that such a move enables a questioning the location of the limit within Copjec’s account of ‘Irma’s Injection’: a return of the Real to the Real.. This discussion results also in a more straightforward reassessment of the understanding of structure in ‘Irma’s Injection’ as read by both Copjec and Žižek. I focus on one particular aspect, ‘flight’, understood to be: central to the structure of the dream; disruptive to this structure; a remaining and an escape; evasion and fidelity. Through the frame of ‘flight’, I re-evaluate the dream within/ across the work of Žižek and Copjec before, finally, contemplating how ‘flight’ might help to refigure the relationship between the two theorists, and the deconstructive practice that both question within their various responses to ‘Irma’s Injection. (shrink)

The question of energy is among the most vital for the future of humanity and the flourishing of life on this planet. Yet, only very rarely (if at all) do we ask what energy is, what it means, what ends it serves, and how it is related to actuality, meaning-making, and instrumentality. Energy Dreams interrogates the ontology of energy from the first coinage of the word energeia by Aristotle to the current practice of fracking and the popularity of "energy (...) drinks." Its sustained, multi-disciplinary investigation builds a theoretical infrastructure for an alternative energy paradigm. This study unhinges stubbornly held assumptions about energy, conceived in terms of a resource to be violently extracted from the depths of the earth and from certain living beings (such as plants, converted into biofuels), a thing that, teetering on the verge of depletion, sparks off movement and is incompatible with the inertia of rest. Consulting the insights of philosophers, theologians, psychologists and psychoanalysts, economic and political theorists, and physicists, Michael Marder argues that energy is not only a coveted object of appropriation but also the subject who dreams of amassing it; that it not only resides in the dimension of depth but also circulates on the surface; that it activates rest as much as movement, potentiality as much as actuality; and that it is both the means and the end of our pursuits. Ultimately, Marder shows that, instead of being grounded in utopian naïveté, the dreams of another energy—to be procured without devastating everything in existence—derive from the suppressed concept of energy itself. (shrink)

Cet article présente Nietzsche comme un héritier du courant Illuministe, qui perpétue la Tradition spirituelle, confluent des différentes traditions ésotériques et qui s'est développé dans l'ombre des Lumières triomphantes. Sous une carapace d'athéisme, on trouve dans l'œuvre du philosophe allemand des éléments hermétiques ou gnostiques qui permettent d'appréhender différemment son Dionysos ou sa volonté de puissance. Par ces aspects et au travers de l'ascétisme transvalué qu'il propose, Nietzsche est proche des conceptions du soufisme, la mystique qui a été développée à (...) partir des sources scripturaires de l'Islam. C'est ce que montre ensuite cet article en proposant une comparaison entre le surhomme nietzschéen et la figure de l'homme partait, « el insan el kamil » d'Ibn Arabi, un des plus célèbres théoriciens du soufisme. En conclusion, l'auteur se pose la question des écrits qui auraient pu mettre le philosophe allemand en contact avec la mystique musulmane. (shrink)

In this article, we present results from an interdisciplinary research project aimed at assessing consciousness in dreams. For this purpose, we compared lucid dreams with normal non-lucid dreams from REM sleep. Both lucid and non-lucid dreams are an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness, giving valuable insights into the structure of conscious experience and its neural correlates during sleep. However, the precise differences between lucid and non-lucid dreams remain poorly understood. The construction of (...) the Lucidity and Consciousness in Dreams scale was based on theoretical considerations and empirical observations. Exploratory factor analysis of the data from the first survey identified eight factors that were validated in a second survey using confirmatory factor analysis: INSIGHT, CONTROL, THOUGHT, REALISM, MEMORY, DISSOCIATION, NEGATIVE EMOTION, and POSITIVE EMOTION. While all factors are involved in dream consciousness, realism and negative emotion do not differentiate between lucid and non-lucid dreams, suggesting that lucid insight is separable from both bizarreness in dreams and a change in the subjectively experienced realism of the dream. (shrink)

I propose a narrative fabrication thesis of dream reports, according to which dream reports are often not accurate representations of experiences that occur during sleep. I begin with an overview of anti-experience theses of Norman Malcolm and Daniel Dennett who reject the received view of dreams, that dreams are experiences we have during sleep which are reported upon waking. Although rejection of the first claim of the received view, that dreams are experiences that occur during sleep, is (...) implausible, I evaluate in more detail the second assumption of the received view, that dream reports are generally accurate. I then propose a “narrative fabrication” view of dreams as an alternative to the received view. Dream reports are often confabulated or fabricated because of poor memory, bizarre dream content, and cognitive deficits. It is well documented that narratives can be altered between initial rapid eye movement sleep awakenings and subsequent reports. I argue that we have reason to suspect that initial reports are prone to inaccuracy. Experiments demonstrate that subjects rationalize strange elements in narratives, leaving out supernatural or bizarre components when reporting waking memories of stories. Inaccuracies in dream reports are exacerbated by rapid memory loss and bizarre dream content. Waking memory is a process of reconstruction and blending of elements, but unlike waking memory, we cannot reality-test for dream memories. Dream experiences involve imaginative elements, and dream content cannot be verified with external evidence. Some dreams may involve wake-like higher cognitive functions, such as lucid dreams. Such dreams are more likely to elicit accurate reports than cognitively deficient dreams. However, dream reports are generally less accurate than waking reports. I then propose methods which could verify the narrative fabrication view, and argue that although the theory cannot be tested with current methods, new techniques and technologies may be able to do so in the future. -/- . (shrink)

Freud's account of dreams has a cogent interpretive basis.

Revonsuo’s influential Threat Simulation Theory predicts that people exposed to survival threats will have more threat dreams, and evince enhanced responses to dream threats, compared to those living in relatively safe conditions. Participants in a high crime area differed significantly from participants in a low crime area in having greater recent exposure to a life-threatening event . Contrary to TST’s predictions, the SA participants reported significantly fewer threat dreams , and did not differ from the Welsh participants in (...) responses to dream threats . Overall, the incidence of threat in dreams was extremely low—less than 20% of dreams featured realistic survival threats. Escape from dream threats occurred in less than 2% of dreams. We conclude that this evidence contradicts key aspects of TST. (shrink)

This book tries to argue for both of two theses that some have thought are incompatible, one negative, the other positive. To start with the negative thesis, the book opposes the 'normative turn' in political philosophy: the idea that the right approach to politics is to start from thinking abstractly about our own normative views and apply them to judging political structures, decisions, and events. Rather, the book argues, the study of politics should be focused on the historically and sociologically (...) contextualized sphere of real politics. The second, and positive thesis, is that opposition to the 'normative turn' need not mean the end of utopianism, although that utopianism needs to be re-understood. The utopian impulse is not an attempt to describe a perfect society, but an impulse to think the impossible in politics. That is, it is an attempt to articulate deep-seated desires that cannot be realized under current conditions and to imagine how structures and forms of action that now seem invariant can be changed."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

A familiar injunction is to follow your dreams. But what are these dreams? Despite their importance, philosophers have almost entirely ignored the topic. This paper fills this gap by advancing an account of the psychological makeup and the normative powers of dreams. To elucidate their psychology, I identify the salient features of dreams. I argue that these features are explained by the hypothesis that dreams are a species of hope. More specifically, the proposal is that (...) dreams fit the standard model of hope, which characterizes hope in terms of desire and belief. But this analysis is only plausible if hope, so understood, is suited to play the normative roles that dreams appear to play (otherwise the significance of dreams will need to be deflated). I argue that dream-constituting desires play a dual normative role: they ground weighty practical reasons (rooted in the identity of the dreamer) and likewise help us to learn about our reasons for action. I argue that hope in the standard sense can fulfill both roles. So while many philosophers in recent years have been focused on analyzing more complex forms of hope, it turns out that our most basic hopes are among the most normatively significant. (shrink)

One challenge for cognitive, evolutionary and anthropological studies of religion is to offer descriptions and explanatory models of the morphology and functions of supernatural dreaming, and of the religiosity, use of experience, and cultural transmission that are associated with these representations. The anthropological and religious studies literature demonstrates that dreaming, dream experience and narrative are connected with religious ideas and practices in traditional societies. Scholars have even proposed that dreaming is a primary source of religious beliefs and practice. Using Barrett’s (...) coding system, we measured a high frequency of minimally counterintuitive dream content among Hindu Nepalese, and we aim to quantify the relation between counterintuitive imagery and reported likelihood to communicate dreams in general and to religious experts, the relation between counterintuitive imagery and reported religiosity, and the proclivity to communicate SA dreams among those who are more or less religious. These aims will then be related to the broader topic of possible explanatory value of DPSR theory, or versions thereof, by framing the issue at the level of cultural transmission, religiosity and credibility of religious dream representations in relation to MCI theory. The article mainly draws upon data from ethnographic research among Hindu Nepalese. (shrink)

The virtual annuls all suspension of time that could, through its tragic or stylistic character, confer to time an existential value. This condition is contrasted with time as it functions in dreams. On the grounds of these observations it is shown that there are resemblances between “autistic” symptoms and the virtual world.

Stiegler argued in Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise that we must refer to archi-cinema just as Derrida spoke of archi-writing. In this article he proposes that in principle the dream is the primordial form of this archi-cinema. The archi-cinema of consciousness, of which dreams would be the matrix as archi-cinema of the unconscious, is the projection resulting from the play between what Husserl called, on the one hand, primary and secondary retentions, and what Stiegler, on the other (...) hand, calls tertiary retentions, which are the hypomnesic traces of conscious and unconscious life. There is archi-cinema to the extent that for any noetic act – for example, in an act of perception – consciousness projects its object. This projection is a montage, of which tertiary retentions form the fabric, as well as constituting both the supports and the cutting room. This indicates that archi-cinema has a history, a history conditioned by the history of tertiary retentions. It also means that there is an organology of dreams. (shrink)

This groundbreaking new translation of The Interpretation of Dreams is the first to be based on the original text published in November 1899. It restores Freud's original argument, unmodified by revisions he made following the book's critical reception. Reading the first edition reveals Freud's original emphasis on the use of words in dreams and on the difficulty of deciphering them and Joyce Crick captures with far greater immediacy and accuracy than previous translations by Strachey's Freud's emphasis and terminology. (...) An accessible introduction by Ritchie Robertson summarizes and comments on Freud's argument and relates it to his early work. Close annotation explains Freud's many autobiographical, literary and historical allusions and makes this the first edition to present Freud's early work in its full intellectual and cultural context. (shrink)

The author attempts to show the relevance of Kosslyn's research on mental imagery to some aspects of Freud's theory of dreams. Some of the findings of this research, such as the properties of visual images, the processes involved in image generation, etc., are discussed and it is shown how they contribute to the various Freudian hypotheses concerning the properties of dream images, the processes constituting the dream work, and the activity of dream interpretation.

In Ancient Science and Dreams, M. Andrew Holowchak analyzes the ancient notion of science of dreams throughout Greco-Roman antiquity, from the Classical Greece in the fifth century B.C. to the Roman Republic in the fourth century A.D. Holowchak investigates psycho-physiological accounts, interpretation of prophetic dreams, and the use of dreams in secular and non-secular medicine.

Lisa Isherwood, one of the founding editors of Feminist Theology journal reflects on the development of Feminist Theology over the past 20 years and looks to its future. Avenues for the future include development of the area of Atonement Theologies and working to get it disseminated to seminaries and various clerical training institutions. Feminism in Europe, particularly Central or Eastern Europe, also has a place in the next 20 years of Feminist Theology and the journal.

_A major theoretical statement by a distinguished political scholar explains why a policy of liberal hegemony is doomed to fail_ In this major statement, the renowned international-relations scholar John Mearsheimer argues that liberal hegemony, the foreign policy pursued by the United States since the Cold War ended, is doomed to fail. It makes far more sense, he maintains, for Washington to adopt a more restrained foreign policy based on a sound understanding of how nationalism and realism constrain great powers abroad. (...) It is widely believed in the West that the United States should spread liberal democracy across the world, foster an open international economy, and build institutions. This policy of remaking the world in America’s image is supposed to protect human rights, promote peace, and make the world safe for democracy. But this is not what has happened. Instead, the United States has ended up as a highly militarized state fighting wars that undermine peace, harm human rights, and threaten liberal values at home. Mearsheimer tells us why this has happened. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that one of the things that matters most to Descartes' account of mind is that we use our minds actively. This is because for him only an active mind is able to re-organize its passionate experiences in such a way that a genuinely human, self-governed life of virtue and true contentment becomes possible. To bring out this connection, I will read the Meditations against the backdrop of Descartes' correspondence with Elisabeth. This will reveal that in (...) Descartes' writings there is a crucial connection between the conception of ourselves as dreamers and the idea that we fail to realize our true potential as self-determined, active agents. Dreams, as Descartes conceives them, are passively received mental states that inhibit our freedom to use reason at will. To awaken here takes the form of activating our thoughts, which holds the key to freeing ourselves from the stimulus-response patterns that Descartes takes to be at work in animal conduct. Applied to the Meditations, these insights suggest that this work engages in questions far beyond the epistemological agenda. By activating the mind, the Meditations teach us how to realize our true human potential as virtuous thinkers and passionate agents. (shrink)

Dreams provide a compelling problem for sensorimotor enactivists like Alva Noë: they seem to replicate our perceptual experiences without sensorimotor interaction with distal sensory stimuli. Noë has responded by saying that dreams actually fail to replicate perceptual experiences in virtue of their lack of detail and stability. Noë's opponents have replied by pointing out that some dreams are richly detailed and stable, and that instability and a lack of detail in dreams can anyway be explained in (...) terms of the underlying neural activity. In this paper, I develop how the sensorimotor enactivist should respond: dreams fail to replicate perceptual experiences because they are exhausted by what shows up at a given moment in phenomenal consciousness, while perceptual experiences go beyond this to include everything accessible via sensorimotor exploration. This difference permeates all levels of experience, so that dreams can't even replicate perceptual experiences of simple shapes and colors. Further, unlike detail and stability, there are not obvious neural explanations of this phenomenal difference. (shrink)

div A sweeping reconstruction of human consciousness and its breakdown, from the Stone Age through modern technology/DIV.

In the 1930s C. G. Jung embarked upon a bold investigation into childhood dreams as remembered by adults to better understand their significance to the lives of the dreamers. Jung presented his findings in a four-year seminar series at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Children's Dreams marks their first publication in English, and fills a critical gap in Jung's collected works. Here we witness Jung the clinician more vividly than ever before--and he is witty, impatient, (...) sometimes authoritarian, always wise and intellectually daring, but also a teacher who, though brilliant, could be vulnerable, uncertain, and humbled by life's great mysteries. These seminars represent the most penetrating account of Jung's insights into children's dreams and the psychology of childhood. At the same time they offer the best example of group supervision by Jung, presenting his most detailed and thorough exposition of Jungian dream analysis and providing a picture of how he taught others to interpret dreams. Presented here in an inspired English translation commissioned by the Philemon Foundation, these seminars reveal Jung as an impassioned educator in dialogue with his students and developing the practice of analytical psychology. An invaluable document of perhaps the most important psychologist of the twentieth century at work, this splendid volume is the fullest representation of Jung's views on the interpretation of children's dreams, and signals a new wave in the publication of Jung's collected works as well as a renaissance in contemporary Jung studies. (shrink)

This volume is a new translation of one of Immanuel Kant's most puzzling works, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, a scathing satire of the works of Emanuel Swedenborg. An introduction by translator Gregory R. Johnson puts the essay in the context of Kant's life and thought, shedding new light on this pivotal work.

Integrative and naturalistic philosophy of mind can both learn from and contribute to the contemporary cognitive sciences of dreaming. Two related phenomena concerning self-representation in dreams demonstrate the need to bring disparate fields together. In most dreams, the protagonist or dream self who experiences and actively participates in dream events is or represents the dreamer: but in an intriguing minority of cases, self-representation in dreams is displaced, disrupted, or even absent. Working from dream reports in established databanks, (...) we examine two key forms of polymorphism of self-representation: dreams in which I take an external visuospatial perspective on myself, and those in which I take someone else's perspective on events. In remembering my past experiences or imagining future or possible experiences when awake, I sometimes see myself from an external or 'observer' perspective. By relating the issue of perspective in dreams to established research traditions in the study of memory and imagery, and noting the flexibility of perspective in dreams, we identify new lines of enquiry. In other dreams, the dreamer does not appear to figure at all, and the first person perspective on dream events is occupied by someone else, some other person or character. We call these puzzling cases 'vicarious dreams' and assess some potential ways to make sense of them. Questions about self-representation and perspectives in dreams are intriguing in their own right and pose empirical and conceptual problems about the nature of self-representation with implications beyond the case of dreaming. (shrink)

The pharmacological literature on negative dream experiences is reviewed with respect to Revonsuo's threat rehearsal theory of dreaming. Moderate support for the theory is found, although much more work is needed. Significant questions that remain include the precise role of acetylcholine in the generation of negative dream experiences and dissociations between the pharmacology of waking fear and anxiety and threatening dreams. [Revonsuo].

Nanotechnology is a swiftly developing field of technology that is believed to have the potential of great upsides and excessive downsides. In the ethical debate there has been a strong tendency to strongly focus on either the first or the latter. As a consequence ethical assessments of nanotechnology tend to radically diverge. Optimistic visionaries predict truly utopian states of affairs. Pessimistic thinkers present all manner of apocalyptic visions. Whereas the utopian views follow from one-sidedly focusing on the potential benefits of (...) nanotechnology, the apocalyptic perspectives result from giving exclusive attention to possible worst-case scenarios. These radically opposing evaluations hold the risk of conflicts and unwanted backlashes. Furthermore, many of these drastic views are based on simplified and outdated visions of a nanotechnology dominated by self-replicating assemblers and nanomachines. Hence, the present state of the ethical debate on nanotechnology calls for the development of more balanced and better-informed assessments. As a first step in this direction this contribution presents a new method of framing the ethical debate on nanotechnology. Thus, the focus of this paper is on methodology, not on normative analysis. (shrink)

Examines three basic approaches to scientific explanation that have been advocated by influential writers in the second half of the twentieth century and are still held today. It shows how fundamental differences in these approaches emerge when they confront explanation in scientific contexts in which statistical laws and functional explanations play major roles. The author argues that the ontic conception, in which events are explained by showing how they fit into the physical patterns found in the world, is best equipped (...) to handle explanations that are problematic for the other approaches. (shrink)

The paper explores the interrelations between Pindar, Heraclitus and the Hippocratic author with regard to ideas of the body, the soul and dreams. I shall consider Pindar’s fr.131b as an overlooked testimony of the poet’s interest in a non-Homeric conceptualization of the soul. I will suggest reading Heraclitus’ fragments B26 and B21 together and offer a new interpretation of the latter. Furthermore, I will compare Pindar’s fr. 131b with the HippocraticOn Regimen(4. 86, 87) and Pindar’s fr. 133 withOn Regimen(4. (...) 92) respectively, in order to highlight unnoticed similarities. (shrink)

It is a commonplace in both the popular imagination and the philosophical literature that hope has a special kind of motivational force. This commonplace underwrites the conviction that hope alone is capable of bolstering us in despairinducing circumstances, as well as the strategy of appealing to hope in the political realm. In section 1, I argue that, to the contrary, hope’s motivational essence is not special or unique—it is simply that of an endorsed desire. The commonplace is not entirely mistaken, (...) however, because standard ways of expressing hope do have motivational influence that is different in kind from that of desire. In sections 2 through 4, I examine one of these ways of expressing hope, fantasizing, and argue that fantasies can present us with reasons to modify our goals and projects in multiple ways. (shrink)

The article considers the problem of images and the role they play in our reflection turning to evidence provided by two seemingly very distant theories of mind together with two sorts of corresponding visions: dreams as analyzed by Freud who claimed that they are pictures of our thoughts, and their mechanical counterparts produced by neural networks designed for object recognition and classification. Freud’s theory of dreams has largely been ignored by philosophers interested in cognition, most of whom focused (...) solely on the linguistic incarnation of thoughts, but even though commonly neglected by respectable theories of thinking, dream images may prove to be the key to the black box of thought. As argued in this article, when seen from the right perspective and approached with the right set of questions, oneiric visions yield groundbreaking insights into the mechanism of how concepts and judgments are formed. Support for this conclusion comes from a tradition seemingly remote, if not opposed to psychoanalysis: the mechanical model of the mind conceived by information sciences and embodied in the form of artificial neural nets which mirror the activity of human visual cortex producing visions strikingly similar to those created by the sleeping mind. These purely mechanical, artificial ‘dreams’ constitute byproducts of algorithms designed for object recognition and classification, which, as I shall argue, reveals the true purpose of our own oneiric visual formations. Just like their mechanical counterparts produced by neural networks, condensations and displacements encountered in dreams are in fact visual universals. (shrink)

KantObservations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime’ reveal a deep concern with the way in which the human drives to equality and unity lead inevitably to a drive for honour and its attendant delusions. He developed his thinking about these problems in the context of his reading of Rousseau. In his published Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant tries to overcome the influence of the drive for honour by appealing to a metaphysics that is critical of itself. (...) The problem is how to distinguish what is grounded in reason when that reason is so easily influenced by others. (shrink)

This brief paper presents a problem: the specialist on specialization must seek to know the value of specialization across different fields, but that would seem to make them non-specialized. I also propose solutions.