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Mannison's Impossible Dream

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Peter Preuss
Peter Preuss*
Affiliation:
University of Lethbridge
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Extract

Alastair Hannay wrote that there is a campaign against the mental image and a look at the philosophical literature on that topic bears him out. But there is also a campaign against dreams. Given the first campaign this is not surprising. What is surprising is that they are separate campaigns. Intuitively mental images and dreams seem to be as alike as kittens and cats, the one being merely the developed form of the other, made possible by the fading of consciousness of the real world. One would think that an attack on the one is also an attack on the other, at least in the sense that an analysis of the one will, with modest modifications, also be an analysis of the other.

But this seems not to be so. To say that a man who pictured his nursery was not a spectator of a resemblance of his nursery, but rather resembled a. spectator of his nursery, may have some initial plausibility because some people behave in curious ways at such times. But to say this of a person who dreamt of his nursery is simply nonsense.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 1976 , pp. 535 - 542
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1976

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References

1 “To See A Mental Image”, Mind, 1973, p. 182.

2 For a notable exception see Sartre, Jean-Paul The Psychology of Imagination, Frechtman, Bernard trans., Washington Square Press, New York, 1966.Google Scholar

3 cf. Ryle, Gilbert The Concept of Mind, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1949, p. 248.Google Scholar

4 cf. Norman Malcolm, Dreaming, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1959, second impression 1962. For Malcolm's, early application to after-images of the technique employed in Dreaming see his “Direct Perception”, Philosophical Quarterly, 1953, republished in his Knowledge and Certainty, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963Google Scholar, and O.R. Jones, “After-Images”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 1972.

5 Mannison, D. S. “Dreaming an Impossible Dream”, Vol. IV, No. 4, June 1975Google Scholar.

6 For a brief but telling discussion of this claim and Malcolm's feeble response see V. C. Chappell, “The Concept of Dreaming”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 1963, p. 209.

7 The Graphic Work of Escher, M. C. Ballantine Books, New York, 1960.Google Scholar For the notion of “what is in the picture” see Aldrich, Virgil C. “Picturing, Seeing and the Time-Lag Argument,” this Journal, Vol. IV, no. 3, March 1975.Google Scholar

8 E.g .. Hosper, S.E. “Controlled Dreams”, Psyche; an annual of general and linguistic psychology(London), Vol. 4, No. 2, 1923.Google Scholar

9 It is difficult to decide what to cite. A good place to start may be Green, Celia Lucid Dreams, London, 1968.Google Scholar

10 For a recent, interesting account see J.T. Price, “Dream Recollection and Wittgenstein's Language”, Dialogue, March, 1974.