A short while ago I had a dream that prophesied some potential problems to come. And what’s true is that one of those “whales” from the dream smacked me nearly senseless as it went by only a few days after I had the dream. I won’t bore you with the details, but what may be of interest is how I cope with such things as “prophecy” given my atheism.

I know enough to realize that while dream images may be random firings of the brain, so, essentially is much else we experience.  The point is what the brain does with those electrical and chemical impulses not just how they originate. There are many theories about how we achieve meaning and while many are interesting, I lean toward embodied cognition. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines embodied cognition this way:

The general theory contends that cognitive processes develop when a tightly coupled system emerges from real-time, goal-directed interactions between organisms and their environment; the nature of these interactions influences the formation and further specifies the nature of the developing cognitive capacities.

In other words, as Wittgenstein said, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”

(I would add another phrase to make it: “The human body (as it comes to be through trying to accomplish things in the world) is the best picture of the human soul. Not as catchy of course, but more accurate.)

This idea is where I begin thinking about how dreams accomplish meaning. Because language and concepts are so blazingly important in our recent development, they drown out much of our older forms of communication. Things like “my skin is crawling” or “my gut tells me no” are messages now largely consigned to the realm of spirit and intuition. They have become all but inaudible in the time it has taken to move from Erectus to Sapiens. We have developed technologies to listen for those “messages” – meditation and the like – and now, given our conceptual dependence, we create stories to explain their origins. Since those zaps of insight often feel as if they are not like us (i.e. rational and conceptual), those “communications” are often thought to originate in the outside-us — in the spiritual world. I understand the impulse to consign the conceptually unknown to outside-us but I think it unnecessary to posit another world when our own will do as an explanation.

Our bodies, living and developing in the world provides enough of an explanatory net.  Where do dreams come from? The bodily (non-conceptual) systems as they co-develop with the larger set of (non-conceptual) environmental systems.

The body is the model (think of it as a biological non-conceptual framework) which guides the activity of organizing those random impulses into meaningful episodes.  Impulses fired because of events in the body in interaction with its environment, are organized into packets based on past experiences. Like rain flowing down a dry stream bed, where a particular rain drop falls may be random, but the pattern the water creates as it moves across the earth is not. Because those body/brain firings originate and are released into a fairly tightly organized set of pathways, many of which result in (and have been caused by) meaning construction of the waking mind, it seems silly to assume that dreams would not have just as much meaning potential as other waking mental events.

I am the kind of reader that has many books on the go at the same time. Normally this isn’t a problem since I read almost entirely non-fiction. When I hit the end of a read-run then I’ll pick up some fiction. I take a break, then back to non-fiction. The world is orderly. When I intermix them, things get a little strange. And confusing.

I think it’s something with the way the two genres affect my mind, but when I read them together it’s as if they start a feed-back loop and my mind starts making weird connections, not static exactly, but definately off-the-wall cognitive shots. So for example, I am re-reading Woolf’s The Waves, and there is Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury along with Sherman Alexie’s books. Add to that a book called The End of Illusion: the end of literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, one called Proust and the Squid (great title), one on the philosophy of mind. There’s another on religion and the american mind and one by Foss that’s become a bit of an obsession (can’t seem to let it go, it’s just such a wonderful idea).

So I started dreaming about moths. My son, who sends me random topics to write about, sent me one about moths and their propensity to immolate themselves in candle flame and haunt floodlights. He sent me the topic some weeks ago, but I haven’t done anything about it because I could feel that whatever I thought of moths wasn’t ready to come out through the fingers. I suppose reading Woolf was bound to trigger a connection there. And the other books, those too – like somehow they are growing toward each other, sparking against each other, but only, it seems, when I turn my head, when I am not looking directly, but as Dickinson said, looking aslant.
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The moon is dark today, as is the sky. It has been raining all day, so much so that even while it was light, going down the narrow walk between houses to get my laundry, I could have used a flashlight to avoid tripping over that *!*&#$ lip of concrete.

I’ve been in my head all day, writing a little essay on Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument and why it isn’t really a problem for physicalism. This may make absolutely no sense to you, but it is what I’ve been doing all day. Next it’s an edit on an essay on Greek god origin myths and their reference to specific body parts and what said references say about the polis-mind of the people. After that, if there is time before I need to sleep, a novel by Louis Owens called Nightland.

I went in to my office to get the first draft of the Jackson essay down. I’ve been struggling with it all week and found that all the home distractions (dishes to do, laundry, cats to pet, dogs to walk, plants to water and kitchen-floor-ground-in-dirt to eradicate by toothpick) irresistible in the face of Mary the supreme colour scientist. So I gathered my materials, drove downtown and sat in my empty office. It helped, because five hours later I had a draft.

It was really dark there. My office is high in a tower and we have acres of window glass but the world just didn’t light up today.

Part of my reaction to the day is because I know it is dark moon. There is something about that, especially now we are past Halloween, that makes me think of dark dreams I have had in the past, and once that happens the dreams are back, slipping under me like a sheet tumbled in a dryer with mugwort. There’s a sense of the dream as ever-there, even though you know it isn’t, or that’s is so long gone that it no longer signifies; nevertheless, it does linger, like it’s a vague smell, or an occasional prickle, like a tiny dried stem that pokes you in the waist when you turn to move your nose out of odor’s reach.

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