Matthew Spellberg writes:

Among certain philosophers it is a commonplace that dreams are radically private, that no one can follow you into them. A fragment from Heraclitus distills the problem: “The universe for those who are awake is single and common, while in sleep each person turns aside into a private universe.” Hegel, commenting on this same fragment, says that “the dream is a knowledge of something of which I alone know.” Consider how you might teach a child to understand the meaning of the word “dream.” You cannot point anywhere and say, “That’s a dream.” Nor can you say at any moment to the child, “Look, I’m dreaming,” and be doing it.

The science of dreams—first psychoanalysis, and then neuroscience—has inherited this frame of reference. In 1900, Freud writes that dreams are “completely asocial.” A hundred years later, Yuval Nir and Giulio Tononi, two leaders in contemporary brain research, write that “dreams … show that the human brain, disconnected from the environment, can generate an entire world of conscious experiences by itself.” Here, dreams are, by definition, that whole nocturnal life you cannot share, that second life as Nerval wrote, with its unexpected villains and lovers, its indescribable moonscapes, its fantastical concatenations of memory, its unfathomable vehicles and dungeons, its transports of flight, and its corporeal crises when the limbs turn stiff and the monster is upon you. Dreams mean disconnection and disengagement from the framework of this our shared world, and immersion in them is so strange, so sorrowful, so disorienting, sometimes so very shameful, that we can barely coax them into the light even should we want to.

And yet, despite this vision of dreams as paradigmatically distant, many of the world’s cultures—especially outside of the modern West—have developed elaborate protocols by which dreams can be shared. The complexity of these protocols is confirmation, in one sense, of the claim that dreams are especially private, even more so than other forms of thinking. A society must work very hard indeed to make them sharable; they must be wrestled into this life from that nighttime one. But these protocols are also somehow a rebuke to the philosophers’ skepticism: people build their own universes in dreams, except, as we’ll see, they then go to great lengths to reconstruct and combine them into a shared one while awake. This seems to raise at least two questions. Why go to such great lengths to share dreams? And what happens to a culture, like our own, that doesn’t practice dream sharing, that (a few isolated realms aside, perhaps the most important being psychoanalysis) has largely given up on it? [Continue reading…]