Sometime in the early 1930s, the Franco-German philosopher Jean Héring was walking along with friends when he suddenly realized that “they” were all dreaming. He tried to convince his friends that it was all a dream and they did not exist, but he encountered resistance: “We are just as convinced as you are that we exist; why should you be the only one with this right?” Hering’s persistent attempts to convince his friends of their non-existence were in vain, so eventually he had to choice but to act out his “final triumph” – to wake up in bed and thereby force his friends to retreat into nothingness.
Hering told this story in a letter to another famous philosopher Husserl, who replied that Hering had misunderstood his dream. The dreaming ego does not know that it is sleeping, but is a participant in the dialogue while perceiving itself as part of the dream world, not the real one. That is why it is impossible to convince your friends of anything in the dream.
A modern researcher from Hong Kong, Saulius Geniusas, expanded this discussion to the topic of lucid dreams (LD). The author identifies two variants of “self” in a dream: the “dreamed ego” and the “dreaming ego.” The first option appears in an ordinary unconscious dream, while the second occurs within LDs. In such a situation, the dreamer is aware of both the sleeping self and the dream world.
Consciousness in an ordinary dream is incapacitated, that is it is completely captivated by the dream scenario. In a LD, on the other hand, the dreamer knows that the surrounding space is not real, but continues to act within it. At the same time, stimuli from the real world (such as sounds, movements of the physical body, etc.) are included in the dream scenario and interpreted according to the dream world. As soon as consciousness shifts focus and switches attention to the physical body, it goes from dream to reality. The Dutch writer Frederik van Eeden called this process “the feeling of slipping from one body into another.”
What would you consider Hering’s dream to be?
The article was published in January 2022 in the journal Husserl Studies.
