Dreams and evidence

1. Introduction

Nicolas Berdyaev has a glorious footnote, "This was once revealed to me in a dream". What was revealed was that "The ego has been a fatality both for the human self and for God" (Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human, page 7). Berdyaev claims to have learnt in a dream something about human and divine reality.

Can we make sense of this mode of revelation, outside the religious context in which there are dreams aplenty (for example in the Bible, and particularly in Genesis)? Can we see how dreams could disclose things about the reality they are ostensibly about, as distinct from disclosing things about the dreamer's character or desires? If Berdyaev's footnote is to stand, it must be possible for dreams to do more than give mere hints as to the nature of reality, hints that could inspire thought on waking, and do more than show us the nature of reality without our having justification for believing that the revelations were correct. Rather, we are interested in the contents of dreams being themselves evidence, perhaps defeasible but evidence nonetheless, as to the nature of reality. The evidence must carry weight in its own right. And it must be such as would be evidence for any human being, not just for the dreamer.

We shall not limit ourselves to dreams. We shall broaden out to include the creative narratives of myths and fiction. (We shall use "fiction" to cover novels, theatre and the like, that is, any imaginary narrative that has not been elevated to the status of a myth that is independent of particular recountings of it.) The narratives of dreams are themselves a form of creative narrative. They are undisciplined and unedited, but then one can imagine publishing fiction of the same nature, even though stream-of-consciousness fiction that is actually published usually has been edited.

A distinguishing feature of dreams, myths and fiction is that their contents are only very loosely disciplined by empirical evidence. The contents may well concern real people, places and events, and they may include factually correct statements. But that is not forced upon the contents. At most, the contents must sufficiently reflect the general nature of the world and people to be intelligible. There need to be objects in physical space and time. Laws of nature must largely be obeyed, but even that constraint can be loosened so long as the violations are superficially intelligible, for example a feather outweighing a stone when they are at opposite ends of a seesaw. And characters must have intelligible psyches, but need not live like actual people. So it is not at all obvious that the contents of dreams, myths and fiction might provide evidence as to the nature of reality.

There are different aspects of reality about which we might aspire to obtain evidence. We shall look first at the physical aspect, the province of the natural sciences, and then at the humanistic aspect, the province of the humanities.

We do not here discuss the social sciences. In the context of our enquiry some parts of them, particularly the more data-driven parts of economics, would have much in common with the natural sciences, while other parts would have much in common with the humanities. In relation to our question about evidence, it is most straightforward to consider the extremes we have chosen. But intermediate cases would also be worth considering.

2. The physical aspect of reality

2.1 What is covered

The physical aspect of reality is the aspect studied in the natural sciences. There is no precise boundary to be drawn, but one good guide is that conclusions and the justifications for believing them would make sense to a Martian just as much as to a human being. That is, human experience of life is not needed. We may draw a contrast with, for example, the study of history beyond mere chronology, or of literature, in which a Martian would not follow what was being said. (For the language in which accounts from the human point of view are given, the human idiom, see Baron, Confidence in Claims, section 2.2.)

Dreams, myths and fiction are not going to supply useful evidence as to the nature of the physical aspect of reality, for two reasons. The first is the nature of the work that is needed to learn about the world. The second is a lack of satisfactory connections from the state of reality to the evidence generated.

2.2 The nature of the work that is needed

We know that what works in the natural sciences is careful formulation of hypotheses and experimental protocols, conduct of the experiments, analysis of the results, and criticism by others. None of this happens in dreams, myths or fiction, although it may be represented.

In dreams, we cannot even expect a decent representation of scientific procedure. Dreams do not have the stability that would be needed. Thoughts come and go, apparent situations change without notice, and single sentences that are being thought can unravel half way through. Moreover, lack of stability is not merely an obstacle to representation of the testing of hypotheses. It is also an obstacle to dreams' having any reliable role in the context of discovery, when hypotheses are first formulated in response to a recognition of gaps in knowledge or difficulties with which data confront us. In principle that task might actually be carried out in dreams, and not merely represented. But even that process needs to be disciplined, with flashes of insight being held precisely and set in a stable intellectual context, if it is to have much hope of yielding useful results. There are examples of useful inspiration coming out of dreams, but even then, what emerges is at the time of emergence far from supporting justified beliefs as to which hypotheses it would be reasonable to work up and investigate.

Things are not quite so bad with myths or fiction, but there is still too much flexibility. Proper experimental procedures can be narrated, but that is optional. Even when they are narrated, details that are critical in real scientific research will be omitted. And supposed results, being driven not by actual experiments but by the preferences of authors, can be changed to fit the narrative. Turning to the context of discovery, readers of myths and fiction may find that ideas come to them, but such reading still does not support justified beliefs as to which hypotheses it would be reasonable to work up and investigate.

2.3 The lack of satisfactory connections

For evidence to be worth anything in support of a given conclusion, it needs to arise out of the reality about which it is supposed to be evidence. More strongly, there needs to be a connection such that if the reality had been different in a way that would have invalidated the conclusion drawn from the evidence, the evidence would very likely also have been different in a way that would have meant the conclusion would not have been drawn. This is an application of Robert Nozick's tracking test (Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, chapter 3, section 1), with the words "very likely" adding an allowance for the fact that evidence can be worth considering even if evidence of its type sometimes misleads. The success of the tracking test in moving us toward an entirely satisfactory definition of knowledge is disputed, but violation of it in relation to evidence that purported to tell us about the nature of the physical world would certainly devalue the evidence.

Moreover, when it comes to the physical aspect of reality, we expect the connection to be causal. We understand how the nature of reality causes instruments to show certain readings.

Once we recognise the need for causal connections, we can easily demote dreams, myths and fiction as evidence. There is no known reliable causal connection from the state of reality in its physical aspect to the contents of dreams, myths or fiction. Dreams are notorious for including events that clearly break the practical constraints of the everyday world, for example when we dream that we are flying (without an aircraft) or that we are in a city a moment after we were in another distant city. Myths and fiction are also at liberty to deviate in their narratives from the limits on what would be likely to happen, or has happened, in the real world. If any of dreams, myths and fiction do appear to supply evidence as to events in the real world, the claims made must be backed up by evidence from other sources that is connected to reality in a way that would pass the tracking test. That evidence will immediately render redundant the dreams, myths or fiction.

3. The humanistic aspect of reality

3.1 What is covered

We shall now consider whether the contents of dreams, myths and fiction could be evidence as to the nature of reality in its humanistic aspect.

We include in the humanistic aspect of reality conclusions about the world that do not have the property characteristic of conclusions in the natural sciences that they and their justifications would be comprehensible without the benefit of a human experience of life. The conclusions that historians reach that make sense of the actions of individuals, that make sense of specific creations in the arts and sciences, or that make sense of large-scale political, social or economic changes, are prime examples of conclusions about the humanistic aspect of reality. And we shall concentrate on these historical conclusions. That focus will not be too narrow, given that history includes history of art, history of thought, history of literature, and so on. We shall also speak of accounts that make sense rather than explanations, recognising the force of the tradition that makes Verstehen the business of the humanities and Erklären the business of the natural sciences.

3.2 Specific events, creations and developments

If the contents of dreams, myths and fiction are to provide evidence as to the humanistic aspect of reality, there must be a connection from how things were, and in the case of history specifically how things were for people at the relevant time, to the contents of the dreams, myths or fiction, such that those contents could be reliable evidence for conclusions as to how things were for people, and those conclusions could in turn generate accounts that would make sense of what happened in a humanistic way. (We focus on seeing how things were for people, rather than how things were in general, because that is what is needed to make sense in a humanistic way.)

It is most unlikely that there would be any reliable connection that would allow dreams, myths or fiction to be dependable guides to how one should make sense of specific events, creations or developments by virtue of contents that directly concerned those things.

There might be successes, but if one were to take the contents of dreams. myths and fiction as evidence, one would often be led astray. We say this because it is a feature of dreams, myths and fiction that they can manipulate the details of actual events, creations or developments, and the attitudes of the people who were there at the time, so as to allow easy ways to make sense that rely on those manipulations in order to succeed. So one would be unlikely to formulate the relevant slice of the past with the accuracy needed to give much prospect of homing in on an account that would make sense of specific events, creations or developments in a way that would stand up to academic criticism.

3.3 The nature of human life

There is something else of which the contents of dreams, myths and fiction might provide evidence. This is the nature of human life as experienced from the inside, a grasp of which permits adoption of the human point of view that is needed in the humanities but not in the natural sciences. An understanding of the nature of human life as experienced from the inside can then be used in the study of history to make sense of actual events, creations and developments.

The proposal is that in dreams, myths and fiction we range over emotions, situations and actions in a very free way, exploring some of the scope and limits of the human psyche. Even in dreams, where we find ourselves in bizarre situations and we have to cope with bizarre behaviour from other characters, our choices and reactions still correspond to the choices and reactions we would have expected of ourselves in the waking world if it were as odd an environment as the dream world.

In this way we might get a more explicit grasp than hitherto of the human condition, of what it was like to be a human being. Then we could use such a grasp in giving some historical accounts. Even if we could not make principles explicit, the experience in dreams of free interaction with characters whose conduct was largely not under our conscious control might improve our implicit grasp of the human condition, something that could be just as useful in understanding the course of events.

Something similar could be said of myths and fiction, although what characters do is under the control of authors other than ourselves and our encounters with the characters are not two-way: they do not respond to what we think or do. Myths and fiction explore the space of human possibilities, unconstrained by the details of actuality. They can take us further in exploring the human condition than we would go by looking only at the facts. And they can focus on specific aspects of human life, putting them in high relief, while in a study of the real world it is hard to distentangle specific aspects or justifiably to give them particular emphasis that disregards the messy and complex context.

We may draw a parallel with the work of Daniel Hutto. He has argued that the process of understanding other people is centrally a matter of narrative practice (Hutto, "Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation"). Having learnt this practice by listening to stories in childhood, we enter into the practice ourselves. It is a way of working which tends to generate accounts that we find satisfactory. They satisfy because the practice is one of giving accounts that would if analysed be found to respect the principles of folk psychology. (We explore these and related ideas in Baron, Epistemic Respectability in History, section 2.1.1.)

Another advantage over actuality of all of dreams, myths and fiction is that in them, the inner mentalities of characters, their thoughts and motives, can be made explicit. This may allow us to derive explicit principles to apply in the study of history. Historical records, by contrast, do not often make inner mentalities visible, the exceptions being diaries and private letters. (Public speeches, especially political ones, are highly unreliable guides to inner mentalities.)

The historian should not often conclude that actual people did think in certain ways. Evidence for such conclusions would usually be lacking. But the historian can at least say that the actions of people are intelligible because there are ways, common to more than a small proportion of humanity, in which they might well have thought.

3.4 Counting as evidence

Whether dreams, myths or fiction were involved, and whether the grasp of the human condition were explicit or implicit, the dreams, myths or fiction would count as providing evidence for the nature of the human condition because it would be on the basis of the experience of dreaming or reading that one would come to have an improved grasp, and because to the extent that one were challenged on the reliability of lessons learnt from such sources, one could point to the reasons for thinking them reliable that we shall cover in this section.

3.4.1 Products of the psyche

Dreams, myths and fiction are generated by human psyches. So they are not likely to be fundamentally misleading about the nature of the human psyche, at least not in educating us in the principles that are needed to make sense of human affairs to human beings. 

The words "to human beings" are important here. The goal is a humanistic understanding of human affairs, the sort of thing that would not be intelligible from the detached scientific viewpoint that could be taken up both by us and by Martians. That which was generated by the human psyche could easily be massively misleading if the goal were scientific explanation of the workings of the mind. But even the usefulness of the human psyche in pursuing a humanistic understanding does not imply immunity to error. There is no claim to perfect authority, on the lines of any supposed first-person authority as to one's own beliefs or sensations.

The words "make sense of human affairs to human beings" may raise a suspicion of circularity. The suspicion would be justified if the objective of the humanities were to make sense of human affairs to all rational beings, including our friends the Martians. But that is not the aim. We aim only to give accounts that make sense of human affairs to beings who know the human condition from the inside. Accounts are not unconstrained. They must have epistemic respectability (see Baron, Epistemic Respectability in History). But such a constraint can be imposed by asking whether accounts make sense to us.

Myths and fiction do have an advantage over dreams. Dreams are personal to the dreamer. But myths and fiction must satisfy a wide range of readers. And they will only do so if the characters are ones with whom readers can identify. This means that their states of mind and their choices must be in line with human nature in general, not merely in line with the idiosyncratic nature of a dreamer.

Myths have a good prospect of being the better source of information about the human condition. This is because there has been a process of natural selection. It is the stories that resonate with us, despite our being well aware that there are no gods or dragons, that have survived. They have to resonate very strongly in order to overcome the hurdle set by literal implausibility. And we can say this without having to assume archetypes in a collective unconscious along the lines proposed by Carl Gustav Jung, although we are not debarred from assuming them.

Works of fiction, on the other hand, may survive without having to overcome the hurdle of speaking of the manifestly implausible, but only the hurdle of speaking of people who are known not to have existed but who might well have existed, and events that are known not to have occurred but that might well have occurred. That is a much lower hurdle. A work of fiction does not have to resonate so strongly as a myth when its acceptability can gain additional support from its realism.

3.4.2 Tracking and reliability

We must now ask the question posed by Robert Nozick's tracking test. If the human condition had been different, would dreams. myths and fiction have provided different evidence? We may say probably, because the nature of dreams, myths and fiction is likely to be heavily influenced by the nature of the human brain, and that nature would have had to be different for the human condition as it plays a role in the course of events to have been different. This is speculative, but it is the best we can do.

Even if the tracking test is passed, we must ask about the reliability of any evidence that dreams, myths and fiction may supply about the human condition. Here we can at least say that the inner appreciation of people, the mechanisms of creating stories, and so on, are likely to be the same ones when dreaming, when creating myths and fiction during waking hours, and when making sense of actual human conduct. If we seek to grasp why someone reacted in the way he or she did in given circumstances, we are likely to weave a tale about him or her along the same lines as we would unconsciously in a dream or consciously when creating myths or fiction. It may not be the kind of tale a psychologist would weave, but that would not matter. In humanistic disciplines, we do not seek explanations in scientific terms but accounts that make sense of humanity to other human beings. And that, the need for an account that will speak to human readers, means that much is to be gained from being influenced in the writing of accounts by the structure of human mind and the structure of human experience as viewed from the inside.

3.5 Two issues

Two issues arise.

The first issue is that the people involved in events to be understood may have been substantially different in their human condition from people today. That is so, and we may very well need to pay attention to evidence as to differences, evidence that might for example be found in personal letters. But at least the most likely kind of difference is that certain considerations, such as religion or hierarchy, played greater roles in the past than they do today. That is, externally definable differences would matter most. A change in the ways in which the mind worked in general would be less likely to be significant, simply because such changes would be likely to take a very long time. And it is this way the mind works in general that is explored in dreams, myths and fiction.

The second issue is that the dreamer, or the reader of myths or fiction, will work from within his or her own psyche. There is a risk that the understanding obtained will not be of the human condition generally, but of the condition of the individual concerned who has the dream or who, although reading the words of others, unconsciously finds a way to read myths or fiction in a way that will resonate with his or her own psyche. This is indeed a risk, especially if one relies solely on one's own dreams or on works by a single author. But at least the risk could be reduced by reading works by many authors. Some of the works would then not be amenable to the particular idiosyncratic readings that happened to suit a given psyche. Any work might be amenable to some idiosyncratic reading or other, but for a given reader, some works would not be amenable to his or her quirks.

3.6 Understanding historical figures

Dreams, along with myths and fiction, may help us to grasp humanity's mental space, a space wider than that which we inhabit in our own waking lives, in the sort of way that is likely to be necessary for us to stand in the shoes of historical figures.

There is debate about the value of standing in the shoes of historical figures. R. G. Collingwood was a proponent of mental re-enactment (Collingwood, The Idea of History; Dray, History as Re-Enactment). Max Weber did not think it necessary to be in one's mind a historical character, but did recognise the benefit of being able to empathise with emotions relevant to the lives of people being studied (Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, part 1, chapter 1, section 1, paragraphs 2 and 3). Experiments in one's own mind, carried out involuntarily in dreams and voluntarily when reading myths and fiction, should help to develop such empathy, particularly when the emotions need to be stretched beyond what one experiences in modern, safe and peaceful life. One may for example get inside the heads of people, both virtuous and vicious, caught up in the French Revolution by reading Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities.

4. Conclusion

If dreams (and myths and fiction) can be evidence as to the human condition in the way suggested in this post, we can read in that light this line from the closing passage of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (with Fridolin as the speaker):

"Und kein Traum", seufzte er leise, "ist völlig Traum."

Schnitzler may have had disclosure of the psyche of the dreamer in mind. But we might equally say that no dream is entirely a dream, in the sense that it is also about the human condition generally, a vital if often only tacitly assumed part of human reality.

References

Baron, Richard. Confidence in Claims. CreateSpace, 2015. https://rbphilo.com/confidence.html

Baron, Richard. Epistemic Respectability in History. Amazon, 2019. https://rbphilo.com/history.html

Berdyaev, Nicolas. The Divine and the Human, translated by R M French. London, Geoffrey Bles, 1949.

Collingwood, Robin G. The Idea of History, Revised Edition with Lectures 1926-1928, edited with an introduction by Jan van der Dussen. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. (Many editions are available.)

Dray, Wiliam H. History As Re-Enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995.

Hutto, Daniel D. "Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation". Chapter 7 of Daniel D. Hutto and Matthew Ratcliffe (eds.), Folk Psychology Re-Assessed. Dordrecht, Springer, 2007.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5558-4_7

Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press, 1981.

Schnitzler, Arthur. Traumnovelle. Berlin, S. Fischer, 1926.

Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1922. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft has been translated as Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1978. The book went through various editions, with text being moved around, but this does not affect the location of the material to which we have referred.