ABSTRACT
Bewusstseinslagen often occur very richly in dreams, where the rapid change of scene forestalls their expansion into words or pictures. Bewusstseinslagen are, of course, a notion constantly mirrored in unreflective talk-we are constantly talking of experiences which condense this or that 'as in a nutshell' or of the 'indefinable suggestiveness' of this or that object, place or passage - hut they represent a notion to which philosophers have perpetually had recourse. This is involved in the Platonic and the Aristotelian accounts of thinking, in which the stuff of sense or imagery may help, but cannot constitute the act of thought. The notion of illusion could, in fact, have none but an indirect or transferred application to the data of the inner life. Nor can we condemn talk in terms of Bewusstseinslagen on the score that it would be absurd or self-contradictory to speak of other objects as we speak about our inner states.
