The Concept of Dreaming

WHERE does the concept of dreaming come from? We are strongly inclined to think of dreaming as an inward state or process of the soul, and to suppose that each of us arrives at the concept of dreaming through taking note of the process in himself. But this idea gives rise to insoluble problems. For one thing, how could it be determined that the inner states of different people were the same and, therefore, that they meant the same thing by the word ‘dreaming?’ Even more serious, how could one know that the inner state one calls ‘dreaming’ is the same in oneself each time? Perhaps there is not enough regularity in one’s application of the sound ‘dreaming’ for it to even qualify as a world! An appeal to one’s own memory impression of its being the same state each time would be useless, because there would be no possibility of one’s determining whether this impression was true or false. I am applying to dreaming the points made by Wittgenstein in his attack on the notion that one learns what thinking, remembering, mental images, sensations, and so on, are from ‘one’s own case’. ¹