Introduction: consciousness as temporal synthesis
Dictionaries show that the word ‘consciousness’ originates from the Latin term con-scientia, which means ‘to know together’. In our culture, being conscious implies having a joint understanding by combining various fragments of knowledge into a unified whole. This concept of consciousness is closely related to its ability to synthesize, meaning the capacity to bring together different elements of perception and cognition into a cohesive picture. This idea is supported by the notion that ‘consciousness’ and ‘synthesis’ are essentially two ways of describing the same process: the act of combining or composing the components of a perception or thought 2. The ability of consciousness to unite is also tied to its capacity for comprehension. The word ‘comprehend’ shares a similar etymology, as it stems from the Latin cum- (meaning ‘together’) and prehendere (meaning ‘take’ or ‘grasp’). Comprehendere carries a rich etymological significance, suggesting the act of grasping together the things that are in front of us to achieve a complete understanding. When we only focus on the details of a situation without perceiving its entirety, we fail to grasp its meaning. If our perception remains fragmented, with disconnected details that do not fit together, what we see becomes incomprehensible. Therefore, consciousness (con-scientia) involves the process of bringing together a multitude of details, organized according to a logical framework, in order to comprehend the overall significance of which they are a part (cumprehendere).
The phenomenological concept of ‘temporal synthesis’ 3 explores how consciousness has the remarkable ability to synthesize elements that are experienced in succession, rather than simultaneously. It is through this synthesis that our ‘living experience’ is formed, as independent elements enter into relationships with one another. Temporal synthesis plays a crucial role in this process by retaining the past within the present and anticipating the future, creating a sense of expectation beyond the present moment. A familiar example of this is our perception of a melody, where individual notes, though perceived as separate, are synthesized by consciousness into a cohesive sequence. This ability to synthesize sequential elements into coherent experiences demonstrates the dynamic nature of consciousness and its role in shaping our understanding of the world.
There are two forms of temporal synthesis. The first is the one consists in the spontaneous and pre-reflective capacity to unite a series of details. This function works at the pre-conscious level, that is, we are not aware of its functioning. Moreover, this function is involuntary, that is, it functions independently of our willingness to synthesize details into a whole. The second form of synthesis is reflective, and mostly voluntary. It comes into play when we try to piece together a series of details whose organization and overall meaning prima facie elude us. This experience of oneself established through self-reflection is called narrative self – an ongoing process during which I establish more or less coherent formulations about who I am, who I was, and who I will be 4. Narration is a kind of active temporal synthesis which organizes autobiographical memory, endowing it with a temporal structure and purpose 5. Its product – the narrative self – culminates in ‘narrative identity’ – the result of the continuous and endless reflective work of narrating one’s own story and arranging one’s experiences and actions in a meaningful order. Self-narratives help one make sense of and explain one’s actions and experiences as chronologically ordered.
Passive and active syntheses are the basis of our way of being conscious – at least as far as the waking state is concerned. Their purpose seems to give coherence and continuity to our experience. Coherence in the sense of putting the parts that occur simultaneously together in a whole – this, as they say, allows one to see the forest and not individual trees. Continuity in the sense of joining the parts that arise later in time – this, as we saw in the previous example, allows one to listen to a melody and not just hear notes disjointed from each other. This applies not only to perception but also to thought. Thanks to the synthetic function of consciousness, I recognize my thought as a mostly continuous and coherent flow and not as a mixture of ideas, words or disordered images.
Divergent forms of temporality and of consciousness
What happens when the synthetic function of consciousness is interrupted is known to students of Psychopathology. Ricoeur, among many others, argues that in the pathogenesis of what he calls mental ‘disease’ a key role is played by a disorder of active synthesis that he calls de-narrativisation. Symptoms, from this angle, appear as fragments, as isolated individual passages of an account, not connected in a coherent narrative 6. Plots (récits) are privileged means by which we reconfigure our otherwise unformed experiences.
It can be argued that the supposed identification of ‘mental symptoms’ or ‘diseases’ can be understood as being made on the basis of a specific conception of consciousness 7, thus of temporality. In this framework, any ‘deviation’ from standard consciousness and standard time synthesis can be seen as a possible index of mental disease and conceptualized in terms of a ‘deficiency’ or a ‘lack’. Especially if we adopt a narrow definition of consciousness as a synthesis of individual experiences, then all those ways of experiencing reality or oneself that lack coherence and continuity can be diagnosed as abnormal. But if we agree to use the word ‘consciousness’ in a broader sense – that is, as a way to be aware of the world and of oneself – we must admit that there are different forms of consciousness and that deviations from ‘standard’ consciousness are not pathological per se.
A number of conditions deemed pathological in our culture are characterized by peculiar forms of temporality, supposedly attributable to anomalies of passive or active synthesis. For instance, the lessening or absence of logical connections in thought and perception are deemed psychopathological symptoms – ‘logics’ is another word derived from the Greek leghein, meaning to collect, put together. Flight of ideas 8 is an example of that, including e.g. loose associations (thoughts are loosely connected) and tangentiality (jumping from one topic to another without clear transitions). Anomalies of associations of thoughts are present in several divergent forms of consciousness, diagnosed as psychopathological disorders (including schizophrenia, mania and organic psychoses). Also, not only logical connections between thoughts seems to be affected in psychopathological conditions, but also fragmentation of perception is quintessential, for example in early schizophrenia 9,10.
Different forms of consciousness correspond to different forms of temporality. Thus, there are schizophrenic, borderline, depressive, etc. forms of consciousness, with their own specific characteristics – as established by empirical research in clinical phenomenology. In people diagnosed as affected by schizophrenia time experience is fragmented supposedly due an impairment of passive synthesis of primal impression-retention-protention. This entails disruption in the experience of time flowing, déjà vu/vecu and premonitions about oneself and the external world 11. In people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder time is experienced as an absolute ‘now’ and characterized by orgiastic explosions of ecstasy during which identity and history collapse; the present is inconsistent but also extremely intense, and life may feel like a chaos of apparently unrelated experiences 12. These phenomena are considered anomalies of active synthesis, that is of the fabric of narrative identity 13. In persons with a diagnosis of major depression there is no disarticulation of time experience, rather an anomaly of conation implying the feeling of a stagnation of self-becoming and of vital processes in general, the experience of present and future dominated by the past and of the slackening of the flow of time 14.
Alongside these anomalous time experiences that we find in psychopathological conditions, there are also peculiar forms of temporality in non-psychopathological states, such as dreams, or meditative states, or when we listen to music. I will focus in particular on those dream phenomena in which anomalies of temporal synthesis can be recognised. I explore two peculiar phenomena in dream consciousness, which I will call ‘rhapsody’ and ‘condensation’, from the angle that sees in them fundamentally a modification of the basic structures of temporality – a rebellious temporality, and more in particular an effect of the total or partial suspension of temporal synthesis.
I will first provide some examples found in the phenomenological literature of conceptualizations of the dream from the perspective of the alterations of temporality present in the dream itself. For my part, I will try to show how the alteration of the synthetic function of consciousness is at the origin of a remarkable phenomenon in the dream: the appearance of single images or scenes detached from the overall narrative of the dream. If we think that the dream tells a story (which in any case remains to be verified), these images are instead interpolated fragments in this story without connection or continuity with the story itself. Without claiming that this phenomenon is the essential characteristic of dream consciousness, and that it is present in all dreams and in each part of every dream, I will give it all the importance it deserves. I will therefore follow the hypothesis that these disjointed details with respect to an overall continuity and coherence represent forms of ‘accidental knowledge’ 15. By this I mean that such details can be an authoritative source of self-knowledge, if properly considered, precisely because they are dissonant with that form of self-knowledge that respects the canon and rules of a continuous and coherent self-narrative.
My hypothesis can also be formulated as follows: in the dream, our waking consciousness – devoted to giving coherence and continuity to our experience and to the stories we tell about ourselves and the world – falls asleep. Waking consciousness sacrifices on the altar of coherence and continuity a series of details that can resurface in the dream when waking consciousness turns off. Such ‘details’ or ‘fragments’ can provide the dreamer with elements usually bypassed by waking consciousness. These fragments, also for this reason, are particularly relevant for the dreamer to assume a more articulated or more complete perspective on oneself, or even simply a perspective dissonant with respect to the dominant narrative.
Dream consciousness as rebellious temporality
Dreams are a depiction of a basic state of consciousness: the dream state is a state of captivated consciousness where we feel immersed in the dream world 16.
It is immediately evident that, in the dream world, our sense of self can be radically different from the one of waking consciousness. This not only because aspects of ourselves may emerge that are dissonant with the way we usually feel and represent ourselves. But also, in a more radical sense, since, for instance, reflective self-awareness, volition and directedness of thinking can be weakened 17.
I will focus on the following issue: while dreaming, our consciousness does not always make something sequential out of something multiple, as it is usually the case when we are in a state of waking consciousness. In dreams, we may experience striking discrepancies and discontinuities. An experience, as strange as it is meaningful, is that dreams may consist in a rhapsody of apparently unrelated images or scenes. Although dreams can be structured as stories – with a beginning, a relatively consistent course of events, and an epilogue – they not infrequently surprise us with an event, a character, an image, a detail or a scene that falls outside the synthetic totality of the dream itself and presents itself as a real anomaly, questioning us with its own incoherence to the rest of the narrative. Later, I will argue that dreams are quasi-narratives, and look for the conditions of possibility of this.
These are the research questions I will try to answer: are the non-sequiturs we may find in dreams logical errors, or do they express a kind of logic which can be identified if we focus on the temporality of dream consciousness? Is the dream world constituted by a specific temporality which determine a specific way of experiencing oneself and the world? Is dream consciousness characterised by a rebellious temporality and, therefore, by a divergent form of subjectivity?
I will begin with summarising some basic contributions from classic phenomenological studies.
The world of dreams
Binswanger 18 and Boss 19 are credited with founding the phenomenology of dreams. Their principal contribution has been redefining dream as a special form of existence, a special way of being-in-the-world – the oneiric being-in-the-world.
Each dream is a world and the dream world in general has its own characteristics different from those of ‘waking’ worlds. The worlds experienced in dreams do not need to be ‘interpreted’ in a psychoanalytic sense, revealing their hidden meaning beyond their strictly manifest content. Rather, they should first and foremost be ‘unfolded’ or ‘explicated’, thus reconstructing the structures of the being-in-the-world they depict, including temporality and spatiality 19.
The phenomenology of dream consciousness tries to answer the following question: How does the dreamer in fact experience the world in which she or he is immersed while dreaming, i.e. time, space, self, the objects and the persons of their dream environment?
We must allow for the possibility that the anomalies in time and space that we observe in dreams do not merely constitute a breaking down of time and space as we experience them in waking consciousness, but manifest a quite different sense of time and space, possibly hidden in daily life 19. If we subscribe to the epistemic equality of the varieties of temporal experience, we advocate the idea that dream temporality is original and with its own ‘logic’ – although divergent from the logic that is at work in waking consciousness.
Binswanger 18 insists on the importance of movement in the dream. Dreams typically exhibit a movement of ascent or descent. In dreams, we are a rising or falling presence, a systole or a diastole, an expansion or a depression, a rising or a folding in on oneself. These movements – he argues – embody the knot of freedom and responsibility regarding one’s actions. Drawing on Sartre’s terminology, we can say that dreams are organized as a ‘hodological space’ 20 – from the Greek hodos, which means ‘way’ – a space of possible movements. This space involves so-called ‘preferred paths’: the dream-world is an environment populated by ‘vectors’ and ‘tensions’ of movements (I am flying, I am falling, etc.) in relation to one’s body.
Turning to temporality, Boss describes several peculiarities of time experience in dreams. Most of these peculiar modes of experiencing time concerns anomalies of conation, not of synthesis. Conation is the ‘energetic momentum’ of temporality 21 which can be expressed by concepts such as striving, urge, or élan. Through conation, we move toward the implicit range of possibilities spread out before us. For instance, in some dreams – which we may call ‘dreams of eternity’ – time is infinitely long. In them the dreamer does not experience long spans of time because something significant has happened, or because a great many future possibilities have emerged, but simply because time stands still.
For instance, poet S. T. Coleridge told of a dream in which he was kept prisoner for centuries in secret chambers. In other dreams, time is running fast and their temporality lead to rapidly shifting scenarios and continuously developing new histories. For instance, a woman who dreamt she went mountaineering reports that it became dark very soon, she fell asleep immediately, she woke up very early in the morning, and started to climb when her companions were still in bed, she quickly stood on a peak bathed in radiant sunshine, etc. 19.
Both Binswanger and Boss propose the idea that each dream carries a concealed ontological significance, rather than merely depicting specific worldly events, objects or individuals. While sleeping, we have withdrawn from the shared waking world in which we are responsible for the task of leading our lives under set conditions and in interaction with others 16. Dreams reveal a deeper concern into the nature of existence, which often eludes everyday consciousness 19. This existential concern takes precedence in dreams, unencumbered by the practical constraints of waking life. Consequently, the content of dreams may seem perplexing, nonsensical, or absurd to waking consciousness. Dreams shift the focus from the easily understandable surface meaning of things to their fundamental ontological significance, addressing basic questions of our being-in-the-world. Thus, the dream is an anthropological indication of transcendence. Dreams announce an enigma, an aporia or a truth about the world – making themselves a world, taking the form of light and fire, water and darkness 22.
According to Foucault, the dream in Binswanger’s reading has an ethical content. Not because it unveils unmentionable desires or repressed instincts, but because it restores the movement of freedom in its authentic sense, showing how freedom can be affirmed or alienated, and the way in which it is constituted as a radical responsibility for its own existence, or is allowed to fall into randomness. The dream is the bearer of profound human meanings, not insofar as it denounces hidden mechanisms and inhuman gears, but insofar as it highlights man’s most original freedom – and its distressing shadow, namely responsibility.
Binswanger insists that the dream world is not a shared world, but a peculiar world that he describes as an idios kosmos (‘own world’). Idios kosmos does not simply mean ‘private world’, i.e. separate from the common world populated by other men. Instead, it means ‘world of one’s own’, the world in which one can recognize the face of one’s ‘own’ destiny, the original movement of their ‘own’ existence, and their ‘own’ freedom that can either fulfil itself or become alienated. The ‘own world’ represents the most individual dimension of each individual. The dream world is the most ‘personal’ form of consciousness one can experience. This solitary movement of original freedom and responsibility is likely what Binswanger, inspired by Heraclitus, meant with ‘idios kosmos’.
Temporal condensation
Merleau-Ponty also acknowledges that the dream is peculiar form of consciousness, emphasising the peculiarity of dream temporality: ‘Dreaming is not a temporally circumscribed act. It affects all times and does not involve this division’ 23, p. 271. The division alluded to by Merleau-Ponty which is absent in dreams is that between past, present and future.
Merleau-Ponty attributes three fundamental characteristics to the dream: dictatorship of figuration, condensation and impossibility of expression. The first relates to the fact that the dream is given by images – and this is evident to all. Certainly, dreamers do not only see images, but live in a flesh-and-blood world which appears real to them. What Merleau-Ponty means is that from the angle of waking consciousness dreams speak in images, rather than in concepts, or in words. In dreams, existence shows itself under the concrete and at the same time approximate and allusive species of the image, in the presence of something that it represents but at the same time always dodges.
The second characteristic, condensation, is the temporal matrix of dreams. Condensation is also one of the key mechanisms of dreaming according to Freud. In condensed images, dream-thoughts are often combined and amalgamated into a single element of the manifest dream; this is the way by which the repressed returns in hidden ways 24. Yet, Merleau-Ponty sees condensation from a quite different angle which entails a peculiar form of temporality.
In dreams, consciousness is not simply temporally discontinuous if compared to waking consciousness: ‘Dream consciousness does not reveal relationships such as: when, because, as well as, although, this or that. So is it in chaos?’ 23, p. 273. In dreams, we do not find a linear causality and temporality; and yet things do not happen by chance: we may sense, not without a feeling of discomfort, that there are multiple, although not explicit meaningful links among the different episodes.
What characterizes the peculiar form of temporality of dream consciousness is a kind of epochè of chronological time. The temporal structure of the dream is not organized in a chronological sequence, that is, according to a logic of temporal linear and causal succession of events from past, to present, and to future. A chronological order is the one in the course of which something happens at a given moment, then gives rise to something else as its consequence, etc. What happens before is the cause of happens after. In dreams, the course of events may take a different turn from what was expected according to linear/causal temporality.
Thus, the temporality of dreams is not diachronic, but is characterized by simultaneity – we are facing a synchronic intertwining of connections and meanings. The dream lies – and more precisely the images contained in dreams lie – in a unique time where things happen simultaneously because there are multiple connections among them 25.
This point is controversial. For instance, Sartre holds quite a different view. He proposes that many dreams are given as stories that one is reading or being told 26. Dreams are structured as narratives. Sartre’s insight is not that we recount and thus configure our dreams as narratives afterwards from the vantage point of awakening. He proposes a stronger claim that (the vast majority) of dreams are constituted and hence experienced directly as narratives 27.
It should be noted that both Merleau-Ponty and Sartre do not seem to help clarify a central point, namely that what we are talking about is not the dream itself, but the dream-narrative established by the person about her dream when she is awake. Dream-telling and dream-dreaming – as Freud himself and Ricoeur, 6 among others, point out – are not equivalent. Dreams are always filtered by the waking consciousness, which to a greater or lesser extent imposes its own logical – i.e., narrative – order on the dream-dreaming, i.e. on the dream itself. The first phenomenologist to become aware of the problem was perhaps Husserl’s former student Wilhelm Schapp: ‘Thus the dream story can be inextricably linked to a real story or, as we prefer to say, to a story in which we are involved while awake, so that only the two together make up the whole story’ 28, p. 152. Therefore, the logic of the dream and that of waking consciousness cannot be easily untangled.
Nevertheless, in dreams one encounters peculiar phenomena that seem to respond to a temporal logic other than narrative. Among these, condensation is a very relevant one. Condensation indicates, first of all, that in the dream events are subsumed in compressed images – they are not distributed in linear succession in a narrative. Merleau-Ponty calls these dream phenomena implexes – phenomena whose plot, composed of various elements, is complicated and needs explication.
He gives the example of a film character, Noel Coward: drowned, he reappears in his office, with a piece of seaweed in his hands, the concretion of his odyssey. Condensation – Noel Coward who reappears with seaweed in his hand – is the extreme abbreviation of a story, its extreme synthesis that skips all the intermediate steps which would appear in a narrative: being submerged by water, clinging to a rock in order not to sink into the abyss, desperately struggling against the currents, miraculously resurfacing, swimming to shore, lying exhausted and semi-conscious on the beach, returning to everyday life in a state of consciousness so astonished that he does not realise he is still holding a clump of seaweed torn from the rock that saved him. All this does not appear in a diachronic time sequence, but in a single image that subsumes – condenses – all these events that to waking consciousness would appear as separate, albeit related, scenes in succession.
Condensation – Merleau-Ponty argues – is the dream process itself, the very essence of the dream consciousness and of its peculiar temporality. Dreams – Merleau-Ponty concludes – are apparitions of concretions that ‘wallpaper’ our lives. The point he seemingly wants to make is that concretions are not present only in dreams, but in our everyday life – if we only would pay attention to them. In everyday life they are in front of us, but are pre-objective, in some meaning of this term they are ‘unconscious’. The word ‘implexe’ refers to these concretions. Explication requires the ability to see, clearly and accurately, what is presented – to apprehend what is actually there through an act of phenomenological vision which is not an interpretation 29.
To conclude: The reason why some dreams may appear temporally lacunar upon waking is not that some episodes of the dreams are repressed (as Freud would argue) – rather it is because the energy of condensation dominates in dreaming consciousness. It is the peculiar form of temporalization of the peculiar form of consciousness we call ‘dream consciousness’.
Impossibility of expression, the third characteristic of dream consciousness, seems to be the consequence of this: how can language articulate something which escapes logical connections (‘when’, ‘because’, ‘as well as’, ‘although’, etc.)? What dreams want to convey and can only find its ‘expression’ in condensed images.
Atemporality
Maria Zambrano argues that the investigation into the temporality of dreams reveals the multiplicity of timeframes in which man has always lived.
In dreams, she claims, time does not exist 30. Like Merleau-Ponty, she identifies in the dream an epochè of chronological time, i.e. a suspension of the flow of time articulated in past-present-future. The phenomenology of the dream shows a subject deprived of chronological time, immersed in an undifferentiated time. She uses poetic language to talk about dream consciousness and the corresponding form of subjectivation: the dreaming subjects lose themselves in the folds of life deprived of time, where only the throbbing of the bowels and the dark feelings that correspond to them pulsate. We may call this stratum of life organic life, characterized by impersonal biological functions, to contrast its being non-historical with personal life, characterized by personal becoming.
The essence of dream consciousness is atemporality. Dreaming is timeless intimacy, the ecstatic apparition of sheer life. Dreams do not illuminate a truth with the flash of lightning, but establish an intimacy with such truth through a slow immersion into the dimness of the pre-personal workings of our bodies. The temporality of dreams is different from that of waking consciousness and from a third type of temporality which she calls ‘time of the person’. The time of waking consciousness is the process of grasping and dissociating, binding and unbinding, opening and closing – all intentional movements. We could say that it is the temporality of the logos that separates time into past-present-future and then reunites it into a continuous flow. The temporality of the person is the integrating time, open indefinitely to novelty without decentralisation of the experiencing subject. The image that illustrates the person’s time is the spiral, in which the person ascends in circles around his or her centre, thus moving but without moving away from himself or herself, and in ascending along the spiral acquires an ever broader and more complete vision in which the ‘new’ and the ‘already-known’ are integrated.
Finally, according to Zambrano dreams are characterized by ambiguity. Ambiguity is tension without movement – the simultaneous presence of opposites without resolution. Thus, dream consciousness reveals the deep layer of life – its dialectical structure. Dream images condense a dialectics between opposites without movement. In them, the dialectical tension between the opposites is at its climax, logical thinking and its ability to establish distinctions comes to a halt and an image saturated with tension is allowed to emerge. Ambiguity is – Zambrano argues – a sign of the absence of time, of the arrest of the flux of time and of the lack of the necessity of becoming in time. Atemporality – the suspension of successive time – is a key feature of the phenomenology of dreams, especially of those characterized by astonishment. During these dreams, the arrest of the pragmatic drive of becoming implies the capacity to contemplate the ambiguities inherent in life. This makes it impossible for the dreamer to choose, to exercise their free will, as it happens in dreams where there is a threshold to overcome, but the attempted action always fails.
Atemporality, according to Zambrano, turns out to be beneficial for receptivity and for opening the mind 31 precisely because its divergent temporality is capable of showing us latent profiles of reality and of one’s own Self. Not repressed contents or processes, but rather implicit ones. The dream experience holds a content all the richer the more irreducible it is to the logical organisation, pragmatic purposes and psychological determinations in which one attempts to place it.
The suspension of the will to identity and the power of fragments
I will now develop the hypothesis that the dream phenomena that we named ‘rhapsody’ and ‘condensation’ are the effect of the suspension of a fundamental function at work implicitly and tacitly in human existence – the suspension of the ‘will to identity’.
My mentor into the exploration of this hypothesis is neither a clinician nor a philosopher or neuroscientist, but Guido Morselli (Bologna 1912 – Varese 1973), an Italian novelist and essayist active during the middle of the last century who developed an original conjecture about dream consciousness.
Without explicitly referring to phenomenology, Morselli argues that in waking consciousness the Self is created through bundling experiences together through acts of a psychic function. Very close to what we might identify with a fundamental life drive, he calls this psychic function ‘will’. Thanks to the ‘will’ our self-narratives are structured. The main objective of the ‘will’ is to establish and maintain the coherence of the self. In order to preserve self-coherence, the ‘will’ forbids access to phenomena that do not fit the dominant narrative. Experience is therefore impoverished 32.
Dreams, which allow a slipping of this ‘will’ to bundle phenomena together, offer a richer menu of potential experiences. This view is clearly in accordance with Binswanger’s and Zambrano’s ideas that dream consciousness is beneficial because it helps to become more intimate with phenomena which would otherwise remain in the shadow. But instead of focusing on organic or biological aspects of the self, or to deepest ontological layer of life as populated by insoluble dialectical tensions, it seems to address aspects related to life-history and personal identity.
Also, the switching off of Morselli’s ‘will to identity’ resonates with what Max Scheler in his late writings names the Dionysian reduction: the switching off of mind and intellect, whose main outcome is the experienced sense of the primacy of perception and the imaginal portrayal of the world drawn from the (Dionysian) forces of nature and life-drives. Life is experienced physiognomically (as if everything were a face), the artistic in the human is at the forefront and the predominant mode of experience is through expressive images 33, p. 402.
‘Will’ sensu Morselli should not necessarily be understood in its usual meaning of the function which in waking life adheres to the moral canons or social customs and forces us onto the track of a given behaviour. This would be the ‘willpower’ that prevents one from committing immoral acts and instead ensures we follow the straight path of an honest life. What is suspended in dreams is also, and above all, the ‘will’ that allows us to be a self and to assert ourselves as such – a will that imposes itself on one’s self.
‘Will’ is what gives continuity to our self, or rather that allows the insertion of our experiences into an organic temporal pattern. The very pattern of our existence as a person–- that is, being a self – consists in willing to be a self and to last as such. ‘Will’ keeps the episodes of a life together, ties them to one another in a chronologically ordered sequence according to its own conventional measure, imparts its own rhythm to the narrative, and strives to group the episodes so that they make sense of one another. In short, the ‘will’ that watches over our waking consciousness has the task of connecting the multiform flow of our immediate experiences so as to avoid fragmentariness, lacunae, disconnections.
Of course, we can see that ‘will’ has a function very similar to what phenomenologists call ‘temporal passive and active syntheses’ and Ricoeur ‘narrative’. In dreaming, ‘will’ – or temporal synthesis, the guardian of our continuity over time – is attenuated. We can see an analogy between Morselli’s ideas about dreams and the basic hypothesis held by Merleau-Ponty: in dream consciousness there is a change in the temporal framework of experience. What Morselli adds to this hypothesis is that what is weakened in dream consciousness is our ‘will to identity’ – remember that the word ‘identity’ derives from Latin idem which means ‘the same’. Especially in the sense of idem identity – remaining the same over time 34. This seems to be very relevant because it adds an explanation to the fact that many potential contents of experience remain out of view in waking consciousness: the reason is that ordinary daily consciousness can hardly tolerate anomalies in our experience of the world and ourselves, discrepancies in our self-narratives, or elements which are dissonant with respect to our dominant vision of the world and the story we tell about ourselves.
Morselli’s explicit philosophical reference is not the phenomenological account of temporality, but Henry Bergson’s concept of durée 35, understood through the literary work of Marcel Proust. He writes: ‘The foundation of psychic life, in wakefulness, is the inner succession (according to a rhythm that is anything but merely chronological), with which the subject identifies himself and which he prolongs and orders with an incessant effort, without allowing himself intervals or overlaps, welding every link of the chain, every instant to the preceding, because in this is its duration’ 32, p. 133.
‘Will’ is the implicit and involuntary function that binds each instant of one’s life to the previous and the next. In dream consciousness, time is other than that which ‘will’ in wakefulness builds up as our durée – and in doing so when we are awake makes our Self congruent, typical and recognizable by ourselves and by an external observer.
The succession of experiences in dreams is a new kind of flux that takes place ignoring the stable pattern within which a self identifies itself and is identified by other people. While dreaming, the self stops striving to prolong and order itself incessantly, without allowing itself interruptions or overlaps, welding every link of the temporal chain each instant to the previous one.
To the dream, therefore, belongs a dissident temporal organization. Contrary to the function of the ‘will’ which is to connect experiences ‘logically’ and ‘chronologically’, dream consciousness -with its ‘illogicalities’, is substantially paratactic 36. Parataxis can be defined as the practice of placing phrases or images next to each other without subordinating conjunctions – e.g. (as also suggested by Merleau-Ponty) ‘after,’ ‘before’, ‘as soon as’, ‘because’, ‘so that’, etc. The contrast, rather than the conjunction and synthesis, may generate novel and unexpected combinations between these dissimilar fragments.
Rhapsody and condensation as two forms of dissonant temporality in dream consciousness
Dream consciousness teaches us that an alternative temporality is possible, against the predominant version of continuous, chronological and narrative time.
‘Time differentials’ 37, p. 192, including interruptions, discontinuities, unassimilable moments and uncanny repetitions, are key characteristics of the alternative, non-synthetic temporality that we experience in dreams. The time differentials included in dream consciousness are usually dismissed by vigilant consciousness as worthless and not candidate for meaning. This ‘trash of history’ 37, p. 192 can be revealed if we pay attention to alternative kinds of consciousness like dream consciousness insofar as it is released from the cycle of repetitions and removed from its embeddedness in a dominant tradition of memories and interpretations – and from the narrative discursive practices appropriate to them 38.
With the help of Merleau-Ponty, we have extracted two forms of dissonant temporality in dream consciousness which we called ‘rhapsody’ and ‘condensation’. Rhapsody (from Greek rhaptein, ‘to sew together’, ‘to stitch’) is a highly intense miscellaneous collection without formal chronological structure. It is the free-flowing and extravagant expression of intense sensations and feelings, as in the case of a musical rhapsody that has the irregular form of an improvisation. Rhapsody is the figure of temporal discontinuity.
The ‘dream of the urn’ is a good example of rhapsodic temporality 19, pp. 77-9. At first, the dreamer was sitting at the dinner table with her husband and children. The table was in her dining-room, she felt safe and peaceful in it. On the walls she could see the pictures which her husband loved to collect. She was fully absorbed in eating, and her husband and children too. ‘Do you remember,’ she asked her husband, ‘that we had exactly the same menu on the first day of our honeymoon?’ He confirmed it with a smile, adding, ‘It was exactly a year ago.’ In the dream she was not in the least disturbed by this ridiculous assertion, and by the fact that their children, five and six years old, were sitting at the table. They had actually been married for ten years. Indeed, she was fully convinced that her husband was right, and replied, ‘I feel as if it had only been yesterday’. While her husband had originally been sitting in his usual place at the opposite corner of the table, he was suddenly and strangely transported right next to her. In the dream it did not appear strange that he had suddenly changed places without any movement.
While she was sitting so happily amongst her family, there suddenly appeared colorful bridges, reminiscent of very bright rainbows. A large and golden urn hovered on these bridges between them. She suddenly thought: ‘Who knows what the future will hold? Won’t the Russians be here shortly?’. She imagined how the Russians might suddenly enter their house and kill all of them. It was not a matter of imagination, but she could actually see the Russian troop of wildly gesticulating soldiers storming the house. Full of eagerness, she turned to her family and began to devise a plan for a drive in the afternoon. She then awoke, because the maid had been knocking at the door.
Condensation (from Latin condensare ’to make dense, thick, crowded’) in physics is the change of state of matter from gas to liquid, the process by which more elements join together to form a larger unit. It means the merging of several parts (e.g., events, thoughts, sensations, etc.) to form a larger unit. Condensation is the figure of stratification of apparently unrelated fragments to form an aggregate saturated with tension.
The dream of the ‘lunatic-tower of the orchestra conductor’ 24, chapter 6 contains a good example of condensation: Here is a lady friend of Freud’s dream.
She is at the opera. It is a Wagnerian performance. In the middle of the stalls there is a high tower, on the top of which there is a platform surrounded by an iron railing. There, high overhead, stands the conductor, continually running round behind the railing, perspiring terribly; and from this position he is conducting the orchestra, which is arranged round the base of the tower.
This is Freud’s own comment: although in other respects the dream gives a good picture of the situation, the tower in the middle of the stalls, from which the conductor leads the orchestra, is nonsensical enough. This tower must be described as a condensation, that is, a composite formation by means of apposition. By its substructure it represents the greatness of the man, but by the railing at the top, behind which he runs round like a prisoner or an animal in a cage (an allusion to Richter, the name of the unfortunate man, which in German means ‘judge’), it represents his later fate. Lunatic-tower is perhaps the expression in which the two thoughts might have met. The tower that appears in this dream condenses two opposite properties: height which means greatness and power and the railing which means limitation and lack of freedom.
Condensed dream images, like the tower which appears in this dream, and their insubordinate temporality (a single image in which the entire arc of a life is compressed) bring to mind the notion of ‘dialectical image’ developed by Walter Benjamin. To thinking – Benjamin argues – belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts. Where thinking comes to a standstill ‘in a constellation saturated with tensions’, there the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thoughts 39, p. 475. ‘The dialectical image – he writes 39, p. 473 – is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash’ – a condensed image that appears out of the linear flux of time.
Implications for the care of the self
A long and august tradition includes attention to and analysis of dreams among the practices of the ‘care of the self’. The main reason why one should care for oneself is to ‘reunite with oneself’ (ad se properare) 1, getting to know oneself, becoming intimate with oneself. Very succinctly, I will conclude with some remarks on the contribution that the phenomenology of dream consciousness focused on their temporality that I developed can enlarge a hermeneutical space of self-understanding and contribute to the care of the self – and more specifically to psychotherapeutic care.
The temporality of dream consciousness seems to suggest that to acquire a better acquaintance and a better knowledge of oneself we have to let slumber the function of temporal syntheses, our narrative vigilance – and with them our ‘will to identity’. This epochè of temporal synthesis can let surface what waking consciousness may consider mere fragments devoid of value. Yet, the emergence of rhapsodic and condensed fragments may generate novel and unexpected combinations between what at face value are mere splinters – but can potentially be tesserae of a new mosaic and a new self.
It is not a question of recognizing which whole they are fragments of – we must not strive for an archaeology of these fragments. It is not even a question of tracing the symbolic meaning (collective or personal) of that object or character in the dream. The phenomenology of dreams adds to these psychodynamic cornerstones of dream interpretation (tracing the repressed origins and hidden meanings of dream contents) a further perspective: it argues that is rather a matter of allowing oneself to be questioned about the new profile of oneself that these fragments allow one to glimpse.
Dreams provide questions about oneself rather than answers. Dream interpretation should address the unfolding of the parts of the dream and not only the overall narrative that the dream seems to tell. It is precisely the attention to isolated scenes of the dream, fragments disjointed from the main narrative and condensed images that could provide new elements and unprecedented perspectives for the hermeneutic of the Self.
Now, it is clear that all this is apparently in conflict with the standard view that the purpose of treatment is to help the patient construct the narrative of his or her life, with the character of intelligibility and acceptability that those unbearably inconsistent fragments that the patient brings to therapy lack 6.
In dreams, the present moment is discontinuous and stratified. This represents a break from the linear unfolding of one’s personal life-history. The anachronism which may appear in the dreaming consciousness is a constitutive element of it. This form of temporality can be the engine of a ‘reform of consciousness’. In place of ‘narcotic’ historicism 39, p. 171, of its myth of the linearity of historical time, dream consciousness can break through as a dialectical reversal, in which the condensed past, disjointed with respect to the continuity of history, or torn from its context can lead to the now of an opportunity of awakening.
The temporality of dream consciousness recalls Benjamin’s notion of the Jetztzeit 40 – the present moment, now-moments with their instantaneous, concentrated character. Grasping now-moments requires the utmost vigilance. We could call this now-vigilance, a vigilance quite different from narrative vigilance. Seizing the image that presents itself in a flash, while attending to a dream or listening to a patient, requires the utmost alertness. The now-moment is a hyper-concentrated form of temporality that must be grasped as a unique chance 41. We need is a kairology, a method ‘designed to exorcize the historical’ 42, p. 463, that is, an assumption of responsibility that looks at what surfaces in the present moment, even as a fragment, as an opportunity for a change. Waking consciousness, with its temporal structure centered on temporal syntheses and narratives, can have its alternative and complement in dream consciousness, with its fragmentary phenomenology, as a way to self-knowledge and clinical care.
Also, clinicians should perhaps learn to listen to their patients as one dreams, by paying attention to the ‘trash of history’ – and not exclusively to what fits into the ‘logic’ of history itself. Waking consciousness crystallises, mummifies the flow of life and the combinatory power of imagination. Dream consciousness may help waking consciousness to be more accurately sensible and perceptive. Waking consciousness, subjugated by the need to bind together experiences into a coherent narrative, can lose contact with intense, vivid and emotionally charged single sensations. Dream consciousness can freely be impressed by them, appreciate their nuances, singularities and strangeness, providing the substrate for a more accurate perception of one’s own being in the world.
Dream consciousness contributes to moments of awakening and to a process of discovery in which it provides scraps of experience otherwise marginalized by waking consciousness, emphasizing perceptions and emotions at the expense of their narrative integration and domestication, arousing perplexity and disrupting previously acquired self- and world-representations.
Dream consciousness is the source of ‘accidental knowledge’ 15, that is, of finding what one was not looking for. A fortuitous, accidental knowledge. Accidental knowledge in the unattended outcome of an event – which is always an encounter with the unexpected. Details manifested in accidental knowledge, precisely because they are dissonant with the canon of continuous and coherent world- and self-narratives, can be an authoritative source of knowledge, and self-knowledge in particular 43.
In short: How can dreams be analysed given the condensed form of dream images and their rhapsodic succession in the absence of a temporal order that respects the logical canons of a story? Let’s start with condensation. If dream images are the work of condensation, the folding and layering of episodes from the dreamer’s personal existence, then such images must be unfolded. Unfolding means to exposit, open up, lay bare the parts of which the dream image is made 44. What comes into sight are the components of the image. The aim of unfolding is bringing unnoticed material into consciousness. Instead of trying to link each part of the dream to the others, each part must be analysed in and for itself – especially those images that appear to be the effect of a condensation. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘implexes’ 23 are the product of a montage 39 – the juxtaposition of heterogeneous fragments whose assemblage results in enigmatic compositions but from which emanates an intense pathos and hints at an unexpected meaning. Montage is a non-narrative form of representation, developed avant-garde art, photography, literature and film, characterized by the preference for the unfinished, the fragmentary and the marginal 45.
Disassembling this montage is the first task of dream analysis. Instead of trying to link each part of the dream to the others, each part must be analysed in and of itself – especially those images that appear to be the effect of a montage. By breaking down the image resulting from the montage, tracing the components of this montage will make it possible to rescue the connection between the fragments of which the montage is composed – the texture that is immanent in the condensed image itself, although it may remain at face value invisible or unnoticed. For instance, in the dream of the ‘lunatic tower’ two opposite characteristics of the conductor are dialectically synthesised: the tower represents the greatness of the man and the balustrade the prison in which he is confined. In a way, this image plastically condenses this man’s life story, his rise and fall, his destiny.
Let’s now turn to the rhapsodic nature of the dream. Like condensation, it requires us not to seek a historical-chronological link between the images and scenes that compose it, but rather invites us to combine these fragments according to a different kind of logic – an analogic one. The analysis of dreams provides a space for the recombination of the disjointed images which surface in dream consciousness. When the dreamer wakes up, instead of trying to compose the parts of which the dream is made according to a narrative logic, can let dream images float and establish links between them within a network of resonances and analogies 46. This emergent constellation of images highlights hidden aspects of each image that only reveal themselves in the presence of this juxtaposition. Figurative links may semi-spontaneously emerge during the analysis of the dream, or actively be established via a work of analogic montage. For example, in the ‘dream of the urn’ the juxtaposition of the images, seemingly incoherent and inconclusive, highlights how the apotheosis in the state of well-being (illustrated by the enjoyment during the family meal, the sudden reenactment of the wedding banquet, and the contraction of time between the wedding date and the birth of the children) may evoke the approach of death, personified by the soldiers invading the home an instant before the stage of serene and ‘timeless’ family life.
The network of images constitutes the space for discovery 47 uncovering what we may call their ‘optical unconscious’ 48 – the unconscious that is not hidden within something, but lies in the space between phenomena and is revealed in the interconnections and resonances between them 49. To be noted, this process takes place with the participation of the dreamer and the observer and is never completed since this network of images forms an open construction, not a closed one such as a given symbolic representation of a ‘hidden’ meaning or the teleology of certain narratives.
The potentialities of dream consciousness, provided that it does not focus on the story it seems to tell, but on the individual fragmentary elements that it proposes, are nicely encapsulated by Susan Brison in her insightful personal report of recovery from trauma: ‘when your life is shattered, you are forced to pick up the pieces and you have a chance to stop and examine them. You can say ‘I don’t want this one anymore’ or ‘I think I’ll work on that one’’ 50, p. 20.
Conclusions
To help the reader identify the fragile points of my discourse, alongside the ‘less fragile’ ones that I hope I have managed to portray, I would like to summarise the argument developed in this paper as follows:
In our culture, consciousness (con-scientia) is the bringing together, operated by passive and active temporal syntheses, of a myriad of details united according to a logic (legein), which allows the meaning of the totality of which they are part to be comprehended (cumprehendere).
Dream consciousness is a sui generis kind of consciousness – not simply a breaking down of waking consciousness. We can shed light on this form of consciousness if we analyse its peculiar way of being in the world, and in particular how the dreamer experiences time, space, etc. in the dream world.
Particularly, the analysis of the dream’s rebellious temporality reveals two types of peculiarities – of temporal syntheses and conatus. Examination of the former highlights two characteristic phenomena of certain dreams, ‘rhapsody’ and ‘condensation’ – figures of discontinuity and stratification, respectively.
‘Rhapsody’ is a miscellaneous, irregular and apparently unrelated collection, featuring a range of highly contrasted of images or scenes; it expresses the weakening of the logical and chronological links between the dream images and scenes which therefore appear as discrete fragments.
‘Condensation’ is the merging of several parts, e.g., events, sensations, thoughts, memories, etc., into a single image or scene; it expresses the ‘stratification’ or ‘folding’ on themselves of apparently unrelated fragments to form an aggregate saturated with tension.
Rhapsody and condensation can be read as modifications of temporal syntheses that would characterise dream consciousness as opposed to waking consciousness.
As a consequence of this basic modification of temporality, an alternative form of subjectivity can emerge in the dream, disengaged from the laws of coherence and continuity that characterise the waking consciousness; it appears as a consciousness of the fragment, rather than of the whole.
This form of consciousness fosters an ‘accidental’ form of knowledge that can enrich self- and world-knowledge with fragments that are dissonant with daytime consciousness based on temporal syntheses, and for that reason discarded by it.
These fragments are of importance not insofar as they are more authentic than the ‘pieces’ gathered and put together by waking consciousness, or because they are the products or desires, emotions or impulses repressed from the censure of the vigilant conscience; but insofar as they are harbingers of a restructuring of self-consciousness based on the freedom and responsibility to explicitly take on the task of the factory of one’s own self and history and their dialectical complexities
All this can be of importance for the ‘care of the Self’, and for care in the clinical setting, as it can enrich our resources with a type of ‘fragment-oriented listening’ and related practices of dream analysis – like the unfolding of the condensed images and the analogical montage of the fragments of rhapsodic dreams – open to include what life may have shattered and rendered useless for the task of the waking consciousness.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to all those who listened to this talk in Florence, Heidelberg and Copenhagen for their comments, critiques and suggestions. I also thank Valentina Fortichiari for all the information she provided me regarding the biography and work of Guido Morselli.
A special thank to George Ikkos for his careful revision of the manuscript.
Conflict of interest statement
The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.
Funding
None.
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