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'The loss of a parent is an experience that we all face without any training - relating to a parent through old age and illness; going through the actual death in different circumstances and whether we can help parents to have a good death; the emotional aftermath - shock, grief, relief, the effect on families; funerals, wills and other rituals; clearing out the house and keeping memories alive; recovery and carrying on with life; the longer-term changes in us and our relationship with our parents. Edited by Sydney Morning Herald literary editor, journalist and writer Susan Wyndham, My Mother, My Father is a collection of stories from 14 remarkable Australian writers, sharing what it is to feel loss, and all the experiences and memories that create the image of our parents. Contributors include Helen Garner, David Marr, Tom Keneally, Gerard Windsor, Susan Duncan and Caroline Baum. These stories are intimate, honest, moving, sometimes funny, never sentimental, and always well written.' (Publisher's blurb)

'In The Best Australian Essays 2014 , Robert Manne assembles his picks of contemporary non-fiction writing. Tim Winton reflects on the impact of landscape on the Australian character; Helen Garner remembers her mother with a raw and stirring poignancy; Christos Tsiolkas wonders how the Left forgot their origins; Tim Flannery traces the history of the Great Barrier Reef and fears its destruction. With essays traversing madness, liberty under the rule of Tony Abbott, the enslaving of horses and the legacy of Doris Lessing, this sharp collection offers lucid insight, shrewd understanding and heartbreaking empathy.' (Publication summary)

' Every day I work on the edit of my book. I slog away, shifting chunks of material and moving them back, eating my salad in a daze, wondering if the linking passages I’ve written are leading me up a garden path, or are sentimental, or violate some unarticulated moral and technical code I’ve signed up to and feel trapped in or obliged to. The sheer bloody labour of writing. No one but another writer understands it—the heaving about of great boulders into a stable arrangement so that you can bound up them and plant your little flag at the very top.

'Spanning fifteen years of work, Helen Garner’s Everywhere I Look is a book full of unexpected moments—sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and laughter. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading Pride and Prejudice. ' Everywhere I Look includes Garner’s famous and controversial essay on the insults of age, her deeply moving tribute to her mother and extracts from her diaries, which have been part of her working life for as long as she has been a writer. Everywhere I Look glows with insight. It is filled with the wisdom of life. ' (Publication summary)

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Daughters Outgrow Their Parents in Two Unsparing Novels

By James Wood

In the essay “Dreams of Her Real Self,” the Australian writer Helen Garner performs the difficult task of honestly appraising her mother. Difficult because love and honesty may be at odds; it is discomfiting to outgrow your parents, to feel more intelligent or more sophisticated than they are, as if you were somehow robbing them of a gift that they already gave you. And careful observation can be so close to mockery: “She used to wear hats that pained me,” Garner writes. “Shy little round beige felt hats with narrow brims. . . . And she stood with her feet close together, in sensible shoes.” Garner admits that she finds it hard to get her mother into focus, in part because her overbearing father did such a good job of blocking the view, “as he blocked her horizon,” and in part because her mother’s hesitant self-effacement rendered her both genuinely obscure and obscurely irritating: “She seemed astonished that someone should be interested in her.” To be her intellectual superior, Garner writes, “was unbearable.” Yet she also admits to the guilty pleasure of refusing her mother the easy concessions that she knows will make her happy. An intimate portrait expands naturally into a social and political sketch: daughter and mother represent not only different generations but different examples of female ambition and opportunity.

I thought often of Garner’s essay while reading two short, savage novels by the English writer Gwendoline Riley, “ First Love ” and “ My Phantoms ,” both published by New York Review Books. I don’t recall reading many novels as grotesquely honest about the original sin of being born to inadequate parents. Riley has Garner’s quick eye for detail but replaces her anguished charity with vengeful clarity. Both of her novels have the unguarded nudity of correspondence; they have no time for the diplomatic niceties, the aesthetic throat-clearing of most literary fiction. The two novels relate to each other like twitching limbs from the same violated torso. Each one is narrated by a young, bookish woman—Neve in “First Love,” Bridget in “My Phantoms”—who lives in London with a male partner. In each book, this young woman, reared in lower-middle-class Liverpool, is struggling to achieve independence from her ghastly and abusive parents, who separated when she was small. In each book, the narrator’s father is a cruel boor and her mother a damaged fool, wreathed in the spoils of her defeat. In each book, the awful father is dispatched within the first forty or so pages, with the novel spending the balance of its negative ledger on the awful mother. In Riley’s economy, fathers are brutish but die off (“First Love”) or, in their martial primitivism, can be swerved around, like sluggish tanks (“My Phantoms”). Mothers, alas, stick around longer and want more, cleaving to their adult children with a sickly persistence. Mothers are the life problems with which Neve and Bridget must do serious battle.

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Ford Madox Ford once said that his friend Joseph Conrad was never really satisfied that he had properly established his characters on the page—what Ford calls “getting a character in.” Ford speculated that perhaps this lack of literary confidence accounted for the great length of some of Conrad’s novels, as if the uncertain novelist were condemned to try and try again. In this respect, Riley is Conrad’s opposite: her novels are so short because they are so confidently exact. She knows just how to get her characters through the doorway and into a scene—all that they have to do, in order to sign their own moral death warrants, is start talking. In “My Phantoms,” Bridget’s father, Lee, likes to lecture his teen-age daughter about her reading. He’s the kind of joker who snatches her book from her hands, and then bullyingly opines on it—this writer is a “creep,” that one was recently on TV and is a pretentious “poser,” and so on. When he sees her reading Chekhov’s plays, he’s scornful: “ ‘You do know there’s no point reading things in a translation,’ he said. ‘Because it’s not the original language,’ he explained. ‘It could be anything.’ ” He seems to route all literary knowledge through a single novel, which he heard on the radio as a boy, and is dismissive of any competition: “Get back to me when you’ve read _Of Mice and Men! _” Something about that formulation, “get back to me,” with its hollow male swagger, its reek of David Brent’s Slough office, instantly gets this character in .

In the same novel, Bridget’s mother, Helen, brings a new boyfriend to a café to meet Bridget. The boyfriend is called Joe Quinn, and he exists in the novel for only a few pages. It’s all that’s needed. At first, Joe silently drinks his Guinness while looking at the back wall of the café. As long as he keeps his mouth shut, he might be passable, but then he opens it. This is the extent of his engagement with Bridget:

“So we’re all supposed to call you ‘Doctor’ are we?” Joe said, to me. “No,” I said. “Why do you say that?” “Your mother said you’re doing a PhD,” he said. “Oh yes. I don’t have it yet, alas! There’s a year or so to go. But even when I do . . .” “Your mother said, we have to call her Doctor.” “Oh, right. No. I’ve never said that, Mum!” “Or else,” he said. “No,” I said. “I knew it!” said Joe. “I thought, fuck off! Seriously? Doctor?”

Joe is in. And swiftly out.

In Riley’s world, the women who consort with such men have been emptied of their confidence and are merely mimicking the men’s aggressive insistence with their own passive-aggressive survivalism. They’re easily flustered, and they tend to overperform their anxiety in a futile effort to draw its sting. In “First Love,” Neve’s mother looks “frightened” when a waitress puts an unfamiliar teapot in front of her—it’s transparent, with a plunger—and whispers to her daughter, “How do we get the tea out?” In “My Phantoms,” Helen comes to London once a year, to celebrate her birthday with Bridget. Entering the designated restaurant, Bridget sees her mother sitting expectantly: “My mother was always there when I arrived: smiling at the room; determined to get the most out of her evening.” A few pages later, Helen tells Bridget about her new haircut, a recent extravagance involving a celebrity stylist. A disaster, of course, and not just because the stylist spent the whole time telling Helen about his previous client, a TV presenter: “I had to listen to him going on and on about this other woman’s wonderful hair. . . . I mean. Hello? And they’d brought me the world’s smallest glass of Prosecco, which was included, you know—sounds nice, but every time I leant forward to sip from it he sort of huffed like I was holding him up or something. . . . I mean it was wham bam thank you ma’am and don’t darken our doors again sort of thing.”

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What unites the fathers and the mothers in these novels is their deep disappointment with the world. This disappointment serves as both hunger and food, arresting these damaged people at their endless banquets of hostility and revulsion. The men turn that hostility outward: “He could never hear enough about the inadequacy of people who weren’t him” is how Bridget devastatingly summarizes her father’s style. The women turn it inward. Both genders are fabulously self-involved, the women happier to riff—only because, one suspects, they are more talkative than the men—at tedious length, without any assistance from interlocutors. But one shouldn’t mistake their wounded narcissism for true self-love. Riley shows us how little they like themselves, how they cover their profound lack of confidence with volumes of nervous bluster. Lee tells Bridget to remember, apropos of Chekhov, that “Russia is huge .” And then he repeats himself, “It’s a really big place,” which, we’re told, he enunciates “seriously, almost angrily.” Bridget’s mother likes to say that she “hates” things. For instance, she goes to jazz concerts with a gay man named Griff, even though she “hates” jazz. Bridget knows better: “Hate hate hate. But my mother didn’t hate. It was just a word she used. It was just her announcing-ness. She thought it sounded vital and dashing. She thought it set her apart.”

Riley is a brilliant summoner of her characters’ “announcing-ness.” And how good she is at her own version, at swiftly announcing a mood, a moment, a tableau. With a few words, she can paint a dreary English January (“Each day brought just a few hours of dampened light”), a cramped Glasgow flat (“You had to squeeze into the shower, elbows tucked: a saint in its niche”), or some breathtaking desolation: “I didn’t, as a rule, talk to her about anything that mattered to me,” Bridget says of her mother. “Why upset her by talking about things she couldn’t understand or enjoy?” Likewise, Riley’s details are spare and killing. In “First Love,” Neve’s mother bravely moves from Liverpool to Manchester, determined to branch out as a single woman. She may still own the “purple-framed glasses” and “too-big thermal gloves” of her former life, along with her William Morris tote bags, but now she’s living on her own, in her “bachelorette pad.” And she is daringly growing her hair. Too daringly, perhaps. For her daughter sees all: “It lay in chancy locks around her neck, held back from her face that day by a padded Alice band.” That terrible appraising adjective, “chancy”—it doesn’t award too many chances to Neve’s poor mum.

Novels that so emphatically lack charity threaten to enroll the guilty reader in nothing more than the author’s hellish vengeance. They can seem hard to justify. One has the sense, reading Riley, of being involved in an alarming experiment, that of reading the world without the slightest mercy or compromise. But at least, in this state of nature, the dynamics of survival and damage are usefully laid bare. In “First Love,” Neve has fled the ruins of her violent upbringing in Liverpool for London, only to marry an older man, Edwyn, who seems as misogynistically abusive as her own late father. So she has effectively married her father, and is suspended between managing this new version of the tyrant she once called a “little imperator” and the attentions of her needy, sad, drifting mother. In other words, Neve has not escaped at all—she is her parents’ child rather than an independent adult, still firmly enchained in family. And how: Edwyn, a talented abuser, blames her for confusing him with her father while he behaves like her father and then blames her for being the kind of woman who gets abused by people like her father, which is to say, people like him. “You hated him, he was cruel to you, that’s the only relationship you understand,” he says.

Another result of Riley’s experiment in unillusioned dissection is that we truly see her characters, in their descriptive nakedness, alive and horridly vivid. The mothers of Neve and Bridget loom out of these books, essentially one composite figure, recognizable both as frail human beings and as solid English types. Easily intimidated by perceived sophistication, the Riley mother views the world suspiciously, since it seems eager to trip her up. Her social life, to use Riley’s word, is extremely “determined.” Divorced, intermittently single, she prosecutes a busy existence of talks, concerts, readings—the Victorian Society, the Wine Circle, the Clan Grant Society. She makes friends with men who are reliably less interested in her than she in them. “Are you a fan of garlic, Helen?” John, Bridget’s partner, asks when Helen comes to their London flat for lunch. He’s doing the cooking. Helen nervously replies, “Well . . . what do you mean by fan?” The exchange places us instantly in a certain kind of comic English universe, a middle England of petit-bourgeois prejudices and anxieties, of lovingly coddled provincialisms and mortal narrowness. For every English eccentric, there are two fellow-citizens desperate to appear anything but, desperate to be crushingly “normal.” (We know this abnormally normal world from, say, Mike Leigh’s play “ Abigail’s Party ”; Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, “ Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit ”; David Mitchell’s “ Black Swan Green .”)

One thing that heartlessly unsentimental writing does is force the reader to generate the very sympathy such books lack. Stirred in this way, I found myself oddly drawn to Bridget’s mother in particular, perhaps because my own mother had a William Morris tote bag or two, belonged to a Scottish-clan society, and kept up many cultural “interests.” Like Helen, she also possessed a full complement of petit-bourgeois anxieties, tics, and unreadable rules (such as putting the milk into the teacup before the tea). In fact, “My Phantoms” is not without its glimmers of charity and compassion, and it’s a better novel than “First Love” for them. Once the cruel father is dispensed with, Riley brings Bridget’s mother to the front and center of the story. We witness Helen’s friendship with Griff, hear about her unfathomable two-year marriage to the boorish Joe Quinn, follow her as she—like the mother in “First Love”—moves to Manchester, watch her as she valiantly tries and fails to comprehend Elena Ferrante’s novels. (“But how can you read it if you haven’t got the two lead characters straight?” Bridget asks her mother in exasperation.)

“My Phantoms,” indeed, follows Helen all the way to the end of her life, when she is hospitalized, in her late sixties, with a brain tumor. In crisis, Bridget proves herself an unexpectedly faithful if still easily irritated daughter, visiting her dying mother as often as she can, even as Helen retreats into wordless hostility. The novel thus offers an enriching sense of a whole life surveyed, even if its arc is finally poignant—for Helen’s life lacked any great fulfillment, was of little consequence, and was remarkable principally for the short-circuiting of its ambitions and projects. What did Helen spend that life searching for? Bridget puts it precisely, almost tenderly: “A place she could feel was her rightful place, from where she could look out at other people less fearfully.” ♦

An earlier version of this article erroneously described Riley’s bibliography.

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‘Everywhere I Look’ by Helen Garner

Non-fiction – paperback; Text; 240 pages; 2016.

I was so excited about the impending publication of Helen Garner’s latest essay collection that I thought, “damn the postage costs”,  and ordered it all the way from Australia.

Garner is one of Australia’s finest writers (you can find many of her books reviewed here) . Most Brits will know her from her sharply caustic 2008 novel The Spare Room in which a woman, caring for a friend dying of bowel cancer, finds herself caught between kindness and honesty: how should she deal with the fact that her friend is relying on quackery for a cure that will never happen?

But in her native Australia, Garner is widely respected (and occasionally vilified) for her journalism, a journalism that she practises with the same dilemma as the narrator in The Spare Room: when to be kind, and when to be blatantly honest? Her reportage style is deeply personal for she often inserts herself into the story, a technique that allows her to capture heartfelt reactions without the so-called veneer of “objectivity”.

In her last non-fiction book (she has five to her name, primarily about true crime cases), This House of Grief looked at a criminal case involving the deaths of three young boys at the hands of their father. Published in Australia last year and the UK earlier this year, it was critically acclaimed and won a literary prize, but there were some who would not read it because it did not condemn the man as a “monster”.

In her latest collection of essays, Everywhere I Look , which has just been published in the UK, Garner answers this criticism robustly in an essay called “On Darkness”:

“If he had been a monster, I wouldn’t have been interested in writing about him. The sorts of crimes that interest me are not the ones committed by psychopaths. I’m interested in apparently ordinary people who, under life’s unbearable pressure, burst through the very fine membrane that separates our daylight selves from the secret darkness that lives in every one of us.”

This is typical of Garner’s style. She’s not interested in dividing the world into black and white; she’s most happy — and effective — when she’s delving into the margins, fleshing out the grey that no one else ever seems to report on. She appreciates the moral complexities of the world, an attitude that not only makes her work especially perceptive but incredibly powerful too.

And that’s a good word to describe the 33 short essays collected here: powerful. Garner turns her sharp, perceptive and sometimes painfully honest eye to a wide range of issues including a court case involving a 17-year-old charged with infanticide (“Punishing Karen”) and criminal proceedings against a man accused of pushing a refugee into Melbourne’s Yarra River, where he drowned (“The Man in the Dock”).

The power of the personal

But she’s no less powerful when writing about herself. For instance, her friendship with fellow Australian writer Tim Winton (“Eight Views of Tim Winton”) is depicted with wit and warmth — “It’s an unlikely friendship-I’m almost as old as his mother” — and she’s self-deprecating when she writes about her love of playing the ukulele (“Whisper and Hum”), an instrument she once regarded as a “cop-out for the lazy and talentless”.

Her personal diary extracts (“While Not Writing a Book”, “Funk Paradise” and “Before Whatever Else Happens”) are particular highlights, for not only do they give a glimpse of Garner’s life as a daughter, mother and grandmother, they are all written with the elegance and undiminished wonder of a true writer who revels in the extraordinariness of the every day. Some of them are also very funny.

“At two in the morning, Ted [her four-year-old grandson], sleeping in the spare room, has a bad dream and creeps into my bed. He flings himself about diagonally for the rest of the night, cramming me into a tiny corner. God damn it, I think at 5am, this is worse than being married.”

But it is her heartbreaking and oh-so-candid essay about her late mother (“Dreams of Her Real Self”) that is the standout of this exceptional collection. In it, Garner writes that her mother was timid and unsure of herself, that she always lived in the shadow of her larger-than-life husband and did not know how to express emotion. Their relationship was always slightly at arm’s length and they never really got to know each other.

“When, in the street, I see a mother walking with her grown-up daughter, I can hardly bear to witness the mother’s pride, the softening of her face, her incredulous joy at being granted her daughter’s company; and the iron discipline she imposes on herself, to muffle and conceal this joy.”

This is my 40th book for  #ReadingAustralia2016 and my 26th for  #AWW2016 .

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I am a book obsessive who has been charting my reading life online since the early 2000s. View all posts by kimbofo

9 thoughts on “‘Everywhere I Look’ by Helen Garner”

I wanted to read This House of Grief when I heard of it, and your review of these essays only convinces me further that Helen Garner is definitely one to read as soon as possible! (The excerpt on her nightmare-having grandson is especially excellent.)

This essay collection is a good indication of her style and subject matter, so if you like this do delve into her narrative non-fiction.

Oh, wow, that last quote really got me. I might even be tempted to read this book for a whole sampling of stuff before reading one of her others.

Yes, that quote about mothers is quite something. I suspect Helen’s mother was too embarrassed to walk down the street with her, cos Helen was quite the outspoken feminist in her day and had a media profile that would have made her recognisable in public.

I thought this book was rather fabulous – I loved every bit of it – from the one-liners through to the anecdotes through to the stories. Helen has such an amazing way of looking at the world – I wish I had even half of her observational/descriptive skills!

I know… her descriptive/observational skills are something else, right? I did a lot of people watching this past week (I went to the Greek island of Kos on a solo trip) and I kept thinking how Garner would write about the people I was observing… I really ought to take a notebook with me and give it a whirl, I suppose, but I’m far too lazy!

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Essays About Self: 5 Essay Examples and 7 Creative Essay Prompts

Essays about self require brainstorming and ample time to reflect on who you are. See our top picks and prompts to use in your essay writing.

“Tell me about yourself.” It’s a familiar question we are asked in social situations, job interviews, or on the first day of class. It’s also a customary essay writing topic in schools to prepare students for future career interviews, cover letters, and, most importantly, to assist individuals in assessing their personalities. 

Self refers to qualities of one’s identity or character. It’s a broad topic, but many find it confusing. Before your get started on this topic, learn how to write personal essays to make this challenging topic easier to tackle.

5 Essay Examples

1. essay on defining self by anonymous on wowessays.com, 2. long essay on about myself by prasanna, 3. self discovery: my journey to understanding myself and the world around by anonymous on samplius.com, 4. how my future self is my hero by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 5. essay on self-respect by bunty rane, 7 writing prompts on essays about self, 1. who am i, 2. a look at my personality, 3. my life: a self-reflection, 4. my best and worst qualities, 5. reasons to write about myself, 6. overcoming challenges and mistakes, 7. the importance of self-awareness.

“Google provided a definition of self as a “person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, esp. considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action.” (Google.com, 2013) This may be as simple as this, but the word “self” is far more complicated than the things that make an individual different from other people.”

The author defines self as the physical and psychological way of perceiving and evaluating ourselves, which has two aspects. First is the development of an existential self which includes awareness of being different from others. Meanwhile, the second aspect is when someone realizes their categorical self or that they have the same physical characteristics as others. 

The essay includes three aspects of self-definition. One is sell-image, or how a person views himself. Two is self-esteem, which dramatically affects how a person values ​​and carries himself. And three is the ideal self, where people compare their self-image with their ideal characteristics, often leading to a new definition of themselves.

“Each person finds their mission differently and has a different journey. Thus, when I write about myself, I write about my journey and what makes the person I am because of the trip. I try to be myself, be passionate about my dreams and hobbies, live honestly, and work hard to achieve all that I want to make.”

Prassana divides her essay into sections: hobbies, dreams, aspirations, and things she wants to learn. Her hobbies are baking and reading books that help her relax. She’s lucky to have parents who let her choose her career where she’ll be happy and stable, which is being a traveler. Prasanna finds learning fun, so she wants to continue learning simple things like cooking specific cuisine, scuba, and sky diving.

“High school has taught me about myself, and that is the most important lesson I could have learned. This metamorphosis has taken me from what I used to be to what I am now.”

In this essay, the writer shows the importance of self-discovery to become a better version of yourself. During their high school days, the author was a typically shy and somewhat childish person who was afraid to speak. So they hid in their room, where they felt safe. But as days pass and they grow older, the writer learns to be strong and stabilize their emotions. Soon, they left their cocoon, managed to express their feelings, and believed in themselves.

Because of self-discovery, the author realized they have their thoughts, ideas, morals, likes, and dislikes. They are no longer afraid of mistakes and have learned to enjoy life. The writer also believes that to succeed, and everyone must trust themselves and not give up on reaching their dreams.

“Bold, passionate, humble these are how I envision my hero to be and these are the three people I want to work on, moving forward as I strive to become the self I want to be in the future.”

The essay shows how a simple award speech by Matthew McConaughey moves the writer’s mind and ultimately creates their hero. They come up with three main qualities they want their future self to have. The first is to be someone who is not afraid to take advantage of any opportunities. Next is to stop being content with just being alive and continue searching for their purpose and genuine passion. Last, they strive to be humble and grateful to every person who contributes to their success.

“People with self-respect have the courage of accepting their mistakes. They exhibit certain toughness, a kind of moral courage, and they display character. Without self-respect, one becomes an unwilling audience of one’s failing both real and imaginary.”

Self-respect is a form of self-love. For Rane, it’s a habit of the mind that will never fail anyone. It’s a ritual that makes a person remember who they are. It reminds us to live without needing anyone else’s approval and walk alone toward our goals. Meanwhile, people with no self-respect hate those who have it. As a result, they become weak and lose their identity.

People can describe who you are in many ways, but the only person who truly knows you is yourself. Use this prompt to introduce yourself to the readers. Share personal and exciting details such as your name’s origin, quirky family routines, and your most memorable moments. It doesn’t have to be too personal. You only need to focus on information that distinguishes you from everyone else.

Personality is a person’s unique way of thinking, feeling, and behavior. You can apply this prompt to describe your personality as a student or working adult. Write about how you develop your skills, make friends, do everyday tasks, and many more. Differentiate “self” and “personality” in your introduction to help readers understand your essay content better.

Connect with your inner self and conduct a self-reflection. This practice helps us grow and improve. In writing this prompt, you will need time to reflect on your life to identify and explain your qualities and values. 

For instance, talk about the things you are grateful for, words that best describe you according to the people around you, and areas of yourself that you’d like to improve. Then, discuss how these things affect your life.

Every individual is a work in progress. Although you consider yourself a good person, there are still parts of you that you want to improve. Discuss these shortcomings with your readers. Expound on why people like and dislike these traits. Include how you plan to change your bad characteristics. You can add instances demonstrating your good and bad qualities to make your piece more relatable.

Writing about yourself is a great way to use your creativity in exploring and examining your identity. But, unfortunately, it’s also a great medium to release emotional distress and work through these feelings. So, for this prompt, delve into the benefits of writing about oneself. Then, persuade your readers to start writing about themselves and give tips to help them get started.

For help with this topic, read our guide explaining what is persuasive writing ?

If you want to connect emotionally with your readers, this prompt is the best to use for your essay. Identify and discuss difficult life experiences and explain how these challenging times helped you learn and grow as a person. 

Tip : You can use this prompt even if you haven’t faced any life-changing challenges. The problem you may have encountered can be as simple as finding it hard to wake up early.

Some benefits of self-awareness include being a better decision-maker and effective communicator. Define and explain self-awareness. Then, examine how self-awareness influences our lives. You can also include different types of self-awareness and their benefits to a person.

If you want to try these techniques, check out our round-up of the best journals !

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Dreams of Her Real Self: Writers on Helen Garner

Both celebrated and controversial, Helen Garner’s 40-year career has been distinguished by a trademark candidness. Garner fans Bernadette Brennan, Jennifer Byrne, Annabel Crabb, and Benjamin Law speak to Rebecca Giggs about her influence.

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Helen Garner on Court, Burning Diaries, and the Violence of Love

John freeman in conversation with the author of everywhere i look.

The following interview was conducted at the Melbourne Writers Festival in August .

To read Helen Garner—so beloved for her five works of fiction and five books of nonfiction—is to discover what may be her defining characteristic: awakeness; an aliveness to the thingness of things. Her curiosity and its receptiveness to the subtlest of gradation of detail.

It made of her an excellent writer about crime—in books like Joe Cinque’s Consolation—where these details often mean the difference between justice and its lack thereof in a trial. But it also makes her a kind of life accelerant in whatever form she is writing, whether it’s stories like “Postcards from Surfers,” or her great collection of necessary journalism, True Stories , or the novel that one can read in one four-hour bolt, The Spare Room .

And now she has a new book, Everywhere I Look , 15 years of various forms of literary errands—essays, introductions, reports, feuilletons, diaries—and up through its pages’ chimneys travels the “faint perfume” which emerges from the belly of a ukulele. “Even the wind wanted to play it,” she writes of her beloved instrument. In its pages one can hear “the high, long sweet wordless cry that rises from children at play.” Here is a woman who notes that when Tim Winton goes to church, he says thanks, mate to the priest who blesses him.

You get the sense that here is a person who has much more life than she’s written, even though some of her books—like her gorgeous and wracked debut novel, Monkey Grip—are drawn from life. That she is a great friend, a great correspondent, a person you want on your side, if only for the sidereal quality of her wisdom.

You sense it in the aisles. “I shared a house in Melbourne in the mid ’80s with a recently ‘saved’ Christian who used to harangue me about Jesus a lot,” begins one essay. And: “A woman on her own can easily get into the habit of standing at the open fridge and dine on a cold boiled potato.”

You sense that this is a woman who drinks vodka, has a sense of outrage keenly tuned to injustice, and a sense of humor toward the absurd. Lying awake, for instance, one night, sharing a bed with a grandson, she writes “God damn it, I think at five a.m., this is worse than being married.”

John Freeman: I want to start by talking about these diaries that are in Everywhere I Look . You mentioned that they became the basis for your first novel. How long have you been keeping a diary and how did it change, if it changed at all, your sense of self?

Helen Garner: I think I probably started when I was 14 or 15, and I know for a fact that I kept a diary before then, but I burned them when I went to university. I was going to have to leave town to go to university. And I thought, I do not want my mother to read these diaries , so I took them out the back and in those days you were allowed to have an incinerator in your backyard—some people present might remember—and so I just tore them up and dropped them into this fiery furnace and my mother was standing there saying, Please let me read them. Please let me read just one page? And I said, Absolutely not.  I was dropping them into this bin and they burned up. And so I didn’t keep a diary for quite some time. Then I started again when I was supposedly grown up. I’ve kept doing it every since. Then I had another great conflagration a few years back; I burnt them all up to the year 1980.

JF: This is catching up to you.

HG: I’m very tempted to burn them up. I like the idea of burning them, but I think it would be upsetting for certain people. For other people it would be really very pleasing. But I’ll tell you why I burned the second lot. A few years back I was thinking about the dismissal of the Governor which happened in, what was it, ‘76? He was dismissed in a tricky kind of way. And I thought, I wonder what I was thinking about it around that time? So I went and dug up the diary in question and turned to the date, and I didn’t even mention it. So I thought, Oh, perhaps I should have a look at these books and see if they’re worth keeping . And they were just so terrible, all the ones up to about 1980. There were just whingy, that sort of girl‘s whingy, He doesn’t love me, what have I done wrong? I know it must be my fault. And all that sort of crap. So I just made another fire in the backyard. I don’t how the Nazis burnt those books; they must have thrown petrol on them, because it’s really hard to burn books. The way they’re bound and everything, they don’t catch for ages, and you have to tear them with strength, you have to pull them out of their bindings. So that was very strenuous.

It’s interesting you should ask me because we’re having a bit of renovation done on our house. I’ve had to empty out our laundry cupboards. You know those great big crates you get . . . they’re plastic, transparent with wheels on them. There are six of them and they’re all stuffed with diaries. And I think, Oh, I have to move them to a different part of the house , and I remember that movie in the ‘80s about that guy who had to climb up a waterfall—he had all these things on his back that were representing his sins, and he had to claw his way up with water cascading. That’s what it’s felt like to have kept a diary for 35 years.

JF: It’s just hanging on to you.

HG: It’s crazy. But I don’t think I’ll burn them.

JF: I sometimes wonder, when you’re reading a good diary, they’re not necessarily good because they mark time and remind you that this was happening at the same time. It’s rather a record of consciousness. I wonder if looking back at the erotic or whatever diaries that you were just bringing up, if what you saw was a consciousness that was foreign to you at all?

HG: It was more like a consciousness that was repellant to me. And I recognize that unfortunately as mine. I thought I was ashamed of myself. I thought, Jesus, you’re such a whinger . And I thought, This is why I can’t stay married because I’m such a pain in the ass and I’m so hypersensitive  . . . but then reading diaries, you alway forget that the reason why you keep the diary is to get a read of something that’s making you unhappy, try to analyze it and take the sting out of it. So I think people tend not to write down their happiest experiences or just even the ordinary experience of the happiness of everyday life.

JF: It’s hard to write about happiness.

HG: It is it’s much harder to write about happiness than rage and feeling that the other person doesn’t do enough housework. That’s what in my diary, that kind of shit. You think I’m hysterical , but objectively I do more housework than he does.

JF: Isn’t it good to develop that double consciousness that to some degree a writer has? To not just be watching, but watching yourself watching?

HG: That’s interesting . . . The thing is, who you’re writing a diary for is the question. Do you imagine that anyone else is going to read it? I think there must be some sort of fantasized reader, because otherwise it would just be a series of technical exercises. And that’s what it is, in a sense. I taught myself to write by writing letters and diaries, because you don’t—especially diaries—because you’re not thinking about them as being published. There is a fantasized reader that I purposely never consciously think about.

JF: Did you diaries change once you began to publish books?

HG: Yeah, I was whinging about different things.

JF: Book prizes . . .

HG: Yeah, and what people say in reviews. The interesting thing about diaries is how much self dislike there is. Those bits are really interesting to me. You look at Virginia Woolf’s diary which is just wonderful, but so much of it is just a kind of agony of feeling that she was unworthy. A really terrific phrase recently in a book I read, somebody used the expression, “Most people in the world walk around all day in a trance of unworthiness.” And I felt very struck by that. I thought, that’s completely a description of my default mode, that I’m thinking, Oh, I can’t do that. No I’d be hopeless that. No I don’t want her to come with me, because she’ll get bored. That sort of stuff. A constant barrage of self criticism.

JF: Where do you think that comes from?

HG: Well, doesn’t everybody or is it just me?

JF: I think it is shared probably amongst 93 percent of this room and the other 7 percent are sociopaths. But in your case, I’m curious. What are the engines of that self loathing? Where’s the gasoline being poured in?

HG: I’m not sure actually.

JF: Were you from a religious family?

HG: No, quite the contrary, in fact. My parents weren’t interested in religion. I had to get myself baptized when I was 19. I went to a church school, but my parents weren’t religious at all. I remember once saying to one of my three husbands, we were just talking generally about things and I said, Because you know as usual I think that I’m really just a small piece of shit. And he looked at me in amazement and said, What, do you think that? And I said Yeah, doesn’t everyone think that? And he said, No, I’m pretty pleased with the shape of myself.

JF: How much later did you get divorced?

HG: Not long after.

JF: It must be a huge relief when you either enter the dream of a novel, or especially when you write the kind of nonfiction you’ve been writing for 35 years, to sort of leave yourself and sit there and interview someone, or leave yourself to cover an event.

HG: Yeah, that’s fantastic. It’s the time when I don’t feel unworthy. I feel that I know how to do that now. I had to learn to do it. But maybe that’s the one of the great pleasures of nonfiction, the huge amount of research you have to do. Whereas if you’re writing a novel, you just have to sit there in front of your own unworthiness, day after day. But at least if you’re, for example, going to write a book about a trial, you have endless weeks, perhaps even months sitting in a court, which is the thing I like the best in life, really.

JF: Sitting in court?

HG: Yeah, love it.

JF: What about it? Is it the bailiffs and their activities?

HG: No, I think its because its extremely ritualized. It’s very formal, and there are very strict rules about how you can behave, how people can behave, and there’s a power figure, a paternal or a maternal figure, which is the judge. Everybody’s got their outlined and agreed upon role to play. So I’m just sitting there, and I’m not doing anything besides listening and watching. Especially the beginning, hearing someone get up and making this sort of statement which is: All persons having business before this honorable court make yourselves known, and you shall be heard. I always feel like bursting into tears at that moment or shouting out Amen ! It seems to me an almost religious moment. It’s like the beginning of a funeral, a religious funeral, a church funeral when people say, Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today  . . . And they say who the person is who’s died, and it’s a statement that We are here, this is why we’re here, and the spirit of the law is in the room. I know there are people who think that’s really pathetic. A lot of people have cynicism about the law and how it functions, but I’ve spent a lot of time in court and I find that at its best, it’s people trying to figure out how to deal with the black side of human behavior. And that the people of the court are trying to bring reason to bear upon irrational behavior or wild behavior and its terrible destruction. I find that wonderful, really.

JF: I find it interesting you say wild behavior or irrational behavior, but you don’t say things like evil. Do you believe in evil?

HG: Yes, but I think think people have recourse to the word evil much too quickly when they’re talking about terrible behavior. I’ve given this a lot of thought, because when I wrote that book This House of Grief about the man who killed his three children, I was surprised to find how many people would ask me what I was working on. I would say I’m writing about Robert Farquharson, and they would look shocked and disapproving and say, Why? Why are you writing about him?  I’d say, Well, there are obvious reasons why you’d want to write about a murderer, and people would get angry with me. They’d say, What sort of bloke was he? How does he strike you?  I would start to describe his life and his formation as a person, and at a certain point the person’s face would harden and say, You’re making excuses, with this accusing gesture. I got used to that. It happened to me very often; it was a very frequent thing.

I realized that people protect themselves against thinking about stories like that by saying, This man is evil, therefore I don’t want to think about him, and nothing that he’s done is connected in me in any way. There is no darkness in me that could possibly connect with the darkness in him . People would say to me, Was he mentally ill, or was he just pure evil? There were these simple concepts you could slot into place to make it possible to contemplate such a person. And so I got less and less interested in the term evil as a way of talking about human behavior. Because it’s really a way of blotting it out. Stopping yourself from having to think about it.

JF: I think about those three books you wrote about various crimes. Sexual crime, murders, as a study of the human context and containers for forms of cruelty. And I wonder if you could talk about the relationship between those three books. Obviously, you like courtrooms and you’re interested in human behavior and its darkness, but because they come into a ten to 12 year period, they feel like they’re connected in a way.

HG: I’ve basically done three books of what I would agree are book-length nonfiction. And the first one was The First Stone and that was the one that got me into a hell of a lot of trouble, because I criticized a certain kind of feminism that seemed to me to be rampant at the time. That wasn’t really a criminal matter. That one to me seems in a little island of its own.  Also, when I first started to look into that story, I thought I was going to write a magazine article about it, but it sort of showed itself to be bigger and more interesting than that. Whereas with the other two books, I set out with an idea that there might be a book in it. That seemed to me a different approach.

JF: Would you change your ideas about how to adjudicate unwanted sexual attention or advances leading up to and including assault? In New York City right now we have signs on the subway that say “Unwanted sexual attention is a crime, and if you see it report it.” You probably know that there are women on the subways right now recording gropers, and putting it on blogs and people go and find the guys. It’s slightly demoralizing that this needs this level of CCTV constant attention and reminder. Have your feelings about this issue that you wrote about changed at all?

HG: I still think there’s a level of unwanted sexual attention that could be dealt with on the spot. But it’s plain to me, and it was always was, that women go through life being sexually harassed to various degrees and nobody can deny that that’s the case. There’s so much to say about that book because it came out 20 years ago, and a lot of things happened in the interim. I think looking back on it, the book probably got its energy not from my interest in the matter, but from the hostility I caught from one of the women involved in conducting the case against the master of the college. I look back on it, and I think My God, that whole thing was powered by the fact that she and I just locked horns at the beginning of the story . And I thought, Fuck you, you are not going to stop me from writing this book . And she’s saying, Fuck you, I’m not going to tell the story , I’m going to tell the story . It was a battle between me and her. I haven’t seen her since, and I expect that neither of us would like to meet the other again, but that makes it sound a little oversimplified, I guess.

That book is less interesting to me than the other two. The other two were when I realized that I liked courts. I realized that I had actually sat through another murder trial. There was a little boy who was murdered years ago in the mid 90s, and I went to his trial out of sheer curiosity. What sort of man would bash a two-year-old child to death? I’m going to go to court and have a look at him. That’s the thing about courts. You can go in there. A lot of people, even quite educated people with PhDs will say,  How did you arrange that? Where did you get permission to go? And I say, This is a democracy. I can just walk in. You can just walk in . The whole thing is being one in the name of the rest of us; it’s a citizen’s thing. But I got very close to Robert Farquharson’s mother and father. In one respect that was a mistake because if you’re following a trial and you get close to one side, the other side will slam the door in your face. I think it’s very hard to get open access to both sides of a very painful story like that.

JF: Has covering these trials changed the way you think about individuals? Your new book Everywhere I Look has a number of portraits in it, but there’s also a long essay about your mother. And I think living in families, as we all do if we’re lucky, you accumulate a series of wrongs you want to right. Things you wish had gone differently. And there’s no court for that, especially after someone’s died. How do you switch from that kind of version of yourself as the person who’s going to tell the story her way, to the person who in telling an essay has to somehow account for the fact that someone may be unknowable even if they’re very close to you?

HG: About my mother . . . I was actually approached by someone who is putting together a collection of essays about people’s parents.

JF: Susan Wyndham, from the Sydney Morning Herald .

HG: Yeah. And when she suggested it, I was pleased to be asked because it just gave me that kick in the ass to do it. I couldn’t have hacked it otherwise it think. I wouldn’t have had to guts, or I don’t know what. Because the thing is, I got on very unhappily with my father all my life. I used to think, I know what’s going to happen when he dies . I ’m going to be guilty all my life because I fought him so bitterly, we fought and fought. When mum dies I’ll just be really sad, and I‘ll miss her . But my mother died first. And that changed everything. The first thing that happened was that I began to get on with my father, which is a whole other story about triangulation. But when my mother died, I was tortured with guilt, and that’s what I wrote about in the essay. I thought this is my chance to look at that feeling which is so painful to me and humiliating. And it was very hard to write that essay. I thought, if I write this I’m going to say some things about myself that are going to make me look bad. And it’s not worth doing it unless I fess up to those.

JF: It seems like one of the hardest thing writing memoir is dropping the rationalizations that you tell to yourself in your head to explain your actions. Because as soon as you write a memoir, they’re all externalized and totally transparent to the reader.

HG: Yeah, and they’re sort of shameful, and you can’t believe you’ve actually clung to them all this time.

JF: Is there a bit you could read on the essay about your mother?

HG: Yes sure. “Dreams of Her Real Self.” I’ll start at the beginning:

It was alway clear to me what would happen when my parents died. Dad would pitch forward without warning into the grave he had dug with his knife and fork. The struggle that had shaped and distorted my character would be over. I would be elated to see the back of him. Then I would torture myself with guilt for the rest of my life. Free of his domineering presence, my mother would creep out from under her stone. She would show herself at least. At last I would know her. Shyly, she would befriend the five remaining children, maybe even come to live with one of us. She would take up her golf clubs again, put on her flowery bathing cap and swim in the surf, simmer her modest vegetable soups, knit cardigans in quiet stripes with a lot of gray. In a few years she would fade, weakened, and slip away. Surely about her I would only feel a bit of mild sorrow that would pass in the middle of the night, as intended.

She went first. She was in her early eighties when dad dragged her to the last of the scores of dwellings he imposed on her during their long marriage. A seventh floor apartment in central Melbourne that in a fit of schadenfreude he had bought from a member of her family whose finances had hit the wall. Isolated up there with a view of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Parliament House, she sank into a stunned resentful gloom shot through with flashes of bitter sarcasm. She would pour a gin and tonic on the table and say, grim warning tone: Mark my words; in a minute that ice is gonna melt and then the glass with overflow and there will be a hell of a mess to clean up. She slumped into depression, then drifted away into dementia. She wandered at night. She fell and fractured a bone. She withered. In a nursing home she became savage. She snarled at us and lashed out with her claws. Lost to herself and to us, she died at last, by means of something I can only call chemical mercy. My younger sister and I, strained and silent, chanced to be the only ones at her bedside when she exhaled her last, hoarse breath.

HG: Now I’ll skip to something that makes me look bad. Yeah, this is the worst bit.

Well, when my daughter was a teenager she had a dog. A poodle cross called Polly. Polly fell down the crack between two of my marriages. She trudged again and again across inner Melbourne to my ex-husband’s house and died a lonely painful death by misadventure in a suburban backyard. She was an anxious creature, timid and appeasing, who provoked in me an overwhelming impatience. She would lie at my feet tilting her head at this angle and that, striving for eye contact. The more she begged for it the less I could give. In just such a way over many years, I refused my mother the eye contact she longed for. I withheld it. I lacerate myself with this memory, with the connection I can’t expunge between lost mother and lost dog. When in the street I see a mother walking with her grownup daughter, I can hardly bear to witness the mothers pride, the softening of her face, her incredulous joy at being granted the daughter’s company, and the iron discipline she imposes upon herself to muffle and conceal this joy.

JF: It’s not all bad portraits of you in this book.

HG: I guess.

JF: There’s a lot of joy leaking through parts, and I wonder if becoming a grandmother is something to explain that. I noticed that in The Spare Room— the absolute joy that the character takes with the girl who comes from next door. It’s throughout Everywhere I Look . I find that sometimes people can be easier as grandparents than they were as parents, and I wonder if putting these two things next to each other in your diaries, in which you’re writing quite a bit about your grandchildren and your children, if you find any kind of juxtapositional peace?

HG: I do feel that as a grandmother. I’m working hard to redeem myself. I don’t know how many other people in this audience would understand that feeling. Quite a lot, I think—that I feel I’m a much better grandmother than I was a mother, and it’s a very privileged thing to be grandparent. The love that you feel is much simpler and cleaner and you’re not where the buck stops. You’re kind of the backup person in this setup, and there’s freedom between someone and their grandchildren that’s really quite astonishing. Do you want me to read a bit of the diary? Okay, hang on . . . I’ve got a granddaughter who’s now 16, so I haven’t written about her very much because I think she might be getting a bit sick of it, but the grandsons, they don’t care anyway, they’re just out in the backyard. Oh, here’s a nice one:

A man came to install a shutter on my kitchen window. While he worked, Ambrose, who would have been around six or seven, wandered in the kitchen to tell me about a disappointing experience with his schoolmate, Hazel, a very spirited little girl who had come over yesterday to play. I tried to kiss her on the trampoline, I tried to hug her, and I tried to dance with her. But she didn’t want to be kissed, she didn’t want to be hugged, and she didn’t want to be danced with. The shutter bloke put down his tools and listened with full attention. What grade are you in? he said. Grade Two. The man had a good look at Ambrose, paused and said quietly. Wait a while. That’ll change.

Yeah. I actually run my grandchildren on a very short leash. When they come to my house, I actually impose severe discipline on them.

JF: Do they love you for it?

HG: Well, they come back. They have terrible table manners, in my opinion, at home, and I try and make them eat with a knife and fork, but you know they consider this to be an overreaction.

JF: Do you have a theory of humor? I mean if you’ve read any of Helen Garner’s books, even the darkest of them, even in This House of Grief , there are moments of humor, and it’s a very unusual thing. I think typically humor and tragedy are siloed. They’re in different parts of the farm, but in each one of your books they’re together. Even in The Spare Room , there are moments of savage humor in that book. I wonder if you could talk about what you find funny, and how you amuse yourself.

HG: As you spoke, I was thinking of something I read that Jean Cocteau said that I picked up years ago. He said, “What would I do without without laughter? It purges me of my disgust.” That struck me a long time ago, and it’s stayed in my mind. I actually really like to laugh with people, and I like it when everyone cracks up at the same time. Laughter seems to me an ecstatic state, and so it’s not only to do with someone making a joke. Sometimes you laugh in shock when you hear something bad, but laughter is very close to tears I know that’s a really corny thing to say, but they’re linked states. My father was really funny person. And he really liked to make stupid jokes, and there was plenty of laughter in our family.

JF: Well, what were his jokes like?

HG: He could mimic people, and he saw the ridiculous in things. He was the sort of guy who liked to take it up to pompous people, and after he sort of won a clash in a restaurant he’d say, I’ve never seen such a deflated manager. That kind of guy you know. It was quite amusing.

JF: Is he the father in Postcards from Surfers ?

HG: Certainly he’s the guy that breathes loudly through his nose while making a corned beef sandwich. I don’t know actually, I’m not sure you’re right about tragedy and laughter being in different silos. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is most books that are really really great—and agreed by everybody to be great—I’m always furious that I didn’t read them when I was younger. For example, Dostoevsky. You don’t expect to laugh when you read Dostoevsky, but it’s terrible that people at universities don’t tell you, Read this book, you’ll get a laugh . Here you are thinking,  Oh god, do I have to read this great big fat thing? It’s as if the funniness of great literature is a sort of secret, and you have to read the book to find out.

I was glad you said that you thought there were funny things in This House of Grief . Because a friend of mine who’s a very sensitive person and said she really didn’t want to read the book rang me up when she read about ten pages of it and said, Oh, I just laughed out loud . I asked, What made you laugh? And she said the scene when I was in the courthouse and I had a young woman with me, a young student called Louise, who was very hip and was wearing a certain kind of hoodie, a sort of sky blue hoodie. She was the kind of person who sits back with an analytical look on her face all the time. But when one of the witnesses was giving a very, very painful testimony everybody in the court was crying, and I looked around and Louise was crying, too. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her hoodie, and I’d written “The sleeve of her hoodie was black with tears.” And my friend the sensitive person had burst out laughing at this point. I was terribly happy about that because people tend to think that if you laugh at something you’re not taking it seriously, but I don’t think that’s true. Do you?

JF: I think obviously the darkest humor comes from some of the darkest places that have suffered the most. The Balkans is full of terrible, funny jokes. I wonder to what degree your father’s sense of humor was a defense mechanism, if you will. Because humor can be a very agile and sometimes largely benign way of keeping the world a little bit at bay. It can be a very useful way to survive the world.

HG: Yeah. And sometimes it can be really infuriating just when you feel like you’re getting somewhere in a conversation with someone and they’ll crack a joke. That’s their way of saying,  Okay, that’s enough, you’re not getting any deeper, you’re not getting any further with this . That’s the other side of this.

JF: When you’re interviewing people, if you felt the wall going up, what would you do?

HG: I’m actually quite good at interviewing people; I’ve gotten good at it over the years. Setting aside the books, I made my living in freelance journalism, feature journalism. And I learnt to interview people just by sheer practice. I also learnt something from the man I was married to at a certain point who didn’t want to talk about himself. He was a very contained person, but I noticed that socially he was brilliant at getting other people to talk about themselves. And I was rocked by this. I watched him do it. He’d just be introduced to a couple sitting around having a drink, and he’d say How did you two meet? and their faces would soften and the man would tell the story, and the woman would tell the story, and they’d tease each other. And then instead of saying, Oh, well we met the following way , he would say, And what happened next ? Or he’d lead further on with another question. So he just kept asking questions. And he never got tired of asking questions. In his case, it was partly a defense because he didn’t want to talk about himself. But he did this with a gracious kind of gentle curiosity. And I thought, O h, I see. That‘s how you do it. So I realized I could use that as a skill. I was once sitting in an airport lounge waiting for a plane and sitting next to me was that guy who wrote Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil .

JF: John Berendt.

HG: Yeah, he was sitting next to me talking to another man. And they were talking about interviewing. The guy who wrote that book said, Oh I never stick around. I just ask questions, I push until I get the answer, I close the conversation, and then I leave . I thought, oh, that’s really terrible. That seemed to be really limited and also self-protective. The thing is, the further you get into somebody else’s life, the more open territory there is. And I think that terrifies people sometimes. Afterwards, it sometimes is very exhausting to go that far into someone’s life.

JF: And usually the last thing that someone says as you’re turning your tape recorder off is the interesting thing.

HG: Or after you’ve turned it off.

JF: Like, Oh, I used to kick my dog . This last, trailing thing.

HG: Well, that was done to me by a journalist and it nearly ruined my life. When I was in my thirties, this guy was interviewing me about something and at a certain point he was taking notes, and he just closed the notebook and put it down and said, By the way, what do you think of so – and-so?  I relaxed, because I saw he put the thing down. I didn’t realize until I read the article that almost everything in the article came from what I’d said after he closed the notebook. And I thought, Oh, right, that’s how you must do it . As it turned out I didn’t say anything I regretted, but yeah, that is true.

JF: I don’t sense regret in these essays, but there is a moment where you write about how you look back on the person that you once were, looking with contempt on where you were from. And it feels like in this book, more than any book, you’re sort of looking back with warmth and a way of reclaiming where you’re from, every part of it. Is that a fair assessment?

HG: Yeah, totally. It’s part of getting older. And because my parents are both dead now, and I don’t have to fight to sort of differentiate myself from them and where I came from. I think one thing that happens as you get older is that you feel more kindly towards others. You don’t feel quite so angry and contemptuous about things. You see people’s struggles more. Perhaps you see how people become less enraging and more endearing.

JF: Because you don’t want to change them?

HG: Yeah, maybe that’s it. Or maybe you realize you can’t. You accept that. Look, I used to be a feminist. I mean, I still am, but I used to be one of the raging ones in the seventies, and we really thought we were going to change the world. We thought, if only guys would listen to us and understand what we’re saying, they’d go, Oh sorry! Okay, let’s sort this out . Now, after a while you come to understand that that’s not going to happen. The whole thing is just this endless battle that’s going to go on forever, as long as we’re on the planet, and it’s the same with just about everything. Some tiny advances might be made, a few laws might be changed, but I don’t know . . . I just feel that this sounds kind of wet, but I think people sort of do their best. There are plenty of people who are complete ghastly beasts, and tyrants, and swindlers, and criminal manipulators, and liars, and you know how we all have those characteristics, but just seeing how the people struggle to be decent to each other is—it’s a wonderful thing that you sort of come to understand or you don’t. I don’t compare myself with people so much anymore either. It’s part of what I was saying before.

JF: You mentioned your father moving your mother around to all these various houses in one of of these essays. And at one point in this book, you say you can count up to number 26 and then you lose track of the houses you lived in. So obviously you’ve had an itinerant, maybe restless, life to some degree, but then you describe moving into a new place, getting rid of some stuff, and getting comfortable being in one place. Is that strange, to give up restlessness? Or are you still restless?

HG: The house I live in now I’ve lived in for ten years. That’s the longest time I’ve lived anywhere in my whole life, including childhood. Because Dad was always moving us on. I mean, he wasn’t one of those guys who lost his job or went broke or anything, but he’s the sort of guy that would walk down the street and see there was an auction and buy a house. And he’d go home to my mum and say, I’ve just bought a house in such-and-such and she’d say You what?! And sometimes he would make her move. She’d just pack up her stuff.

JF: And you and all your siblings.

HG : No, this is mostly after when we’re all grown up. But he was just bored, and he wanted to. He had a bit of money. He also liked auctions, he liked fighting with the auctioneer, fighting about prices and money.

JF: Tell us where you get your love of confrontation.

HG: Yeah, I do love it.

JF: Yeah, it’s in the novels, too. One of the glorious energizing forces of them is you show people in confrontation. Enraged, entangled, wrecking their lives. Even in The Spare Room , where doing something generous can be a form of confrontation.

HG: That’s true. There’s a guy who wrote a review of The Spare Room , and he said something that really jolted me that I think is true. He said that when the narrating character, which is really me in disguise, thinks she can take on this friend and be a kind and wonderful person, she’s surprised to find that what she really wants is violence. I read that, and I thought, Oh, that’s the first time anyone’s pointed that out and it’s absolutely true . It really gave me a jolt. I get in a lot of stupid fights with people. You’re right, I must like confrontation. I always think of myself as being more pacific than that, but I got in a terrible fight with a plumber recently, and I lost it. I came out $410 down. And then I lost my nerve. I sent him a text saying you have ripped me off, and he went berserk. I got a bigger reply than I expected and didn’t deal with it at all well. I might cave in the early stages, but I’m not really good at working through confrontation.

JF: I wonder, though, like when you were talking earlier about grandchildren, I feel like love has veins of violence in it.

HG: Yes, it does.

JF: And you write about this. We all know this. One of the pure forms of gentler love that we can have is towards children, especially grandchildren or children that you’re not necessarily responsible for, because it has no violence in it. Do you agree?

HG: I think that that desire for violence goes very deep in people, and I think everybody feels it. Some people perhaps have resolved it better than others, and a lot of people lie about it themselves. It’s gotta be true because otherwise certain historical events couldn’t have happened involving whole populations. Yeah, I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure what to say about that. But haven’t you wanted to kill a child that you didn’t know?

JF: See now the notebook’s closed! And the interview starts!

HG: On a plane, yes. I can’t imagine having that sort of feeling that towards a child that was related to me. To children that I know, like my youngest siblings when we were kids, and my grandchildren sometimes, I have an urge to—not rain blows, but to deliver a blow. Mostly I’m more like the person who says THAT’S ENOUGH GET IT OUTSIDE YOU CAN SLEEP IN THE BACKYARD. Bang, click, lock the door. And I can hear the little one sniveling and the big ones saying, I know what we’ll do, I’ll sleep in the dog’s bed . The bigger ones are kind of more cunning, the little one collapses and sobs. That’s only happened once, and I let them back in. But they did have really nice manners when I let them back in.

Helen will appear in conversation with Ben Lerner at McNally Jackson tonight at 7 p.m.

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Seven brilliant student essays on your wildest dreams for 2020.

Read winning essays from our spring 2020 student writing contest.

For the spring 2020 student writing contest, we invited students to read the YES! article “ Alicia Garza: How to Prepare for 2020 ” by Kate Werning. Alicia Garza, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter offered this advice, “Clarity inside of chaos can help us find direction when it seems like everything around us is unstable.” Lots of things may keep students up at night or make them anxious. Students wrote about what they might accomplish in their wildest dreams for themselves or for this nation—and the steps they would take to make this vision a reality.

THE WINNERS

From the hundreds of essays written, these seven were chosen as winners. Be sure to read the author’s response to the essay winners and literary gems that caught our eye.

You can hear four students read their winning essays on the Irresistible podcast. Be prepared to be inspired! Thank you to author and Irresistible’s founding director Kate Werning for sharing these powerful stories.

Middle School Winner: Theo Cooksey

High School Winner: Kira Walter

University Winner: Athina Amanor

Powerful Voice Winner: Sary Barrios

Powerful Voice Winner: Avery Chase

Powerful Voice Winner: Daniel Cook

“Can I Dream?” Winner: Maitreya Motel

From the author Kate Werning: Response to Essay Winners

Literary gems, middle school winner.

Theo Cooksey

Brier Middle School, Brier, Wash.

Looking Back to Move Forward

I’ve never really looked at long-term goals for myself, as Alicia Garza suggests in the YES! article “How to Prepare for 2020” by Kate Werning. Other than my goal of reaching Eagle Scout before I turn 18, I tend to live day to day. I’m 13, so shouldn’t I just, well, be a kid? Isn’t goal planning and future planning something adults do? To be honest, when I read the article and learned what the topic was, I locked up like a clam. Sharing dreams of how I could positively change the world makes me uncomfortable. Why would I open myself up to that level of critique, especially in middle school? Although I would love to see advancements to reduce the effects of climate change and uneven wealth distribution, I can’t visualize myself impacting these issues right now.

This led me to wonder why I stopped thinking about my ability to influence the future in a way where anything is possible. What made me narrow my scope and start looking down, rather than seeing my potential? I believed I couldn’t possibly change the world if I could hardly impact myself. If you’re always working hard at fitting into a world by other’s standards, how do you have time to dream of your possibilities? This made me ask, “When did I allow this box to contain me?” When I realized I wasn’t accepted as myself.

When I was young, I possessed an immense personality that couldn’t be contained. I was a giant, perpetual motor hurling questions, wanting answers, always moving. However, over years of school, my personality withered, and my motor followed suit. Going from a storm to no more than a summer breeze, my motor was barely able to push paper. Why did that happen? I quieted my voice, so I wouldn’t be told I was too loud. I suppressed my motor, so I wouldn’t be told to stop moving. I spoke less so I wouldn’t constantly be told to stop talking and stop interrupting. 

After spending so much energy shrinking my personality, I hardly had time to look up and think about what I wanted to do. How do I get back to looking up and out into the world? I believe that this assignment has given me the chance to start doing just that. As I uncoil the past, undo the steps and remember the moments that quieted and contained me, stole my voice, and seized my motor, I am determined to recreate what I lost. I will slowly rebuild my motor into an impervious hurricane that will break out of the box that limited me. My opinion will not be hidden from others.

As I lift my head up, I will start with the small things and my familiar spaces. For me, these are working on what affects me directly, like school and what I enjoy outside of school. I will build the forge in our backyard with my dad to pursue blacksmithing together. I will continue to hone my skills in archery. I will dust off my trumpet and give myself the chance to hit the high notes. I will earn Life Scout rank to put me one step closer to Eagle Scout. By keeping my head up and moving forward with a plan, I no longer need to be the kid who internalized everything.

Becoming a better me now, at 13, will make me a better person who may just be able to influence climate change and build a more equitable wealth distribution system when I get older.

Theo Cooksey, an eighth grader from Lynnwood, Washington, is an avid reader and video game player. Theo plays the euphonium and trumpet, and is an expert in Star Wars movies and music. During the COVID-19 quarantine, he is learning to bake and is building a forge.

High School Winner

Kira Walter

Mamaroneck High School, Mamaroneck, N.Y.

Turning Flowers to Trees

 Maybe we used to be trees. Rainforests of friendly monsters, scraping the sky, communicating, and reaching the sun. Maybe roots used to run where we couldn’t see them, connecting us to each other and spreading through the world like telephone lines across our continent. But somehow, though the earth stayed warm and the rain fell on our soil, we evolved from trees into flowers. Flowers alone in our own empty fields, roots too short to reach anything. 

At a high school with over 1,000 students, I notice how we pass each other on the street, in the hallway, lucky if our eyes meet for a moment, if our hearts touch for a second. We are isolated. Although I hope for a world where none go hungry, where violence is absent, where rivers breathe with cold clean life, and wild creatures run through lush green forests, I first hope for a world where we can connect. A world where America’s youth doesn’t have to contemplate whether it is better to live in the light or commit suicide in the darkness. 

My wildest dream for this nation is that people will reach out to those suffering, to America’s youth whose second leading cause of death is suicide. It was not too long ago that a friend approached me about trying to take her own life; she locked herself in a bathroom filled with poisonous gas, waiting for her breath to go soft and blow out like a candle in the wind. We had always been distant, but she chose to share her secret with me because she had no one else to share it with.  

According to the Jason Foundation, 3,069 high schoolers in the U.S. attempt suicide every day. Among this group, four out of five leave clear signs of depression. So why do so many signs, such as drug use, sleep shortages or extreme mood swings, go unnoticed? The answer is isolation. People are so separate from each other that the chances of being discovered are nearly impossible. Although many try to ascribe teen suicide to the pressures of excelling both academically and socially, overcoming these obstacles can be easier than they seem. Easier as long as students have someone to support them through struggles. 

Many teenagers who take their lives are members of healthy families and are surrounded by friends, but they feel as if they can’t share their troubles with them. They fear that this would be a burden on those they care about and so they remain silent. Teens let dangerous secrets collect like water droplets in a jar. One day, this jar reaches its capacity, problems overcome them, and alone, they surrender. In Kate Werning’s YES! article “How to Prepare for 2020,” Alicia Garza explains that “clarity inside of chaos can help us find direction when it seems like everything around us is unstable.” I dream our community will teach suffering teens to find that clarity – that we will help them blossom on a path to success. 

In modern-day society, too many people shame others for attempting suicide. They identify them as troubled and accuse them of being too weak to deal with life’s challenges. To combat suicide, I’ll make sure to do the opposite. I’ll reach out, check in with, and cheer up my peers. I’ll try to comfort those in need of comfort. Because in an ever-changing world of frightening dangers and darkness, we need to be trees with roots linked together in harmonious peace. We need to support each other into a new decade, out of the shadows and towards the sun.

Kira Walter is a sophomore at Mamaroneck High School in New York. Kira writes for the school newspaper and plays on the varsity tennis team. She has enjoyed studying classical piano since she was five years old and volunteers for the American Legion in her free time. When she grows up, Kira aspires to continue her passion for writing.

University Winner

Athina Amanor

Spring Hill College, Mobile, Ala.

Woman with No Nation

“You sound like a white girl.” “You’re an American baby now.” “Wow, you actually speak very good English.” “Did you live in a tree?” 

As a Ghanaian immigrant living in the United States, I’ve heard it all. Statements from my own family members living back home and from friends I’ve made in this foreign land serve as reminders that there really isn’t a place for me. I’m too American to be African, yet I am too African to be American. Even college professors have laughed while a fellow student mocked a group of African languages by clicking his tongue at me and asking,  “What did I just say in your language?” disregarding my offense and reinforcing ignorance. Many of my anxieties and doubts about self-worth stem from these types of interactions. I have adapted, self-monitoring to the highest degree, in order to be more palatable and to fit in. 

As an outwardly appearing “African American,” I fight negative stereotypes when interacting with white people, striving for excellence in both academics and athletics and hoping to outrun stereotypes and shatter prejudices. Within the African American community, I appear as a poser. I walk, talk, and think too differently to be welcomed there either. For my relatives, I speak too “American,” too fast, and I stress all the wrong syllables. I’ve carefully created so many personalities, slipping out of one skin and into the next to appease others, that I hardly recognize my true self. So, when I hear words like,” go back to your country,” a tidal wave of confusion hits me. Sometimes I wish I could, but I know the same alienation I feel here would be waiting for me in Ghana because I would still be seen as an outsider. I am a woman with no nation. I worry about being viewed as second class, about not being awarded the same rights and freedoms, about losing my culture, and about losing irreplaceable familial relationships. 

So, what in my wildest dreams do I wish for this nation? I wish for acceptance. I wish for understanding. I wish for kindness and an egalitarian mindset for all. I wish for the extinction of xenophobia and the predominance of support. I wish for a community in which I do not feel the need to prove I am not a threat, where my culture is not a trend, and above all else, where being me is enough. My wishes may seem far-fetched and on par with beauty queens claiming to want nothing more than world peace, but I am aware that I must make efforts on my own behalf and not simply put wishes out into the world.

In this new decade, I continue to fight for my dream by working with refugees and  building bridges between them and other volunteers as both groups work together to create a safe space filled with the same friendship and sense of belonging that I’ve craved for myself. I continue to make strides towards my dream by rejoicing in differences and staying open to immersing myself in new experiences without judgment. I continue to make leaps in my effort to make my dream a reality by engaging in intercultural, interreligious, and interracial dialogues, fanning the flames of mutual understanding.

And, as I look at the next ten years, I plan to make bounds towards realizing my dream by doing something we all struggle to do in life:  to discover who I am outside of the carefully curated personalities I put on and give that person all the support and acceptance I so willingly give to others yet constantly deny myself. This new decade demands that I stop viewing my self-ascribed status as a woman with no nation as weakness, and make way for the potential it holds. 

Athina Amanor is a Ghanaian immigrant who recently completed her undergraduate coursework in cellular and molecular biology. As a recently retired student-athlete, Athina enjoys staying active by taking long walks, going for short runs, and playing tennis with her older brothers. She hopes that her concern for the human condition and openness to helping others serve her well as she pursues a career in pediatric cardiology.

Powerful Voice Winner

Sary Barrios

A Borderless World

As I walk into the kitchen, I see both of my grandmas stirring the masa and my mom putting the tamales de carne on the stove and cutting different fruits to boil in the pot for caliente . It’s Noche Buena and my dad, my siblings, and I are hanging ornaments and lights. At the bottom of the tree, we arrange the Three Wise Men and the animals on one side, Mary and Joseph on the opposite side of each other, and place Jesus in his manger at the center of them all. Lastly, we put the star on top of the tree, and turn on the beautiful lights. At 8 p.m., we gather around the table to eat. We pray to God for all the good things he has brought to us in the past year. Then, we pass the tamales de carne around, talk about our family in Guatemala and how they’d decorate their tree with clementines and light fireworks at Christmas, and laugh at my brother’s jokes. Everyone is together in one place, one day, one moment. But that’s all a dream.

Instead, it’s only my parents and me at the table. Some people are able to see their family every single day or at least once a week, but my parents are forbidden to see their relatives. They went through a lot to get here, and they’ve never gone back to Guatemala. While they are grateful for the opportunities here, the borders they crossed are like a cage, keeping them from seeing their loved ones. So when I dream of a better future, I dream of a world without borders.

These boundaries keep our families apart. A few months before I was born, my dad received a call: my grandpa had passed. My dad had a hard time dealing with not being able to see his father during those last few days he was alive. This was devastating. I see other kids with their siblings, playing soccer, bonding, and telling each other jokes, but I only see my siblings every two years if I’m lucky. I can’t imagine how I would feel if my siblings were here. I know I wouldn’t feel as lonely as I do now. 

It’s not easy to be a child of immigrants, feeling scared every second of your life, and constantly thinking about “what ifs.” Last summer, when I was at camp in Maine, miles away from my parents, immigration police arrived on my first day. I wasn’t allowed to contact anyone, and I had a meltdown. It was heart-wrenching to think about being separated from my parents, and yet these borders have stopped my parents from doing the same—seeing their mothers forever. Can you imagine not being able to see your mother?

A borderless world is like an eagle soaring through the sky, completely free. In a borderless world, families would be united and everyone would live without fear of someone searching for them. In her YES! article “Alicia Garza: How to Prepare for 2020, author Kate Werning says, “We are often called to reflect on our lives, and how we want to mobilize for ourselves and our communities.” I often reflect on this beautiful dream that one day our world would be borderless, a dream that I will fight for.   

At the camp in Maine, I learned about the Hawaiian word ohana . Ohana is the spirit of family togetherness. It means that no one is ever going to be forgotten or left behind; they are stuck with each other no matter what. Ohana can also mean “nest,” which is where birds go to be safe with their families. Just like birds, immigrants want to be with their families in a safe space. Everyone together in one place, one day, one moment. 

Sary Barrios is a Guatemalan American student at Mamaroneck High School. Sary’s passion is to help others and give back to those who are in need of more. She has a huge love for her heritage and family.

Avery Chase

Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Mo.

There is a French photographer who said: “I will never be able to take a picture as beautiful as I see it in my eyes.”

Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) is a rare disease—there are less than 200,000 patients in the U.S. I was a competitive gymnast at nine years old. At a tournament,  I awkwardly dismounted from the bars and landed on my ankle. That moment changed my life. For the next eighteen months, I saw six doctors, four therapists, and three psychologists, took three  trips to different pain clinics, and missed about 100 days of school to search for answers to “the sprained ankle that could.” I was one of the “lucky” ones. That summer was a revolving door of experts dismissing me one after another.

The pain I experienced was beyond my ankle. I understand that I grew up differently, that most kids don’t divide their family moving cross-country for chronic pain rehabilitation. I have been living with CRPS for nine years—with a brief remission circa seventh grade—and a prognosis of “years to a lifetime.” Some days I’m better at accepting what I know and what I don’t. Other days it’s easier to lie in bed complacent to the pain. No matter what type of mindset, I must constantly strive to recover and hide disappointment every day that wasn’t pain-free. Outsiders haven’t seen the pictures I’ve seen—not through my eyes. Outsiders don’t know what it’s like to watch a 70-year-old squat better than you or realize that the only “record” you hold is “Longest-Stayed Patient,” not “Highest All-Around Score” in a gymnastics meet (where I really wanted to be).

It’s difficult to paint a picture of when my body physically shakes uncontrollably. My eyes scan it slowly, realizing my helplessness. Or the picture of mornings I wake up with a split lip after having habitually chewed it. Or the days I wish I wasn’t a breathing mortgage for my parents. Or the nights I spend praying for the safety switch, trusting my body will scientifically pass out if pain exceeds a threshold. There are still stories that I can’t tell and stories I don’t want to remember.

In psychologists’ offices, I go mad trying to cling onto any word I can to describe my pain, and, too often, I fail. In my wildest dream, I’m able to paint the masterpiece that finally allows people to understand the years and tears. Currently, I am trying for a picture-perfect life. I’m taking steps to overcome my highest anxieties by listening to doctors, pushing through compulsions, getting out of bed, and challenging cognitive distortions. I am living the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I know that the steps to overcome Chronic regional pain syndrome don’t necessarily mean a pain-free life. I can’t change the existence of the problem itself, but I can change the way I deal with the problem. In my wildest dream I can accept myself and whatever I accomplish, even if it is not perfect.  I can learn to accept that CRPS and everything it comes with will always be a part of my life, my disappointments, and my triumphs.

The pain translates to today. Every day, I make decisions based on that gymnastics meet nine years ago and the hundreds of hours of doctor’s appointments and clinic visits throughout the years. I wonder who I’d be if I skipped gymnastics that night. If Boston is simply a city with smart colleges, not just medical treatments. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand a life without my pain. What I do understand though is that being healed won’t change me. I know how it has influenced me, but I doubt I will ever stop learning either. For that reason, my life is a life with CRPS, with and without pain. I am who I am because of these experiences and the circumstances I have yet to face.

Avery Chase lives in St. Louis, Missouri, the city with the most neurotic weather in the country. Avery coaches gymnastics in her free time and has an irrational fear of cats. She plans to attend Kansas University and study social work.

Daniel Cook

Fighting the Undertow

Have you ever been caught in an undertow? Imagine swimming through waves—feeling the cool rush send a shock through your body— when a force begins pulling you away from the shore. You try swimming back to the beach but feel the current’s grip dragging you farther out to sea. After a minute, your arms and legs begin hurting. You start choking on water as you gasp for air. You attempt to yell for help only to be choked on by more water. Your mind is in a state of panic as your body begins shutting down. Suddenly, you remember what your parents told you, “Swim parallel to the shore.” You turn and start swimming again. Every muscle screams in agony, but you keep fighting. Finally, after what seems like an eternity, the force stops. Relief floods your mind. You slowly swim to the shore and crawl onto the sand. Falling flat on your back, you breathe peace back into your soul. 

Life is full of undertows. Today we are faced with so much political and social injustice that many people feel as if they are caught in an undertow of emotions. I was caught in this particular undertow for a while. As a gay male living in the Deep South, I have struggled with finding my place in society. I have often asked myself questions such as  “Who do I want to become?,” “What do I stand for?,” and “How can I help others?.” With the start of the new year, I have decided it is time to face these questions. 

I am an activist at heart. It is my purpose. With the help of the YES! article “How to Prepare for 2020” and Alicia Garza, I was able to pinpoint objectives that I should focus on instead of aimlessly treading through life, being swept further away from my goals. I want to be able to hold my husband’s hand in public without eyes glaring in our direction. I want to have a place of worship that accepts me. I want to be able to enroll my children in school without the fear of them being bullied for having gay parents. I want a job without having the fear of being dismissed because of my sexuality. I want to be seen as an equal instead of as an “other.” And most of all, I want to live in a world where I don’t have to fear being murdered like Matthew Shepard. 

In order to achieve all of this for myself and people like me, I have to be more active. The article helped me outline steps I can take within the next year to help myself and others in the LGBTQ+ community. These steps include getting involved with a local LGBTQ+ activist organization, getting trained in how to provide safe spaces for people to freely discuss issues affecting them, and reading more literature and research on LGBTQ+ issues while  making these resources more available to the public. If I can conquer these steps, I will have made 2020 worth wild. 

2020 is the year I have decided I will no longer be a victim of the undertow. By focusing on my goals and following steps to achieve them, I will have the knowledge and ability to get out of the treacherous current of fear and anxiety about being who I am. I will no longer drown in the self-doubt accompanied by not knowing what I stand for. I will glide through the waters of hate and social injustice and hopefully arrive one day on the shores of equality, love, and acceptance. 

Daniel Cook is a proud gay man. Daniel was born and raised in Alabama and embraces his Southern roots while also advocating against the social injustices around him. He wants to use his privilege to help others have their voices heard and dreams of a world where all lives are valued and no one is considered an “other.”

“Can I Dream?” Winner

Maitreya Motel

High Meadow School, Rosendale, N.Y.

Can I Dream?

How do you dream in a nightmare? How do you solve a puzzle when half of the pieces have been stolen? I remember being barely twelve years old when the shooting happened at Parkland. My dad held onto me like I would vanish any second, sobbing while we listened to the news. 

When you’re 12 years old, you’ve thought about death a lot in theory, but rarely in a way that’s grounded in reality. You normally aren’t considering, “Oh, it could happen like this. Someone could have a gun and you could be in the bathroom at the wrong time. Someone could have a gun and your sixth-grade classmates could sneeze at the wrong moment. Someone could have a gun and shoot you. And you won’t be able to say goodbye to your mom and dad or tell them how much you love them. When’s recess?” 

I guess kids used to dream about being movie stars and star football players and millionaires. Now, I look around and we’re praying to make it through high school. And beyond that? Will the planet be liveable? Will our kids be okay? We want answers and guarantees. Are there any guarantees anymore? Our dreams are survival based. How much can you dream before waking up again? 

But I do have a dream.

My dream is to have the luxury of dreaming. My dream is to live in a world where what matters most is that new movie or first date. My dream is for us to be kids again instead of feeling like the future is on our shoulders. If I lived in this world, I could breathe again. Maybe, just this once, I’d get to sleep.

Maitreya Motel, an eighth-grade student at High Meadow School in New York, has been writing and producing her political Vlog “Eye On Politics” since age 10. Maitreya has been a featured speaker at women’s marches, climate change events, and political rallies, and is a member of her town’s youth commission and her county’s climate-smart commission. Her best pals are her two rescue dogs, Jolene and Zena. 

Dear Theo, Kira, Athina, Sary, Avery, Daniel,  Maitreya,

Thank you so much for sharing your writing with all of us (and some of you have shared your essays in your own voice on the podcast, too!). It takes guts to be real and vulnerable in public—to share your struggles and to be audacious enough to have dreams & compelling visions in a world where there is so much suffering.

At Irresistible , we believe that healing and social transformation are deeply connected— and that a critical foundation for both is radical honesty. To face where we feel vulnerable and afraid and powerless. Where we’ve been humiliated, shortchanged, discriminated against, or told to give up. To really feel into those places, because our deepest truth is what connects us and can become the source of our greatest power. We have to be real with ourselves about what hurts and scares us most, and connect with others’ heartbreaks and fears to move in a journey toward change together.

I see that courage in each of you. Avery, we feel you so deeply when you say “It’s difficult to paint a picture of when my body physically shakes uncontrollably. My eyes scan it slowly, realizing my helplessness.” Athina, we connect when you talk about feeling like a “woman with no nation.” Theo, I remember when I’ve been there too when you say “Sharing dreams of how I could positively change the world makes me uncomfortable. Why would I open myself up to that level of critique, especially in middle school?”

Yet despite the discouragement and pain, you still have big dreams—and I want to live in these worlds you are visioning! Maitreya’s world, where kids “have the luxury of dreaming.”Sary’s “borderless world [that] is like an eagle, soaring through the sky, completely free.” Daniel’s world where he is “able to enroll [his] children in school without the fear of them being bullied for having gay parents.” I want to follow your leadership and the leadership of youth organizers all over the country—you truly are “ Generation Transformation .”

As Kira paints for us, “Maybe roots used to run where we couldn’t see them, connecting us to each other and spreading through the world like telephone lines across our continent.” I see each of you growing those intertwining roots through your commitments to working with refugees, volunteering with your local LGBTQ+ activist organization, and training your bodies and minds toward your goals.

Especially now, as 2020 is turning out so completely differently than any of us could have imagined, the moves you are making toward your visions are critical. I’ve often felt like my hard work trying to contribute to liberation movements has been futile, that the world is getting crueler in so many ways. But I also remember that even though I’m only 32 years old, I am amazed at how much has already changed radically in my lifetime— toward a world of more racial justice, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ & gender liberation, disability justice, and so much more. It does get better.

adrienne maree brown teaches us that in every small action we take, we shape change. Even under the intense conditions we currently face, this remains true. With our big visions as a strong north star, we find the next right move we can make toward freedom.

Keep dreaming, keep taking action, and keep sharing your story with powerful honesty. I’m right next to you on the journey.

—Kate Werning

We received many outstanding essays for the spring 2020 Student Writing Competition. Though not every participant can win the contest, we’d like to share some excerpts that caught our eye:

My wildest dreams would be a world filled with non-judgmental people, self expectations—not anybody else’s expectations of me—being me and loving it, less school stress, and, of course, free puppies! —Izzy Hughes, The Crest Academy, Salida, Colo.

I want to imagine a place where I can go wherever I want without having to worry about another person violating my body. No one should ever touch another person without their permission. That is what I want.  —Ruby Wilsford, Goodnight Middle School, San Marcos, Tex.  

Type 1 diabetes is not a choice or a result of poor life decisions. It is an autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks itself. How can Americans justify that it is acceptable to pay seventy-two times the worth of a life-or-death product? —Elise Farris, Spring Hill College, Mobile, Ala.

I was born on April 26, 2005, in a hospital in Appleton, Wisconsin, the home of the first hydropower plant and the “world-famous” Harry Houdini Museum. Then, at age three, my family moved to Beloit, Wisconsin, a town on the board of Wisconsin and Illinois. My parents sent me and my siblings to a Catholic school 12 miles north in a town called Janesville, Wisconsin. It was like living in two cities at once. My family lived in one and my friends and their families lived in the other. I thought the situation was fine, but as I got older, I started to notice things. I noticed how my friends felt uncomfortable when we went anywhere else in Beloit besides my house. I noticed how adults grimaced when I said I was from Beloit. And, suddenly, I felt my situation wasn’t fine. —Charlotte Mark, Craig High School, Janesville, Wis. 

Pandemics happen when we fail to be aware of how interrelated we really are—when we fail to note the doors we open, the hands we shake, and the spaces we share every day. Mindful of these connections, we realize that the health of one of us affects the health of all of us. We must care for our fellow beings, even if it means personal sacrifice. —Donald Wolford, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

I can help others, but I also need to know what to do when dark thoughts manifest in my own mind. —Natalie Streuli, Brier Middle School, Brier, Wash.  

If I’ve learned anything in the past 13 years, it’s that things never go as planned. Having a rough draft of your life is okay, but never expect it to turn exactly how you imagined. —Emerson Reed, The Crest Academy, Salida, Colo.

There are about 40 million food-insecure people in the United States and 13 million of those people are children … I want these people to go to sleep full and knowing that they will get another three meals tomorrow. —John Francis, Our Lady Star of the Sea, Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich.

… I was floating, levitating in midair when the voice began slowly whispering. His voice washed over my body like warm sunlight on a summer day. “This is what inner peace feels like. You tried your best and did the most you can, but to achieve this, you must continue on.” He disappeared and the world collapsed on itself. I was motivated to do better but now looking back I wish I had started sooner.   —Nicholas Tyner, American School of The Hague, Wassenaar, Netherlands

Failure isn’t a dangerous monster we should run from. It is a beautiful seed of a flower yet to blossom. —Jarrod Land, Mamaroneck High School, Mamaronec, N.Y.

I’ve yet to figure out how to complain about my perfectionist nature without it sounding like a twisted form of bragging. As it turns out, whining about being tired of trying so hard just makes it look like you’re fishing for praise. Ironically, you rarely get either.  —Claire Beck, Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Mo.

I can never talk to my parents about my feelings directly because what goes into the pot is an argument and what comes out is unsolved problem soup with a side of tears. —Tracee Nguyen, President William McKinley High School, Honolulu, Hawai’i

I’m not exactly sure what I want to be when I grow up, but I am certain that it’s not going to require me to know how to find points on a graph or to understand slope intercept form, well at least not to the point that I need to study the subject for months on end, and why do I need to know how to find the cubed root of a six-digit number on paper? Who doesn’t have access to a calculator? —Lauren Ragsdale, Lincoln Middle School, Ypsilanti, Mich. 

I can’t truly say how many nights I’ve spent tossing and turning because something was crawling around in my head. The anxiety smothering any free thoughts I had, forcing me to stay awake, and to start questioning every choice I’ve ever made. Those nights are always the hardest considering who I want to be: somebody who believes without fear of judgment, somebody who loves who they are, somebody who helps without prompting. —Daniel Heineman, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

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Dream Vs Reality Analytical Essay

Dream vs. reality: essay introduction, dreams: a historical perspective, dreams vs reality, sleeping and dreaming, psychology dreaming, accessing physical experiences, dreams and reality: essay conclusion, works cited.

The concept of dreams has eluded even the most renowned philosophers and psychologists, including Aristotle, Plato, and Sigmund Freud. Plato likened dreams to a presentation that we experience while sleeping (Hamilton, Cairns and Cooper 571). Modern psychology seems to have borrowed the definition of a dream from Plato’s, in that they have defined dreams as sequences of experiences borne of imagination during sleep (Dennett 129).

The aim of this statement of intent is to provide a more holistic definition of dreams from both a historical as well as a modern perspective. There is often a very thin line between “dreams” and “reality”. As such, it is indispensable to examine such a link.

Sigmund Freud commenced his psychoanalytical study on dreams in 1900 with a complaint that philosophers viewed his idea of dreams as second-rate and intellectually unworthy (Freud 5). In his article, ‘Dreams’, Manser opines that Freud had “littler to say about the nature of dreams which is of interest to the philosopher” (415). There appears to be little attention devoted to the concept of dream by philosophers, even as the topic puzzled such renowned philosophers as Aristotle and Plato.

There is a need to define what dreaming is, and how one may distinguish between reality and dreams. From a historical point of view, dreams are a frightening and puzzling phenomenon. Prehistorically, ancestors also viewed dreams as messages sent to them by demons and gods. To the fatalist, dreams are portents or omens of future events.

Ancient Greek philosophers adopted a rather rational naturalist approach to dreams. Aristotle provided the definition of dreams as that experience one has in his/her sleep (Ross 56). On the other hand, Plato defined dreams as the visions that we always recall in our waking hours (Hamilton et al 571). Modern psychology appears to have adopted the Aristotelian stance: dreams are sequences of experiences borne of imagination during sleep (Dennett 129).

Nietzsche’s argument blaming the belief in ghosts, gods, resurrection and life after death on the doorstep of the dream was sensible (LaBerge 231). Supposing that, the idea of soul-body arose from subjective experiences in the dream world, whether or not the soul was an objective reality depended on reality insight placed on the dream.

If, in ancient times, human believed that they had discovered a second real world in a dream, what did that mean? Was it a mere intuitively verifiable existence? Few possibilities exist in an attempt to solve the mystery of these questions. Whether dreams are real and if they are, how do they compare to physical reality in terms of the mental truths (LaBerge 231).

Two issues emerged – one was the extent to which an experience appears to be subjectively real. The second was the extent the experience appears to be objectively real (this was independent of the first). Simple logic affirms that something exists only if it can cause an effect on another thing (LaBerge 233). Therefore, since it is extraordinarily difficult to interact with a dream physically, proving that it existed in reality was exceedingly difficult.

The line between dream and reality is often frightfully thin. Although one can hardly control the contents of their sleep compared with those of waken imagination and daydreams, on the other hand, dreams appear to have a stronger false impression of reality. Baudrillard opines that our cultural products do not distort or reflect a basic existing reality anymore; instead, the absence of reality seems to have been concealed (262).

The emergence of novel computer and media technologies presents yet another challenge to the reality vs. dream issue, because, through this interaction, we can immerse in virtual reality. Consequently, we cease being external observers per se and partake in a synthesis of “cyberspace” borne of our association with computer technology. Virtual reality has effectively ended the conventional technological dream of establishing an ideal illusion of reality.

From the historical perspective, it was understood that dream were mystifying, as human awoke to self-consciousness to consciousness of mortality. Many people came up with religious and magical explanations to explain the strange visions they experienced during sleep (Dennett 130). This introduced thoughts like the ability of the soul to depart the body and travel to other places. The possibility of the dead and the living interacting were a possibility. Some even believed that, dreams in sleep were messages from gods or destiny.

Philosophers like Plato emerged with rational naturalist approaches, characterizing dreams as visions in people (Plato 571), remembered in reality.

Aristotle, on the other hand, put it that dreams were some presentation or imagination, specifically those that occurred during sleep (Dennett 130). Aristotle affirms that dream were not God-sent neither did they present any future predictions (Ross 46). Yet, sometimes, dream could be an inspiration for future happenings.

Plato, being more imaginative, compared mad people with sleepers and found that, their thought were false, for instance, feeling of flying. Plato realized that, however much decent man appeared, there was always a low and licentious point of experiences during dreams (Plato 571). This thought anticipated that Freud’s idea of many-layered organization of human consciousness (Freud, “Introductory Lectures” 21).

Freud’s theory purports rest as a function of sleep, which could be well experienced in dreamless sleep. However, when control of the daytime consciousness was resting in sleep, the subconscious mental process continues to work on an immature level (Freud “Introductory Lectures” 21).

Therefore, dreams were regressive. They go back to visual images, more so the primary sexual desires (Freud, “Interpretation of Dreams” 67). An idea that Freud added to Plato’s theory of dream-work: dreams guaranteed sleep, blocked censorship, by revisiting the original latent dream idea, and then disguising its manifestation (Plato 571).

As people argue, we spend about one third of our lives in sleep, it is crucial to conduct extensive research to understand dream and sleep. Study of sleep and dream shows proof of principal experiences in sleep, for instance, the sleep-wake cycle, sleep disorders, sleep regulations and snoring among others (LaBerge 233).

Based on the nature of scientific studies, the studies of sleep often look at physical signs like body temperatures, eye movement, and blood pressure. philosophers cannot hence be able to use these data to draw conclusions. Philosophy is more interested in a dream while psychology deals with the sleeping process. Therefore, studying dreaming and sleeping will require the use of internal mental processes and reactions to interpret what happens in sleep in external viewpoint (Ross 49).

Connecting the internal and external features becomes intricate. Having no characteristics and stable variables to use for studying dreams, little research is available on the topic compared to other topics like reasoning, memory, Imagination and beliefs. Dreams still puzzle people since the times of Plato, and Aristotle. Concerns of how to identify dreams, individual and social function of dreams, and the logic behind dreaming, lead to metaphysics, mind philosophy, culture and epistemology. Dreaming hence remains fascinating.

Dreaming is a fascinating experience and rather under-researched. Dreams also challenge the real life experiences and the fact that human think they understand consciousness and conscious (Freud, “Introductory Lectures” 21). There are numerous theories of the mind that do not dream and reality.

Hence, they are incomplete. Scholars can be motivated to be more imaginative about dreaming, and to include it in a number of philosophical topics because of they will draw defined pedagogical utilities. The study of sleep and dreaming by use of inventive experiments developed by psychologist form an exceptional way of studying physiology and phenomenology, and experiential and conceptual approaches in the study of mind.

Despite the discovery of the fascinating rapid eye movement (REM) sleep relationship with dreams, there has not been much thoughtful derivative of the mind philosophy. Epistemologists still use dream concepts to address skepticism, has barely influenced the active self-image of mainstream philosophy of mind.

It is often difficult to measure dream for study especially when comparing dream and reality because, one has to do comparison against real-life events (Metzinger 528). However, the better way to study dream and reality is to compare dream metal event against wake mental events. A number of experiences can e improbable in physical reality but intensely easily to imagine in a dream. Only a broad perceptual (Hallucinatory) model of dreaming has compared dream and reality.

There is a new focus on lucid dreaming and lucid. Some evidence has indicated that, people experiencing lucid dream were also likely to fluctuate between viewpoints dream and mental life. A lucid dreamer always knows that the existing world of the dream was not real (Metzinger 530).

Metzinger suggested that a lucid dreamer understood the phenomenon they experienced did not vary with external physical reality in content. To the farthest, lucid dreamer can recollect full memory and remember at least some characteristics of phenomenology of agency (Metzinger 530).

In his study on children’s dream, Foulkes recommended research on the connection between dreaming and skills of imagination and manipulation of patterns (Foulkes 9). Probably, visual-spatial capacities somehow assisted in generation of continuous kinematic imagery typical of happier dreams.

Too young children had rather static dreams. Foulkes connects the continued production of spontaneous kinematics imagery. In a study lab of young adults, participants were to respond on whether they saw themselves the way another person would do, or whether they saw the dream in their own eyes (Foulkes 9). A remarkably small percentage saw themselves in the dream. They did not experience kinematic imagery.

However, seeing the dream in their own eyes saw the dreamers experienced much kinematic imagery. Research that explicitly question subjects to specify a certain perspective of their dream and memory experience is not a vital choice in this fascinating domain. Most people impulsively flip between perspectives and confidence retrospective judgment of the dream is not always high.

Our mental health depends on dreams. Through science, one can understand nature better is by first achieving harmony. However, perhaps we need not be so concerned with turning dreams into reality; instead, we should just let them remain dreams. Are Dreams Functional? Currently, there are many logical reasons of functional and the way dreams appeared different from sense of function.

Even though there are incredible adaptationist accounts for sleep and phases of the sleep-cycle itself, there is reason to perceive that mental activity that took place in sleep was an authentic example of byproduct of what was designed during sleep-wake cycle. If this was right, there would be a situation where dreaming was mysteriously an uncontrolled sequeale, a spandrel and exaptation.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Precession of Simulacra . New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984. Print.

Dennett, Dan. Are Dreams Experiences ? In Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology . Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981. Print.

Foulkes, David. Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1999. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams . London: Allen & Unwin, 1951. Print.

Hamilton, Edith, Huntington Cairns, and Lane Cooper. The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters . Princeton: Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005. Print.

LaBerge, Stephen. Dreaming, Illusion, And Reality in Lucid Dreaming . New York: Ballantine, 1985. Print.

Manser, Paul. Dreams, in P. Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy . London: Collier and Macmillan, 1967. Print.

Metzinger, Thomas. Being No-one: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Print.

Plato, Aristocles. The Collected Dialogues . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Print.

Ross, William. Aristotle . London: Routledge, 1995. Print.

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Reader Essay: A Letter To My Younger Self

Dearest Younger Self,

Today will most likely be another day where you sit behind a closed door that your parents refuse to open. Today will most likely be another day where you wonder if there will ever be a time when things won’t feel this way.

The years will teach you that children deserve unconditional love, attention, and acceptance as they grow into the people they are meant to become. And it pains me to admit there will be many times in your life when you do not receive that. I am so sorry.

“There are people who will need you. There are things that only you can do. There is a purpose for your life.”

But, I do promise things won’t always be this way. You won’t always wonder if your parents will come out to play or if your next meal will be more than just cereal and milk. You won’t always have to take care of your brothers or make sure someone wakes up in time to take you to school.

There will be moments where you question yourself, your existence, your “why.” Honestly, the first twenty years of your life will be a really hard journey. One where you need an outlet to get you to the other side. There will even come a moment in time when you do not know how to move forward.

And in that moment, you’ll know the one, I want you to remember one thing and one thing only — you are important. There are people who will need you. There are things that only you can do. There is a purpose for your life.

Hold on for just a little while longer, darling. In just a matter of minutes, the sun will start to peek through the clouds.

“In that moment, the one where you think you might not make it through one more day of clouds and rain, I want you to create. “

But until then, walk back to your room where your books and Walkman and colored pencils lie scattered across the floor — and in that moment, the one where you think you might not make it through one more day of clouds and rain, I want you to create.

Do the one thing where there are absolutely no boundaries . The one thing that helps you express yourself and dream and speak , all in one place. It may be the only thing you know how to do for a while, and that is more than okay. You will thank God that you know how to do it when you need it most.

It will help you understand that you can create the life you have always dreamed of. When you combine all of those hopes and dreams with that strong imagination of yours, you will create something absolutely beautiful that this world has never seen.

“When you combine all of those hopes and dreams with that strong imagination of yours, you will create something absolutely beautiful.”

And because of that, you will not only be free from what you are feeling at this moment, you will also become everything you want and need. Your dreams will be what propels you forward and helps you escape all of this.

Now, I’m going to let you in on a little secret… I’m writing to you today because I just discovered something very special about us. I won’t spoil the fun of how I discovered this, but I will tell you what it is.

One day when that closed door is just a distant memory locked in the confines of your mind, and you are spending your life creating what you love most, you will take a look at where you are and realize: We made it.

We defied the odds. We took something ugly and painful and turned it into someone you are extremely proud of. You took the broken dishes and trinkets and ink and combined them into a story to tell. And that story may very well be what helps those around you hold on. Helps those around you feel seen.

“The icing on the cake is that you will tell this story from a safe place — your home. “

And the icing on the cake is that you will tell this story from a safe place — your home.

One day you will own a home with a door that remains open for anyone who needs a place to run to — a place of solace, a sanctuary from the outside world where they know the only thing they need to do in your home, in your presence, is just be .

“You will learn that there will always be something going on in the background of your life, but it won’t feel nearly as impossible as it once did.”

The very thing that you need in this moment in your youth, will turn out to make up the essence of who you are as a woman — kind, free, and loving.

You will learn that there will always be something going on in the background of your life, but it won’t feel nearly as impossible as it once did. One day, you will start to desire the things to come, and realize that you will give love, receive it, and finally feel like you deserve it.

I know you may not be able to see the possibility of this yet, and it will take a long time for you to discover the sunshine that is waiting for you, but I’m planting the seed now so that you can have hope for a better future. Good things are coming.

So, promise me that you will just hold on for a little while longer to experience the joy you have always wished for. For in just a few years, your life will feel very, very special.

The Woman You’ll Become

Madison Leigh King is an author, writer, and copywriter from North Carolina. Avid reader turned writer, she draws inspiration from her favorite works and interweaves personal experience into what she creates. She loves sharing stories over coffee, prioritizing movement, and spending slow mornings in her Southeastern home. Follow along on her journey as she writes her first novel on Instagram and TikTok.

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Essay on My Dream

List of essays on my dream in english, essay on my dream – essay 1 (100 words), essay on my dream – essay 2 (250 words), essay on my dream to become a soldier – essay 3 (300 words), essay on my dream and fears – essay 4 (300 words), essay on my dream life – essay 5 (400 words), essay on my dream to become a doctor – essay 6 (400 words), essay on my dream – essay 7 (750 words), essay on my dream – essay 8 (1000 words).

Every night I dream of living a life of a celebrity. In my dream I see myself dressed up like a model posing for cameras. It is my dream to work in the film industry and become famous. But, for that, I will have to work really hard. My mother always tells me to concentrate on studies and live up to the dream of becoming a model. My father also supports me and he says that he believes in me. Once he told me that I should help others and be in good books of the people to win their heart as it will help me make my dream come true.

Every day I like to take some time aside from my responsibilities to think about my dreams and all the goals I want to achieve. My dream is to become a successful businessman. Business is something that has always intrigued me. As my father is a businessman, since childhood, I had this keen interest to be a part of or to lead a business.

Only having a dream won’t help, I also need to work towards the achievement of my dream. As doing business is not as easy as it seems, first I need to understand the basics of what business actually is. This will the first step towards my dream. So after completing my intermediary, I have enrolled myself in a reputed college to do my Bachelors in Business Administration (BBA). After completing BBA, I will also do my Masters in Business Administration. By then I will have gained the complete knowledge on business and its functioning which will help me reach my dream.

Apart from the theoretical part, I can always count on my father to share with me the practical experiences and advices that will help me shape my dream. This will take me closer to my dream of becoming a successful businessman. I have also started reading magazines about successful businessmen and their success stories in order to gain some idea that will help me in the long. I will put the best of my efforts and work hard towards achieving my dream.

Introduction:

My dream to become a Soldier started on an Army Day (January 15th), when I was still in High School. I witnessed the tribute paid to martyred soldiers at the Amar Jawan Jyoti in India Gate. It was followed by parades displaying Tanks, Missiles, and War Helicopters etc. The impression I received that day motivates me to realise my dream to become a Soldier.

Love of a Soldier:

The history of Indian independence and the life of freedom fighters has always fascinated me. Those who were responsible for the air of freedom we breathe today, loved our motherland and dedicated their lives to its well-being. These seeds in me have developed a sense of love for the country. It has also nurtured my dream to become a soldier and safeguard it.

Spirit of a Soldier:

Apart from academics, I started to collect all details about how to realise my dream to become a Soldier. I began to understand the values that inspire a Soldier to willingly face challenges and responsibly safeguard the nation even at the cost of his own life. This inspired me to study well and keep myself fit to achieve my dream to become a Soldier.

Training of a Soldier:

I also understood about the training before service. The feeling of pride and mutual loyalty is imbibed among the trainees. They are also trained to willing sacrifice for the country’s honour, with a do or die spirit. A sense of fearlessness, fairness and honesty are inculcated during the disciplined training. These components further kindled my dream to become a Soldier.

Lifestyle of a Soldier:

On the one hand, the soldier’s life is a life of self-sacrifice. On the other hand, the lifestyle it offers far exceeds my expectation, and fuels my dream to become a Soldier. Opportunities to advance in ranks, paid study holidays, subsidized housing, free medical coverage and recreational facilities are provided, apart from regular salary and perks. Lifelong pension is awarded after retirement.

Conclusion:

Many young people in the country offer the time of their life to work for big Corporates. But, I am here to pursue my dream to become a Soldier and dedicate my life to the welfare of the nation. I often encourage my friends to follow my dream to become a Soldier, at least for a short service tenure ranging from 10 to 14 years.

At a very early age, my dream was to do something big in life. But along with that I still had some fears also. I want to have a successful career, and for this, I had set an aim. It is quite essential for everybody to get them to establish professionally and successfully. Besides this, few other dreams are also necessary for me like health, relationships, and many different aspects of life. However, I also fear to get fail in achieving all these targets.

Career Dream and Fear:

When I was a kid, my dream was to become a doctor. But during my growing age, the Bollywood industry fascinated me and then my dream of becoming doctor changed to an actor. When I passed my class 12 th , the only goal that hit my mind was becoming an engineer. I always fear of dreaming about big things, but if you have potential then, you can achieve anything in life.

Dream and Fear of Health and Fitness:

When I was young, I was not so much concerned about my health. But now I realized the importance of having good health. My dream of becoming fit and healthy was only achieved due to strong willpower and eagerness of doing regular exercise. With this thought, I managed to lose around 15 kg easily. Now, I don’t fear about eating any food as I compensate that with my daily workout.

Dreams and fear about the relationship:

There is a special place of relationships in my life, and sometimes I fear about losing the important people in my life. But, now I realize that instead of thinking negative, we should try to spend more time with the people. It is as essential as my dream of good career.

Thinking only about the career and success with the little amount of fear might not offer you complete happiness later. It is good to become serious about your career, but you should also try to overcome any fear for a more successful life ahead.

Life is a dynamic process that has its ups and downs. Juggling the disparities of life can be very stressful at times and that is why you get your mind wondering in thoughts. Most thoughts are usually based on what people desire, which we call the dream life. The desires in life may not always be achieved but it is good to have a picture or at least an idea of the kind of life on desires to have. In America, people have the American dream but you as an individual should ask yourself; what is your dream life?

How my dream life looks like:

Socially, I have always imagined myself being a very influential person in my society. Currently in school, I always have the urge to influence someone but I still lack the confidence and resources to do so. I have always wanted to travel the world and explore different cultures of the world through interactions with people. I also imagine of having a great family with whom I can travel the world with.

Career-wise, I want to work at the comfort of my own home and be flexible so that I can always have time for my family. Spiritually, I have a desire to always be in good terms with God and follow the doctrines of my religion.

Economically, I want to be self-actualized at an early age so that I can focus on my influential personality, having all the resources I need. I want to be satisfied with what I will have achieved and work on living a happy life.

How I plan on living my dream life?

Living the dream life can begin any time that you chose to be as an individual. For my dream life, the things that I can achieve while still at school is the ability to have a spiritual wellness and flowing the doctrines of my religion. I can also start learning to appreciate whatever I have and living a happy life.

For the desires that I cannot achieve at the moment, I will work towards achieving them by shaping and redirecting the pathway. For example, my career, I will pursue something in the university that will allow me to work from home without necessarily going to work.

A dream life is basically the desired of one’s heart inform of an imagination. A dream life does not affect the reality in any way.

A dream is something that helps you to mold your future and aim your life to an appropriate goal. Dreaming big will help us to work for it harder and finally achieve it. Without desire and aim in life, we cannot focus and work hard to fulfill our dream.

My Dream to become a Doctor:

The biggest dream of my life is to become a doctor. I have seen many doctors, who save other people’s lives and they feel happy in the satisfaction they get through this activity. I want to be a doctor, who will serve good for this society and help poor to get good medical care without expecting big money in return.

Doctors are respected in all places and among all types of society. In spite of being different in many things like wealth, religion, etc., everyone will be in need of the best doctor to treat them honestly. I dream of being one such doctor to whom anyone can come without any doubt and fear of being tricked.

I don’t want to be a doctor who just works for money. I want to help others who can’t afford big budget treatments and choose their fate due to their lack of money. When a person is cured of their illness, the smile that appears on their face will be the greatest reward I will ever get. My dream is to become a doctor, who is praised for the kindness and get rewards through others blessings.

How to become a Doctor?

To get the admissions in a medical seat is not that easy. But I will work hard and crack the competitive exam to get a merit seat in the college. I will work hard from the beginning to end to improve my knowledge and keep updated about every upcoming and ongoing development.

I would like to choose the specialization when I can actually decide which one will suit my desire. I have an aim to serve the people in their needs and once I grow big enough to decide the correct career to fulfill my dream, I will work harder to achieve that as well.

After achieving My Dream:

Once I complete my whole medical courses I would be looking to practice in a well-reputed hospital to perfect my job. With this perfection I will start my own clinic and serve people for the rest of my life along with this I will help other students also to get trained to become a good doctor. I will make sure that my dream will come true at the best time.

We all have some sort of ambition or dream. My dream is to become a world class chef. Dreams play a very important role in moulding our future. There is a saying that “if you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it”. This saying implies that if you can work hard and put in your best to achieving your dream, it is very possible to live your dream. Working hard to achieve ones dream is easier said than done but if you put in your best effort and never give up, dreams are achievable.

In the path of achieving my dream, it is important that I take one step at a time. Even if I have a very big dream of becoming a word class chef, it is best for me to take steady and small steps by setting both long term and short term goals, by doing this, I am always working towards achieving my dream. When I take one step at a time, it helps not to rush into decisions and take things easy.

I know becoming a world class chef is not very easy and can only happen if complete and proper training from a very reputable institute and there isn’t much I can do at the moment to speed up the realisation of my dream since I am still in school. However, I still do my best to set my dream rolling, I follow a lot of cooking websites and blogs, watch cooking shows, read culinary books and I practice my cooking to sharpen my skills every time. These are all little steps I am taking towards achieving my dream. Though my goal is to become a world class chef, I have small goals in place for each month and year to come so that I can reach my dream.

A major hindrance to achieving my set goals and my dream is the lack of inadequacy of motivation. A lot of people have given up their goals and dreams just because they got tired on the way. It is extremely important to remain motivated and only stop is when the dream has been achieved. Highlighted below are some useful tips that I have used to keep myself motivated on the journey to reaching my dream:

i. Anytime I see that I am running out of drive and energy and I am becoming too tired to stick to my set goals, I try to remind myself of what my dream is and the feeling of pride and joy I will experience when I achieve it and become a world class chef. It feels like pressing a reset button and starting with a refreshed mind again and working harder towards achieving my dream.

ii. Long term goals and short term goals are set towards the ultimate goal of achieving my dream and as I reach these short term goals, I try to reward myself for my achievement. The reward can vary from eating dinner at my favourite restaurant or buying myself a new phone I wanted or going out with my friends. Rewarding myself is a very good way to remain motivated towards the achievements of my goals and ultimately my dream.

iii. When I work too much and have no time to relax and play, my productivity drops and I become dull. Therefore, it is a good idea to have some time for myself away from work to focus on something fun that I love. I find time in my schedule every day to engage in some form of leisure activity or sport.

iv. Having people who believes in my dream and support my goals around me makes all the difference. Having positive people helps me find the strength and courage to push on and not give up on my dream. They motivate me to work hard and do the best to achieve my goals and my dream.

v. A mistake is nothing more than an experience and an opportunity to try again and do things much better. So, instead of getting heartbroken and disheartened to the point of wanting to give up on my goals and dream when I face a tough time or make mistakes, I learn from the mistakes and move on as the tough times and mistakes make me a lot stronger.

I will keep working hard towards achieving my dream and I believe that I will become a world class chef one day.

Who in this world does not have a dream? A dream to buy a car, a dream to be a scientist, a dream to do something for the society, or just a dream to live a life with contentment. Something or the other, but surely every person has a dream. It is this dream that drives you to work hard, achieve your milestones and ride towards success in your life. Success need not be becoming the wealthiest person on the earth. Achieving even your smallest dream can be a huge success for you. Since childhood, you come across various fields which often you think of as your ultimate targets. However, most of them are just fantasies and fade away with time. Still, there are some things which just stick on to your minds and these very things eventually go on to be your dreams.

My Dream – My Passion:

Like others, even I have a dream. My dream is to join the intelligence unit of the country and serve my country with pride. Usually, in order to serve the country, people think of joining the armed forces. However, I have a different point of view. I dream to join the intelligence unit and provide inputs to these armed forces so that they can protect the country in a good way and not many lives are lost fight battles with our neighbours.

Where did it all start?

Since my childhood, I have been fascinated by the role of intelligence and the methods of work they are used to. I had got a chance to be with a couple of people early in my life who were in the same field and it is from here that I got so much stuck up with this profession that I have dreamt day and night to be a part of this elite team. Moreover, I feel that I have it in me to research about things as well as people and am known in my circles to extract information from nowhere. I feel that this talent of mine can prove helpful for the country as well. Intelligence plays a crucial role in the security establishment of the country. The inputs gathered from intelligence units help the government and the forces to plan their steps both at diplomatic and at the level of securing the borders.

Another thing which excites me about this dream is that it is not a conventional field such as common occupations which are sought after by most of the youth of our country. Another very important thing to mention here that you need not formally join the intelligence to realise this dream. By keeping a check on your surroundings and providing proper information to the police in case you notice an unfavourable incident is also a form of your contribution to the security agencies of the country. If everyone remains active, a lot many incidents such as terrorist attacks can be averted.

Why having a dream is so important?

Dreams are very important for everyone. Without dreams, there will be no desire to pursue. There will be no objective to reach. We will all be nothing without dreams. Not having dreams resembles pursuing a traceless homicide. It resembles following an undetectable shadow. It is a loathsome goose pursue. We should comprehend what we need to do and pursue that desire.

A great many people have dreams. Successful ones or little ones. Indeed, even the best individuals had dreams and that is the thing that has made them what they are today. Envisioning is basic for a person. Without dreams, you will lose enthusiasm forever lastly prefer not to live. You will be exhausted and tired of the equivalent dull schedules of your everyday life and won’t discover an enthusiasm for the most energizing things. Just with dreams, will you discover a reason to carry on with your life? You will begin buckling down towards the fantasy and will never lose enthusiasm forever. You will never tire and dependably be spurred. This is the most ideal approach to end up effective. So, dream and dream big. It is the only way to achieve contentment in life.

Be that as it may, with dreams, comes extraordinary duty. It is not just sufficient to dream and disregard that fantasy. Numerous individuals dream, however just some wake up and work for it.

It is basic to buckle down for your fantasies. Without this diligent work, a fantasy will just remain a craving in the subliminal personality and will never be accomplished.

On the off chance that you don’t have a fantasy, you can never appreciate the extravagances of life or all that life brings to the table. You will never feel that delighted sentiment of accomplishment. You will never get pride in what you do and what you have accomplished. Every one of these things is vital for people and without these emotions, there is no inspiration.

In the event that you don’t have inspiration, you will be a disappointment throughout everyday life. You won’t have the capacity to accomplish those objectives and will have a hopeless existence. You will never appreciate the extravagances of life and you will never feel glad. You will be a disappointment and you will be nothing throughout everyday life. We should go that additional mile to achieve our objectives. Disappointments may come, however a state of mind to continue proceeding onward and attempting to enhance is completely accomplished by dreams. Dreams are the fuel that continues invigorating you to go further. Regardless of whether there are numerous snags throughout everyday life, you will, in general, continue moving further and attempting to be superior to anything your identity. Consistent and endless enhancement is extremely imperative in advancing throughout everyday life. It improves your identity and furthermore whatever you need to advance in. It causes you to gain from your missteps

Only having career objectives and succeeding professionally can disregard you after one point throughout everyday life. Work as constantly to accomplish these as you do to understand your ultimate dreams. Having a dream is not important. What is important is striving continuously to achieving it. The sense of satisfaction you acquire once you have attained your goals cannot be explained in words and has no alternative in life. So, strive hard and live your dreams. Who knows, what is there in store for you?

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Dreams and Dreaming

Dreams and dreaming have been discussed in diverse areas of philosophy ranging from epistemology to ethics, ontology, and more recently philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This entry provides an overview of major themes in the philosophy of sleep and dreaming, with a focus on Western analytic philosophy, and discusses relevant scientific findings.

1.1 Cartesian dream skepticism

1.2 earlier discussions of dream skepticism and why descartes’ version is special, 1.3 dreaming and other skeptical scenarios, 1.4 descartes’ solution to the dream problem and real-world dreams, 2.1 are dreams experiences, 2.2 dreams as instantaneous memory insertions, 2.3 empirical evidence on the question of dream experience, 2.4 dreams and hallucinations, 2.5 dreams and illusions, 2.6 dreams as imaginative experiences, 2.7 dreaming and waking mind wandering, 2.8 the problem of dream belief, 3.1 dreaming as a model system and test case for consciousness research, 3.2 dreams, psychosis, and delusions, 3.3 beyond dreams: dreamless sleep experience and the concepts of sleep, waking, and consciousness, 4. dreaming and the self, 5. immorality and moral responsibility in dreams, 6.1 the meaning of dreams, 6.2 the functions of dreaming, 7. conclusions, other internet resources, related entries, 1. dreams and epistemology.

Dream skepticism has traditionally been the most famous and widely discussed philosophical problem raised by dreaming (see Williams 1978; Stroud 1984). In the Meditations , Descartes uses dreams to motivate skepticism about sensory-based beliefs about the external world and his own bodily existence. He notes that sensory experience can also lead us astray in commonplace sensory illusions such as seeing things as too big or small. But he does not think such cases justify general doubts about the reliability of sensory perception: by taking a closer look at an object seen under suboptimal conditions, we can easily avoid deception. By contrast, dreams suggest that even in a seemingly best-case scenario of sensory perception (Stroud 1984), deception is possible. Even the realistic experience of sitting dressed by the fire and looking at a piece of paper in one’s hands (Descartes 1641: I.5) is something that can, and according to Descartes often does, occur in a dream.

There are different ways of construing the dream argument. A strong reading is that Descartes is trapped in a lifelong dream and none of his experiences have ever been caused by external objects (the Always Dreaming Doubt ; see Newman 2019). A weaker reading is that he is just sometimes dreaming but cannot rule out at any given moment that he is dreaming right now (the Now Dreaming Doubt ; see Newman 2019). This is still epistemologically worrisome: even though some of his sensory-based beliefs might be true, he cannot determine which these are unless he can rule out that he is dreaming. Doubt is thus cast on all of his beliefs, making sensory-based knowledge slip out of reach.

Cartesian-style skeptical arguments have the following form (quoted from Klein 2015):

• If I know that p , then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that p .
• U is a genuine ground for doubting that p .
• Therefore, I do not know that p .

If we apply this to the case of dreaming, we get:

• If I know that I am sitting dressed by the fire, then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that I am really sitting dressed by the fire.
• If I were now dreaming, this would be a genuine ground for doubting that I am sitting dressed by the fire: in dreams, I have often had the realistic experience of sitting dressed by the fire when I was actually lying undressed in bed!
• Therefore, I do not know that I am now sitting dressed by the fire.

Importantly, both strong and weak versions of the dream argument cast doubt only on sensory-based beliefs, but leave other beliefs unscathed. According to Descartes, that 2+3=5 or that a square has no more than 4 sides is knowable even if he is now dreaming:

although, in truth, I should be dreaming, the rule still holds that all which is clearly presented to my intellect is indisputably true. (Descartes 1641: V.15)

By Descartes’ lights, dreams do not undermine our ability to engage in the project of pure, rational enquiry (Frankfurt 1970; but see Broughton 2002).

Dream arguments have been a staple of philosophical skepticism since antiquity and were so well known that in his objections to the Meditations , Hobbes (1641) criticized Descartes for not having come up with a more original argument. Yet, Descartes’ version of the problem, more than any other, has left its mark on the philosophical discussion.

Earlier versions tended to touch upon dreams just briefly and discuss them alongside other examples of sensory deception. For example, in the Theaetetus (157e), Plato has Socrates discuss a defect in perception that is common to

dreams and diseases, including insanity, and everything else that is said to cause illusions of sight and hearing and the other senses.

This leads to the conclusion that knowledge cannot be defined through perception.

Dreams also appear in the canon of standard skeptical arguments used by the Pyrrhonists. Again, dreams and sleep are just one of several conditions (including illness, joy, and sorrow) that cast doubt on the trusthworthiness of sensory perception (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers; Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism) .

Augustine ( Against the Academics ; Confessions) thought the dream problem could be contained, arguing that in retrospect, we can distinguish both dreams and illusions from actual perception (Matthew 2005: chapter 8). And Montaigne ( The Apology for Raymond Sebond ) noted that wakefulness itself teems with reveries and illusions, which he thought were even more epistemologically worrisome than nocturnal dreams.

Descartes devoted much more space to the discussion of dreaming and cast it as a unique epistemological threat distinct from both waking illusions and evil genius or brain-in-a-vat-style arguments. His claim that he has often been deceived by his dreams implies he also saw dreaming as a real-world (rather than merely hypothetical) threat.

This is further highlighted by the intimate, first-person style of the Meditations . Their narrator is supposed to exemplify everyone’s epistemic situation, illustrating the typical defects of the human mind. Readers are further drawn in by Descartes’ strategy of moving from commonsense examples towards more sophisticated philosophical claims (Frankfurt 1970). For example, Descartes builds up towards dream skepticism by first considering familiar cases of sensory illusions and then deceptively realistic dreams.

Finally, much attention has been devoted to several dreams Descartes reportedly had as a young man. Some believe these dreams embodied theoretical doubts he developed in the Discourse and Meditations (Baillet 1691; Leibniz 1880: IV; Cole 1992; Keefer 1996). Hacking (2001:252) suggests that for Descartes, dream skepticism was not just a philosophical conundrum but a source of genuine doubt. There is also some discussion about the dream reports’ authenticity (Freud 1940; Cole 1992; Clarke 2006; Browne 1977).

In the Meditations , after discussing the dream argument, Descartes raises the possibility of an omnipotent evil genius determined to deceive us even in our most basic beliefs. Contrary to dream deception, Descartes emphasizes that the evil genius hypothesis is a mere fiction. Still, it radicalizes the dream doubt in two respects. One, where the dream argument left the knowability of certain general truths intact, these are cast in doubt by the evil genius hypothesis . Two, where the dream argument, at least on the weaker reading, involves just temporary deception, the evil genius has us permanently deceived.

One modernized version, the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, says that if evil scientists placed your brain in a vat and stimulated it just right, your conscious experience would be exactly the same as if you were still an ordinary, embodied human being (Putnam 1981). In the Matrix -trilogy (Chalmers 2005), Matrixers live unbeknownst to themselves in a computer simulation. Unlike the brain-in-a-vat , they have bodies that are kept alive in pods, and flaws in the simulation allow some of them to bend its rules to their advantage.

Unlike dream deception, which is often cast as a regularly recurring actuality (cf. Windt 2011), brain-in-a-vat-style arguments are often thought to be merely logically or nomologically possible. However, there might be good reasons for thinking that we actually live in a computer simulation (Bostrom 2003), and if we lend some credence to radical skeptical scenarios, this may have consequences for how we act (Schwitzgebel 2017).

Even purely hypothetical skeptical scenarios may enhance their psychological force by capitalizing on the analogy with dreams. Clark (2005) argues that the Matrix contains elements of “industrial-strength deception” in which both sensory experience and intellectual functioning are exactly the same as in standard wake-states, whereas other aspects are more similar to the compromised reasoning and bizarre shifts that are the hallmark of dreams.

At the end of the Sixth Meditation , Descartes suggests a solution to the dream problem that is tied to a reassessment of what it is like to dream. Contrary to his remarks in the First Meditation , he notes that dreams are only rarely connected to waking memories and are often discontinuous, as when dream characters suddenly appear or disappear. He then introduces the coherence test:

But when I perceive objects with regard to which I can distinctly determine both the place whence they come, and that in which they are, and the time at which they appear to me, and when, without interruption, I can connect the perception I have of them with the whole of the other parts of my life, I am perfectly sure that what I thus perceive occurs while I am awake and not during sleep. (Meditation VI. 24)

For all practical purposes, he has now found a mark by which dreaming and waking can be distinguished (cf. Meditation I.7), and even if the coherence test is not fail-safe, the threat of dream deception has been averted.

Descartes’ remarks about the discontinuous and ad hoc nature of many dreams are backed up by empirical work on dream bizarreness (see Hobson 1988; Revonsuo & Salmivalli 1995). Still, many of his critics were not convinced this helped his case against the skeptic. Even if Descartes’ revised phenomenological description characterizes most dreams, one might occasionally merely dream of successfully performing the test (Hobbes 1641), and in some dreams, one might seem to have a clear and distinct idea but this impression is false (Bourdin 1641). Both the coherence test and the criterion of clarity and distinctness would then be unreliable.

How considerations of empirical plausibility impact the dream argument continues to be a matter of debate. Grundmann (2002) appeals to scientific dream research to introduce an introspective criterion: when we introspectively notice that we are able to engage in critical reflection, we have good reason to think that we are awake and not dreaming. However, this assumes critical reasoning to be uniformly absent in dreams. If attempts at critical reasoning do occur in dreams and if they generally tend to be corrupted, the introspective criterion might again be problematic (Windt 2011, 2015a). There are also cases in which even after awakening, people mistake what was in fact a dream for reality (Wamsley et al. 2014). At least in certain situations and for some people, dream deception might be a genuine cause of concern (Windt 2015a).

2. The ontology of dreams

In what follows, the term “conscious experience” is used as an umbrella term for the occurrence of sensations, thoughts, impressions, emotions etc. in dreams (cf. Dennett 1976). These are all phenomenal states: there is something it is like to be in these states for the subject of experience (cf. Nagel 1974). To ask about dream experience is to ask whether it is like something to dream while dreaming, and whether what it is like is similar to (or relevantly different from) corresponding waking experiences.

Cartesian dream skepticism depends on a seemingly innocent background assumption: that dreams are conscious experiences. If this is false, then dreams are not deceptive experiences during sleep and we cannot be deceived, while dreaming, about anything at all. Whether dreams are experiences is a major question for the ontology of dreams and closely bound up with dream skepticism.

The most famous argument denying that dreams are experiences was formulated by Norman Malcolm (1956, 1959). Today, his position is commonly rejected as implausible. Still, it set the tone for the analysis of dreaming as a target phenomenon for philosophy of mind.

For Malcolm, the denial of dream experience followed from the conceptual analysis of sleep: “if a person is in any state of consciousness it logically follows that he is not sound asleep” (Malcolm 1956: 21). Following some remarks of Wittgenstein’s (1953: 184; see Chihara 1965 for discussion), Malcolm claimed

the concept of dreaming is derived, not from dreaming, but from descriptions of dreams, i.e., from the familiar phenomenon that we call “telling a dream”. (Malcolm 1959:55)

Malcolm argued that retrospective dream reports are the sole criterion for determining whether a dream occurred and there is no independent way of verifying dream reports. While first-person, past-tense psychological statements (such as “I felt afraid”) can at least in principle be verified by independent observations (but see Canfield 1961; Siegler 1967; Schröder 1997), he argued dream reports (such as “in my dream, I felt afraid”) are governed by different grammars and merely superficially resemble waking reports. In particular, he denied dream reports imply the occurrence of experiences (such as thoughts, feelings, or judgements) in sleep:

If a man had certain thoughts and feelings in a dream it no more follows that he had those thoughts and feelings while asleep, than it follows from his having climbed a mountain in a dream that he climbed a mountain while asleep. (Malcolm 1959/1962: 51–52)

What exactly Malcolm means by “conscious experience” is unclear. Sometimes he seems to be saying that conscious experience is conceptually tied to wakefulness (Malcolm 1956); other times he claims that terms such as mental activity or conscious experience are vague and it is senseless to apply them to sleep and dreams (Malcolm 1959: 52).

Malcolm’s analysis of dreaming has been criticized as assuming an overly strict form of verificationism and a naïve view of language and conceptual change. A particularly counterintuitive consequence of his view is that there can be no observational evidence for the occurrence of dreams in sleep aside from dream reports. This includes behavioral evidence such as sleepwalking or sleeptalking, which he thought showed the person was partially awake; as he also thought dreams occur in sound sleep, such sleep behaviors were largely irrelevant to the investigation of dreaming proper. He also claimed adopting a physiological criterion of dreaming (such as EEG measures of brain activity during sleep) would change the concept of dreaming, which he argued was tied exclusively to dream reporting. This claim was particularly radical as it explicitly targeted the discovery of REM sleep and its association with dreaming (Dement & Kleitman 1957), which is commonly regarded as the beginning of the science of sleep and dreaming. Malcolm’s position was that the very project of a science of dreaming was misguided.

Contra Malcolm, most assume that justification does not depend on strict criteria with the help of which the truth of a statement can be determined with absolute certainty, but “on appeals to the simplicity, plausibility, and predictive adequacy of an explanatory system as a whole” (Chihara & Fodor 1965: 197). In this view, behavioral and/or physiological evidence can be used to verify dream reports (Ayer 1960) and the alleged principled difference between dream reports and other first-person, past-tense psychological sentences (Siegler 1967; Schröder 1997) disappears.

Putnam noted that Malcolm’s analysis of the concept of dreaming relies on the dubious idea that philosophers have access to deep conceptual truths that are hidden to laypeople:

the lexicographer would undoubtedly perceive the logical (or semantical) connection between being a pediatrician and being a doctor, but he would miss the allegedly “logical” character of the connection between dreams and waking impressions. […] this “depth grammar” kind of analyticity (or “logical dependence”) does not exist. (Putnam 1962 [1986]: 306)

Nagel argued that even if one accepts Malcolm’s analysis of the concept of dreaming,

it is a mistake to invest the demonstration that it is impossible to have experiences while asleep with more import than it has. It is an observation about our use of the word “experience”, and no more. It does not imply that nothing goes on in our minds while we dream. (Nagel 1959: 114)

Whether dream thoughts, feelings or beliefs should count as real instances of their kind now becomes an open question, and in any case there is no conceptual contradiction involved in saying one has experiences while asleep and dreaming.

To ask about dream experience is also to ask whether there is something it is like to dream during sleep as opposed to there just being something it is like to remember dreaming after awakening. Dennett’s (1976, 1979) cassette theory says dreams are the product of instantaneous memory insertion at the moment of the awakening, as if a cassette with pre-scripted dreams had been inserted into memory, ready for replay. Dennett claims the cassette theory and the view that dreams are experiences can deal equally well with empirical evidence for instance on the relationship between dreaming and REM sleep. The cassette theory is preferable because it is more parsimonious, positing only an unconscious dream composition process rather than an additional conscious presentation process in sleep. For Dennett, the important point is that it is impossible to distinguish between the two rival theories based on dream recall; the question of dream experience should be settled by independent empirical evidence.

While Dennett shares Malcolm’s skepticism about dream experience, this latter claim is diametrically opposed to Malcolm’s rejection of a science of dreaming. For Dennett, the unreliability of dream recall also is not unique, but exemplifies a broader problem with memory reports: we generally cannot use retrospective recall to distinguish conscious experience from memory insertion (Dennett 1991; see also Emmett 1978).

An earlier and much discussed (Binz 1878; Goblot 1896; Freud 1899; Hall 1981; Kramer 2007:22–24) version of Dennett’s cassette theory goes back to Maury’s (1861) description of a long and complex dream about the French revolution that culminated in his execution at the guillotine, at which point Maury suddenly awoke to find that the headboard had fallen on his neck. Because the dream seemed to systematically build up to this dramatic conclusion, which in turn coincided with a sudden external event, he suggested that such cases were best explained as instantaneous memory insertions experienced at the moment of awakening. Similarly, Gregory (1916) described dreams are psychical explosions occurring at the moment of awakening.

The trustworthiness of dream reports continues to be contentious. Rosen (2013) argues that dream reports are often fabricated and fail to accurately describe experiences occurring during sleep. By contrast, Windt (2013, 2015a) argues that dream reports can at least under certain conditions (such as in laboratory studies, when dreams are reported immediately after awakening by trained participants) be regarded as trustworthy sources of evidence with respect to previous experience during sleep.

Unlike Malcolm, many believe that whether dreams are experiences is an empirical question; and unlike Dennett, the predominant view is that the empirical evidence does indeed support this claim (Flanagan 2000; Metzinger 2003; Revonsuo 2006; Rosen 2013; Windt 2013, 2015a).

A first reason for thinking that dreams are experiences during sleep is the relationship between dreaming and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Researchers in the 1950s discovered that sleep is not a uniform state of rest and passivity, but there is a sleep architecture involving different stages of sleep that is relatively stable both within and across individuals (Aserinsky & Kleitman 1953, 1955; Dement & Kleitman 1957). Following sleep onset, periods of non-REM (or NREM) sleep including slow wave sleep (so called because of the presence of characteristic slow-wave, high-voltage EEG activity) are followed by periods of high-frequency, low-voltage activity during REM sleep. EEG measures from REM sleep strongly resemble waking EEG. REM sleep is additionally characterized by rapid eye movements and a near-complete loss of muscle tone (Dement 1999: 27–50; Jouvet 1999).

The alignment between conscious experience on the one hand and wake-like brain activity and muscular paralysis on the other hand would seem to support the experiential status of dreams as well as explain the outward passivity that typically accompanies them. Reports of dreaming are in fact much more frequent following REM (81.9%) than NREM sleep awakenings (43%; Nielsen 2000). REM reports tend to be more elaborate, vivid, and emotionally intense, whereas NREM reports tend to be more thought-like, confused, non-progressive, and repetitive (Hobson et al. 2000). These differences led to the idea that REM sleep is an objective marker of dreaming (Dement & Kleitman 1957; Hobson 1988: 154).

Attempts to identify dreaming with mental activity during REM sleep have not, however, been successful, and many now hold that dreams can occur in all stages of sleep (e.g., Antrobus 1990; Foulkes 1993b; Solms 1997, 2000; Domhoff 2003; Nemeth & Fazekas 2018). In recent years there has been renewed interest in NREM sleep for the study of dreaming (Noreika et al. 2009; Siclari et al. 2013, 2017). This suggests the inference from the physiology of REM sleep to the phenomenology of dreaming is not straightforward.

A second line of evidence comes from lucid dreams, or dreams in which one knows one is dreaming and often has some level of dream control (Voss et al. 2013; Voss & Hobson 2015; Baird et al. 2019). The term lucid dreaming was coined by van Eeden (1913), but Aristotle ( On Dreams ) already noted that one can sometimes be aware while dreaming that one is dreaming.

Scientific evidence that lucid dreaming is real and a genuine sleep phenomenon comes from laboratory studies (Hearne 1978; LaBerge et al. 1981) showing lucid dreamers can use specific, pre-arranged patterns of eye movements (e.g., right-left-right-left) to signal in real-time that they are now lucid and engaging in dream experiments. These signals are clearly identifiable on the EOG and suggest a correspondence between dream-eye movements and real-eye movements (as predicted by the so-called scanning hypothesis ; see Dement & Kleitman 1957; Leclair-Visonneau et al. 2010). Retrospective reports confirm that the dreamer really was lucid and signalled lucidity (Dresler et al. 2012; Stumbrys et al. 2014).

Signal-verified lucid dreams have been used to study muscular activity accompanying body movements in dreams (Erlacher et al. 2003; Dresler et al. 2011), for advanced EEG analysis of brain activity during lucid dreaming (Voss et al. 2009), and imaging studies (Dresler et al. 2011, 2012). Eye signals can also be used to measure the duration of different activities performed in lucid dreams; contrary to the cassette theory, lucid dreams have temporal extension and certain dream actions even seem to take slightly longer than in waking (Erlacher et al. 2014). There have also been attempts to induce lucidity through non-invasive electrical stimulation during sleep (Stumbrys et al. 2013; Voss et al. 2014). The combination of signal-verified lucid dreaming with volitional control over dream content, retrospective report, and objective sleep measures has been proposed to provide controlled conditions for the study of conscious experience in sleep and a new methodology for investigating the relationship between conscious experience and neurophysiological processes (Baird et al.2019).

A third line of evidence (Revonsuo 2006: 77) comes from dream-enactment behavior (Nielsen et al. 2009), most prominently in patients with REM-sleep behavior disorder (RBD; Schenck & Mahowald 1996; Schenck 2005; Leclair-Visonneau et al. 2010). Due to a loss of the muscular atonia that accompanies REM sleep in healthy subjects, these patients show complex, seemingly goal-directed outward behaviors such as running or fighting off an attacker during REM sleep. Retrospective dream reports often match these behaviors, suggesting that patients literally act out their dreams during sleep.

While persuasive, these lines of evidence might not satisfy skeptics about dream experience. They might worry that results from lucid dreaming and dream enactment do not generalize to ordinary, non-lucid dreams; they might also construe alternative explanations that do not require conscious experience in sleep. There are also methodological concerns, for instance about how closely sleep-behaviors actually match dream experience. A key issue is that to support the experiential status of dreams, evidence from sleep polysomnography, signal verified lucid dreams, or sleep behavior requires convergence with retrospective dream reports. This means trusting dream reports is built into any attempt to empirically resolve the question of dream experience – which then invites the familiar skeptical concerns. Again, an anti-skeptical strategy may be to appeal to explanatory considerations. In this view, the convergence of dream reports and objective polysomnographic or behavioral observations is best explained by the assumption that dreams are experiences in sleep, and this assumption is strengthened by further incoming findings. This strategy places dream reports at the center of scientific dream research while avoiding the contentious claim that their trustworthiness, and with it the experiential status of dreams, can be demonstrated conclusively by independent empirical means (Windt 2013, 2015a).

Even where philosophers agree dreams are experiences, they often disagree on how exactly to characterize dreaming relative to wake-state psychological terms. Often, questions about the ontology of dreaming intersect with epistemological issues. Increasingly, they also incorporate empirical findings.

The standard view is that dreams have the same phenomenal character as waking perception in that they seemingly put us in contact with mind-independent objects, yet no such object is actually being perceived. This means dreams count as hallucinations in the philosophical sense (Crane & French 2017; Macpherson 2013). Even if, in a particularly realistic dream, my visual experience was exactly as it would be if I were awake (I could see my bedroom, my hands on the bed sheets, etc.), as long as my eyes were closed during the episode, I would not, literally, be seeing anything.

There is some controversy in the psychological literature about whether dreams should be regarded as hallucinations. Some believe the term hallucination should be reserved for clinical contexts and wake-state pathologies (Aleman & Larøi 2008: 17; but see ffytche 2007; ffytche et al. 2010).

The view that dreams involve hallucinations is implicit in Descartes’ assumption that even when dreaming,

it is certain that I seem to see light, hear a noise, and feel heat; this cannot be false, and this is what in me is properly called perceiving ( sentire ). (Descartes 1641: II.9)

It also lies at the heart of Aristotle’s ( On Dreams ) assumption that dreams result from the movements of the sensory organs that continue even after the original stimulus has ceased. He believed that in the silence of sleep, these residual movements result in vivid sensory imagery that is subjectively indistinguishable from genuine perception (see also Dreisbach 2000; Barbera 2008).

The assumption of phenomenological equivalence between dream and waking experience can also be found in Berkeley’s (1710: I.18) idealist claim that the existence of external bodies is not necessary for the production of vivid, wake-like perceptual experience. Similarly, Russell defended sense-data theory by noting that in dreams,

I have all the experiences that I seem to have; it is only things outside my mind that are not as I believe them to be while I am dreaming. (Russell 1948: 149–150)

Elsewhere, he argued dreams and waking life

must be treated with equal respect; it is only by some reality not merely sensible that dreams can be condemned. (Russell 1914: 69)

Hume was less clear on this matter, proposing that dreams occupy an intermediate position between vivid and largely non-voluntary sensory impressions and ideas, or “the faint images of previous impressions in thinking and reasoning” (Hume 1739: 1.1.1.1). On the one hand, as mere creatures of the mind, Hume wanted to categorize dreams as ideas. On the other hand, he acknowledged that in sleep, “our ideas can approach the vivacity of sensory impressions” (Hume 1739: 1.1.1.1). Dreams do not fit comfortably into Hume’s attempt to draw a dichotomous distinction between impressions, including perception, and ideas, including sensory imagination (Ryle 1949; Waxman 1994; Broughton 2006).

Phenomenologists often focus not so much on the quality of dream imagery as on the overall character of experience, noting that dreams are experienced as reality; as in waking perception, we simply feel present in a world. This also sets dreams apart from waking fantasy and daydreams (Husserl 1904/1905; Uslar 1964; Conrad 1968; Globus 1987: 89.

At its strongest, the hallucination view claims that dreaming and waking experience are identical in both the quality of sensory imagery and their overall, self-in-a-world structure (Revonsuo 2006: 84). This claim is central to the virtual reality metaphor , according to which consciousness itself is dreamlike and waking perception a kind of online hallucination modulated by the senses (Llinás & Ribary 1994; Llinás & Paré 1991; Revonsuo 2006; Metzinger 2003, 2009).

This seems to be empirically supported. Neuroimaging studies (Dang-Vu et al. 2007; Nir & Tononi 2010; Desseilles et al. 2011) show that the predominance of visual and motor imagery as well as strong emotions in dreams is paralleled by high activation of the corresponding brain areas in REM sleep, which may exceed waking; at the same time, the cognitive deficits often thought to characterize dreams such as the loss of self-awareness, the absence of critical thinking, delusional reasoning, and mnemonic deficits fit in well with the comparative deactivation of frontal areas (Hobson et al. 2000). Hobson (1988, Hobson et al. 2000) has argued that the vivid, hallucinatory character of dreaming results from the fact that in REM sleep, the visual and motor areas are activated in the same way as in waking perception, the sole difference being dreams’ dependence on internal signal generation. Horikawa and colleagues (2013) used neuroimaging data from sleep onset to predict the types of objects described in mentation reports, which they took to support the perceptual equivalence between dreaming and waking.

Generally, versions of the hallucination view that suggest dreams replicate all aspects of waking perception are too vague to be informative. Especially for subtle perceptual activities (such as visual search), we might not know enough about dream phenomenology to make any strong claims (Nielsen 2010). Specifying points of similarity leads to a more informative and precise, but likely also more nuanced view. Dreams are heterogeneous, and some might be more perception-like while others resemble imagination (Windt 2015a). There might also be differences between or even within specific types of imagery. For example, visual imagery might be quite different from touch sensations, which tend to be rare in dreams (Hobson 1988). Visual dream imagery might overall resemble waking perception but lack color saturation, background detail and focus (Rechtschaffen & Buchignani, 1992). Classifying dreams as either hallucinatory or imaginative is further complicated by the fact that there is strong overlap in cortical activity associated with both visual imagery and perception (Zeidman & Maguire, 2016). This means even a strong overlap in cortical activity between, say, visual dream imagery and visual perception does not necessarily set dreaming apart from waking imagination.

This is also true for evidence on eye movements in dreams. LaBerge and colleagues (2018) recently showed that eye tracking of objects is smooth in lucid dreaming and perceiving, but not in imagining. Drawing from this evidence, Rosen (forthcoming) suggests many dreams mimic the phenomenology of interacting with a stable world, including eye movements and visual search. Others argue we should not analogize dream imagery to mind-independent, scannable objects and that eye movements might instead be implicated in the generation of dream imagery (Windt 2018).

Another way to make sense of the claim that dreaming has the same phenomenal character as waking perception is to say some kinds of dream imagery are illusory: they involve misperception of an external object as having different properties than it actually has (cf. Smith 2002; Crane & French 2017). The illusion view disagrees with the hallucination view on whether dreams have a contemporaneous external stimulus source.

The illusion view has fallen out of favor but has a long history. The Ancients believed dreams have bodily sources. This idea underlies the practice of using dreams to diagnose illness, as practiced in the shrines at Epidaurus (Galen On Diagnosis in Dreams ; van de Castle 1994). Aristotle ( On Dreams ) thought some dreams are caused by indigestion, and Hobbes adopted this view, claiming different kinds of dreams could be traced to different bodily sensations. For instance, “lying cold breedeth Dreams of Feare, and raiseth the thought and Image of some fearfull object” (Hobbes 1651: 91).

Appeals to the bodily sources of dreaming became especially popular in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Many believed specific dream themes such as flying were linked to sleeping position (Macnish 1838; Scherner 1861; Vold 1910/1912; Ellis 1911) and realizing, in sleep, that one’s feet are not touching the ground (Bergson 1914).

There were also attempts to explain the phenomenology of dreaming by appealing to the absence of outward movement. The lack of appropriate feedback and of movement and touch sensations was thought to cause dreams of being unable to move (Bradley 1894) or of trying but failing to do something (Gregory 1918).

Some proponents of the “ Leibreiztheorie ” (or somatic-stimulus theory) of dreaming attempted to go beyond anecdotal observations to conduct controlled experiments. Weygandt (1893) investigated the influence of various factors including breathing, blood circulation, temperature changes, urge to urinate, sleeping position, and visual or auditory stimulation during sleep on dream content (see Schredl 2010 for details). Singer (1924) proposed experiments on stimulus incorporation in dreams can inform claims on the ontology of dreaming: If dreams are sensations, a particular auditory stimulus should increase the frequency of dreams in nearby sleepers as well as the frequency of sound in their dreams, and it should decrease the range of quality and intensity of these dreams, making them overall more similar and predictable.

Newer studies provide evidence for the incorporation of external stimuli in dreams, including light flashes, sounds, sprays of water applied to the skin (Dement & Wolpert 1958), thermal (Baldridge 1966), electrical (Koulack 1969), and verbal stimuli (Berger 1963; Breger et al. 1971; Hoelscher et al., 1981), as well as blood pressure cuff stimulation on the leg (Nielsen et al. 1995; Sauvageau et al. 1998).

Muscular activity also often leaves its mark on dreams. It occurs throughout sleep but is especially frequent in REM sleep, mostly in the form of twitching but occasionally also in the form of larger, seemingly goal-directed movements (Blumberg 2010; Blumberg & Plumeau 2016). The relation between outward and dream movements is complex: in some cases, outward movements might mirror dream movements, while in others, sensory feedback might prompt dream imagery (Windt 2018).

Generally, it seems external and bodily stimuli can be related to varying degrees to dream and sleep onset imagery (Nielsen 2017; Windt 2018; Windt et al. 2016). Some of these cases appear to fit the concept of illusion, as in when the sound of the alarm clock is experienced, in a dream, as a siren, or when blood pressure cuff inflation on the leg leads to dreams of wearing strange shoes (Windt 2018; for these and other examples, see Nielsen et al. 1995). In other cases, such as when blood pressure cuff stimulation on the leg prompts a dream of seeing someone else’s leg being run over, describing this as illusory misperception might be less straightforward.

Saying that dreams can be prompted by external stimuli and that in some cases these are best described as illusions is different from the stronger claim, sometimes advanced by historical proponents of somatic-stimulus theory, that dreams generally are caused by external or bodily stimuli. As an example of the stronger claim, consider Wundt’s proposal that the

ideas which arise in dreams come, at least to a great extent, from sensations, especially from those of the general sense, and are therefore mostly illusions of fancy, probably only seldom pure memory ideas which hence become hallucinations. (Wundt 1896: 179)

This claim is likely too strong. It is also likely that appeals to external or bodily stimuli on their own cannot fully explain dream imagery, including when and how external stimuli are incorporated in dreams. Sensory incorporation in dreams is often hard to predict and indirect; associated imagery seems related not just to stimulus intensity, but also to short- and long term memories. A full explanation of dream content additionally has to take the cognitive and memory sources of dreaming into account (Windt 2018; Nielsen 2017; cf. Silberer 1919).

The most important rival to the hallucination view is that dreams are imaginative experiences (Liao & Gendler 2019; Thomas 2014). This can mean dream imagery involves imaginings rather than percepts (including hallucinations or illusions; McGinn 2004), that dream beliefs are imaginative and not real beliefs (Sosa 2007), or both (Ichikawa 2008, 2009). An important advantage is that by assimilating dreams to commonplace mental states such as waking fantasy and daydreaming, rather than a rare and often pathological occurrence such as hallucinations, it provides a more unified account of mental life (Stone 1984). However, the reasons for adopting the imagination view are diverse, and dreams have been proposed to resemble imaginings and differ from perception along a number of dimensions (e.g. McGinn 2004, 2005a,b; Thomas 2014). This issue is complicated by the fact that there is little agreement on the definition of imagination and its relation to perception (Kind 2013).

One way is to deny dreams involve presence or the feeling of being in a world, which many believe is central to waking perception. Imagination theorists compare the sense in which we feel present in our dreams to cognitive absorption, as when we are lost in a novel, film, or vivid daydream (Sartre 1940; McGinn 2004; but see Hering 1947; Globus 1987). Some argue that reflexive consciousness or meta-awareness (as in lucid dreams) interrupts cognitive absorption and terminates the ongoing dream (Sartre 1940), essentially denying lucid dreams are possible.

Another issue is whether dreams are subject to the will (Ichikawa 2009). Imagination is often characterized as active and under our control (Wittgenstein 1967: 621, 633), involving “a special effort of the mind” (Descartes 1641: VI, 2), whereas perception is passive. Because dreams just seem to happen to us without being under voluntary control, they present an important challenge for the imagination view. Ichikawa (2009) argues lucid control dreams show dreams are generally subject to the will even where they are not under deliberate control.

Dreams are widely described as more indeterminate than waking perception (James 1890: 47; Stone 1984). In scientific dream research, vagueness is regarded as one of three main subtypes of bizarreness (Hobson 1988; Revonsuo & Salmivalli 1995). An example are dream characters who are identified not by their behavior or looks, but by just knowing (Kahn et al. 2000, 2002; Revonsuo & Tarkko 2002). Dreams are also attention-dependent and lack foreground-background structure (Thompson 2014); while it is tempting to construe the dream world as rich in detail, there is no more to dreams than meets the eye, and many think dream experience is exhausted by what is the focus of selective attention (Hunter 1983; Thompson 2014).

Indeterminacy is also related to the question of whether we dream in color or in black and white. Based on a review of historical and recent studies, Schwitzgebel (2002, 2011) argues there has been a shift in theories on dream color that coincides with the rise first of black-and-white and then color television. He argues it is unlikely that dreams themselves changed from colored to black and white and back to colored, proposing that a change in opinion is a more plausible explanation. Maybe dreams were either black and white or colored all along; or maybe they are indeterminate with respect to color, as may be the case for imagined or fictional objects; were this the case, it would strengthen the imagination view (Ichikawa 2009). Schwitzgebel’s main point is that reports of colored dreaming are unreliable and our opinions about dreams can be mistaken (but see Windt 2013, 2015a). This relates to Schwitzgebel’s (2011; Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel 2007) general skepticism about the reliability of introspection.

The issue of dream color has led to a number of follow-up studies (Schwitzgebel 2003; Schwitzgebel et al. 2006; Murzyn 2008; Schredl et al. 2008; Hoss 2010). They suggest most people dream in color and a small percentage describe grayscale or even mixed dreams (Murzyn 2008) or dreams involving moderate color saturation (Rechtschaffen and Buchignani 1992). Indeterminacy is rarely reported.

The imagination view has consequences for Cartesian dream skepticism. If dream pain does not feel like real pain, there is a fail-safe way to determine whether one is now dreaming: one need only pinch oneself (Nelson 1966; Stone 1984; but see Hodges & Carter 1969; Kantor 1970). As Locke put it,

if our dreamer pleases to try, whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace, be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man’s fancy, by putting his hand into it, he may perhaps be wakened into a certainty greater than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination. (Locke 1689: IV.XI.8)

If dreaming feels different from waking, this raises the question why we tend to describe dreams in the same terms as waking perception. Maybe this is because most people haven’t thought about these matters and they would find the imagination view plausible if they considered it (Ichikawa 2009). Or maybe

it is just because we all know that dreams are throughout un like waking experiences that we can safely use ordinary expressions in the narration of them. (Austin 1962: 42)

Some authors classify dreams as imaginings while acknowledging they feel like perceiving. For example, Hobbes describes dreams as “the imaginations of them that sleep” (Hobbes 1651: 90), and imagination as a “ decaying sense ” (Hobbes 1651: 88). Yet he also uses the concepts of imagination and fancy to describe perception and argues “their appearance to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming” (Hobbes 1651: 86).

In the scientific literature, the imagination view is complemented by cognitive theories. Foulkes (1978: 5) describes dreaming as a form of thinking with its own grammar and syntax, but allows that dream imagery is sufficently perception-like to deceive us. Domhoff’s neurocognitive model of dreaming (2001, 2003) emphasizes the dependence of dreaming on visuospatial skills and on a network including the association areas of the forebrain. The theory draws from findings on the partial or global cessation of dreaming following brain lesions (cf. Solms 1997, 2000), evidence that dreaming develops gradually and in tandem with visuospatial skills in children (Foulkes 1993a, 1999; but see Resnick et al. 1994), and results from dream content analysis supporting the continuity of dreaming with waking concerns and memories (the so-called continuity hypothesis ; see Domhoff 2001, 2003; Schredl & Hofmann 2003; Schredl 2006; see also Nir & Tononi 2010).

A number of researchers have begun to consider dreaming in the context of theories of mind wandering. Mind wandering is frequent in waking and involves spontaneous thoughts that unfold dynamically and are only weakly constrained by ongoing tasks and environmental demands (Schooler et al. 2011; Smallwood & Schooler 2015; Christoff et al. 2016). Based on phenomenological and neurophysiological similarities, dreams have been proposed to be an intensified form of waking mind wandering (Pace-Schott 2007, 2013; Domhoff 2011; Wamsley 2013; Fox et al. 2013). This basic idea seems to have been anticipated by Leibniz, who noted that the spontaneous formation of visions in dreams surpasses the capacity of our waking imagination (Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters , Vol. I, 177–178).

The analogy between dreams and waking mind wandering has been discussed in the context of cognitive agency. Metzinger (2013a,b, 2015) describes dreams and waking mind wandering as involving a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy, or the ability to deliberately control one’s conscious thought processes. Dreams and waking mind wandering are not mental actions but unintentional mental behaviors, comparable to subpersonal processes such as breathing or heartbeat. Because dreaming and waking mind wandering make up a the majority of our conscious mental lives, he argues that cognitive agency and mental autonomy are the exception, not the rule.

This raises the question of how to make sense of lucid control dreams, which involve both meta-awareness and agency. Windt and Voss (2018) argue that in such cases, spontaneous processes including imagery formation co-exist alongside more deliberate, top-down control; they also argue metacognitive insight and control themselves can have spontaneous elements. This suggests spontaneity and control are not opposites, but a more complex account is needed. Possibly, certain dreams and instances of waking mind wandering can be both spontaneous and agentive.

The analogy with mind wandering might help move forward the debate on the ontology of dreaming. In this debate, a common assumption is that dreams can be categorized as either hallucinatory or imaginative. Yet the application of these terms to dreams quickly runs into counterexamples and it is unclear they are mutually exclusive. One option is pluralism (Rosen 2018b), in which some aspects of dreaming are hallucinatory, others imaginative, and yet again others illusory. Another is that dreams are sui generis, combining aspects associated with wake states such as hallucinating, imagining, or perceiving in a novel manner without mimicking them completely. Windt (2015a) proposes that mind wandering, which describes a range of mental states loosely characterized by their spontaneous and dynamic character, might be particularly suitable for the characterization of dreaming precisely because that term leaves open more specific questions on the phenomenology of dreaming, allowing for variation in control, determinacy, and so on. This might be a good starting point for describing what is unique about dreaming while also acknowledging continuities across sleep-wake states and capitalizing on the strengths of the hallucination, illusion, imagination, and cognitive views.

The second strand of the imagination view argues that dream beliefs are not real beliefs, but propositional imaginings. This may or may not be combined with the claim that dream imagery is imaginative rather than perceptual (Sosa 2007; Ichikawa 2009).

Denying that dream beliefs have the status of real beliefs only makes sense before the background of a specific account of what beliefs are and how they are distinguished from other mental states such as delusions or propositional imaginings. For instance, Ichikawa (2009) argues that if we follow interpretationist or dispositionalist accounts of belief, dream beliefs fall short of real beliefs. He claims dream beliefs lack connection with perceptual experience and fail to motivate actions; consequently, they do not have the same functional role as real beliefs. Moreover, we cannot ascribe dream beliefs to a person by observing them lying asleep in bed. Dream beliefs are often inconsistent with longstanding waking beliefs and acquired and discarded without any process of belief revision (Ichikawa 2009).

This analysis of dream beliefs has consequences for skepticism. If dream beliefs are propositional imaginings, then we do not falsely believe while dreaming that we are now awake, but only imagine that we do (Sosa 2007). It is not clear though that this protects us from deception. If dream beliefs fall short of real beliefs, this might even make the specter of dream deception more worrisome: in mistaking dream beliefs for the real thing, we would now be deceived about the status of our own mental states (Ichikawa 2008).

It is also not clear whether the same type of argument extends to mental states other than beliefs. As Lewis points out, a person might

in fact believe or realize in the course of a dream that he was dreaming, and even if we said that, in such case, he only dreamt that he was dreaming, this still leaves it possible for someone who is asleep to entertain at the time the thought that he is asleep. (Lewis 1969: 133)

Mental states other than believing such as entertaining, thinking, or minimally appraisive instances of taking for granted might be sufficient for deception (Reed 1979).

The debate about dream beliefs is paralleled by a debate about whether delusions are beliefs or imaginings (see Currie 2000; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; McGinn 2004; Bayne & Pacherie 2005; Bortolotti 2009; Gendler 2013). Both debates might plausibly inform each other, especially as dreams are sometimes proposed to be delusional (Hobson 1999).

3. Dreaming and theories of consciousness

Dreams are a global state of consciousness in which experience arises under altered behavioral and neurophysiological conditions as compared to standard wakefulness; unlike other altered states of consciousness (such as drug-induced or deep meditative states) and pathological wake states (such as psychosis or neurological syndromes), dreams occur spontaneously and regularly in healthy subjects. For both reasons, many regard dreams as a test case for theories of consciousness or even an ideal model system for consciousness research (Churchland 1988; Revonsuo 2006).

Existing proposals differ on the phenomenology of dreaming: referring to dream bizarreness, Churchland describes dream experience as robustly different from waking, whereas Revonsuo argues dreaming is similar to waking and the purest form of experience:

the dreaming brain brings out the phenomenal level of organization in a clear and distinct form. Dreaming is phenomenality pure and simple, untouched by external physical stimulation or behavioural activity. (Revonsuo 2006: 75)

Revonsuo argues dreaming reveals the basic, state-independent structure of consciousness to be immersive: “dreaming depicts consciousness first and foremost as a subjective world- for-me ” (Revonsuo 2006: 75). This leads him to introduce the “world-simulation metaphor of consciousness”, according to which consciousness itself is essentially simulational and dreamlike. This is taken to support internalism about conscious experience.

This latter claim is also contentious. Noë (2004: 213) argues that phenomenological differences between dreaming and waking (such as greater instability of visual dream imagery) result from the lack of dynamic interaction with the environment in dreams. He proposes this shows that neural states are sufficient for dreaming but denies they are also sufficient for perceptual experience.

A possible problem for both views is their reliance on background assumptions about the phenomenology of dreaming and its disconnection from environmental stimuli and bodily sensations. Windt (2015a, 2018) argues both internalism and externalism mistakenly assume dreams to be isolated from external sensory input and own-body perception; she believes both the phenomenology of dreaming and its correlation with external stimuli are complex and variable. She argues the analysis of dreaming does not clearly support either side in the debate on internalism vs externalism (but see Rosen 2018a). Generally, in the absence of a well worked out theory of dreaming and its sleep-stage and neural correlates, proposals for using dreaming as a model system or test case run the risk of relying on an oversimplified description of the target phenomenon (Windt & Noreika 2011).

Recent accounts appealing to generative models and predictive processing (Clark 2013b; Hohwy 2013) suggest a new, unified account of perception, imagination, and dreaming. In these accounts, different mental states, including perception and action, embody different strategies of hypothesis testing and prediction error minimization. Perception is the attempt to model the hidden external causes of sensory stimuli; action involves keeping the internal model stable while changing the sensory input. Clark argues that on such a model,

systems that know how to perceive an object as a cat are thus systems that, ipso facto , are able to use a top-down cascade to bring about the kinds of activity pattern that would be characteristic of the presence of a cat. […] Perceivers like us, if this is correct, are inevitably potential dreamers and imaginers too. Moreover, they are beings who, in dreaming and imagining, are deploying many of the very same strategies and resources used in ordinary perception. (Clark 2013a: 764)

Predictive processing accounts have also been used to explain specific features of dreaming. Bizarreness has been associated with the comparative lack of external stimulus processing, implying dream imagery is relatively unconstrained by prediction errors (cf. Hobson & Friston 2012; Fletcher & Frith 2008; Bucci & Grasso 2017). Windt (2018) suggests a predictive processing account of dream imagery generation that links bodily self-experience to own-body perception and subtle motor behaviors such as twitching in REM sleep (Blumberg 2010; Blumberg & Plumeau 2016). She argues that movement sensations in dreams, in relation to REM-sleep related muscle twitching, involve a form of bodily self-sampling in which coordinated muscular activity contributes to the generation and maintenance of a body model. This is important because in predictive processing accounts neither the bodily nor the external causes of sensory inputs are known; at the same time, having an accurate body model is a prerequisite for action, requiring the system to disambiguate between self- and other generated changes to sensory inputs. Especially in early development, sleep might provide the ideal conditions for exploring one’s own body via subtle but coordinated muscular activity while processing of visual and auditory stimuli is reduced.

Dreams have also been suggested as a test case for whether phenomenal consciousness can be divorced from cognitive access (e.g., Block 2007; but see Cohen & Dennett 2011). Sebastián (2014a) argues that dreams provide empirical evidence that conscious experience can occur independently of cognitive access. This is because during (non-lucid) REM-sleep dreams, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) as the most plausible mechanism underlying cognitive access is selectively deactivated (see also Pantani et al. 2018). This would challenge theories linking conscious experience to access, such as higher-order-thought theory (Sebastián 2014b). However, both the hypoactivation of the dlPCF in REM sleep and its association with cognitive access have been debated. Fazekas and Nemeth (2018) suggest that certain kinds of cognitive access may be independent of dlPFC activation, necessitating a more complex account.

Dreaming has been suggested as a model system not just of waking consciousness in general, but also of psychotic wake states in particular. The analogy between dreaming and madness has a long philosophical history (Plato, Phaedrus ; Kant 1766; Schopenhauer 1847) and finds particularly stark expression in Hobson’s claim that “dreaming is not a model of a psychosis. It is a psychosis. It’s just a healthy one” (Hobson 1999: 44). Gottesmann (2006) proposes dreaming as a neurophysiological model of schizophrenia. There is a rich discussion on the theoretical and methodological implications of dream research for psychiatry (see Scarone et al. 2007; d’Agostino et al. 2013; see Windt & Noreika 2011 as well as the other papers in this special issue) and a number of studies have investigated differences in dream reports from schizophrenic and healthy subjects (Limosani et al. 2011a,b).

Rather than likening dreaming to waking in general or specific wake states such as psychosis, there have also been attempts to compare specific dream phenomena to wake-state delusions. Gerrans (2012, 2013, 2014) focuses on character misidentification in dreams and delusions of hyperfamiliarity (such as the Frégoli delusion, in which strangers are mistakenly identified as family members, and déjà vu ) to argue that anomalous experience and faulty reality testing both play a role in delusion formation. Rosen (2015) analyzes instances of thought insertion and of auditory hallucinations, which are key symptoms of schizophrenia, to raise broader questions about the altered sense of agency in dreams as compared to waking.

Philosophers have focused almost exclusively on dreaming, largely leaving to the side questions about dreamless sleep including whether it is uniformly unconscious. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the possibility of dreamless sleep experience and foundational issues about the definition of sleep and waking. This has been paralleled by growing interest in dreaming in NREM sleep.

Conceptually, interest in dreamless sleep experience has been facilitated by the precise definition of dreaming offered by simulation views (Revonsuo et al. 2015). If dreams are immersive sleep experiences characterized by their here -and- now structure, it makes sense to ask whether this is true for all or just a subset of sleep-related experiences and whether non-immersive sleep experiences exist. By contrast, if dreaming is broadly identified with any conscious mentation in sleep (Pagel et al. 2001), there is no conceptual space for dreamless sleep experience.

Following Thompson's (2014, 2015) discussion of dreamless sleep in Indian and Buddhist philosophy, Windt and colleagues (2016; see also Windt 2015b) introduce a framework for different kinds of dreamless sleep experience ranging from thinking and isolated imagery, perception, or bodily sensations, where these lack integration into a scene, to minimal kinds of experience lacking imagery or specific thought contents. A possible example of minimal phenomenal experience in sleep are white dreams, where people report having had experiences during sleep but cannot remember any details. Taken at face value, some white dream reports might describe experiences that lack reportable content (Windt 2015b); others might describe forgotten dreams or dreams with degraded content (Fazekas et al. 2018). Another example are reports of witnessing dreamless sleep, as described in certain meditation practices. This state is said to involve non-conceptual awareness of sleep, again in the absence of imagery or specific thought contents, and loss of sense of self (Thompson 2014, 2015). Some schools in Buddhist philosophy explain claims of deep and dreamless sleep by saying we never fully lose consciousness in sleep (Prasad 2000, 66; and Thompson 2014, 2015).

Empirically, interest in dreamless sleep experience is paralleled by increasing interest in experiences in NREM sleep (Fazekas et al. 2018). Most researchers now accept that dreaming is not confined to REM sleep, but also occurs at sleep onset and in NREM sleep. The deeper stages of NREM sleep are particularly interesting as they involve roughly similar proportions of dreaming, unconscious sleep, and white dreams (Noreika et al. 2009: Siclari et al. 2013, 2017). In the search for the neural correlates of dreaming vs unconscious dreamless sleep, this makes comparisons within the same sleep stage possible and avoids confounds involved in comparing presumably dreamful REM sleep with presumably dreamless NREM sleep. Findings suggest that activity in the same parietal hot zone underlies dreaming in both NREM and REM sleep (Siclari et al. 2017).

Where sleep and dream research have traditionally tried to identify the sleep stage correlates of dreaming, newer research suggests local changes occurring independently of sleep stages might in fact be more relevant. Traditionally regarded as global, whole-brain phenomena, there is now increasing evidence that sleep itself is locally driven, and local changes in sleep depth might be associated with changes in sleep-related experience (Siclari & Tononi 2017; Andrillon et al. 2019). While sleep and dream research are often considered as separate fields, changes in how sleep in general and sleep stages in particular are defined appear closely associated with changes in the theoretical conception of dreaming and its empirical investigation.

Historically, discoveries about dreaming have precipitated changing conceptions of sleep (for an excellent history of the study of sleep and dreaming, see Kroker 2007). Following Aristotle ( On Sleeping and Waking ), sleep was traditionally defined in negative terms as the absence of wakefulness and perception. This is still reflected in Malcolm’s assumption that “to a person who is sound asleep, ‘dead to the world’, things cannot even seem” (Malcolm 1956: 26). With the discovery of REM sleep, sleep came to be regarded as a heterogeneous phenomenon characterized by the cyclic alteration of different sleep stages. REM sleep was now considered as “neither sleeping nor waking. It was obviously a third state of the brain, as different from sleep as sleep is from wakefulness” (Jouvet 1999: 5). The folk-psychological dichotomy between sleep and wakefulness now seemed oversimplified and empirically implausible. At the same time dreaming, which had previously been considered as an intermediate state of half-sleeping and half-waking, came to be regarded as a genuine sleep phenomenon, but narrowed to REM sleep. Today, the framework for describing dreams and other sleep-related experiences is more precise, but dreaming has also been cast adrift from REM sleep.

A closely associated issue is how to define waking. Crowther’s (2018) capacitation thesis casts waking consciousness as a state in which the individual is fully switched on to their environment, but also to their own epistemic (cf. O’Shaugnessy 2002) and agentive potential; the waking individual is empowered to act and think in certain ways, though this potential need not be actualized. By contrast, dreaming is an “imagining-of consciousness” (O’Shaughnessy 2002: 430) and consciousness is conceptually tied to wakefulness. Because in lucid dreams, the epistemic and agentive profile of waking is at least partly realized, they might, according to Crowther, be regarded as closer to waking than nonlucid dreams.

This account of waking and sleep may also have consequences for the imagination model of dreaming and dream skepticism (Soteriou 2017). As in the imagination model, dreaming would be passive and action, including cognitive agency, would be tied to waking. If dreaming nonetheless involved passive episodes of imagining oneself to be active, one would be unable to tell that one were dreaming and imagining, as this insight would require the exercise of real agency. The sceptical consequence would be that when dreaming, one would lose agency as well as the capacity to gain insight into one’s current state. Yet our ability to know we are waking when waking would be unscathed; according to Soteriou, waking would thus have an epistemic function connected to the capacity to exercise agency over our mental lives.

Finally, definitions of consciousness themselves are bound up with conceptions of sleep and dreaming. As dreaming went from a state whose experiential status was doubted to being widely recognized as a second global state of consciousness, consciousness sometimes came to be defined contrastively as that which disappears in deep, dreamless sleep and reappears in waking and dreaming (Searle 2000; Tononi 2008). In light of dreamless sleep experience, such definitions are problematic (Thompson 2014, 2015; Windt 2015b; Windt et al. 2016). Dreamless sleep experience has been proposed to be particularly relevant for understanding minimal phenomenal experience, or the conditions under which the simplest kind of conscious experience arises (Windt 2015b). The investigation of dreamless sleep might thus shed light on the transition from unconscious sleep to sleep-related experience.

We almost always have a self in dreams, though this self can sometimes be a slightly different (e.g. older or younger) version of our waking self or even a different person entirely. Dreams therefore raise interesting questions about the identity between the dream and waking self. Locke (1689) invites us to imagine two men alternating in turns between sleep and wakefulness and sharing one continuously thinking soul (Locke 1689: II.I.12). He argues that if one man retained no memory of the soul’s thoughts and perceptions while it was linked to the other man’s body, they would be distinct persons. His position is that personal identity depends on psychological continuity, including recall: in the absence of recall, as illustrated by the toy example of two people sharing one soul, continuous conscious thinking does not suffice for identity. Locke also rejects the possibility of unrecalled dreams and the idea that we dream throughout sleep, remembering only a small proportion of our dreams (Locke 1689: II.I.19).

Valberg distinguishes between the subject of the dream (i.e., the dream self) and the sleeping person who is the dreamer of the dream and recalls it upon awakening (Valberg 2007). He argues that awakening from a dream involves crossing a chasm between discrete worlds with discrete spaces and times; it does not make sense to say that “the ‘I’ at these times [is] a single individual who crosses from one world to the other” (Valberg 2007: 69). According to Valberg, this is relevant to dream skepticism because there is no simple way to make sense of the claims that it is I who emerge from a dream or that I was the victim of dream deception.

Vicarious dreams, or dreams in which the protagonist of the dream seems to be a different person from the dreamer, are particularly puzzling with respect to identity. They may even raise the question of whether the dream self has an independent existence (Rosen & Sutton 2013: 1047). Such dreams are superficially similar to cases in which we imagine being another person, but according to Rosen and Sutton require a different explanation: in the case of dreaming, the imagined person’s thoughts are not framed as diverging from one’s own and one does not retain one’s own perspective in addition to the imagined one; in nonlucid dreams, only the perspective of the dream’s protagonist is retained.

The dream self is also at the center of simulation views of dreaming, which define dreaming via its immersive, here and now character as the experience of a self in a world. This leads to further questions about the phenomenology of self-experience in dreams and how it is different from waking self-experience. Different versions of the simulation view focus on different aspects of self- and world experience in dreams, ranging from social simulation (Revonsuo et al. 2015) to the typical features of selfhood in dreams (Revonsuo 2005, 2006, Metzinger 2003, 2009) to the minimal conditions for experiencing oneself as a self in dreams and what this tells us about minimal phenomenal selfhood in general (Windt 2015a, 2018). Yet these different versions of the simulation view are largely complementary and together have forged unity in a field that was previously hampered by lack of agreement about the definition of dreaming. They also integrate the philosophy of dreaming and scientific dream research.

As so often in debates about dreaming, there is disagreement about basic phenomenological questions. Revonsuo (2005) describes self-experience including bodily experience in dreams as identical to waking, whereas Metzinger (2003, 2009; see also Windt & Metzinger 2007) argues that important layers of waking self-experience (such as autobiographical memory, agency, a stable first-person perspective, metacognitive insight, and self-knowledge) are missing in nonlucid dreams. He argues this is due to the cognitive and mnemonic deficit that characterizes nonlucid dreams (cf. Hobson et al. 2000). Windt (2015a) analyzes the range of cognitive and bodily self-experience in dreams, both of which she describes as variable. She argues that in a majority of cases, dreams are weakly phenomenally embodied states in which bodily experience is largely related to movement sensations but a detailed and integrated body representation is lacking; instead, bodily experience in dreams is largely indeterminate (for an attempt to test this empirically, see Koppehele-Gossel et al. 2016). She proposes this is because dreams are also weakly functionally embodied states, in which the specific pattern of bodily experience reflects altered processing of bodily sensations (as in the illusion view). She also analyzes instances of bodiless dreams, in which dreamers say they experienced themselves as disembodied entities, to argue that self-experience can be reduced to pure spatiotemporal-self-location (Windt 2010); she proposes these cases can help identify the conditions for the emergence of minimal phenomenal selfhood (Blanke & Metzinger 2009; see also Metzinger 2013b).

How the phenomenology of dreaming compares to waking and what to say about how the dream self relates to the waking self bears on questions about the moral status of dreams. For Augustine ( Confessions ) dreams were a cause of moral concern because of their indistinguishability from waking life. What particularly worried him about dreams of sexual acts was their vividness, as well as the feeling of pleasure and seeming acquiescence or consent on the part of the dreamer. He concluded, however, that the transition from sleep to wakefulness involves a radical chasm, enabling the dreamer to awaken with a clear conscience and absolving them from taking responsibility for their dream actions.

What exactly Augustine thought the chasm between dreaming and waking consists in allows for different interpretations (Matthews 1981). Firstly, if the dream and waking self are not identical, then waking Augustine is not morally responsible for dream-Augustine’s actions. Secondly, actions performed in dreams might be morally irrelevant because they did not really happen. And thirdly, assuming that moral responsibility requires the ability to act otherwise, dreams provide no grounds for moral concern because we cannot refrain from having certain types of dreams.

The issue of dream immorality may also present a choice point between different accounts of moral evaluation. Where internalists assume the moral status of a person’s actions is entirely determined by internal factors such as intentions and motives, externalists look beyond these to the effects of actions. Driver (2007) argues that the absurdity of dream immorality itself should count against purely internalist accounts; yet she also acknowledges this absurdity is not a necessary feature of dreams.

Central to the question of dream immorality is the status of dreams as actions rather than mere behaviors. Mullane (1965) argues that while we don’t have full control over our dreams, they are not completely involuntary either; as is the case for blushing, considerable effort is required to attain control over our dreams and in some cases they can even be considered as actions. That lucid dream control is, to some extent, a learnable skill (Stumbrys et al. 2014) lends some support to this claim.

6. The meaning of dreams and the functions of dreaming

Philosophical discussions of dreaming tend to focus on (a) dream deception and (b) questions about the ontology of dreaming, its moral status, etc., that tend to intersect with dream skepticism. By contrast, the main source of interest in dreams outside of philosophy traditionally has been dream interpretation and whether dreams are a source of knowledge and insight. Historically, the epistemic status of dreams and the use of prophetic and diagnostic dreams was not just a theoretical, but a practical problem (Barbera 2008). Different types of dreams were distinguished by their putative epistemic value. Artemidorus, for instance, used the term enhypnion to refer to dreams that merely reflect the sleeper’s current bodily or psychological state and hence do not merit further interpretation, whereas he reserved the term oneiron for meaningful and symbolic dreams of divine origin.

The practice of dream interpretation was famously attacked by Aristotle in On Prophecy in Sleep . He denied that dreams are of divine origin, but allowed that occasionally, small affections of the sensory organs as might stem from distant events that cannot be perceived in waking are perceptible in the quiet of sleep. He also believed such dreams were mostly likely to occur in dullards whose minds resemble an empty desert – an assessment that was not apt to encourage interest in dreams (Kroker 2007: 37). A similarly negative view was held by early modern philosophers who believed dreams were often the source of superstitious beliefs (Hobbes 1651; Kant 1766; Schopenhauer 1847).

In Freudian dream theory, dream interpretation once more assumed a prominent role as the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious. This was associated with claims about the psychic sources of dreaming. Freud (1899) also rejected the influence of external or bodily sources, as championed by contemporary proponents of somatic-stimulus theory.

In the neuroscience of dreaming, Hobson famously argued that dreams are the product of the random, brain-stem driven activation of the brain during sleep (Hobson 1988) and at best enable personal insights in the same way as a Rorschach test (Hobson et al. 2000). Dennett (1991) illustrates the lack of design underlying the production of dream narratives through the “party game of psychoanalysis”, which involves an aimless game of question-and-answer. In the game, players follow simple rules to jointly produce narratives that can seem symbolic and meaningful, even though no intelligent and deliberate process of narration was involved.

Even if we grant that dreams are not messages from a hidden entity in need of decoding, this does not imply that dream interpretation cannot be a personally meaningful source of insight and creativity (Hobson & Wohl 2005). Whether and under which conditions, and following which methods, dream interpretation can lead to personally significant insights is an empirical question that is only beginning to be investigated systematically (see Edwards et al. 2013).

Finally, throughout history, views on the epistemic status of dreams and the type of knowledge to be gained from dream interpretation (e.g., knowledge about the future, diagnosis of physical illness, or insights about one’s current concerns) often changed in tandem with views on the origin and sources of dreaming, which gradually moved from divine origins and external sources, via the body, to the unconscious, and finally to the brain.

Different theories on the functions of dreaming have been proposed and the debate is ongoing. An important distinction is between the functions of sleep stages and the functions of dreaming. Well-documented functions of REM sleep include thermoregulation and the development of cortical structures in birds and mammals, as well as neurotransmitter repletion, the reconstruction and maintenance of little-used brain circuits, the structural development of the brain in early developmental phases, as well as the preparation of a repertoire of reflexive or instinctive behaviors (Hobson 2009). Yet none of these functions are obviously linked to dreaming. An exception is protoconsciousness theory, in which REM sleep plays an important role in foetal development by providing a virtual world model even before the emergence of full-blown consciousness (Hobson 2009: 808) .

Numerous studies have investigated the contribution of sleep to memory consolidation, with different sleep stages promoting different types of memories (Diekelmann et al. 2009; Walker 2009). However, only a few studies have investigated the relationship between dream content and memory consolidation in sleep (for a review, see Nielsen & Stenstrom 2005). Dreams rarely involve episodic replay of waking memories (Fosse et al. 2003). The incorporation of memory sources seems to follow a specific temporal pattern in which recent memories are integrated with older but semantically related memories (Blagrove et al. 2011). Nielsen (2017) presents a model of how external and bodily stimuli on one hand and short- and long-term memories on the other hand form seemingly novel, complex, and dreamlike images at sleep onset; he proposes these microdreams shed light on the formation and sources of more complex dreams. There is also some evidence that dream imagery might be associated with memory consolidation and task performance after sleep, though this is preliminary (Wamsley & Stickgold 2009, 2010; Wamsley et al. 2010).

Prominent theories on the function of dreaming focus on bad dreams and nightmares. It has long been thought that dreaming contributes to emotional processing and that this is particularly obvious in the dreams of nightmare sufferers or in dreams following traumatic experiences (e.g., Hartmann 1998; Nielsen & Lara-Carrasco 2007; Levin & Nielsen 2009; Cartwright 2010; Perogamvros et al. 2013). Based on the high prevalence of negative emotions and threatening dream content, threat simulation theory suggests that the evolutionary function of dreaming lies in the simulation of ancestral threats and the rehearsal of threatening events and avoidance skills in dreams has an adaptive value by enhancing the individual’s chances of survival (see Revonsuo 2000; Valli 2008). A more recent proposal is social simulation theory, in which social imagery in dreams supports social cognition, bonds, and social skills. (Revonsuo et al. 2015).

An evolutionary perspective can also be fruitfully applied to specific aspects of dream phenomenology. According to the vigilance hypothesis , natural selection disfavored the occurrence of those types of sensations during sleep that would compromise vigilance (Symons 1993). Dream sounds, but also smells or pains might distract attention from the potentially dangerous surroundings of the sleeping subject, and the vigilance hypothesis predicts that they only rarely occur in dreams without causing awakening. By contrast, because most mammals sleep with their eyes closed and in an immobile position, vivid visual and movement hallucinations during sleep would not comprise vigilance and thus can occur in dreams without endangering the sleeping subject. Focusing on the stuff dreams are not made of might then be at least as important for understanding the function of dreaming as developing a positive account.

Finally, even if dreaming in general and specific types of dream content in particular were found to be strongly associated with specific cognitive functions, it would still be possible that dreams are mere epiphenomena of brain activity during sleep (Flanagan 1995, 2000). It is also possible that the function of dreams is not knowable (Springett 2019).

A particular problem for any theory on the function of dreaming is to explain why a majority of dreams are forgotten and how dreams can fulfill their putative function independently of recall. Crick and Mitchinson (1983) famously proposed that REM sleep “erases” or deletes surplus information and unnecessary memories, which would suggest that enhanced dream recall is counterproductive. Another problem is that dreaming can be lost selectively and independently of other cognitive deficits (Solms 1997, 2000).

Some of the problems that arise for theories on the functions of dreaming can be avoided if we do not assume that dreaming has a specific function, separate from the function(s) of conscious wakeful states. This depends on the broader taxonomy of dreaming in relation to wakeful states. For example, if dreaming is continuous with waking mind wandering, imagination, and/or own-body perception, we should not expect it to have a unique function, but rather to express a similar function as these wakeful states, perhaps to varying degrees. Nor should we expect dreams to have a single function; the functions of dreaming might be as varied and complex as those of consciousness, and given the complexity of the target phenomenon, the failure to pin down a single function should not be surprising (Windt 2015a).

Questions about dreaming in different areas of philosophy such as epistemology, ontology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and ethics are closely intertwined. Scientific evidence from sleep and dream research can meaningfully inform the philosophical discussion and has often done so in the past. The discussion of dreaming has also often functioned as a lens on broader questions about knowledge, morality, consciousness, and self. Long a marginalized area, the philosophy of dreaming and of sleep is central to important philosophical questions and increasingly plays an important role in interdisciplinary consciousness research, for example in the search for the neural correlates of conscious states, in conscious state taxonomies, and in research on the minimal conditions for phenomenal selfhood and conscious experience.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Philosophy of Dreaming , entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Dreams , PhilPapers collection.
• Dreams and Skepticism , PhilPapers collection.

belief | Berkeley, George | delusion | Descartes, René: epistemology | imagination | Locke, John | perception: the problem of | personal identity | personal identity: and ethics | Plato: on knowledge in the Theaetetus | sense data | skepticism | skepticism: and content externalism

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Regina Fabry and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and constructive criticism on an earlier version of this manuscript. And as always, I am greatly indebted to Stefan Pitz for his support.

Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer M. Windt < jennifer . windt @ monash . edu >

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1.2: Meeting the Real Self in the Essay

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Chapter 1: Meeting the Real Self in the Essay

Knowing that Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; ‘tis her privilege,

Through all the years of this our life, to lead

From joy to joy: for she can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress

With quietness and beauty, and so feed

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life

Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold

Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk.

—William Wordsworth

The essay is habitually talked about in terms of its relationship to its writer. Teachers of the essay, for instance, often tell students that the essay is a space for self-discovery and for self-exploration. For example, in “Suddenly Sexy,” Wendy Bishop argues that this is at least one major reason why composition teachers should incorporate creative nonfiction (the umbrella genre under which the personal essay is now housed) into their classrooms. This incorporation, she believes, would help “encourage students to meet themselves in their writing” (273, emphasis added). In the creative nonfiction courses that I’ve taught for more than a decade, I find that writing students, in turn, are consistently enthused about writing essays for precisely this possibility. In particular, they appreciate having the opportunity to practice using the conventions of the genre that are supposed to enable the possibility of meeting themselves in writing: the use of the first-person singular in such a way that the “I” refers specifically to them (not to a fictive or constructed narrator); and the use of their own experiences to explore a topic that is personally meaningful to and chosen by them. If they use these conventions effectively, then they consequently should find out more about who they are, as they discover what they think, believe, and feel in the processes of essaying and of examining the shaping text.

On the one hand, I must admit that it is very likely that my students are enthusiastic about the self-focused requirements of the essay simply because of the course’s place within our curriculum. In other words, many students have confessed to me that they like the genre because by the time they take the course, they are so used to writing arguments and literary analyses, they are excited to write something, anything, new. On the other hand, as Lynn Z. Bloom argues in “Living to Tell the Tale,” their enthusiasm could also be attributed to the fact that people want to talk about themselves—about who they are, what they think, what they feel, and what experiences they’ve had. As one of my prior students aptly put it, “Everybody’s most interested in her own self because it’s through the ‘I’ that we live.”

I believe, though, that the appeal of the personal essay may also and, perhaps, primarily be due to its celebration of a simpler notion of the self and that self’s relation to the world—a notion that is not as complicated as our postmodern conceptions of the self, of reality, and of the relations between them. These postmodern notions of the self, we are intimately aware of, if we work in the humanities. They inevitably inform how we teach literature and writing. These “postmodern notions” are, in fact, part of the very atmosphere of the academy. I’m thinking, for example, of Lester Faigley’s decisive work, Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition (1992), in which Faigley considers, at great length, the fragmentary, the contradictory, and the consuming subject; I’m thinking, too, of Susan Miller’s Rescuing the Subject (1989) in which Miller theorizes the postmodern subject as one who “both originates with, and results from, a written text” (15).

Today, it seems that discussion about the postmodern subject has focused its attention onto, and its tenor in response to, what we might call the materialistic and narcissistic subject (e.g., I’m thinking of the agonized and/or frustrated reflections I see weekly in professional listserves on the changing student demographic—a demographic accused of being more interested in making money and having fun, in their iPhones and Instagram accounts, in selfies and statuses, than in an education that gets them the academy’s promised pay-off of social consciousness and cultural critique). No doubt, this is part of the reason behind writing teachers’ suspicions about the genre of the personal essay: they worry that it not only perpetuates an overly simplistic concept of the subject but that, in so doing, the genre also risks encouraging the consumer-mentality and narcissism so many educators find at least disconcerting, if not deplorable, in today’s college students. To put it simply, if students believe who they are is equal to what they like and buy, then the essay may become little more than an exercise in affirming that belief.

To be clear, I believe that these suspicions or worries about the essay are born of the assumption that the essay is necessarily a space into which the subjectivity of the writer—the real-world referent of the text’s “I”—is expressed and examined. According to this assumption, the essay serves as one space where writers can take a long, hard look at how they look, how they see themselves and the world: through what narratives, what tendencies, what beliefs, what values, what experiences. In short, it is in the essay that one can see clearly his/her own subjectivity. However, the whole exercise stops at looking/seeing. There is nothing in the conventions of the personal essay that requires anything more than that. There’s nothing in them that requires students to challenge (or change) what and/or how they see.

In sum, assumptions about the genre and, in particular, about the writer-page relation in the genre can prove problematic. Consequently, this chapter examines the more generic conception of the relation between the writer and the page in the personal essay. To get at that relation, I examine three major conventions of the genre: freedom, walking, and voice, which circulate in examples of scholarship about the genre. In examining these three conventions, I find that they enable and, in turn, are enabled by a particular conception of subjectivity. In this mutually enabling relation, I find a compelling, seductive, but also contradictory and intensely problematic theory of the personal essay.

A significant portion of this examination will focus on one of the three conventions—voice. Voice in writing is a concept that most writing teachers are familiar with, and most would acknowledge that the concept seems to be rooted in a romantic notion of the writer-page relationship. Though such a relationship between the flesh-and-blood writer and the textual self may seem antiquated, if not downright dangerous, to many of us teaching writing in the academy, that conception of the relationship has not gone away, and in fact, it still holds powerful sway over writers and readers of essays—practitioners, scholars, teachers, and students alike. Too, it is still powerfully present in Rhetoric and Composition, no matter how much we think we’ve moved on to the interest/bent we like to call “social constructionism.” In fact, because of their mutual interest in voice, essayists and voice-invested compositionists explain the relationship between the writer and his/her text in significantly similar ways. To trace that similarity and use it to conduct a textured analysis of voice, the last half of this chapter will move away from essayists’ articulations of that relationship and focus at length on compositionists’ articulations of the processes of “meeting the self in writing.”

Of the primary convention of the essay, voice, essayist Scott Russell Sanders states in “The Singular First Person”:

We make assumptions about that speaking voice [in an essay], assumptions we cannot make about the narrators in fiction. Only a sophomore is permitted to ask if Huckleberry Finn ever had any children; but even literary sophisticates wonder in print about Thoreau’s love life, Montaigne’s domestic arrangements, De Quincey’s opium habit, Virginia Woolf’s depression. (194)

I point to this quote to demonstrate that there is a problem with the premise driving common conceptions of the relation between essay and essayist that I’ll trace out here. The problem is that in order for Sanders’s argument to work, first one must buy the premise that the essay is the expression of the writer’s self. Only then would one be permitted to ask questions about the essayist, like those listed by Sanders. As to where that premise might come from, I will speculate a bit below, but for now, it’s worth noting that said premise would not even be possible without the first convention of the genre: freedom. As essay scholar Michael Hall says in “The Emergence of the Essay and the Idea of Discovery,” the personal essay is free from “the constraints of established authority and traditional rhetorical forms” (78), e.g., the constraints of a whole literary tradition that the writer must speak to and within. As such, it can be and do other things. It can be, for example, the embodiment of the essayist.

Of course, the interesting irony here is that there are, in fact, conventions of the essay—qualities that make an essay recognizable as such. The most important of those conventions is also the one that is most inherently contradictory: the essay’s freedom from the conventions of a literary tradition. The essay is not supposed to be about conventions, about the great essayists, the great literary movements, and the great sociopolitical concerns that came before (or that emerged during) the essayist’s foray into essaying. Rather, the essay is a form without tradition. To explain, in another ironic move (ironic because it argues for the essay’s freedom from tradition by historizing it), Michael Hall argues that the essay came about in response to the huge shifts in thinking that emerged just prior to and during the Renaissance—shifts that emphasized and celebrated the exploration of unconstrained possibilities.

Freedom is important to the work of the essay because it makes possible something other than participation in the confining conventions of a literary tradition. Instead, according to Sanders, “an essay is […] about the way a mind moves, the links and leaps and jigs of thought” (192). He goes on to explain that in this movement, the mind (which he equates to a dog hunting in “the underbrush of thought”) “scatters a bunch of rabbits that go bounding off in all directions.” The essayist must then chase a few of these metaphorical rabbits and avoid “plodding along in a straight line” (192). This requirement of chasing the jigging and jagging lines of thought is bound up in what Sanders argues, after Emerson, is the essayist’s job: to “fasten words again to visible things” (Emerson 88 and Sanders 191), including, it seems, the essay to the essayist, or more specifically, the essay to the essayist’s mind. 4

Essayists working from this premise take their cue from a conception of a mind-essence relation that is more than 2000 years old (or at least, they take it from a particular reading of that conception). In Georg Lukács’s influential chapter on the essay in Soul and Form , he points out that in a free form (the essay), “an intellect … believes itself to be sovereign” (2). Without constraints, without the parameters imposed by a more rigid genre, the mind does as it will. In that freedom, it is likely to work according to its own tendencies, its own habits, according to its own logic. And if it is working according to its own tendencies, habits, and logic, then it is free to see the writer’s essential, unmediated self (what Lukács refers to as the “soul”).

To explain this, Lukács invokes Plato’s argument that “only the soul’s guide, the mind, can behold it” (5). 5 To clarify this relation between the mind and soul a bit further, I point to the supposition here that not only are the mind and soul separate, but that the mind’s purpose is to know and to guide the soul. What’s interesting in this articulation of purpose is that while one could easily reason that in this statement, Plato is actually arguing that “the rational mind” should rein in the impulses of the more passionate (and impulsive) parts of the self, essayists use the claim to argue that where the mind is freed from any obligation to the boundaries of convention, the soul is better or more truthfully revealed. To explain this through Sanders’s metaphor, if the essayist’s mind is like a hunting dog chasing thoughts, then the key to the essay is in granting that mind plenty of freedom to chase whatever thoughts it likes wherever it likes. What will emerge in the course of this run over open land, so to speak, is a soul that is finally free to emerge as it truly is—without the constraints of social mores, without the expectations imposed on us according to our gender, ethnicity, class, etc., and without, it seems, even the confines of rationality (a socially-sanctioned way of thinking).

Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, to find that the next major convention of the essay concerns the chase itself—i.e., how one chases what thoughts one wants to chase and, consequently, reveals the unmediated, unconstrained self. That how is understood as being like a journey into nature, which traditionally involves a long, meandering, contemplative walk in the woods. 6 In short, the walk in nature serves as a metaphor for essaying, and there’s a long tradition of essayists using this metaphor in their essays to reveal both the nature of the essay and the nature of the essayist’s self. Essayists typically describe the self-realizing/self-remembering process that they underwent in their latest visit to the woods (or to the mountains or to some other remote expanse of nature); in turn, via the description of the distillation of the natural self, the essay comes to embody that self. 7

For example, in the anthologized essay, “An Entrance to the Woods,” Wendell Berry explicitly invokes the metaphor of walking and simultaneously enacts that movement on the page. He writes of walking through the woods and shedding “all the superfluities” of his life. For Berry, this shedding or “stripping,” as he calls it, is made possible only in “the absence of human society.” He states, “The necessities of foot travel in this steep country have stripped away all superfluities. I simply could not enter into this place and assume its quiet with all the belongings of a family man, property holder, etc. For the time, I am reduced to my irreducible self” (677). By walking through the woods without the cumbers of all his worldly obligations and through the subsequent effects of that walking (i.e., the quieting and the reducing of the obligations of the worldly self), Berry discovers his natural self, what he calls his “irreducible self.”

This discovery happens not only in the process of walking-in-the-woods but in the process of walking-on-the-page, and Berry points to this play. Note the tense he uses as he states, “Slowly my mind and my nerves have slowed to a walk. The quiet of the woods has ceased to be something that I observe; now it is something that I am a part of” (678). He writes as though he is walking in the woods at this moment. And, he notes that by walking in nature (and now in the essay), he no longer simply observes the quiet of the woods; he becomes a part of it. I would suggest, then, that for Berry, discovering the irreducible self involves a return to what he is a part of naturally—nature—while moving away from what is not “natural”—society. This movement, he does not simply describe but enacts in the essay, not only because of the verb tense he uses, but because the essay lingers in and wanders through the issue [of discovering his natural/irreducible self]. The return to the natural self via the movement of the essay seems most important to the work of the essay because through this return, the natural self—the self that is buried/diluted when integrated with society—emerges.

In another famous example of discovering the natural self through the freeing experience of walking in nature, William Hazlitt is able to shed the superfluities or “impediments,” as he calls them, of life in his essay, “On Going a Journey.” Hazlitt states, “The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others” (181). Again, Hazlitt is freed in journeying, not only in the described real-world journey, but in the journey enacted in the essay, because the essay provides him with the singularly unimpeded and open space that he only otherwise finds in walking/journeying alone in nature. He states, “I want to see my vague notions float like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy. For once, I like to have it all my own way; and this is impossible unless you are alone […]” (182). Similar to Sanders’s metaphor of a dog chasing rabbits, Hazlitt is describing the meandering, seemingly haphazard movement of his mind (“my vague notions float like the down of the thistle before the breeze”), freed from social constraint/obligation (“not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy”), bound only by his own desires/impulses (“all my own way”).

Of course, Hazlitt, too, says above that he is freed in journeying of even his self (“leav[ing] ourselves behind”). The self that Hazlitt writes of leaving, though, is apparently the impeded and burdened self, for as he journeys, he discovers another self: “Then long forgotten things, like ‘sunken wrack and sumless treasures,’ burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and be myself again” (182, emphasis added). Again, the natural self seems to be capable of being discovered in the shedding of our social-ness, in a journey into what is natural.

The appeal of this simpler notion of the self and of the self’s relation to the world, perhaps, is obvious. It offers us the possibility of getting away from the world, getting away, even, from our worldly selves. Our students certainly see the appeal. I’m reminded of at least a few of my students’ essays in which they have written about a nostalgia for a more natural self, which equals, for them, a simpler mode of being—e.g., a self that has to worry about tilling the land or making bread for the family dinner, instead of a self that has to worry about paying bills and submitting papers and negotiating the competing versions of self that are maintained at the job, in the classroom, on Facebook, and at the dinner table. I’m reminded, though, too of many of the same student essays in which they experience some paralyzing moment in which they are confronted by a storm or a rattlesnake or a twisted ankle, while walking in the woods. In those moments, they realize that people built what we know to be “modern life” (of self-satisfaction and convenience) for many good reasons: to stave off threats and fears, to make surviving easier, but also so that we can concentrate on other stuff (like how best to treat a horse, how best to educate citizens, how best to negotiate the animosity between warring factions of people).

Sure, taking a walk can be relaxing; even commercials are now advising us to do so. But, my student essayists, even when waxing poetic about the benefits of getting away from it all, always, eventually realize that the effort doesn’t actually get us away from our (postmodern) selves. Perhaps this example will do more to reveal my own fears than to prove my point, but I offer this personal example of my own daily walks: there are moments when I find that the rhythm of my own feet and the playful present-ness of my dog’s experience of various spots of grass and of the other animals we meet along the way inspire a kind of dumb but also hyper-sensory state in me; however, I never get to stay in that state long. I am constantly jarred back into a much more “postmodern” reality with all of its splintering and spreading power dynamics: by men honking their horns as they pass us, by my comparison of my own body to the bodies of the women we pass at the pool, by the apparent economic differences between the lives lived in the neighborhoods we pass, by the tensions expressed in the “vote for” signs nailed to the yards we pass, and so on.

There is simply no simpler self, not without that simpler self being made in a grand pretend. Even the moments I mention above in which I describe myself as dumb and hypersensitive are not, to my mind, indicators of my having discovered a simpler self. Rather, I suspect that they are simply moments when I am given over to the present and have stopped worrying; they are not the momentary revelations of a distilled me. That said, none of this awareness, in my own or in my students’ meanderings in nature and/or on the page, of the essay’s failure to really capture a simpler self through the first two conventions of freedom and walking diminishes the essay’s valuing of or value granted by voice.

The two concepts—voice and walking—are pointing to intimately related processes: the first points to the power of the movement of a mind on the page (I’m invoking terms from Peter Elbow’s work here, which I’ll explore at greater lengths in the coming pages); the latter points to, describes, the movement itself, as I’ve discussed above . I find, however, in my readings about essays that the concept of voice has emerged as the convention that readers (and presumably, writers) care most about in the genre. 8 For example, Scott Russell Sanders states, “The essay is a haven for the private, idiosyncratic voice […]” (190). This assumption about the genre being conducive to the writer’s voice is so ingrained in essays and essay scholarship that voice seems an inescapable or inevitable part of the genre. For example, in their Introduction to one of the most widely used essay textbooks The Fourth Genre, Robert Root and Michael Steinberg state, “[…W]e are aware of [essayists’] presence, because their voice is personal, individual […]” (xxiv). Again, this statement suggests that voice in an essay is a given (“we are aware”)—but also that it is proof of the essayist’s presence on the page.

In his extensive study of George Eliot’s writing voice over the course of her literary life, 9 Robert Strange frames much of his study around the assumption that the narrator in her works is the “figure which George Eliot has animated with her own convictions and made to speak with the clarity and authority of her own celebrated authority” (326). It should come as no surprise that Strange can assert that “this figure” re-presents Eliot’s own convictions and speaks with her own authority, given that the text is an essay (specifically, a “moral essay”). Because of the common conception of the essayist-essay relation I’ve been describing, Strange can assert that even through the fictional character in a moral essay, the writer speaks and is manifest. It is through the writer’s “authorial voice,” in particular, that Strange hears the writer in her essays.

In the conventions of freedom, walking, and voice, the assumption is that there is a direct and transparent relationship between the essayist and the essay; in fact, I have often found that this relationship is the ultimate goal, if not the driving force, for writing or teaching the essay. According to voice scholars in Composition Studies, though, it is not through walking [in nature and/or on the page] or even in the freedom of the form that one finds voice; rather, it is through a series of operations—e.g., reflection and speaking/breathing—which can be enacted in a personal essay to create voice in writing.

In his article addressing the distinction between tone and voice, Taylor Stoehr states, “Voice is the pervasive reflection , in written or spoken language, of an author’s character […]” (150, emphasis added). Like the image we see in the mirror, voice must be a copy of the real face, or in this case, the real writer’s character. 10 Stoehr continues: “There are as many possible voices as there are tones of voice, but a writer has only one voice, and while he may modulate it with many tonalities, it remains his idiosyncratic way of talking” (150). To extend the metaphor of the mirror, then, the image may reflect the apparent changes of the real face—the changes brought on by age, sleep, hairstyle, makeup, and so on—but the image remains, even in all these changes, the unique reflection of the person.

In his Introduction to Landmark Essays: On Voice and Writing , Peter Elbow is a bit more careful about asserting that voice is equal to the writer’s self; however, he admits that he “tend[s] to lean toward” (xxviii) the view that “people do have some kind of identity that exists apart from the language they use, and that it’s worth trying to talk about whether or not that identity shows in a textual voice” (xvii). Given his career-long investment in the conceptualizations and pedagogies of voice and given the field of Rhetoric and Composition’s general understanding of his role as one of the central figures of the Expressivist movement, perhaps it’s no surprise that I read Elbow’s work as consistently asserting that something of the writer can and should necessarily show up in the voice on the page. As to what the “something” is, though, that’s one of the major questions that drives much of his work, and there’s no easy way to pin down what that something is.

In investigating the writer-page relation, Elbow draws, in part, on discussions of ethos in order to demonstrate that there is a very old and established tradition that takes seriously the fact “that listeners and readers get a sense of the real speaker and his or her virtue (or the absence of it) through the words on the page” (xvii). 11 According to Elbow’s argument, the success of a piece is in large part determined by the personality of the writer finding its way onto the page (or into the speech) and, then, into the reader’s experience of that page. Consequently, in Stoehr’s and Elbow’s work on voice in writing, there is at least one common thread—the assumption that language can be used as a medium for capturing some essential part of the writer’s self on the page.

If we follow this assumption and apply it to the essay, then it seems easy enough to conclude that in the essay, the mind has a unique opportunity, due to the openness of the form, to take advantage of this conception of language. Imagine: there are no constraints in the form, and the language, itself (the tool for expression), is a veritable reflecting pool. 12 There are at least a few operations that have to be working in order for the process to unfold, though, which I will trace out through an extended engagement with Peter Elbow’s work. Those operations include the following: the writer would have to reflect an essential part of his/her self into language, and the language would have to reflect back to the reader not just an image of the writer’s self, but some real, meaningful, powerful part of the writer’s self. To begin then, these operations lie in a very old theory of language.

Speaking in Writing: A Theory of Language

After giving an example of a “jargony piece of educational writing,” Elbow states, “[The writer] must have had a sense of the intended meaning and then constructed words to express it. The words lack breath or presence. […It] would take her an extra step of revising—and revising consciously for the sake of voice—to change her written words so as to break out of that language-construction into a saying-of-words on paper” ( Writing With Power 288-289, emphasis in text). In sharing this quote with a few of my literature colleagues and my rhetoric colleagues, the response to it is consistent: it usually ranges from raised eyebrows to an audible “grrr.” When I share the same quote with my Creative Writing colleagues, the response is also consistent, but differently so: it usually ranges from a nod of the head to an audible, “duh!” This difference is interesting. It suggests that what is a given in one sphere is not in another, even though we all teach the same students from the same curriculum in the same department. To my mind, it is The fundamental difference between creative writing teachers’ and scholars’ conceptions of the writer-page relationship and literature teachers’ and scholars’ conceptions of the writer-page relationship. The source of that difference seems to be rooted in two different conceptions of language.

Expressivists, by definition, work from a philosophy of language that privileges the speaking subject, much like what I have found in the work of the French philosopher, Georges Gusdorf. In his work, Gusdorf is interested in the relationship between the writer and the text; he’s especially interested in that relationship with regards to creative nonfiction (e.g., autobiographical) texts, which is why I bring him into this discussion. His most famous and extensive study of that relationship is rendered in La Parole , which is a phenomenological philosophy of language that, to my mind, captures in readable and useful ways a logocentric theory of language (one that is reminiscent of the object of much of Jacques Derrida’s criticism).

In “Scripture of the Self: ‘Prologue in Heaven,’” Gusdorf argues that speech “is what constitutes the real and what founds identity” (113). He continues, saying that speech “initiate[s] being” (113). In the context of his larger work, I understand this claim to mean that speaking has the power to create a living, breathing entity, and that in the process of speaking, one can shape that being into an identity… but not just any identity. According to Gusdorf, the initiated being is an extension of the living, coherent, original speaker. This extension is possible because, according to Gusdorf, written or spoken language is consciousness, itself—“inner speech” made external, “expos[ing] the innermost human recesses to inspection and judgment” (113).

In Gusdorf’s model, after speaking, writing becomes “a second incarnation…” of the utterance of the speaker. He states, “[Writing] is the memory and the commemoration of spoken utterances, which thus will be able to confront the very one who, having spoken them, might very well have forgotten them” (114). So, in writing, the writer has the opportunity to study a finite form of the initiated being—which, in the case of creative nonfiction, is his/her self. To put this in phenomenological terms, in writing autobiographically, one discovers the self by making an observable object of it, but an object that is an extension of the original self. The key pay-off for Gusdorf in such a writing exercise is that it is only through the work of autobiography, in which he includes the essay (127), that we are able to search out our true selves, not in comparison to an other that is not us (like Adam does with Eve) but according to an other that is us.

This objectification of the self onto the page (the making of the flesh-and-blood writer into an “I” or “me” on the page) is important, key in fact, to the concept of voice. It is also responsible, as I will show in the coming pages, for voice’s failure to do what it is supposed to do—to express and empower the self of the writer. To explain how voice is supposed to empower writers, I turn now to some of Peter Elbow’s work on voice. In it, Elbow relies on a theory of language similar to Gusdorf’s (though he does not map it out explicitly, like Gusdorf does), and it is through that theory of language that Elbow argues that by writing—by making our inner speech (i.e., life force) external—we externalize the self. If this externalization is done adequately in writing, then the externalization is of the writer’s life source, which Elbow calls “ resonant voice.”

Elbow states that resonant voice consists of words that “seem to resonate with or have behind them the unconscious as well as conscious” writer’s mind. As a result, the reader feels “a sense of presence with the writer” (“About Voice” xxxiv, emphasis in text), and that is where its power lies. Elbow is careful in his phrasing here. He says “a sense of presence,” as if to suggest that the experience is sensory, not necessarily scientific—i.e., predictable, objective, the inevitable consequence of a cause-effect relation. This carefulness in phrasing, tentativeness even, is typical of Elbow’s work on voice. It suggests that he is experimenting with the concept, that he is testing out an idea, practicing, perhaps, the very practices he teaches in his writing textbooks (e.g., the believing/doubting game). I note this in order to clarify the fact that Elbow’s investigations into and experiments with the concept of voice have yet to come to an end. He continually revises them. Thus, his work makes for a difficult object of study, as the object, itself, is often shifting and is still being revised. In this part of his ever-evolving exploration of voice, however, in the claim about words seeming “to resonate with or have behind them the unconscious as well as conscious” writer’s mind, one finds, again and obviously, an emphasis on the writer’s mind somehow being captured and made present in the text. 13

This emphasis is interesting to the effort in this chapter to investigate the relation between the personal essay and the concept of voice in writing because it demonstrates the sometimes obvious (but often complicated) relationship between the ways in which one Expressivist, Peter Elbow, is emphasizing the writer’s mind-page relation and the ways in which personal essayists, too, have emphasized the same relation. In Elbow’s work and in the arguments about personal essays, this essential part of the writer (his/her mind) may be made present like an image in a mirror or made present in the aural qualities (the resonance) of the text, but the important point here is that the presenting of the mind on the page should be powerful enough that it impacts the reader: s/he sees it, feels it, and is affected by it, when s/he reads. To encourage that impact, Elbow advises writers to make careful choices about what kind of language they use. This advice is meant to help the student express the “invisible self”—a deeper self that exists behind or hidden within the apparent self, one that is full of power, that can extend itself beyond the physical boundaries of the flesh-and-blood writer, that can manifest in, for example, black squiggles on white pages. This self is, if framed in the discourse of and about the personal essay, the natural state of being that is so essential to the relationship between essayist and essay on which this chapter centers.

Resonant Voice: What it is and What it is not

In Writing With Power , Elbow states, “[Some people’s] speech sounds wooden, dead, fake. Some people who have sold their soul to a bureaucracy come to talk this way. Some people speak without voice who have immersed themselves in a life-long effort to think logically or scientifically […]. Some people lack voice in their speech who are simply very frightened […] ” (290). Here, voice is somehow bound to a person’s essence, his/her soul, for in the lines above, it is in selling his/her “soul to bureaucracy” that one might find oneself without a voice. That is, though, only one example of lost voice. The voiceless might be, instead of soul-selling bureaucrats, logically or scientifically-minded. The afraid may also find themselves voiceless. 14 According to this passage, then, it is bureaucracy, logic, science, and/or fear that may steal (or to which one relinquishes) a writer’s voice.

In opposition to this theft or sacrifice, Elbow states, “Writing with voice is writing into which someone has breathed ” and “[w]riting with real voice has the power to make you pay attention and understand—the words go deep.” He continues, “I want to say that it has nothing to do with the words on the page, only with the relationship of the words to the writer—and therefore that the same words could have real voice when written by one person and lack it when written by someone else” (299, emphasis added). In other words, the power of a text hinges on the proximity of the relationship between writer and page, and Elbow takes this relationship very seriously, suggesting a proximity that is similar to the magical acts described in the Old Testament.

To explain, if one takes seriously Gusdorf’s assertion that language is “not simply designation, but an immanent reality by virtue of which it is possible for man to repeat the denominative and at the same time creative act of God” ( Speaking 12), then one sees how voice works as a divine act. The “first word” of God works like a text that has voice and vice versa. The speaker/writer is able to call into being a self, his/her self, the same self or part of the same self that exists outside of words into words. Adam is created “in the image of God”… “from the word of God.” In the voice on the page one finds a reflection of the creator, the writer, but most importantly to my point here, one that is alive; some essential, life-giving, life-sustaining force remains.

Following this lineage and applying it to prior discussions about freedom and walking (the return to nature) in the essay, for voice to be breathed into the words on the page and for it to call into being the self that is the writer, the voice and its source must be in its natural state. They cannot be contaminated, diluted, or deadened by bureaucracy, logic, science, or fear. These are important requirements, for it seems that what is driving them is the assumption that such influences impede the expression of the natural (and the most potent) self. If the natural self is impeded, then the power of voice fails, for in voice theory, words not only issue from my essence, but generate power in issuing from and carrying the force of that essence.

According to Elbow, there is evidence of that power in the writer’s words, if they impact the reader’s center. He states, “[…T]he words somehow issue from the writer’s center—even if in a slippery way—and produce resonance which gets the words more powerfully to a reader’s center” ( Writing With Power 298). To enact resonant voice, then, the words of a text should “somehow issue from the writer’s center,” from his/her essence, resonating powerfully enough to effect a thrust into “the reader’s center.”

As to what that center is, it’s difficult to say. Elbow certainly does not explain explicitly what it is, though he does seem to oscillate in terminology between the writer’s “mind” and the writer’s “center.” If there is a commonality between the two, it is in the assumption that both are the inside of a person. The interiority is the writer’s clunky violin or chest cavity (two metaphors Elbow uses at length to explain voice), the place from which s/he can speak his/her self. And in that speaking [of] self, [of] his/her innerness, s/he will assume the creative power of something like a god—the capacity to call his/her self into being. The stakes, for Elbow, are these: real voice is what he hopes to teach his students in order to empower them, for if I see what I am inside—beyond social influences, “impediments,” or obligations—I can use this essence as the space from which to say “no” to those social impositions.

Empowerment in Voice

Within this assumption that voice grants us a space from which to say “no,” voice becomes the means to liberation. Gordon Rohmann and Albert Wlecke state, “[By] merely permitting students to echo the categories of their culture, they would never discover themselves within the writing process” (7). This is the most common argument for voice—and the rally-cry that has met with the most backlash from composition scholars. Here is the crux of the voice issue: an emphasis on voice is opposed to an emphasis on “the categories of [our] culture.” Voice is invested in who I am essentially, which is necessarily and significantly opposed to who I am socially. To put this in other terms, the thinking around the value of voice in writing (that it liberates) generally goes something like this: my essence is innate, and it is the key to my individuality, to my uniqueness. In a culture that privileges the autonomy of the individual, my uniqueness, and its expression, is not simply innate, but is, in fact, my birthright.

This thinking is rooted in an ideology that is, arguably, the nucleus of Western notions of subjectivity. In this emphasis on the individual and his/her unique essence, social forces or categories are believed to be necessarily working on us to oppress us, to silence our innerness and its potential expression. For Elbow, these social forces may be the socially privileged influences called “bureaucracy” or “science.” For Stoehr, they might be the conventions of literature at a given moment in history. For bell hooks, one of the most celebrated and renowned advocates of voice, they might include racism and sexism.

In hooks’s work, the stakes of voice-in-writing are best demonstrated: it is against the formidable foe of racism that she speaks. In speaking against racism by voicing her self, hooks argues that she moves from object-position (object of racism) to subject-position, to a position of autonomy where she is able to say “no” to racism. hooks states,

[C]oming to voice is an act of resistance. Speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being subject. Only as subjects can we speak. As objects we remain voiceless—our beings defined and interpreted by others. That way of speaking is characterized by opposition, by resistance. It demands that paradigms shift—that we learn to talk—to listen—to hear in a new way. (53)

The presupposition is that when we don’t speak as individuals, as subjects, we let our selves be defined and interpreted by others, according to assumed social categories (like race, gender, social class, etc). So, for example, in hooks’s experience as a student in a writing class, where “the teacher and fellow students would praise [her] for using [her] ‘true,’ authentic voice” when she wrote a poem in “the particular dialect of Southern black speech,” she felt this praise “mask[ed] racial biases about what [her] authentic voice would or should be” (52). She insists that writers must, instead, write in the voice that can combat stereotypes and racial biases, a voice that she explains as “liberatory voice—that way of speaking that is no longer determined by one’s status as object—as oppressed being” (23). Herein lies the interesting hypocrisy of voice: hooks’s concept of voice is about making the writer a subject, not an object, but for me to reflect or resonate or “express” my distinctive self, the self must be objectified in the re-presentation on the page. It becomes that-which-is-outside, that-which-is-there; it becomes that-which-is-me (an object).

This theory of voice, of the self-page relation, hinges on the older, magical theory of language that I articulated earlier, one in which language functions as a vehicle that, basically, carries the essence of an entity. As a result, the self on the page can be pointed to and designated by an object pronoun, such as “me” or “her,” but because that reflection is of myself, it can also be designated by a possessive pronoun, such as “my” or “her” (“that is my self, my voice on the page”). In such ways, the self-on-the-page is both separate from the writer and intimately related to it. It is made separate from the writer, in part, out of necessity: if, according to Berry or Hazlitt, one must isolate the self from society, from social influence—making it an entity separate from the social forces that act on/in it—then that self-on-the-page must be separated, even, from the actual self that is the flesh-and-blood writer; it must be separated from all of the impositions on the writer, and it must be purified, distilled in that separating. Yet, even in that separation, the self-on-the-page is still deeply related to the writer—thus the possessive relationship (“that is my voice”), indicating a kind of pointing simultaneously inward and outward to name the relationship, to claim the self-on-the-page.

I acknowledge that this ‘me’-on-the-page can influence the reader—and thus, function like an agent. But, if the liberatory voice, if the resonant voice, in this conception of subjectivity, is supposed to possess the life force of the writer and is supposed to be an agent (which here equals the slayer of social forces, the shedder of social impositions), then of course, the self-on-the-page fails. It fails because it is language, made of language, possible only as language, which is a decidedly “social” phenomenon. Language is its own imposition—giving shape to an experience by giving experience a name, a category (“that is a tree” or “this is love”), a shape that only makes sense in relation to other names, other categories (“it is like a bush but taller” or “it is an affection but more than that”). Montaigne offers one of the best examples of the social phenomenon of language in “Of Experience.” He states, “I ask what is ‘nature,’ ‘pleasure,’ ‘circle,’ ‘substitution.’ The question is one of words, and is answered the same way. ‘A stone is a body.’ But if you pressed on: ‘And what is a body?’—‘Substance’—‘And what is substance?’ and so on, you would finally drive the respondent to the end of the lexicon” (818-819). Language refers to itself; it is, it functions via, relations between and among words, which explain concepts, not the “thing in itself.” Language is not the vehicle for the life force of a living being. Despite any romantic notions about the writer’s relationship to the page, we know that words do not carry the writer’s mind or soul (if they did, conversations about the value, preservation, and destruction of texts would be very different). Rather, language can only constitute a textual self, one that is then imposed upon when it is read by others—even by the writer.

Where Voice Fails, Why It Remains, and Where to Next

Of course, as I’ve demonstrated in this chapter, this concept of voice in writing does not acknowledge the social theory of language I describe above. Yet, hooks recognizes that voice in writing is always a social act, a political act, that it cannot be isolated from context. Elbow, too, begins his first major book, Writing Without Teachers , with this statement: “Many people are now trying to become less helpless, both personally and politically: trying to claim more control over their own lives. One of the ways people lack control over their lives is through lacking control over words” (vii). He acknowledges here that writing is both a personal and political act. Too, if we push our students just a little on this point about language and about the writer-page relation, they, too, see the problems. I’ve yet to meet a student essayist who has been able to describe his/her self in asocial or pre-social ways, e.g., according to qualities other than his/her class, religious affiliation, political beliefs, etc. Who am I, if not my age, gender, education, ethnicity? Who am I without my relationships to others, as a colleague, sister, teacher, or friend? And, perhaps even more importantly, how can I talk about myself without a culturally, historically, politically-bound language—without using the syntax and vocabulary made available to me by the society I speak within and to?

Too, though “write your true self” might be a call that (re)invests student writers in the work of the writing classroom and (re)invigorates their relationships to their own texts—which, in turn, can (re)make me, as teacher, into an inspiring figure—I, for one, feel very uncomfortable with the requirement that I, then, grade my students’ selves-on-the-page. But, all of these points have been made by others, throughout the last few decades, as the Humanities has turned its attention to “the social” (I’ll take up this turn at length in Chapter 2). So, why does this particular conception of subjectivity hold such sway over essayists, student essayists, essay scholars, and essay teachers, alike?

Many writers and scholars want to and do buy into a belief in a self untouched by “the social,” a self that is pre-social and that they can access through particular practices. Many of the essayists and scholars discussed here work from the assumption that in a more integral self, a different truth—a truer truth—can be found. This truer truth, if it issues from that essential part of the self, is more powerful. It can make change, influence others, and ultimately, stop the damning social influences that work to bury it. This, I suspect, is why many of my colleagues who are for or against the teaching of the personal essay in our curriculum are quick to point out that one of the benefits and drawbacks (again, depending on if one is for or against the essay) is that these “truer truths” are often those that are felt, that are unprovable, and that in privileging such truths in the essay, those truths can be expressed and, thus, can become part of the discourse (e.g., think of the example of the student who wanted to write about ghosts, which I talk about in the Introduction). The problem, of course, is that such truths, when understood as issuing from the essence of the writer, become undebatable truths; they cannot be proven, cannot be refuted, cannot be analyzed and critiqued beyond their own givens. And, therein lies the danger.

At one time, I, too, wanted access to and permission to express some pre-social self—and all the truths that felt right. But in so doing, as I’ll show in the next chapter, I had enabled a classroom that could only perform at an expressive level, that could not engage beyond solipsistic discovery. This process can be, no doubt, valuable to us and to our students. However, the process cannot stop there, if said truths are going to get any traction in the discourses in which we work and/or want to participate.

In conclusion, for all its virtues in encouraging students to write and in helping composition and essay scholars to articulate the relationship between the writer and the self-on-the-page, voice theory doesn’t allow me to voice my center, my innerness without making an object (something exterior) of it—an object that is, ironically, made of the social stuff of language. I encounter this self, this voice, through the operation of objectification, where the self-on-the-page is not my mind, but an object rendered in language that is perceptible by my mind. The most damning problem, though, is that in that move to objectify my mind by expressing it on the page, I do not negotiate with the social and overcome it; rather, I [pretend to] avoid “the social,” altogether—which, to be frank, can only make me impotent, even irrelevant, in relation to it.

These failings of voice theory have expansive implications. For example, if the writer is not writing and the reader is not reading the essayist’s self, as subject, on the page, as is so often assumed, then what is being written/read? If the essay is not the writer’s manifested mind on the page, then how does one argue for any interesting relationship between writer and page? Can one derive the latter’s meaning in relation to the former (or vice versa)? The questions proliferate, as do their consequences. Perhaps, the most important question is this: If I can’t discover and express my self through voice in an essay in order to know my natural self and to resist the oppressive forces working to manipulate me, then by what other means can I know my self, if at all, and negotiate with or resist those forces in writing? To come at this question and a few of the earlier questions from another angle, this project turns now to the other side of the debate over subjectivity in writing—the social.

4. It’s important to note, at the beginning of this exploration, that essayists tend to differ about what kind or aspects of self one might meet on the page. However differently essayists might describe the particulars of what they see on the page, though, they generally agree that one can see the writer’s self on the page through the conventions of the personal essay.

5. In the Phaedrus , Plato calls the mind “the pilot of the soul” (52).

6. Undoubtedly, walking-as-essaying is an old and persistent analogy. According to Paul Heilker in his landmark text, The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form , the analogy has its roots in the “consistent and unbroken line of agreement about the nature and form of the essay running from its originators to contemporary essayists and theorists: the essay is kineticism incarnate—the embodiment of perpetual mobility, motion, and movement” (169). For example, in a study on the essay as a reflective text, Réda Bensmaïa states that the essay is “an efficacious means to realize and implement the mind’s ‘mobility’” (xxxi). Thus, the essayist does not simply describe the walking mind, but the essay, itself, is walking because it is a fluid, moving form.

As Paul Heilker examines much more extensively in The Essay , there are many images used to describe the movement of the essay: flying, slithering, flowing, journeying, walking, rambling, wandering, meandering, roaming, exploring, searching, seeking, venturing, following, tracking, and hunting. These images, he groups together in some cases, but notes that they constitute “an extended family of tropes which relies, at its core, upon a conflation of physical, mental, and textual journeying” (173). Heilker continues, “Upon this notion of the essay as journeying is built a branching family of closely related images, the most elementary of which is the image of essay, essay writing, and essay reading as walking” (174). Again, “walking” is not simply an image or a trope for what the essay looks like, but is a description of the essay as “kineticism incarnate.”

7. It should be noted that part of the appeal of the “walking” metaphor is that it is vague. As I’ve explained in the section in this chapter titled “Freedom,” the essay is supposed to be unstructured. Heilker builds on this idea that the essay is unstructured in the traditional sense (e.g., like a scholarly argument) but argues that it is still organized, that it still has “form.” Specifically, he argues that the essay is organized “chrono-logically,” which is a term he uses to describe a kind of kairos-driven organization of thought, where in the process of writing, the writer responds to what s/he is writing. As such, the text moves in an unstructured but organized way.

8. No doubt, this is because of the long and passionate practice (by rhetoric and composition scholars and essayists, alike) of polarizing the essay and the argument as irreconcilable opposites with the one championing personal voice and the latter championing scholarly authority. See William Gass’s “Emerson and the Essay” for a particularly powerful example of this polarization from a writer who is both an essayist and scholar.

9. This kind of work—extensive studies of particular writers’ voices—is done much more often in literary criticism than in composition scholarship. This is one of the critiques in current discussions of voice in the field of Composition Studies—that voice-invested scholarship has not done enough work to apply a theory of voice to particular texts (see, for example, Elbow’s relatively recent College English article, “Voice in Writing Again: Embracing Contraries”).

10. In voice scholarship, there is rarely a distinction made between “author” and “writer”—a point that Harris makes in his treatment of Elbow’s work in his chapter on voice in A Teaching Subject . There is a difference, however, when the two concepts are considered through the lens of Foucault’s work. For Foucault and in most poststructuralist theory and scholarship, the author is but a conception of the writer. It is based on what is known of the writer through his/her written texts, and this knowledge is social, contextual; it circulates in a culture and informs the ways in which a text circulates. The writer is something else. It is, too, a concept, but it refers to the one who writes, not the figure in whose conception we can (or, according to Barthes, should not) read a text.

More to the point here, in Stoehr’s work there seems to be no distinction between author and writer. I use his choice of word in this section in order to avoid any confusion created by my using a different term.

11. “Virtue,” as the key ingredient in effective ethos, comes to us from the works of classical rhetors (e.g., Aristotle). Elbow is drawing on this tradition.

12. Of course, since Nietzsche first wrote “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (in 1873), if not since the sophists (see Susan Jarratt’s Rereading the Sophists ), the transparency of language has been called into question. Nietzsche famously explains in “Truth and Lies” that language always operates as metaphor, that it cannot capture “the thing in itself,” so to speak, that it is an arbitrary designation for some piece of reality—e.g., the designation of T-R-E-E for the reality of the tree—and that, really, we are only getting access to the human conception of that piece of reality when we invoke the [relative] word. Thus, in order to buy this argument about the transparency of language, one must first buy into a much older theory of language—one that is intensely problematic for granting language a power that I can only describe as “magical.”

13. There are ways in which Elbow’s work has been inherited by the field as utterly and perfectly Expressivist in nature, when in truth, it is not necessarily so—a terrible consequence, perhaps, of the “author function,” as Foucault explains it. Much of my reading of his work is informed and therefore limited, inevitably, by that inheritance.

14. Stoehr argues that these influences—of fear or uncertainty, namely—are “failures of tone” (150). In his model, tone is “an author’s attitude toward his audience,” which he argues is different from “an author’s character.” The difference in each scholar’s assessment of what one calls “failure of tone” and the other “voicelessness” seems to be the result of what are different projects: Elbow is interested in voice-as-empowerment; Stoehr is interested in distinguishing between tone and voice.

Understand Your Dreams by Using Jung's “Active Imagination”

Jung believed we could unlock both the conflicts and cures hidden in our dreams..

Posted October 23, 2016 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Dreams are a marvel, worlds of wonder filled with phantasmagoric images, surreal plot twists that have their own logic even as they turn us inside out with their shifting points of view. Dreams take us high and drop us low. Whether we’re flying over the Manhattan skyline or being chased through a cornfield by a bull, we sense that our dreams are trying to communicate something—perhaps something essential—to our waking selves. We suspect that what is hidden from one part of our minds in the day-world—our unspoken worries, our secret loves, the destiny we fear to follow—becomes manifest in living color in our dreams.

As far as we know, humans have always dreamed. Some of our earliest written stories include dreams. In the first tablet of our oldest epic poem, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh , just before he encounters his doppelganger Enkidu, Gilgamesh dreams of a rock and an ax falling from the sky; his mother explains to him that these images foretell the arrival of “a mighty comrade.” In Homer’s Odyssey , Penelope dreams of 50 geese being killed by an eagle, a wish fulfilled when her husband Odysseus returns and slays the suitors plaguing her. And in the Old Testament, Joseph achieves fame by interpreting Pharaoh’s dream about 14 cows, seven fat and seven lean.

On every continent groups still exist that consult dreams to foretell the future or connect with the Divine. Even some of us “non-believers” decorate our bedrooms with dream catchers. Why? As much as we might want to reject the notion of an invisible world that influences our day-life, don’t we all suspect there is a meaning and purpose to our dreams?

Marie-Louise von Franz, a scholarly colleague of Jung’s, wrote that dreams “are the voice of nature within us.” Dreams may be the sacred place where human and cosmos meet and interact. In The Collective Works , Jung elaborates:

“... in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare from all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises ...” ( CW 10).

On the scientific side, we are learning more about the neuroscience of dreams than ever before. As Sander van der Linden describes in an article in Scientific American , one hypothesis, based on where dreaming occurs in the brain, speculates that dream stories “may be stripping the emotion out of a certain experience by creating a memory of it.” Other scientists speculate that the purpose of dreaming may not be psychological but physiological. Rapid-eye movement or REM sleep has been thought to help the brain process memories, but new research in the field of ophthalmology suggests the purpose of REM sleep might be to oxygenate our corneas.

Though we can study the hard facts about our dream-brain, the dreaming mind still remains a mystery.

After losing his mentor and father-figure in a professional split with Freud , Jung suffered a tremendous psychological upheaval, a twenty-year period Stephen A. Diamond describes in his PT post “ Reading The Red Book : How C.G. Jung Salvaged His Soul .”

Like Freud, Jung understood dreams to be messages from the unconscious , but rather than viewing dream images as manifest symbols of latent pathology, a storehouse of unwanted and dreaded content, Jung, through his own self-analysis, concluded that our darkest dreams might contain imagery that illustrates our internal conflicts and point to their cure as well .

In an essay on Jung, psychoanalyst Joan Chodorow describes the process by which Jung experimented with ways to restore his emotional equilibrium through dialoguing with fantasy and dream images as if these characters existed in the day-world. She writes:

“… he made the conscious decision to ‘drop down’ into the depths. He landed on his feet and began to explore the strange inner landscape where he met the first of a long series of inner figures. These fantasies seemed to personify his fears and other powerful emotions. Over time, he realized that when he managed to translate his emotions into images, he was inwardly calmed and reassured. He came to see that his task was to find the images that are concealed in the emotions.”

Jung later called the process of working with dream figures “active imagination .” In his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections , he describes terrifying encounters with his unconscious, which often threatened to overwhelm him. His gradual discovery of how to work with the fearsome material flooding his psyche has been posthumously published in The Red Book .

Written closer to the end of his life, Memories, Dreams, Reflections details perhaps more objectively Jung’s actual experience during the time of his turmoil and outlines how he came to use his own frightening encounters with his psyche to form some of his most lasting theories about conscious and unconscious material:

“… I did my best not to lose my head but to find some way to understand these strange things. I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible. ... But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the beginning there was no doubt in my mind that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies. “I was frequently so wrought up that I had to do certain yoga exercises in order to hold my emotions in check. But since it was my purpose to know what was going on within myself, I would do these exercises only until I had calmed myself enough to resume my work with the unconscious. As soon as I had the feeling that I was myself again, I abandoned this restraint upon the emotions and allowed the images and inner voices to speak afresh… “To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images—that is to say, to find the images that were concealed in the emotions—I was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them…. As a result of my experiment I learned how helpful it can be, from the therapeutic point of view, to find the particular images which lie behind emotions.” ( MDR , p. 177).

What if dream figures could step out of our dreams and talk to us, and tell us why they have appeared and what they want?

Using the imagination as a tool for transformation is what drew me to Jung and, later, to work with active imagination. As a writer, I inherently trust the wisdom of my unconscious mind to lead me to the story inside the story. To show me what I am not looking at, what escapes my awareness but wants to be seen. What a revelation to discover that the nightmares that wake us, shaken and despairing, might indeed be coded messages of a healing source within!

Try it yourself. Sit in a quiet place and recall a figure that has appeared to you in a dream. Talk to it. What is your second-grade teacher doing in a dream? Why is she grooming a parrot? Why is this happening in your grandmother’s yard? To find out the meaning of the dream, active imagination encourages the dreamer to dialogue with dream figures in waking life. We ask and through their answers, we associate what these figures might mean to us. Do they bring any stories, myths or fairy tales to mind? Looking at dream images through an archetypal and a personal lens allows us to see, alternately, the broadest and the most precise meaning of our dreams. What I’m suggesting is a simplified process but many good guidebooks exist. In the animate world of dreams, cars, trees, shoes, dogs can all speak, and what they have to say has everything to do with your life.

I am the author of the novel, The Conditions of Love ; visit my Facebook page .

Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth by Robert A. Johnson.

Jung on Active Imagination , edited and with an introduction by Joan Chodorow.

Dreams, A Portal to the Source by Edward C. Whitmont and Sylvia Brinton Perera.

Dale M. Kushner, MFA , explores the intersection of creativity, healing, and spirituality in her writing: her poetry collection M ; novel, The Conditions of Love ; and essays, including in Jung’s Red Book for Our Time .

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