Philosophers have long debated how we can tell that we are not dreaming. But the more profound question is raised by Kant, namely: how in the world did we ever come to assign any meaning and reference to the term “dream” in the first place since there are patently other sounds that we don’t assign any meaning to, e.g., the “uhh” or “errr” which we liberally sprinkle our speech with?! What is necessary in order to arrive at our understanding of dream? In the first place we must first have an objective world existing externally to us, a world of Humean things, things which are independent of us and which are uniform in their existence.* For it is in contrast to that world that we position a dream as an internally seated reflection of that independent and uniformly existing world.

[* See Hume’s Enquiry Section 118 (back button to return here).]

But that merely raises a new question, namely how did we come to think of (or up?!) and recognize such a world, since we are never given any intuition of independently and uniformly existing things on their own, but rather merely specters, i.e., objects on our retinas (especially) and on our other sense organs. At this level there is no difference in these specters between a dream and a sighting in the objectively existing world; even as there is no difference, subjectively speaking, between the rain and the rainbow, even though the former is actually in space apart from us, while the latter is only on our retina and not in the same space as the rain at all. And so how is it that we come to make such distinctions in and amongst our specters, and assign some of them to the dream world, i.e., entirely within us when asleep, and others to the world of waking reality which continues even while the things of the dream world possess our consciousness? I submit the following to provide the solution to this problem.

We are prompted by an a priori sense of orderly existence, and by means of our consequent drive to find meaning to sounds (making them into words), to pay attention expectantly when we lie down in bed. Later, upon arising from bed, we recall that earlier state of going to bed, and we notice that what has just happened, i.e., in our dreams, took place since that time. We then conceive of a state called sleep by watching other people as they sleep, and noticing how different they are, e.g., not responding to normal stimuli. And we come to consider the time between our going to bed and our getting out of bed as such a state. At that point we can conceive of dreams, namely that what we saw and experienced in that time between going to bed and getting out of bed was a product of that sleep, and not actually happening at all.

What we will have done is to begin to order and arrange the specters, and the way we do this is to conceive of a world of independent and uniformly existing things and we utilize that conception to ascribe certain specters to sightings of those things by a perceiving being (ourselves). In order to see that things don’t get smaller as they get further away, but merely look smaller, for example, we must realize we are not actually seeing the thing looked at itself, but only a specter, namely an image of that thing in our eye. This differentiation of thing and specter we test by shutting one eye and then the other, and seeing that the two visual fields overlap and thereby come to suspect them as always existing and necessarily so under laws of interdependence with each other and even with us.* This is likely first prompted when we notice that our finger splits as it reaches our nose, and we will have further investigated to see that the split grows in proportion to its closeness to the nose.**

[* This observation would have been prompted and made possible by Kant’s first principle of analogy in particular (in the Critique of Pure Reason), namely by asserting (a priori) that there is something whose existence continues independently of our perception; for it is only upon such a preconception that we would ever have been induced to make such experiments and observations.]

[** This calls for an unusual capacity in the human, one that I call lancian vision, namely an ability to look past an object of interest in order to see what happens when something is not being physically looked at (at least not directly). ]

Now the supreme conception we bring to the world therefore is that of connection, namely that things make sense and they make sense for us via a universal inter-connectivity. The proof for Kant lies in this: it is only by means of this assumption of universal connection, which Kant calls “affinity,” that we are able to have even our first perception, which is the building block for all empirical knowledge and certitude. We must remember here that for Kant the perception is the Wahrnehmung or the careful look* It is by means of the affinity of all specters, namely that all things are connected, that we are able to turn our attention to an empirical situation with the intention of replicating a suspicious, earlier sighting or hint of a sighting. And so it is only in the assumption of the continuation of the world according to laws, namely such that the future and present are like the past, that we can, for example, even imagine paying attention to the sound we hear and the moving lips that we spy and notice their correlation (in order eventually to conclude that the sounds we hear are the voice of a person). That is a perception and that requires an a priori consciousness (the subjective deduction) as a capacity and an assumption of the affinity of things (the objective deduction) as a prompt in order ever to occur in any human.

[* Earlier I had sought to use “Truthful-Taking” for the German Wahr-Nehmung but then realized, thanks to Werner Pluhar, that properly this would have to be “Careful-Taking.” It would only be thorough a careful apprehension of things that we could be sure of having a truthful look at things.]

Something similar happens with regard to Hume’s specific problem in Section 118 of his Enquiry, namely his inability to account for the most elementary of all possible perceptions, namely that his table does not in fact get smaller the further removed he is from it. Here we notice the correlation of distance and size. The animals may possibly not notice this as we do; they may notice that things get larger and smaller, and they may sense a comfortable and uncomfortable size of things (speaking of retinal images), but they may not notice that the change in size is proportionate to the distance.* We do; and we find this intriguing. We experiment with our hands and calibrate the sense of sight and that of touch, and we conceive of this uniformly existing object, corresponding in some way to our sense of touch, and the look of this thing, corresponding to the retinal image in our eye; and we conclude that the actual object does not change in size (per the uniformity of the touch), and so it is only a picture that we are seeing and not the thing on its own as it is on its own. It is by means of the affinity of all things that we are intrigued to calibrate sight and touch in this way, for without that the fact of their correlation, while it might be noticed in passing, would not become a matter of interest and experimentation and empirical determination.

[* I imagine a test for animals, perhaps for apes. Let two balloons be a certain distance from the ape and be of the same size. Let the two balloons now be withdrawn slowly from the ape and let one of them remain the same size (and so making an increasingly smaller image on the ape’s retina) and let the other increase in size proportionate to the removal so that its retinal image remains constant. Then see if either of these balloons evoke any interest on the part of the ape. I don’t think that the ape will be surprised, for I don’t think that the ape realizes that things don’t get smaller as they get further away.]

A very important consideration perhaps has to do with drawings. We also notice the projection of line drawings into space as in photographs and paintings. This tells us very early, in conjunction with our calibration of touch and sight and with our assignment of reality to touch and actuality to sight,* that space is actually in our heads, and while all the things we see about us in space actually are in space, this space itself is actually only within us, and is not a thing on its own at all.**

[* Another contribution from Werner Pluhar, if I have understood him rightly.]

[** This may be especially true for two-eye persons who are able to experiment with the parallax by noticing the splitting or doubling of the finger as it approaches the nose.]

All this will have an affinity with the recognition of the pantomimicly drawn circle in the air, for there we must assume the affinity of things in order to be able to focus on something in an entirely original way, and not by means of perception,* which is always a sort of look-back, empirical as it is. We assume an affinity of all things when we begin to capture the tracing of this circle by a mime artist in mid air, following his tracing finger as it makes its way around the face of an imaginary clock out in front of both of us, and when we come to a rule (= concept) which reproduces this individual circle any time we wish, then we have come to recognize this object, even though it is a production of our productive imagination, and not existing as such on its own at all. But because we know that space is within us and not external to us at all, we can distinguish in our imagination between a circle that it is simply a circle (merely thought about) and one which we can see in an objective space apart from us and which we can point it out to and discuss it with others.

[* Kant refers to this capacity as an a priori and pure envisagement. Hence it is different from the perception, but only in terms of the content. The perception is an a priori consciousness of an empirical, a posteriori content, while the pure envisagement has no empirical component at all. Whether I am making the “second look” which characterizes the perception or making the “first look” which denotes a sighting of a pantomimic circle, I am looking forward in anticipation of acquiring something, which is an apprehension, and so my mind is attuned to apprehending something. This is the same consciousness we are familiar with when we return to check whether we actually did lock a door or set an alarm, having done so earlier while preoccupied.]

And in this wise we can see the relevancy of the subjective and objective deduction of the categories.* The former gives us the a priori consciousness needful for paying attention to things, and the latter gives us the affinity of all specters so that we have reason

1. to undertake the perception and
2. be assured that any recognition is compatible with all recognitions, even those not yet made.

[* This refers to the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories from the first (A) version of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.]

Here is a relevant experience of mine: I was about 12 years old and lay down on a cot on the back, screened porch on a warm day in Rome, Georgia (USA), and I fell asleep. Suddenly I was awaken by shouts and sounds of gun shots; I carefully raised myself from my cot and peered over the banister into the back yard where I saw a raging gun battle between two groups of men, one of which, led by an uncle I saw only rarely, was charging the other. The ground was covered with wounded and dead, and the air was filled with smoke. I became very frightened and lay back down on the cot in order to avoid being shot; and then it suddenly occurred to me to get up and go find my daddy. And so I jumped up from the cot and ran upstairs only to find him and my brother calmly working on some project together. “What’s going on?!” I shouted to them. “What’s wrong?” my father asked, expressing surprise at my state. I went to the window and peered carefully down into the back yard where the battle should have been raging, and there I saw only a peaceful back yard with no guns or men or wounded, indeed not even broken shrubbery or displaced yard utensils. I then realized that I had been sleeping during the battle, and that it was all a dream.

The reason for the difficulty I had in making out the dream in this case is because the elements and details of the dream fitted in perfectly with the details and elements of my waking perception. The getting off of the cot and seeing the battle and laying back down all took place only in my dream, but it fitted in perfectly with my original laying down on the cot to sleep and my getting up off of the cot to go find my father. But this is what we do generally in dealing with what we come to call dreams and the real world: we conceive of an independent and uniformly existing world, the famous and unexamined presupposition of David Hume, and we first order and arrange the specters as elements of the sightings of this world. Essentially we connect all perceptions together within a single time. By virtue of this the specters between getting out of bed and going to bed are reality, and those between going to bed and getting out of bed are dreams. The former all fit together, and even include the latter, but considered as dreams. The dream cannot be fitted in with the other perceptions in terms of its actual content, e.g., the raging battle was cleaned up too quickly to be accounted for, and so is ascribed to our mental reflection of this world of Hume. A remarkable construction which has to be undertaken by every human!

The subjective deduction takes us from the apprehension, through the retention and reproduction to the containment and encapsulment of a multiplicity by means of a concept/rule. And this rule is a product of the mind's search for order in unifying things, especially specters. This subjective capacity of looking in advance, or a priori, is a necessary component in our obtaining of recognitions and even perceptions.

But it is only in the objective deduction that we see that the fundamental, underlying, enabling conception is an a priori assumption of an affinity of all things, and it is this affinity (which we then seek out in the empirical data) which not only prompts us to take “second looks”at things, the original perception through observation and experiment, but also assures us of the compatibility of the eventual recognition of the object of this perception with all possible recognitions, namely it is all part of a single world. In a word: the unity that is presupposed objectively in order to make the first perception is the same as the unity that characterizes our minds in general and makes all perceptions fit together into a single whole of recognitions, a system we come to call the world of nature.That’s what we bring to the table, our recognition that there is a single world. Kant calls it the affinity of the specters, and that is a contribution of the categorical mind. And it is then by means of this conceived single world that we are able to distinguish what is internal from the external, and the dream from the waking state.

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