Language, Dream, & Duality

The nature of linguistic definition tends to convince us that discrete words must by necessity refer to discrete phenomena. For example, when we use the words “sleep” or “dream” in everyday language, we often assume a fixed understanding of what we mean. Our linguistic Platonism goes unchecked. That is to say, we assume that such words must denote something singular (that can then be discussed abstractly as though there were a monolithic and context-independent definition or universal meaning of those terms). The intellectual precedent for this point belongs in part to Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose primary philosophical concern was how linguistics or semantics influence common assumptions about reality. While the aim of this essay will not be to expound at length on Wittgenstein’s perspective regarding sleep and dreams, I want to use his insight as a launch-pad for my own theoretical discussion of waking, dreaming, and sleeping — namely, Wittgenstein’s insight that “dreaming” is a learned concept that children acquire from parents’ and others’ lexica, through common repeated phrases such as “What did you dream while sleeping?” or “Don’t worry, it was only a dream.”

In an online academic course discussion with professor Michael Sheehy of University of Virginia, he noted that contemporary science is beginning to conceive of waking and sleeping as more of a spectral phenomenon than a pair of mutually…