On the Logic of Dreams
Making Sense and Nonsense from the Inside Out
Introduction
There are many aspects of dreams that have been of great interest to me from time to time. While I may be surprised by the random inclusion of people I haven’t seen or talked to in years, to the point that it may even ruin the entirety of the next day for me, what I have always wanted to explore further was our acceptance of the dream’s sense. This is not trying to identify the meaning behind a particular dream, but rather trying to understand how dreaming produces itself in a way that we always accept its sense as obvious while we are dreaming.
Sense & Non-Sense
Sense takes on a particular relationship with signifiers within the dream that is totally unlike the relationship between sense and signifiers within our experience of the real world while awake. Deleuze discusses the latter relationship in The Logic of Sense, stating, “Sense is like the sphere in which I am already established in order to enact possible denotations, and even to think their conditions. Sense is always presupposed as soon as I begin to speak; I would not be able to begin without this presupposition.”1 Sense, within language at least, is that which is unspoken and underlying that creates the possibility for what is spoken or to portray anything particular at all. This is not merely within the sense of language which creates the content of the signifier-signified relationship, but also sense by anticipation, memory, and relative meaning: additional meanings created by social association.
While awake in the real world, sense has to perform the underlying function of providing translatability between subjects as well as defining and limiting the grounds of that possibility so that particularity can function. The dream exists in nonsense primarily because it does not have to provide the possibility of inter-subject translation. Dreams present a form of sense folded into itself and having become nearly one with the signifiers that it provides the grounds of possibility for. Sense providing an external check for signifieds would break the experience of the dream, thus everything is made sensical to the dreaming subject as nonsense.
This is because the underlying process of making sense is taking place at the exact same time as the observed process of making the signifyers or stimuli of the dream, the events and their sense are self-referential to themselves and to each other rather than as a signifying chain. Deleuze discusses this in the section on Non-Sense in The Logic of Sense, stating, “We know that the normal law governing all names endowed with sense is precisely that their sense may be denoted only by another name (n₁→n₂→n₃…). The name saying its own sense can only be nonsense (Nₙ).”2
While Deleuze primarily speaks of this on the topic of language, semiotics, or linguistics, for the purpose of dreams, the distinction of Sense and Nonsense must also be conferred onto events. The dream is self-referential, it is self-expecting, it is self-determining, with the external world providing at most characters and events to fill itself with. What is taking place is a language in that it is understood by the subject, but it is a language that only gains sense from itself while being spoken; once awake, you are again filled with the curiosity of how you were fooled by such obvious deception.
The Nonsense of Dreams
To further explain, let me put in more specific detail the difference between this relationship while awake and while asleep. While awake, the real world provides the limits of sense externally. Language use in the real world thus does not merely exist within the distinction of sense and nonsense (the underlying referential and the self-referential) but more often within the distinction between sense and the lack of sense. When something is not understood, it is assumed, rather than being something that can only be understood by reference to itself, that there is a missing & necessary sense that would contextualize what is being said or done properly and thus provide translatability. One will then seek to find or learn this sense rather than this sense always finding them.
In the dream, there is only too much sense and never less than enough. The relationship between sense and signifiers is folded in on itself as a loop, while sense produces the possibility of useful signifiers here, the reciprocal relationship within the dream means that signifiers are often producing sense at the same time that sense is providing the ground for the signifiers. The things that exist within sense itself: memory, space, expectation, linearity…, are constantly altered to maintain sense in the ever-changing events of a dream.
Going back to the content discussed at the beginning, when I have a friend or former friend that I have not spoken to in years become a character within a dream of mine, our relationship is often completely recontextualized. Rather than starting off from the point of view and memory of my waking self, who would often start with reintroduction (that is, if I even went up to speak with them), rather the dream begins with us having already reestablished such friendship. Additionally, it is not necessarily that I can now remember the particular dream memory of rekindling, but rather that I know within the dream that we had, at some point, rekindled the friendship for some time now.
Further aspects of one’s life are changed through this alteration of dream memory in order to maintain sense: just the other night, I had a dream take place within the hallways of a large apartment complex that I recalled as my current residence despite currently living in a house and having never lived in a place that looked similarly except for maybe at a hotel. This produces the necessary sense as it answers questions that my dream self would have, such as “why am I here?” and “who are the people around me?”
The alteration of expectation, space, and linearity seems to be around one and the same process, as it is the maintaining of sense during the progress of the dream that matters here for all three. While dream memory is an alteration of the conditions and relationships before the start of a dream, this alteration shows dream time as excessively present-minded. With the constant production of sense, the dream proceeds with a sort of linearity that focuses on the current moment and is concerned at most with what could possibly happen immediately next.
This linearity only makes sense in the dream, and it is only once we wake up that we see the obvious discontinuities between quick and immediate changes in feelings and space, as they no longer make sense to us. While within the dream, the constant production of sense requires an active forgetting of any contradictory or disjointed past, even if only experienced seconds ago. Transitions that would be immediately noticed by the awakened mind are seamless, as the production of sense focuses endlessly on producing the sense for the present moment, as the present moment is the only thing that needs to be maintained to contain the dream. Disjointed spaces can be easily connected, and scene changes drastic enough to only be described as a separate dream can be immediately contextualized again.
The sense and the signified also function as a feedback loop through expectation; many times, I, as the dreaming subject, have thought of a possibility within the context of a dream, only for such a thing to immediately take place. The expectation of danger has turned dreams of just walking around into ones with dangerous stories and quick changes in character interactions. The latter is evident in dreams where someone will appear and I will think of them in one way or another, and they will immediately begin acting in such a way: if I see them as a potential danger, they become so, if I see them as someone I wish to talk to, they will come speak to me, etc… The expectations and actions I take within the dream are filtering back into the creation of the experience of what is external to me as a subject, but since the external is also internal, as it is my mind taking parts of itself for producing its own dream, the dreamer has only the rare idea that this is nonsense.
There are dreams where things don’t make sense, but they have often mimicked the feeling of a lack of sense of the real world, where you are missing necessary sense, rather than seeing that you are simply not within the process of a self-referential sense. Dreams where I am confused by the actions of all those around me are the most common from my own experience. I would spend the entire dream wondering why everyone is acting so strangely, but there is still a unifying nonsense in that this strangeness does not break the full sense of the dream; it is a self-reliant sense that the characters in my dream have a sense just one that I am seperated from and would not act or speak within.
Lucid dreaming is another case that seems to sit outside of a normal dream, but it still falls almost perfectly within the feedback loop of a dream’s nonsense. The Lucid Dreamer is aware of the dream and thus usually decides to fly or do something that can not be done in the real world. It is the awakened mind within a realm of pure self-referential sense: one can fly because one is able to believe that they can fly, one can be anywhere because one is able to believe that they can be anywhere, and all of this maintained by the subject understanding that sense and the signified events of the dream are in a loop. Sense bends to a will within the lucid dream in the same way that it does within a normal dream; it is simply that that will is directed externally, rather also produced in a feedback loop with sense.
Even the lucid dream still tries to produce an excess of sense to recreate nonsense, and this is why lucid dreaming can result in the return to a regular sleeping state. I remember this happening once as when I was younger, I had an instance where I went back to accepting the nonsense of the dream unquestionably after having a temporary lucid dream; when I woke up later, I was mad at myself for letting myself be fooled again. It thus seems to me that the logic of the dream reveals a sort of desire for sense within the mind, always trying to reconfigure itself in such a way as to be within sense, even if that means being within nonsense.
The Logic of Sense, Deleuze, “Fifth Series of Sense” p. 28, trans. Mark Lester & Charles Stivale. Columbia University Press, New York, United States.
The Logic of Sense, Deleuze, “Eleventh Series of Nonsense” p. 67, trans. Mark Lester & Charles Stivale. Columbia University Press, New York, United States.