I have written that fiction that includes passage into an instance of unreality highlights the perspective of the passenger, thus emphasizing an element that makes the travel metaphor seem particularly apt. There are exceptions, such as the shifted passage technique, which has the function of verifying that passage has actually happened in the world of a fiction (in our examples, these fictions were all movies). But on the whole, the perspective of the character who makes the trip is closely attended to.
A further characteristic that is sometimes in line with the travel metaphor and sometimes not is this: the character who does the trip sometimes fully departs from his world, vanishes physically, and at other times remains there, albeit oblivious of, and incapable to interact with his surroundings for the duration of the trip. In order to have some labels, let's say that a character sometimes leaves his world in the mode of ejection, and at other times in the mode of projection.
Thus in the clip from Die Einsteiger we have a clear case of ejection: the two travelers vanish from their own world for the duration of their trip. Shifted passage is used to demonstrate this to the audience; but the fact is also often referred to in the course of the movie, when the trips get more and more extensive and some characters even decide never to return from the fictional worlds they have entered. In contrast, in Dreamscape we have seen a typical example of projection (the word 'project' is actually used in the film itself as a term for the act of entering dreams of other people).
Entering dreams or memories seems to suggest projection mode more than ejection mode, perhaps because it allows closer modeling on the (real) dream state, which is very similar to projection: you're asleep, you physically remain in your room, though oblivious to your environment, and the only sense in which you're 'there' in the dream world is mentally, even though it may not look and feel that way to you while you're immersed. On the other hand of the spectrum, trips into fictional worlds and time travel seem to suggest ejection more strongly. (In particular time travel stories would struggle to use projection mode: it's rather counterintuitive to suggest that a character can be a two different times at once, whatever 'at once' can mean in this context. Remember that all passage stories, time travel not excluded, have to keep up the metaphor of traveling, and that requires a sequential personal time for the traveler, even as she jumps from one spacetime-location to the other.)
There can be hybrids: in the extract from Sherlock Jr. the protagonist doesn't simply enter the world of a movie, he dreams that he enters a movie. So we have a more complicated setup: there is the world of the Buster Keaton movie itself, then nested inside it the world of the dream, which allows passage into movies, and then again nested inside that dream world the world into which he steps when Buster walks into the movie screen. The latter is a clear case of ejection, for the in-dream-Buster vanishes from the world surrounding the movie screen when he walks in. But then there is also the dream itself, which is a case of projection. (The sleeping body of the projectionist remains visible for us, the audience, unresponsive to the surrounding world, but not physically away.) Probably the motivation for this complicated setup was a hesitation to make the movie too phantastic. It's one thing to create a fiction in which people dream (not unusual in the real world, too), but another to create one in which people walk into fictional worlds through a movie screen. (To wrap the more extravagant elements of a fiction into a dream is a time-worn device, just think of the epilogue of A Midsummer Night's Dream.)
Note that there is no difference in the experience of the passenger between ejection mode and projection mode. The passenger is immersed in what happens at the destination location. The only difference is what an additional observer would see at the origin location during the time of passage.
Yet shifted passage neither implies ejection nor projection. We have seen ejection in the clips that included shifted passage, but as I have noted, there could easily have been shifted passage in Dreamscape, where we're clearly in projection mode. Likewise, in The Dutch Master, there's no shifted passage, which I argued is by design; yet both ejection and projection might be in play here — the movie leaves it open, thus allowing both interpretations, but this very fact shows that there might be both cases in which we have no shifted passage and projection and cases in which we have no shifted passage and ejection. So the distinction between use of shifted passage or not on the one hand and projection mode vs. ejection mode on the other are completely orthogonal.
The Phenomenology of the Unreal
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
May 17, 2012
May 14, 2012
Passage illustrated V - the shared dream
We have looked at fictions and memories; let's now examine something you get when these two are combined: dreams.
Already in 1984,[1] the movie Dreamscape had people enter other people's dream worlds, by means of a combination of technology in the sleep lab and rather obscure 'psychic' abilities of the passengers themselves. (One character learns, over the course of the film, to 'project' into others' dreams by means of pure concentration.)
Some subtle setup is going on in the dialogue before the actual trip: the protagonist mentions that the test subject (the other man whose dream he is about to join) is a steel worker; then we recognize that the projection has worked in part by the character of the setting, a construction area on top of a skyscraper. A familiar scene for a steel worker, though it's probably not something in most other people's everyday experience. The recognition is supported by a short verification dialogue after the trip back as well, when both dream subjects recall what they've experienced and it matches. (A more serious scientific verification would have both participants record their recall separately from each other, but understandably this has been contracted for the purposes of the dramatization.)
There is a rather elaborate departure sequence. The film tries to establish an authentic-looking scientific setting, drops some references to actual sleep science (such as entering REM phases), and then also visualizes the process of passage into the dream in a manner that fits descriptions of dream subjects falling asleep (such as the hypnagogic imagery, the feeling of falling through a tunnel onto the dream scene, and random sound effects). Just as all the other movies I've discussed so far (with the exception of Sherlock Jr.), there is a clear suggestion of the character being drawn into the unreal world he enters. Compared to all that, the arrival sequence is very brief — the protagonist looks around for a moment, but then is quickly absorbed in the action.
Just as before, no shifted transfer here, although we could easily imagine how it might have been staged. There could have been a shot of the scientists who monitor the sleepers, or of the sleeping characters themselves, interleaved with the dream sequence itself. Of course, there would have been little benefit to such an interruption of the dream sequence. Especially when presenting dreams, movies tend to replicate the grip they have on us in our real lives by leaving such sequences uninterrupted. (Look out for this when you next see a dream sequence in a movie: they are very rarely interleaved with any other plot elements.)
Already in 1984,[1] the movie Dreamscape had people enter other people's dream worlds, by means of a combination of technology in the sleep lab and rather obscure 'psychic' abilities of the passengers themselves. (One character learns, over the course of the film, to 'project' into others' dreams by means of pure concentration.)
Some subtle setup is going on in the dialogue before the actual trip: the protagonist mentions that the test subject (the other man whose dream he is about to join) is a steel worker; then we recognize that the projection has worked in part by the character of the setting, a construction area on top of a skyscraper. A familiar scene for a steel worker, though it's probably not something in most other people's everyday experience. The recognition is supported by a short verification dialogue after the trip back as well, when both dream subjects recall what they've experienced and it matches. (A more serious scientific verification would have both participants record their recall separately from each other, but understandably this has been contracted for the purposes of the dramatization.)
There is a rather elaborate departure sequence. The film tries to establish an authentic-looking scientific setting, drops some references to actual sleep science (such as entering REM phases), and then also visualizes the process of passage into the dream in a manner that fits descriptions of dream subjects falling asleep (such as the hypnagogic imagery, the feeling of falling through a tunnel onto the dream scene, and random sound effects). Just as all the other movies I've discussed so far (with the exception of Sherlock Jr.), there is a clear suggestion of the character being drawn into the unreal world he enters. Compared to all that, the arrival sequence is very brief — the protagonist looks around for a moment, but then is quickly absorbed in the action.
Just as before, no shifted transfer here, although we could easily imagine how it might have been staged. There could have been a shot of the scientists who monitor the sleepers, or of the sleeping characters themselves, interleaved with the dream sequence itself. Of course, there would have been little benefit to such an interruption of the dream sequence. Especially when presenting dreams, movies tend to replicate the grip they have on us in our real lives by leaving such sequences uninterrupted. (Look out for this when you next see a dream sequence in a movie: they are very rarely interleaved with any other plot elements.)
[1] That is, long before Inception; of course, the idea is much older. Dreamscape itself was based on a 1966 novel by Roger Zelazny entitled The Dream Master.
May 7, 2012
Passage illustrated II - the dreaming projectionist
An early forerunner of the geeks who traveled into movies in my previous post, in Die Einsteiger, is Buster Keaton, who does a similar trip in his 1924 film Sherlock Jr.
While the 1980s were a period in which the dramatic device of choice was a blinking and beeping machine, this earlier film from the 1920s uses a more traditional approach: the protagonist is just dreaming that he enters the movie world. Here's how it looks (watch until approx. 22:30):
Keaton plays the operator of a movie projector at a film theatre; he falls asleep while a picture runs and dreams that the characters in the film transform into people from his own life. He then walks up (still dreaming) to the screen and steps right into the scene that is being shown. In other words, he enters the world of the movie and starts interacting with its characters.
This is a very early example of how such a situation is staged. It's a comparatively prolonged and elaborate sequence, as the film tries to get the idea across that the main character is now entering a movie. But it includes all the elements I have discussed in my previous analysis.
Let's begin with setup and recognition. Before the actual passage happens, we are introduced to the world of the movie into which Buster is about to step. It is set in a villa and there's its owner, his daughter, and a young man (presumably her suitor). Each of the characters is briefly shown and then turns around and transforms into a person from the projectionist's world, noticed by the dreaming Buster. This is what I've called setup: elements of the destination world are introduced to us (the audience), as part of the departure sequence. Later on, in the arrival sequence, these elements are then used to show us that the traveler really has arrived there. In the case of Sherlock Jr., the plot of the movie into which the protagonist steps resumes in earnest (after a bit of slapstick comedy) with the daughter of the house and her suitor on the stage. This is supported by one or two cinematic tricks: one of them is a circle-open effect (as if we're opening our eyes to the scene); another is that the camera now zooms in so that the stage of the nested movie fills the entire frame. So far, we have watched the movie-within-the-movie on a cinema screen, with bits of the orchestra and audience visible. Now it has become exclusive: there is no intruding outside world any more, we're fully immersed in the nested picture's world. We have now moved into the recognition part: the elements that were introduced earlier, during the setup, are repeated so that we know we have arrived. (In this case, it's only we, the audience, who have arrived. Buster will follow, though he is already mentioned in absentia as "the world's greatest detective".) We witness a bit of interaction between the daughter of the house and the suitor, and then the villa's owner discovering the theft of the pearls. With the telephone call for Sherlock Jr. and Buster's subsequent appearance (not in this extract), the arrival scene ends.
Where exactly would we pinpoint the departure and arrival sequences? I'd say that the departure sequence spans the time from Buster falling asleep to the end of the slapstick intermezzo (where he is thrown into one location after the next). When he finally fades out of the picture, in the setting with the empty park bench (quite conceivably the front garden of the villa), he has entirely vanished from the surrounding setting in the movie theatre, has lost his presence in the outer movie's world, so to speak. He really has departed. The arrival sequence, on the other hand, somewhat interleaves with the departure sequence. In a sense, the arrival begins when he first steps into the frame of the inner movie. He is promptly knocked out of it again, and then needs another attempt to step in until it holds. When the departure sequence has ended, and the inner movie resumes its plot, this is made clear by the cinematic tricks I've mentioned above. A little later on (not in this extract any more), Buster appears in the role of Sherlock Jr. — at this point at the latest I think the arrival sequence is completed.
Finally, note that again there is a shifted transfer: when Buster has already entered the world of the inner movie, we (the audience) are still located with a perspective that includes both the outer and the inner world, the origin and destination locations. Only after Buster has completed the passage and is firmly located at the destination, the audience's perspective also changes to focus exclusively on the inner movie's world.
While the 1980s were a period in which the dramatic device of choice was a blinking and beeping machine, this earlier film from the 1920s uses a more traditional approach: the protagonist is just dreaming that he enters the movie world. Here's how it looks (watch until approx. 22:30):
Keaton plays the operator of a movie projector at a film theatre; he falls asleep while a picture runs and dreams that the characters in the film transform into people from his own life. He then walks up (still dreaming) to the screen and steps right into the scene that is being shown. In other words, he enters the world of the movie and starts interacting with its characters.
This is a very early example of how such a situation is staged. It's a comparatively prolonged and elaborate sequence, as the film tries to get the idea across that the main character is now entering a movie. But it includes all the elements I have discussed in my previous analysis.
Let's begin with setup and recognition. Before the actual passage happens, we are introduced to the world of the movie into which Buster is about to step. It is set in a villa and there's its owner, his daughter, and a young man (presumably her suitor). Each of the characters is briefly shown and then turns around and transforms into a person from the projectionist's world, noticed by the dreaming Buster. This is what I've called setup: elements of the destination world are introduced to us (the audience), as part of the departure sequence. Later on, in the arrival sequence, these elements are then used to show us that the traveler really has arrived there. In the case of Sherlock Jr., the plot of the movie into which the protagonist steps resumes in earnest (after a bit of slapstick comedy) with the daughter of the house and her suitor on the stage. This is supported by one or two cinematic tricks: one of them is a circle-open effect (as if we're opening our eyes to the scene); another is that the camera now zooms in so that the stage of the nested movie fills the entire frame. So far, we have watched the movie-within-the-movie on a cinema screen, with bits of the orchestra and audience visible. Now it has become exclusive: there is no intruding outside world any more, we're fully immersed in the nested picture's world. We have now moved into the recognition part: the elements that were introduced earlier, during the setup, are repeated so that we know we have arrived. (In this case, it's only we, the audience, who have arrived. Buster will follow, though he is already mentioned in absentia as "the world's greatest detective".) We witness a bit of interaction between the daughter of the house and the suitor, and then the villa's owner discovering the theft of the pearls. With the telephone call for Sherlock Jr. and Buster's subsequent appearance (not in this extract), the arrival scene ends.
Where exactly would we pinpoint the departure and arrival sequences? I'd say that the departure sequence spans the time from Buster falling asleep to the end of the slapstick intermezzo (where he is thrown into one location after the next). When he finally fades out of the picture, in the setting with the empty park bench (quite conceivably the front garden of the villa), he has entirely vanished from the surrounding setting in the movie theatre, has lost his presence in the outer movie's world, so to speak. He really has departed. The arrival sequence, on the other hand, somewhat interleaves with the departure sequence. In a sense, the arrival begins when he first steps into the frame of the inner movie. He is promptly knocked out of it again, and then needs another attempt to step in until it holds. When the departure sequence has ended, and the inner movie resumes its plot, this is made clear by the cinematic tricks I've mentioned above. A little later on (not in this extract any more), Buster appears in the role of Sherlock Jr. — at this point at the latest I think the arrival sequence is completed.
Finally, note that again there is a shifted transfer: when Buster has already entered the world of the inner movie, we (the audience) are still located with a perspective that includes both the outer and the inner world, the origin and destination locations. Only after Buster has completed the passage and is firmly located at the destination, the audience's perspective also changes to focus exclusively on the inner movie's world.
January 30, 2012
Introductory book about the ideas behind this blog
During the fall months of the past year, it's been a little quieter than usual on this blog. The reason was that last summer I found that I needed something more of a coherent presentation of the ideas behind it — a kind of backgrounder and introductory text. So I sat down to write that. The result has taken the shape of a small book, which is now available in a draft version. (There is still some formatting work I want to do to optimize readability, and possibly smallish corrections in wording and grammar.)
You can download the pdf version here.
The table of contents looks like this:
You can download the pdf version here.
The table of contents looks like this:
Preface
Activities
Living your life · Reflection · Imagination · PhilosophyGoals
Beauty · Excellence of character · EudaimoniaTheory
Unreality · Interplay · Apartness · PresentReferences
January 22, 2012
Passage and nested unreality
In my earlier posts about entering the worlds of movies and the pull this exerts on the imagination I looked closer at the fascination we might feel with this idea.
So, as I wrote, the worlds of some movies exert a pull on the imagination; but there is no way to satisfy the desire, no way to go in and follow up. So what does the movie do? It 'knows' about that desire and 'satisfies' it, by giving it expression, playing it out. In the movies, everything is possible, including entering a movie plot. So in the world of a movie (such as Die Einsteiger), a device is conjured up that fulfills the desire. It's not different from many other wish-fulfilling machines (or from wish-fulfilling magic). The worlds of fiction are in part intended to act out fantasies in which desires are fulfilled. Thus the idea of a passage into the unreal is born.
Note that this is in some sense a reflective process: fiction, as it were, self-consciously exploits a desire which it itself has helped to generate in the first place. But we must be careful not to make too much out of this reflexive constellation. People in movies don't just travel into the worlds of fictions, but also into dreams, or the past and the future. It's not the reflexivity that makes this work; that's not even a necessary attribute. It is merely a spicy extra feature in the particular constellation in which the world from which departure is taken and the destination world are both instances of the same form of unreality (i.e., worlds of movies).
There seems to be one thing that is required, though. In the real world, it's not possible to travel into the world of a movie, a dream, or the past or the future. In the real world, there is no magic, and neither are there any technical devices (at least up to now) which can do the trick. And therefore we (real people) cannot make any such journey. The only people who can are fictional characters, people who are already part of the world of a movie (or other fiction, such as a novel). The starting point of any passage into the unreal must lie within an instance of unreality already. The laws that govern the real world don't allow for it (as far as we know), but the laws that govern any world of fiction can be adjusted by the creator of that world, the person who imagines it, and so an instance of unreality might allow traveling into those worlds of fictions, dreams, or the past and the future. Note that this means that passage is always a matter of going into the world of a nested fiction. There is no way into fiction; just into fiction-within-fiction.
(It's an interesting question exactly how far this can be generalized: there seems to be a passage from fiction into dreams, and the past or the future; maybe there's a path from dreams into fiction, or again the past or the future; there might be dreams-within-dreams into which we can travel from dreams. There seems to be no passage from either the past or the future to anywhere — what does this tell us about the differences between these forms of unreality?)
So when there is what I have called 'passage into the unreal', we're always talking about nested unreality— there is an outer instance of fiction (the world of the film Die Einsteiger) and a bunch of inner instances (e.g. the world of Dance of the vampires). That they are nested means that the second is, as viewed from within the film itself, a film with its fictional world. The characters in Die Einsteiger are like people in the real world in that they watch movies, put them on video cassettes (which weren't yet replaced by DVDs or Blu-rays as the prevalent medium at that time), and watch them for entertainment. They have the same idea of a movie as fiction, and of the world of that movie as a fictional world (just as I described it in my previous post). But of course, what's fiction for them is fiction-within-fiction for us, the audience in the real world, for these people are fictional characters already. And of course only because their world is a fictional world is it that people can jump into movie worlds (worlds of movies-within-the-movie); that's not possible in the real world (for all we know).
Such fiction-within-fiction is not exactly a rare phenomenon. There is nothing unusual for people in novels to read books or watch movies, or for film characters to do the same. After all, the characters in those novels or films are often intended to appear much like people in the real world, and consuming fiction is something that people in the real world do. Sometimes, fiction-within-fiction has a more substantial role to play than just making characters seem like real people. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Danish prince uses a play to confront another character with a story very similar to what he thinks might have been enacted by his uncle. In other words, Hamlet uses the play-within-a-play as a means of indirect communication, and something that is intended to awaken emotions and provoke a reaction.
In any case, however, this nesting of fiction-within-fiction is necessary for passage into the unreal: there is no traveling into fiction unless you are already within a fiction.
So, as I wrote, the worlds of some movies exert a pull on the imagination; but there is no way to satisfy the desire, no way to go in and follow up. So what does the movie do? It 'knows' about that desire and 'satisfies' it, by giving it expression, playing it out. In the movies, everything is possible, including entering a movie plot. So in the world of a movie (such as Die Einsteiger), a device is conjured up that fulfills the desire. It's not different from many other wish-fulfilling machines (or from wish-fulfilling magic). The worlds of fiction are in part intended to act out fantasies in which desires are fulfilled. Thus the idea of a passage into the unreal is born.
Note that this is in some sense a reflective process: fiction, as it were, self-consciously exploits a desire which it itself has helped to generate in the first place. But we must be careful not to make too much out of this reflexive constellation. People in movies don't just travel into the worlds of fictions, but also into dreams, or the past and the future. It's not the reflexivity that makes this work; that's not even a necessary attribute. It is merely a spicy extra feature in the particular constellation in which the world from which departure is taken and the destination world are both instances of the same form of unreality (i.e., worlds of movies).
There seems to be one thing that is required, though. In the real world, it's not possible to travel into the world of a movie, a dream, or the past or the future. In the real world, there is no magic, and neither are there any technical devices (at least up to now) which can do the trick. And therefore we (real people) cannot make any such journey. The only people who can are fictional characters, people who are already part of the world of a movie (or other fiction, such as a novel). The starting point of any passage into the unreal must lie within an instance of unreality already. The laws that govern the real world don't allow for it (as far as we know), but the laws that govern any world of fiction can be adjusted by the creator of that world, the person who imagines it, and so an instance of unreality might allow traveling into those worlds of fictions, dreams, or the past and the future. Note that this means that passage is always a matter of going into the world of a nested fiction. There is no way into fiction; just into fiction-within-fiction.
(It's an interesting question exactly how far this can be generalized: there seems to be a passage from fiction into dreams, and the past or the future; maybe there's a path from dreams into fiction, or again the past or the future; there might be dreams-within-dreams into which we can travel from dreams. There seems to be no passage from either the past or the future to anywhere — what does this tell us about the differences between these forms of unreality?)
Such fiction-within-fiction is not exactly a rare phenomenon. There is nothing unusual for people in novels to read books or watch movies, or for film characters to do the same. After all, the characters in those novels or films are often intended to appear much like people in the real world, and consuming fiction is something that people in the real world do. Sometimes, fiction-within-fiction has a more substantial role to play than just making characters seem like real people. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Danish prince uses a play to confront another character with a story very similar to what he thinks might have been enacted by his uncle. In other words, Hamlet uses the play-within-a-play as a means of indirect communication, and something that is intended to awaken emotions and provoke a reaction.
In any case, however, this nesting of fiction-within-fiction is necessary for passage into the unreal: there is no traveling into fiction unless you are already within a fiction.
January 14, 2012
Entering dream worlds
Suppose you could enter someone else's dream just as if you were visiting a party. It's not that this is an entirely unpopular idea, there are several movies based on this notion, such as only recently Inception. But let's for the moment leave the elaborate theories presented there aside and examine the basic idea in a more simple setting.
1) Suppose, then, you could enter someone else's dream. Let's call the dreamer 'Joe'. You're now in Joe's dream. What would this be like? Would you just be at the same location, see what Joe sees in his dream? Imagine that Joe is in fact dreaming about a party, and now that you have entered the dream, you're at that party. Just as Joe, when he dreams about being at a party, it's as if he were standing in the room, together with all the other guests, hearing the music and idle chatter, seeing those people, the furniture, some food and drinks on a table, the dimmed light, the stereo in a corner... just as for Joe it feels in his dream as if he were actually there, it now also does for you. You're there with him in that very room, seeing and hearing the same things. But does this mean that you can see everything in the room, including the things that Joe isn't looking at, including the things that Joe hasn't even looked at up to now? Or is what you see restricted to what Joe sees, or at least to what he has seen so far (what his dreaming mind has, so to speak, dreamed up)? For instance, if Joe is just standing near the door, looking into the room — does it mean that all you can see is this room, or can you actually peek out the door and see what happens in the next room, even though Joe has (so far in his dream) never turned round and looked there?
We can only answer that question if we have some account of how dream worlds are built. Who decides what and who is in the room at that party Joe and you have joined? Since Joe is the dreamer, it seems that Joe's dreaming mind must do that job. The moment Joe dreams up a chair standing in the middle of the room, the moment that chair exists in the dream world. As it happens, there are three ways this can look to him. Let's say that Joe hasn't glanced at that spot before; then he either might take it that the chair has been there all the time, or he might think it just appeared out of thin air. On the other hand, if we assume that Joe has been looking there frequently and there's never been any chair, then he might notice that now, suddenly, there is a chair where none was before. (Dreams are like that, such things happen all the time.)
But what does that mean for you, the extra participant? What's going on from your point of view? It seems clear that in the third case you are observing a dream world in which there is an empty spot in the middle of the room and in which suddenly a chair appears in that very spot. But what about the two others? What if Joe has been transfixed by some events in the left part of the room and for quite some while hasn't looked at the middle of the room: what do you see when you do look there? Do you see the chair? Since Joe hasn't imagined (dreamed) it yet, perhaps we should say that you can't see it. Now what if Joe now turns to the middle of the room and calmly imagines a chair there, satisfied that it must have been there all along?
We seem to have run into a dilemma here: on the one hand, if we grant the dreamer authority about the furniture of his dream, its position and its changes of place, then we can only observe what he's already dreamed, so there is literally nothing there at any place until he brings his attention there. And presumably, when he turns his awareness somewhere else, there can't be said to be anything there as well: it's neither that the chair remains there nor that it suddenly disappears, leaving the spot empty again. Somehow, it seems, if we take this point about a dreamer's authority serious, the largest part of the dream world is undefined, for most of the time. If, on the other hand, we relax this strict adherence to the dreamer's attention (and imagination), we might enjoy a much more stable world of the dream, but it would be less clear in what sense this is still the world of that dreamer's dream.
2) At this point we might borrow a trick from the way fiction (another form of unreality) works in order to avoid this kind of trouble. No fiction describes each and every detail of the fictional world it is about — that wouldn't be possible. So what usually happens is that there is a tacit agreement between the author and the audience that the undescribed portions are filled in with appropriate assumptions. Thus if a story starts by telling us that "It was a cold, rainy autumn day in London of the year 19__", we can assume that the big city has many inhabitants who go about their lives, and that there has been a day with some weather before and after that particular day at which the story begins, while none of all this is ever mentioned, and quite probably most of it is also totally irrelevant for the narrated events. We just imagine the relevant parts and assume the rest as suitably fixed.
We mustn't misinterpret this 'filling in', however. When you read such a sentence, you may or may not visualize the streets of London in pouring rain, and to any degree of detail you like. Perhaps you'll take a moment after reading this very first sentence and bring those streets before your mind's eye, one by one, with every house clearly and to the smallest detail specified; but probably not. But then some people read stories without even picturing anything; and still they can take up the general idea of a cold, rainy day in a place like London.) In either case, none of them will have to imagine anything about the weather on the previous day, the day before the story begins, our about all the other people in the city which don't have any bearing on the story. To 'fill in' the necessary detail, then, is not to run through all the small details in your mind and fill them in. It's just to suppose that, as in the real world, there are some facts of the matter about all those things, and to be content that they would be described to us, should they be of any relevance to the story.
How can this stance of 'as close to what you'd expect unless directly specified' help us with the world of the dream party we're attending? Let's go through all the possibilities again. First, let's say Joe has looked several times at the center of the room, never noticing a chair or anything else there, but then suddenly dreams up one standing there; he thinks 'Whoops, there's a chair there!' for a moment, and then turns his attention elsewhere. For you, as an observer, the sequence would be the same: you see an empty spot up to the moment when suddenly a chair pops into existence there; you might have a similar thought about it, and from now the chair just remains standing there. Should Joe at some point turn back to see if the chair is still there and then dream its sudden disappearance, then at that moment the chair will dissolve before your eyes as well. Second, let's say the moment you enter the room you look at that center spot, whereas Joe so far has never as much as even glanced there, transfixed by the events in the left part of the room. If the room is mostly empty, then we wouldn't expect neither a chair nor anything else there, so you don't see a chair. (Of course, if the room is actually like a theatre audience with rows and rows of chairs, then we wouldn't expect a gap at this spot either, and so we would do see a chair there. It all depends on what the reasonable thing to expect is.) When Joe turns his attention to this spot, suddenly imagining a chair there, then the chair will duly appear, and for you as observer it will appear only then, even if Joe thinks that it has been there all the time. (That is, the third option above collapses into the second option — there isn't any difference between them, except in what Joe thinks; that, however, is not part of the dream world's exterior, but only of Joe's awareness of it.)
I think this approach preserves most of the authority of the dreamer while still keeping the dream world somewhat stable. Just as always in dreams, completely surprising things can suddenly happen (such as a totally unmotivated appearance of a chair in the middle of the room), but then that's just what dreams are like. However, only with this extra assumption can there be something like a shared dream world, something that both Joe can dream and you can observe. The minimum is some assumption of stability and filled-in detail. Otherwise, the whole idea of entering someone else's dream wouldn't even be conceivable.
But note that this means that Joe can be wrong about the world of his own dream in some respects: not about its present state, for that is exactly as he imagines it, and there is no way he can be wrong about that. (We still hold on to the idea of the authority of the dreaming mind. You can't be wrong about what you imagine. It is as you imagine it, by stipulation.) What he can be wrong about is what was going on before. The past sequence of dream events must be something stable, for that's not something Joe imagines, but something that he has imagined, and you have perceived. It's not something that can be up to anyone's imagination any more. It can be tracked as if it were an objective fact about the dream world, no longer a subjective element that is in Joe's imagination. (I think there is something wrong about this move, but I won't follow up with this here. I'll reserve that for a later post.)
3) So far, we have only talked about looking around, and what it would be like for you to be an observer in someone else's dream. What about exploring this dream world a little more actively? Think of that door next to which Joe is standing. Since he hasn't yet dreamed about what's behind that door, it could be anything from a yawning abyss to an ordinary floor — or perhaps it's a blind door that is fully blocked by a wall. Assuming what is most likely, we would think that if you looked behind it, you'd probably see another room that appears roughly as one would expect; you'd however step through at your peril, for if Joe focuses on it and imagines a blind door there, then you're suddenly in the middle of nowhere (possibly in an adjacent room, or falling down several stories outside — whatever the most likely scenario would be under the changed circumstance, or alternatively, if Joe dreams anything more about it, then whatever that will be).
The world of someone else's dream is an extremely unstable thing: a dreaming mind will change the surroundings all the time. Remember your own dreams: sudden changes of place, or transformations in your surroundings aren't in the least unusual.
4) This is not yet the end of our difficulties. What happens to the authority of the dreamer when it comes to interaction? Once you're not just an observer, but also take action in the dream world, there is potentially a conflict in everything that happens. Suppose you've spotted a chair in the middle of the room, and that chair is actually dreamed by Joe; now you decide to walk over to that chair and sit down on it. Suppose further that Joe's repeating nightmare is an empty chair that just remains empty however long he stares at it. But this time, you just go there and occupy it. Can we still claim that we're in Joe's dream, when this sequence of events is not something that originated in Joe's mind, when it in fact couldn't even have originated there (assuming that the nightmare pattern is relatively sticky and Joe would go through it all over again if left to his dream).
Now you might perhaps say that there is nothing unusual about this: after all, things happen to us in the real world all the time, we don't have full control over events (not even nearly). So why should a dream be different?
It should be different because dreams are a play of the imagination. You may not be able to control what you dream — in fact, most of the time, our dreaming mind plays wild spectacles for us without us having even the slightest say in matters of the program. But even though it is the arbitrariness of our dreaming mind, it is precisely the arbitrariness of our mind. It's not as if you perceive events going on somewhere. You imagine them. Thus the wildest things may happen indeed, but none of them have originated outside your imagination. There is no such thing as an independent actor, or an independent event. It's all in your head.
Intervening in someone else's dream, then, is probably best taken as indeed breaking up the dream state and fiddling with it from the outside. It belongs in the same category as noises or light effects in the sleeper's room which get through to the sleeping mind and become ad-hoc components of the dream; or talking to someone who is in the process of waking. There's decidedly an outside influence here. Sometimes, this idea is taken to the point of actual therapy: in Dreamscape, for instance, dream researchers enter others' dreams in order to figure out the deep-seated origins of nightmares (typically some repressed idea, a notion from the Freudian tradition of dream theory), and address them from within the dream. It is, as if a helping hand is extended to you from a character in your dream, only that this character is not in fact a character at all (someone imagined by you), but a real person who is projected into your dream. (Is there a way for the dreamer to distinguish between a proper dream character and an impostor, someone who came from the outside world into the dream with an agenda?) In any case, interaction is a further complication that makes the idea of entering someone else's dream a rather difficult setup. (Remember that we still haven't even discussed the question how this might be implemented: we're only talking about the phenomenology, that is, how it appears; or how it would appear, if it were actually possible to implement.)
5) Because of all this, in Inception a wholly different process of dream world creation is used.
The basic idea of the movie is that you can get into another person's dreams and there interact with that person's mind, in particular, steal some information that person wouldn't reveal to you when awake. This notion is probably inspired by the observation that dreams do visualize much of our inner lives, especially our emotional lives, which we wouldn't be willing (or even capable) to expose to others in words. Since you put your deepest secrets into pictures when you dream, you open up to spies there much more than when you're awake.
But your dream world would be much too unstable for anyone to enter it, and thus too dangerous — the plot would be infeasible. Therefore, the spies won't simply put you to sleep and then enter your dreams. Instead, they let you enter the dream of someone from the team; and the world of that dream has been pre-designed. It's not something his dreaming mind creates on the spot, it's something that an 'architect' has carefully drafted and later on explained to the team member who dreams it. Then you are invited into this world, and you start walking around in it. When you encounter a safe place, such as a bank vault, you'll picture your innermost secrets as lying there, safely. (You also 'populate' it, in the film's lingo, with projections of people you know.) The gang of thieves, who don't just know the interior of the world much better than you, but also quite probably have built in some back doors and secret shortcuts, will then 'extract' that information from the safe place, and so in effect steal it from you.
So, in other words, the way Inception solves the problem of the instability of dream worlds is by using worlds which aren't, strictly speaking, dream worlds at all. They resemble much more the worlds of a video game: they're pre-designed, not just in their layout, but also with a specific purpose in mind. You don't enter another person's dream, you enter a virtual-reality playfield. (Revealingly, the dream worlds are called 'dream levels' in Inception jargon, which is probably not a coincidence: the worlds of video games are also structured into 'levels'.) By treating dreams as a kind of shared video game, the creators of Inception have addressed an inherently complicated aspect of a world of unreality to make it plausible that you can 'enter' it, as it were, travel into it. (In this way, the film is also similar to those which play around with the notions of the past and the future, to make it plausible that you can travel there, using a time machine.)
(Side remark: This is basically a more detailed exposition of the line of thought at the end of my earlier posting on Projection, interception, and Inception.)
1) Suppose, then, you could enter someone else's dream. Let's call the dreamer 'Joe'. You're now in Joe's dream. What would this be like? Would you just be at the same location, see what Joe sees in his dream? Imagine that Joe is in fact dreaming about a party, and now that you have entered the dream, you're at that party. Just as Joe, when he dreams about being at a party, it's as if he were standing in the room, together with all the other guests, hearing the music and idle chatter, seeing those people, the furniture, some food and drinks on a table, the dimmed light, the stereo in a corner... just as for Joe it feels in his dream as if he were actually there, it now also does for you. You're there with him in that very room, seeing and hearing the same things. But does this mean that you can see everything in the room, including the things that Joe isn't looking at, including the things that Joe hasn't even looked at up to now? Or is what you see restricted to what Joe sees, or at least to what he has seen so far (what his dreaming mind has, so to speak, dreamed up)? For instance, if Joe is just standing near the door, looking into the room — does it mean that all you can see is this room, or can you actually peek out the door and see what happens in the next room, even though Joe has (so far in his dream) never turned round and looked there?
We can only answer that question if we have some account of how dream worlds are built. Who decides what and who is in the room at that party Joe and you have joined? Since Joe is the dreamer, it seems that Joe's dreaming mind must do that job. The moment Joe dreams up a chair standing in the middle of the room, the moment that chair exists in the dream world. As it happens, there are three ways this can look to him. Let's say that Joe hasn't glanced at that spot before; then he either might take it that the chair has been there all the time, or he might think it just appeared out of thin air. On the other hand, if we assume that Joe has been looking there frequently and there's never been any chair, then he might notice that now, suddenly, there is a chair where none was before. (Dreams are like that, such things happen all the time.)
But what does that mean for you, the extra participant? What's going on from your point of view? It seems clear that in the third case you are observing a dream world in which there is an empty spot in the middle of the room and in which suddenly a chair appears in that very spot. But what about the two others? What if Joe has been transfixed by some events in the left part of the room and for quite some while hasn't looked at the middle of the room: what do you see when you do look there? Do you see the chair? Since Joe hasn't imagined (dreamed) it yet, perhaps we should say that you can't see it. Now what if Joe now turns to the middle of the room and calmly imagines a chair there, satisfied that it must have been there all along?
We seem to have run into a dilemma here: on the one hand, if we grant the dreamer authority about the furniture of his dream, its position and its changes of place, then we can only observe what he's already dreamed, so there is literally nothing there at any place until he brings his attention there. And presumably, when he turns his awareness somewhere else, there can't be said to be anything there as well: it's neither that the chair remains there nor that it suddenly disappears, leaving the spot empty again. Somehow, it seems, if we take this point about a dreamer's authority serious, the largest part of the dream world is undefined, for most of the time. If, on the other hand, we relax this strict adherence to the dreamer's attention (and imagination), we might enjoy a much more stable world of the dream, but it would be less clear in what sense this is still the world of that dreamer's dream.
2) At this point we might borrow a trick from the way fiction (another form of unreality) works in order to avoid this kind of trouble. No fiction describes each and every detail of the fictional world it is about — that wouldn't be possible. So what usually happens is that there is a tacit agreement between the author and the audience that the undescribed portions are filled in with appropriate assumptions. Thus if a story starts by telling us that "It was a cold, rainy autumn day in London of the year 19__", we can assume that the big city has many inhabitants who go about their lives, and that there has been a day with some weather before and after that particular day at which the story begins, while none of all this is ever mentioned, and quite probably most of it is also totally irrelevant for the narrated events. We just imagine the relevant parts and assume the rest as suitably fixed.
We mustn't misinterpret this 'filling in', however. When you read such a sentence, you may or may not visualize the streets of London in pouring rain, and to any degree of detail you like. Perhaps you'll take a moment after reading this very first sentence and bring those streets before your mind's eye, one by one, with every house clearly and to the smallest detail specified; but probably not. But then some people read stories without even picturing anything; and still they can take up the general idea of a cold, rainy day in a place like London.) In either case, none of them will have to imagine anything about the weather on the previous day, the day before the story begins, our about all the other people in the city which don't have any bearing on the story. To 'fill in' the necessary detail, then, is not to run through all the small details in your mind and fill them in. It's just to suppose that, as in the real world, there are some facts of the matter about all those things, and to be content that they would be described to us, should they be of any relevance to the story.
How can this stance of 'as close to what you'd expect unless directly specified' help us with the world of the dream party we're attending? Let's go through all the possibilities again. First, let's say Joe has looked several times at the center of the room, never noticing a chair or anything else there, but then suddenly dreams up one standing there; he thinks 'Whoops, there's a chair there!' for a moment, and then turns his attention elsewhere. For you, as an observer, the sequence would be the same: you see an empty spot up to the moment when suddenly a chair pops into existence there; you might have a similar thought about it, and from now the chair just remains standing there. Should Joe at some point turn back to see if the chair is still there and then dream its sudden disappearance, then at that moment the chair will dissolve before your eyes as well. Second, let's say the moment you enter the room you look at that center spot, whereas Joe so far has never as much as even glanced there, transfixed by the events in the left part of the room. If the room is mostly empty, then we wouldn't expect neither a chair nor anything else there, so you don't see a chair. (Of course, if the room is actually like a theatre audience with rows and rows of chairs, then we wouldn't expect a gap at this spot either, and so we would do see a chair there. It all depends on what the reasonable thing to expect is.) When Joe turns his attention to this spot, suddenly imagining a chair there, then the chair will duly appear, and for you as observer it will appear only then, even if Joe thinks that it has been there all the time. (That is, the third option above collapses into the second option — there isn't any difference between them, except in what Joe thinks; that, however, is not part of the dream world's exterior, but only of Joe's awareness of it.)
I think this approach preserves most of the authority of the dreamer while still keeping the dream world somewhat stable. Just as always in dreams, completely surprising things can suddenly happen (such as a totally unmotivated appearance of a chair in the middle of the room), but then that's just what dreams are like. However, only with this extra assumption can there be something like a shared dream world, something that both Joe can dream and you can observe. The minimum is some assumption of stability and filled-in detail. Otherwise, the whole idea of entering someone else's dream wouldn't even be conceivable.
But note that this means that Joe can be wrong about the world of his own dream in some respects: not about its present state, for that is exactly as he imagines it, and there is no way he can be wrong about that. (We still hold on to the idea of the authority of the dreaming mind. You can't be wrong about what you imagine. It is as you imagine it, by stipulation.) What he can be wrong about is what was going on before. The past sequence of dream events must be something stable, for that's not something Joe imagines, but something that he has imagined, and you have perceived. It's not something that can be up to anyone's imagination any more. It can be tracked as if it were an objective fact about the dream world, no longer a subjective element that is in Joe's imagination. (I think there is something wrong about this move, but I won't follow up with this here. I'll reserve that for a later post.)
3) So far, we have only talked about looking around, and what it would be like for you to be an observer in someone else's dream. What about exploring this dream world a little more actively? Think of that door next to which Joe is standing. Since he hasn't yet dreamed about what's behind that door, it could be anything from a yawning abyss to an ordinary floor — or perhaps it's a blind door that is fully blocked by a wall. Assuming what is most likely, we would think that if you looked behind it, you'd probably see another room that appears roughly as one would expect; you'd however step through at your peril, for if Joe focuses on it and imagines a blind door there, then you're suddenly in the middle of nowhere (possibly in an adjacent room, or falling down several stories outside — whatever the most likely scenario would be under the changed circumstance, or alternatively, if Joe dreams anything more about it, then whatever that will be).
The world of someone else's dream is an extremely unstable thing: a dreaming mind will change the surroundings all the time. Remember your own dreams: sudden changes of place, or transformations in your surroundings aren't in the least unusual.
4) This is not yet the end of our difficulties. What happens to the authority of the dreamer when it comes to interaction? Once you're not just an observer, but also take action in the dream world, there is potentially a conflict in everything that happens. Suppose you've spotted a chair in the middle of the room, and that chair is actually dreamed by Joe; now you decide to walk over to that chair and sit down on it. Suppose further that Joe's repeating nightmare is an empty chair that just remains empty however long he stares at it. But this time, you just go there and occupy it. Can we still claim that we're in Joe's dream, when this sequence of events is not something that originated in Joe's mind, when it in fact couldn't even have originated there (assuming that the nightmare pattern is relatively sticky and Joe would go through it all over again if left to his dream).
Now you might perhaps say that there is nothing unusual about this: after all, things happen to us in the real world all the time, we don't have full control over events (not even nearly). So why should a dream be different?
It should be different because dreams are a play of the imagination. You may not be able to control what you dream — in fact, most of the time, our dreaming mind plays wild spectacles for us without us having even the slightest say in matters of the program. But even though it is the arbitrariness of our dreaming mind, it is precisely the arbitrariness of our mind. It's not as if you perceive events going on somewhere. You imagine them. Thus the wildest things may happen indeed, but none of them have originated outside your imagination. There is no such thing as an independent actor, or an independent event. It's all in your head.
Intervening in someone else's dream, then, is probably best taken as indeed breaking up the dream state and fiddling with it from the outside. It belongs in the same category as noises or light effects in the sleeper's room which get through to the sleeping mind and become ad-hoc components of the dream; or talking to someone who is in the process of waking. There's decidedly an outside influence here. Sometimes, this idea is taken to the point of actual therapy: in Dreamscape, for instance, dream researchers enter others' dreams in order to figure out the deep-seated origins of nightmares (typically some repressed idea, a notion from the Freudian tradition of dream theory), and address them from within the dream. It is, as if a helping hand is extended to you from a character in your dream, only that this character is not in fact a character at all (someone imagined by you), but a real person who is projected into your dream. (Is there a way for the dreamer to distinguish between a proper dream character and an impostor, someone who came from the outside world into the dream with an agenda?) In any case, interaction is a further complication that makes the idea of entering someone else's dream a rather difficult setup. (Remember that we still haven't even discussed the question how this might be implemented: we're only talking about the phenomenology, that is, how it appears; or how it would appear, if it were actually possible to implement.)
5) Because of all this, in Inception a wholly different process of dream world creation is used.
The basic idea of the movie is that you can get into another person's dreams and there interact with that person's mind, in particular, steal some information that person wouldn't reveal to you when awake. This notion is probably inspired by the observation that dreams do visualize much of our inner lives, especially our emotional lives, which we wouldn't be willing (or even capable) to expose to others in words. Since you put your deepest secrets into pictures when you dream, you open up to spies there much more than when you're awake.
But your dream world would be much too unstable for anyone to enter it, and thus too dangerous — the plot would be infeasible. Therefore, the spies won't simply put you to sleep and then enter your dreams. Instead, they let you enter the dream of someone from the team; and the world of that dream has been pre-designed. It's not something his dreaming mind creates on the spot, it's something that an 'architect' has carefully drafted and later on explained to the team member who dreams it. Then you are invited into this world, and you start walking around in it. When you encounter a safe place, such as a bank vault, you'll picture your innermost secrets as lying there, safely. (You also 'populate' it, in the film's lingo, with projections of people you know.) The gang of thieves, who don't just know the interior of the world much better than you, but also quite probably have built in some back doors and secret shortcuts, will then 'extract' that information from the safe place, and so in effect steal it from you.
So, in other words, the way Inception solves the problem of the instability of dream worlds is by using worlds which aren't, strictly speaking, dream worlds at all. They resemble much more the worlds of a video game: they're pre-designed, not just in their layout, but also with a specific purpose in mind. You don't enter another person's dream, you enter a virtual-reality playfield. (Revealingly, the dream worlds are called 'dream levels' in Inception jargon, which is probably not a coincidence: the worlds of video games are also structured into 'levels'.) By treating dreams as a kind of shared video game, the creators of Inception have addressed an inherently complicated aspect of a world of unreality to make it plausible that you can 'enter' it, as it were, travel into it. (In this way, the film is also similar to those which play around with the notions of the past and the future, to make it plausible that you can travel there, using a time machine.)
(Side remark: This is basically a more detailed exposition of the line of thought at the end of my earlier posting on Projection, interception, and Inception.)
June 26, 2011
Sedimentation of unreality
Dreams sometimes come true. So do prophecies (sometimes). Jealous fantasies can become so destructive that they actually create what they were about (albeit wrongly) in the first place. Visionary leaders know that they first have to draw a picture before people can start acting towards making it a reality.
A while ago I wrote about some even more complex examples in Hitchcock's movies (Vertigo and North by Northwest), where an elaborate deception creates a dynamic in the world (the world of the movie, that is) which in effect makes it seem as if the deception has become reality.
Even in the real world there are some rare cases of an instance of unreality causing far-reaching developments. The first airing of Orson Welles' radio show War of the worlds (based on H.G. Wells' novel) was so convincing that it caused confusion and panic with some in the show's audience who mistook it for a real report.
Such effects are normally short-lived in the real world — reflection kicks in, people communicate and cross-check, and closeness to reality is restored all the faster the higher the number of people who are affected directly. On the other hand, as long as the feasibility of reality checks is kept low and the subject remains fascinating enough to hold a grip on the imagination, even foggy rumors can be sustained for quite some time. In his 1993 Norton Lectures, Umberto Eco cites the case of the Superb, a British submarine which was rumored to be deployed during the build-up of the Falklands crisis. It wasn't, but a combination of public imagination, media speculation and official secrecy quickly made it into a quasi-fact. "[T]he whole story grew out of vague gossip, through the collaboration of all parties. Everybody cooperated in the creation of the Yellow Submarine because it was a fascinating fictional character and its story was narratively exciting."[1]
What all these examples have in common is that some instance of unreality brings about changes in the real world, gets people to act in a different way than they'd have acted without that instance of unreality. Unreality (sometimes) settles into reality: though unreality is unreality, and reality is reality, part of reality consists of sedimented unreality.
Let's look closer at this. When we say that a dream comes true, it's not that literally the dream events come to have happened. It's still only a dream. What does happen is that I start acting in a way that makes some future situation resemble the situation from the dream. (This future situation can be a desirable state, if the dream expresses some wishes or goals I have; it could be an undesirable state, if it is a nightmare and expresses some of my fears. In either case, the way I act towards the situation I experienced in the dream can be conscious, or unconscious, or both.) If that happens and my actions are successful in bringing that situation about, we have now two different situations: an unreal dream situation and a real situation, which I made happen partly because of my dream experience.
When unreality sediments into reality, that instance of unreality remains what it is (it's not, so to speak, transformed into something real). In the example, there's still that dream, and that is an instance of unreality. It becomes, however, the cause (at least, a partial cause) and reason (possibly one reason among others) why some further, real situation, happens the way it does.
To conclude, here are some random reflections about sedimentation. First, in the case of dreams or visions what the unreal situation (the one that's dreamt or envisioned) and the real situation have in common is some experience you have in it, or a description that applies to it. It's an experience or description that was originally a 'what-if' experience or description. In other cases, such as the panic following a fictional invasion from Mars, there's no experience in common, but rather the real situation contains an 'as-if' perception or even action. (People start evacuating as if there really was an invasion.) In the most intricate cases, a constellation might involve both a 'what-if' experience and an 'as-if' action, leading to a very potent confusion of reality and unreality: this is what Vertigo uses to great and disturbing effect.(Again: read more about it in my previous post about sedimentation of unreality in those Hitchcock movies.)
Second, people who act on the basis of some instance of unreality are sometimes aware of this (when they try to fulfill a dream or achieve a vision, or when they have deliberately assumed a scenario, e.g. as a working hypothesis); sometimes they're not (when they act under a deception or illusion). But since people invest by acting and forming views about the world that contains this sedimented unreality, it's unlikely to be reversed once it's found unreal. (There's only a limited possibility to revert your actions in the world anyway, in particular if they have caused more development already.) I've called this the irreversibility of sedimentation in the previous posts I've already linked.
And finally, not everything in reality is sedimented unreality. (Although many facts about the real world have some sedimented unreality somewhere in the chain of causes that lead up to them.) Neither does all unreality sediment into reality of some form. (Some instances of unreality will remain largely without effect in the real world.)[2]
A while ago I wrote about some even more complex examples in Hitchcock's movies (Vertigo and North by Northwest), where an elaborate deception creates a dynamic in the world (the world of the movie, that is) which in effect makes it seem as if the deception has become reality.
Even in the real world there are some rare cases of an instance of unreality causing far-reaching developments. The first airing of Orson Welles' radio show War of the worlds (based on H.G. Wells' novel) was so convincing that it caused confusion and panic with some in the show's audience who mistook it for a real report.
Such effects are normally short-lived in the real world — reflection kicks in, people communicate and cross-check, and closeness to reality is restored all the faster the higher the number of people who are affected directly. On the other hand, as long as the feasibility of reality checks is kept low and the subject remains fascinating enough to hold a grip on the imagination, even foggy rumors can be sustained for quite some time. In his 1993 Norton Lectures, Umberto Eco cites the case of the Superb, a British submarine which was rumored to be deployed during the build-up of the Falklands crisis. It wasn't, but a combination of public imagination, media speculation and official secrecy quickly made it into a quasi-fact. "[T]he whole story grew out of vague gossip, through the collaboration of all parties. Everybody cooperated in the creation of the Yellow Submarine because it was a fascinating fictional character and its story was narratively exciting."[1]
What all these examples have in common is that some instance of unreality brings about changes in the real world, gets people to act in a different way than they'd have acted without that instance of unreality. Unreality (sometimes) settles into reality: though unreality is unreality, and reality is reality, part of reality consists of sedimented unreality.Let's look closer at this. When we say that a dream comes true, it's not that literally the dream events come to have happened. It's still only a dream. What does happen is that I start acting in a way that makes some future situation resemble the situation from the dream. (This future situation can be a desirable state, if the dream expresses some wishes or goals I have; it could be an undesirable state, if it is a nightmare and expresses some of my fears. In either case, the way I act towards the situation I experienced in the dream can be conscious, or unconscious, or both.) If that happens and my actions are successful in bringing that situation about, we have now two different situations: an unreal dream situation and a real situation, which I made happen partly because of my dream experience.
When unreality sediments into reality, that instance of unreality remains what it is (it's not, so to speak, transformed into something real). In the example, there's still that dream, and that is an instance of unreality. It becomes, however, the cause (at least, a partial cause) and reason (possibly one reason among others) why some further, real situation, happens the way it does.
To conclude, here are some random reflections about sedimentation. First, in the case of dreams or visions what the unreal situation (the one that's dreamt or envisioned) and the real situation have in common is some experience you have in it, or a description that applies to it. It's an experience or description that was originally a 'what-if' experience or description. In other cases, such as the panic following a fictional invasion from Mars, there's no experience in common, but rather the real situation contains an 'as-if' perception or even action. (People start evacuating as if there really was an invasion.) In the most intricate cases, a constellation might involve both a 'what-if' experience and an 'as-if' action, leading to a very potent confusion of reality and unreality: this is what Vertigo uses to great and disturbing effect.(Again: read more about it in my previous post about sedimentation of unreality in those Hitchcock movies.)
Second, people who act on the basis of some instance of unreality are sometimes aware of this (when they try to fulfill a dream or achieve a vision, or when they have deliberately assumed a scenario, e.g. as a working hypothesis); sometimes they're not (when they act under a deception or illusion). But since people invest by acting and forming views about the world that contains this sedimented unreality, it's unlikely to be reversed once it's found unreal. (There's only a limited possibility to revert your actions in the world anyway, in particular if they have caused more development already.) I've called this the irreversibility of sedimentation in the previous posts I've already linked.
And finally, not everything in reality is sedimented unreality. (Although many facts about the real world have some sedimented unreality somewhere in the chain of causes that lead up to them.) Neither does all unreality sediment into reality of some form. (Some instances of unreality will remain largely without effect in the real world.)[2]
[1] Umberto Eco, Six walks in the fictional woods. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1993, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1994, 97–99, the quote is from 99.
[2] Technical side note: I'm using a sketchy notion of cause and effect here that leaves many unclarities and is not (yet) connected to the contemporary philosophical discussion of causation. But note that the idea of sedimented unreality as a cause is no more problematic than any notion of mental causation of events in the world. Sedimentation can unproblematically be analyzed in terms of people's views and actions. It singles out views and actions that are based on an exercise of the imagination, but that's a phenomenon that every account of human action has to deal with anyway.
May 17, 2011
Der Glanz der Unwirklichkeit
I gave this speech at the Spring 2011 Toastmasters Area F1 (District 59) contest. (I wasn't competing, it was a target speech for the evaluation contest in German.) I've used several themes from this blog in the speech.
The speech is in German; switch on the captions for the (German) transcript.
The speech is in German; switch on the captions for the (German) transcript.
May 8, 2011
Borges' crevices of unreason
We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.Thus Borges has memorably summarized his brief discussion of the appearance in philosophy of paradoxes flowing from the idea of infinity. (A formulation suggestively posed just after another quote from Novalis to the same effect, but formulated in terms of magic instead of dreams, thus replacing one form of mystified unreality with another one.)
'Unrealities', as Borges uses the term (in the essay, though not in the passage I quoted), seem to be exclusively paradoxes, which are however assumed to reflect something in the nature of the universe. Mere fiction, say, or ordinary dreams would not count as unrealities in Borges' use of the term, as they would in mine. He finds examples for his unrealities in Zeno's paradoxes of motion and Kant's antinomies of reason. (The former he traces through a mostly arbitrary selection of philosophical works.) Given the "hallucinatory nature of the world", which remains in Borges' essay a mere claim rather than a motivated view, the function of such paradoxes (those "tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason") is to remind us of the falseness of the world. They are part of the original plan: the illusion might be perfect, so that we can't see through it; but anticipating that success, we have put some signposts for our dreaming selves into it which tell us that this dream world is false.
But it remains to be clarified in what relationship a 'false' world and a 'true' world would stand. (Note that the pair of terms, reality vs. unreality, is already used up for the reality of the dream world vs. the paradoxes built into it.) Would a world that didn't contain those 'unrealities', in Borges' sense of the term, be so perfect that it couldn't be distinguished from a 'true' world then? Would that mean that it were a 'true' world? Or would it still be 'false' because of its origin as dreamt? Moreover, is there yet another world, that of the dreamer who "has dreamt the world"? And if so, is that containing world now a 'true' world, or yet another dreamt one? And if the latter, how could we avoid the infinite regress that Borges himself has found in all those philosophical texts? Wouldn't he have to diagnose that regress first and foremost in the idealist philosophies to which he refers so admiringly?
For all its bibliographical interest, there isn't much to be gained from Borges' essay. What, then, remains to be drawn from it? At least, there is a memorable (and beautiful) quote: right at the end.
[1] Jorge Luis Borges, "Avatars of the Tortoise", in: Labyrinths. New York: New Directions 1964, 202–208, 208.
February 27, 2011
Projection, interception, and Inception
Dreamscape is probably best described as a typical horror movie, where the motive of dream manipulation is simply a dramatical device that provides a frame for portraying horribly-looking monsters, murder and bloodshed, a fairly steamy sex scene, and nuclear-devastation scenarios. The story is straightforward enough, but the characters are not too well developed and border on the inconsistent.[1] The movie is, however, a remarkably early forerunner of Inception in the way it explains how the characters get into each other's dreams.
The process of getting into the other person's dream ('psychically projecting oneself into the dream', as it is referred to in the movie), complete with hypnagogic images and a feeling as if entering through a tunnel, is at first supported by some nondescript machinery, but later on both the positive and the negative hero are shown to be able to do it without any technical help, presumably by pure psychic ability. (Both the machine and the psychic stuff place the story firmly in the real of science-fiction; the former returns in Inception, the latter doesn't, which may be taken as a sign that even in the popular imagination there isn't so much room any more for mediums and the like, at least not where the story tries to establish the illusion to be based on sound science. Audiences, it seems, are more advanced nowadays in their views on what would count as a good candidate for plausible science and what wouldn't.)
But that process is based on the same idea in both movies: that the world of a dream can be shared between two or more dreamers (in Inception, the term is 'shared dreaming'), in a manner quite similar to that of a multi-player video game. One of the dreamers hosts the world, in that his sleeping mind creates the landscape and architecture, the interior, props and extras (people who don't really have a role, but just stand around to populate the scene). The other dreamers are guests in that world, but they interact with the host and his world quite as they would do in the real world. Let's speculate a little on what is involved in this.
In order to interact with another person's dream, the visitor to the host's dream world has at first to be able to perceive what's going on in that world. Let's call this intercepting the dream. In Dreamscape, the scientists who set up the shared dream scenarios indeed start out with experiments in which they instruct the subject to 'just observe' the dream. (Being a proper story hero, of course Dennis Quaid's character ignores these instructions at the first possible occasion.) Before any interaction takes place, the primary step is just to be able to see, hear, smell and feel what's going on, to get oriented in the dream world based on the sensory inputs it generates. It's that sensory input that is intercepted and interpreted, so that an additional perceiver can see, hear etc. exactly what the dreamer himself sees, hears etc. (Never mind the complications generated by different spatial locations and thus differences in perspective, distance, visual and acoustic obstacles and so on. Let's just assume the dream interception technology can handle these.)
There is a bit of a problem here already already with this idea. When you're dreaming, say, that you are in your house, your dream world is centered around what you see in your dream. You dream that you enter through the front door, and go up the stairs — fine, so the dream world comprises the front of the house, the front door, the hall, and the stairs. Since it is your house, it may also contain all the other rooms, the back of the house, the garden and so on. But then, it may as well not contain those. It's a dream, right? In a dream, all sorts of strange things may happen, and if you go round the house, you'll quite probably not be in the garden, but somewhere else entirely, perhaps on a mountain cliff, or in a tech museum. There's no way to know until you go there in your dream. But so far, the dreamer hasn't, and nobody knows what it looks like at the back of the house in that particular dream. And yet, in Dreamscape, the dreamer and the hero (Dennis Quaid) approach the dreamer's house and separate, the dreamer walking through the front door and the hero going round the house and entering through the back door. This scene already goes beyond mere interception of the dream: it's not just that the hero perceives the host's dream world. He also perceives aspects of that dream world he cannot possibly perceive, because they haven't been dreamed yet! In Inception, that problem is addressed by making it a rule that the dream's host is always one of the gang, and the dream world is designed in advance (by the architect) and taught to the dreamer. This little trick guarantees that the world in which all the participants in the dream move around is defined in advance, and properly dreamt.
The process of getting into the other person's dream ('psychically projecting oneself into the dream', as it is referred to in the movie), complete with hypnagogic images and a feeling as if entering through a tunnel, is at first supported by some nondescript machinery, but later on both the positive and the negative hero are shown to be able to do it without any technical help, presumably by pure psychic ability. (Both the machine and the psychic stuff place the story firmly in the real of science-fiction; the former returns in Inception, the latter doesn't, which may be taken as a sign that even in the popular imagination there isn't so much room any more for mediums and the like, at least not where the story tries to establish the illusion to be based on sound science. Audiences, it seems, are more advanced nowadays in their views on what would count as a good candidate for plausible science and what wouldn't.)
But that process is based on the same idea in both movies: that the world of a dream can be shared between two or more dreamers (in Inception, the term is 'shared dreaming'), in a manner quite similar to that of a multi-player video game. One of the dreamers hosts the world, in that his sleeping mind creates the landscape and architecture, the interior, props and extras (people who don't really have a role, but just stand around to populate the scene). The other dreamers are guests in that world, but they interact with the host and his world quite as they would do in the real world. Let's speculate a little on what is involved in this.
In order to interact with another person's dream, the visitor to the host's dream world has at first to be able to perceive what's going on in that world. Let's call this intercepting the dream. In Dreamscape, the scientists who set up the shared dream scenarios indeed start out with experiments in which they instruct the subject to 'just observe' the dream. (Being a proper story hero, of course Dennis Quaid's character ignores these instructions at the first possible occasion.) Before any interaction takes place, the primary step is just to be able to see, hear, smell and feel what's going on, to get oriented in the dream world based on the sensory inputs it generates. It's that sensory input that is intercepted and interpreted, so that an additional perceiver can see, hear etc. exactly what the dreamer himself sees, hears etc. (Never mind the complications generated by different spatial locations and thus differences in perspective, distance, visual and acoustic obstacles and so on. Let's just assume the dream interception technology can handle these.)
There is a bit of a problem here already already with this idea. When you're dreaming, say, that you are in your house, your dream world is centered around what you see in your dream. You dream that you enter through the front door, and go up the stairs — fine, so the dream world comprises the front of the house, the front door, the hall, and the stairs. Since it is your house, it may also contain all the other rooms, the back of the house, the garden and so on. But then, it may as well not contain those. It's a dream, right? In a dream, all sorts of strange things may happen, and if you go round the house, you'll quite probably not be in the garden, but somewhere else entirely, perhaps on a mountain cliff, or in a tech museum. There's no way to know until you go there in your dream. But so far, the dreamer hasn't, and nobody knows what it looks like at the back of the house in that particular dream. And yet, in Dreamscape, the dreamer and the hero (Dennis Quaid) approach the dreamer's house and separate, the dreamer walking through the front door and the hero going round the house and entering through the back door. This scene already goes beyond mere interception of the dream: it's not just that the hero perceives the host's dream world. He also perceives aspects of that dream world he cannot possibly perceive, because they haven't been dreamed yet! In Inception, that problem is addressed by making it a rule that the dream's host is always one of the gang, and the dream world is designed in advance (by the architect) and taught to the dreamer. This little trick guarantees that the world in which all the participants in the dream move around is defined in advance, and properly dreamt.
[1] For instance in the positive hero (played by Dennis Quaid) who seems to be a player person in the beginning, driven by pure morality in the middle when he takes on the task of freeing a young boy and the president of the United States from their nightmares, and again not thinking too much about murdering a villain in his dreams simply because he might be dangerous in the future — all those different motives simply don't integrate into a plausible personality.
January 9, 2011
An elegant solution for keeping track of reality
(Jetlag has its good sides, too...)
In Inception (a movie about which you'll read a lot on this blog), there is the concept of a 'totem', an idea that provides "an elegant solution for keeping track of reality", as one character puts it. It's a small physical object which you would carry with you, and which has a particular behavior known only to you. For instance, one character has a loaded dice as his totem, the behavior of which only he knows. The function of this device is to tell you, "beyond any doubt", whether you are in the real world or within a dream world. From the behavior of your totem, you could tell the difference.
Now I'm not quite sure what to think of this idea. If you are training for lucid dreaming, one of the techniques you employ is habitual reality-checking: you constantly ask yourself whether you are dreaming or awake right now; and one of the ways to tell is to look at a string of symbols (a multi-digit number, such as on a digital watch, or a line of text), which generally isn't stable in dreams. The idea of a totem in the film, however, seems not to be like that. (Those reality checks aren't reliable enough to fulfill the crucial function assigned to totems in the movie.)
Perhaps it rather has to do with another concept in that movie's world, that of 'shared dreaming'. In Inception, all the dreams are arranged so that several persons are in the same dream world, acting and interacting within it, somewhat similar to what happens in a multi-player video game. Since only one of the people sharing the dream 'hosts' the world (sometimes referred to as 'the dreamer'), it's up to that person to build up the physical surroundings in it. But this means that if you are in someone else's dream, that person has created the physical world around you, and thus when you use your totem, it's the host who would have to arrange for it to behave in its peculiar way. But the host doesn't know exactly what that way is, and so your totem doesn't behave as it should, showing that you are in someone else's dream world.
If that's the idea, however, it doesn't seem to withstand a closer examination either, even within the rules that make up the world of the movie (remember: we're still talking about the fictional world of Inception, not about the real world, i.e. our world).
For one thing, I can't quite see how it would prevent you from mistaking your own dream for reality, if the outline I have given above is correct. For another, it doesn't fit with a claim made earlier on in the movie, namely that most of the details are filled in by those experiencing the dream world, in order to "make it seem real". And moreover, remember the business model of the group around diCaprio's character? It's about stealing secrets (called 'extraction' in the movie). The idea is to build a secured area into the dream world which then is filled by the victim's subconscious mind with some valuable secret information, and that's what they then steal. But if it's possible to 'extract' even such well-protected secret information from someone, then what would be different about the information how your totem is supposed to behave? What would prevent one from stealing that bit of information, and then fake the totem's behavior? So, if totems worked the way I've sketched above, they wouldn't be good enough to fulfill the function ascribed to them by the characters.
Still, the concept of a totem is an interesting idea, a clever solution to the problem of distinguishing between dream and reality (keeping in mind all along that 'reality' here means the world of the movie, which is called 'real world' in the film, but is still a fictional world). Again, this is an instance of the question of where the borders between reality and unreality run, and the way it is solved here suggests that the person who experiences both reality and unreality has itself some crucial role to play here, as have the experiences themselves.
There is an old story (I don't remember where I originally read it) in which a man is haunted by what seems to be the ghost of his late wife. She appears frequently and seems to know everything about him, even his most secret thoughts. Disturbed and not quite sure if she really is an omniscient ghost or merely a figment of his imagination, the man consults a Zen master, who advises him to put a handful of beans into a bag and ask her, on her next appearance, to tell him the exact number of beans within it. If she can't do that, then the man would know he's only dreamt her up (and presumably get rid of her by virtue of that realization).
The strategy here is basically the same: create some privileged knowledge (or non-knowledge) which you can be sure nobody else can have, and test it in order to find out whether you're in the real world or not. In the beans story, the ghost's ignorance about the number of beans demonstrates her to have implausible limits to her 'omniscience', which thus turns out to be fake. In Inception, your totem supposedly can assure you that you're not in a dream. But unfortunately, elegant though this "solution for keeping track of reality" may be, it's ineffective outside the fictional world of that movie. (Just in case you were in doubt.)
In Inception (a movie about which you'll read a lot on this blog), there is the concept of a 'totem', an idea that provides "an elegant solution for keeping track of reality", as one character puts it. It's a small physical object which you would carry with you, and which has a particular behavior known only to you. For instance, one character has a loaded dice as his totem, the behavior of which only he knows. The function of this device is to tell you, "beyond any doubt", whether you are in the real world or within a dream world. From the behavior of your totem, you could tell the difference.
Now I'm not quite sure what to think of this idea. If you are training for lucid dreaming, one of the techniques you employ is habitual reality-checking: you constantly ask yourself whether you are dreaming or awake right now; and one of the ways to tell is to look at a string of symbols (a multi-digit number, such as on a digital watch, or a line of text), which generally isn't stable in dreams. The idea of a totem in the film, however, seems not to be like that. (Those reality checks aren't reliable enough to fulfill the crucial function assigned to totems in the movie.)
Perhaps it rather has to do with another concept in that movie's world, that of 'shared dreaming'. In Inception, all the dreams are arranged so that several persons are in the same dream world, acting and interacting within it, somewhat similar to what happens in a multi-player video game. Since only one of the people sharing the dream 'hosts' the world (sometimes referred to as 'the dreamer'), it's up to that person to build up the physical surroundings in it. But this means that if you are in someone else's dream, that person has created the physical world around you, and thus when you use your totem, it's the host who would have to arrange for it to behave in its peculiar way. But the host doesn't know exactly what that way is, and so your totem doesn't behave as it should, showing that you are in someone else's dream world.
If that's the idea, however, it doesn't seem to withstand a closer examination either, even within the rules that make up the world of the movie (remember: we're still talking about the fictional world of Inception, not about the real world, i.e. our world).
For one thing, I can't quite see how it would prevent you from mistaking your own dream for reality, if the outline I have given above is correct. For another, it doesn't fit with a claim made earlier on in the movie, namely that most of the details are filled in by those experiencing the dream world, in order to "make it seem real". And moreover, remember the business model of the group around diCaprio's character? It's about stealing secrets (called 'extraction' in the movie). The idea is to build a secured area into the dream world which then is filled by the victim's subconscious mind with some valuable secret information, and that's what they then steal. But if it's possible to 'extract' even such well-protected secret information from someone, then what would be different about the information how your totem is supposed to behave? What would prevent one from stealing that bit of information, and then fake the totem's behavior? So, if totems worked the way I've sketched above, they wouldn't be good enough to fulfill the function ascribed to them by the characters.
Still, the concept of a totem is an interesting idea, a clever solution to the problem of distinguishing between dream and reality (keeping in mind all along that 'reality' here means the world of the movie, which is called 'real world' in the film, but is still a fictional world). Again, this is an instance of the question of where the borders between reality and unreality run, and the way it is solved here suggests that the person who experiences both reality and unreality has itself some crucial role to play here, as have the experiences themselves.
There is an old story (I don't remember where I originally read it) in which a man is haunted by what seems to be the ghost of his late wife. She appears frequently and seems to know everything about him, even his most secret thoughts. Disturbed and not quite sure if she really is an omniscient ghost or merely a figment of his imagination, the man consults a Zen master, who advises him to put a handful of beans into a bag and ask her, on her next appearance, to tell him the exact number of beans within it. If she can't do that, then the man would know he's only dreamt her up (and presumably get rid of her by virtue of that realization).
The strategy here is basically the same: create some privileged knowledge (or non-knowledge) which you can be sure nobody else can have, and test it in order to find out whether you're in the real world or not. In the beans story, the ghost's ignorance about the number of beans demonstrates her to have implausible limits to her 'omniscience', which thus turns out to be fake. In Inception, your totem supposedly can assure you that you're not in a dream. But unfortunately, elegant though this "solution for keeping track of reality" may be, it's ineffective outside the fictional world of that movie. (Just in case you were in doubt.)
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)