Dreaming, recollection and recognition

The recollection-provoking assets of dreaming are salient: will, and the concomitant control and filter function of the mind, become gradually extinguished. As a result, the recollective function is strengthened: “der Schlaf [macht] häufig den im Wachen vorangegangen Prozess des Vergessens rückgängig”. (Carl du Prel, Philosophie der Mystik, p. 289) As a rule, dream content is drawn from memory even though it can only be recognised as such, if at all, upon awakening. As a matter of fact, dreaming can activate recollection without corresponding recognition: “es findet Reproduktion ohne Erinnerung statt”. (ib., p. 290) 

If we take as an example Freud’s famous dream about Irma’s injection (quoted in his Traumdeutung), Freud can only recognise (that is, consciously re-mind, re-member) the dream events after awakening and upon subsequently reflecting on his dream (even more so upon a deliberate analysis of the dream). Awakening can make us ‘recollective’, that is, it may add recognition (if at all) to ‘mere’ remembering.

However, recognition, Du Prel notes, ultimately originates in the very memory (Gedächtnis) which also allows for the eliciting of memorie-s. Memory is the common yet enigmatic source of reproduction, recollection and recognition. Without the latter, our experience is drifting on a sea of unrecognised memories which it will be unable to re-collect. Conscious recognition deepens recollection. It does so even if – or must we say, because – recollection is ultimately unfathomable. For we should not discard the possibility that recollection is an infinite job, even less so in light of the layered structure of consciousness discussed in the previous chapters. Just as ‘pure’ actual perception may be illusory (due to its pervasion by past memories or present fantasies), it may be equally misleading to pursue a ‘pure’ memory exhausted by a purportedly ‘adequate’ recognition. 

Not only may the original event subsequently ‘stored’ in memory have been inadequately processed, so that what had been stored was actually an ‘original distortion’. It could also be – and this is a far more promising possibility – that what is called ‘recognition’ will discover hitherto neglected dimensions of the stored memories. Perhaps the alleged ‘original’ memorised content (‘memory’) is susceptible to being re-engaged by ‘recognition’ in such a way that it appears in an altogether new fashion – just as, for example, when someone’s youngest son shows up at a family meeting wearing a decent dinner suit with a corresponding tie for the first time in his life.

‘Recognition’, then, might be more than just a re-appropriation of an alleged ‘pure’ past; it might amount to a rediscovery or even re-creation of this past. This virtual possibility, I think, is facilitated by dreaming. In dreams, we experience the fluctuation of a threshold whose essence is not only to protect us (from mental overload) but also to fixate past and present. Attributing primacy to waking or supraliminal consciousness, far from serving scientific truth-finding, rather contributes to paralysis, if not to ontological despair. Descartes’ dream doubtlessly saved him from falling prey to the ‘cartesian’ mechanism and materialism of his disciples.