But Foucault's argument is that waking consciousness effects this logical
construction of the dream. Here his position is weak and incapable of
proof. It is, indeed, contrary to all the tests we are able to apply
to it. If it is the object of the logic of our dreams to make them
conformable to our waking experience, that end, we must admit, is in most
cases very far from being attained. In their original form, as Foucault
views the matter, our dreams are simple dissociated images. In that shape
they would present nothing whatever to shock the consciousness of waking
life. The logic, hypothetically introduced solely to make them conformable
to real life, is frequently a preposterous logic such as the consciousness
of waking life could not accept or even conceive. This fact alone serves
to throw serious doubt upon the theory that it is waking consciousness
which impresses its logic upon our dreams.
Nor, again, is there any analogy, and still less identity, between the
process whereby we grasp a dream when we awake, and the process whereby
the memory of a dream is transformed during months of waking life.
The latter is part of a general process affecting all our memories in
greater or less degree. I visit, for instance, a foreign cathedral, and
take careful note of the character and arrangement of buttresses and
piers; a few months later, if I have failed to set the facts down, my
memory of them will become uncertain, confused, and incorrect. But I need
not, therefore, lose faith in the tolerable exactitude of my original
impressions. In the same way, we cannot argue that the shifting memory
of a dream during a long period of time throws the slightest doubt on
the accuracy of our original impression of it. We never catch a dream in
course of formation. As it presents itself to consciousness on awakening
there may be doubtful points and there may be missing links, but the dream
is, once for all, completed, and if there are doubtful points or missing
links we recognise them as such. We make no attempt to supply a logic that
is not there, and we never see any such process going on involuntarily. I
should, indeed, myself be inclined to say that there is always a kind of
gap between sleeping consciousness and waking consciousness; the change
from the one to the other kind of consciousness seems to be effected
by a slight shock, and the perception of the already completed dream
is the first effort of waking consciousness. The existence of such a
shock is indicated by the fact that, even at the first moment of waking
consciousness, we never realise that a moment ago we were asleep. As soon
as we realise that we are awake it seems to us that we have already been
awake for an uncertain but distinct period of time; some people, indeed,
especially old people, on awaking, feel this so strongly that they deny
they have been asleep. It once happened to me to be in the neighbourhood
of a dynamite factory at the moment when a very disastrous explosion
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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