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Question Is it logically possible to have a dream within a dream? Or is there, as it were, only one "level" of dreaming?

Accepted:
November 26, 2009

Comments

A good question.One way of looking at it is to make a comparison with fictions within fiction -- say, the play-within-a-play that we have in Hamlet. The whole shebang is fiction: both the play-within-the-play and the play itself, but we can still sensibly ask what's true within the "fictional world" of Hamlet. (Philosophers have written a good deal on "truth in fiction," but the details needn't detain us.) Our question is about the inner structure or logic of the overarching fiction we call Hamlet.

We can obviously say similar things about dreams. Dreams have (more or less coherent) plots or story lines, and the "logic" of those story lines is plausibly not so different from the "logic" of stories, plays and the like. It's clearly possible (and probably pretty common) to have a dream that includes "waking up" from a dream within the story line. There's only one real dreamer -- the flesh and blood person lying in the bed. But the story line of the dream includes a fictionalized (dreamatized?) version of the dreamer who dreams that he has awakened from a dream. And in some cases, it can get even more complicated. I've had at least a small handful of dreams with a dream-within-a-dream-within a dream structure and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

My guess is that there are some interesting differences between the logic of fiction and the logic of dreams, and that it would be worth exploring the territory. But there seems to be enough similarity for what's said above to stand.

I agree with Allen Stairs comments about the logic and the possibility of dreams within dreams. I wonder, though, whether your question is also about the possibility of different "levels" of reality. When we 'wake up' from one dream into the reality of another, are we shifting from one level of reality to another or are both dreams equally unreal? There is certainly a tradition (in philosophy and in religion) that embraces the idea of different levels of reality, and that often characterizes the move from one level to another as being like awaking from a dream. From any particular standpoint, however, there seems to be a single line that divides what is real from what is unreal. So from my current waking standpoint, the dream within a dream is just as unreal as the dream that contains it.

If I dream that I am in Lisbon, it does not follow that I am, and I may not be. Nor does it follow that I am not, of course. But if I say that I dreamed that I was in Lisbon last night, this may be one way of saying that I was not in Lisbon. If then I say that I dreamed (in a "ground-floor" dream) that I dreamed something (in a second-level dream, so to speak), it seems to follow that I did not; I did not produce a dream within my dream. And it seems to me hard to see how I could. For the contrast is between dreams and reality, and there is no reality for the second-level dreams to return to. There are just sequences of images and dreamed descriptions of them. If I dream that I have a dream, the second thing I have is not a dream within a dream, but just part of the ground-floor dream.

Question Is it logically possible to have a dream within a dream? Or is there, as it were, only one "level" of dreaming? Accepted:November 26, 2009

Question Is it logically possible to have a dream within a dream? Or is there, as it were, only one "level" of dreaming?

Accepted:
November 26, 2009