Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Preface

2014; University of St. Thomas; Volume: 17; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/log.2014.0035

1533-791X

Michael C. Jordan,

Historical Astronomy and Related Studies

Preface Michael C. Jordan The jarring uncertainty we sometimes feel when transitioning from dreaming to waking consciousness instigates wonder. How could an experience vivid enough to cause us to cry out in fear during a nightmare become in waking awareness a harmless illusion? It sometimes happens that the transition is extended, and a certain labor of thought is required to discern which state is a dream and which is the world we perceive while fully awake. The experience of dreaming somewhat famously undermines the sense of security that the world of our daily reality is indubitable or as firm and intact as our senses lead us to believe from moment to moment. Moreover, we sometimes find desire in various forms on display and engaged in dreams, and when the dreamed object of desire vanishes upon awakening, we are left disturbed or at least bemused by the nature of desire that seems to operate beyond the boundaries of our waking perceptions. We have choices concerning how to handle such uncertainty, and no doubt a categorization and history of world cultures could be sketched through the identification of dominant factors in making such choices from one culture to another. Dreams might be [End Page 5] discounted and dismissed, resolving the uncertainty they provoke through an insistence that the world of sensory experience is solid and univocal. Or at the opposite extreme, they might be regarded as harbingers of a higher reality, as windows on a different realm. Most of us will mix these modes to varying degrees, sometimes using the metaphor of dream to indicate our highest ideals, sometimes using the metaphor of waking to refer to our restoration to sanity. In a short story titled “The Ivory Gate,” David Bentley Hart conveys us into an exploration of this territory through a depiction of the vast amplification of the power of dreaming exhibited by a character named by the narrator only as “my friend.” His dreams are so vivid and complex that he regards himself, perhaps with a touch of irony, as a kind of advanced stage of human evolutionary development, “Homo somnians, rational creatures able to walk with equal ease in this world and the dream world.”1 The character points to what he regards as his rare ability to know that he is dreaming when dreaming and to experience dreams framed by other dreams—experiencing a dream that he knows is taking place during another dream, and this to multiple levels, indicating his vast proficiency in the exercise of the faculty of dreaming. The gravity of this complex experience of dreaming is greatly enhanced by the story’s depiction of the character as a beloved and familiar friend of the narrator, as a learned and cosmopolitan man who knows himself to be approaching death and has made an effort to visit his friend perhaps one last time to make the disclosures of the dreams that he narrates during a late-night conversation. The art of the story is to remind us of the ontological richness and multidimensionality of our common human experience of dreaming prior to our culturally conditioned efforts to reduce or reconcile or perhaps instead enhance such ontological richness in the ways in which we learn to regard our waking and dreaming experiences. The proficient dreamer in the story locates his own interpretation of dreaming within the framework of various wisdom traditions in the world: “Maybe I should just say I’m a ‘perennial philosophy’ [End Page 6] sort of man” (138), and he remains open to the potential importance of his dreams: “It’s not a matter of fleeing reality at all, but rather of realizing that, at some preconscious level of our being, we know that there’s a greater reality out there from which we’re always shielding the eyes of our spirits with the veils of illusion we weave every day” (137). In spite of these reminders of ontological richness, delivered by a character who clearly accords the highest significance to his dreams, the story deliberately withholds a full affirmation to the declarations of this character by reminding us of the ethical claims that must be discerned and resolved as we shape our...