Ernest Sosa And Julia Driver: The Theories Of Dreams

To begin, I will tell two brief anecdotes that will provide a real world examples of my theory, while serving as a point which I can refer back to when explaining my theory. One night during my usual sleep, my mind jolted me awake with such a clamor that I could not fall back asleep. Usually, my dreams come and go, as if I were sitting beside a river, watching particulate drift with the current. Suddenly, as if the river had been dammed, I was stuck in a dream. I was falling, yet the ground never approached. I was no longer a bystander to my dreams, but an active recipient. I could feel the air rushing through my fingers, blowing my hair above my head. I heard the air as it blew over my eardrums. Suddenly, I could see the ground working it’s

I define the conscious plane as the space just before sleeping, and right before waking. It is within this window where, as my first anecdote states, the effects of our real world clash with those that appear to be a dream. When I woke up, for a split second I knew my surroundings had changed to my bed, yet I was still feeling the sensation of falling. Philosophers such as Ernest Sosa and Julia Driver believe that this could be a door opening into our dreams. While both philosophers acknowledge that dreams originate from the mind, implying they are two separate entities, Sosa believes that during the time that the conscious plane is blurred, they become one and the same. He says, “A possible extended dream and a possible stream of waking consciousness are indistinguishable”(CITATION NEEDED). This brief unification can be summed up as a way our brain processes two separate worlds, one of direct contact, and one of pure thought. While I agree with Sosa’s theory, I cannot help but argue that we have no true way of knowing which plane is real. While Sosa tackles the idea of dreams and their realness, Julia Driver puts dreams into a context of

The philosophers’ works diverge from their topics when they begin to suggest that all humans are inherently good. I find this to be flawed, as I align with Sartre’s belief that the existence of one extreme must be based on the existence of another. If there is inherent goodness within, there must also be inherent bad. Sosa acknowledges that, “The safety of one's belief is not affected by the nearby possibility of a realistic dream”(CITATION NEEDED). Here, Sosa ideates the conscious plane as following the dreamer’s strict moral principles, hinting that for every good moral conscience there can also be an evil one. Driver does not refute her synthesis of waking and dreaming reality, yet she says, “One could point out, trivially, that one cannot perform immoral actions in a dream because one cannot perform any action in a dream”(CITATION NEEDED). While she is right in saying that a dreamer is not actively performing any action, she does not allow for morality to cloud dreams. Yet isn’t it our morality, as she stated earlier, the way in which we set our bounds? Morality and dreams often go hand in hand when discussing dreams, because, as seen in Descartes’ Meditations and Paul Auster’s City of Glass, a solid conscious plane requires a set of morals which can formulate an ideal situation for the