Posted by
lrudolph on
Oct 22, 2016; 1:24pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Unix-Nightmare-tp7587974p7587983.html
Frank writes:
> Nick,
>
> Well, sometimes when I'm thinking about a dream, I suddenly remember some
> detail that I had completely forgotten. But more often I fall back to
> sleep. In my old age, I seldom remember dreams.
in reply to Nick:
> > Good lord, Frank. Surely you are teasing me. How could your memory of a
> > dream not be accurate?!
I thought it was widely believed by Psychologists (as it is certainly believed by *me*) that
one commits an error (a category error, perhaps? or an error of attribution?) if one thinks of
"a dream" as some thing that existed--or some act that was undertaken--before one awakes,
which can thereafter be "remembered"; rather, the behavior that one (mis)names "remembering
the dream I just awoke from" is actually the conjunction of two behaviors--"dreaming while
half-awake" and "attributing the quality of 'rememberance of the past' to 'awareness of an on-
going behavior'" (pardon the awkward phrasings). Of course, often one also "thinks about a
dream" when one is fully awake (or going back to sleep), and that behavior may be (or
incorporate) actually remembering an earlier behavior of the previous type.
In particular, to say that "I suddenly remember some detail that I had completely forgotten"
*may* be begging the question: how can you know (and why should you suppose) that you are not
simply (sic!) creating that detail anew, and simultaneously attributing pastness (and
veridicality) to it? And I do mean to ask, literally, *how* can you know something like that?
On an account like mine, Nick's question becomes vacuous; but maybe Nick phrased the question
exactly as a succinct way of stating my more rambling account.
Lee
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