Episode 060 - Dreams, And The Mind's Use of Images
Date: 03/01/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1901-episode-sixty-dreams-and-the-mind-s-use-of-images/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Book Four lines 907–1036, read by Charles: Lucretius explains sleep as partial dispersal of the soul — the body is beaten from within and without by air through the pores until the soul’s seeds cannot unite; sleep is deepest when full and weary; the mind in sleep revisits what it was engaged with when awake (lawyer pleads cases, sailor fights winds, Lucretius searches nature); experience of plays leaves open passages through which similar images find entry even after; animals also dream (the racehorse, hounds on the trail, house dogs).
Discussion covers the unexplained question of how the soul particles return after sleep; Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, as the traditional supernatural alternative; sleep as a disruptive rather than restorative process in Lucretius’s account; Elaine maintains that images in dreams are still coming from outside through open passages, not from stored memories — citing the Diogenes of Oinoanda inscription on dreams (read by Charles); Cassius is not yet fully persuaded that internal memory-storage can be ruled out; Martin observes that prior experience conditions the mind to select certain incoming images, which is how the lawyer’s dreaming of legal cases can be explained without a storage mechanism; and the episode closes with observations about dreaming pets and human sleepwalking and sleep-talking.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 60 of Lucretius Today. I am your host, Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com Forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem, and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. For anyone who is not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode 1 for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any question about that, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In this Episode 60, we’ll continue our discussion of the mind’s use of images. Our text comes from Latin lines 907 through 1036 of Book 4. Now let’s join the discussion with Charles reading today’s text.
Charles: Next, how soft sleep dissolves the limbs and rest and frees the mind from anxious care, I choose in few but sweetest numbers to explain — as a swan’s short song is more melodious than the harsh noises of cranes scattered by the winds through all the air. Hear me, my Memmius, with a tendered ear and a discerning mind, lest what I shall prove you think impossible to be, and so your mind, refusing to admit the truth, I shall relate — you make no progress in philosophy when the fault is in yourself that you will not see. And first, sleep comes on when the power of the soul, diffused through the limbs, part of it is thrown out and fled abroad, and part being squeezed more close retires further within. Then are the limbs dissolved and grow weak, for without doubt the business of the soul is to stir up sense in us, and since sleep removes it, we must conclude that the soul is then disturbed and driven abroad — not the whole soul, for then the body would lie in the cold arms of eternal death. Then no part of the soul would lie retired within the limbs, as a fire remains covered under a heap of ashes from whence the senses might be kindled again through the body, as a flame is soon raised from hidden fire. But by what means this wonderful change is brought about — how the soul is thus disordered and the body languishes — I shall now explain. Do you see that I do not scatter my words unto the wind? And first, the outward surface of bodies, which are always touched by the adjacent air, must of necessity be struck by it and beaten with frequent blows. And for this reason all things almost are covered either with skin or bristles or shells or buff or bark. This air then, as it is drawn in and breathed out by respiration, strikes upon the inward parts of the body. Since therefore the body is beat upon from within and without, and since the strokes pierce through the little pores into the seeds and the first principles of it, this causes a kind of ruin and destruction through all the limbs. The situation of the seeds, both of the body and mind, are disordered, so that part of the soul is forced out and part retires and lurks close within. And the part that is diffused through the limbs is so broken and divided that the seeds cannot unite to perform their mutual operations, for nature stops up all the passages of communication between them. And therefore the regular motions being exceedingly changed, the sense is entirely gone. Since therefore there is not a power sufficient to support the limbs, the body becomes weak, all the members languish, the arms and the eyelids fall, and the knees sink under the weight of the body. Thus sleep follows when the belly is full, because food, when it is distributed through all the veins, has the same effect upon the soul as the air had. And that sleep is by much the soundest which you take when you are weary or full, because then more of the seeds being agitated and put into motion by the hard labor mutually disturb and disorder one another. And for this reason the soul retires further within, and a greater part of it is thrown out, and the parts that remain within are the more separated and the further disjoint. And in the business we more particularly follow, the affairs we are chiefly employed in, and what our mind is principally delighted with when we are awake — the same we are commonly conversant about when we are asleep. The lawyer is pleading of cases and making of statutes. The soldier is fighting and engaging in battles. The sailor is warring against the winds. For myself, I am always searching into the nature of things and writing my discoveries in Latin verse. And so many other arts and employments are commonly the empty entertainments of the minds of men when they are asleep. And they who spend their time in seeing plays for many days together — when those representations are no longer present to the waking senses, there still remain some open traces left in the mind through which the images of those things find a passage — so that for many days after the whole performance is acting over again before their eyes. And even while they are awake, they fancy they see the dancers leaping and moving their active limbs, and hear the speaking strings. They see the same audience, the same variety of the scenes and decorations of the stage. So strong impressions do use and custom make upon us. Such effects do the common business of life produce in the minds of men. And beasts likewise — for you shall see the gallant courser, when his limbs are at rest, to sweat in his sleep, to breathe short, and, the barriers down, to lay himself out as it were on the full stretch for the prize. And hounds frequently in their soft sleep throw out their legs, and of a sudden yelp and snuff the air quick with their nose, as if they were full cry upon the foot of the deer. And when awake they still pursue the empty image of the game, as if they saw it run swiftly before them, till undeceived they quit the chase, and the fancied image vanishes away. And the fawning breed of house dogs that live at home often rouse and shake the drowsy fit from their eyes and start up of a sudden with their bodies, as if they saw a stranger or a face they had not been used to. The sharper the seeds are of which the images are formed, they strike in the sleep with the greater violence — so many birds will fly about and hide themselves in the inmost recesses of sacred groves by night, if in their soft sleep they see the hawk pursuing them upon the wing, or pouncing, or engaging with his prey.
Cassius: Thank you for reading that section, Charles. It’s longer than normal, but it’s generally addressing the issue of what happens when we’re asleep and in dreams and so forth, so it was good to keep this section together. Some of the physical description is obviously obsolete — the soul withdrawing deeper into the body and things like that. Does he get to how it gets back in? I don’t know that he does.
Elaine: Yeah. What happened to the soul wandering abroad?
Cassius: Well, the idea of any part of it leaving the body is kind of strange to me under the general theory we’ve been discussing, but that’s kind of what he’s saying, isn’t it?
Elaine: Yes, yes. He just didn’t explain what happens to the part that leaves. Maybe the next section has to do with what happens when you wake up?
Cassius: I don’t think so. I don’t think he comes back to that. He just left that out. Well, maybe there’s something about the soul really being like seeds of which you can lose some and gain some. If you lose them, you’re going to have to get them back. He analogizes it to the fire within the ashes — the fire can die down and yet rekindle itself when it gets more material to work with. Maybe there’s something going on there.
Elaine: But it would have to be new particles, because his soul particles — the seeds — are different. You can’t turn a blood particle into a soul particle. So yeah, I guess he just left that out. He pretty much consistently talks about soul in ways that we would think about the peripheral nervous system — but as particles, not as electrical impulses, because he didn’t have that. And he does say that without doubt the business of the soul is to stir up sense in us, which is almost like saying souls are catalysts. But he leaves that first passage by saying don’t let my words just scatter themselves into the wind — he really wants us to believe this part.
Cassius: And it’s too bad that it’s not right, but it’s again very creative. It’s a fascinating attempt to explain sleep in a material way. Isn’t there a goddess or a concept of sleep in Greek mythology? I think it’s Lethe? No, wait —
Charles: Actually Lethe was one of the five rivers that flowed through the underworld in Greek mythology, passing through the cave of Hypnos the god of sleep. The river of forgetfulness. But I don’t know if that was the explanation for people going to sleep in normal life — not in the underworld.
Cassius: Right. I’m thinking of that river as being what people drink from. Is that when they come into the river of forgetfulness — you think of that when you die or when you’re born, or both?
Elaine: Well, they didn’t have reincarnation — so it would just be after you die. I think some of them believed in reincarnation, but not the majority of Greeks. Because, Cassius, that’s what this whole Platonic theory of remembrance was about — that you’re remembering your past life. That’s the theory of knowledge that’s tied into the ideal forms. Pythagoras would be an example of reincarnation belief — metempsychosis is another word that goes with that.
Charles: Pythagoras and also Empedocles, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Cassius: Anyway, what was the explanation for sleep besides involving the gods?
Elaine: Hypnos — the god of sleep and dreams, remover of all pain, suffering, and sorrow. So it would involve a god. And here’s a material explanation of sleep that doesn’t involve a god. And I want to remember that in reading this second paragraph: Lucretius is talking about sleep as not something necessarily good or restorative, but disruptive. He’s describing a counterintuitive thing — because most of us would presume that sleep is rest — but this description of what’s going on with the seeds is really a disruption of the normal operation of the soul.
Cassius: I noticed that too. And also this thing about the body being beaten by blows is a really kind of violent view of experience. Finally the body just can’t take it anymore. I’ve had days where I might say that made sense as a metaphor, but still I would think of sleep not as the culmination of disorder but as a restorative process.
Elaine: I can see how you can’t keep laboring on forever and eventually the seeds will have to stop. But still, it reads as if sleep is brought about by disorder, not as a restorative process. And that puts me on alert that maybe there are other aspects of Epicurus’s thought that we’re not completely positive about when it comes to sleep. I mean, how does it end? If sleep is brought about by disorder — blocked connections, things not functioning properly — what puts it back? That would be my same question about where the soul particles come back from.
Cassius: Could be the seeds rebuilding themselves. I do want to point out that this continues to support my understanding that the images are still coming from outside — even the images of the lawyer and the soldier. Brown says: “there still remain some open traces left in the mind through which the images of those things find a passage.” And Munro says: “there yet remain passages open in the mind through which the same idols of things may enter.” So that’s real consistent with what Elaine has been saying — the images are not from the mind, but there are passages for them to come through from the outside.
Cassius: All I can say is I’m not persuaded yet that it’s completely that way. I have to think that the fact that the lawyer is dreaming of his cases has something to do with his past experiences. He says there are passages, but the actual image is coming from the outside.
Elaine: He’s already said that in a previous section — that the dream images come through the pores directly into the mind. He’s been saying that consistently.
Cassius: My view would be that some of them do, but I’m also not convinced that we don’t store images. I think we can see images from outside and I also think we store them.
Elaine: We know that from neuroscience — we don’t store images as such. It’s pretty complicated, but I will find you some references because that’s a common popular idea, but it’s not how the brain works.
Cassius: Okay, well — we have to distinguish there between that’s your view of the way things really are versus the way Epicurus was looking at it. And it seems glaringly clear that every time he’s described it, he’s talking about images coming through the pores. He has never said that we store images.
Martin: I agree that counter to what we think today, there is no mentioning of any memory function, or at least no direct memory function. So the only thing we can put together — from this section and the previous one — is that the mind is conditioned to select what we are interested in or what we deal with. A lawyer who works all the time on law — when he dreams, he’s also looking for images related to law, and that’s what he sees. So in that sense, a lawyer or a sailor would just be conditioning their mind’s focusing habit so that it’s continuously focused in a particular direction. And that would be the method by which prior experiences cause it to select new incoming images.
Cassius: That may be — and I certainly see a large component of that in here. I don’t want to suggest that any resistance I have needs to be resolved at the moment. We’re in the middle of the second passage maybe. And probably nobody would question his commentary that sleep is the deepest when the belly is full or when you’re the most tired — that’s probably pretty uncontroversial.
Charles: I found the section from the Diogenes of Oinoanda inscription on dreams. Shall I read it? It’s a little long.
Cassius: Yeah, we probably ought to include it.
Charles: “And often, mirrors too will be my witness that likenesses and appearances are real entities. For what I will say will certainly not be denied at all by the image, which will give supporting evidence on oath — and not a continual flow being born from us to the mirrors, and indeed bring back an image to us, for this too is convincing proof of the efflux. Seeing that each of the parts is carried to the point straight ahead. Now, images that flow from objects, by impinging on our eyes, cause both to see external realities and through entering our soul to think of them. So it is through impingements that the soul receives in turn the things seen by the eyes. And after the impingements of the first images, our nature is rendered porous in such a manner that, even if the objects which it first saw are no longer present, images similar to the first ones are received by the mind, creating visions both when we are awake and in sleep. And let us not be surprised that this happens even when we are asleep, for images flow to us in the same way at that time too. How so? When we are asleep with all the senses, as it were, paralyzed and extinguished — again in sleep the soul, which is still wide awake, and yet is unable to recognize the predicament and condition of the senses at that time — on receiving the images that approach it, conceives an untested and false opinion concerning them, as if we were actually apprehending the solid nature of true realities. For the means of testing the opinion — the senses — are asleep at that time.” And then he goes on to oppose Democritus by saying that dreams are god-sent.
Cassius: Are you still there, Elaine?
Elaine: Yeah, I’m here. Clearly what was just read supports what I’m saying — that the experience of seeing things conditions your passages, almost like tuning them, so that they’re going to be receiving something similar in the future.
Cassius: Now where I would want to inquire is: when he’s talking about the means of testing being asleep — I don’t know what he’s talking about there, because I would think part of the means of testing what you’re seeing would be to compare it to what you’ve seen in the past, which would be memory to me.
Elaine: Well, these days I would say it’s your executive function — your frontal lobes. But I don’t know what he meant exactly. It would be something similar.
Cassius: Our means of testing what we see is to look further, but at some point you have to store your past observation in order to compare it to the current observation, or you’d never have anything but your current observation.
Elaine: Well, that is still research going on about image processing and memory and imagination. What we know is that there are neurological patterns that get created — which you could metaphorize as passages — but he literally was saying passages where physical objects were passing through, which is not the same. The neurological patterns by which we sort of recreate our experience of an image — or create an experience of a new imaginary image — they’re not coming from outside, nor are they like some kind of image file. They’re distributed widely over the brain and recreated when you see something from these patterns. Well, Cassius, when he talks about passages I can see the analogy — you could metaphorize it — but he literally was talking about passages as physical tunnels, and that isn’t what happens. It comes from inside the brain.
Cassius: Well, ultimately the brain is a physical object. Maybe “passages” is not a worse physical description than “pattern” — I mean, the brain can’t really store patterns, can it?
Elaine: Yes, the brain can store patterns — a pattern of neural firing. There are obviously paths — you could say passages would be the neuron connections — but that’s not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about literal material images coming from outside the body going through tunnel-like passages, and that isn’t what happens.
Cassius: I don’t profess to have any answer — I’d have no response to that. Anybody else?
Charles: I think that section from the inscription is mostly about how dreams can often feel real and convincing — and that’s what he’s saying about how the means to actually test them are asleep. Meaning the senses are asleep.
Cassius: Is he saying that it’s the mind’s direct receipt of images from the outside that is not asleep, while the hearing, seeing, and five senses are asleep? Or is it saying that the mental opinion-making function is asleep? He says “the soul which is still wide awake and yet is unable to recognize the predicament and condition of the senses at the time.” And the soul itself conceives the false opinion. I’m not so sure I’m clear on what it is that’s asleep when you’re asleep.
Elaine: The senses are asleep. The soul has been drawn from the limbs where our senses are, but in the core where the soul is, that is still awake — but it can’t do much because it doesn’t receive input from the senses. It receives only those images from outside, these eidola, that come through the passages. That sounds reasonable. And I think he thinks the eyes, the ears — it’s all turned off. And if you’re getting stuff it’s probably coming through your pores and not through your sense organs. But with the mind in his theory being a sense organ of its own receiving things directly — why is that not asleep too?
Cassius: Well, he didn’t say why. I think he was trying to make observations. And what would explain the lawyer’s and soldier’s dreams would be that if that’s what they’re immersed in, they would have more exposure to those images, and so there’d be more traces. And here’s the passage in the third paragraph: “they who spend their time in seeing plays for many days together — when those representations are no longer present to the waking senses, there still remain some open traces left in the mind through which the images of those things find a passage.” Munro and Bailey both translate that as “passages” rather than “traces.” So clearly you could say he is saying that experience tunes you to receive certain images. And the images are already out there — constantly all around us — and so these passages give preferential access to particular images. Could you extend that to say that is his full description of memory — that memory is the tuning, and that’s all he’s given?
Elaine: I think he’s been extraordinarily clear-cut, whereas he’s left out: how do you wake back up from sleep? How do you get your soul particles back? This part I don’t find to be vague at all — I think he’s been real straightforward, and he hasn’t said there’s a need for any other explanation. This is how it works. And I don’t see why you would need another mechanism of memory — I could think they could peacefully coexist, but I’m not persuaded.
Cassius: When he talks about having seen a play and the images finding a passage — wouldn’t you think that that’s memory? That sounds like memory to me.
Elaine: That’s what I’m saying — you could expand this to take over the entire function of memory. There is no need for any other mechanism. The way he set it out, he’s explained it thoroughly and materially. His model didn’t leave anything out in this instance where you would need something special for a different kind of memory versus another kind. I don’t see any confusion on his part about that — or like he’s reserving something out to the side. Because he was real clear in talking about these images: we’re constantly surrounded by them, they’re always out there, and there would never be any shortage of whatever image you wanted to think of. You would decide you want to think of it and boom, you would see that image because you had made a decision to see it.
Cassius: But I just see that as too much of a stretch. There are limitations in his physics to what can and cannot be. And to extend the idea that all images of every possible thing are just constantly in every location where a human being could be — that seems to me further than I can imagine Epicurus going.
Elaine: Didn’t he pretty much say that?
Cassius: I thought that’s what he said in a previous section, yes.
Martin: Yes, that’s what he said. These particles are very fine, and so there’s enough space that many images can be around in any space. And certainly anything that has already demonstrated itself to have been possible to see — those images would be out there. And image particles, even after scattering, don’t disappear — they’re around, and they can combine again into images which are spontaneously formed. And of those spontaneously formed images we then see those in sleep which match our passages.
Cassius: I certainly can see that is clearly what he’s saying for some phenomena. I’m just not sure that that explains all mental phenomena. But that’s something everybody will have to pursue. We’re about to become long for another week in a row, which I guess is a good thing — we have a lot to say. Let’s look at that last passage about dreams and animals.
Elaine: I really expected us to spend most of our time talking about our pets and what we see them doing when they’re asleep — how dogs and cats, cats especially, run around like they see things that are not there. So at least I want to mention it because I think that’s a very — I don’t know what the right word is — a sweet aspect of this passage.
Cassius: Yes, and people do that too. There’s parasomnia — sleepwalking, sleep-talking. And there’s REM behavior disorder — where during dream sleep, instead of losing muscle tone the way Lucretius describes, you act out your dreams and can actually hurt yourself or your bed partner thrashing around in your sleep. And unfortunately it can be an early sign of pending neurologic problems like some kinds of dementia.
Elaine: Yes. But the normal sleep movement — the jerking of legs, the twitching — that can be part of a normal dream state. And there’s the deep sleep phase in which we don’t have any memory, and it’s in those deep sleep phases that sleepwalking and sleep-talking mostly occur. I used to sleep-talk so much when I was a kid that my dad threatened at one point to tie a string around my toe and run it across the hall into their bedroom so he could tweak it and wake me up, because I would be waking up the house blathering about whatever. It’s more common in kids but adults can do it too.
Cassius: I know people do it. I’ve seen many times with dogs that when they’re sleeping they’ll start running — lying down but their legs will start running as if they’re running — and I’ve seen the sniffing and stuff that he talks about as well with dogs.
Charles: And as a cat person — cats do very strange things. They can seem to be hallucinating or sleepwalking.
Cassius: Okay, we ought to begin to come to a conclusion for today. I intend to put some posts in the forum thread to try to draw participation from other people, because I think it’s an interesting question: how far did Epicurus intend this theory to go in relation to memory? And is there a memory theory within Epicurus aside from this? Let’s begin to come to a conclusion. Martin, concluding thoughts?
Martin: No comment.
Cassius: Charles?
Charles: Not really.
Cassius: Elaine?
Elaine: I just think the high-level thing is that he is trying to explain sleep and dreams in a non-supernatural, material way. And just because he didn’t get the details right doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a valiant and interesting effort.
Cassius: I completely agree with that. That’s the place to leave the discussion for the day — because everything we’re doing is continuing to go down this road of non-supernatural explanations of the way things are. Some succeed better than others, but it’s so important that we have non-supernatural understandings of things. That’s the point. Anything else for today?
Elaine: I don’t think so.
Cassius: Okay, well with that then we’ll call it closed and come back in another week or so. Thanks everybody.
Martin: Thank you. Bye bye.
Elaine: Bye.
Charles: Thanks. Bye.