The question can be summed up as: is dreaming a failure of cognition, a breakdown of logic, and otherwise deficient OR is dreaming an accomplishment of cognition, a creative fire that burns bright inside us, the original inspiration behind art, genius, and even religion?

It’s always been Either/or. Madness versus Creativity. Proto-mammalian gibberish versus Spiritual Ascent.

Thankfully, researcher Don Kuiken from the University of Alberta is questioning this false dualism. His paper at the Montreal Dreams conference was one of my favorites because of its far-reaching implications. Kuiken simply asked, “What if dreaming is both?” Focusing on the anomalies of dreams – those discontinuities of scene, memory, and thought – Kuiken illustrated how dreaming cognition can be seen as a “failure” and an “accomplishment” at the same time.

Take reflective awareness, for example (a favorite topic of mine). In most dreams, we are absorbed in the drama of the dream, so much so that we never stop to think, “Hey, I graduated from high school 15 years ago, and I really don’t need to worry about where I”m going to sit at the lunch table any more.” No, we have single-minded absorption to a very high degree, and we don’t question this anomaly at all. The cognitive psychologists have labeled this a “deficiency” because we”d never be fooled by this shenanigan in waking life.

Kuiken then notes that this absorption in the dream has its own logic. Our “encapulation” in the dream scene allows long-term memories to come to consciousness, and we participate fully within this drama, to a degree that is generally impossible when awake. So we can think of this bizarre emergence as a “coming to light,” Kuiken says, that would not be possible if our thinking was not simultaneously deficient (too single-minded) as well as a marvel (total participation allowing a revelation of deep emotional material).

Heidegger was then dragged into the fray, as his understanding of Logos can handle this sort of ambiguity. Based on Aristotle’s hermaeneia, Heidegger envisioned logos as the hidden order of things. More specifically: Logos is the uncovering of the hidden order. This view of logos works well with dreaming thought and experience, which naturally lends itself towards making connections with deep emotional traces, as well as the revelation of conceptual and metaphoric similarities. IN other words, this muddy thought has its own poetry.

Dreaming has its own logos, and the question still remains how can we switch back and forth between these different modes of consciousness for thousands of years, yet still fundamentally misunderstand them? We’ll have to discuss this in a dream to really close the loop.