Asian Philosophy

ISSN: 0955-2367 (Print) 1469-2961 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/casp20

Dreams in Buddhism and Western Aesthetics:

Some Thoughts on Play, Style and Space
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
To cite this article: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (2007) Dreams in Buddhism and Western
Aesthetics: Some Thoughts on Play, Style and Space, Asian Philosophy, 17:1, 65-81, DOI:
10.1080/09552360701201189
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09552360701201189

Published online: 27 Aug 2010.

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Asian Philosophy
Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2007, pp. 6581

Dreams in Buddhism and Western

Aesthetics: Some Thoughts on Play,
Style and Space
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Several Buddhist schools in India, China and Japan concentrate on the interrelationships
between waking and dreaming consciousness. In Eastern philosophy, reality can be seen
as a dream and an obscure reality beyond can be considered as real. In spite of the
overwhelming PlatonicAristotelianFreudian influence existent in Western culture,
some Western thinkers and artistsValery, Baudelaire, and Schnitzler, for example
have been fascinated by a kind of simple presence contained in dreams. I show that this
has consequences for a philosophy of space. According to the authors discussed, the
dreamer and the player recognize that human space always means the entire cosmos.

Introduction
In this article I want to reflect upon the ways that the phenomenon of dream
is perceived in Eastern and Western philosophical traditions respectively.
Radhakrishnan (1933, p. 57) wrote that we have in the West the realism of the
men of action: in the East the sensitivity of the artist and imagination of the creative
dreamer. In spite of the antagonizing tendency of Radhakrishnans statement, it is
difficult to deny that it contains some truth. Any Westerner who tries to get a glimpse
of Asian culture is surprised by the strange elaborations of the subject of dreams in
Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism. All over Asia, dream metaphors are used in order
to explain most essential philosophical problems. Indian imagination has created,
with the mythic literature of the Jataka,1 an entire dream world. The composition of
Sutras like the Mahayana Sutras can appear as extremely disorderly and illogical and
thus dreamlike. Moreover, the Katha and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishads provide
not only intriguing phenomenological descriptions of dreaming, but full-fledged
theories of dreams.2 In China, Taoists like Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi affirm in an
Correspondence to: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Department of Philosophy, Zheliang University, Xixi Campus,
Tianmushan Road, 310007 Hangzhou, China. Email: thorstenbotz@hotmail.com
ISSN 0955-2367 print/ISSN 1469-2961 online/07/010065-17 ! 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09552360701201189

66 T. Botz-Bornstein

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apparently relativistic fashion that one day we will awaken to the fact that life is only
a dream (Tao Te Ching).
In Japan, through a strong Buddhist link, dreams have become important in
aesthetics and literature where dreamlike motives are systematically employed in
order to explore states of reality and feeling (Brower & Miner, 1962, pp. 382383).
In Japanese literature, poems like that of the 12th century poet Saigyo, which
relativize the distinction between reality and dream, abound:
ustutsu o mo
utsutsu to sara ni
oboeneba
yume o mo yume to
nanika omowan

Since the real world seems

to be less than really real,
why need I suppose
the world of dreams is nothing
other than a world of dreams?
(Quoted from LaFleur, 1983, p. 6)

No-plays achieve a convincing interpenetration of dreams and reality that is often

more important than the plays dramatic action (Ohashi, 1994, p. 13ff.;
Botz-Bornstein, 2004, p. 171) and the aesthetic notion of mono no aware (sensitivity
to things) evokes a dreamlike atmosphere in which individuals have lost the power
or desire to control their destiny. Even the important aesthetic concept of wabi has a
link with dreams as it suggests not to awaken from dream in order to enter another
dream in which no suffering exists but rather to view the dream of life as a dream.3
Furthermore, in Japan, dreams seem to have a special linguistic status. According
to Megumi Sakabe, Japanese language resists the notion of being as full presence
(genzen), and the notion of utsutsu (which Saigyo uses in the poem), which means
reality, can refer to both a conscious and an oneiric state of mind.4 In Japanese
aesthetics, a dreamlike state of mind (yumegokochi) can give rise to a phenomenon
like dreamreality (yumeutsuru) in which the terms conscious and subconscious
are not clearly distinct.
How do Western concepts of dream compare with this? Is there, in the West, really
only the Freudian idea of dream as an accumulation of symbols produced through
distanciation and condensation? Is there only a scientific discourse, which talks much
about the sense of the dream, which itactuallynever finds? Being able to locate
deformations and being also able to say what it was that has been deformed,
Freudian dream interpretation remains unable to state the reasons that have made
these deformations necessary.
Certainly, also in the West there are, apart from psychological approaches to
dream, philosophical ones; but they most often stubbornly stick to questions linked
to theory of knowledge along the lines of: what is the cognitive status of dreams?
Can we know that we are dreaming? Can dreams produce knowledge?
I want to look at other Western concepts of dreams that have been developed by
Western theoreticians and artists ranging from Nietzsche to Paul Valery in order to
see if what they say about dreams is not compatible with Eastern thoughts on dreams.
The concepts examined are aesthetic in the largest sense of the word; instead of

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dealing with the sense of dreams, they deal with the conditions of their
creation, with the creative power to which they owe their being, or with their
existential style.
At the end of this article I want to show that a different definition of, as well as
a different relationship with dream can lead to different conceptions of the world or,
more particularly, to different conceptions of space in the world.

Dreams in the West

Though Western discourses on dreams also find truth in dreams, the dreams
themselves are, in general, not considered true. Dreams can reveal truths that had
thus far been hidden under thick layers of waking life, but this truth can be revealed
only if the dreams interpretation is undertaken within the conceptual grid of waking
life. At the bottom of this Western attitude towards dreams lies the fundamental
distinction between reality and appearance. The Greeks divided arts into the
production of real things and the production of simulacra (eidola), for example
pictures (Plato, Sophist, 266a). Humans can make use of these simulacra, but they
should do so while being in the state of waking life.
In many Western theories of dreams (the most famous of which is Freuds), the
reconsideration of dreams from the point of view of non-dream is supposed to
permit the objectification of the dream and its transformation into a discourse.
This can even lead to a purely linguistic research into dreams. Emile Benveniste
explains the linguistic differences between normal language and the oneiric language
of myths and dreams on the grounds of a logic of discourse. For Benveniste (1971,
pp. 6575), dreamlike figures are first of all figures of style and of rhetoric, which
leads him to considering the dream as a product of dreamlike stylization. It is clear
that in this context the interpretation of dreams is nothing other than the reverse
method of artistic production, as has said Georges Deveraux (1976, p. xxxi):
The poet turns reality into a dreamlike metaphor; the dream interpreter reconverts
a metaphor-like dream into reality . . . Neither psycho-analytical interpretation nor
structural analysis go much beyond this Aristotelian insight.
All this works, of course, only as long as one commonsensical link between dream
and reality remains stable. This link is the subjective mind of the dreamer able to
transport all images from dream to reality. The dreamer dreams the dream and
endows the otherwise fluent and self-sufficient action of the dream with a finality
because through him we are able to trace the why of what has been dreamt back to a
certain subjectivity. Subsequently, as a subjective action following the rules dictated
by a finality, the dream can be objectified into something. This can be done, for
example, by dissecting and transforming it into symbols. However, the objectification
of the dream remains incomplete to the extent that a part of the experiential status
of reality still clings to the dream after its objectification: the feeling that what is
now an objectified (even though unreal) reality had been utterly real while we were
dreaming yields the impression of strangeness or uncanniness. Dreams are not

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68 T. Botz-Bornstein

perceived as strange while we are dreaming but they become strange when we are
looking at them from the objective point of waking life.
In spite of the overwhelming PlatonicAristotelianFreudian influence existent in
Western culture, some Western thinkers and artists have been fascinated by a kind of
simple presence contained in dreams in which, as has said Paul Valery (1929, p. 89),
the if disappears and the conditional tense becomes present tense.5 These artists
and thinkers do not see dreams in terms of strangeness. Bergson (1901, p. 116),
for example, was convinced that in dreams we become doubtless indifferent to logic
but are not incapable of thinking logically and that actually waking life, much more
than dreams, asks for explanations (Bergson, 1922, p. 136).
Certainly, in dreams we are confronted with a presence that mocks logic as well
as the rules of causality and that seems to develop its own way of thinking. On the
one hand, this makes dreams strange. On the other hand, for the same reason
dreams can appear as just another reality and therefore sometimes appear as
closer to reality than any thinking through normal/abnormal dichotomies would
permit.
Questioning the absolute character of the distinction between dream and reality
has considerable consequences for ontology and aesthetics. What is questioned in the
first place is the old Platonic distinction between a permanent and beautiful essence
and fugitive and illusory appearances. Some Western artists decided to concentrate on
this very matter. Baudelaire (1962, p. 215), for example, declared that for him the
beautiful is always strange and that most often it is even fugitive. Paul Valery, who
has written much about dreams, has insisted again and again that the rigorous logic
of dreams of which every moment appears as natural, evokes not even a shadow of
doubt, that the dream is believed just as it appears (est cru sur simple apparition,
Valery, 1929, III, p. 24). The dream is not just seen as an appearance but, in terms
of clarity and experiential intensity, it is equal to waking life.
The Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler criticized modern dream interpretation
because it lays too much stress on metaphors and loses sight of the psychic reality
presented by every dream. Schnitzler attempted to retrieve this reality through his
dreamlike pieces of literature (Schnitzler et al., 1981, p. 343). In a way, Schnitzler
refused to go to the explanative bottom of reality as much as of dream and tried to
depict both in a simple, dreamlike way.6
Still, these approaches remain unusual in European modernity. True, as a result
of a sudden opposition to naturalism, European fin de sie`cle literature witnessed a
prolific production of dream literature authored, for example, by Rainer Maria Rilke,
Hugo von Hoffmannstal, Georg Trakl and Franz Kafka (see Bahr, 1968, p. 86).
For these authors, dream narratives became the dominant theme of their works.
However, very often the dreams they develop coincide largely with those of German
Romanticism whose fairy-tale like stories use the model of the dream as an idyllic
realm that remains entirely unconcerned with reality.
The fugitive reality that Valery and Baudelaire allude to, however, has nothing to
do with such an aesthetic idealization of dreams. If Valery and Baudelaire concentrate
on the aesthetic aspect of dreams then only because it is in the domain of aesthetics

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that the dream can have an autonomous existence while as a part of a realitya
medical reality, for exampleit has a subordinate function.
Valery tried to design a theory of dreams that is utterly opposed to that of Freud:
For centuries I have dealt with dreams. Suddenly these Freudian theses come along
and they are completely different: I am interested in the possibility and the intrinsic
qualities of the phenomenon; they are interested in the meaning, in the dreams
relation with the history of the subject, in all these things that I dont care about
(Valery, 1929, III, p. 81). Contrary to Freud, Valery attempts to analyze the form, the
structure, and the mental functioning of the dream, concluding that the dream is
much more comparable with what is real than with what is thought (Valery, 1929,
III, p. 92). For Valery, truths about the dream are not obtained through
interpretations, but are expressed by the dream in the same way in which a
pantomime expresses something (cf. Rouart, 1979, p. 242). In order to appreciate
these expressions we should first of all stop looking for the dreams possible meanings
(soter de lesprit toutes les significations, Valery, 195761, IV, p. 527).
When Valery says that people have no longer time to dream, he means that the
modern objectifying way of seeing the world is unable to grasp reality. This comes,
of course, close to Radhakrishnans opposition of Western realism and Eastern
imagination of the creative dreamer whose culture and whose relationship towards
the world is completely different. It is obvious that both Valery and Radhakrishnan
are interested not simply in the phenomenon of dream but in alternative ways of
approaching reality.

Buddhism
With statements like those of Valery we move in the direction of some East Asian
concepts of dreams. Dreams are not a product of thought (even if this thought is
considered as unconscious or primitive) but dreams are an expressive reality. Eastern
and Western philosophies have found different means of philosophically formulating
this idea. First, in Eastern philosophy, reality can be seen as a dream and an obscure
reality beyond can be considered as real. Several Buddhist schools in India, China
and Japan concentrate on the interrelationships between waking and dreaming
consciousness. For Hinduism, life is a long dream and the hinduist seeks
transcendence by going from dream to dream until he reaches the state of the
final dreamer, which is that of the brahman (the supreme cosmic spirit).
This Hinduist scheme can appear as roughly Platonic because it suggests that on
our way to knowledge we are moving towards higher and higher stages of truth and
reality. It is entirely unimportant if this reality is called a dream or not.7
For Buddhists, such a model of transcendence through dreams does not really
apply. Also for Buddhists, dreams raise serious questions about the nature of reality;
however, the dreams themselves can appear as a heightening of normal experience
(Heine, 1991, p. ix). Within this conception, the division of phenomena into real
things and simulacra does not apply in a strict Platonic sense; it seems rather that

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70 T. Botz-Bornstein

another kind of realism allows for the conception of the dream as an alternative
reality and not as an arbitrary product of a dreamer.
Mahayana Buddhism holds that human consciousness is always a consciousness
of and thereforemetaphorically speakingan ontological illusion or a dream.
The objective world, objectified especially through language, is deceptive because it
cuts the pre-linguistic reality of sunyata into pieces. These pieces will then appear as
things. Original, pre-linguistic reality or sunyata, however, is emptiness because it is
a reality in which nothing is formed yet. In this reality there are no things and no
essences. Finally, this nothing is more real than the objectified reality of our
everyday consciousness, and only a consciousness which abandons the dream of
objectified reality in order to be no longer a consciousness of but simply
consciousness can recognize the reality which exists beyond dreams.
For the commonsensical mind it is, of course, rather the objectified form of reality
that appears as a non-dream, whereas a non-objectified world that can be perceived
only with the help of a consciousness which remains unable even to state of what it is
conscious, is considered as utterly dreamlike. The Western mind in particular likes to
use the metaphor of awakening from a dream in a more direct sense as a shift from
unobjectified dizziness to objectified clarity. Kant wanted our reason to wake up from
our sweet dogmatic dream because for him the state of non-dream was that of a
self-reflective reason that is conscious of its own limits. Coached in a dogmatic
slumber, reason does not manage to see itself as an object and is therefore also unable
to take an objective view of the world (Kant, 1974, p. 644). Kant makes fun of the
transcendental hypothesis:
that holds that life is nothing other than an appearance which is a sensible
representation (Vorstellung) of the purely spiritual life, and [that] the whole world
of the senses is a mere image which our present mode of knowledge takes for
granted and which, like a dream, has no objective reality. [The view] that, when we
ourselves want to contemplate things as they are we will have to enter a world of
spiritual nature. (Kant, 1974, p. 659)

What Kant mocks as a transcendental hypothesis is reminiscent of Schopenhauers

Matrix-like idea of a world constituted by a series of well-linked dream images; it
represents what Irving Babbit has called a primitivistic reverie of some artists who
try to ape an experience of dream by dissipation of attention, a relaxation of ones
grip on the world of spiritual values and even on the facts of natural order8 in order
to depict commonsensical reality as a dream. This strategy is certainly common to
some of the Viennese authors mentioned above (it should not be forgotten that
Schopenhauers philosophy was extremely popular in fin de sie`cle Vienna).
The problem is that here dreams are treated by applying the same theoretical
schedule that is used for the treatment of reveries. The reverie is well known in
Western psychology and has been defined as a kind of errance of the mind definitely
leaving the rails of reason (Green, 1987).9 The world of the reverie is an aesthetic and

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stylized world in which necessity has been replaced by blind contingency and
consciousness by a grotesque lack of awareness.
Such a metaphorical use of dream is also common in Buddhism as it uses dream
in order to allude to the transience and precariousness of life. However, Buddhist
meditation does not intend to produce these dreamlike experiences. On the contrary,
it aims to see a certain non-objectified reality in a clear and discriminate way.
This reality appears as necessary and as being due to a state of mind that is lucid
and aware of itself, which means, in the first place, that it does not represent an
ontological entity created by a mind that is conscious of something. The necessity of
the dream reality is not the objective one that can be opposed to contingency
produced by subjective minds. It is not a causal kind of necessity but one that exists
beyond both objectiveness and subjectiveness.
Finally, the dream, with its non-causal and non-mechanical kind of necessity
is able to produce forms of being that are more complex than those realities
that are simply objective or subjective. From a psychological point of view, this
reality is not conscious of something but it is consciousness itself; from an
aesthetic point of view this reality is not due to an act of (conscious) stylization
but style itself; from a metaphysical or religious point of view it is a form of
emptiness (sunyata).
The state of mind that best enables the clear perception of this reality is that of
dreaming because in waking life the differentiation of the perceiving subject as
opposed to the objects it perceives is unavoidable. In a subjectless dream, however,
reality can appear most clearly. This is how the Vedanta depict the relationship
between dream and reality. There are different degrees of states of mind: that of
waking life is considered the lowest one, the state of dreaming is considered a higher
one though it is still inferior to that of deep dreamless sleep. In no way does this
model suggest that the knowledge about the world comes to us, in a mystical way,
through sleep; the Vedanta attribute, in a philosophical way, a higher value to a state
of consciousness that is neutral and determined by nothing than to a state of
consciousness that is arbitrarily determined by objective influences. The man who
sleeps dreamlessly has entered his own center; the one who dreams is already outside;
the man who is awake and daydreams is even more uncentered, explains Hubert
Benoit (1960, p. 122).
This can be clarified through the Buddhist/Hinduist concept of dharma or the way
of the higher truths. The dharma is reality but also inapprehensible like a dream
(Conze, 1975, p. 12). What is meant by this is that the dharma is inexistent in a
materialthat is, objective and subjectiveway. It is like a dream because one
cannot apprehend the one who sees the dream.10 The enlightened being
(bodhisattva) dreams, but because he dreams he has a development of the perfection
of wisdom.11 Both the dreamer and the knowledge derived from the dream are
immaterial: In dreams there is no heaping or accumulation of deeds, but only

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when one wakes up and thinks it over, then there is a heaping up or accumulation of
it (Conze, 1975, p. 415). In this dialogue from The Large Sutra, the Lord emphasizes
that the dream should not be understood as something material in itself because
that would correspond to the
perverted view on the part of foolish common people . . . But Arhats
[ascetics] . . . do not see an apparition or one who sees an apparition . . . because
all dharmas have non-existence for their own being, and they are the same as final
Nirvana, because of their unreality. Not totally real are all dharmas, because
they have not actually come into being. It is quite impossible that a
Bodhisattva, who courses in perfect wisdom, should become one who has the
notion of an existent, or of something totally real, or of something truly real.
(Conze, 1975, p. 571)

Zen Buddhism
In all Eastern philosophies, dreaming does not mean imagining that which is not.
Buddhism, in particular, directs all its intellectual powers against this idea because
it exemplifies precisely the linguistic or stylizing procedure, which takes words and
signs for granted and accepts them as vehicles for beings. Buddhism is not interested
in imagination but in reality: When they eat, they do not just eat, they conjure up all
kinds of imagination; when they sleep, they are given up to varieties of idle thoughts.
That is why theirs is not my way, complained the Zen master Tai-Chu Hui-hai about
some monks (Suzuki, 1949, p. 104). Reality cannot be imagined, only experienced.
This is even true for the reality of knowledge. Knowledge is not something objective
that can be imagined, just as it is useless to imagine the non-existence of ignorance:
The [Buddhist] instruction is not to wrest that ignorance from ones person,
but merely to observe that ignorance until it ceases to function, said John McRae
(1986, p. 137) about this extreme realism.
Reality, truth, and knowledge cannot be imagined but only seen in a way that is
not mingled with imagination: The Zen master is too intelligent to advise the
ordinary man to hypnotize himself . . . that he is finally in contact with Absolute
reality. This would be replacing the old imaginative reveries with a theoretical image
of cosmic participation which would not change anything, says Hubert Benoit (1960,
p. 73). Zen philosophy and practice avoid discursive reasoning, imagination,
sentimentality, and, naturally, also dreams about knowledge that so often represent
a reverie propelled by quietism.
At the same time, the state of mind achieved through Zen practices like the koan
or aesthetic productions of Zen art is highly reminiscent of dreams because these are
dreams that are neither objective reality nor imagined non-reality. Though Dogen
(1971, p. 51) claims that our life is like a dream, and time passes swiftly, he also
believes dreams to be the real nature (jisso), that is, Ultimate Reality.12 For Dogen,
dreams are as real and legitimate as the so-called realities in that they comprise
our incessant efforts to decipher and dramatize the expressive and actional

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possibilities of existence. Both dreams and realities are ultimately empty,

unattainable, and of no self-nature (Kim, 1987, p. 85).
Dogen aims at retrieving an existence of thusness, which is beyond reality and
illusion; an existence, which has is its own raison detre and which Hee-Jin Kim
recognized as the activity of homo ludens par excellence (Kim, 1987, p. 60). In this
reality-illusion, representation or symbolization have no sense because the symbol
and the symbolized overlap. This means that existence does not flow out of playful
stylization of some form of life that pre-existed in an objective way, but existence is
that play or that style itself.
Along PlatonicAristotelian lines, the poet creates a stylized copy of reality in
which he preserves, in spite of all distortions, the essence of the original. In Zen art,
however, essence presents itself as a style that has not gone through stylization, or
as an aesthetic play in which nothing has been objectified. Zen art has developed
particularly efficient means of overcoming the separation of object and subject by
attempting to grasp reality before it is objectified. There should be neither objective
representation of reality nor subjective evocation of the psychological state of the
person who sees this reality. Style here is non-subjective and should not be seen as
a psychological notion. As a momentary auto-presentation of absolute reality that
overcomes objective reality as well as objectivizing imagination, stylejust like
realityhas the self-sufficient traits of a dream. The person of non-mind sees the
objects of the world as neither real nor unreal, as neither independent substances nor
dreams or illusions, has said Thomas Kasulis (1985, p. 44). This concept of reality, of
dream, and of style is so playlike that it eludes even perception because perception is
already an objectivizing act that materializes what is seen instead of seeing reality
unfolding itself like a game.
Dream becomes the metaphorical way of describing an act of seeing in which
the seer and the seen become one. In a way, the dream is not even a dream because
that would attribute already too high a degree of materialization to this self-sufficient
phenomenon. The dream is always a non-dream in the same way as the style of what
is seen is always a non-style. Necessarily, through this constellation, the most real
experience can also become the most dreamlike one. Among the many examples that
one could cite, Dogens line birds fly like birds (Genjo Koan) is perhaps the most
stunning one. According to Shizuteru Ueda, it evokes a feeling of the realunreal
because it is highly real and at the same time dreamlike (Ueda, 1984, p. 212).

Thinking in Dreams in the West

We have said that dreams are not a product of thought but that dreams are an
expressive reality. Orthodox Western views held by Plato, Descartes and Freud, see
dreams as a form of hallucination. Descartes believed that only waking life can give us
evidence about truth. In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes explains that certainty can
appear only in waking life and never in sleep: Mais lorsque japercois des choses
dont je connais distinctement et le lieu dou` elles viennent, et celui ou` elles sont, et le

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74 T. Botz-Bornstein

temps auquel elles mapparaissent, et que, sans aucune interruption, je peux lier le
sentiment que jen ai, avec la suite du reste de ma vie, je suis entie`rement assure que
je les apercois en veillant, et non point dans le sommeil.13
Descartes skepticism is radical because he likens dreams to a Matrix-like fake
reality from which there is no escape except awakening. Modern physiological
dream research supports the dream hallucination hypothesis by stating, for
example that in REM [Rapid Eye Movement] sleepcompared with walking
hallucination is enhanced (Hobson, 2002, p. 108).14 Dreams are here seen as not
more than neurophysiologic functions, that is, asextremely unsophisticated
activities of the brain. Against this, the philosopher Ernest Sosa holds that to dream
does not mean to hallucinate but to imagine because dreams seem more like
imaginings, or stories, or even daydreams, all fictions of a sort, or quasi-fictions
(Sosa, 2006, p. 7).
Hallucinations are dangerous because they are immaterial and cannot be
described and defined as something. To ascribe the hallucinating results of
dreaming to imagination allows us to incorporate them into the safe realm of
objectified eidola. Sosas idea reinforces the position of a narrating subject: Dreams
are a kind of fiction, that is, they are a half-conscious form of thinking led by a
subject.
It might appear rather eccentric to assert that dreams are hallucinations and not
imagination but that they still represent a form of thinking. From the Buddhist
arguments dealt with above, it follows that dreams do hallucinate and that this way of
hallucinating represents a way of seeing an unobjectified reality. Hallucinating is a
way of seeing that goes straightforward toward the truth of some reality (no matter if
this reality is real or false) because it leaves aside all imaginations that we can have
about any reality whatsoever.
Nietzsche knew of these two ways of seeing, the hallucinatory and the imaginary
one. The latter is unable to dissociate seeing from imagining, it is that of pretence,
deception, flattery, lying and cheating while the former is driven by an honest and
pure drive to truth (Wahrheitstrieb). Normal people, so Nietzsche (n.d., p. 606)
contends, are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images, their eyes glide only
on the surface of things, they see only the forms but nowhere their perception leads
to truth. These people Nietzsche wants to provoke by confronting them with their
dreams as if they were reality: For everything you assume responsibility, but not
for your dreams! What a miserable weakness, what a lack of consistent courage!
(Nietzsche, 1969, p. 1098).
Imagination is not dreaming but a reverie, which, as Walter Benjamin has stated,
closes the door to the inexhaustible dream (Benjamin, n.d., pp. 602607). Whatever
the imagination imagines, it estranges the human mind not just from reality but also
from any feeling for reality. Spinoza saw imagination as a fundamentally evil activity
that necessarily drives the human being towards delire and absurd pride. Imagination
advances an inconsistent way of thinking, which takes partial and incoherent facts for
granted, accepts the infinite as a totality, etc. (Ethics, III, p. 55).

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Dreams however, are neither idle imageries nor half-conscious products of fiction
but immaterial ways of thinking.15 When we see reality consciously, we see
representations and data. The dream, however, combines in an aesthetically playful
way unconscious and pre-linguistic elements that are nothing. This is why it is
wrong to treat dreams as quasi-linguistic forms of narratives. They are rather a form
of thinking in action.
Freud would have granted dreams the capacity neither of thinking nor of
imagining. Though dreams are a sort of narrative, they contain no judgments
(not even aesthetic ones), and above that they are even deprived of normal,
functional language. Nothing could be further removed from Freudianism than the
idea of dreams as aesthetic and dramatic auto-narrations developing a kind of
thinking or imagination. For Freud, dreams are mainly a subject for clinical analysis,
he sees them as phenomena whose structure is, in principle, identical with that of
delire. This is his way of establishing dreams as a reality and not as a product of the
imagination. Only by likening dream to delire, can Freud establish the reality of
dream as a reality to be taken seriously by an audience with a medical background.
The reality of dream is not simply unreal but it has a sense; it is not just imagined
by a creative subject whose imagination overran all limits of reason being able to
imagine anything. On the contrary, the dream has a sense, however strange it might
appear, and it can be spelled out in the form of a medical diagnosis. Lacan
revealed the problematic character of these Freudian reflections and protested against
any equation of dream with delire. In Les ecrits techniques de Freud Lacan writes:
One of the most popular conceptions is that the delirious subject is dreaming, that
he has fully settled in the realm of the imaginary. This means that in Freuds
conception the function of the imaginary cannot be the function of the non-real.
Otherwise one cannot understand why he refuses to allow the psychotic to access
the imaginary. (Lacan, 1975, p. 134)

In principle, Freuds claim that dreams represent a reality which is not just
imagined, has been accepted and dreams were recognized as expressive entities
about whose functions we should try to learn as much as about the sphere of nondream. Of course, the reality of dreams makes sense only as long as it is based on the
declared intention to establish reasonable links between the reality of dreams and
the reality of waking life.
C.G. Jung (1946) seems to see dreams as archaic forms of thinking in which
symbols and parabolas have replaced logic. This distances him from Freuds theories
because he attributes dreams to the domain of imagination.
In the Buddhist philosophies that we have dealt with, dreams come close to
thinking that is at the same time a non-thinking. It cannot be normal thinking
because these dreams have abandoned all forms of imagination: there is no thinking
with. Dreaming appears here as a pure, pre-conceptional form of thinking, which
grants access to reality and to being because it does not accept words, concepts and
symbols as vehicles for beings and reality. It is a thinking which deals neither with
objective reality nor with imagined non-reality.

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Dreams and the Problem of Space

Buddhist doctrines explain that in ego-less dream, reality is seen without a seer.
Valery attempts to establish a similar egoless notion of dreams when writing: Why
does one say I dreamt when it would be better to say it has been dreamt?
(Valery, 1929, II, p. 321). The subjectivizingobjectivizing way of dealing with
reality approaches reality always from a certain perspective. An ego-less way of
seeingwhich is possible in dreamsnecessarily has consequences for the
conception of space: As for representations, there is [only] the rule of the linear
and the superficial in dreams. There is no perspective [and] everything appears to
be word for word (mot a` mot), said Valery (Valery 195761, III, p. 55).
The German philosopher Eugen Fink likens play to dreams, because the doing as
if that is proper to play is more than just an imitation of reality. Play is a dream and
we move within the space of the play with the assurance that is proper to dreamers
(Fink, 1960, p. 191). Nothing is strange in the play, exactly like in dreams.16 Play
is always more than a codified language issued by a dreaming I but in the play, the
player and play are one, just as in the real dream, dreamer and dream are one
(Fink, 1960, p. 192). Fink insists that real play comes about only through a kind of
dispossession of the player. Play is for him not the product of a subjective
consciousness but whilst playing, the human being does not remain enclosed in
himself, in the limited domain of his own psychic interiority but, through a cosmic
gesture, he leaves his own self and interprets the whole of the world.17
This means that the space of dream and the space of play are contained in
themselves. Dreams and plays create a spatial phenomenon that Aristotle has called
chora, which is a space that cannot be limited by geometrical laws of perspective.
The space of dreams and of plays is more than just a visible substance but a spiritual
phenomenon.
What Fink says about play is very similar to what Radhakrishnan says about
dreams. The quotation by this Indian author produced at the beginning of this article
continues like this: The ideal of Western culture, derived from Greek philosophy, is
to train men for citizenship that they may be able to realize their full power in the
State and for the State. In the East, the good man is one who feels at home in the
whole world. Radhakrishnans conclusion is stunning: by contrasting the western
man of action and realism with the eastern man of dreams, he ends up attributing
two fundamentally different concepts of space to both.
It is worthwhile to consider this claim at the age of globalization in which space
develops increasingly image-like (mediatized) qualities, that means, in which space
is increasingly dissociated from those typically spatial experiences that constantly
transcend the objectified character of geometrical environments. What Fink has said
about dreams and space accords very well with Radhakrishnans claim about the
Eastern man who is a citizen of the world. Fink said that the dreamer and the player,
while dreaming and playing, constantly interpret the whole of the world. This means
that the kind of seeing that is proper to the player and to the dreamer is able to
perceive space not as an image-like environment, but as a cosmos. For the player and

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Asian Philosophy

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the dreamer, space always represents a unified world containing a united mankind.
This is the universalizing way of seeing space and it is different from the globalizing
one. Globalization means to assimilate certain spaces to other spaces while
universalization means to look at space like a dreamer or a player. Through the
globalizing way of seeing, space becomes material and objective while the
universalizing way of seeing represents space as a spiritual and therefore unlimited
phenomenon. In the contemporary world, experience of space loses its aspect of
the universal because is globalized.
Radhakrishnan claims that this is very eastern, which is true to some extent.
In Buddhism, for example, the concept of emptiness that holds that things have no
self-existence can only create a universal concept of space. William LaFleur has
explained that for Prajnaparamita literature, [s]ince nothing anywhere could be
found to have independent existence, there were no stopping places or barriers
within reality as investigated by the Prajnaparamita (LaFleur, 1983, p. 100).
Emptiness negates the idea of spatial limitation. To this Buddhist quality, LaFleur
links a Japanese aesthetic phenomenon that has as much to do with dreams: yugen.18
In traditional Japanese aesthetics, yugen effectuates a transition between reality and
dream, or between fact and imagination. Artists reproduce the experience of such
a transition. The result is that the realm of yugen becomes universal:
And it is this . . . which is directly linked to the depth, density, distance and
wondrous quality that seems to be so much a part of yugen. Reality is boundless in
the most precise sense; since there are no hard, absolute, or independent entities,
there are no boundaries or limits to the deep and mutual interpenetration of all
existent things. Yugen acknowledges and discloses this. (LaFleur, 1983, p. 100)

It remains to say that the eastern way of seeing the world, which, according to
Radhakrishnan, is that of the dreamer, existed also in ancient Europe. Stoicism, in
particular, developed these thoughts. For Stoicism, the human soul is divine fire, and
all humans are related to each other through this fire. At the same time, the world is
governed by this divinity of reason. This means that for Stoicism, humans are always
more than simple national animals bound by material spatial limits. While animals
are only preoccupied with their own existence, humans are able to perceive their own
place within the entire cosmos because the unity of humans is divine and
cosmological. Seneca (1994) affirms in On Constancy that the republic is of human
nature (re publica est generis humani), and Cicero writes in a canonical text on the
ideas of Stoicism: But they think that the universe is governed by the power of the
gods, and that it is, as it were, a city and state common to men and gods, and that
every one of us is part of that universe.19 When speaking in his own voice, Cicero
uses the double idea of cosmic citizenship and divine descent: There exists, therefore,
since nothing is better than reason, and since this is the common property of God
and man, a certain aboriginal intercourse between divine and human natures . . .
Law and justice being thus the common rule of immortals and mortals, it follows that
they are both the fellow-citizens of one city and commonwealth (De legibus, I, VII,
see also all of VIII et IX). Plutarch develops this theme not in a Stoic but in a

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78 T. Botz-Bornstein

Platonic context. In On Exile Plutarch discusses Platos idea of humans as earthly

plants as it appears in the Timeus and concludes that humans do rather have
heavenly roots, they are kosmios that is, of the world. Humans are rooted not in a
particular place but depend only on a god who governs everything. Again, it is the
divinity of the soul that constitutes the particularly human condition. Humanity can
be reduced neither to a place nor to some ethnic components but humanity is always
universal (On Exile, p. 338).
This universality can only be recognized as long as leisureschole or otium
provides us the possibility of taking such a philosophical look at the world. Aristotle
considered leisure the origin of philosophy. Only humans who are not mentally
imprisoned in objectified reality but playing are able to transcend the environmental-political sphere of perspectival space.20 The capacity of perceiving space in
a non-material way makes humans superior in terms of civilization. According to
Buddhism, Fink, and the many other authors that have been quoted in this article,
the dreamer and the player recognize that human space always means the entire
cosmos. The reason is that plays and dreams are not just images or mimetic products
of being but that they transgress the commonsensical subjectivity clinging to all
materializing procedures. In other words, plays and dreams are more than just
imitations of reality: they are not images but universal phenomena. Finally, the rules
that govern dreams and plays are always divine rules of the cosmos that constantly
transcend the rules of pure utility.

Notes
[1]
[2]

[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]

[8]
[9]

[10]
[11]
[12]

The folkloric and mythical literature of the Jataka is linked to Theravada Buddhism.
Cf. OFlaherty (1984). See Muller (1884, p. 19): He the highest Person, who is awake in us
while we are asleep, shaping one lovely sight after another, that indeed is the Bright, that is
Brahman, that alone is called the Immortal. All worlds are contained in it, and no one goes
beyond. This is that.
Wabi does not suggest to avoid suffering but to live quietly in its midst.
See Bellah (1965, p. 383).
See introduction by Michele Marra to Sakabe (1999, pp. 240241).
All quotations from Valery are either from the second or the third volume of the Cahiers
Paul Valery.
See my chapter Schnitzler From Ethno-Dream to Hollywood: Schnitzlers Traumnovelle,
Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut and the Problem of Deterritorialisation (Botz-Bornstein, 2007).
Cf. Wayman (1987, p. 10): The philosophical interpretation of dream began in India
especially with the Upanishadic formulation of four states: waking, dream, sleep, deep sleep,
and the state that is the first three in all. Cf. Paul Deussen (1883), ch. XXVIII, in particular
the sub-chapter on Traumschlaf.
See Appendix to Babbit (1972, p. 108).
For Freud, in the Tagtraum the dreamer does not experience or hallucinate but he
represents the event of dream; One does not experience or hallucinate anything in them,
but one imagines something (Freud, 1922, p. 99).
The Large Sutra, dialogue between Subhuti and The Lord. Conze (1975, p. 313).
The Large Sutra, dialogue between Subhuti and Sariputra, Conze (1975, p. 415).
Muchu-setsumu DZZ1 244. Quoted from Kim (1985, p. 71).

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[14]
[15]

[16]

[17]

[18]

[19]

[20]

79

Mais lorsque jappercois des choses dont je connais distinctement et le lieu dou` elles
viennent, et celui ou elles sont, et le temps auquelles elles mapparaissent, et que, sans aucune
interruption, je peux lier le sentiment que jen ai, avec la suite du reste de ma vie, je suis
entie`rement assure que je les apercois en veillant, et non point dans le sommeil (Descartes,
1953, p. 334).
Quoted from Sosa (2006, p. 7).
I have dealt with dreams as a mode of thinking advanced in certain passages of
(Locke, 1977) quoted in Botz-Bornstein (2004), p. 16ff. Dream thinking in Western
thought remains on principle unordered and incoherent in the sense of lacking something.
Certain Western philosophical tradition, starting with Locke and passing through Condillac
and LaMettrie, reduced dream thinking to a mechanism that needed to be mastered by
reason.
Vladimir Jankelevitch has noted that the dreamer looks ridiculous only in the material world
of non-dream but that in the world of dream he cannot even be qualified as a dreamer.
See Jankelevitch (1959, p. 124).
Spielend verbleibt der Mensch nicht in sich, nicht im geschlossenen Bezirk seiner seelischen
Innerlichkeiter tritt vielmehr ekstatisch aus sich heraus in einer kosmischen Gebarde und
deutet sinnhaft das Ganze der Welt (Fink, 1960, p. 22).
In Japanese art, yugen is a scrim, haze, or dream through which the numinal is vaguely
sensed . . . point[ing] beyond itself to a sense of reality veiled by, and not confined to, the
phenomenal world (Pilgrim, 1977, p. 294). The origin of yugen is the Chinese yu which
is what is hazy or unclear to the senses, a kind of veil which is a hint of loftier realms
and gen which is the calm repose of the unfathomable depths of ultimate darkness
(Konishi, 1985, p. 204).
Mundum autem censent regi numine deorum, eumque esse quasi communem urbem et
civitatem hominum et deorum, et unum quemque nostrum ejus mundi esse partem.
De finibus, III, XIX (64).
I thank Professor Jean-Michel Muglioni for providing me, in private correspondence,
insights into these themes developed by Seneca and Plutarch. I would also like to refer to
Professor Muglionis essay Cosmopolitanism and globalization seen from a Hellenistic
point of view (Muglioni, 2006), in particular pp. 437ff.

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