Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Aristotle on sleep and dreams 171discussed. For although Aristotle, within the scope of these short treatises,covers an admirable amount of topics and aspects of the phenomenon ofdreaming with a sometimes striking degree of sophistication, it is at thesame time remarkable that some important aspects of dreaming are nottreated at all – aspects which are of interest not only to us, but also toAristotle’s contemporaries. Let me give two examples. (i) Aristotle doesnot appear to be interested in the contents of dreams, in their narrativestructure or in the mechanism responsible for the sequence of events andexperiences that occur to the dreamer in a certain order. Nor does he payserious attention to the interpretation of dreams: he only makes some verygeneral remarks about this towards the end (464 b 9–16); he does notspecify the rules for a correct interpretation of dreams. Yet the meaning ofdreams was what the Greeks were most concerned with, and we know thatin Aristotle’s time there existed professional dream interpreters who usedhighly elaborated techniques to establish the meaning of dreams. 8 (ii) Afurther striking fact is that Aristotle hardly discusses the relation of dreamswith other mental processes during sleep, such as thinking and recollection.He has little to say on questions such as: can we think in sleep? can we solvemathematical problems in sleep? (a problem that attracted much attentionin later thought on dreams, e.g. in medieval Arabic dream theory). This lackof interest calls for an explanation, for not only does experience evidentlysuggest that these mental operations are possible in sleep, but there was alsoa powerful tradition in Greek thought, widespread in Aristotle’s time, thatsome mental operations, such as abstract thinking (nous), could functionbetter and more accurately in sleep than in the waking state, because theywere believed to be ‘set free’ in sleep from the restrictions posed by the soul’sincorporation in the body. Why does Aristotle not address this issue?Now, in response to this, one could argue that Aristotle was under noconstraint from earlier traditions to discuss these points, for early and classicalGreek thought tends to display rather ambivalent attitudes to thephenomenon of sleep, and in particular to whether we can exercise ourcognitive faculties in sleep. On the one hand, there was a strand in Greekthought, especially in some medical circles, in which sleep was definednegatively as the absence of a number of activities and abilities that arecharacteristic of the waking life, such as sense-perception, movement, consciousnessand thinking. And as we shall see in a moment, Aristotle’s theoryof sleep shows strong similarities to this tradition. On the other hand, therewas also a strand in Greek thought, represented both in Orphic circles but8 See del Corno (1982).