Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Aristotle on sleep and dreams 179referred to are to be explained within the overall theory, he does not makeclear.3 on dreamsIn his treatment of dreams, the approach is likewise psycho-physiological,as emerges clearly from the questions Aristotle asks in the course of hisdiscussion:(i) To what part of the soul does dreaming belong (i.e. how is dreaming relatedto other mental faculties such as sense-perception and thinking)?(458 b 1)(ii) How do dreams originate? (459 a 23)(iii) What is a dream, what is its definition? (459 a 23)In these questions, we can again detect the typically Aristotelian pattern ofthe four causes; only the final cause is lacking, and this has to do with thefact that Aristotle does not attribute any natural purpose or end to dreams.This absence of a teleological explanation of dreams is significant, and Ishall come back to it at the end of this chapter.In On Dreams, asinOn Sleep and Waking, Aristotle again begins bystating rather bluntly that dreams cannot be an activity of the sense faculty,since there is no sense-perception in sleep (458 b 5–10). However, in thecourse of the argument he recognises that the fact that sense-perceptioncannot be activated (energein) does not mean that it is incapable of being‘affected’ (paschein): .(459 a 1–8)But perhaps it is true that we do not see anything [in sleep], but not true that senseperception is not affected, and perhaps it is possible that sight and the other sensesare somehow affected, and that each of these affections makes some impressionon sense perception as it does in the waking state, but not in the same way as inthe waking state; and sometimes our judgement tells us that this is false, as it doeswhen we are awake, but sometimes it is withheld from doing this and follows whatit is presented with.He goes on to say that dreams are the result of ‘imagination’ (phantasia), afaculty closely associated with, but not identical to sense perception. Theway this works is explained in chapters 2 and 3 of On Dreams. This time,though, Aristotle presents his account much more emphatically as being