Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

186 Aristotle and his schoolwhich are caused by actual perceptions – not, such as in dreams, by lingeringsense-movements which derive from previous perceptions in the wakingstate – are not dreams, because we do not have these experiences ‘in so faras’ (hēi ) we are asleep, but in so far as we are, in a sense, already awake.This typically Aristotelian usage of the qualifier hēi also provides us withan answer to the other question I raised earlier in this chapter, namelywhy Aristotle does not explicitly address the possibility of other mentalexperiences during sleep such as thinking and recollection. The answerseems to be that thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, hallucinations, recollectionsand indeed ‘waking acts’ (egrēgorikai praxeis) performed while sleepwalking(456 a 25–6) are not characteristic of the sleeping state: they do not happento the sleeper ‘in so far as’ (hēi ) (s)he is sleeping. They do not form part ofthe dream, but they exist ‘over and above’ the dream (para to enhupnion). Wecannot say, in Aristotle’s theory, that we ‘think in our dream’, although wecan say that we think in our sleep. The role of thought in sleep is apparentlynot essentially different from that in the waking state, 27 although there isnothing in what Aristotle says here to suggest that we might have clearer,‘purer’ thoughts in sleep than in the waking state.The definition of dreams that Aristotle presents here is, as I said, inaccordance with his views in On Sleep and Waking. Dreams are not actualperceptions, rather they are, as it were, reactivated perceptions which wereceived during the waking state; they are ‘movements of sense-effects’( ). Aristotle, again, differentiates betweenvarious kinds of experience in sleep. And although the recognition that wemay after all have perceptions in sleep constitutes an important qualificationof Aristotle’s initial, and repeatedly reiterated view that there is no senseperceptionin sleep, Aristotle avoids contradicting himself by saying thatalthough we have these perceptions while we are asleep, we do not havethem in so far as we are asleep. The point of the specifications kuriōs kaihaplōs in Somn. vig. 454 b 13 and tropon tina in 454 b 26 has now becomeclear, and they are answered here by the specifications pēi and hēi.4 on divination in sleepWhen we turn to the third treatise, On Divination in Sleep, however,itisbecoming increasingly less clear how Aristotle manages to accommodatethe phenomena he recognises within his theory without getting involvedin contradictions. In this work, he does accept that we sometimes foreseethe future in sleep; but his theory of dreams as expounded so far does notgive much in the way of help to explain how this can happen.27 But see no. 20–1 above.