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PAUL What shall we discuss today?
ROBIN I feel I can't remember what we were talking about before. It is curiously like dreams, for I know that I have dreamt and though I couldn't say what the dream was, I know that I have not forgotten it – it has gone. On these occasions it can come back; I don't remember it, but it is there, all in one piece. It is quite whole and quite absent.
ROLAND I can't say I have that experience, but then I rarely dream at all. I do remember some dreams which I had as a child and some were very frightening, but others were not.
DOCTOR It sounds as if we were going to talk about dreams. But what about things that could be easily explained if they were dreams, but the patient has them – I'm thinking of a particular man – when wide awake? I don't think I would call them hallucinations; there is no adequate name.
PAUL What would you call the vision clearly seen and verbalized by Isaiah? – he describes it clearly in the sixth chapter as he would any other fact and date.
P.A. I think of visions as coming from a ‘level of mind’, or a ‘time of life’, although I always hear of them in the present and described in articulate terms. This is one of my difficulties; because I use ordinary English it is assumed that I am saying something already known to all of us, and at the same time that it cannot be anything so ordinary as to be comprehensible to ordinary people.
ROLAND Couldn't you say something that is neither?
ROBIN According to the Intuitionists you can't, because there is no excluded middle. Why, as someone asked, does logic apply to anything but mathematics?
P.A. I certainly do not intentionally exclude, or include, any
topic, although I can see that if one topic can be said to be ‘included’ then other topics are ‘excluded’. A responsible person must exclude the topics which he does not discuss. To that extent he is not allowing some aspect of his personality to express itself and is thus incurring his self-hatred – whatever grievances he may consid