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The former stand-up comedian, now professor of neurology cum television presenter, David Eagleman, has professed that the major function of dreaming is to keep us bombarded with visual information so that the visual cortex won't have its “territory overrun” by the other senses during the sleep cycle (2021). Such a colonizing/military/mechanistic model of the mind triumphs in the Shakespearean tragedies of Othello and Troilus and Cressida and is very much the enemy of mental growth, according to the landmark new book by Meg Harris Williams, Dream Sequences in Shakespeare: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. Antigonus — just before he is eaten by a manifestation of a dreamed doomsday bear — makes the same mistake about dreams by referring to them as mere toys (and not Wintry Tales).
By great contrast with the Eagleman model of the dreaming brain, Harris Williams recapitulates, advances, and integrates a (post-Kleinian) psychoanalytic model of the mind and its Self, whereby growth and development evolve with emotional development, at its core altar — the internalized couple. This requires, and gives rise to, a poetic mind capable of poetic language and symbolic thought and emotional transformation, along the lines of Klein's depressive position and Bion's catastrophic change (Harris Williams, pp. 153-159).
Eagleman's “scientific” road to the annihilation of the unconscious mind may assert the rights and territory of the visual in a “China Sea” of neuronal territorial island warfare. But, in so doing, he obliterates the workings of a mind which — according to Harris Williams — dreams itself into being, and which forges emotion and thought together to generate meaning within an otherwise impossible world of seemingly random tragedy, pain, comedy, and romance. For her, dreams are not mere Eaglemanic weapons of