Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

May 14, 1963. KNOWLEDGE AND DREAMS. Bertram D. Lewin, M.D.

The dream experiences of Descartes and other philosophers, writers, and scientists are employed by Lewin to study the feeling of revelation and inspiration in dreams, and to introduce some comments about dream theory and dreams and knowledge in general. The long tripartite dream of the twenty-three-year-old Descartes, which he regarded as divinely inspired assurance of the certainty of his philosophical and mathematical discoveries, exemplifies the feeling of absolute certainty found in some dreams. Freud reported the dream of a patient in which he was given two pears by a woman, accompanied by a feeling that the dream image was 'absolutely real'. The intense feeling of reality, Freud found, was displaced from the knowledge of the dreamer that he had been fed from both breasts. Descartes did not attach his sense of truth and revelation to any manifest element in his dream, but interpreted them anagogically, each element standing for an abstract idea.

Several examples of so-called dreams from above are cited by the author, in which dormescent thoughts become direct dream pictures. The philosopher, Dilthey, reported a dream in which the picture, School of Athens, by Raphael, came to life. The dreamer feels a sense of conflicting loyalties to several schools of philosophy, which Lewin informally guesses as referring to the dreamer's own identity conflicts and divided loyalties to various schoolmasters. A dream that brought a solution to a concrete problem was that of Kekule, in which revolving snakes united to form a model for the benzene ring. Rather than considering this a supernatural experience, Kekule ascribed the inspiration for his discovery to his father. A father figure is portrayed in the dream of Hilprecht, the Assyriologist, in which a priest of ancient Nippur appears and instructs him to assemble three fragments in the museum collection where an inscription will be found. Professor Loewi