II. The Epistemological Problem in the Theory of Dreams

While the psycho-analytical literature has almost without exception followed Freud's lead in the general theory of dreams both as regards their function in the mind as well as the mode of their genesis, the literature of philosophy has been occupied, in so far as it has taken note of the phenomenon of dreams at all, with the epistemological aspect. This seems to take the form of two different sorts of questions: can we know that we are dreaming? and do dreams, as our prime evidence of a world of intuitive mental activity, generate knowledge?

In general the interest in linguistics among the philosophers has centred on defining the limits of language on the assumption that language is both man's unique differentiating capacity that separates human from animal mentality, and the parallel dicta that anything that can be thought can be said, and anything that can be said can be said clearly (Wittgenstein of the Tractatus). This attitude separated the world of rational thought about observable facts from the world of emotion and intuitive understanding by arrogating meaning exlusively to the former realm. This was not meant to imply that the latter realm was of no importance in human relations but that it did not deal with knowledge and therefore was meaningless in the epistemological sense. It rightly, in a sense, relegated dreams to the vicinity of myths, religions, art as the realm of the ineffable, where this term, meaning inexpressible in words, equated this deficiency of language with the borderline between real and mystical experience. But it wrongly mistook the solipsistic position that one cannot have knowledge of other minds with the parallel assumption that a mind cannot have direct knowledge of itself.

The unmistakable link between this philosophical position and Freud's attitude towards dreams is apparent in their common view of the emotions. The idea that words which are intended to describe emotions are in fact no better than evocative noises and therefore “s