Do philosophers dream of saving electric cats?

So tell me about the last time you had a fever and tried to do work and hallucinated some version of your work. Wrote a crazy lecture in your mind. Whatever. Maybe later I’ll write up my screenplay proposal for your judicious consideration. Oddly enough, I remember every bit of it. I never remember my dreams.

I have heard that Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde started out from just such a fever dream, which he then worked up. Also, notoriously a philosopher whose name I forget once thought he had found a deep insight in dreams, so he arranged to have a pencil and notepad handy the next time to write it down before he forgot it; it turned out to be the doggerel “Hogamus, higamus / Men are polygamous / Higamus, hogamus / Women, monogamous”.

I don’t know, can’t remember it all very well, interrupted by some damn visitor from Porlock.

I actually have made two difficult diagnoses in my career this way, by dreaming the correct answer. Both times it was this sort of state you describe, where you drift in and out, and you’re just awake enough to impose some sort of direction, and then to remember the outcome.

The problem is that you can never own up to this method in my line of work. Makes people unaccountably nervous these days to have to trust an oneiromancer to arrive at the right answer. Patients just aren’t wrapped as loose as they used to be.

I’m a reasonably successful inventor, and all my ideas seem to have come from somewhere else. Limericks pop into my head without my having to craft them, as once did a scheme to print customized forms by means of a resident program peeking at video memory*, the sort of thing that would be obvious to anyone sufficiently familiar with HP’s printer control language. Either that’s just the way the mind works, or I’m possessed by a demon.

* the TSR worked only 95% of the time, and was easily replaced

Sick right now but not on sufficient drugs to do much other than make me a bit sleepy. Long ago, in grad school, I was seriously hurt in a climbing accident, had surgery and was in the hospital for several weeks on lots of narcotics. Read Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer. De Quincey had nothing on my dreams. Can’t say I got any meaningful work done.

I “got” cultural materialism in a dream. For days afterwards I was pointing at architecture and muttering these specific formal articulations of space were embedded in, hence are ultimately in complicated ways an expression of, a whole way of life, or words to that effect.

Never did quite wear off.

This may be a well-known citation, but it seems relevant. Heuristic G22, in McGuire’s set, for “creative hypothesis generation in psychology” invites the reader, without any irony, to take drugs to alter consciousness.

McGuire, W. J. (1997). Creative hypothesis generating in psychology: Some useful
heuristics. Annual Review of Psychology 48:1-30.

Just two nights ago, I had an extremely vivid dream about an oral argument in the courtroom of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, where I was apparently addressing panel of three federal judges (Richard Allen Griffin, Helene White, and the late Albert J. Engel) on the constitutional rights of vampires.

What kind of protections would the consitution provide for zombies ?

For or against?

For. The argument was based on due process and freedom of religion. The main thing I remember, though, was a discussion of whether Judge Engel ought to recuse himself.

So could feasting on the brains of the living be plausibly argued as constitutionally protected on religious grounds ? I’m not neccesarily asking would it hold up at SC level (it seems a slippery slope) but could you get away with it in the lower courts ?

@21
I’d say yes with respect to fast zombies, but for slow zombies it should be regarded as a premeditated act and therefore not protected. Even for fast zombies it wouldn’t be protected if the zombies showed racial, sexual or gender preference (disparate impact studies would no doubt be a challenge).

22 – but surely any religious exception would have to cover fast and slow zombies? ‘The feasting on brains’ aspect is protected, the method isnt relevant ? (I can see the distinction you’re drawing here, and it’s an insightful one, but to my eyes surely it’s closer to a defence of manslaughter (in the case of fast zombies) rather than a constitutional protection ?)

@25
Good point. To defend the zombies I’d have to go with a very expansive version of free exercise (like the ones that preclude vaccinations and allow for handling of snakes and such) and then argue that there is no way the zombie can get a fair trial by a jury of their peers.

Well, I did spend all night once with the flu and Nyquil, designing transfer tooling to change a diaper. The fixturing was giving me trouble, babies being so squirmy.

In my experience, the problem with doing computer related work in your sleep is that hitting the save button absolutely does you no good, so it’s all wasted effort even if you were doing good work. Which you generally are not.

There are other movies that follow some kind of act structure exactly: Revolutionary Road and Source Code (maybe others that rhyme too): you look at the VCR as the script chunks on to the next thing, and you see three or four zeros in a row, every time.

I’m curious about this, though: Joseph Campbell stuff, monomyth stuff, how Star Wars conquered science fiction, and whether that might be kind of unhealthy.

Unhealthy, which? Campbell or Star Wars? I ask as someone whose choice of electives, if not ultimately of major, was largely determined by an interview in an Empire Strikes Back fan magazine, in which Lucas gave inaccurate advice about the social sciences. And also because I’m reading Kate Mosse’s third Cathar novel, which is about how the Nazis go looking for the formula for the critical mass the legitimate descendant of Elizabeth I and the Earl of Oxford aka Shakespare the Ark of the Covenant a Gnostic incantation, which will enable them to build a super-weapon, because they believe all that mythos stuff proves the historical existence of the master race.

” … actually, it isn’t really a proper screenplay, since I was hallucinating.”

If it was good enough for Philip K. Dick. . .

Dear John,

Reading your piece was a strange experience to me, because in some sense I had already read it. So, in short you must absolutely read Do Androids prove theorems in their sleep? by Michael Harris (easily accessible by Googling the title); a very engaging essay that covers the following issues 1) How and why was one of the contributions to the Grothendieck Festschrift officially co-authored by a ghost who appeared in a dream? 2) Why mathematical articles are genre literature, usually of the medieval quest kind, complete with beats by beats decomposition in the sense of Snyder (and why the proof of some theorems, though not Pythagoras’s, are indeed bromance) 3) Are dreams narrative, and if so what kind of narratives are they?

Bonus points include references to Pynchon, X-Men and Dick (of course) as well as Aristotle Poetics.

I’m not going to lie to you, it might be a hard read for a non-mathematician, though the official aim is to show the narrative structure independently of the mathematical content, so it should in principle be accessible. Do read it!

I joke with my students: what if someone told you to prove the Pythagorean theorem, but make it a bromance. Or: what if Newton had structured his cannonball thought-experiment as a proper technothriller, with some madman holding the world hostage!

There’s always the (probably apocryphal) story about the first proof of the existence of irrational numbers, in which a group of Pythagoreans traveling on a ship are so horrified when one of them comes up with the proof that they throw him into the sea to drown…

This thread does not seem to have caused much excitement. However, I have gotten two important things out of it: Save The Cat and Do Androids Prove Theorems in their Sleep. In the former case, I find the strict formalization of screen plays fascinating and have been discussing it with a person who knows far more about the movies than I. She doesn’t think all successful big-ticket movies always follow the formula, but the fact that people in the industry believe it does is important even if it isn’t so. In the case of Androids, not being a mathematician, I just let the math wash over me. It has a kind of poetry to it; as if you were hearing a poem in an only partially known language and could perceive the patterns assembling and rising and falling apart and assembling again without necessarily understanding the narrative, the allusions, or the donnée. I read math for the poetry. And the fizz. Sometimes I get a glimpse. Anyway, by the time I come to any conclusions about these things you all will be long gone, but I thank you for providing them.

I have always used dreams as raw material for fiction, but I imagine ‘everybody’ does that.