Since the beginning of time human beings have been seeking to understand the mystifying nature of dreams. A dream is a puzzle. I see objects but there is nothing there. I see people, I speak with them, yet there is no one there and I have not actually spoken. What is going on? In Dreams, first published in 1913, French philosopher Henri Bergson analyzes the phenomenon of dreaming as a product of the mind attempting to interpret what happens physiologically during sleep. Our eyes respond to light and shapes. We hear sounds. Our bodies move and we have the sensation of touch. Bergson explains that we relate these phenomena to the vast reservoir of experiences stored in our memory, which he believes stores each of our experiences in detail in perpetuity. The brain seeks to associate the perceptions in our dreams with those memories that most closely that data. The result may be disconnected, illogical, incoherent, and absurd, but that is likely because during sleep we have relaxed from the labor of making sense of connections when we are awake. In this short essay he manages to elucidate the profound metaphysics of dreaming and suggest new areas of inquiry in disciplines such as psychoanalysis that promise further understanding.
