From: monnier@csa2.lbl.gov (JOHN MONNIER)
Newsgroups: alt.dreams
Subject: Nietzsche and dreams
Keywords: Nietzsche, Wanderer, Gay, Science, Daybreak, Dawn, Good, Evil, Beyond
Date: 30 Jul 92 19:02:15 GMT
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In my readings of Nietzsche, I have happened across many very interesting ideas,
and these ideas extend into Nietzsche's view of dreams.  The following are
some examples.

Although the final excerpt from Daybreak is long, it is a really good 
summation of much of his philosophy using dreams as a convenient framework
to illuminate his ideals.. Give it a chance..     

John Monnier


::::: *Stars* usually mean italics in original.:::::


Nietzsche. Daybreak. Section 128. Hollingdale Translation
	Dream and responsiblity.--You are willing to assume responsiblity for
everything! Except, that is, for your dreams!  What miserable weakness, what
lack of consistent courage! Nothing is *more* your own than your dreams!
Nothing *more* your own work! Content, form, duration, performer, spectator--in
these comedies you are all of this yourself! And it is precisely here that you
rebuff and are ashamed of yourselves, and even Oedipus, the wise Oedipus,
derived consolation from the thought that we cannot help what we dream! From
this I conclude that the great majority of mankind must be conscious of having
abominable dreams. If it were otherwise, how greatly this nocturnal poetising
would have been exploited for the enhancement of human arrogance!--Do I have to
add that the wise Oedipus was right, that we really are not responsible for our
dreams--but just as little for our waking life, and that the doctrine of
freedom of will has human pride and feeling of power for its father and mother?
Perhaps I say this too often: but at least that does not make it an error.

Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil.  Section 193.  Kaufman Translation
	Quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit; ("What occurred in the light, goes
on in the dark.") but the other way around, too.  What we experience in
dreams--assuming that we experience it often--belongs in the end just as much
to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced "actually": we are
richer or poorer on account of it, have one need more or less, and finally are
led a little by the habit of our dreams even in broad daylight and in the most
cheerful moments of our wide-awake spirit.
	Suppose someone has flown often in his dreams and finally, as soon as
he dreams, he is conscious of his power and art of flight as if it were a
privilege, also his characteristic and enviable happiness.  He believes himself
capable of realizing every kind of arc and angle simply with the lightest
impulse; he knows the feeling of a certain divide frivolity, an "upward"
without tension and constraint, a "downward" without condescension and
humiliation--without *gravity*!  How could a human being who had had such dream
experiences and dream habit fail to find that the word "happiness" had a
different color and definition in his waking life, too?  How could he fail
to--desire happiness differently?  "Rising" as described by poet must seem to
him, compared with this "flying," too earthbound, muscle-bound, forced, too
"grave."

Nietzsche.  The Wanderer and His Shadow.  Section 194.  Kaufman Translation
	Dreams.--On the rare occasion when our dreams succeed and achieve
perfection--most dreams are bungled--they are symbolic chains of scenes and
images in place of a narrative poetic language; they circumscribe our
experiences or expectations or situations with such poetic boldness and
decisiveness that in the morning we are always amazed at ourselves when we
remember our dreams.  We us up too much artistry in our dreams--and therefore
often are impoverished during the day.

Nietzsche.  The Gay Science.  Section 232.  Kaufman Translation
	Dreams.--We have no dreams at all or interesting ones.  We should learn
to be awake the same way--not at all or in an interesting manner.


Nietzsche. Daybreak. Section 119. Hollingdale Translation
	Experience and invention.--However far a man may go in self-knowledge,
nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of his
*drives* which constitute his being.  He can scarcely name even the cruder
ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and
counterplay among one another, and above all the laws of their *nutriment*
remain wholly unknown to him.  This nutriment is therefore a work of chance:
our daily experiences throw some prey in the way of now this, now that drive,
and the drive seizes it eargerly; but the coming and going of these events as a
whole stands in no rational relationship to the nutritional requirements of the
totality of the drives: so that the outcome will always be twofold--the
starvation and stunting of some and the overfeeding of others.  Every moment of
our livessees some of the polyp-arms of our being grow and others of them
wither, all according to the nutriment which the momen does or does not bear
with it.  Our experiences are, as already said, all in this sense means of
nourishment, but the nourishment is scattered indiscriminately without
distinguishing between the hungry and those already possessing a superfuity. 
And as a consequence of this chance nourishment of the parts, the whole, fully
grown polyp will be somthing just as accidental as its growth has been.  To
express it more clearly: suppose a drive finds itself at the point at which it
desires gratification--or exercise of its strength, or discharge of its
strength, or the saturation of an emptiness--these are all metaphors--:it then
regards every event of the day with a view to seeing how it can emply it for
the attainment of its goal; whether a man is moving, or resting or angry or
reading or speaking or fighting or rejoicing, the drive will in its thirst as
it were taste every condition into which the man may enter, and as a rule will
discover nothing for itself there and will have to wait and go on thirsting: in
a little while it will grow faint and after a couple of days or months of
non-gratification it will wither away like a plant with no rain.  Perhaps this
cruelty perpetrated by chance would be more vivdly evident if all the drives
were as much in earnest as is *hunger*, which is not content with *dream food*;
but most of the drives, especially the so-called moral ones, *do precisely
this*--if my supposition is allowd that the meaning and value of our *dreams*
is precisely to *compensate* to seom extent for the chance absence of
'nourishment' during the day.  Why was the dream of yesterday full of
tenderness and tears, that of the day before yesterday humorous and exuberant,
an earlier dream adventurous and involgved iindescribable beauties of music,
why do I in another soar and fly with the joy of an eagle up to distant
mountain peak?  These inventions, which give scope and discharge to our drives
to tenderness or humorousness or adventureousness or to our desire for music
and mountains--and everyone will have his own more striking examples to
hand--are interpretations of nervous stimuli we receive while we are asleep,
*very free*, very arbitrary interpretations of the motions of the blood and
intestines, of the pressure of the arm and the bedclothes, of the sounds made
by church bells, weather-cocks, night-revellers and other things of the kind. 
That this text, which is in general much the same on one night as on antoher,
is commented on in such varying ways, that the inventive reasoning faculty
*imagines* today a *cause* for the nervous stimuli so very different from the
cause it imagined yesterday, though the stimuli are the same: the explanation
of this is that today's prompter of the reasoning facility was different from
yesterday's--a different *drive* wanted to gratify itself, to be active, to
exercise itself, to refresh itself, to discharge itself--today this drive was a
high flood, yesterday it was a different drive that was in that
condition.--Waking life does not have this *freedom* of interpretation
possessed by the life of dreams, it is less inventive and unbridled--but do I
have to add that when we are awake our drive likewise do nothing but interpret
nervous stimuli and, according to their requirements, posit their 'causes'? 
that there is no *essential* difference between waking and dreaming? that when
we compare very different stages of culture we even find that freedom of waking
interpretation in the one is in no way inferior to the freedom exercised in the
other while dreaming? that our moral judgements and evaluations too are only
images and fantasies based on a physiologica process unknown to us, a kind of
acquired language for designating certain nervous stimuli? that all our
so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic ommentary on an unknown,
perhaps unknowable, but felt text?--Take some trifling experience.  Suppose
we were in the market place one day and we noticed someone laughing at us as
went by: this event will signify this or that to us according to whether this
or that drive happens at that moment to be at its height in us--and it will be
a quite different event according to the person we are.  One person will absorb
it like a drop of rain, another will shake it from him like an insect, another
will try to pick a quarrel, another will examine his clothing to see if there
is anything about it that might give rise to laughter, another will be led to
reflect on the nature of laughter as such, another will be glad to have
involuntarily augmented the amount of cheerfulness and sunshine in the
world--and in each case a drive has gratified itself, whether it be the drive
to annoyance or to combativeness or to reflection or to benevolence.  This
drive seized the event as its prey: why precisely this one? Because, thirsty
and hungry, it was lying in wait.--One day recently at eleven o'clock in the
morning a man suddenly collapsed right in front of me as if struck by
lightning, and all the women in the vicinity screamed aloud; I myself raised
him to his feet and attended to him until he had recovered his speech--during
this time not a muscle of my face moved and I felt nothing, niether fear nor
sympathy, but I did what needed doing and went cooly on my way.  Suppose
someone had told me the day before that tomorrow at eleven o'clock in the
morning a man would fall down beside me in this fashion--I would have suffered
every kind of anticipatory torment, would have spent a sleepless night, and at
the decisive moment instead of helping the man would perhaps done what he did. 
for in the meantime all possible drives would have *had time* to imagine the
experience and to comment on it.--What then are our  experiences? Much *more*
that which we put into them than that which they already contain!  Or must we
go so far as to say: in themselves they contain nothing? To experience is to
invent?--
Newsgroups: alt.dreams,sci.skeptic