Time and the dream

ABSTRACT This paper is a contribution to a theory of duration and subjective time in dream and waking consciousness. According to microgenetic theory, an act of thought begins, Wittgenstein wrote, and psychoanalysts would agree, as would I, with instinct as the animal inheritance traverses the evolutionary core of the brain, the drives arousing acquired experience and knowledge. These strands of the inherited and acquired constitute the core self, the “me,” which is bound up with bodily function, immediacy and the largely innate determinants of behavior. This construct passes a liminal threshold leading to a conscious self in relation to desire for objects or conditions in the future. Thus, the self appears early in the mental state prior to thought and the endpoint of object-perception. A mental state enfolds a transition from instinct to thought to perception in a fraction of a second. The partial overlap of early segments in a series of mental states arouses preliminary phases out of which thoughts and perceptions actualize. Long-term or experiential memories, revised but not erased by the oncoming state, serve as a foundation for thought and perception, while segments at the surface or endpoint of the state that transition to an object, which are not enfolded in the overlap, are receptive to new perceptions. In dreaming, the specious or illusory present arises in the overlap of mental states and the incomplete revival of their predecessors. Incompleteness of revival is the key to recall as fading states lapse to successive planes of iconic, short- and long-term memory. The present arises in the forgetting of perceptions, or the passage of perceptual to memorial content, as the disparity between the floor of the mental state – the endpoint of withdrawal beneath recall – and conscious revival – the ceiling of the mental state – in the final actuality. This disparity is converted to a longitudinal epoch of duration. The degree to which each state is revived – the forgetting of each state, in dream and waking – accounts for the rapid decay in dream recall on waking, as well as the predominance of imagery.