P.P's Dream

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

P.P's Dream Part I B  (to read part I A--second industrial
revolution, go to archives and type "mumford")

In "Dreams and Telepathy," Freud addresses the
"incontestable fact that sleep creates favorable conditions
for telepathy, " and says he is of the opinion that
"dream-formation itself does not necessarily wait for the
onset of sleep to begin." He writes, "often the latent dream
thoughts may have been lying ready during the whole day,
till at night they find the contact with the unconscious
wish that shapes them into dreams." Freud concludes this
essay (Dreams and Telepathy, 1922), by stating that he knows
nothing and has no opinion of "the reality of telepathy in
the occult sense." 

"In the ages of the rude beginning of culture," Nietzsche
states, "man believed that he was discovering a second real
world in dream, and here is the origin of all metaphysics.
Without dreams, mankind would never have had occasion to
invent such a division of the world. The parting of soul and
body goes also with this way of interpreting dreams;
likewise, the idea of a soul's apparitional body: whence all
belief in ghosts, and apparently, too, in gods." 

In Pynchon's stories, we find all sorts of dreams. We find
telepathy and dreams and we even find "the reality of
telepathy in the occult sense." In the opening chapter of
GR, we find that we or "YOU" are reading a dream of the end
or the fall of the second Industrial Revolution. Pirate's
dream is what we might call, in more ways than one, a
"Mutual Dream." Accounts of "mutual dreaming," (dreams
apparently shared by two or more people) raise the
possibility that the dream world may be in some cases just
as objectively real as the physical world. That is, if we
accept that the primary criterion of  "objectivity" is that
an experience is shared by more than one person, which is
supposedly true of mutual dreams, we can also consider what
happens to the traditional dichotomy between dreams and
reality, conscious and unconscious?