On Dreaming
The Separation of Mind and Body During a Moment of Rest
An essay on the separation of mind and body during rest — on what the dreaming self is, when the body lies still and experience continues without it. It treats sleep as a nightly natural experiment in the mind-body question, a place where the felt self detaches from its usual anchor and travels. Within the On——ing series it is among the most phenomenological entries, attending closely to the texture of a common experience most of us pass through and forget. The dream becomes a small proof that the first-person perspective is not simply identical to the body it usually rides.
It pairs instructively with On Being: where that essay asks what it is to be one waking self, this one watches that self come loose at night and continue elsewhere. For a reader interested in the mind-body question, the dream is the cheapest available evidence that the first-person view is not simply the body, and this essay attends to it closely.
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