Descartes' dreams, our nightmares
On the puzzling relationship between dreams and the worship of rationality
My mind was blown last week when, while sitting in a cafe reading Sharon Blackie’s The Art of Enchatnment, I came across this paragraph, which was talking about 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes:
“…during the course of the night, Descartes had three ‘big dreams’ which he later credited with determining the future course of his work. He immediately interpreted them as coming directly from God, and from that moment on, Descartes believed that he had a divine mandate for his ideas…
…Descartes - clearly by then not a man particularly given to self-doubt - took from those dreams the message that he should set out to reform all human knowledge; he decided to begin with philosophy. Unfortunately for the future trajectory of Western civilisation, Descartes’ dream-God seems to have left him with the impression that our job is to make ourselves the ‘masters and posessors of nature’” (p. 23, emphasis added).
Descartes’ dreams, our nightmares!
There is so much that baffles me about this situation, and I do not have clear answers. So I invite you to be baffled with me…
Descartes, as you may recall from an introductory philosophy or European history course, was responsible for the philosophy of “I think, therefore I am,” which basically put linear rational thinking above all other ways of knowing. The roots of today’s problems are complex and not easily simplified or traced to their roots, and there are many differing perspectives on this. However, many argue that Cartesian dualism is largely responsible for the mess we are in - most explicitly, the notion of supremacy of all sorts (European, male, white, wealthy), including the supremacy of humans over nature.
Descartes was not the only philosopher on this trajectory of thinking, but he certainly popularized and concretized these ideas in vastly influential ways. And apparently, it all started with three dreams1.
This blew my mind. I texted Minna immediately.
At Prism of Wisdom, we see part of the magic and power of dreamwork - a big, vital part, in fact - is how dreamwork inherently disrupts linear rationality and binary thinking, which is overvalued as the only way of knowing within modernity. You can’t reason with a dream. You can try, but dreams will generally resist this. Dreams are another way of knowing beyond (but including) the material realm, beyond logic and rational capacities. Dreamwork invites us to dance with, honor, and value other ways of knowing, which is part of why we see dreamwork as a decolonial praxis2, as disruptive to modernity’s overemphasis on rationality.
It blew my mind that Descartes’ idea, and his alleged instruction that he had divine providence to impose his ideas across the world, came from three dreams. Upon doing some digging, I also learned about Descartes’ dream argument, in which he uses the example of dreams to rationalize that our senses cannot be trusted.3
“Maybe if he had done community dreamwork, he wouldn’t have arrived at that conclusion!” I wrote to Minna.
“I don’t know, I am guessing he was surrounded by a lot of people who had similar thoughts,” Minna replied.
I think she is right. On one hand, could Descartes’ grandiose interpretation been checked by a collective, by interpreting his dream in community? Possibly, depending on the collective. But it is also entirely possible if he was surrounded by a group of yes-men (they were undoubtedly men), that they would have reinforced and affirmed his interpretation of grandiosity. In fact, in all likelihood, they did.
The part that baffles me most is: how did the most non-linear, non-rational way of knowing somehow instigate a god-like worship of absolute rationality? Descartes received this message from his dreams. Based on this, I assume that he valued them. How did he interpret such a message from one of the most nonlinear ways of knowing one can image? A cornerstone of Cartesian philosophy is that only what can be seen, measured, and verified counts as knowledge. This would discount the realm of dreams.
He clearly valued dreams, as he followed them. How did this lead him down a path that cut off all other ways of knowing, devalued them?
Then another line of thinking strikes me: what about the agency of the dreams themselves? What was their intention? When I trace back centuries of violence and exploitation grounded in binary thinking and overvaluing rationality, I am floored. The dreams alone can’t be blamed, and yet…it all started with Descartes’ dreams.
If this mess started with one pompous megalomaniacal philosopher’s dreams, can we dream our way beyond it?
If the roots of modernity started with a dream, can we hospice modernity4 through them, too?
If a series of dreams partially guided us into this world, can we dream our way into new ones? Can dreaming be part of the healing? Must it be?
I think so - not dreaming alone, but dreaming as part of what needs to be done. If you believe that dreams are the land and ancestors and collective energy dreaming through us, as I do, perhaps our dreams, collectively, can guide us beyond.
May our dreams nourish movements for collective liberation.
May our dreams guide us towards other worlds.
May our dreams guide us beyond destructive rationality, and towards nourishing other possibilities of living, knowing, and being.
Sweet dreams,
Stephanie
Stephanie Knox Steiner, PhD is an enchantress, mother-scholar, dreamworker, community weaver, and peace educator who currently lives and teaches at the University for Peace in Costa Rica. She has been writing down her dreams since she was a teenager, and studied community dreamwork as part of her doctoral studies in the Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Ecopsychologies specialization at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She writes prolifically about enchantment, interbeing, and re-imagining education at her other Substack, .
For more on this topic, please see the article we published in In Factis Pax journal, as well as many previous posts.
See: https://plato.stanford.edu/Entries/dreams-dreaming/#CartDreaSkep
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity