So Good They Said It Twice

Certain words have a tendency to change their meaning on a regular basis. These include the words “nice”, “silly” and “gay”. Interestingly these three words also tend to overlap in meaning. “Nice” in its earliest form meant “ignorant”, “silly” meant “blessed” at an early stage and “gay” has recently shifted to mean “lame” in the pejorative sense. Even the word “blessed” has shifted to mean “silly” in the contemporary sense. Another set of words like this, but rather distant from that triad in sense, is “Goth”, “Gothic” and the like.

Starting with proto-Indo-European, the stem “jhew-” meant “pour” and gave rise to the Greek “chyme”, which describes the fluid food becomes while it’s being digested. A D was added to this, making “jhewd-“, also meaning “pour” although presumably it was inflected or altered to a slightly different meaning. This became “hundo” in proto-Italic, meaning “I pour”, which became “fundo” in Latin, possibly due to another form. In Proto-Germanic, this word became “geutanã” (I can’t find the “a” with a hook underneath it), meaning “(to) pour” (there are two infinitives in English but not in many other Germanic languages), ultimately leading to the English “gut” and “ingot”, and related to the Proto-Germanic “Gautaz”, a mythical figure whose name means “he who pours out libations” and is connected to the word “God”. Some Germanic tribes have mythical founding figures. If you trace the Anglo-Saxon monarchs far enough back, you get to Woden, who is alleged to be Hengest’s great-great grandfather, meaning that the current King seems to be able to trace his ancestry back to a pagan god.

The Goths seem to be named after such a mythical figure, and the word Goth tended to float around the Germanic people, giving its name to Gothenburg, the Gutnish dialect or language, the Geats mentioned in ‘Beowulf’ and the Jutes who settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight and were later massacred. The Goths themselves were a Germanic people like the Vandals, Norse, Angles, Saxons, Alans, Burgundians and Franks, but unlike them they fell upon such hard times that they were eventually completely lost. They called themselves (that phrase will become important) the “Gutþiuda”, which was also their land’s name. They crossed the Baltic and settled along the Vistula. Wulfila, whose name means “wolf cub” or “wolflet”, evangelised them in the fourth Christian century and converted them to Arian (not Aryan) Christianity, which includes the heretical belief that Christ was created and hadn’t existed ab aeterno. This led to the printing, and yes it was printed though with separate stamps, of the Codex Argenteus, a Gothic gloss of the Bible, which is the main source for the Gothic language today. All that said, their chief claim to fame was when the first king of the Visigoths Alaric I and his army reached the gates of Rome, at which point it’s famously been said that the people inside the city spoke a language with fewer inflections than the people outside it. This is probably true. It’s also tempting to believe that the fall of Rome was caused by the decay of the Latin language, with the existence of a more fusional language as spoken by the Visigoths somehow leading to a military advantage. Perhaps they were able to think more quickly than the Romans, or their conversations about strategy were faster because of it? I don’t take this idea seriously at all but I kind of wish it were true. It makes the idea of prescriptive grammar, that is, the notion that correct usage ought to be a certain way such as having no double negatives, saying “should have” rather than “should of”, or not overusing the word “like”, seem more valid. There is an argument, which I think doesn’t work at all in most cases, that that kind of grammar promotes clear and rational thought. All of this is rubbish, probably.

The actual reason Rome fell, according to Edward Gibbon, was that the Empire’s adoption of Christianity led to people focussing on the hereafter rather than trying to keep it going. If that’s true, it suggests that the Goths, being Arian Christians, were not so affected by it. In that case, is there some implication of the idea that Christ was “begotten and made” as opposed to “begotten, not made”, which would’ve led to them behaving differently. Another hypothesis is that the horseshoe was invented and made their exploitation of horses more efficient, and that actually might make sense even with the explanation employing the faith, because maybe they’d invented the horseshoe before they became Christian. As far as I can tell, the front runners of hypotheses regarding the fall of the Roman Empire are to do with ecological unsustainability, such as the Empire needing to maintain Rome through pillaging other lands as it conquered them, but I’m no historian. It is notable, though, that Wulfila is said to have refrained from translating the books of Kings in the Bible because he thought it would encourage them to wage war, so maybe they were just more successfully violent and aggressive than the Romans at that point.

This incident is the cause of the first semantic shift in the word “Gothic”, where it refers to the likes of architecture. This is because historians at a later date perceived Roman territory as being taken over by the Goths, and this was indeed somewhat true, with for instance the Visigothic kingdom in the future Spain and the Goths taking control of the Italian peninsula. Hence the distinctive architecture and calligraphy of a particular time during the Middle Ages came to be called “Gothic”. Apparently some early clockwork timepieces are also described in this way. It went on from there to be used to describe a genre of tales set in Gothic buildings, and their aesthetic led in the twentieth century to the youth culture.

The Goths were a large section of Germanic-speaking people who have now completely disappeared along with their language. Although they spread, in two halves, from Portugal to the Crimea, they were ultimately conquered, although there are traces of their language in Italian and Catalan, the word “Catalunya” possibly being a corruption of a word like “Gothland”. Surprisingly, their language seem to have survived in the Crimea into the late seventeenth century CE. They had fallen upon hard times in the later fourth century, being treated harshly by corrupt Roman officials and having to sell their children into slavery in exchange for rotten dog meat. This led to a war, and later a massacre of the Goths by the Romans, so although my knowledge of their history is limited I can certainly see that they may have become very resentful of the way the Romans behaved towards them. I don’t know if this was actually worse than the way they’d behaved towards other nations though.

As I’ve said, the Codex Argenteus is the main large text surviving today. There is also the Skeireins, which seems to be a Gothic translation of a Greek commentary on the Fourth Gospel. Although this is better than a lot of other languages at the time, for instance early Germanic runic inscriptions in the Elder Futhark or Irish Oghams (which are also in Wales incidentally), it isn’t like there’s a huge extensive body of literature as with Ancient Egyptian, the Greeks and the Romans. Consequently there are big gaps in what’s known about Gothic, and to my mind the actual use of the language itself as opposed to what seem to be glosses (word-for-word “translations” from another language), which might therefore obscure many features of its grammar, is lost. However, it hasn’t vanished completely. It’s written mainly in Greek-derived script, like Coptic and Old Church Slavonic, with a few runes used to fill in the missing sounds. Oddly, it actually uses Ψ for Þ even though later Greek employed Θ for the same sound, presumably indicating that in the early fourth century that sound was still an aspirated T in Greek, but this still doesn’t explain why it didn’t adopt the rune, as English and Old Norse did.

Being the earliest Germanic language which is extensively recorded, Gothic is a fair guide to what the ancestor of English, Icelandic and German was actually like. It did have a few idiosyncratic features of its own, such as the initial sound “FL-” as in “flea” becoming “ÞL-“, and it’s the only language I’m aware of which has no separate words for “this” and “that”, but on the whole it preserves an earlier stage of Germanic than is otherwise available. This leads me to an oddity among Germanic which has been largely lost but brings to mind something quite distinctive and odd about European languages generally. Unlike many other languages, European ones, including non-Indo-European ones such as Finnish, are strangely reluctant to repeat words and syllables as a way of conveying meaning.

To illustrate what I mean, I once had a Punjabi student who, instead of saying “is very different”, used to say “differ-differ”. I presume this is a feature of Punjabi, which is an Indo-European language and I believe most closely related to Romani, the language complex of the Roma people, which however like other languages spoken in Europe doesn’t have duplication. In other languages, such as Malay, repeating a noun is used to make it plural, which is like many features of Malay and Indonesian bafflingly logical and makes speakers of other languages wonder why we bother with the kind of grammar we have. It does happen in English, as with “blah-blah”, “boogie-woogie” and “tutu”, but it tends to be quite informal and seems to have no fixed function. Yiddish does it to express contempt of course, and that’s been borrowed into American English. English varies the vowel sometimes, such as with the word “flip-flop”. Afrikaans, which is very close to Dutch indeed, uses it, which is interesting because it isn’t a European language. Outside Europe it’s both very common and has specific grammatical functions.

The ancestral Indo-European language did appear to use reduplication, in particular to express certain inflections of verbs. In Sanskrit, the Class III athematic verbs express the aorist, preterite and the intensive. Where these verbs can be traced to a cognate in Germanic, it’s possible that such a verb would also be reduplicative in our own ancestral language.

Well, Gothic does this! Germanic languages historically have two main types of lexical verb plus some other unusual ones such as the preterite-present classes, though one type has been lost from Afrikaans, Bislama and Tok Pisin. These are the weak and strong verbs. In English, weak verbs generally either add “-ed” or “-t” to form the preterite and the past participle unless there’s a T already at the end, so we have “generated”, “burnt” and “cut”. There are also a few contracted verbs in this class like “have” – “had”. English strong verbs are gradually disappearing, but inflect nowadays by changing the vowel in the stem in the past and often add “-en” with another vowel change in the past participle: “drive” – “drove” – “driven”. Over the history of written English, many verbs have passed from strong to weak, an example from my own lifetime being “thrive”, but a few have gone the other way, such as “dig”. English strong verbs as they are now are, as usual, not as distinctly conjugated as they used to be since the plural preterite used to be like the past participle, and before that was distinct from both it and the singular preterite.

Anglo-Saxon as she was written had seven strong verb classes. There were also dual pronouns, “wit” and “git”, for when there were two of someone, but no third person dual personal pronoun, but the verbs associated with them just used the plural. Gothic was, unsurprisingly, more highly inflected and did conjugate for the dual, something which is incidentally completely absent from Latin. I’ve seen it claimed that in the oldest Germanic, strong verbs were actually the main form of verb with weak verbs a minor feature of the languages, and extrapolating backwards this does seem to make sense but it’s a little hard to believe. The seventh class included the reduplicative verbs, of which there were two types. One changed the stem vowel, the other didn’t. The reduplication happened in the preterite. The verbs included: “haitan” – “hight” and “hey” (this is an interesting one); “laikan” – leap (the cognate is “lake”, meaning “play”); “slepan” – “sleep”; “letan” – leave, let go (cognate “let”); “tekan” – “touch”; “saian” – “sow”; “bnauan” – “rub”; “hahan” – “hang” (transitive only); “bautan” – “beat” (found as a loanword in Portuguese but possibly not in the bits of the Bible which survived); “trauan” – “trust”, believe; “gangan” – “go”, walk.

Leaving Gothic, at least for now, Old Norse also retained a few reduplicative verbs, including “róa” – “row”; “sá” – “sow”. The former was still reduplicative in Old Norse, the preterite being “rera” in the preterite active first person singular (“I rowed”), but the latter had undergone the common change of S or Z to R which occurred in Scandinavian and West Germanic, making the same part of the verb “sera”. This made the “-ra”-type ending and the similar endings for other parts of the preterite more like an ending for a small class of non-reduplicative verbs rather than reduplicative in themselves. That is, although the form of “row” was still reduplicative in form, it wouldn’t’ve seemed like it to the speakers of the language due to “sow” changing.

I’ve gone into these verbs in what is possibly quite tedious detail in order to test an hypothesis I had about them. I thought that reduplicative Germanic verbs tended to refer to repetitive actions, and to an extent I stand by this. Sowing seed, rowing and beating, for example, are clearly that kind of action. Sleeping could also fall into this category if it formerly meant something like snoring, and walking involves stepping forward repeatedly. It doesn’t seem to work for all of them. It is interesting that trusting, i.e. having faith, is in this class because some Christians see commitment to Christ as a one-time thing and others say that the perseverance of the saints is like someone holding onto a rope being saved from drowning, and it could be said that faith waxes and wanes in a cycle and is therefore a repeated rather than continuous action. Hence trusting in the Lord is something one has to do more than once. One of the many peculiar things I do is to say the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic, and if it gives me other insights like this, it’s definitely worthwhile. The others are not so obvious, but there is another distinctive feature which still shows traces in English. One of these is the verb “hang”, which we use in both strong and weak forms: hanged for execution and hung for the more benign action. Hence there is a distinction of some kind here which is unique in English so far as I can remember. The other is the remarkable verb “hight”, which is one of the two last traces of reduplicative verbs in English, and also the only synthetic passive in our language. English passives are almost always in the form “be called”, “be taken” and so forth, but “hight” is a passive in itself, and also looks suspiciously like it would’ve been “hey” in the active present. Hence when we say “hey”, coincidentally or not, we seem to be using the active voice of “hight”. It should actually be “hote”, which was a real English word. Moreover, the “GH” in “hight” descends from the Anglo-Saxon H in “heht”, which is a remnant of the reduplication which produces the likes of “haihait” in Gothic, although the passive is not reduplicative in Gothic and in fact it’s a preterite in English.

The other apparent remnant of such verbs in English is the past tense of “do” – “did”. This, however, is rather obscured by the development of all the weak verbs which use the “-ed” ending in the past, which in fact has been thought by some to be a descendant of an appended “did”, or rather its ancestor, although that idea may have gone out of fashion. If so, it’s a bit like the Old Norse “row” and “sow” extended to the whole weak verb system. Also in that class in Old English are fon – seize, preserved in its past tense as “fang”, which is no longer a verb, and also in the phrase “new-fangled”, and “feallan” – “fall”. These are not repetitive actions. “Hang” actually used to be the past participle “hangen”, the present being “hon”.

In English then, all this is, like the traces of the instrumental case, a tiny island of the way things used to be in the ancestor of our current language, except that this time it doesn’t survive in present day English at all unless you count “did”. “Hight” is no longer used, although Shakespeare did employ it.

All of this, that is the instrumental and the traces of a synthetic passive and reduplication in English, makes me feel like there could be a familiar-sounding version of modern English which nevertheless (remember?) drinks of the ancient font of our tongue in such a way that it’s more reminiscent of the ancient phase of the millennia-long string of parents and children, each of whom could understand each other, stretching back into prehistory, than of how we speak today. After all, we all know what led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, don’t we?

Dream Time

Daniel Dennett is quite annoying. His view of consciousness is completely absurd, for example. I’m not going to defend my position here because this isn’t exactly what this post is about.

In case you don’t know, Daniel Dennett is a major analytical philosopher, the English-speaking tradition of philosophy dating from the late nineteenth century CE with the rejection of Hegelian idealism, continuing today and apparently also including Polish philosophers for some reason. Bertrand Russell is a good example. It was once described in ‘Radical Philosophy’ like this: a Heideggerian says something like “Die Welt weltet”, and analytic philosophy comes along and says “Where is this Welt, and when exactly did it start welting?”. It is actually mainly my own background and I have a lot of respect for it, partly because I think postmodernism is a good way of making excuses for how things are politically and socially without coming up with a solution to them, and that comes out of the continental tradition. I’d also distinguish analytic philosophy from other viable philosophical approaches taken by anglophones such as that of William Blake, who is unsurprisingly an outsider and apparently linked to the Muggletonians, about whom I know very little. Sarada is the expert on Blake, but for what it’s worth I think of him as an English Romantic. I don’t know if that’s fair.

Recently, Dennett was involved in a movement referred to as the “Brights”, whose aim was to further metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is often treated as if it’s synonymous with atheism, but in fact it’s a specialised form of atheism which is radically different, for instance, from Marxist atheism and the South Asian Samkhya and Carvaka. I had a conversation with a White bloke the other day who was atheist because of karma, a view also found in South Asian thought. The basic idea there is that because karma is a universal law governing the working of the Universe, there’s no need to suppose that God exists. Although I’m theist, I do find this interesting on an intellectual level, mainly because it’s so unlike metaphysical naturalism but still strongly atheist. Metaphysical naturalism is the idea that only natural forces and laws operate in the Universe, i.e. there is no supernatural realm and therefore no God or other deities. Obviously I don’t agree with this, but that isn’t why I find Dennett annoying.

The Brights were founded by Dennett and Dawkins, among other people whose names don’t come to mind right now. Other metaphysically naturalistic atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, have criticised the name as appearing to imply intellectual superiority. It reminds me a bit of the stereotypical Mensa attitude. To be fair, I’m not sure this was the intention so much as an attempt to come up with a positive-sounding name. Brights use the word “super” to describe people such as myself who have supernatural and/or mystical elements as part of our view. This actually makes me sound like Wonder Woman or something, so it’s okay really. Nonetheless, the Brights believe themselves to be right and us to be wrong. It isn’t an unusual position to see oneself as correct by contrast with others whose opinions differ, so that is also fine.

One of Dennett’s more bizarre positions is that lucid dreams are not experiences. This strikes me as a kind of ideological commitment resulting from it being a logical conclusion of his other views about consciousness. However, it’s also an elaboration of another, simpler position of his with which I actually do agree, in a sense: that dreams are not experiences in general. I do differ with this view but also think it captures something significant about the nature of consciousness, particularly wakefulness. Looking at them from a position of being awake, it seems to me that dreaming could well represent the wakeful consciousness attempting to make sense of the “junk” present in one’s mind on waking. There are some reasons why this may not be true, but others which are hard to reconcile with it not being so. For instance, someone I know once dreamt that she, note the tense in this phrase, has to cry three tears to save a toad’s life, and I could hear her trying to do this several minutes before she woke up. On the other hand, I was once dreaming while the radio was on and the sequence of events on the radio is time-reversed in my dream. The dream ends with something happening on the radio which in waking experience happened before something which starts the dream, which can be explained if dreams are false memories created during REM sleep.

The idea that lucid dreams are not experiences is kind of arse-about-face. It’s a conclusion Dennett is forced into due to his expressed view of consciousness which is counter-intuitive to me, and I’d think to most other people. There is an odd phenomenon in consciousness where immediately prior events are “re-written” by memory. For instance, MP3 files when played back often have periods of silence in them before loud notes which the listener doesn’t notice because they’re eclipsed by the slightly later event. Dennett uses a similar illusion called the “phi phenomenon” where lights of two colours flashed in succession leads to the perception that a single light is moving back and forth and changing colour. He offers two explanations for this, which he calls “Orwellian” and “Stalinesque”. In the Orwellian hypothesis, like Winston’s experience with the fingers (or Picard’s experience with the lights in ‘Star Trek’, which is a direct steal), perception is revised after the fact of being experienced. Stalinesquely, the forthcoming experience is revised before reaching consciousness like a show trial whose verdict is pre-decided. These two versions of what happens don’t require any difference in the model of what’s going on in the brain. The only difference is in when the perception becomes an object of consciousness. The claim is then that the reason there is no difference between the two is that this account of consciousness as emerging at a certain point is an error based on the legacy of misunderstanding consciousness as Cartesian – that is, that living humans consist of two substances, the soul and the body, whereof the former is conscious and dimensionless and the latter occupies space and is not conscious, with the two interacting, according to Descartes within the pineal gland. Dennett believes that we are still too attached to this kind of account, although we don’t literally believe it any more, and that consciousness is not a special, circumscribed state, has no subject of experience (I have sympathy with this bit) and is actually the flow of information from place to place.

Applying this to non-lucid dreaming, information flow would occur on waking. With lucid dreaming, we only have illusory choice and experiencing in the moment according to this account, which also applies as far as Dennett is concerned to waking life. Dreaming and lucid dreaming are primarily useful illustrations of his general theory here rather than objects of study themselves.

Obviously I think he’s wrong. He also casts doubt on the existence of qualia, which are the essential qualities of experience whose existence cannot rationally be doubted. Qualia, put another way, are what people refer to when they say things like “your red might be my blue”, which captures the notion well but doesn’t actually work in detail because of the network of experiences and how they relate to one another. It’s important to decide what are and aren’t qualia, because once one declares something as a quale it’s placed beyond question and that restricts possible arguments. For instance, Nkechi Amare Diallo could claim that her Black identity is a quale, at which point White people identifying as Black suddenly becomes sanctified in some realm beyond criticism. I actually do think the mental perception of the possibility of becoming pregnant is a good example of a quale which is not intuitively so, because it sometimes leads to radical departures of opinion regarding the ethics of reproductive choice, and that does in fact correspond to “no uterus, no opinion” as the position is sometimes rather crudely expressed. However, the existence of quale cannot be doubted, and if someone is led into the position where they can make such a claim, it comes across to me as a weird ideological commitment to an untenable position rather than something which can be attached to an account of consciousness.

From wakeful experience, we tend to perceive dreaming as something which occurs while we’re asleep, and individual dreams as prospects which occur in the future of our wakefulness before we fall asleep and in the past of our wakefulness when we have woken up. With closer examination, we might conclude that dreams are not experiences but attempts by a wakeful mind to make sense of the clutter present in our minds when we awake. Although I think this is incorrect, it does work well as an illustration that the chronology of dreams is not what we might assume. Lucid dreaming is said to be encouraged by always recounting dreams in the present tense. This is somewhat confused by the fact that not all languages have a present tense, and this raises a further question: are there languages which have a way of expressing dream time?

Before I answer this question, I want to outline my understanding of states of consciousness. I believe it makes sense to say there are six states of consciousness: wakefulness, dreaming, dreamless sleep, hypnosis, meditation and Ganzfeld. There’s also a very strong tendency to prioritise wakefulness above the others, to the extent that it’s seen as the only realistic state of consciousness and the state which dictates the nature of time. Dream logic is not seen as proper logic. A friend of mine recently observed, interestingly, that although I had recently dreamt about the King, that didn’t mean there wouldn’t still be Queen dreams. My own attitude towards states of consciousness is rather different. I believe that several or all of those states are of equal, or perhaps incommensurate, status. The list I’ve just made was from a wakeful state. It’s equally possible to dream of a completely different list. I’m not convinced that hypnosis is a valid state of consciousness but I do believe it’s neither dreaming nor dreamless sleep. There are “state” and “non-state” views on hypnosis. The state view is that a hypnotised subject has entered an altered, more suggestible state of consciousness, which is supported by their alleged inability, in some cases, to recall the events which took place during it. The non-state version is that hypnosis is a form of role-play in a kind of theatrical setting, which doesn’t just apply to stage hypnotism but also the likes of hypnotherapy. That idea is not supposed to contradict its efficacy as a therapy, incidentally. Ganzfeld is the other state which could do with a bit of explanation. This can be introduced by relaxation and sensory deprivation although it also occurs at one’s bidding, perhaps with a bit of practice. It may not may not be a healthy state.

Insofar as each of these is a valid state of consciousness, none has priority over any others. Each has unique features. As I’m mainly contrasting dreaming and wakefulness here, taking them equally seriously, the wakeful mind can have a view of dreaming that is either the detritus of dormancy or a sequence of experiences which occur between successive experiences of wakefulness, but this is only the view of the waking mind and is no more valid than that of dreaming. There is still a relationship between dreaming experiences and the senses, for instance because a cold night might be associated with dreaming of the Arctic or because some experience one had the previous day influences the dream. From the perspective of dreaming, wakeful consciousness influences one’s experience but there are oddities about its temporality because with dreams of any length, it can often be difficult to locate a moment when the dream begins and, as I’ve said before, some of my dreams involve things like “having always sat on the roof”, i.e. my dream is of climbing out of a bedroom window onto the roof just like I always have for years. From a dreaming perspective, whatever waking life makes of them, dreaming consciousness is very different in terms of the passage of time and even if it turns out that dreams are squished-up false memories of stuff happening immediately before waking from a daytime perspective, this has no more or less validity than whatever the dreaming mind thinks of wakefulness.

Given all that, this is the question I am mainly interested in answering here: how do we refer to dream time? English uses the present tense to refer to “tenseless” things, such as saying that “one plus one is/equals two”. We don’t usually say “one plus one used to equal two” or “one plus one will be two next Thursday” unless we’re trying to make some kind of rhetorical point about eternal verities. I have said in the past, from a waking perspective anyway, that the events of dreams should be referred to in the aorist. This is in fact a somewhat inaccurate way of describing what I’m doing when I seem to use the present tense.

The word “aorist” originates from the Ancient Greek “ἀόριστος”, which breaks down as “ἀ-” – not – and “όριστος” – definite. In other words, “indefinite”, “undefined” and also simple – the unadorned, plain form of the verb. In English, we might identify this with the simple present indicative except that in English this usually puts an S, an “-eth” or “-est” on the end, so it isn’t usually unadorned. As an ahistorical, perhaps an aorist, word, it seems to work quite well as a way of describing events which do not occur in the waking passage of time, but in fact the Ancient Greek usage is to refer to the past. It’s used as a narrative tense, so it does make sense if dreams are retold as stories to use the aorist, but in certain circumstances can also refer to the present or future. It’s also worth mentioning that there is aspect as well as tense involved here. Aspect is how the action described by a verb occurs over time, i.e. whether it’s a one-time short term event, a repeated action or a continuous one. For instance, “I rowed” and “I sowed” might involve grabbing the oars just once and sculling briefly and putting a single seed in the ground, or they might refer to rowing across a river or walking across a field broadcasting a full bowl of seed. English seems to have lost the ability to distinguish easily between these, but many other languages actually focus more on that element of time than on tense. Hence aspect is still relevant to dreaming as experience, or perceived experience but tense may be misleading.

Sanskrit also has an aorist, which is relevant because it happens to be used to discuss consciousness a lot. In fact I almost used the word “samadhi” to describe what I called “meditation” just now. There are two aorists in Sanskrit, one which is simply preterite indicative, like our own simple past, and an injunctive mood, which is also found in Homeric Greek, which could be used as an imperative or subjunctive, usually for prohibitions in later Sanskrit.

Hence the problem is that although there is something out there called the aorist, which is not in any case present in English, it actually tends to express the past although it technically needn’t and the literal meaning of the word “aorist” is not perfectly reflected in the actual meaning of the word. From the perspective of wakefulness, I would want to express dreaming experience as occurring in a kind of abstract time. Imagine a three-dimensional line graph. The space within that graph could be said to be located in a particular place in the sense that it might be on the page of a book or a computer display, but there need be no region of the Universe consisting of a graph, which can in principle be visited. Time and space in dreaming are virtual. Events can be located relative to each other temporally only within the dream, but need to be referred to outside of it, but referring to them in the past tense doesn’t do them justice.

Calling this post “Dream Time” makes it sound like a reference to the idea Australian Aboriginals are said by Western anthropologists to have about the primordial state of the world, but as usual it’s important to examine this critically. If it turns out that the kind of wakeful consciousness we have today in the West is highly contingent, maybe our lives are surrounded temporally by a sleep, not in the sense of absence of consciousness but as a different kind of consciousness. I know very little about this and feel it would be culturally insensitive to say too much about it, as well as inappropriate for the cultural and environmental milieu I live in, but the term itself suggests to me an entirely valid concept of a kind of timeless eternity out of which our wakefulness condenses. I have no idea whether this is what anthropologists mean by it or whether it even exists in any Australian Aboriginal culture, but it does make sense although it might give dreaming unwarranted priority. At this point I could of course read what Wikipedia says about it and pretend I know what I’m talking about, but that doesn’t do it justice.

Behind all this while I’ve been writing is awareness of a particular form of dementia called Lewy Body. This is associated with Parkinsonism, and involves the mixing of dreaming and wakefulness. Although it would seem insensitive to regard this as anything other than a pathological state, it is interesting that this occurs towards the end of waking life. We tend to think of dreaming and wakefulness as sharply differentiated, although when I had B12 deficiency early signs of my psychosis there was some such mixture. Prisoner’s cinema, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, phantosmia and possibly some forms of tinnitus and hearing voices also seem to have things in common with this. Prisoner’s cinema is more like Ganzfeld, and in fact it leads me to wonder whether states of consciousness are to each other like different gears on a car, with Ganzfeld intermediate between dreaming and wakefulness.

People have been known to enter a state of meditation as a prelude to their death. More often, the state of mind immediately before death as monitored by instruments resembles dreamless sleep and this continues immediately after death, with a sudden flash of activity a few minutes later. Once again, it may be inappropriate to refer to these phenomena temporally, as any subjectivity may not experience them in this manner.

This post, I hope, will make a good companion to tomorrow’s, written on International Yoga Day.