I am interested to know about your dreams. Tell me about your dreams. Did you dream last night? Can you recall a long, harrowing sequence of events? Or just a feeling you retained upon waking? Did you dream of specific people? People you see in your current life? People you knew in childhood? Have you had any particularly powerful dreams that you remembered for years afterward, that seemed to guide you, or terrify you, or watch over you?

Please tell me about your dreams.

No, no, no—stop there! I did not mean that I wanted a blow-by-blow report. Your dreams are not that interesting. Do you take offense? I am sorry. Well, then, how about this? To return the favor, I will not share a blow-by-blow report of my own dreams, either. Fair? Fair.

However, I do still want to know about your dreams. Do you dream most nights? Do you dream only rarely? Have you never once experienced a dream? Do you know you are dreaming when you dream?

I never know that I am dreaming. I have always had very vivid dreams. On certain medications, they get even more vivid. I have had dreams that were so steeped in meaning that they felt like thunderclaps, missives, mandates. Have you? I would like to share what I mean . . . so can we amend our deal? Please? A blow-by-blow report is only okay if it is meaningful, and if that meaning is explained. Deal? Deal. Now, here is what I mean:

When I was in the final stages of finishing my novel, and was nervous about how it would finally turn out, and whether I could get it right—this was a few years ago—I had a dream. In the dream, I was at a place that has great meaning for me: the capitol square in Madison, Wisconsin. For me, this place represents peace and stability. I could hear a beautiful symphony playing, and I knew I had written it. I had written it by typing words on the computer, and the result was a symphony, and it was the most beautiful music I had ever heard. In the dream, I listened to the music, and I was proud, and joyously happy, but also sad, because no one else could hear it, or wanted to hear it. When I awoke, I could no longer hear the music and did not know what it sounded like. But the loss of the music was bearable, because I suddenly remembered that I had something else: a nearly finished novel manuscript.

Some time later, when I was contemplating seeking an agent for the novel and starting a blog, I had another dream. In the dream, I was a dancer/stripper, auditioning for a part. I performed on the stage, dancing to the music before an audience, slowing taking clothes off. The removal of clothes was, I knew, the same thing as publishing my writing. I desperately wanted to remove all my clothes, but I somehow could not manage to take off the last layer. But I danced my heart out, and afterward, despite not taking off my sports bra and little skirt, I found out that I got the part. I was ecstatic, but also mortified. How could I bear to finally take my clothes off, when it came time to perform for real? I walked out into the audience, and my college roommate was there, having watched my audition. I was terrified about what she might say. I was shocked when she started telling me about something in her own life. It was then that I realized that she, and almost everyone I knew, did not care that much about any decision I made about my own life—as long as it did not affect them—and my worries that everyone would judge me were unwarranted.

Each of these dreams taught me something about myself that I had not known before. Each of them also guided me toward the future. I do not necessarily believe that this can be attributed to some sort of woo-woo mysticism, but rather to the workings of the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind often has access to knowledge that the conscious mind does not.

So anyway, few days ago, I had another such dream. In the dream, I knew I should do something, and I knew I should do it alone. It’s nothing bad or illegal or harmful, but it would require a certain outlay of money and time.

Should I do it?

What do Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics and David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College (known as the “This Is Water” speech) have in common?

Both of these famous philosophies, according to Matthew B. Crawford in his book The World Beyond Your Head, are faulty—and for the same reason.

It’s a bold claim. Crawford attempts to topple two towering figures of Western culture and thought in one fell swoop! So let’s back up a sec and analyze what Kant’s and Wallace’s philosophies, in these instances, are. Then we can delve into why Crawford thinks they are wrong.

Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics of Freedom

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher famous for a philosophy called the categorical imperative. He states that morality exists beyond the realm of the everyday world, and can be derived through reason alone. The moral law, he says, is categorically (“unconditionally”) imperative (“crucial and essential”).

Crawford points out that Kant held a mind thinking rationally, in an ideal state, in far higher esteem than a mind grappling with the way things are in the messy, real world:

“Kant builds a high wall between the empirical world and the purely intellectual, where we discover a priori moral laws. Reasons to act must come only from the latter if we are to be free, and the will is to remain pure, ‘unconditioned’ by anything external to it. . . . To be rational is, for Kant, precisely not to be situated in the world.”

David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” Commencement Speech

As those who know me well know, I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace (1962–2008). Infinite Jest was well worth the struggle to read. I have also enjoyed and marveled at the brilliance of many of his other works, fictional and nonfictional. However, I was distinctly unimpressed by his work—for the only time ever—when encountering, ten years ago, the commencement speech he delivered on May 21, 2005: and for the same reasons Crawford cites.

Even ten years later—and I remember it very well: it was exactly ten years ago, give or take a few months, when my boss (at the time) printed the speech and gave it to me, as a benefactory gesture, an offering* of moral guidance from mentor to mentee, and which I duly read, but did not duly (oops) compliment, nor, however, criticize, because, after all, who criticizes David Foster Wallace?!!

But I seem to have gotten off track. As I was saying, even ten years later, I distinctly remember the bit in the speech about the annoyance of grocery shopping. Wallace opines that if you are engaged in one of the many frustrating activities of modern life—such as grocery shopping, after a long day at work, in an ugly and crowded supermarket, when all you want to do is go home and rest, but everything is annoying and taking too long, etc.—that you should remember that you can always control what you are thinking.

Here’s what Crawford has to say about this:

“Wallace’s core suggestion in the speech is that ‘you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.’ . . . His solution is thus emblematic of the problem we are addressing in this book: we have an uncertain grasp of the world as something with a reality of its own.”

In other words, Wallace, in this speech, held a mind thinking rationally, in an ideal state, in far higher esteem than a mind grappling with the way things are in the messy, real world.

Matthew B. Crawford’s Praise of the World Beyond Your Head

I believe in the power of the mind, thinking rationally; but I also concur with Crawford that thinking in an idealized bubble is not enough. There’s a real world to contend with out there! If the deep, rational thinkers aren’t up for working to make a difference . . . whom does that leave?

Crawford titled his book The World Beyond Your Head. His thesis is that we should work to apply our minds to real things, in the real world, despite the many powers that be and cultural conceptions guiding us in less grounded—and more illusory—directions. This quote of his is buried in a footnote, but it’s one of my favorites in the whole book:

“Wisdom is impossible without biography.”

The mind is not an empty shopping cart, hovering in an imaginary space. It has a history. It has been filled and emptied a bit, filled a lot more and emptied a bit more. It has traveled the aisles again and again and again. It has been knocked around quite a lot, but it keeps going. It keeps moving. It keeps engaging. And the more it moves and engages, the fuller it becomes.

With what real-world activities will you fill your cart today, this week, next year?

*I thought I'd throw a footnote in here, just for good measure. (RIP DFW.)

Earlier in the chapter I quoted in my previous blog post, the protagonist says something that I found fascinating, sad, and immediately recognizable:

“I don’t let my thoughts touch the sides as I take the crowbar out of the toolbox . . .”

“I don’t let my thoughts touch the sides”: I get that; I have felt that way before.

Do you; have you?

Later in the novel All the Birds, Singing, the author, Evie Wyld, has the protagonist say something similar, expanding upon the idea:

“I walk down the corridor of my brain and don’t even look at the doors either side.”

Wow, what powerful imagery: a picture of numbness. Why doesn’t the protagonist want to make contact with the sides, look at the doors, or—God forbid—walk through those doors? Why does she endeavor to go straight down the middle, focusing only on stepping cautiously forward?

Wyld expands on this idea even further, later in the novel, but the idea is understandable even after reading just these two short passages. When something bad has happened in your past—an event, or many events, so horrifying or shameful or depressing or otherwise traumatic that you can’t bear to think of them—the memories continue to reside in your brain, whether you want them there or not. Sometimes it is more comfortable and less anxiety provoking to avoid thinking or feeling at all, so as not to risk touching upon one of the danger areas.

If you have never felt this way—felt so paralyzingly numb that you could not bear to let your thoughts touch the sides—count yourself lucky, young, otherwise blessed, or more than one of the above. If, like me, you have? Well, we’re only human.

And maybe, one day, letting your thoughts touch the sides will feel not so bad, and walking through the doors will feel not so awful, after all.

Know what I mean?

I don’t often buy books without consulting online reviews or a friend. When I do, it feels like I have a delicious secret.

Having confronted no direct evidence that another human had encountered the book Perfect Me by Heather Widdows, I felt like a voyager alone, making a profound discovery that I hoped to one day share with the folks back home.

My feeling of secrecy was compounded by the fact that the book’s introduction launches into a discussion of philosophical concepts that don’t usually arise in ordinary conversation. And so, like an intrepid explorer, both exhilarated by and afraid of marching into an exotic place, I read this passage:

“It is important to remember that one thing worse than locating the self in the body is locating the self in the mind and neglecting embodiment . . . (the ghost in the machine). . . . As embodied beings, appearance—beauty—should matter, but it should not be all that matters or what matters most.”

Thus Widdows begins her book by reminding her readers (or, for all I knew, just me?) about Descartes’ philosophy declaring a dualism of mind and body. Today, this idea is often referenced through the term the ghost in the machine. Is the ghost (a.k.a. the mind or consciousness) a separate phenomenon from the machine (a.k.a. the body and brain)?

Sidestepping that debate, Widdows reminds us (or only me?) that, just as it’s not a great idea to live in your head and ignore your body and everything else in the world, it’s also not a great idea to focus solely on your body and what others think of it, to the exclusion of your intellect, emotional strength, values, and so on. She fears that, in the age of the Internet, appearances matter too much: that the primacy of machinelike attributes is making ghostlike attributes increasingly irrelevant.

Widdows declares, sensibly enough, that we should strike a balance when it comes to beauty. A machine without any hint of a ghost is like a doll. She may be beautiful . . . but she’s lifeless.