For my Jane

and in loving memory of my father,

Herbert Gelernter, zichrono li’vracha.
One of the six men who invented AI,
and that was the least of it.
I shall not look upon his like again.
 Contents

Preface

One The Tides of Mind

Two Three Thirds of the Spectrum
Three Every Day
Four A Map
Five Spectrum, Upper Third: Abstraction
Six Spectrum, Middle Third: Creativity
Seven Spectrum, Lower Third: Descent into Lost Time
Eight Where It All Leads
Nine Conclusions

Acknowledgments
Literary Works Cited in the Text
Notes
Index
 Preface

I have practiced computer science for thirty years. What drew me to the
field was the unlimited plastic power of digital computers: computers give
you the power to dream up almost any machine you like, shape a simple
version in modeling clay, and then flip a switch and watch it come alive.
This naïve-sounding vision is almost real, almost true. A good
programmer can sit down at the keyboard and build a program—a working
piece of software—with nearly the complexity of an aircraft carrier all by
himself, to his own designs and no one else’s. The fact that you can achieve
so much all alone is one good reason to be fascinated and terrified by
computing. The field has always attracted sociopaths.
But there are also good scientific reasons to be intrigued by this
enormous power. For example, how does one study the mind?
Here is a strange fact about mind study. It demands explanation,
although people in the field take it for granted and barely notice its
strangeness.
Go to a well-stocked academic library and grab, at random, some
books and journals on philosophy of mind. Virtually everything you pick
up will be full of digital computers, full of assertions about the science
and technology of computers and software, and results from the theory of
computing.
Why should philosophy of mind be obsessed with digital computers?
Philosophical ethics is not obsessed with pneumatic jackhammers.
Political philosophy is not obsessed with fiberglass fishing rods. Why
should philosophers of mind return to a certain machine and its capacities
again and again?
There are three explanations, all related. One centers on computers as a
test-bed for mind theories. Another focuses on computing as a powerful,
simple way to describe or blueprint events in time: processes—that is,
organized actions. The last explanation, a theory called computationalism,
asserts that brains are computers, and the mind is just software that runs
on the brain. This would be awfully neat if it turned out to be true.
Now, if you had decided that a jackhammer happened to be a precise
model of an individual driven to the breaking point by an insoluble ethical
dilemma, or a fiberglass fishing rod was the ideal way to understand an
electorate weighed down with misinformation but still endowed with the
springiness of freedom, these technologies might be important to their
respective areas of philosophy.
Regarding philosophy of mind, serious thinkers have concluded that
certain machines bear a remarkable resemblance to the human brain:
computers resemble brains, and minds are like software. The alleged
resemblances are no coincidence, of course. Scientists designed these
machines to carry out tasks for which, ordinarily, they used their minds.
So it was perfectly natural to imagine that when machines carried out
these tasks, those machines were showing themselves to resemble mind or
brains.
Let’s briefly look at the first two reasons for attending to computers
and their capabilities. (They are my own reasons for going into the field of
computing.) The third requires more space but is fundamental to the whole
drift of modern thought.
Mind researchers saw, in computing, an opportunity to test their mind
theories directly—to embody them in working models, throw the “on”
switch and see what happened. Did the working models perform as
predicted? For example, by carrying out a particular theory embodied in a
working program, did the computer succeed in learning grammar and
sentence structure from the spoken language all around it? Or did it
succeed in planning a series of movements to accomplish a goal, or create
memories of the expected type, or learn to pronounce words it had never
heard before? Did your theory work?
This kind of programming is one branch of “artificial intelligence,” or
AI. This is “theoretical AI,” which centers on the human mind. “Applied
AI” seeks to solve problems that minds can solve only by using
intelligence, not by following a prearranged set of rules. Sometimes
applied AI works by incorporating mind-like techniques into software.
Applied AI has scored major successes. Two of its most important in
recent years were the work of IBM Research: the “Deep Blue” program
that won the world chess championship in 1997, and the “Watson”
program that beat the best Jeopardy! players in the world in 2011. (IBM
has a long history of pathbreaking work in AI, going back to its famous
geometry theorem prover of 1957—the third AI program ever built, and
the first that did anything.) Many other enormously impressive
accomplishments have come out of applied AI, from the sophisticated
robots that are becoming ubiquitous, to software that can invent syntheses
for organic compounds (can figure out, that is, how to produce complex
chemicals from raw materials), to other programs that do jobs ordinarily
requiring a scientist in the flesh, PhD in hand.
The second reason for computing’s central place in modern research is
that it provides the framework for understanding processes, actions-in-
time. The root idea is nearly as simple as ideas get. Given a list of steps,
carry them out in sequence. Finish one and then proceed to the next, until
you reach the end of the list. Then stop.
Two simple details increase the power and expressiveness of this idea
enormously. One is recursive structure. Given a list of instructions, any
individual instruction can be replaced by an entire list. (This is like saying
that any number or variable in an algebraic expression can be replaced by
a whole expression: I can start with x + y + 5 and replace the y so that I
have, say, x + (3x + 120 + z) + 5, and so forth. I still have a legitimate
expression.) And I can vary the meaning of the list of instructions by
setting parameters. If I set x equal to 150 and y to 14, then x + y + 5 means
(or “equals”) 169. If I set x and y equal to 2 and 3, respectively, then the
same expression equals 10. Changing the values of parameters (in this
case the parameters x and y) allows one expression to mean many things.
Lists of computing instructions work the same way. The result is a
powerful and concise way of capturing actions-in-time.
These were my own reasons for studying computation: the modeling
power of software, the idea of algorithm.
Like so many others, I have always been obsessed with the mind.
When I was a student in the 1960s and ’70s, the whole world spoke Freud’s
language of repression and childhood trauma, the unconscious and the
egomaniac, phobias and libidos and Oedipus complexes—just as the whole
world does today, only we no longer bother to mention Freud.
As an undergraduate I studied neurophysiology and molecular biology,
the usual things. But those left me a long way from the mind, barely able
to make it out in the distance. The brain doesn’t believe things, or get
excited or grow wistful or daydream about a farm by the ocean in Maine,
with a studio overlooking the sea. The mind does those things. John Milton
wrote, “The mind is its own place.” The mind is the landscape we invent,
the landscape of us.
AI attracted me to computer science because (again, like so many
others) I had a theory I was eager to test. The theory led to a software
project when I was a young professor at Yale—carried out mainly with
Scott Fertig, one of my graduate students in the late 1980s and ’90s. The
project was successful—but not in the way I had hoped. It became a
suggestive and promising application, one of the first that converted data
records (describing chest X-rays, in our case) into online advice about new
cases, advice based on general rules derived from the input data and
backed up by concrete examples, also from the input data.
But I had wanted to build a program with a dial in front marked
“focus.” You could vary the value of focus by turning the dial, from
maximum to zero. At maximum focus, the program would “think”
rationally, formally, reasonably. As focus diminished, its “mind” would
start to wander—it would attend to other things than the patient-case right
before it. As you kept dialing focus lower and lower, the program’s mind
wandering would grow more pronounced. Finally, it would start to free-
associate—and finish by ignoring the user completely as it cruised off into
its own mental adventures.
The actual program did some intriguing things. But it never achieved
the sort of focus-knob behavior I had hoped for. Mainly, it demonstrated
that I didn’t yet understand my own theory.
So, back to the drawing board. Nearly twenty years later, this book is
(at last) the result.
An author must review other, competing ways of viewing his topic. I
will do that partly in this preface, partly in the body of the book. But in my
case, there are no competing views to my theory of mind. By which I
mean, there are no others I must reject if my view is to be successful. The
reason is simple. The others are arguing an important question, focused
(let’s say—metaphorically) on what is the best route into the city from the
north? But I am coming from the east.
I will argue that both questions (how to come from the north and the
east) are important: we need both views of the mind. In a way, the two
approaches are orthogonal: independent ways of examining the same topic
—in principle, complementary.
Before proceeding to reason three for mind studies to be obsessed with
computation, one general point. A computer scientist working on mind
must discuss philosophy; a philosopher of mind must discuss computation.
I was trained as a computer scientist. But intellectual mingling and
fraternization across this line has been the way of the world since the birth
of AI.
This blurring of lines between computation and philosophy of mind
makes perfect sense. In the short history of artificial intelligence, there has
always been much mixing along the boundary between philosophy of mind
and AI. After all, it was a computing expert and mathematician—Alan
Turing, the genius who invented artificial intelligence (and many other
things) and introduced it in a philosophy journal called Mind—who did
more than anyone to nudge philosophers in the direction of digital
computers.
In general, academics say they love this sort of cross-field
fertilization. In fact, they hate it. (Not all of them, obviously. Many of
them.) There’s nothing surprising in that. An academic is nothing if not a
specialist.
Finally, to the third reason for the intimacy between computing and
philosophy of mind: a tremendously popular and influential theory of the
mind called “computationalism.” Computationalism is the intellectual
project that opened the floodgates, that brought ideas and language from
computing and software roaring, pounding, and exploding (in bright
plumes of spray and the odd leaping fish) into the peaceful green fields of
philosophy.
Computationalism asserts that computing is the very stuff of mind:
that the brain is a sort of organic computer, and the mind is like software
that runs on the brain.
Some people and many computationalists believe that you can build a
mind out of software. A real, genuine mind. If you arrange enough
computer instructions correctly, the app or the program you have just built
will be a mind. If it is running on your laptop, your laptop now has a mind.
Those who believe this, many of whom are computationalists, mean a
complete mind—one that can think and solve problems of all sorts, but can
also feel, can experience the world, can imagine. If you told your mind-
equipped computer to “picture a swan,” it would picture a swan just as you
would. In fact, your computer would be conscious, just as you are.
Why would anyone believe this? We need to go further: Why would
this be the consensus view of the intellectual mainstream in the mind
sciences? Answering this question will help put this book in perspective—
in the context of today’s mainstream views of the mind.
The ideas of computing seem essential to the study of mind because of
a state of affairs at the very start of the field in the late 1940s and early
1950s. Computers were invented to solve problems that would help win
the war. They solved those problems and did help win the war.
As researchers emerged from wartime and began to think in broader
terms about the science and technology they had discovered, something hit
them. What did it mean for a person to think? It meant (many decided) to
compute, broadly speaking, using a large range of different methods. (To
compute meaning simply to calculate; no suggestion, yet, of digital
computing machinery.)
Thinking—rational thought, or reasoning—meant computing, and
computing meant following some sort of rule, or making one up. Maybe
you are solving a high school algebra problem. Maybe you are planning
your day, or figuring out where you left your keys, or how to clear a tree
out of the driveway knocked over by last night’s storm. The essence of
rational thought is building your case step by step so that each step is
justified by the previous ones. The variety of techniques or rules to choose
from is huge, but there’s always some kind of rule.
Sensational news! (Stop press!) Because now, for the first time in
history, people were not the only ones that could follow rules. Digital
computers could too. This was exactly what digital computers were for.
Accordingly, it struck researchers—not everyone in the still-minuscule
field, but more than a few—that computers were not merely
programmable digital calculators. Not merely calculators whose behavior
could change. Computers were not merely calculating machines of any
kind. They were thinking machines. Why? Because thinking—rational,
reasonable thinking—was really just computing. It all came down to
computing. And digital computers could do any computation there was.
Everyone knew that a human mind could do more than rational
thinking. But rational thinking seemed to be its defining activity. The word
that especially fascinated Turing was “intelligence.” Rational thinking was
the manifestation of intelligence. Turing knew well that there was more to
a mind than intelligence. But intelligence was the main thing. That’s why
the field has the name it does: not artificial mind, artificial thought,
artificial reasoning, but artificial intelligence.
For Turing, and a few other scientists in Europe (mainly Britain) and
America, the general shape of the artificial intelligence project was clear.
First you got computers to manifest intelligence in many areas—not just
mathematics, but (for example) in articulate, wide-ranging conversations
on any topic. Then you could fill in the rest of the mind, to the extent
filling was needed: emotions, sensations, attitudes, many other mental
states, even consciousness.
Since mind is for rational thought, which amounts to computing,
which can be accomplished by computers, to study the theory and
structure of digital computers and software was to study the essence of
mind. Before long, the philosophical field of computationalism emerged.
Computationalism involved more than these simple intuitions. But these
intuitions were the heart of it.
Nearly all computationalists believe that minds relate to brains as
software relates to computers. This analogy was crucial because one of the
hardest of all points in philosophy of mind had been just this: How do
minds relate to brains? How can a mere thought (I think I’ll type the letter
R)—intangible, immeasurable—be converted into physical action in the
real world? How are casual, passing fancies converted into physical
motion, into the complex nerve signaling and muscle movement that is
typing? What could the connecting link look like? What could it be? The
analogy offered a kind of answer: mind relates to brain as software relates
to computer.
Computationalists say this: to understand the mind, study software. A
digital computer is merely a set of binary switches wired together in
complex ways. A binary switch is just like an ordinary light switch. The
switch on your wall is binary, with two positions: “on” and “off.”
Whatever position we put it in, it remembers. Computers and computer
memories are built out of microsized, purely electronic (no moving parts)
versions of a light switch.
The active, thinking part of the brain is built out of neurons, and they
can be described as binary switches too. A neuron is either off or on. On, it
transmits a nerve signal to all the neighboring, downstream neurons. Off,
it transmits nothing. Neurons turn on when the right signals reach them
from their neighbors upstream, some ons and some offs.
With a little imagination, then, a brain becomes a kind of organic
computer; and the mind is the software of the brain.
Concretely, building the right software, and downloading it on the right
digital computer, will yield a computer with a conscious mind that is just
as capable as the human mind. There will be differences, but basically the
two types of mind can do the same things. All digital computers are
identical except for performance, meaning speed and memory size, and
details that are irrelevant here, such as power consumption. We might need
a very fast computer to produce a mind, but that superfast computer will
be merely a speeded-up version of our computers today. There will be no
logical difference. And the software that creates our computer mind will
be built of the same parts as today’s software. Build the software right (say
computationalists), run it on the right computer, and you will have a mind.
Not a simulated mind, not something like a mind, but a real, working
mind.
Dissenters say this: We only need to build the right software to have a
mind? And run it on a fast enough computer? But this mind-creating
software would be built of the same parts, the same basic instructions, as
today’s software. And we know what those instructions do. They move
numbers around (“Move a number from here in memory to there in
memory”), do simple arithmetic (“Add these two numbers”), and logical
tests (“If the result is zero, skip the next ten instructions and continue”).
Any person can do all these instructions—much more slowly, but just as
correctly, as a digital computer.
So let’s do a thought experiment, say the dissenters—let’s imagine a
simple test. Someone hands you the remarkable software application that
creates minds on digital computers. You can read each instruction and
carry it out just as a computer can. So you sit down at a table with paper
and pencils and carry out the first five instructions. (Maybe you add some
numbers and multiply some others.) Has a new mind been created as a
result of those five instructions? Of course not. You can’t create a mind by
adding a few numbers. Then you do the next ten. Then (in a burst of
enthusiasm) the next two hundred. You’ve filled up a whole pad of paper
and resharpened your pencil twice. But have you created a mind? No. If
ten additions, multiplications, logical tests, and so forth don’t create a
mind, why should two hundred? You can proceed to another three hundred
instructions, and another and another. You just keep adding numbers,
moving them around, and so forth as the software tells you to. When does
a new mind get created? Does it pop into being after the ten millionth
instruction? The ten trillionth? No. How could it? How could it possibly?
How could playing with numbers (just as a digital computer does) ever
produce a mind? You can imagine the entire process, say the dissenters;
you can imagine it in exact detail, because each instruction is precisely
defined and simple enough for a child to do. And, by imagining the whole
process, say the dissenters, you can see that no new mind is produced,
ever. We are doing nothing that could possibly create a mind.
The computationalists have a proposition, say the dissenters, like
winning the marathon at the Olympics by hopping up and down and
croaking like a frog. If you hop a hundred times, will you win? No. If you
hop a thousand times, or a million? No. No. Why not? Because hopping up
and down and croaking like a frog has nothing to do with winning a
marathon at the Olympics.
The computationalists’ answer is this: Imagine a single neuron. (You
can’t see it with the naked eye, but it’s there.) Can it think? Understand?
Create consciousness? Of course not. Can a hundred neurons? A thousand?
A million? No! The idea seems ridiculous. Yet we happen to know that
when you have enough neurons, a hundred billion or so, and they’re
connected in the right way and attached to a body—those neurons do,
indeed, create consciousness. So the inability of one, a hundred, a million,
or a hundred million computer instructions to create consciousness is
completely irrelevant.
To which the dissenters reply, “So what?” True, a hundred billion
neurons, connected correctly and wired to a body, will yield consciousness.
But that doesn’t mean that a hundred billion random anythings will create
consciousness! Neurons work, but why should I believe that computer
instructions (of all things) will do the same job? Why shouldn’t I believe
the thought-experiment evidence that tells me they don’t? After all, a
hundred billion grains of sand don’t create consciousness, or a hundred
billion mosquitoes, or sardines, or flamingoes, or anything whatsoever—
except neurons.
That’s where the argument stands today. Whether you are a
computationalist or a dissenter, the ideas of computing have merged with
those of mind science. The approach I take in this book is radically
different from computationalism, and far away from these arguments. But
readers ought to know where things stand in the world at large.
The computationalist view has too many leaders and persuasive
exponents to list; I refer to some in the course of the book. The two leaders
of the dissenting camp are John Searle and Thomas Nagel—but their
views are very different.
In 1980, Searle published a famous thought experiment called the
Chinese Room,1 which is similar, in essence, to the thought experiment I
have described here. Searle’s argument was fallen upon immediately,
attacked from every side, like Caesar in the Capitol—but with fury more
than considered passion. Searle’s particular focus is understanding. No
computer (he believes) will ever understand anything at all, no matter
what it seems to do. Computer instructions just don’t have it in them, he
believes, to create understanding—and (as I’ve said) he uses a thought
experiment like the one I have used (his came first!) to make that point.
He is a thoroughgoing materialist; he has no interest in metaphysical or
spiritual claims. He only insists on the prudent skepticism that has always
been fundamental to science.
Thomas Nagel takes a broader, in some ways higher-level, view.2 His
argument is too wide-ranging to summarize here. But he does not believe
that computers are capable of creating subjectivity: your own personal
experience, your mental life, your own private landscape of mind—the
world inside your head that no one but you can ever wander through, ever
see or come to know or directly experience in any way at all. He does not
believe that computers are capable of creating consciousness. (Searle is
with him so far, although Nagel’s emphasis on subjectivity is different
from Searle’s on understanding and the mental property called
“intentionality” or “aboutness”—a belief is about something.)
But Nagel believes, further, that a scientific revolution will probably
be required before we have the means to explain consciousness.
Consciousness and other aspects of the mind, he notes, raise hard
questions about the whole smooth, shiny Spandex cover that science has
stretched over the bumpy reality of nature. Nagel, like Searle, is a strict
materialist, a deep believer in science as far as it goes. He rejects
metaphysical, spiritual, or religious explanations of the universe. But he
believes we are nowhere near a convincing explanation of subjectivity or
consciousness. We can’t even say what a convincing explanation would
look like.
A last significant dissenter, not as influential as Searle and Nagel but
important in his own right—Colin McGinn—believes, like Nagel, that
science as it stands lacks the ideas and the intellectual framework to
explain subjectivity and consciousness.3 Unlike Nagel, McGinn believes
our problem lies deeper. Sheep have never understood Gilbert and
Sullivan, and parrots (who are thoughtful and brilliant) do not and cannot
understand physics, or how to win at chess, or how to read. They can try as
hard as they like (and parrots try very hard), but their brains are just not
cut out for it. Our brains have limits too, says McGinn. Not only do we not
understand consciousness; there are no grounds for believing we ever will.
I will discuss the phenomenologists and the Freudians in the book
itself; their views are closer to mine. The Freudians have kept the serious
study of the human mind alive, have kept “depth psychology” alive (as a
non-Freudian psychiatrist described Freudianism during Freud’s own
career) in an era that often seems contemptuous of the individual and what
sets him apart from the crowd.

When I was a child, I loved science but found it discouraging: it seemed

as if all the questions already had answers. Whatever I asked my parents
or their scientist friends or my teachers, there always seemed to be
answers—from why is the sky blue to what are stars made of, and why is
metal shiny, and how fast can elephants run, and can pigs stand on their
snouts?
Learning about science and technology, to the small extent I have
learned, has been equally a matter of learning what we know and what we
don’t. It is hard for a child to accept (and hard for adults too) that deeply
important facts about human beings and our world lie right in front of us,
hidden in plain sight. But we know that blasé boredom and sophisticated
cynicism are the easiest and cheapest of human attitudes, surprise and
wonder the most precious. Not for nothing do we remember the luminous
visions of childhood as irreplaceable, different in kind from the rational
(or fairly rational) worldview of adulthood, and our best compensation—
payment in advance—for whatever is to come.
On the other hand, rationality is not so bad either.

TRANSLATIONS FROM FRENCH and German literary texts are mine, except for
Kafka and for Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, where I have
followed the lead of the Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Mayor translation
(Remembrance of Things Past, Random House, 1981). Translators from
the Russian and a few other instances are given in the list of cited literary
works at the end.
 THE
TIDES
OF
MIND
 One

The Tides of Mind

Many thinkers see the mind as a massive ancient temple newly

unearthed in a desert somewhere. Dozens of world-class teams are spread
all over the site in shorts and floppy hats, each team absorbed in its own
courtyard or cellar or fortified guard post, measuring, remeasuring, taking
photos, measuring again. Someday, one group will issue the definitive
work on all the courtyards or all the cellars or all the guard posts, and
eventually the whole story will emerge—the truth—and the mystery of
mind will be solved.
But this is all wrong. The mind changes constantly on a regular,
predictable basis. You can’t even see its developing shape unless you look
down from far overhead. You must know, to start, the overall shape of
what you deal with in space and time, its architecture and its patterns of
change. The important features all change together. The role of emotion in
thought, our use of memory, the nature of understanding, the quality of
consciousness—all change continuously throughout the day, as we sweep
down a spectrum that is crucial to nearly everything about the mind and
thought and consciousness.
This book is about that spectrum and a new way to understand the
mind. This new way incorporates the findings and observations of many
thinkers but rests ultimately on the solid, unspectacular bedrock of
common sense.
If you understand the nighttime sky, you understand how the stars’
positions change. Not to understand those patterns of change is not to
understand the sky. The mind changes too.
Even a child knows that the mind at work on a math problem on a fine
sunny morning is a strangely, strikingly different instrument from the
same mind fighting through a nightmare, in the grip of terrifying
hallucinations and oblivious of the outer world. We know that our thought
processes differ when we are fresh and wide-awake, when we are at a
comfortable midday midpoint, and when we are drifting off to sleep. We
all know this. But, like an island completely submerged and then released
by the ocean every day, we go from one state to the other in a series of
indiscernibly gradual, gently lapping steps.
The very purpose of the mind changes as we move down-spectrum,
from doing to being, from the mental manipulations called “thought” to
sensations and feelings that reach, at the absolute bottom, the pitch of pure
un-self-conscious being, of wholly unreflective experience. As we descend
from the top, our gift for abstraction and reasoning fades while sensation
and emotion begin to bloom cautiously and then grow lusher and brighter.
(Up-spectrum, we keep emotion on a short leash because it disrupts
thought.) As focus falls and conscious mind relaxes its guard, and memory
ranges more freely, the mind wanders. Daydreams grow more insistent.
And we experience more of the saturated intensity of emotions and
sensations—barefoot in the clover and wildflowers. Consequently, we
reflect less and less, our self-awareness declines, we lay down fewer and
shoddier memories. Our minds are dominated by sense and feeling.
Where the spectrum bottoms out, we find dreams. They are “intensely
emotional,” writes the neurophysiologist J. Allan Hobson.1 Of course,
they are hard to recall; sometimes they erase themselves while we try to
remember them. (“That night I was startled awake by a dream,” writes the
psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, “which began to dissolve as soon as I
woke.”)2 In fact, we remember the intensely vivid, emotional experience
of earliest childhood badly too. Dreams at their most saturated make time
run backward. The effect can be overwhelming. But up-spectrum, where
creating memories is the main business of mental life, we can almost hear
each event we enact tolling endlessly downward through the future as
recollections reenter consciousness over and over and over.
FIG. A . A quick sketch.

These transformations govern daily life. As children mature, they seem

to push their way up a broadly similar spectrum. The same idea can even
be applied to societies as a whole. They have their favorite thought styles
—old ways to think versus fashionable new ways. Thus T. S. Eliot’s
striking comment on Dante: “Dante’s is a visual imagination. It is visual in
the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw visions” (“Dante”).
Ancient literature drifts farther and farther out of focus to modern
minds—not just because old literature is written in old language, not just
(by no means!) because it uses unfamiliar assumptions about society and
each person’s status and value, but also, most important by far, because it
uses different thought styles from those of today. We favor high-focus,
analytic thought. Our elite thinkers cluster around the top of the spectrum,
whether or not they belong there. (That’s another story.) Older societies
favored lower-spectrum approaches.
Trying to read ancient literature (such as the older strata of the Hebrew
Bible) without retuning our minds to lower-spectrum settings is a plain
mistake—like listening to an old recording at the wrong speed, or
watching a movie at the wrong frame rate, in the wrong aspect ratio, that’s
been dubbed. The brain doesn’t change over the centuries, but the mind
does, subtly, as habits of thought and the qualities of consciousness we
cultivate change.
The spectrum, however, can help us grasp what has changed over the
generations. It can help us see why being a small child is so important to
our private mental histories: the world dazzling bright and deepest dark all
around us, full of mystery. “Those fleeting moods of shadowy exaltation,”
writes William Wordsworth, caught up in childhood memories. “Oh! Then,
we feel, we feel” (Prelude, Book 5). The spectrum is the first thing we
need to know about the quality of consciousness. Arguably, it is the first
thing we need to know about the mind in general.
Yet mind scientists and mind philosophers ignore the spectrum almost
completely. They ask good questions, but they ignore good questions too.
What are the mind’s dynamics? How do relations between thinking and
memory change over a day? How does the role of memory itself change,
between its duty as mainly an information source up-spectrum (where did
I put it, what do I do next, who is that?) and its chattier, storyteller role
down-spectrum, supplying remembered incidents, anecdotes, and
eventually the whole rich ambience of dreams? Every day we cross the
hallucination line as we approach sleep. Past that line, our ideas and
recollections become real as they occur to us, in the very process of our
conceiving them. You can see it happen if you watch closely. How will we
understand this portentous transition if our view of the mind is static? And
if we refuse to study mind dynamics over the course of just one day, how
will they help us understand the changes we experience as we grow up? Or
over a lifetime?
These questions have rarely been asked, even though the answers are
so simple, so important, and—in bare outline—so obvious! They stare us
in the face. Every day we descend a continuous spectrum of mental states
like shimmying down a rope—a spectrum of qualities of consciousness,
from the wide-awake, highly focused state in which we do our best
reasoning and analysis, through increasingly diffuse states in which our
thought processes (or trains of thought, thought sequences) are more likely
to be interrupted, and finally into the free-flowing, free-associative
thinking that leads straight into hallucination, sleep, and dreaming. I am
speaking here about the conscious mind, but the functions of the
unconscious mind are mapped out by the spectrum too. Blocking out the
conscious mind’s functions will let us see what the unconscious mind is
doing.

What’s Hard about This?

The facts are simple and obvious, and they haven’t been missed because of
obtuseness. So how have they been missed? How—for that matter—could
there be a new way to understand the mind? How could philosophy,
science, and plain curiosity have missed anything during all those long
centuries of ransacking the merchandise since Descartes, since Plato, since
the dawn of man? How could any bargains be left?
The problem is subjectivity. The problem is our strange position inside
the phenomenon that we are trying to understand. It is hard to track the
rising tide when you are in the water.
One more reason for overlooking the obvious facts is so simple that we
are likely to miss it. As we descend the spectrum into the circus din of
vivid, sometimes bizarre hallucination, our attention grows overstrained,
sensation and emotion fill our mind to the edges—and we are less and less
able to create sound new memories. We don’t pay as much attention as we
should to the lower spectrum, because it’s so hard to remember what
happens there.

Room with a View

The mind is a room with a view: from inside, we observe the external
world and our own private, inner worlds. Mentally, we are stuck inside our
rooms as we are stuck, physically, within our bodies. The view is great—
and had better be, because we can’t ever leave.
“O that you could turn your eyes to the napes of your necks and make
but an interior survey of your good selves!” says the voluble arch-
politician Menenius in Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s masterpiece of steel-
gray heat. “O that you could!”
Many of the largest and deepest questions in philosophy center on this
two-part reality of the mind: a room with a view. The glittering winter’s
dawn outside versus the warmth and light within. Kant builds one version
of his two basic, eternally true “intuitions” on inner mind versus outer
reality: the idea of space underlies our intuitions of the external world. Yet
even before space, there is time, which makes the inner world
comprehensible.
In recent years, however, mind researchers and philosophers have
tended to downplay or just ignore the room in favor of the view. Pure
objectivity is their holy grail, and subjectivity seems suspiciously good
friends with (almost) the worst character in the whole world, the
unscientific. “The history of philosophy of mind over the past one hundred
years,” writes the philosopher John Searle, “has been in large part an
attempt to get rid of the mental by showing that no mental phenomena
exist over and above physical phenomena.”3 This focus on the physical
over the mental seems supremely scientific and has an inevitable
consequence. As Searle writes elsewhere: “This crisis produces a flight
from subjectivity.” 4 A flight from subjectivity: we ignore the room and
care only for the view.
Computer-based ideas of mind have encouraged us to disregard and
cold-shoulder subjectivity, and computer-based ideas continue to dominate
the field. Yet subjectivism has more defenders than it did a generation ago.
Important voices like John Searle’s and Thomas Nagel’s continue to insist
from inside the philosophical mainstream (in very different ways) on the
importance of subjective reality. Today, more people are listening. (Not
many more, but any progress is welcome.) From outside, subjectivism is
championed by phenomenology—a school of the early 1900s, now
reviving.
Still more important is the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan
Lear’s reading of Sigmund Freud, whom he calls the inventor of the
“science of subjectivity.”5 Freudianism is staging a strong though quiet
comeback, on the basis of a few simple, core ideas that not even the most
florid anti-Freudian can deny with a straight face. But depth psychology
(Freud’s invention), and the whole field of subjectivism in science and
philosophy, have been marking time for decades, playing defense. “Tidal
psychology,” “spectrum psychology,” “daily mind tracking” (take your
pick) has yet to be born.
Freud might have invented the science of the subjective; obviously, he
did not invent subjectivity. Mental life is subjective by definition. Private
experience can only be subjective. And the mind creates private
experience. So the science of mind must be a subjective science. We want
neurobiology to explain the phenomena we’ve discovered, but first we
must discover them, and be sure of them.

How Subjective Is Subjective?

If we are serious, we can’t take anything for granted. Just how subjective
is subjective?
Often other people know just what we think and feel—because we tell
them. Sometimes we do it on purpose; other times, implicitly—in words
and with our faces and bodies. “The human body,” writes Ludwig
Wittgenstein, “is the best picture of the human soul.” 6
Sometimes other people know what we feel better than we do. Jack is a
middle-aged man I know who takes a battery of medications for chronic
pain. None relieves the pain absolutely, and the medications take hold and
wear off gradually. On certain occasions his wife will ask, “Are you sure
you took your meds this evening?” “Of course I did; I feel fine!” Jack will
snarl. Then he will march back into the bedroom to establish that she is
wrong—and discover, usually, that she is right. The pills will be laid out
on the pill shelf, untaken. His wife knows his pain level better than he
does.
We know intellectually how other people feel. Still more important, we
feel each other’s feelings; we sympathize—we “feel with.” The reason we
can feel other people’s feeling is that we are feeling creatures ourselves,
and we know how we feel when we say certain things, look certain ways.
In a sort of emotional resonance, we can—under the right circumstances—
feel someone else’s feelings in our own bodies.
It is a philosophical conundrum that what you call red, I might
experience as blue, while I see “blue” as red. Our subjective experiences
of color might be radically different, and neither of us would ever know.
Yet I can see that you smile slightly, and frown ironically, and sneer
thoughtfully, in roughly the same circumstances I would—at least if you
and I are close and understand each other. We describe ourselves
constantly, and we try hard to be understood. Colorful clichés—butterflies
in the stomach, insides twisted in knots, jumping for joy, bored to tears,
bursting with news—help us to be understood. “My heart aches, and a
drowsy numbness pains / My sense . . .” (John Keats, “Ode to a
Nightingale”). Mental life is irreducibly subjective, but we know plenty
about each other’s mental states. Feelings can arc gaps. Feelings do flow,
sometimes, from one body to another.
Of course, our knowledge of other people can’t, ultimately, go further
than they allow, and it can never go all the way. We all know secrets about
ourselves that we have never told and never will. Usually we die, I believe,
with our deepest truths unspoken.
“We are most of us,” I said, “in some kind of agony.” (Martin Amis, London Fields)

We must operate the best we can with the knowledge we can get—in
the world that is. We have more than enough knowledge to go much
further than we have in understanding the subjective world of the
spectrum. We must start our study by knowing what the mind is like from
inside.

Mind from Inside

What I have said about the centrality of subjective experience amounts to

a type of phenomenology, the philosophy developed by the Czech Jew
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). It took off in several different directions in
the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, the best-known
branches to sprout from Husserl’s sturdy trunk.
Phenomenologists strive to understand subjective experience. They
search for an underlying objective reality in subjective appearance. They
care especially about consciousness. For our purposes, their message is
simple. The first law of psychology—all psychology—is to know what
needs explaining. You can’t explain anything until you know just what you
must explain.
What needs explaining then? The philosopher lham Dilman tells us
what is wrong with a famous mainstream philosopher who champions a
computer-centered view of mind: “In his commitment to find a scientific
explanation of consciousness he shows very little understanding of ‘folk
psychology,’ treating its contents in a very cavalier fashion.” (“Folk
psychology” is commonsense, intuitive psychology.) Dilman continues:
“What he needs is a clarification of the concept of consciousness, instead
of an explanation of it along scientific lines.”7

CLARIFICATION OF THE CONCEPT

The science or philosophy of psychology, writes the contemporary

phenomenologist Eduard Marbach, requires “a systematic descriptive
analysis of consciousness.”8 Where do we get this “descriptive analysis”?
The phenomenologist Shaun Gallagher gives this answer: from “a
methodologically controlled reflective introspection.”9 One must
(methodically) introspect.

INTROSPECTION

Emergency! 911! Most psychologists and philosophers hate the idea of

introspection as if it were hell on wheels. Because most research-minded
philosophers and psychologists are (after all) professional clear thinkers,
their first impulse on confronting proponents of introspection is, naturally,
to have them rounded up and shot. (Of course I am only kidding. They
would have no legal means to have them shot. But the point is general:
sentiment on the issue runs deep.) I will describe several other crucial
information sources besides introspection. But let’s not kid ourselves; you
cannot study an inherently subjective topic like consciousness without
introspection.
Phenomenologists remind us that when introspection is required, we
must do it carefully, systematically—trying always to see or intuit
(Husserl’s words) the general laws revealed in our own experience. For
every experience reflects the underlying laws of its domain—if there are
any laws—as every rolling stone reflects the shape of the mountain slope.
Through the peephole of my experience, I can see (if I am sharp enough)
how consciousness must be structured in order to make my experience
possible.
 Introspection, however, is easy to misunderstand. Superficially, the
introspectionist seems to say: “Here’s how my mind works; I infer that
some other minds (or many others, or all others) work the same way.” But
that is not the introspectionist proposition! (At least it should not be. It is
not mine.) The introspectionist is a dance teacher, not a dancer. He
demonstrates a move and then says, you try it! His goal is not to explain
dancing by showing you how he does it. His goal is to explain dancing by
showing you how to do it. Then you will reach your own conclusions. Thus
the introspectionist goes in one leap from the weakest possible argument
to the strongest—from a weak argument based on his experience alone to
an irrefutable one based on yours. It is hard to deny the existence of
phenomena you have seen in your own mind. “Until a person is able to fill
up those concepts with their manifestations in his own life,” writes
Jonathan Lear, “his understanding of those concepts will be hollow.”10

The “Little Room of Man”

The room with its view, the room in which we are confined, is an obvious
metaphor for mind. King Lear, who comes to know the whole cosmos
while staggering drenched over the moors through a screaming black
thunderstorm, “strives in his little room of man” to come to grips with
reality, with the thing itself. As usual, Shakespeare lays it on us exactly.
The room with a view is a deep-rooted metaphor. “I live inside a skin
inside a house. There is no act I know of that will liberate me into the
world. There is no act I know of that will bring the world into me” (J. M.
Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country). The novelist and memoirist V. S.
Naipaul describes his proper topic: “The worlds I contained within myself,
the worlds I lived in” (Enigma of Arrival). He lives within worlds within
himself, worlds he himself has built: his little room of man.
The “little room of man,” the room with a view, is equally a metaphor
for the mind and for phenomenal consciousness—for subjective
experience, that is, the moment-by-moment feel of reality. (For my
purposes, “phenomenal consciousness” is the same as consciousness
—“phenomenal” merely emphasizing that “consciousness” always means
subjective experience.)
 Consciousness is immediate, direct, and intimate—a sort of mental
touching. You are conscious of something when your mind “touches” it
and is touched by it. Consciousness is the feeling created by thoughts
within your mind or by objects or events in the outside world.
We handle everything there is, in the outer and inner worlds, using the
delicate cloth of phenomenal consciousness. Any interaction with the
world is a thing of which we are conscious—therefore, a thing we
experience, a thing we feel. The philosopher David Chalmers writes,
beautifully:
Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experience of the faintest
background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on
the tip of one’s tongue. . . . All these have a distinct experienced quality. . . . To put it
another way, we can say that a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel—an
associated quality of experience.11

Charles Siewert is more direct: “ ‘That noise sounded louder to me

than the previous one’; ‘I was visualizing the front door of my house’; ‘it
looks to me as if there is an X there.’ ”12 Now the quality of
consciousness (I’ve asserted) changes continuously and drastically as we
move over the spectrum during the course of a day. But what is the
“quality of consciousness”?
Here are some examples: “awake,” “asleep and dreaming,” and “out
cold” are rough descriptions of three different qualities of consciousness.
Subjective experience has a different quality when we are awake than
when we sleep and dream. When we are unconscious, it’s not there at all.
“The first task of the science of mind,” writes Hobson, “—to describe,
define and measure polar states of consciousness such as waking and
dreaming—has only recently assumed a serious status.”13
Describing states of consciousness is the only place to start. Awake,
asleep and dreaming, and unconscious are (however) only three states of
consciousness on a continuum. We move from top to bottom of this
spectrum or continuum nearly every day of our lives.
You are either asleep or not. But if we take one step back, to the
moment just before sleep, we discover sleep-onset thought—a hard-to-
know state of consciousness in which we tend to hallucinate as if we were
dreaming. Back up one more step and we discover the free-flowing,
associative thought that occurs when we are deeply drowsy. Take another
step or two backward, up-spectrum—imagine moving from the bottom of
a playground slide to the top—and we find the daydream- and fantasy-
prone, easily distracted state of consciousness that is good for reminiscing
but no good at all for systematic problem solving.
You have one personality, refracted into many states of consciousness
by the prism of mental focus.
One more large step backward and we are midspectrum—no longer
tired, but not fresh either; not at our sharpest, but ready and able to
encounter the world. We can pay attention to a problem, work on it, focus.
But prolonged focus is hard. Only when we have backed all the way up to
the top of the slide, to our widest-awake, most energetic state of mind—
not long after we’ve awakened from a night’s sleep, usually—do we reach
our best point for logical problem solving and systematic reasoning. A
father teaches his children “not just to speak properly but to think
logically, to classify, to analyze, to describe, to enumerate” (Philip Roth,
The Human Stain). These are high-spectrum skills.
Looking at the process from its starting point—from the top—upper-
spectrum changes are usually slow and subtle. We lose our edge, the
energetic bite with which we strike into problems, our taut, focused
attention, fairly soon. But then comes a long, slow relaxation, unfocusing
until the mind starts to loosen up. Then we feel thought start to flow, and
blow sideways in the breeze—not from one thought to logical next
thought, but from one thought to illogical, irrelevant next thought, which
somehow overlaps the previous one as thoughts do when we free-
associate. Maybe the overlap is minor. Maybe we have no idea what it is.
But when this happens, we have upshifted and are about to start moving
faster. We will move from mental acting to mental being.
Memory changes too as we move down-spectrum. We live like
chronicle composers bent over our parchments, looking up to scan the
scene and back down to transcribe it into memory. Memory is no literal
chronicle: our memories can become confused, can be rearranged, can
fade or simply be lost, or can be put down wrong in the first place. But we
are like chroniclers insofar as we live to remember.
Experience is a body of memories we use (on purpose or implicitly) to
guide us. But we don’t experience an event merely by living through it. To
experience an event, we must live through and remember it.
 Surgeons will tell you that sometimes a patient is awakened briefly on
the operating table when the procedure is almost finished, to make sure
everything has been put back in place. But modern anesthetics and
associated drugs ensure that no memories are laid down; the patient will
never recall this little scene. Often he has a breathing tube stuck down his
throat during the temporary reawakening—a sensation that is nearly
unbearable in normal waking conditions. But it doesn’t matter, because no
memories are created, and nothing will ever be recalled; you’ll never
know unless someone tells you, and even then you might not believe it.
Did it ever happen?
Not in your experience. An experience is a memory. No memory
means no experience.
Unremembered “paradoxical experience” (what we live through but
don’t remember) grows more important as we move down-spectrum. We
recall little about the free association that accompanies drowsiness, little
about sleep-onset thought, and dreams are famously hard to recall. Low-
spectrum experience is often vivid and striking but “paradoxical,” unreal,
gone forever.
Experience at the bottom of the spectrum is hard or impossible to
remember. Thus, it tends to erase itself: in the act of happening, it makes
itself “unhappen.” Some of the most vivid experiences we live through
never happened to us, insofar as we cannot remember them.
Thus, as we move down-spectrum, we sink gradually (as the sun sinks
in the west) into a deep reservoir of unrealized experience, paradoxical
experience, which affects the mental world in subtle but profound ways.
This is one of the stranger facts about mind. But it is an everyday fact, not
a rare or exotic phenomenon. We must come to grips with it.
Usually, we oscillate partially up and down the spectrum several times
over a day. Some people reach a comfortable spot for reasoning in the
evening, but they still need to slide the whole rest of the way down-
spectrum before reaching sleep. Different patterns hold for different
people. The basic spectrum facts, however, apply to nearly everyone.
The “quality of consciousness” is, in short, a straightforward idea.
Gradations in the quality of consciousness are easy to accept; we have all
experienced them. A spectrum of conscious states is a simple idea. You
would expect this spectrum to put in an appearance in chapter one of every
introduction to the mind. Yet it doesn’t. We are blinded by the subjectivity
of mental reality, and the paradoxical experience of the lower spectrum.
Ultimately, too, we all suffer at times from the weakness that King
Lear’s nastiest daughter casually attributes to her old father: “He hath ever
but slenderly known himself.” That the mental spectrum should be largely
unknown is just one more expression of the terrible trouble we have in
knowing ourselves.
Long ago, an eminent professor of philosophy interrupted a lecture on
Descartes to relate this story to the class: “A friend I hadn’t seen for years
told me, ‘Do you know what your most obvious personal trait is? It’s this.’
” The trait itself remained a secret; we had to guess. The professor
continued: “I couldn’t believe it. It seemed absurd. Absolutely absurd.
When I got home that day I told my wife, ‘Can you believe what my friend
described as my most obvious personal trait? This!’ And my wife said,
‘But of course.’ ”
Seeing things that are too close instead of too distant to make out
clearly is one definition of philosophy and the philosophical method.
“How hard I find it,” writes Wittgenstein, “to see what is right in front of
my eyes!”14
Authorities agree: we do not know ourselves. So it is no surprise, after
all, that we do not know the spectrum that describes our own minds.

How Can We Know the Mind from Inside?

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an eloquent defense of what has become the
grossly unfashionable practice of introspection. (Marilynne Robinson
cited it in her indispensable Absence of Mind.) Emerson’s advice to the
young writer:
In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation
to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time,—happy
enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly. . . . For
the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns
that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of
all minds.
 Husserl and the phenomenologists make it clear that to give up
introspection is to disarm completely in the face of subjective experience.
To understand, we must know our own subjective experience first. We
must know it in a systematic, disciplined way. Our goal must be
transcendental insight, in Husserl’s sense: to see nothing less than the
shape of mind in the small, local incidents we experience within our own
minds.
But there are other, more important sources than introspection for this
book.
I lean on some of the deepest thinkers and best-informed and most
genuine experts mankind has ever known—the real authorities on the
human mind. First, of course, there’s Shakespeare. Second, and not even
close—though far ahead of everyone else—comes Tolstoy.
Behind these, my choices are idiosyncratic to a point, but hardly
surprising: Blake, Keats, De Quincey, Racine, Rimbaud, Hugo, Hölderlin,
Büchner, Rilke, Kafka, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Jane
Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir
Nabokov, Karen Blixen, Cynthia Ozick, J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul, and
others. These are the people who know.
Wordsworth is in a class by himself, with his “mind beset / with
images, and haunted by itself” (Prelude, Book 6). No one ever approached
him in capturing the numinous light of early childhood. Freud is a special
case too: a psychologist and philosopher of revolutionary depth and
originality, with a great novelist’s penetration into the stuff of life. He is
one of the decisive, defining thinkers of modern times.
I tell my students that those who care about literature and mind must
know the Hebrew Bible, Donne, Sterne and Jane Austen, Coleridge and
Wordsworth, Proust and Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and (of course)
Shakespeare, to start. We are lucky to have a superb group of mind-
mindful novelists at work today: Philip Roth and Martin Amis, Cynthia
Ozick, Jenny Erpenbeck, John Banville, V. S. Naipaul, and J. M. Coetzee—
to start.
Mind thinkers have often turned to literature. The phenomenologists
make a practice of it; Freud and the psychoanalysts, even more so. But I
must explain my special predilection for fiction. An eminent novelist or
story writer must be a superb psychologist, must see straight to the bottom
of human character; that’s part of the job description. (We are talking
eminent novelist.) Unlike a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, or
technologist, a novelist ordinarily has no theory to defend, no
psychological axe to grind. And we trust eminent novelists to take us
where no one else can, into the subjective reality of a human mind.
Novelists have no more data than anyone else. But they have
psychological intuition that the worldwide community has evaluated and
believes in.
Philosophers refer disparagingly to “folk psychology,” the psychology
or philosophy of the average peasant or serf. But what Shakespeare
thought about the mind is not folk anything. It goes as deep as psychology
can.
There is one additional source of information, a powerful one, about
the subjective mind: the language we speak. Listening to language is
crucial to a new subjectivist methodology. This is not the listening of
analytic or language philosophy. This listening understands language as
the hyperconcentrated, 180-proof, distilled essence of centuries’ worth of
thought and common sense about the mind.
Language is our handbook of common knowledge and common sense.
Language is knowledge distilled, far beyond the concentration of any mere
encyclopedia, into words, idioms, ways of speaking. “Feeling” is a
synonym for “emotion.” The mind can wander, can daydream, can drift
off. You can lose yourself, focus, snap out of it, see the world through rose-
colored glasses, or, on the other hand, see red. Information of huge value
is captured here. Compared to the “smart” of human language, a
smartphone is the smartest rock in the pile.
Now we are ready to pull on our boots, head into the mucky, sopping
field, and (as carefully as we can) observe. Then think, and observe some
more.
 Two

Three Thirds of the Spectrum

Our movement across the spectrum is a simple operation with subtle,

important details. We should have the freedom to observe the process from
several angles. Suppose we are listening to an orchestra on a big bandstand
in a park. We are circling around it, looking and listening from as many
different viewpoints as we like. In this chapter I’ll stop at three different
points on the perimeter of the bandstand where the spectrum is,
metaphorically, enshrined.
Everyone experiences the transformations that go with the spectrum.
Everyone travels the whole distance top to bottom. But the road and the
trip differ depending on you. “Top of the spectrum” means your best,
clearest reasoning—which is radically different for a first-rate
mathematician versus the average journeyman second baseman or brain
surgeon. For some people, logical thinking consumes more territory than
for others. For some, the middle zone of brisk, practical dealing is a
comfortable place to linger. Our energy and focus levels determine our
current spectrum position. But easy, natural work costs us less energy than
hard labor. It costs less energy to linger where things come easily. So it is
natural to draw such moments out. Your own spectrum, and your own
method of moving across it, enter into the delicate balance between a
universal pattern on the one hand and personal qualities and habits on the
other.

View 1: The Transformation in How We Make Sense of the

World
In this first view, as we move down-spectrum, mental activity changes—
from largely under control to out of control, from thinking on purpose to
thought wandering off on its own. Through it all, the mind has a powerful
urge to make sense of the universe—to understand, that is, how the
countless pieces at countless scales relate; to assemble enough of the
jigsaw puzzle to see the slowly emerging big picture. Up-spectrum, the
mind pursues meaning by using logic. Moving down-spectrum, it tends to
pursue meaning by inventing stories—as we try to do when we dream. A
logical argument and a story are two ways of putting fragments in proper
relationship and guessing where the whole sequence leads and how it gets
there. This is the logic-versus-narrative axis.

Spectrum Law: The mind is in business to make sense. Up-spectrum, it makes sense
by making logic. Down-spectrum, it makes sense by creating stories.

Up-spectrum, with mental focus high—we might imagine the thinker

atop a mountain on a bright early morning, with a clear head and
commanding view—we are willing and able to pay close attention to
what’s happening around us, to make plans and solve problems. We rarely
think logically in any precise or formal sense, but we lay down mental
tracks step by step to our goals.
As energy dips and freshness fades, and our thinker makes his way
down the mountain trail, we attend to business, keeping our minds on our
work and surroundings. But we concentrate in shorter bursts and attack
problems using less logic and more experience (what usually works?), and
we grow increasingly distractible. We say our minds wander, go off by
themselves; memories, daydreams, and fantasies lead us away from the
task at hand. Further down-spectrum—it’s evening, maybe getting late—
daydreams can engross us completely. (During a long walk, Wordsworth
stops to rest in a forest grove, lies on the ground, and daydreams. He is
“lost / Entirely, seeing nought, nought hearing” [Prelude, Book 1].) And
eventually we drift off to sleep. “Drifting” means motion we can’t control.
Reason and logic are ways of assembling thoughts to bridge the gap
between where we are and where we want to be. Reasoning requires
mental focus and concentration, and our ability to bring it off decays as we
move down-spectrum. But another strategy for building thought sequences
emerges. A daydream or a fantasy is a narrative—often short and weak on
plot, but a narrative. In dreaming, we spin longer stories. It can be hard to
turn a collection of memories and ideas into a story, just as it can be hard
to build a logical path from premise to goal. But minds are in business to
make sense. Logic and narrative are different ways to go about the same
task—opposite ends of one spectrum.
The scientist explains the origins of the universe with a logical
argument. The religious believer tells a story. (When I say “believer,” I
mean Jew or Christian—the only religions I know sufficiently to speak
of.) Only the logical argument has predictive power. Only the story has
normative moral content. Only a fool would pronounce one superior.

STORYTELLING

Notice how satisfying stories are at the end of the day. The bedtime story
is a practical device for calming children, and it works well in part
because we are in the mood for hearing and telling stories when we are
down-spectrum. Jane Austen’s Emma was required for weeks on end to tell
exactly the same bedtime story to her visiting nephews, who were “still
tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from
the original recital” (Emma). They don’t want to know the story; they want
to hear it, as one hears a song. Story hearing is the perfect lead-in to
dreaming.
Some adults read themselves to sleep. Proust did, and he would
routinely dream himself into the center of the story he had been reading.
Story and dream would blend perfectly. “I hadn’t stopped reflecting, when
I fell asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these reflections had
taken a slightly peculiar turn” (À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search
of Lost Time]). Stories are plainly easier to remember than other forms of
information. “There are astonishing feats of memory. . . . Illiterate bards
sing long epic poems in remote Yugoslav taverns; . . . oral historians in
Liberia remember the histories of whole clans and tribes. Their
performances are impressive. How can they remember so much?”1 One
reason is that stories are made for remembering. By following the natural
contour lines and force fields of character and plot, they yield narratives
that are not merely engaging, that we like to hear, but that suit our
memories the way native flora suits the landscape.
 The mythical Scheherazade, the beautiful maiden who sleeps with the
king of Persia despite his bad habit of beheading each new bride at
daybreak, is the embodiment of a basic urge. Each night she tells the king
a fascinating story and breaks off at dawn, partway through—and he
spares her, holds her over just long enough to finish her story the next
evening. Whereupon she immediately starts another story, is held over
again, and continues through the famous cycle of the thousand and one
nights. It is almost as if she is dictating the king’s dreams straight into his
inner self, his passive, wide-open, parched-for-stories memory. She is the
goddess of the lower spectrum.

THEME CIRCLES

I am using the terms “story” and “narrative” in a slightly nonstandard way.

The raw stories our minds invent have no conventional narrative unity.
They have thematic unity. A dream is a loose bundle of scenes that change
abruptly and obviously don’t sustain a plot or characters as any ordinary
folktale or bedtime story might. A dream is more a set of anecdotes
(sometimes bizarre) fastened together, with no more narrative consistency
than a charm bracelet. But when we look carefully at those anecdotes, we
usually discover that they are all about the same thing—all have the same
theme. I’ll call this a “theme-circling” narrative.
The theme is never stated explicitly; the many segments of narrative
are like many segments of one circle without its center point marked. But
the whole circle points to the center, making the center clear even though
it is not marked. And the theme of these narratives, these circles, is
usually quite clear when we stop to think. We might think of such a
narrative as disorganized, without start or finish—like a mature novel by
the eminent V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul himself writes (in a novel): “Life
doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end. Life is always going on. You
should begin [your novel] in the middle and end in the middle, and it
should all be there” (Half a Life). Of course, such a story is organized, by
the character whose life is under discussion. His personality is the theme
of this theme circle.
A theme-circling narrative, a string of anecdotes (in effect) that reads
just as well backward as forward, is in many ways less sophisticated than a
carefully plotted work that builds to a climax. Yet the theme-circling work
has its own sophistication. It points implicitly but with perfect clarity to a
theme that isn’t there—that is never stated explicitly—for a good reason.
The theme is probably an image or emotion or both: an image charged
with emotion, like a sweater with static electricity. Such themes are not
hard to conjure up indirectly, but they are hard to describe explicitly.
An ordinary narrative has themes too, naturally. Its themes might be
images or emotions or anything. But the repetitions in a theme-circling
narrative, each segment pointing toward the same center point, guide
readers or listeners to the theme. Awareness of the theme grows naturally
in the reader’s or listener’s mind as the theme circle progresses. The circle
has its own technique, its own nuances, and must be taken on its own
terms.
Narratives are created in several ways in the lower spectrum. We tend
to store rough notes, not multimedia scenes, in our memories. To retrieve a
recollection, we reconstruct the full scene from our notes—a
reconstruction based on similar memories, but also on what seems right,
what fits. “Re-creation is the key term here,” writes the psychologist
David Foulkes. “Conscious episodic recollections are momentary
constructions out of information left behind by past experience”—in other
words, out of notes or partial recollections of past experience.2
This inventing of appropriate detail is a quintessential storytelling
task. The first manifestation of our switch from logical to narrative
thought is this conversion of rough notes into full recollections. We are
like reporters transforming notes into news stories.

FROM LANGUAGE TO IMAGES

Dreaming is storytelling in pictures. “All of us try to make sense of our

lives by telling our stories,” writes the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz.3 (Of
course not every spectrum point is equally hospitable to the telling of
stories.) “Visualization of the fluid sort that we find in our dreams,” adds
Foulkes, “is a thought process.” 4 He is echoing Freud: “At bottom,
dreams are nothing more than a particular form of thinking.”5
 Why do we think in images and tell stories at the bottom of the
spectrum?
Language and pictures are not simply two ways to express ourselves.
For one thing, we teach children how to speak and write but not how to
draw; in one sense, the deck is stacked. Nonetheless, language is in many
ways natural up-spectrum, where we want precision and conciseness and
often rely on abstraction. Pictures do well down-spectrum, conveying
concrete richness of detail and (sometimes) the nuances that are essential
to emotion and atmosphere.
Nabokov wonders whether a memory of his first girlfriend will
“survive captivity in the zoo of words” (Speak, Memory). Although he can
write sentences like that, he is still uncertain whether words will convey
the sensory richness and mystery of memories so heavy with emotion that
they arc backward like long shoots of grass touching their tops to wet
ground after heavy rain. Nabokov has a strong bias and talent for thinking
in pictures—but he is, of course, a master of words too. (This combination
is more the rule than the exception.) Less widely understood is the power
of pictures to capture elusive abstractions that one intuits before clearly
understanding them. And of course, vision is our primary sense. When we
remember the past, we usually remember in pictures. And we will see that
dreaming is, first and foremost, remembering.
Images have another good property as a basis for thought: it’s easy and
natural to combine them to make complex but vivid composites. I can take
a memory of walking down the sidewalk, add a snowstorm, subtract
people and buildings, add the sound of a fast-approaching police car—a
wide range of options. “A whole Essay might be written on the dangers of
thinking without Images,” writes Coleridge, the poet-psychologist-
philosopher (Biographia Literaria).6 Nonetheless, in fairness, as I discuss
later, the real alternative to language as a form of communication is the
body itself. Language is natural to logical, up-spectrum communication;
wordless gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, ways of standing are
natural to emotional, low-spectrum communication.
We see children demonstrate in their own lives something like the
hypothetical emergence of logic from stories. Children love stories but
gradually make room for logic and nonfiction too. We see a maturing child
able to reach higher and higher points on the spectrum month by month,
increasingly able to manage logic and abstraction. We see signs of the
same transformation in the coming of age of civilizations. Human
literature began by telling stories and hasn’t stopped yet. But along the
way we have developed a propensity for history too.
We have developed an interest in objective truth. Our growing science-
centeredness is one coarse index of the ever-more-focused thought styles
dictated by fashion and preference in a maturing culture. The widespread
beliefs in the modern West, fuzzily defined or just implicit among the
believers, that legal worldviews are more sophisticated than religious
ones, and sexual worldviews more than romantic ones, are more symptoms
of up-spectrum life. In each case, the spectrum is just one tree in a large
grove of explanations. But it’s a sturdy tree, and that’s another story.
Let’s move to a different viewing angle and watch from there. Here is a
second axis of change—subtler, but equally important.

View 2: The Transition from Acting to Being as the Main Focus

of Mind

There are two main facts about the mind: acting and being—what the mind
does and how it is. (Aristotle made an influential distinction, in discussing
the mind, between action and passion, but my dichotomy is different.) The
first pole, mental activity, is, broadly speaking, the deliberate
manipulation of conscious mental states: thinking about something, or
reflection. The second pole, mental being, is sensation and feeling:
feelings, physical or mental. As we slide down-spectrum, our mental
center of gravity moves from acting to being. From thinking about to
sensing and feeling.

Spectrum Law: Up-spectrum, the mind is dominated by doing.

Down-spectrum, it is dominated by being.

We never don’t feel. To be conscious is to experience, to feel. But as

we move down-spectrum, feeling and sensing move from the periphery of
mind to dead center. Let me explain.

ABOUTNESS DISSOLVES
Much of mental life has a topic: my car, your car, where to park, Mike and
Erica, tension in the European Union, peanuts. And much has no topic: I
am dizzy with happiness, in pain, afraid to move, enraged and bitter,
smugly triumphant. “Smugly triumphant” is not the topic of my mental
life, although it could be. I could be pondering smugly triumphant, but I’m
not; I am smugly triumphant. I might be giving a lecture about fear, or (on
the other hand) I might be afraid. Or I could be both: aware of a feeling
called “fear” while I experience fear. But I can perfectly well be afraid yet
unaware of the fact.
It’s not that I’m deluded, not that I think I’m cheerful and carefree. It’s
just that I am wholly, deeply engaged in the sensation or experience of fear
and have no attention left over for anything else—not for awareness of my
sensations, or self-awareness generally; not for whistling a happy tune; not
for anything. By “sensation,” I mean the many subtle body feelings
associated with fear; by “experience,” I mean those feelings and my
immediate emotional responses: perhaps anxiety, jumpiness, mind racing
—or maybe cool resolution.
Whether I am merely aware of my sensations or feelings, or wholly
engaged in having them, is partly a matter of how strong they happen to
be. But it also depends on where I am on the spectrum. The act of thinking
about, of stepping back and examining myself and my sensations, comes
more naturally up-spectrum than down. Down-spectrum I tend,
increasingly, not to think about, but just to be.
Aboutness dissolves—mental topics in general dissolve—as I move
down-spectrum from action to pure being. In philosophical language,
“intentionality” dissolves. Intentionality is the quality of aboutness, of
referring to something. “I believe it is about to snow” is an intentional
state; the belief is about something—namely, the weather. Intentionality
grows dilute and finally dissolves completely as we move down-spectrum.
Believing it is about to snow is an intentional state; being depressed is
not an intentional state. Being depressed is about nothing. It is just a way
to be. You are depressed in roughly the sense that a petunia is purple.
Purple is how that petunia is. Depressed is how you are. (That depression
is not intentional makes it no less important.)
The pleasant coolness of my forearm is not about the cool, fresh
breeze. My nostalgia or my anger (say) have causes, as the coolness of my
forearm does, but they are not intrinsically about anything. Anger and
nostalgia are just ways a person can feel. They are ways to be.
Intentionality was introduced to modern philosophy in the mid-
nineteenth century by the German philosopher Franz Brentano, who got it
from the medieval scholastics, who found it in Aristotle. Brentano,
however, used the old idea in a new way: to distinguish states of mind
from everything else in the universe. All states of mind and nothing but
states of mind are intentional, said Brentano. No mere physical state, on
the other hand—no state of a tree, planet, photon, tomato—can be
intrinsically about anything. It was a brilliant and useful observation, half
true. Only states of mind can be intentional, but it is widely agreed that
some states of mind are not.
Brentano’s answer was wrong, but his question—what is specifically
mental about the mental?—was a milestone. What makes a state of mind
different from all other states? The answer, I believe, lies in subjectivism.
All and only states of mind are two-faced, two-sided, double states. (The
eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel has said so, in a different way.) Your
mental states have an outer, objective side that anyone can see, and an
inner, subjective face that is visible to you alone. Everything else in the
universe, so far, is one-sided, with objective properties only. Everything
else has only outer; minds alone have outer and inner.
Rainer Maria Rilke puts it vividly in the eighth “Duino Elegy”: “With
every eye, Creation beholds the wide-open world. Only our eyes are turned
backward. . . . We can know what is out there only from the animal’s face.”
Animals only look out, never in, and they have no human-style selves to
worry about. We, on the other hand, can never forget or shrug off the room
we are locked in forever.
Brentano was wrong about mental states but right that thought is
always about something, and thinking about dominates the upper
spectrum. But as we move down, aboutness dissolves and mental life
comes gradually to center on our own pure being. Watching the spectrum
run backward, from bottom to top, we can almost imagine that we are
seeing evolution gradually carve out a place in the mind for reflection, for
thinking about, as our capacity for abstraction slowly emerges.
In terms of aboutness, feelings and music are analogous. Music can be
inspired by something—the departure or return of one’s beloved,
Shakespeare’s Tempest, a gentle brook in the countryside. But it can’t be
about any of those things. Music is not capable of aboutness. The notes of
the scale can communicate emotion but not information. And emotions
can’t be about anything either.

THE SPECTRUM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF EMOTION

Up-spectrum, we keep our emotions on a short leash, because emotion

disrupts thought as catnip disrupts cats. Emotion is thoughtnip. Up-
spectrum, we rarely give way to emotion. We focus on our plans, goals,
surroundings. Early mornings are rarely the time for storms of rage or
despair. Nor are we normally at our wittiest or most engaging at breakfast.
(“ ‘Aw, hell!’ I said. ‘It’s too early in the morning’ ” [Hemingway, The Sun
Also Rises].) Down-spectrum, emotions gradually emerge. Daydreams and
fantasies are usually emotional. Many dreams are highly emotional. And
the most intensely emotional experiences our minds ever concoct happen
in dreams. But there is more.
Approaching bottom, in the fullest bloom of pure being, even our sense
of self is shouldered aside. We forget ourselves, lose our selves. We
become mere experiencers. We encounter selfless states of pure being.
States of pure being are dangerous and can terrify us: we are wide open
and have no defense against nightmare. Such states can also bring us to the
very lip of volcanic euphoria—or flood us with deep contentment, or make
us (briefly) one with the universe and show us a spark, gleam, glimpse, or
lightning flash of what is meant by “God.”

AT THE BOTTOM OF THE “EMOTIONS SPECTRUM”

At the spectrum’s bottom we are asleep, or almost, or awake in a daze that

resembles sleep—although we might be active and encountering the
world. Near the bottom, strange states happen. Let’s consider the “selfless
state of pure being.”
States of pure being might seem, if nothing else, simple. Feeling or
sensation dominates the mind. Period. But these states are not simple.
They happen and unhappen simultaneously. They challenge our sense of
the real. For this if no other reason, philosophy of mind cannot ignore
them, as it likes to.
These states are paradoxical insofar as we start to lose our sense of self
and the capacity to form sound memories at about the same time. We
don’t know exactly how a lost or weakened sense of self hurts our
memory-making ability—if it does. And it seems to. But unless we focus
attention on a new memory, think about it, it stands little chance of
surviving. Self-awareness being shouldered aside suggests that awareness
in general has been pushed out of the way. We are caught up in pure being,
sitting back and smelling the roses, not pondering or reflecting, not
making solid memories. We have trouble finding, as well as forming, these
low-spectrum memories. We encounter the problem of overconsciousness.
“Overconsciousness.” Psychologists have never even heard the word.
(Of course not! I just made it up.) But this phenomenon without a name
has always been important. Overconsciousness happens when an exclusive
focus on experience shoulders aside our usual sense of self, self-
awareness, reflectiveness—and makes memory work badly or fail
completely. It happens routinely down-spectrum, but it can crop up
anywhere when abnormal events surprise us.
In overconsciousness, sensation or emotion fills our minds to the brim.
The principle is simple. We have just so much attention to give. If we use
it all on one thing—one sensation, one experience—we have none left for
anything else. We can watch one place or person carefully, two at the same
time less carefully, ten even less carefully. Unfortunately, we cannot
increase our supply of attention to match increasing demand.
In overconsciousness, one powerful, coherent group of stimuli makes
it hard to do anything else with our minds—to reflect on what’s happening,
to track and remember other simultaneous events. Imagine looking
straight at a lightbulb that flashes so bright you can’t quite see it. You
could also live straight through an event that’s so “bright” you don’t quite
experience it—because you don’t reflect on, don’t remember it in the
normal way. Flash burn is something like overconsciousness
(“consciousness burn”), and we might not quite be able to understand
dreaming—or earliest childhood—without understanding
overconsciousness.
TESTIMONY: OVERCONSCIOUSNESS, “CONSCIOUSNESS BURN”

How does overconsciousness occur? How is it described, or not described?

The eyewitness to an accident in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron says this:
“Time seemed to stop and then resume, leaving a gap: in one instant the
boy put out a hand to save himself, in the next he was part of a tangle in
the gutter.” Perhaps the experience is uncommon, but we recognize it.
Coetzee’s account rings true. Ernest Hemingway describes a serious
artillery wound: “A roar that started white and went red and on and on in a
rushing wind. . . . I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out
and out” (A Farewell to Arms). This is a novel, but Hemingway himself
experienced just this type of war wound. Here we read experience
reconstructed after the fact. But the “on and on,” the “out and out and out,”
sound like mental blanks, memory blanks.
I can experience something, as I have mentioned, without being aware
that I am experiencing it. My mind is full of the fresh, raw experience
itself—of being thrown through the air (say) by an explosion: I sense
many things—the rush of air, the feel of falling or flying, disorientation,
the ground in a blur—and have no mind left over to reflect. But without
self-awareness or reflection, with no interpretation of what is happening, I
have no basis for memory—except for memory of the sensations
themselves. I can’t remember what I never knew.
Thomas De Quincey says: “Rightly it is said of utter, utter misery, that
it cannot be remembered” (Salaman, A Collection of Moments). In saying
so, De Quincey cites Coleridge: “I stood in unimaginable trance / And
agony, which cannot be remembered” (Remorse). Philip Roth in The
Human Stain: “Delphine is so stunned that, later, she does not remember
putting down the receiver or rushing in tears to her bed or lying there
howling his name.” In The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis writes with
terrible acuity that newcomers to Auschwitz saw sights they simply could
not absorb, that went unremembered because they were too horrible for the
mind to take in.
In Esther Salaman’s words: “One seldom remembers a moment when
one’s whole self goes into a passionate or violent action.” No mind, no
self, is left over for self-awareness or creating memories. This is
“consciousness burn.”
 Overconsciousness is easy to recognize in traumatic circumstances.
But it happens in other ways too. It happens nearly every day to nearly
everyone, at the bottom of the spectrum.
Some personalities fall naturally into daytime overconsciousness.
“Nikki was explosive, crazily emotional, and could do and say bizarre
things and not even remember them afterwards” (Philip Roth, Sabbath’s
Theater). Crazy, explosive emotion monopolizes your attention. Georg
Büchner’s manic-depressive hero Lenz recounts an experience he had
during a hike through the mountains:
The storm would drive the clouds downward, and rip into them a light-blue sea, and the
wind would hold off and then murmur upward out of the deep gorges, from the tops of
the fir-forest, like a lullaby, like a peal of bells . . . it made a tearing in his chest—he
would stand gasping, body bent forward, eyes and mouth wide open. (Georg Büchner,
Lenz; italics mine)

This is a powerful reaction to the beauty of nature. But we also notice

overconsciousness in portentous yet perfectly normal childhood
experience. “Remember what April was like when we were young,” writes
John Banville, “that sense of liquid rushing and the wind taking blue
scoops out of the air and the birds beside themselves in the budding
trees?” (Ancient Light). The child’s normal experience sounds almost like
the adult’s highly abnormal encounter with artillery fire. A child’s mind is
biased toward the spectrum’s low end, toward vivid sensation.
As a child, J. M. Coetzee believed that the young colored children of
his South African town—lighter-skinned than “natives,” in the old-time
South African view—would be right to hate him for his birthday treat in a
pastry shop that they couldn’t afford. They gathered at the window and
watched. Yet their faces showed no hatred. Puzzle. Coetzee doesn’t
explain, but he supplies all the data we need. Watching through the
window, the small children “are like children at a circus, drinking in the
sight, utterly absorbed, missing nothing” (Boyhood). When sensation and
emotion flood the mind, there is no room for anything else, not even
natural anger or hatred.
Karen Blixen writes in Out of Africa of her East African, as opposed to
European, friends: If you travel into town together, go into a building to do
an errand, and leave the African behind for a while, “he does not try to
pass the time then, but sits down and lives.” Being as opposed to doing.
“Boredom is a sentiment not available to the Hottentot,” says Coetzee’s
narrator in Dusklands, with contempt for supposedly stunted Hottentot
intelligence. But to take satisfaction in just living, in pure being, to have
no concept of boredom—these are lower-spectrum attitudes whose
resplendence we can barely guess.
“Ready for what I don’t know,” says a Philip Roth character. “Not just
making love. Ready to be” (The Human Stain).

PURE BEING AND THE DREAM

Overconsciousness happens to us nearly every day. We all reach this exotic

state routinely. We merely slide and tumble like children down the slope of
the spectrum and find overconsciousness at the bottom, as consciousness
itself burns brighter and brighter in the pure oxygen of the spectrum’s
lower reaches.
Proust speaks of “all these mysteries that we believe ourselves not to
know—and into which we are in reality initiated almost every night” (À la
recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time]). Every night we
experience, in dreams, sensation or emotion so vivid as to occupy our
minds almost completely and leave us no space, or not much, for self-
awareness or reflection or making memories.
“They slept again . . . , dreamlessly, or so they believed” (Cynthia
Ozick, Foreign Bodies). We often believe such things.
Hallucinations come in many varieties. Some are psychopathic
symptoms. But imagine an “ordinary” dream-type hallucination in which a
normal scene appears before you, perhaps with motion and sound—just
like life. You would expect such an experience to be enveloping, to
command your attention. Compare the recollection of a huge red-orange
maple in fall to a hallucination of the same maple. When we hallucinate,
we don’t just recall the memory; we reexperience it. We reenter the
experience instead of merely inspecting it from outside. A hallucinated
recollection is clearly more involving, enveloping, and attention-grabbing
than a typical recollection.
Ordinarily, the hallucination overwhelms the hallucinator—who does
not reflect, “I am now hallucinating. This is not real.” Such reactions can
and do happen, but they usually don’t. Ordinarily, we are taken in.
 Hallucinating usually means dreaming. While we dream, we do not
tend to reflect about the dream (or hallucination) that is happening right at
the moment. Sheer experience—pure emotion and sensation—overwhelms
us, and we approach a state of pure being.
Thus the sleep researchers Inge Strauch and Barbara Meier write that,
in dreaming, “we deal predominantly with events of the moment” (the
ones in the dream), and “these demand our total attention.”7 Total. It is
rare to ponder car insurance while you are dreaming about a magical
faraway landscape. It is rare to ponder the dream itself, to reflect on what
you are dreaming, to consider the fact that “I am now hallucinating.” The
dream demands total attention. There is no room (or not much) for
anything else, and thus we reach pure being, a pure way to be—
overconsciousness, or almost.
“As is typical of most dreams,” writes Hobson, “I am so involved in
the scenario that it never occurs to me that I am dreaming.”8 Consider
similar statements: I am so involved in what’s happening, it never occurs
to me that I am watching a movie, or playing the piano before a large
impromptu audience, or charging the enemy while I fire my weapon and
bullets suck the air all around me. A hallucination or dream is, by its very
nature, a commanding, involving experience that leaves little mind left
over.
Overconsciousness rules out self-awareness. We become pure
sensation, pure emotion. In this realm of pure being, the self dissolves.
That fact is reflected in the well-established nature of the self in our
dreams. It’s been understood for generations that our dream selves are
nearly always at the center of the dream action—but are radically different
from our normal selves. They are hollowed out. They are unreflective
crypto-zombies. We accept all sorts of absurdities in our dreams. We don’t
say, “That can’t happen! What’s going on here?”
We need a “self” character to organize the dream story, but the dream
self is so strange that it almost tells the story of overconsciousness all by
itself. Hobson, again, writes that our dream selves “can’t keep track of
time, place or person, and can’t think critically or actively.”9 David
Foulkes wonders, “How can our awareness of dream events be so vivid,
while we are so little aware of what our minds in fact are up to?”10
Because all our attention goes to the spectacle of the dream, none is left
over to observe the dreaming mind. The first of Hobson’s “cardinal
cognitive features of dreaming” is “loss of awareness of self (self-
reflective awareness).”11

THE EMOTIONS AXIS, IN SUM

As we move down-spectrum, we gradually lose control over thought; we

grow passive. Mental states grow more vivid and enveloping. We
daydream, fantasize, get lost in a maze of free association, and then
wander dazed into sleep-onset hallucinations. At each stage, less attention
goes to thought—to mental doing, organized mental acting—and more to
experience, to pure being. Dreaming is the natural end point.
Overconsciousness is also a contributor to the other great mystery of
forgetting in normal psychology—“infantile amnesia,” Freud called it.
“Days / Disowned by memory,” writes Wordsworth (Prelude, Book 1).
Before some age, usually between two and four years, we recall nothing.
Might infancy and early childhood be states in which sensations
overwhelm us, leaving us unreflective, not self-aware?
Mind science has not yet captured the special phenomenal status of the
lower spectrum, the strange kind of experience we meet there.
The philosopher Brian O’Shaughnessy, however, describes something
much like some of this axis in a Freudian key. He writes that the thinking
process is “the central phenomenal process of mind,” and that thinking
covers a sequence or spectrum of processes, including “creative thinking,
the day-dream and the dream.” “What has impressed me,” he says,
is that a continuity links the most self-determined of these [thought processes],
attending, and the least self-determined, dreaming; and that as one moves along this
spectrum, pari passu the will fades from the scene.12

In other words, our ability to exercise deliberate control over these thought
processes fades. I don’t know of other references in the literature of mind
to a spectrum of mental states, but whether or not they use the word, the
Freudians are most likely to think the thought.
Our experiences grow more intense, our memory spottier, as we move
down-spectrum. It’s hard to estimate how much of our lives we spend
dreaming. But that part plus the unremembered periods that lead into
dreaming equals the segment of our own experience that is not part of our
lives. Toward the bottom of the spectrum we take the most precious of all
substances, conscious experience, and pour it out on the floor. Only by
understanding what happens during those periods, and the indirect ways in
which those occurrences affect us, can we reclaim any of this precious
spilt life.

View 3: The Transition from Outer to Inner Field of

Consciousness

As we move down-spectrum, we become increasingly inner-focused until,

drowsy and with mind wandering, we all but ignore the outside world.
Then we find ourselves beneath the waterline, asleep and dreaming, sunk
into our own memories, in a strange private world where external reality is
just barely audible when it shouts.
As we move down-spectrum, we sink into ourselves, into our own
minds. “I deepened myself,” says Coetzee’s narrator in Dusklands, “into a
boyhood memory of a hawk ascending the sky in a funnel of hot air. The
stillness of the wagon awoke me.” Notice that, in “deepening himself,” of
course he falls asleep.
As this shift in focus happens, the very nature of remembering
changes. Down-spectrum, we can remember things, especially details
about the past, that were invisible or inaccessible at higher spectrum
points. (It’s no accident that Coetzee’s narrator should plunge into a
boyhood memory.) This third axis centers on consciousness of the outer
versus inner world. This is the outer-to-inner consciousness axis.

Spectrum Law: Up-spectrum, we live in the present. Down-spectrum, we tend

increasingly not merely to recall but to revisit, briefly to reoccupy, the past. We sink into
ourselves, out of the present. Yet, paradoxically, the only moment we ever can
experience is now. Experience, phenomenal consciousness, ties us irrevocably to
now.

Of course I can think consciously about the past or future. But I can
experience only the present moment and no other. Even when I
reexperience the past, I reexperience it at this moment, now.
 What seems, perhaps, like a change from a now-centered to a then-
centered view as I move down-spectrum is, in fact, a change from a space-
based to a time-based view. My awareness of time, now and then,
increases as I move down-spectrum. (“Everyone tends to remember the
past with greater fervor as the present gains greater importance” [Italo
Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience].) Recall Kant’s view of space as the intuitive
organizer or form of the outer world, time of the inner.
Tumbling back into the past is a side effect of a crucial daily change in
the mind’s workings. Thoughts and memories can be conscious or
unconscious. It’s generally accepted that the conscious and unconscious
minds exist side by side, although there are deep disputes about the
unconscious mind’s role. We speak about mental events under control and
out of control: we do some mental acts deliberately; others happen to us.
We can decide to daydream. We cannot decide to dream—at least, not
ordinarily. Clearly under control versus out of control has to do with the
conscious mind versus unconscious mind. A conscious mental act is under
“my” control—“my” meaning, as always, my conscious mind’s. An
unconscious mental act happens to me, out of my control.
Up-spectrum, the conscious mind is in charge. The unconscious
gradually asserts itself as we move lower. During the same interval,
memory’s behavior changes. Naturally, all these changes are connected.
Up-spectrum, we use memory mainly as an information source. We
want data, not recollections. What’s the name of the person who just said
“Hi”? Will there be parking in the next block? Why is Jill sulking? Often
the information is ready and waiting. Sometimes it must be created on the
spot. Relevant recollections are fetched; information is extracted, like
metal from ore. The information matters, not the recollections.
As we move lower, memory takes on its more characteristic function. I
am reminded of scenes and events that emerge from memory and allow
me to think back, reminisce, put things in perspective.
And the quality of time changes. Our focus moves from outer to inner.
Time is no longer the ticking clock; it is something you create, you exhale
—as if you were a pianist at the keyboard, improvising time. It is
something you make, to accompany your life. Your attention is off the
outer world and its clocks, and on the natural, varying beat of your inner
world—your sensations and feelings, and the moods and memories that
follow.
 In the upper spectrum, you dance to the music. At the bottom, you are
still dancing, but the music is inside your head, setting the rhythm and
pushing time forward all by itself. In the upper spectrum, time is clear,
tasteless water; in the lower, it has character—just the character you give
it. Hence Nabokov’s wonderful phrase “the texture of time,” repeated often
in his masterpiece Ada. In the right circumstances, time is a fabric whose
texture varies. For the poet Paul Valéry, looking out to sea, le temps
scintille, “time glitters” (“Le cimitière marin” [“The Cemetery by the
Sea”]); time, like the sea, is a mere background that colors everything
else.

BACKWARD IN TIME

Turning away from outer to inner dims the lights of the outside world—
closes the curtains—and the inner world, inside our own room, grows
correspondingly brighter. The growing vividness of memories, eventually
turning hallucinatory, is partly the consequence of darkness everywhere
else. The increased importance of emotion as we move down-spectrum is
also, in part, a result of lowering the lights on the external bustle that fills
our minds up-spectrum. To feel emotions properly—the nuanced valleys
and not just the peaks—we must be attuned to the quiet inner world. Jane
Austen tells us so. In the famous conversation leading to the plot climax of
Persuasion, Anne tells Harville, speaking of early-nineteenth-century
women generally: “We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey
upon us.” She is explaining why women are more faithful than men. For
one thing, she says, we have less to distract us from our own emotions. We
are less able to escape our own feelings.
When we shift emphasis from the outer to the inner field of
consciousness, we sink into ourselves. Sinking into ourselves, we sink into
the past.
Our subjective selves are objects built in time—as a road or a tree is an
object in space. A human life is a kind of village in time, with a thousand
small buildings dotting the temporal landscape, most clustered in early
childhood. Each holds one moment that is hidden away in our minds like
the grottoes, secret lakes, and diamond-clear underground pools in silent
caverns of an enchanted island, of Xanadu. Most we will never see. No one
will. Yet some will be revisited.
Our memories (especially but not only of early childhood) are
sometimes not merely recalled, but reinhabited. Our uncanny capacity to
reenter memories of past time—not merely to know them, but to
reexperience them—is a defining aspect of mental reality. We can
remember a trip to the beach by inspecting the memory from outside, as
we normally do—or we can revisit, reenter, reexperience it, as we do in
our dreams. “How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it),
how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single
individual recollection” (Nabokov, Speak, Memory).
Those eternally preserved moments of past time are locked doors
inside us, and if we dive deep enough, we can find the doors, pick the
locks, and reenter the naked past just as we first lived it. In fact, most of us
do so nearly every day—although afterward, we forget all about it. Pure
being makes for low-quality memories, or none at all.

STRANGE STATES ON THE WAY TO SLEEP

As we approach sleep, our minds pass through strange states that we

almost never recall.
Past the hallucination threshold (in fact, we might pass it, retreat, and
pass it again several times), we are hallucinating, as when we dream. But
the distortions of actual dreaming have yet to begin. So we reenter old
memories as they happened, not in their mixed-up dream forms. In effect,
we have been led, in secret, backward through time into moments we
thought were gone forever. We can’t participate in these moments (which,
after all, have already happened), but we can observe firsthand as long-lost
people and places reappear.
Sleep-onset thought is rarely mentioned in any sort of literature, but
Charlotte Brontë knew all about it. “Sometimes I half fall asleep when I
am sitting alone, and fancy things that never happened,” her narrator says
in Jane Eyre. To “half fall asleep” is a good way to describe sleep-onset
thought. The narrator continues:
It has seemed to me more than once when I have been in a doze, that my dear husband,
who died fifteen years since, has come in and sat down beside me; and that I have even
 heard him call me by my name, Alice, as he used to do.

Notice that this character speaks first of imagining “things that never
happened.” What she is describing, however, is not a fantasy but a
memory, recalled, realized, with hallucinatory vividness “in a doze”—on
her way to sleep.
Coetzee has the same precise, polished knowledge of sleep onset that
he has of every other square inch of the human psyche. A sudden flood of
memories at the theater in the evening: “As if he has fallen into a waking
dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on
two continents. . . . His heart floods with thankfulness. Where do moments
like this come from? Hypnagogic, no doubt” (Disgrace)—that is, “leading
to sleep,” another term for sleep-onset thought.

THE DEPTHS

What happens once we have fallen asleep? The obvious prediction is that
we continue to move down-spectrum, to “sink into ourselves,” until a
turning point where we reach bottom and start upward again. We might go
further, guessing the meaning of “sink into ourselves.”
First we move from outer to inner reality. Then what? How would we
sink deeper? By traveling further back in time.
It is hard to gather data about the subjective realities of sleeping and
dreaming. But sleep-lab studies over the last half century have turned up
useful information. In a 1965 study titled “Temporal Reference of
Manifest Dream Content,” Paul Verdone reported the following trends:
During the first 3.5 hours of the sleep period dream reports referred to elements
encountered in reality in the last week; during the next 4 hours, temporal references
moved back in time toward more remote events . . . until approximately 7.5 hours of the
sleep period had elapsed, when a reversal of this trend occurred toward more recent
temporal reference.13

This is only one study, more a suggestive anecdote than hard data. But
it is suggestive. Perhaps we do continue to move down-spectrum and “sink
into ourselves” as we sleep, until we reach a turning point toward morning.
Still more interesting, to sink into yourself once you have passed the sleep
threshold, once inner reality wholly dominates outer, might well mean to
sink into the past.
I have claimed that we are chronicle composers observing our own
lives, living largely in retrospect. The metaphor shows us the importance
of the growing vividness of experience as we move down-spectrum. In
sleep-onset thought and dreams, the past returns. There we stand again in
the presence of people we love who are gone—or people and places who
(loved, hated, neither) were central to our childhoods. We live through
these experiences, yet they never happened to us, because we do not
remember them.
Still, repeated experiences of this kind—and they happen to us nearly
every night—can change our selves in other ways. They can subtly bend
our personalities by direct pressure or leave us with the haunting sense
that something important has taken place just over the horizon.

A Summary Rule of Thumb

In summary: At the top of the spectrum, traffic flows mainly from

consciousness to memory, to be laid down as memories for recollection in
the future. At the bottom, that flow is reversed. Traffic goes mainly from
memory to consciousness; memory supplies the sequences of recollections
on which dreams are based.
Of course, the up-spectrum mind can and does recollect. But (again) it
makes a disciplined, often abstract use of memory. And as we’ll see,
dreaming is first and foremost recollection—not creating, but
reexperiencing, memories. The flow is so marked that recollections that
would ordinarily have been turned back at the border of consciousness (as
too disruptive or too painful) are allowed to push their way in. Those
disruptive or painful memories find it easier to slip into consciousness in
the lower (less watchful, less disciplined, less self-controlled) half of the
spectrum. But they don’t slip consistently into consciousness until we
dream. Dreaming is remembering.

Spectrum Rule of Thumb: Up-spectrum, consciousness feeds memory. Down-

spectrum, memory feeds consciousness.
 This rule of thumb has a corollary, a related heuristic or useful
approximation. Roughly halfway down-spectrum, the mental tide turns;
the net flow changes direction. Henceforth, the flow of stuff from memory
into conscious mind increasingly dominates flow in the other direction.
And this change of direction has an important consequence.

Spectrum Rule of Thumb: Below the spectrum’s midline, thought is increasingly out of
control.

Fine, but it is out of whose control? Conscious mind notices what is

happening—our rational, reflective self. Conscious mind is always on the
job, even during the wildest, most flagrant dreams. But its part has
steadily faded. The mental time and energy it commands has grown
smaller and smaller.
Once we sink below the hallucination line, however, it is no longer
thought that is out of control. Memory is no longer creating and pushing
forward thoughts; it is creating reality. In dreaming, it is not thought but
reality that is out of control.

AXES, IN SUM

In conjunction with the three axes I’ve described in this chapter—the

logic-versus-narrative axis, the emotions axis, and the axis of outer to
inner consciousness—a series of separate, related ideas arise:

1. The theme circle, or a theme-circling narrative, as a well-structured

alternative to the plot-developing narrative.
2. States of action versus states of being as the two major kinds of
mental states, and the associated idea of overconsciousness, of pure
being, with its connection to poor memory function and dreaming.
3. The routine accessibility of past time and long-ago experience as part
of sleep-onset thought and dreaming—with the rigid house rule that
you must take nothing (or almost nothing) away from these
encounters. But such encounters are, naturally, overwhelming. And if
we are overwhelmed, and forget ourselves or lose ourselves in the
 experience, it’s not surprising that insufficient mental resources are
left over to create solid memories.

We could draw three separate spectra instead of the one “master

spectrum” I’ve described. One reaches from reasoning to storytelling. It
might be labeled “How we make sense.” One stretches from acting to
being, labeled “Energy for doing versus existing.” The last axis stretches
from outer field dominant to inner field dominant and is labeled “Living
now versus living then.” They are all true models of the mind. We can and
should reduce each separate axis to fundamentals. Any intellectually,
scientifically serious discussion will search for basic elements that are as
simple as possible.
Unfortunately, nothing will change the fact that the master spectrum
itself consists of all three (relatively) simple elements overlaid, acting
together. The finished product is, obviously, more complicated than its
components.

PERSONALITY

I have looked at one transformation from several related viewpoints. We

can also see the spectrum’s reality (if not the actual transformation, the
rising tide) in different personalities and personal styles.
Casual, unconsidered observations are often the most revealing. John
von Neumann, the Hungarian Jew who emigrated to the United States in
1930, is often called the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century.
The eminent physicist Eugene Wigner said, “Whenever I talked with von
Neumann, I always had the impression that only he was fully awake.”14
The top of the spectrum, after all, is where we find logical (and, a fortiori,
mathematical) thinking—and wide-awakeness. A first-rate mathematical
genius soars higher in his logical thought than nearly anyone else. In the
spectral (or ultraspectral) region of “exceptional logical capacity,” our
model predicts that von Neumann would also, simultaneously, be in the
region of “exceptional wide-awakeness.” This is a fine prediction, but
what does it mean? Can a person be wider than wide-awake?
Wigner tells us yes. That was exactly von Neumann.
 This sort of anecdote is not data—nothing of the sort. It is one small
sandbag of plausibility, to help support a new approach on the rough,
windswept plateau of “This is not orthodox!” “This is not the way we do
things!” But that is exactly my task: only to make a new approach
plausible.
At the other end is a subtler question: How low can we go, yet remain
awake and aware? Napoléon was a different kind of genius. He knew
warfare, politics, symbolism, big pictures. He knew power and how to
wield it. His favorite topic was literature. Above all, he was a genius at
handling people. “He knew,” writes the celebrated memoirist Madame de
Rémusat, “how to attract and deflect attention, to excite approbation on
one side or the other, to upset or reassure whomever he needed to, to make
use of surprise and of hope” (Mémoires de Madame de Rémusat). In his
classic biography, Jacques Bainville quotes Napoléon as a young officer: I
do “a thousand projects every night as I fall asleep” (Napoléon). His
brilliance is clearest not in his wide-awakeness, but in the depth and
breadth and clarity of his almost-asleepness, when he wanders the mind
meadows of his particular, spacious-at-the-bottom mental spectrum.
Just as von Neumann seemed to push the spectrum upward far beyond
its normal bounds, Napoléon seemed to push it downward, in the sense of
putting far more space than usual between the start of drowsy free
association and the arrival of sleep. Instead of falling straight to sleep, he
could make use of the strange mind states of the lower spectrum. I’m not
speaking of an abnormal ability to be exhausted yet resist sleep. I mean an
abnormal spectrum in which the need for sleep isn’t felt until farther than
usual in the down-spectrum trip. Or, in which the mental energy released
by the satisfaction of “doing a thousand projects” in bed with your eyes
closed keeps a mind afloat and awake that would otherwise have long
since sunk into sleep.
Von Neumann extended his spectrum into the upper reaches.
Napoléon’s extension, or lengthening, of the spectrum occurred near the
bottom. Thus we see roughly the same phenomenon leading to very
different consequences. Proust’s alter ego speaks of his “natural
inclination to daydream” (À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of
Lost Time]). Something like Napoléon.
Jane Austen’s Emma tells us that “a linguist, a grammarian,” “even a
mathematician” is very different from her; she is “an imaginist.”
Napoléon was too—although Jane Austen, English patriot that she was,
would have hated to say so.
“Her brother, she knew, was born to feel” (Cynthia Ozick, Foreign
Bodies). Some people are.
One way of recognizing high-spectrum personalities is to observe how
they handle many simultaneous inputs. With their gift for focus, such
people can often concentrate on what’s before them and tune the rest of the
world out. You can speak to them and they will not hear—whether they’re
hard at work, or just reading a newspaper. Low-focus personalities cannot
do this trick; they cannot tune out music, TV, or conversation in the
background. The problem isn’t noise; it’s information. Noise in itself is no
distraction, or not much, but meaningful noise is impossible for low-focus
personalities not to hear. On the other hand, low-focus personalities are
more likely than up-spectrum types to be tactful and knowing with other
people. Because they cannot shut down their mental input ports, they are
doomed to gather, constantly, the small hints and little clues about human
nature that add up to detailed knowledge of human beings. However
brilliant high-focus types might be, this sort of knowledge usually eludes
them.
Keats had a different kind of low-spectrum genius. He was able to
reach a state of perfect quiet watching, of near-pure experience where the
mind, perfectly dilate, floods with being. The average person is nearly
asleep at the point of reaching such a state. But Keats was able to be (just
be), yet remain awake and aware. And he had exactly the phrase to
describe this state: “wide quietness” in “Ode to Psyche,” “visions wide” in
“The Eve of St. Agnes.”
The greatest of all expressions of the dilate, ultra-low-focus mind is
Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
/ Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs.” In the dark he is a passive
absorber. The sounds, fragrance, and feel of the night take the place of
dreams. “Darkling I listen; and, for many a time / I have been half in love
with easeful Death.” Preternatural receptivity with preternatural passivity
—so passive yet awake that it feels, perhaps, like death. To be “laid asleep
/ in body, and become a living soul” (Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”);
medieval painters show death as the living soul, in the form of an infant,
soaring free of the body.
The nightingale departs.
 . . . thy plaintive anthem fades . . .
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Ponder the expression on Baldassare Castiglione’s face in Raphael’s

great portrait (perhaps the greatest ever painted) in the Louvre. You see a
man with his mind dilate, taking it all in, drinking life in deep, quiet
drafts. Where others find a teaspoonful of life, he finds endless depths.
Everyone has a distinct cognitive personality or thought style—a
cognitive gait—which can change or mature or evolve. Hölderlin writes
memorably, in a short poem called “Ehmals und jetzt” (“Then and Now”):

In younger days I rejoiced every morning,

wept every evening; now that I am older,
I start my day doubtful—and yet
Its end, for me, is sacred and serene.

The stronger your grasp of every second of your life, including the
paradoxical experience at the bottom of the spectrum, the stronger you are.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Only subjectivists and subjectivism can elucidate the deep problems of the
spectrum, or at least inch forward in that direction—because only
subjectivists can see them. Martin Heidegger was a terribly weak man but
a strong philosopher, and he is never more impressive in his superb
astonishment at sheer being (why am I?) than when he points to one of van
Gogh’s paintings of worn peasant’s shoes and tells us, with a shrug,
anyway—he understands. Van Gogh’s painting throbs, pulses, practically
pants out loud with the pain and elation of this monumental is. The shoes
(amazingly!) are, and van Gogh has painted that awe-inspiring fact.
Others, easily a dozen among the greatest Western painters and sculptors,
have done likewise. They have painted overconsciousness, consciousness
burn—an important element in Western art that we have never properly
acknowledged.
 Van Gogh’s paintings of shoes dare us to ask, What does this painting
show?—and to answer, Nothing! Van Gogh was not indifferent to his
subjects, but the way he carved and sculpted his images out of paint
counted much more. All his mature paintings and drawings struggle to
show sheer being. It is no accident that Cézanne should have been
obsessed with the same thing in his own way. What matters is not what the
painting is about (its “intentional content,” metaphorically speaking), but
how the painting is; the way it has chosen to be—striving mightily to
make us see the actual fact of being.
But there is also a less obvious, more powerful way in which these
paintings shed intentionality and reached for absolute concreteness, pure
being—just as intellectual life, especially physics and mathematics (which
set the tone), were mastering ever-higher peaks of abstraction. We see
painters pouring terrific, transcendent energy into the struggle to show
being. Just being in itself, being there, right there before your eyes
(Dasein to Heidegger—although he uses the simple phrase to refer to
essential human-ness). “Your life’s a miracle!” says Edgar to Gloucester in
King Lear, after the miserable, blinded Gloucester has tried and failed to
kill himself. Every last thing is a miracle, reply the painters.
We have not even begun to grasp this bottom rung of the spectrum—
just being; but look, here is something where there might have been
nothing! Astounding. (This something where there might have been
nothing is the basis of Leibniz’s famous, controversial, “cosmological
proof” for the existence of God).15 Above all, the human being is a
miracle. The mind has followed an inconceivably daring and beautiful
path from raw nothing to Percy Bysshe Shelley writing: “I am the eye with
which the Universe / Beholds itself, and knows it is divine” (“Hymn of
Apollo”).
Thus, Cézanne paints Ambrose Vollard, van Gogh paints Dr. Paul
Gachet; Picasso paints Gertrude Stein; Soutine paints anyone; Alberto
Giacometti paints his brother Diego. Each of these images is a
monumental struggle to depict what is undepictable, the model’s sheer
existence—in a universe that is mostly full of nothing. But in the last
analysis (caution!), these paintings are nonetheless about nothing—not
about being or about anything else. They are not about; they just are. They
don’t argue or demonstrate. They are, and that’s that. It is what they are as
objects with paint on them, not what they show in imaginary picture space,
that makes them powerful. They are the artist’s struggle with the fact of
being, with the something that might have been nothing—yet, somehow,
isn’t.
Thus we saw in the twentieth century the mainstream scientists
climbing higher, rung by rung up the spectrum, like high-wire artists
stepping up calmly into a stratosphere that is so far overhead, we can’t
even see it. They are confronted (so to speak—in an inverse sense) by a
vibrant artistic community going just the other way—matter and
antimatter. The artists were deliberately descending the spectrum rung by
rung as far as they could go toward the absolute bottom—not toward pure
abstraction, but the exact opposite, toward pure concreteness, where sheer
being is a miracle that needs grasping as much as or more than it needs
scientific explanation. It has been explained but has yet to be plainly
grasped. (Recall Dilman: “What he needs is a clarification of the concept
of consciousness, instead of an explanation of it along scientific lines.”)16
Thus the spectrum becomes a metaphor for the most dramatic split
between science and art we have ever known.
My task in this book is to assemble the fundamental facts about
subjective reality, show you what they are, and try to convince you that
they amount to a picture of the mind in motion, to the spectrum of
consciousness.
 Three

Every Day

Every day we move down a continuum of physical states from rested and
relatively wide-awake to tired and needing sleep and, beyond, into sleep
and dreams. That spectrum of physical states has a corresponding
spectrum of mind, of qualities of consciousness. Up-spectrum, we are
focused on the outer world, on abstraction and reason. As we move
gradually from alert to relaxed to drained to drowsy, withdrawn, falling
asleep, our mental focus keeps declining. Eventually, our capacities to
reason and reflect burn down like candles to virtual silence—as we hold
tight on our tumbling, plunging, twisting-and-turning coaster ride through
the haunted house of dreams.
But we don’t stop sinking—one of the mind’s many surprises. As we
sink from outer to inner, objective to subjective, awake to asleep, we also
sink right out of the present into the past. Emotion draws us irresistibly.
Love story, horror story—it doesn’t much matter; it is the intensity that
draws us. Rational intelligence fends off emotion-ridden memories, which
disrupt straight thinking. But rationality has grown tired and fallen asleep,
and emotional memories are free to flood consciousness. Our most
emotional memories are usually childhood memories, often early-
childhood memories. Since we no longer inhabit objective reality, each of
those memories is an alternate reality. They draw us out of now altogether,
into the past. So we sink out of objectivity, rationality, awakeness—and
plunge on into the past.
In Chapter 2 I traced the transformation from three viewpoints. It’s
time to braid them together. Up-spectrum, we make sense of the world by
reasoning, abstraction, and informal logic, but that gradually changes, and
storytelling becomes our chosen method. Meanwhile the acting of rational
reflection gradually takes on emotional and sensory color and becomes
being: how you are dominates what you do.
Emotion grows increasingly prominent as reflective thinking fades and
the brightness of memories grows—and, by not creating memories, we
unmake our own experience as it happens.
To the human mind, the world of pure being is just as important as the
up-spectrum world of pure thought—although many researchers would
rather ignore it.
The mind moving through the spectrum is a complex and beautiful
mechanism. It moves from active to passive, present to past—as the
themes that define our lives emerge, circled by stories. But the substance
of these themes is merely hinted at by a Stonehenge of signposts, all
pointing to the same pregnant silence in the middle.
My discussion of the tide in this chapter, and of the native landscape
that is swept by the tide in the next, will lay the groundwork for a more
careful exploration of the spectrum and its consequences.

From the Top

Sometimes we wake like popped balloons, because an unpleasant stimulus

punctures our sleep. Sometimes we are able to sleep until we have slept
enough, and we awaken as naturally as swimmers coming out of the water
up a gentle slope of beach. Sometimes, as we come awake, we lapse back
into light dreams—the kind that are hardest to distinguish from reality,
that leave us unsure whether we have been asleep. Sometimes, at gentle
awakenings, we keep handling the same material that occupied us during
the last dream—continuing to spin a narrative based on absurd or at least
slightly odd settings and characters, although we are awake. Usually we
put these dream topics aside unthinkingly and move on. The material itself
is as fugitive as any dream. It is forgotten in a moment. But occasionally,
we notice with puzzlement what we have just had in mind.
On these unusual occasions we grasp, by reflecting afterward, the basic
character of dream thought. Its job is to accept material from
recollections, the imagination, and sometimes perception, and work it up
into a narrative, into something we might call “counterreality.” Up-
spectrum, the mind’s job is to build a reasonable path from premise to
goal. The low-focus, dreaming mind is the ultimate improvisational
theater.
Why do we dream? For the same reason we think. Freud famously
believed that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish. He meant that a dream
presents a story—often disguised, distorted, or incomplete—of
accomplishing something we want. Jonathan Lear emphasizes that this
Freudian “wish” is a creature of the dream world, intended for fulfillment
in the dream world. It is not a mere ordinary wish that cannot be satisfied
because we are asleep. On its own terms, it is satisfied.
Freud’s answer was, in fact, broader and deeper than the one statement.
Yet it was only partly correct. On the other hand, the idea many people
have that Freud was “just wrong about dreams” is like arguing that Euclid
was just wrong about geometry. Here is what a popular psychology
textbook says on the topic:
Sigmund Freud proposed that dreams were disguised outlets for the inner conflicts of
our unconscious. . . . But given its lack of scientific support, the Freudian view has
been rejected by most contemporary sleep researchers.1

If you want a good laugh, read some modern psychoanalytic case

histories—for example Morton Reiser’s or Stephen Grosz’s—and then try
saying “dreams are not disguised outlets for inner conflicts” with a
straight face. But the best way to learn that Freud was right in this instance
is to observe and think about your own mental life and your own dreams.
Jonathan Lear again: “Until a person is able to fill up those [Freudian]
concepts with their manifestations in his own life, his understanding of
those concepts will be hollow.”2 Lear believes that, in modern culture, it’s
not Freud and his depth psychology of the individual that has become
obsolete; the individual is becoming obsolete.3
Notice that in answering “why dream?” with “to fulfill a wish,” Freud
was doing something fascinating that is often overlooked. He was saying,
in effect, that we dream at night for the same reason we think during the
day. The goals of dreaming are just the goals of thinking. Freud knew well
that dreaming is a form of thought. (“At bottom,” recall, “dreams are
nothing more than a particular form of thinking.”)4 Waking thought
centers on planning ways to get what we need, or do what we want—in
other words, to fulfill our wishes. Waking thought also solves any
problems we wish (and are able) to solve, reacts to the physical
environment, and so on. But on Freud’s reading, the overlap between
waking thought and dream thought is much larger than the difference.
Plainly, Freud’s view is correct. Yet it is also fair to say that the main
function of dreaming is not wish fulfillment. Its main function is simpler
and more obvious. Freud himself might even have agreed to it. I will
examine this function at the end of the chapter.

Waking

I have been speaking of dreams because we start our days by waking, often
out of dreams. But let’s re-join the awakening process itself. Different
people and occasions call for different stimuli to cause awakening.
Ordinarily, it takes us some minutes to come fully awake. (At breakfast: “I
didn’t hear your chair I was so lost in my dreams, didn’t realize you had
stopped talking” [Sean O’Reilly, Watermark].) Sometimes we use the same
word, “sleepy,” to describe our states before and right after sleep. We are
in the same state both times: far down-spectrum, occupied by what’s
inside our minds, neither able nor willing to focus on the outer world. We
must re-aim consciousness from the inner to the outer field—a portentous
operation. “If, following awakening,” dream-lab researchers write, “we do
not abruptly abandon the dream world, but try to retain contact with it,
there is a greater likelihood to recall a dream.”5 If we deliberately “keep
looking” at the inner field of consciousness, the dream world, we are more
likely to remember what went on there.
“He’s scarce awake, let him alone,” Cordelia is counseled in King Lear
when she is desperate to talk to her father but he has just awakened and
needs time to come to himself. When we are awake but not quite, we have
the sensation, sometimes, of looking from the bottom of a clear, shallow
lagoon at the wide-awake world above the surface; of uncoiling gracefully
yet uncertainly upward, like a sea plant. “Early next morning, in the
nameless space between sleeping and waking, he has a dream or a vision”
(Coetzee, Childhood of Jesus). So there is a “space” within which one can
dip back into dreaming—light dreaming; often your actual, real-world
surroundings are part of the dream.
 To come awake means to travel up-spectrum, often with a jolt—from
sleep to waking, and past the hallucination threshold. We journey from
taking inner consciousness as basic reality to treating outer, real-world
consciousness as basic. Perhaps physiology makes it simpler for us to
make the up-spectrum trip than to move down-spectrum. Sheer survival
might depend on our snapping awake quickly. It rarely depends on our
falling right to sleep. Sometimes, in living things and machinery, the same
mechanism that makes it easy to go one way makes it hard to go the other.
Is this true of spectrum physiology? We don’t know.
Still, waking is (to say the least) not always easy. “Like ice forming in
water, memories begin at last to coagulate: who he is, where he is”
(Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg). Saul Bellow’s self-absorbed narrator
in Humboldt’s Gift wants to know “why waking was so convulsive.” “Her
spine felt drilled through; her brain still swarmed with fearsome dream-
shreds retreating into oblivion. She had slept hard and wickedly. Her
dreams were rife with treacheries” (Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies). Her
“dream-shreds retreating”: a powerful phrase, just right. We feel dreams
pulling away like living things, huddling away from us as we reach out
helplessly.
We do know that you cannot force your way down-spectrum, however
much you’d like to. We also know that, ordinarily, we spend the whole day
and perhaps part of the night traveling down-spectrum, but it takes far less
time to come fully awake and move straight up to the top.
Having come awake and reached the spectrum’s top, we oscillate down
and up again during the day. We descend in a series of swallow swoops,
down and partway up, further down and partway back up again. The
swallow swoops continue in a different sense while we sleep: we dip into
deep sleep without much dreaming, ascend to lighter, more brain-active
periods (REM sleep) where most of our dreaming occurs, and then repeat.
We complete four or five such swoops on an average night.
Much research has focused on circadian cycles, in search of normal or
typical patterns of energy and sleepiness. They are hard to pin down;
people’s inner clocks differ greatly. About half the population seems to
consist of distinctly “morning” or “night” people. Beyond that, most
people’s mental energy or focus level seems to rise as they gradually come
awake until a midmorning maximum; then, focus declines until
midafternoon. After this midafternoon drowsiness point, energy and focus
level drift back up again until early or midevening, when the last
downward stretch begins. Thus, there seems to be a natural evening peak,
presumably more pronounced in “night people” and those who prefer to
concentrate on their work toward the end and not the start of the day. In
this view, focus rises, falls, rises once more, and then falls continuously
into sleep.

Office Hours

If the spectrum does bottom out for many people in midafternoon, that
would be around 3:00 p.m. “At three in the afternoon—the hour when, all
over the world, the literary stewpot boils over, when gossip . . . is most
untamed and swarming” (Cynthia Ozick, Messiah of Stockholm). If gossip
is the opposite of focused work, if gossip is the bearing of tales or, in other
words, storytelling, we have just what we would expect if all sorts of
people were indeed to reach a spectrum low point in midafternoon.
No workday schedule could possibly be ideal for more than a small
fraction of workers. Discovering the details of one’s own spectrum—
which times (ideally) to do what sort of work, when to rest—is one of the
great projects of young adulthood. But many people never really get to do
it.
Many office workers would probably do better under a split schedule
than a standard workday: 8:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. (say) would be the quiet,
hard-work period, with minimal interruptions. No meetings, no phone or
video calls; no electronic messages until noon. (Obviously it can’t work in
every case. But for some people, in some jobs, it can.) Then there would
be a break until, say, 6:00 p.m., and a second three-hour work period for
more “reflective” tasks, meetings, and communication. Then everyone
goes home.
Would people be happier and more productive this way? Siesta
countries already have schedules something like this, and it doesn’t seem
to do them much good. But a disciplined first segment is essential. Many
office workers would get more done in a disciplined, early-in-the-day five-
hour period, with strictly limited interruptions, than they do in today’s
eight standard hours. If they worked well, you would send them home for
the day at 1:00 p.m.
 Unfortunately, these are 1920s-style experiments. We aren’t likely to
see any nowadays. But they’re interesting to contemplate.
These ideas—the split day with two work periods of different types—
are all based on the daily circadian cycle, which is well known. But Eric
Klinger sees another cycle governing daydreams.6 Daydreaming occurs in
roughly ninety-minute cycles throughout the day, and as each period nears
its close, we grow more likely to be distracted and to daydream. Of course,
there is always a limit to any period of close concentration, whether we are
up-spectrum and fairly fresh or down-spectrum and working doggedly;
ninety minutes (also the length of the typical sleep cycle) seems a
convincing average value. Yet we are clearly far more distractible, far
more likely to be preoccupied and get lost in a daydream, when energy and
focus are low, down-spectrum, than at high energy and focus near the
spectrum’s top.
Natural cycles are important to any inherently cyclic, tidal process like
the rise and fall of mental focus. But we must treat such news cautiously.
The variation between one personality and another, one job and another—
between, for that matter, Monday and Friday—might easily swamp any
underlying pattern. It’s safe to say that the basic trend over our waking
hours is from top to bottom of the spectrum.

Travels across the Spectrum

“She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with
great rapidity; the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger,
and at the decisive moments of his life.” Thus Tolstoy wrote in Anna
Karenina (Garnett translation), describing the most focused place on the
spectrum, the very top. “The state a man is in before a battle or a struggle”
suggests that we can almost always force ourselves up-spectrum. But we
can never force ourselves down.
We would often like to send ourselves down-spectrum, in order to
relax or sleep. Alcohol and other pleasure drugs exist mainly to break the
iron grip of high focus and let us sink at least a few rungs down-spectrum.
Those who can master the discipline of meditation move down that way.
But it takes practice and does not come easily. Children have been known
to decide they want to sleep and then simply relax their bodies and (almost
immediately) fall asleep. But this is a hard trick for adults to pull off.
No matter the age, what is perhaps most important is that movement
over the spectrum is not just mental movement—not just a decline in
mental focus, self-control, and acuity, and a rise in other ways of thinking,
remembering, and being conscious. It is also a physical change, a change
(as we move down) in muscle tone and tension. (In some sense, downward
movement might also be described as a change in “mental tone.”) The
more we learn about the spectrum, the more we discover how close—and
how often overlooked—are the connections between states of body and of
mind. We need a brain and a body to make a mind.
This is one of John Donne’s most important themes. He is a devout
Christian and preacher and understands body and soul as the components
of mind; and of the two, the body is decisive. “I say again, that the body
makes the mind” (“that the gifts of the body are better than those of the
mind” [“Paradox VI”]).
We see the intimacy of body and mind in countless ways; happiness,
for example, is the greatest of all energy boosters. “By the mass, ’tis
morning;” says Iago the villain of Othello, after a happy night spent
scheming and ruining people. “Pleasure and action make the hours seem
short.” It is not surprising that sadness should make us listless and tired
and draw us down-spectrum. “Commend me to thy lady,” says the friar to
the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, “And bid her hasten all the house to bed, /
Which heavy sorrow makes them apt unto.”
And just as happiness increases mental energy, sheer mental energy
(other things being equal) makes us happy.
Emotions grow gradually more important as we move down-spectrum,
in several ways. As we tire, naturally we lose control. Asleep, we have
virtually none over body or mind. Gradual movement down-spectrum
means a gradual loss of self-control—which affects the degree to which
we are “emotional” in the sense of letting our emotions show. If a friend
makes you angry, at the focused start of the day you are likely (other
things being equal) to get on with your business rather than berate him.
When you are tired after a long day, you are more likely to light into him.
In between, you’re angry and you say so, but you rein yourself in. Big
scenes tend to come lower on the spectrum.
 By one definition, you have become more emotional by moving down-
spectrum and losing self-control. Internally, you might have been just as
angry in the morning as in the evening. But expressing our anger often
heightens it; showing our anger can increase our internal, felt anger.
Getting drunk reproduces some aspects of a swift down-spectrum
tumble. Drunk, most people seem to be more emotional externally and
internally. Often they seem to feel more acutely, reinforcing our guess that
self-control affects not only emotions expressed but emotions
experienced.
We must evaluate the entire spectrum, and that includes foreign
relations—how different spectrum points relate to the world at large. Ours
is a high-focus world. I will write in detail about the power of low-focus
thought, because the low end of the spectrum is the less understood by far.
But let’s not kid ourselves. We don’t think much about it, but our world is
built by high-focus thinking—built not just by science or formal
reasoning, but by the long progress of practical engineering since
antiquity.
Practical engineering is reasoning with your hands. It is up-spectrum
work. We live in a world created by the technology of ceramics, masonry,
glass, metal, textiles, mills and clocks, and hand tools; measuring and
navigating tools; presses and pumps; and paper makers, roads, wheels,
springs, blades, and weapons of every sort. Our world was created by wire-
making, gear-making, and gear-train-making machinery, and engines of all
kinds; by power generators, amplifiers, transformers, power tools,
machine tools, lighting and heating and cooling and refining, distilling,
extracting, synthesizing. The amount of intellectual progress we never
waste a thought on is staggering.

Two Fields of Consciousness

Let’s return to the mind itself—not forgetting its all-but-incredible

accomplishments. There are two fields of consciousness, outer and inner.
Outer means perceptions, of the external world and our own bodies. Inner
means recollections, and ideas we concoct. We can perceive and examine
(metaphorically) things we have recollected or invented—inner things,
pink elephants and pale blue peaches and flying hamburgers—just as we
perceive and examine the outer world.
For many people, visual thinking—including the invention and
manipulation of abstract images—is crucially important. But visual
thinking is poorly understood.7 For many people (few of whom seem to be
philosophers, unfortunately), pictures are the language of thought.
“Dreaming is continuous with our waking reflective ability to think in
images,” writes Foulkes.8 But most philosophers, and perhaps most
psychologists too, are more comfortable with language than with pictures
as a thought medium.
So there are two fields of consciousness, each able to show us facts in
many forms. And whenever we are conscious, we are conscious of both
fields. But at the top of the spectrum, the outer field dominates. At the top,
“reality” means outer, physical reality. At the bottom, or near the bottom
(at the absolute bottom we are unconscious), the inner field dominates.
When we dream, “reality” means inner, hallucinated reality. Of course, we
don’t switch over instantly from dominance by the outer field to
dominance by the inner field. The daydreams and fantasies of the lower
spectrum represent inner reality growing continuously more attention-
grabbing and vivid.
Thus, one way to understand the mind’s transformation as it moves
from top to bottom is that it gradually pulls itself inside out. The two
fields of consciousness, outer and inner, might be the outer and inner
surfaces of a sphere. The sphere has a hole at one pole and is easily
reshaped. Up-spectrum, the outer field dominates the inner. It makes the
outer surface. The inner field, the inner surface of this sphere, is farther
away and less vivid. As we move down-spectrum, the sphere is gradually
flattened: it becomes a disk—outer field on one side, inner on the other. As
we continue down-spectrum, the disk is worked into a sphere again, this
time with inner consciousness on the outside. Consciousness has been
pulled inside out.
But our move down-spectrum is no simple transfer of focus from outer
to inner. The mind does something and simultaneously is something. As
we move down-spectrum, we are increasingly aware of our state of being
—what we sense (meaning the sensations themselves) and how we feel.
 The Middle Regions

The middle parts of the spectrum are often hardest to notice and speak
about precisely. They are the moments that are merely normal. Thus Jane
Austen’s Emma, as she watches the minor, mundane doings on her local
Main Street: “A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and
can see nothing that does not answer” (Emma). Anything she sees,
however minor, will answer the needs of her lively, easy mind. She
watches—is fully aware of—the ordinary doings on the uncrowded street.
That is outer-field consciousness, and it is not quite enough to entertain
her. Instead of turning away and seeking something else, her lively mind
“can do with seeing nothing.” Her own thoughts are interesting enough to
piece out the entertainment. Inner-field consciousness is also a part of her
world, as it is of everyone’s—but some people enjoy it more than others.
Emma, at this point, is somewhere in the middle of her spectrum. And the
scene takes place, appropriately, around the middle of her day.
If it had been later and Emma had been further down-spectrum, she
might just have tuned out the outer world and daydreamed. She might have
turned from outer- to inner-field consciousness—still vaguely aware of the
outer world, but preoccupied. “The girl had been quiet and a little
withdrawn, since she had seen Alvarito. Something was going on in her
mind. . . . Momentarily, she was not with them” (Hemingway, Across the
River and into the Trees). This small incident of temporary distraction
happens in the evening, in the dark of a gondola—as Emma’s pausing
between outer and inner worlds happens at midday. The authors have no
thought of the spectrum. But certain incidents feel right in certain places.
The spectrum emerges in this way implicitly, as a matter of instinct. And
this sort of instinct is part of the large gap between ordinary writers and
great ones.
Sometimes we choose to daydream. (“I drew up a deck chair in a sunny
spot, closed my eyes, and indulged in a little day-dreaming” [Coetzee,
Summertime].) Other times, daydreams choose us. The psychologist and
pioneer daydream researcher Jerome Singer finds that most daydreams are
involuntary.9 They take control of our minds uninvited. “Willy-nilly, he
finds himself slipping into daydreams” (Coetzee, Childhood of Jesus). “He
was haunted by daydreams and such strange daydreams” (Dostoyevsky,
Crime and Punishment).
A daydream often leads us away from the mental path we started on.
We lose control of our thoughts as we descend the spectrum—lose
conscious control. We cede control to the unconscious parts of mind.
(“When you approached her,” writes André Gide of a daydreamer, “her
eyes would not turn from their reverie to look at you” [La porte étroite
(The Narrow Gate)].)
Thus, daydreaming increasingly represents not a pleasant diversion but
a loss of control as we move down-spectrum. Of course, not all daydreams
are pleasant. Singer’s studies showed, too, much “negative emotion” in
daydreaming—“anxiety or anger or guilt, in addition to joy.”10 As we
gradually lose control over our minds, unpleasant thoughts are more likely
to barge into consciousness.

The Liberation of Emotions

The stormier climate of daydreams as we move down-spectrum fits

perfectly with the liberation of emotions. We are apt to be more emotional
when we are down-spectrum and tired than when we are up-spectrum and
alert. “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime,
but at night it is another thing” (Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises). Emotion
spreads gradually into the mental atmosphere as we move down-spectrum,
perfuming and changing it. We don’t suddenly become emotional when we
cross a particular line on the way down. Upon entering a dark room, your
eyes adjust gradually; the objects around you begin to emerge. And
similarly, as you move down-spectrum, consciousness changes gradually
from unemotional black-and-white to a million-colored patchwork—and
nearly all the colors are subtle and quiet, mere color-washed grays. Then,
slowly, your thoughts become a heath in pale winter sun, silvery green and
moss brown dotted with a million tiny white, lavender, and rose florets.
And finally, the brighter stuff starts to appear. Crabapple. Azalea.
Emotions can be loud and hot.
One subject of a study (in this respect fairly typical) sometimes uses
harsh words coolly in the morning, and always regrets them in the
afternoon. His rare outbursts of real anger or temper, on the other hand,
come in the evenings—always accompanied by the idea that he will be
more rational in the morning. In adolescence and college, he would often
spend much of the afternoon practicing the piano, but if he played in the
evening, he played only for pleasure or he improvised and wrote music. He
associates early-morning classes during his high school and college days
with a sort of numb stiffness. Classes were more relaxed and fun as the
day wore on. And so on. Many small things.
Of course he was capable of feeling emotion in the upper spectrum. He
remembers long-ago and modern times when he was miserable in the early
mornings because of the agenda for the day. But on those mornings, he
would seldom say much about his unhappiness. The emotion stayed inside,
bound and gagged, and he would set out without hesitating, passively
miserable but uncomplaining. In lower-spectrum periods, he complained
plenty.
Emotions are fundamental to the mind and thought in many ways. One,
not appreciated sufficiently but important, is the fact that an emotion is a
meaning-independent summary. Because many complex facts of a scene,
person, or recollection can be captured by one subtle, nameless emotion,
emotion is crucial to remembering—to grabbing out of memory the stored
information we need in order to live. And because emotion is a meaning-
independent summary—two radically different things can give rise to the
same emotion—it can bring about the invention of new analogies.
I’ll return later to the peculiar information-processing power of
emotions. Emotions have other crucial properties too; they set thought in
motion by determining our needs and wants, our fears, anxieties, and
hatreds. Emotion runs the mind. Thus the great British empiricist
philosopher David Hume: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of
the passions.”11 And many others. A Philip Roth character says, “If it
weren’t for sentiment, Zuckerman, one person would not pass another
person a glass of water” (The Prague Orgy).
Another important property of emotion lies in creating personality.
Those who are guarded or reserved are in a different personality class
from the emotionally outgoing, from those who are happy (even eager) to
show their emotions. The difference between the two might be in the
character of their emotions, or their spectrum personalities, or both. Some
people have more intense and vivid emotional responses. Some are
especially at home in the lower spectrum, where emotion permeates the air
like the smell of wine or pot or roses.
Your way of showing emotion is clearly one of the main determinants
of your personality. This is one of Jane Austen’s themes. In Persuasion,
the heroine ponders a rejected candidate for her hand:
Mr. Elliot was rational, discrete, polished,—but he was not open. There was never any
burst of feeling, any warmth of indignation or delight, at the evil or good of others.
This, to Anne, was a decided imperfection. . . . She prized the frank, the open-hearted,
the eager character beyond all others.

One feels that Jane Austen did too, and that she was frank, openhearted,
and eager herself. Henry Austen wrote a famous sentence about his sister
after her tragically premature death: “Her eloquent blood spoke through
her modest cheek” (Preface to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion)—“her
eloquent blood” meaning the richness, alertness, penetration of her
emotions. Her color and complexion advertised her feelings, to those who
knew. Reserve was the only flaw (but it was serious) in the personality of
Emma’s elegant, pretty, smart, and talented competitor Jane Fairfax. Henry
Austen’s words echo Donne’s famous “Second Anniversary,” in praise of a
patron’s child who died at fifteen:

Her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say, her body thought.

“Her body thought” is no mere turn of phrase, but a fundamental

conviction: “I say again that the body makes the mind.” If philosophers of
mind had considered the implications of Donne’s doctrine—not the trivial
fact that the brain is a physical thing, but the deep observation that
interchange between body and mind is constant, and shapes our thoughts—
they would have avoided many wrong turns, including (probably)
computationalism.
“Exuberance is beauty,” says William Blake (Marriage of Heaven and
Hell). In some people, emotion lies deep and is rarely visible, or is so
dilute as to be hard to make out. Maybe they dislike spending time in the
lower spectrum, where emotion is let out to romp. More often (one
guesses), their emotions are mostly unsaturated, inherently dilute; or they
are set against disclosing emotions because of their upbringing, and have
thrust them down deep. People like Jane Austen’s Persuasion heroine
Anne prefer those whose emotions are vivid, or nearer the surface: Anne
knows what “open-hearted” people are feeling and thinking, and therefore
has more chance to sympathize. (“Her own special talent: meegevoel,
feeling-with” [Coetzee, Summertime].) To be interested in your fellow
creatures means, furthermore, to react to them emotionally; we are
interested in those who are interested in us. People we can’t read, like
books in languages we don’t know, are frustrating and boring.
Being up-spectrum has personality implications in itself, because up-
spectrum means mentally energetic. How do we understand, in spectrum
terms, the tendency of happiness to make us talkative and outgoing,
sadness to make us withdrawn? Back in Persuasion, Henrietta is preparing
for her wedding:
Henrietta was exactly in that state of . . . fresh-formed happiness, which made her full
of regard and interest for every body she had ever liked before at all.

We have all seen such behavior. And, as I’ve mentioned, happiness

increases mental energy, which sends us up-spectrum. Being up-spectrum
promotes external versus internal focus, makes us attuned to the world
around us, ready to act or react. She is happy, so she feels energetic; that
pushes her up-spectrum and makes her outer-centered. Sadness lowers
mental energy—which sends us down-spectrum. There we grow inner-
centered, withdrawn, and even sadder.
But does happiness really make us mentally energetic? There’s no
abstract reason it should, but it does indeed; we find evidence in language.
“She was jumping for joy.” One might be jumping for sadness, but one
rarely is. “He got into Columbia Law School; is he excited?” Is he eager
and happy? One might say, “I hear you got fired. Are you excited?” But
one rarely does. Happiness makes us energetic, which sends us up-
spectrum, which makes us outgoing. That depressed persons should be
withdrawn, speak little, and rarely go out (should be inner-centered) is
part of the same broad principle that makes us dream when we sleep. The
transition from high to low spectrum is a transition from a predominant
outer field of consciousness to the inner field.
FANTASY

Let’s continue down-spectrum, from daydreaming to fantasies. Fantasies

are hard to distinguish from daydreams; in common use, the word
“fantasies” often refers to daydreams with sexual topics. The psychology
literature sometimes places fantasies farther down-spectrum than
daydreams (without using the term “spectrum”). But this is a useful
distinction: let’s agree that fantasies are a step closer than daydreams to
the strange twilight of sleep-onset thought, and to sleep itself. There is a
lot we don’t know about fantasies, and the fact of our relative ignorance is
an important bit of information.
Fantasies that happen to us (rather than those we plan) are much like
real dreams, except they are not hallucinated. One fascinating study found
bizarre situations in fantasy nearly as often as in dreams. “Bizarre features
are certainly not limited to dreams; they infiltrate the waking fantasy
activity in manifold ways.”12 Let’s look at a concrete example: selections
from one typical fantasy gathered in a Swiss sleep lab. The subjects were
lying in bed but were not asleep—eyes not closed.
I was inside my old school. . . . Then some young people came sliding down the
banister, very fast, a whole lot of them. I then entered a workroom. . . . A miserable
gray structure of pillars. It begins to shake and keeps crashing down . . . but my feet are
underneath. And as I have my feet down there, they become like a spirit that emerges
from a bottle. And then I get to be like smoke, on top.13

These descriptions were collected the way sleep reports are taken in
sleep labs. Some people are surprised to learn that illogical, bizarre, and
fantastic storytelling occurs in fantasies. Recall that these are ordinary
waking fantasies; we are down-spectrum, our mental focus is diffuse, and
we are not energetic, but we are fully awake in every sense. Why be
surprised? And why use sleep-lab techniques to gather fantasies? Exactly
because we recall fantasies badly, just as we do dreams. Fantasies that are
vivid enough to preoccupy us, keep our attention, keep us distracted, tend
to be vivid (not as vivid as dreams, of course)—and thus tend, also, to
create overconsciousness and bad remembering. We do tend to remember
dreams on a regular basis, when we wake up in the middle of them. But we
don’t wake up from, break away from, fantasy in the same sense because
we are awake already.
THE SPECTRUM’S CONTINUITY

The goal is to see the continuity of the spectrum. Dreamlike thinking

doesn’t emerge suddenly when we are asleep. Dreamlike thought is one
way for the mind to be, and it grows increasingly frequent and pronounced
as we move down-spectrum.
In the table shown below, the progression as we move down-spectrum
—from out-of-control thought to sleep—is obvious.

Out-of-control Story- Bizarre

Hallucinations Sleep
thought telling features

Thoughts
+ 0 0 0 0
wandering
Daydreaming + + 0 0 0
Fantasy + + + 0 0
Sleep-onset
+ ? ? + 0
thought
Dreaming + + + + +

But nature in detail is rarely neat and tidy. Sleep-onset thought is

anomalous in some ways: though each separate episode is like a small
dream, the story is often implicit or submerged—and sometimes there is
no story, merely a static scene.
Sleep-onset thought is sometimes bizarre, but less often (it appears)
than dreams. It is a mixture of hallucinations and ordinary thought.

Losing Control over Our Own Thoughts

Before we descend the cliff face of consciousness and the spectrum any
further, what does “loss of control” tell us about the structure of mind?
The great poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge speaks of
“master currents below the surface” taking over the mind, and of “flights
of lawless speculation”—following no rules, no logical laws (Biographia
Literaria).14 We are all familiar with states of mind (or parts of the
spectrum) where thoughts happen to us.
 “C’est faux de dire: Je pense,” wrote Rimbaud; “on devrait dire: On me
pense” (“One should not say ‘I think’ but ‘I am thought’ ” [Letters]).15 In
his soaring, gliding memoir Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes: “Just before
falling asleep, I often become aware of a kind of one-sided conversation
going on in an adjacent section of my mind, quite independently from the
actual trend of my thoughts. It is a neutral, detached, anonymous voice,
which I catch saying words of no importance to me whatever.”
When we speak of losing control, we don’t mean that a sorcerer or
demon is taking over. Clearly, we mean that an autonomous part of the
mind itself, outside our conscious control, with its own agenda (so to
speak), is calling the shots. We mean that the unconscious mind is taking
charge.
And what is the “unconscious mind”? Basically, it is memory.
Memory itself has two main components, for our purposes. (I focus
here not on “procedural” memory for skills, but on “episodic” and
“semantic” memory—where incidents of our lives are kept along with
facts and ideas we have learned.) “Memory” means the stored information
itself and procedures for storing and retrieving it.
The cars in a Manhattan parking garage and the attendants who park
and fetch them are collectively the “49th Street Garage.” The cars are the
memories; they are stored and retrieved. The attendants are the storage
and retrieval mechanism or procedures. One final function of memory is
to maintain the collection in good order. This curatorial activity takes the
form of “background processes” of which we are never aware. The most
important processes allow us to learn by forgetting: by forgetting
distinctions among many similar memories, by allowing them to blend
together, to melt together into single (slightly heavyweight) memories, we
make space, clear up clutter, and create abstract templates or schemata.
I’ll return to this topic in Chapter 5.
Ordinarily, all three aspects of memory, the two majors and a minor—
the stockpile, the storing and fetching, the background processes—are
unconscious. You have in your memory untold hordes of items of which
you remain unconscious nearly all the time. You know the names of the
Great Lakes and the music and lyrics of five hundred Beatles songs (or the
equivalent for another band) but are rarely conscious of them. The
memory processes themselves, the storing and retrieving, are usually
unconscious too.
 Ordinarily, the process of recollection takes place outside
consciousness, “automatically.” Memory hands over the names, identities,
and recollections we need just as we need them. A friend or colleague
walks into the room, a neighbor waves from across the street, and we say
“Hi, Nicoletta.” We step out front, sniff, and think, “Asphalt—that’s right,
they’re paving Barton Street.” When Fred, who works in the next office,
says hello in the hall, ordinarily we say, “Hi, Fred” without telling
ourselves, “I’ve seen that face before, right here in this area—carrying a
coffee mug! Whose could it be?” The name is ready for us when we need
it. Unconscious memory processes do the job.
Countless times each day we recognize pieces of the outer or inner
worlds we live in. We know them and know their names. We don’t
consciously recollect them. We simply find them “on the tips of our
tongues.” To be conscious of a thought does not mean we know where it
came from. The process of recollection is nearly always unconscious,
carried out behind the closed doors of memory. We might picture the
conscious mind as a surgeon at work in a hot, narrow spotlight, surrounded
by the cool, dark nurses of memory, handing him each recollected fact he
needs before he asks for it—before he even knows he needs it. This
surgeon and these nurses work with supernatural intimacy because they
are all part of one intelligence, separate districts of one mind.
In grasping that ordinary, everyday recollection happens
unconsciously, it helps to notice that when we intervene consciously in the
process, we usually mess it up.
I was asked for a particular word recently; I rummaged around and
failed to find it. The best I could come up with was “compass”—not what I
wanted. Ten minutes later I happened to notice the correct word
—“calipers”—floating casually in the full light of consciousness, on the
rippling-smooth surface of the unconscious, like a lounger on a pool raft,
sipping a margarita. As soon as I stopped churning the depths, the right
word surfaced by itself. Which is hardly unusual. We’ve nearly all had the
experience of being asked for a name or fact we know well and—under the
hot glare of that explicit, specific question—not finding it. Usually when
that happens, we have gone consciously looking for the recollection we
need, instead of trusting the unconscious delivery system that works
perfectly most of the time.
 Moving Down into the Republic of Being

One important change as we move farther down-spectrum, toward

enveloping daydreams and the outskirts of sleep, is implied by “loss of
control.” It is also suggested by the spectrum’s rule of thumb that says, up-
spectrum, consciousness feeds memory; down-spectrum, memory feeds
consciousness.
Naturally, we become less disciplined and precise in our use of the
controls as we move down-spectrum. And the entity we are controlling (or
think we are) is increasingly apt to go farther and do more than our
instructions tell it to. We leave the memory tap open longer: instead of the
relevant items only, entire recollections emerge, including information
that’s irrelevant to the task at hand. Within memory, each recollection
suggests others. As our disciplined use of memory evaporates, we see
whole recollections, and then sequences of recollections.
Up-spectrum, the mind is busy acting. Its activities, and the situations
they belong to, are copied down by memory and put down in its storage
racks. Much information flows from consciousness to memory, more than
the modest amount supplied by memory in answering the conscious
mind’s questions. When it needs memory’s services up-spectrum, the
conscious mind opens the memory tap in a controlled, careful way,
withdraws the cup- or teaspoonful of information required, and shuts it
down again.
But eventually, moving downward, we can present a query and be met
by a barrage of recollections, a sequence that ranges on indefinitely, far
past the bounds of an actual response. (By the same token, someone in a
meditative, down-spectrum mood might react to a simple question with a
teeming flood of recollections.) One recollection leads to another. Instead
of just information, or one recollection, or a sequence of five or ten, we
get a continuing flow. In Chekhov’s story “After the Theater,” a young
woman sits down to write a letter before going to bed, “and soon her
thoughts went wandering, and she found herself thinking of many things:
of her mother, of the street, of the pencil, of the piano.”
Notice how many of these changes, which deeply alter our experience
of mind, are simple, natural results of losing energy, losing acuity,
gradually growing tired.
Recall Nabokov’s experience: when he is almost asleep, he hears a
voice speaking irrelevant words and phrases. That is not so different from
the case of Chekhov’s teenager, whose thoughts go wandering. Down-
spectrum, memory takes over and presents long sequences of thoughts to
consciousness. Below or even just at the hallucination line, memories are
embodied: instead of just observing them, we reexperience them.
This is merely a general outline. Different uses of memory are
interleaved at every spectrum level. But spectrum level tells us what sort
of memory use predominates.

Pause for a Tragedy

The growing importance of unconscious memory processes in determining

how we think as we move down-spectrum plays a part in the tragic farce
called “transhumanism.” Catch transhumanism any day now, coming soon
to a university (and then a high school and then a kindergarten) near you.
Transhumanism is the idea that, by gradually replacing more and more
bits and pieces of the human body with computer chips and other exquisite
machines, we will make life better—and it doesn’t matter anyway, because
this is the direction of technology and progress. What kind of pitiful
Luddite would ask questions?
Unfortunately, transhumanism is a formula for wiping out the human
race. Whether you think that is a good idea will determine your view of
the project as a whole. Once we have built robots with IQs of 500, we can
easily build them with IQs of 5,000 or 50,000; what makes you think that
these transhuman wonder machines will keep you around, except as a
houseplant? One near-term part of the program is to implant memory
chips to improve our own organic memories. But no memory chip as we
understand such chips today could replace anything but the uppermost,
narrowest slice of memory—memory as it operates at the spectrum’s top.
There, memory is a mere information supplier. But as soon as it starts
offering entire, ambience-loaded recollections and sequences of
recollections, memory becomes part of your personality. Those sequences
reflect both your own experience and the way your memory works: how
you move from one recollection to the next, what you notice and don’t
notice, what you remember and what you omit.
Assuming you had the local surgeon wire the new chips into your brain
so that you could choose which memory to invoke—organic or brand-new
inorganic—are you sure you would always choose organic when you
should? Inorganic is so much faster and more impressive! And with all
your competitors at the office running off their new chips all the time,
could you afford your old-fashioned predilection for having a personality?
The real brilliance and charm of transhumanism will emerge in the
way it sets human beings against themselves. Like the Soviet show trials
of the twentieth century, in which political prisoners broken by
interrogation denounced themselves, not to avoid execution (they were all
shot anyway and were never in any doubt about the outcome), but to do
their patriotic duty. They believed in the workers’ state! Transhumanism,
by the same token, will turn each subject into the most persuasive of all
voices for his own extermination.
But, as Freud writes at one memorable point in his essays: enough of
these horrors.

The Waiting Room

Consciousness, the “conscious mind,” has a waiting room that is central to

our mental lives. Candidates for consciousness are delivered to the waiting
room (what Freud called the preconscious), where we can feel their
emotional tone before admitting them to consciousness or turning them
away. If they are menacing, we can get rid of them before they enter
consciousness. We know they will come back—and we will swat them
away again.
In what sense are we aware of such thoughts if we haven’t allowed
them to become conscious? We can feel them before we are fully aware of
them, before we inspect them head-on. We feel their contents even if our
eyes (so to speak) are averted.
A routine mental event we have all experienced is embodied in the
exclamation “I don’t want to think about it!” “The sun beating down on the
deck feels so beneficent that I don’t want to admit any thought that might
claim me” (that is, that might claim the narrator’s attention [Jacob
Glatstein, The Glatstein Chronicles]). “I don’t want to admit”—just the
right word. A thought seems to be right there (in mind, in the “waiting
room”), fully formed, patiently waiting for admission—to what?
Obviously, to full consciousness. Into attentive consciousness. I am
already conscious of this thought: I have it in mind, but it merely lurks on
the periphery.
Coetzee tells us the same thing: “An image of Pavel comes back to
him”—Pavel, who has just died. “There is something else looming too in
the corner of the picture, something he thrusts away” (The Master of
Petersburg). He is conscious of this something but doesn’t want to be.
We need a sufficiently flexible view of consciousness to account for
the waiting room. My degree of focus or attention is tremendously
important in determining how information reaches me from outside, and
what I do with it when it does. By the same token, I can be conscious of
something but not attend to it, allow it to sit passively without triggering a
mental response (or much of one) aside from no.

BLOCKED EMOTIONS

Freud discovered that an emotion conceived but pushed away—an emotion

we don’t express, never feel (a blocked emotion, we might call it),
frustrated, smoldering, incomplete—is a lit fuse that burns on and on in
your mind. It is an unresolved dissonant chord.
Bertha Pappenheim (called Anna O. in the famous case history) was
Freud’s most important early patient. Once, a friend let a pet dog drink
water from her glass. Miss Pappenheim was revolted—but good manners
kept her quiet. She suppressed her revulsion. The emotion was conceived,
so to speak, but never felt, never completed, never consummated. It
remained in the patient’s mind, “undischarged.” Frustrated. Blocked.
For Freud, this observation was the start of a journey that took him to a
deep understanding of neuroses and repressed memories.16 Blocked
emotions are central, however, not only to psychiatry, but to the spectrum.
Among other things, the spectrum is a sort of tug-of-war between thought
and emotion. Emotions are increasingly important as we venture down-
spectrum, and one of the most important species of emotions is the
blocked emotion, which goes on expressing itself whenever it can for long
periods, or forever.
A blocked emotion is any emotion I have not got out of my system.
For example: An emotion I would naturally have expressed had it not been
stifled, at the time, by ideas of correct behavior. Or an emotion that I now
believe I should have felt—love, pity, anger—but at the time, I did not
feel. (Maybe because I was a child and selfish, as children are, or because
I was afraid to show my real feelings.) Or an emotion I did experience, but
not fully: a fire that I hid somewhere while it still smoldered. (Perhaps a
childhood scene terrified me, and ever since, I have kept myself from
remembering it. But terror needs time to burn itself out.)
Some of these blocked emotions are stored in memory—the fear or
disgust, say, that I don’t want to remember. Some are merely evoked by
memories: the love or pity, perhaps, that I should have felt and showed,
but didn’t. All blocked emotions, whether suppressed, incomplete, or
unborn, are raw and dangerous and psychologically powerful. In a sense,
each is unconsummated.
Blocked emotions try to sneak into consciousness. They can be
recalled like any other memories—but they find the way barred.
Consciousness tries to keep them out. They are most likely to slip into
consciousness when your guard is low because you are asleep and
dreaming. Even then, a blocked emotion (or the memory that gives rise to
one) might have to sneak past in disguise.
An emotion must be carried on through, like a physical action—like a
sneeze, a swallow, the swing of a tennis racket, a slap on the back, a leap
up three stairs or down four. Most emotions are completed the same
moment they are conceived or immediately after. You are pleased the sun
came out, happy to smell the coffee, angry at the driver in front for not
signaling. All done.
But blocked emotions always find a way to speak. Sometimes they
speak in neurotic symptoms—but this is a radical end case. Sometimes we
let the dissonance into our consciousness, and it resolves and goes away.
But sometimes it cannot resolve. It is bound up with places or people or
worlds that are gone.
Our revolted Fräulein Bertha P.—Freud was treating her jointly with
his mentor Josef Breuer—had a gift for hysteria. She experienced her
blocked dog-disgust as an inability to drink, which left her parched and
miserable. It was no joke. But when she succeeded in locating the dog
memory (she had pushed it out of the way), and she expressed,
experienced, the blocked feeling of revulsion, that emotion was no longer
desperate to make itself known. It receded to normal proportions, and
Fräulein P. could drink freely again. The dissonance resolved.
Ordinarily, neuroses don’t enter the picture. Blocked emotions are
perfectly normal. We thrust a blocked emotion away, as if we were rolling
a ball energetically uphill—knowing that it will always come back to
haunt the waiting room, waiting to slip into consciousness. A blocked
emotion is most likely to make its way past our defenses when our thought
is most passive and (potentially) most emotional—at the bottom of the
spectrum. There, it often emerges as the center of a theme circle—a series
of sleep-onset memories, that is, or a dream.

Strange Thoughts

We can taste and feel the sea before we reach the water’s edge. And we can
feel the lower spectrum—those strange, vivid, dreamlike states—before
we approach drowsiness. How? Why? We don’t know. But the phenomena
are right there in front of our noses and must be recorded.
The novelist and translator Esther Salaman published an important
book on “involuntary memories of childhood”—in effect, brief
hallucinations experienced during an ordinary day; waking dreams. They
are vividly emotional, joyous or terrifying. She writes, too, about a
formidable collection of other authors and memoirists who have described
the same phenomenon. Proust’s “Salaman memories” are the most
celebrated. Nearly his whole literary output is based on those memories.
We don’t know how widespread such experiences are, because they are
hard to recall; in fact, they are hard to notice. But it is clear that they often
verge on the experience of pure being.
The recollection is always fleeting, sometimes joyful. You might
remember an emotion (how you felt) even if you remember nothing else.
You might be overwhelmed by a brief Salaman memory and never
notice. “It was usually half gone before my conscious mind seized
anything,” Mrs. Salaman writes about her first experiences with returning
childhood memories. “Often one notices nothing more than a change of
mood” (A Collection of Moments). Many intriguing mental events happen
when we aren’t paying attention. But if you monitor your thinking
uncritically for a few days, “you will be amazed at what novel and
startling thoughts have welled up in you.” One Ludwig Börne published
this observation in 1823. Freud was fascinated.17 No wonder! Try it
yourself and you might be surprised to find it is true. I did. When these
events happen to me, they pass me by completely, leaving no trace of a
memory—unless I have primed myself to watch for them incessantly.
When you do notice one of these “Börne memories,” you will catch
yourself in dreamlike thought even though you are fully awake; you will
find yourself casually contemplating strange things, bizarre or impossible
situations.
By the same token, we are reminded regularly of the past, especially as
we move lower on the spectrum. We are consistently reminded, with
remarkable precision, of past events that happened surprisingly long ago.
And usually we sweep right past. We don’t dwell on the unexpected
memory. We don’t remember having remembered—as if the sidewalk
underfoot suddenly revealed a chink through which you could see miles
into the molten depths. But when we don’t remember, it never happened.
Then we might look at, for example, the New Zealand novelist
Katherine Mansfield’s celebrated “Bliss,” which is full of brief, blazingly
vivid emotional experiences that take place during an ordinary late
afternoon and evening. A dream equals hallucination plus emotion. The
brief experiences that “Bliss” describes are enormous swells of emotion,
as in dreams, but without hallucination. They are not “waking dreams” in
the simple sense. But you would never mistake these moments for normal.
They are transporting.
Adding up all the evidence reveals that mental life—for some of us,
maybe all—glitters with dazzling foam specks thrown up by shattered
dream waves. Flecks of dream touch us like faint spray far from the
ocean’s edge, as the light diamonds thrown by stained glass do when the
sun shafts align just right. We rarely remember them. Often we don’t even
notice them. (How could we not notice such vivid experiences? In
overconsciousness, again, we are so caught up in sensation and emotion
that we have no attention for anything else.)
“Involuntary memories” are a broader group that include Salaman
memories, but involuntary memories don’t necessarily have dreamlike
characteristics. They are merely recollections that come to mind unsought.
They are routine, the psychologist Dorthe Berntsen believes; and “some
two thirds of all involuntary memories . . . occurred when her subjects
reported being in a nonfocused (‘diffuse’) state of attention.”18 Clearly,
they are a low-spectrum phenomenon. But we don’t know whether
Salaman or Börne thoughts happen to everyone, or only to low-spectrum
personalities. We don’t know whether they happen at any time, or only at
the bottom of down-spectrum oscillations. Mrs. Salaman’s own
experiences happened, usually, when she was “sitting in my study, blind
and deaf to sensations.” Which tells us little. Proust’s are the most famous
of all such memories. The originals, on which he based his monumental
novel, did, in fact, strike him on a winter’s evening as he came home
freezing out of the snow (“Contre Sainte-Beuve” [“Against Saint-
Beuve”]). Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale (and a million other witnesses)
remind us that winter, as well as evening, makes us look inside, to the
inner field of consciousness and the storytelling end of the spectrum.
In any case, “while awake,” the neurophysiologist J. Allan Hobson
tells us, “dreaming is essentially impossible.” Wrong—as Words-worth
knew long ago.

The Great Spectrum Struggle: Lust versus Danger

We are drawn to all remembered scenes of vivid emotion—especially to

memories of pain or violence. Straight vodka to an alcoholic, heroin to a
junkie, equals strong emotion to an ordinary person. We want to remember
and think about scenes that evoke strong emotion. “They were drawn by
the dark curiosity that trawls minds to the grotesque” (Cynthia Ozick, Heir
to the Glimmering World).
They draw us because of our morbid fascination, and innate sadism or
masochism. (We are sadists insofar as we are drawn to other people’s pain,
and masochists insofar as we are drawn to such memories even though we
find them unpleasant or painful or revolting.) Sadism and masochism are
common as dirt, human as breathing. But we are drawn to these
recollections most of all by their sheer intensity, their brightness in the
night sky of memory. The brightest, loudest, biggest, boldest anything
invites our attention. Naturally, our attention is drawn to these strong
memories steeped in emotion.
We are attracted to nearly anything that will make us feel strong
emotion, especially in the sensational world of the twenty-first century.
We are drawn (obviously) to pleasure, and we construct daydreams and
fantasies to feel pleased. We are strangely drawn to unpleasant emotion
too. Faced with violent or horrific scenes, we don’t want to look. But we
must. And then we draw back in horror.
We might feel like Desdemona after hearing the terrifying war stories
of her secret fiancé (soon husband), the great warrior Othello: “She swore,
in faith, ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange, / ’Twas pitiful, ’twas
wondrous pitiful: / She wish’d she had not heard it.” But she always asked
for more.

Return to the Waiting Room

I have already referred to the “waiting room,” a critical function of mind.

Facts are not foisted on us blindly; recollections and ideas are delivered
from memory into a “waiting room” just outside consciousness.
The conscious mind knows what’s in there. We can feel it. And we are
free to accept or reject these “thought candidates.” If they are painful or
upsetting or merely inconvenient, they are booted out of the waiting room
and go back to memory. Memory proposes; conscious mind disposes. But
in the end, we cannot forever evade an important memory, a memory
loaded with a substantial emotional charge. If we refuse delivery, it will
slip into dreams or down-spectrum daydreams. If we refuse even to dream
about it, it will probably reemerge as a neurotic symptom.
Obviously, we feel differently about pain and suffering if it is our pain
and suffering. But not terribly much different. In fact, very little different!
Again, we are ambivalent. The memories are painful, but we are drawn to
them. The phrase “don’t dwell on it!” exists because we do dwell on
embarrassing, unpleasant, painful memories. We dwell on them out of
self-fascination, sometimes prudence (figuring out how to avoid these
things in the future), or a desire for vengeance, but mainly because we get
a kick out of them. Of all vivid memories, these are the most vivid.
 These personal-suffering memories make for intense internal struggle
—to remember or not?—as we move down-spectrum. There are three
categories of trouble: (1) bad, (2) dangerous, and (3) banned outright. Bad
memories can slip into ordinary, waking consciousness, especially down-
spectrum. Dangerous memories can usually enter consciousness only when
we dream. Banned memories are the ones we repress. We try to get rid of
them entirely.
Dangerous memories often involve childhood pain and suffering. They
are the most intense and therefore most frightening. The restrictions
imposed by dreaming—ideas and recollections must be presented visually,
are made to fit an ongoing theme-circle narrative, and could be distorted
by the organic process of recollection when we are asleep—sometimes
cause these memories to appear in disguise. But we nearly always
recognize them anyway.
Yet some of these memories (the absolute worst) are so upsetting that
we will never remember them. We repress them. They wind up stuck in the
mud floor of memory, never to rise again unless we make a point of
digging them out. (“These flashes of illumination disturb him; rather than
holding on to them, he tries to bury them in darkness, forget about them”
[Coetzee, Youth]. “When we start digging around in our souls,” says Anna
Karenina’s husband, “we often unearth something that might have lain
undetected” [Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Bartlett translation].)
But these dark memories aren’t gone. Freud tracked them down, as I
have mentioned, in the form of neurotic symptoms.

BRUTAL MEMORY

Macbeth consults a doctor about his wife. She had urged him to murder
the king and seize the crown, and she helped him do it. But now, that
merciless murder is unraveling her mind and dragging her downhill
toward suicide. Macbeth knows that her obsession with these guilty
memories is driving her mad. He loves his wife. He asks her doctor:
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, . . .
Which weighs upon the heart?
(Shakespeare, Macbeth)
Answer: no. There is no way to “pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow.”
The doctor’s answer: “Therein the patient / Must minister to himself.”
Basically, that was Freud’s thought too.
Our penchant for recollections that trigger strong emotion is just one
expression of our consuming lust for emotion. The most direct expression
is our fondness for the thing itself. Many people love horror films. Many
don’t; but anyone who goes to the movies is probably seeking strong
emotion. Love of roller coasters might not be widespread, but we nearly
all engage in activities designed to flood the senses, from music to sports
to sex. Such activities rarely approach overconsciousness or pure being
(except for sex, in certain circumstances). But they all point in that
direction.
Sadism and masochism underpin some of our greatest artistic
achievements. King Lear includes one of the most horrifically violent
scenes in all of drama: the on-stage blinding of Gloucester. Hugo’s Notre-
Dame de Paris [Hunchback of Notre Dame] and Dumas’s Comte de Monte-
Cristo [Count of Monte Cristo] are probably the most popular of all
French novels. The first makes effective narrative use of the torture of a
beautiful young girl, plus many executions and murderous fighting. The
second includes an unforgettable (unfortunately) account of the most
disgusting (as far as I know) public execution in all literature. Both are not
only popular but great novels.
To reason is human. To long for our minds to be flooded with powerful
emotion, so that we can only feel and can’t think, so that we can’t reason,
is also human. We long for pure experience. We long to lay down the
burden of reason as kings once longed (they said) to lay down their crowns
for an occasional rest period. Reasoning is the crown jewel of human
achievement, but it is hard work.

Approaching the Hallucination Line

We know that to “sink into yourself” is one way to understand the

movement down-spectrum. Consciousness shifts its main focus from the
outer to the inner fields. We need to rest, to leave our bodies in peace, and
(not insignificant!) to close our eyes. So, naturally, we “withdraw
consciousness” from the body and its perceptions of the outer world. The
inner field must occupy us henceforth. And naturally, the inner world
glows brighter as the outer world darkens and disappears.
But if we don’t mistake our memories and ideas for reality when we
are wide-awake, why make that mistake when we are asleep? Why a
hallucination line? Because (among other things) something tells us that
external reality is always there, even when our eyes are closed and we
sleep. Since it is always there, we expect it to be there whenever we are
conscious. When we are conscious but asleep, and the outer field has
blinked off, it’s natural to reinterpret the inner field as reality. After all, we
don’t believe that reality has disappeared merely because we have fallen
asleep. So where is it? Hallucination steps into the breach, and we stay
true to the continuity-of-reality assumption.

Mental Dusk and Sleep-Onset Thought

We have been following the spectrum downward, into mind wandering and
daydreaming—into the world of emotion and sensation. Let’s continue.
As mental energy continues to fall and focus continues to grow more
diffuse, sleepiness begins. Daydreams grow more distracting. Or we stare
out a window, and thinking just stops for a while. (“He sometimes locked
his fingers behind his head, closed his eyes, and emptied his mind,
wanting nothing, looking forward to nothing” [Coetzee, Life & Times of
Michael K].) Eventually, we find ourselves free-associating as we slide
toward sleep and dreams. The fact is not as well known as one might
guess, so, for the record: you will find yourself free-associating as you
approach sleep.
There is a good reason why the French songer should mean both
“think” and “dream.” Songe bien, oui, songe en combattant, qu’un oeil
noir te regarde, Bizet’s toreador sings in the famous lyric from Carmen.
“Think well—dream well—while you fight; a pair of black eyes watches
you. And love awaits.” Thinking and dreaming can blend into each other.
But there is another reason to cite this wonderful song. A moment’s
thought will convince anyone that nobody becomes a matador to get girls.
Less dangerous tactics are available. Many people find it impossible to
grasp that some men want to fight bulls for the fight’s own sake—and only
then for the danger, the triumph, the fruits of victory. The Carmen lyric, by
Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, tells us plainly that soldiers and
toreros are the same breed, insofar as “for pleasure, they do battle.” But
that’s only the verse. By the chorus it is forgotten, and the watching-eyes
theory steps forward.
The boundary between thinking and dreaming is a fascinating, little-
known part of the mind. We all know that dreams are hallucinations, but
the special character of the “sleep-onset mentation,” or hypnagogic
thought that leads to sleep, is not widely known. We know that it is loosely
associative or free-associative or maybe a “stream of consciousness.”
(William James introduced the term “stream of consciousness”;
Wordsworth had already written about “the river of my mind” [Prelude,
Book 2].) But it’s not just that; it is often a series of separate, short-term
hallucinations. “Pensive awhile she dreams awake,” says Keats of his
perfect specimen Madeline, who is half-undressed and ready for bed (“The
Eve of St. Agnes”). To “dream awake,” to experience dreamlike
hallucinations while still awake but on the verge of sleep, is the exact
character of sleep-onset thinking.
I once embarked on sleep onset with the following unimportant but
typical experience. I thought I was fully awake; I believed I was merely
thinking about holding a coffee mug. But suddenly the mug seemed to slip
out of my hand and fall—which startled me alert. I realized that I was
hallucinating and had been nearly asleep.
If you are interrupted shortly before dreaming or sleep begins, your
own account of your just-interrupted sleep-onset thought might surprise
you. “I was at Mr. Schwartz’s front door and he was saying, ‘Why not
come visit on Tuesdays as you used to?’ ” You weren’t thinking about or
recalling that encounter. You were experiencing it. You stood at the man’s
door. You heard his voice. (Perhaps he died years ago.)
Still, you were able to regain awareness and awakeness more easily
than if you had been properly asleep or dreaming.
Had you not been interrupted, your next thought or hallucination would
likely have been (or seemed) unrelated. Usually there is no obvious story
line to sleep-onset thought. But each step along the way can be wholly
enveloping.
Below is a typical (so it seems) sleep-onset sequence. In discussing
sleep-onset thought, I am especially dependent on my own logs. It’s hard
to find substantial examples either in literature or in science.19 I want,
also, to show continuity between sleep-onset thought and dreaming (I will
quote dreams in a later chapter). To do that requires dream and sleep-onset
examples from the same source.
Sleep-onset sequences are a mixture of ordinary thoughts and
hallucinations. The proportion of hallucination to ordinary thought seems
to increase as we approach sleep. In this example, each element was a
hallucination.

(1) Our macaw stretching his left wing. (2) Ping-Pong. (3) The iridescent colors on a
pigeon’s gray neck. (4) Rabbi S. in a car; he is driving. (5) Rain on Yale campus. (6)
The smell of spring rain on campus and on the streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn. (7) C.’s
long, dark, silky fragrant hair; Palestrina, Rilke. (8) A feeling of turbulence in which
many memories are dissolved.

Here’s an abridged guide to the complex associations in (merely) this

one short sequence: I had recently seen the macaw stretch his wing.
Elements 1 and 3 are related: colorful birds. Elements 5 and 6 deal with
urban rain. The underlying theme of this sequence is clearest in element 4:
as a student, I had invited Rabbi S. (a brilliant young scholar) to come to
Yale for a debate on biblical issues. (In fact I was driving; I think it was
raining, but I’m not sure.) The theme is conventional: the comfort and
safety of home versus the risk and excitement of college. Here, “home” is
my grandparents’ home in Brooklyn. Rabbi S. and I were driving between
“home” and college.
At the time that this sequence came to me, I hadn’t experienced the
fragrance of spring rain in Flatbush for thirty years. But the past reaches
out to us. Inevitably we accept its advances, lose ourselves in its embraces
—remember nothing.
Furthermore, my college roommate and I would often play Ping-Pong
in late evening after we’d done some work. Across the quad in our dorm
complex was a small room with a table. The visual, sensory aspect of
every memory seems to be emphasized; “Ping-Pong” was (to my mind)
colorful: a forest-green table, bright vermilion padding on the rackets,
walls of the small room painted some vivid color—amber, I think.
Element 7 took place at college on my birthday, and Palestrina and Rilke
refer to birthday presents from my roommate in earlier years; C. has
something to do with them also, but I’m not sure what. The last, unclear
element (8) had a feeling of mist that brings to mind a sentence from
Dumas’s Comte de Monte-Cristo [Count of Monte Cristo]: “His mind
floated like a vapor, unable to condense around a thought.”
There is far more to this story, but the bare outline is good enough for
now. Perhaps it’s clear that these memories form a theme circle.
One other, very simple example is this single hallucinated scene:

I am swimming in the YMCA pool in Huntington on Friday afternoon, thinking about

the school Christmas play (I played violin in the orchestra) and the chorus singing a
particular song (hearing the tune and lyrics), looking fondly at V. among the girls in the
chorus.

I would have been twelve when the original scene happened. Again, I
wasn’t remembering that swimming pool; I was in it—and knew exactly
what time of week it was and where the calendar stood. I was crazy about
V. This happened during a year I rarely think about; my family had moved
and I had switched schools and lost friends. A hard year. Unhappy. This
sleep-onset thought alerts me to perverse feelings I must have developed
long ago and rejected for their unorthodoxy, for not fitting my agreed line.
In fact, that long-ago year wasn’t all bad. I wouldn’t have believed that I
had a memory of anything like this scene, in anything like this degree of
detail, until I recorded this sleep-onset event.

Dreaming Is Remembering

Rappelling down the cliff face of consciousness leads us, at last, to

dreaming and a simple truth. The truth is neither new nor difficult, but it is
important.
When we dream, the inner field of consciousness (imagination and
memory) dominates the outer field. Memory feeds consciousness, and we
are at the bottom of our ability to control consciousness, to decide which
thoughts enter and which are turned away. All this means, in sum, that
dreaming is remembering, unconstrained. Ideas and speculations appear
too, expressed in visual form, but remembering dominates dreams. Freud
knew it: dreaming, he wrote, is simply “another kind of remembering.”20
“The moment I had fallen asleep I was woken up again by a great
feeling of terror” (Karen Blixen, Out of Africa). She has remembered
something she had refused to think about during the day: a defenseless
young gazelle, bound, being offered for sale by children at the roadside.
She had seen it but refused to think about it. She had set the emotion
briskly aside, added a blocked emotion to memory. Asleep, with her guard
lowered, she admits it to consciousness as she dreams. She is remembering
the emotion she had ignored.
Anna Karenina was unfaithful to her husband. Whenever she thought
about it, “she was overcome with horror and drove those thoughts away”—
just as Karen Blixen drove away her thoughts about the helpless gazelle.
“But in her dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her
position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness” (Tolstoy, Anna
Karenina, Bartlett translation). Dreaming is remembering.

Spectrum Law: Dreaming is remembering, out of control.

We start with recent memories and work our way back. In the process,
we discover what truly interests or worries us. We are good at rejecting
unpleasant thoughts, keeping them out of waking consciousness. Even in
dreams we never surrender completely; dreams tend to be haunted by
“dysphoria,” unfocused unhappiness. The waiting room holds unpleasant
memories that we can feel but will not allow into consciousness, even
when we dream. Asleep, however, we are not careful enough to be
consistent. We let dangerous thoughts slip by. We have nightmares.
Now the remorseless engine of memory is in charge. The doors of
memory are wide open and we feel the night breeze playing. We can no
longer protect ourselves from dangerous or frightening thoughts. A bad
memory can be on us like a famished bear out of the dark before we can
turn and fight. “A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, / And yet I
would not sleep,” says Banquo, Macbeth’s close friend and fellow warrior.
He is exhausted. He is courageous. But he is afraid of sleep. He anticipates
bad dreams; he can feel them coming. “Merciful powers,” he continues,
“Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose!”
(Macbeth).
Other people can guard your body, but no one can guard your mind. By
allowing yourself to fall asleep, you are standing down, relaxing your own
guard almost completely and hoping nothing bad will happen. But
sometimes you know it will.
 In dreaming, the conscious mind has left the memory tap on, and
recollections flow. One thing leads to another. Frightening or painful
memories approach. Up-spectrum, the conscious mind would feel a
dangerous memory thread and shut it down. But in dreaming, the gates are
open. All the conscious mind can do is to improvise a continuous narrative
(or try to) using the material it is given.
Hobson summarizes dream thought as “illogical, bizarre.”21 A widely
held idea, which (I believe) is not quite true. Our conscious thought when
we dream, as when we are awake, is a rational attempt to make sense of
reality. But what is reality? When we sleep, the inner field of
consciousness is reality—and presents us with a series of recollections
that probably make no sense as a sequence and might each be damaged or
distorted. (Damaged or distorted because of the state of our sleeping
brains, or the tendency of memory—out of control—to present several
recollections superimposed.) In short, it’s not that our thoughts are
irrational and bizarre when we dream. Reality is irrational and bizarre!
Making sense of this reality is a stiff assignment, but we do our best. We
do it by inventing theme-circle narratives—because at the spectrum’s
bottom, that is our technique for making sense of the world.
In another sense, too, dreams are not illogical. As strange as the
narrative might be, the underlying emotions are usually clear when we are
awake and thinking about the dream. The theme of a dream is an emotion,
or an emotion-steeped image. Sometimes it’s an unpleasant or painful
emotion that we refuse to think about when we are awake. But when we
dream we are careless, and our reach into memory goes far. That
combination brings to dream consciousness emotions that bother us, that
we ordinarily refuse to think about.
In looking at the dream itself, we note a point of agreement between
Freud and the anti-Freud, J. A. Hobson. (There are many anti-Freuds, but
Hobson will do for now.) Dreams are concrete and visual. In dreams we
have no ability to invent language, although we can recall and understand
it. We can invent pictures. Dreams speak in images.
Dreams, however, can’t simply present disembodied emotions. A
painful emotion gathers pictures to make its point, and the pictures might
be illogical or confusing or absurd. But we can usually detect the
underlying emotion when we are awake and able to reflect—when we have
our selves back. And those emotions tell us the truth about our minds.
 The psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz spends his time analyzing other
people’s dreams, but he also reports one of his own.22 In this dream he
reaches for a small lizard disappearing between two rocks into the earth,
but he cannot catch it. It’s gone. When he wakes, four letters linger in his
mind along with the image: S, I, D, A. He works out the dream’s meaning
by free-associating from the remembered fragments. Years earlier, as a
young clinician, he had met with a patient who refused to be treated for a
disease associated with AIDS. He had tried to convince the man to accept
treatment and had convinced him to take better care of himself—but only
by heading off early for a holiday in Rio, not by checking into a hospital.
Several months later the patient died. This dream, decades later, was an
image of that decades-ago, deeply upsetting event and the dreamer’s
reaction.
The AIDS patient had grown up on a peninsula at the tip of Cornwall,
called the Lizard—the southernmost point in England. The Spanish
Armada had first been sighted, the patient had remarked, from a field next
to his childhood home. SIDA is Spanish for “AIDS.” The young
psychoanalyst had tried his best to save the man—who had slipped
through his fingers, who was dead and in his grave. There is more to this
simple dream. But its eloquence (meaning Grosz’s eloquence, of course)
should be clear.
Grosz’s unconscious wants to remind him: decades ago you lost that
patient, whom you might have saved. (These are not facts; they are just
unconscious mutterings.) But dreams can’t speak English. They must
speak pictures. The barely escaped lizard darting underground, into the
grave, is the result.
Old stories are like dreams. They speak concretely, visually, in images.
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a wild thunderstorm is understood by
Cassius as the image of Caesar himself, who is dangerous and must be got
rid of. I could, says Cassius to Casca, “name to thee a man / Most like this
dreadful night, / That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars.”
This passage is an introduction to a still more remarkable one in the
Hebrew Bible—one of the best-known in Western literature, and least well
understood. Because we read it at the wrong spectrum setting, we do not
understand it. Intellectual and literary habits and fashions have changed
decisively, leaving us to understand the words but not the sense. (I have
discussed the story in detail elsewhere.)23
Moses has escaped from Egypt to the calm of provincial Midian,
where he is tending his father-in-law’s flocks in the wilderness. He is
brought up short by one of literature’s most famous visions: a burning
bush that is not consumed. It simply burns on and on. A divine voice from
the flames tells Moses he must confront the most powerful man in the
world, the emperor of Egypt, and demand freedom for his enslaved fellow
Jews to make their way back to their ancestral homeland.
If the majestic vision is intended merely to stop Moses in his tracks
and shake him so deeply that anything is possible, it does its job. But that’s
only part of its purpose. Its most basic task is to reveal Moses to himself,
show him the man he really is, convince him that there is no hiding from
his own sense of justice.
The burning bush is a picture of Moses’s character, a visual synopsis of
his psyche. Moses himself is the thornbush aflame with passion that never
burns itself out. (Passions burn in Hebrew as well as English.) We know
Moses is a passionate man: he was forced to escape Egypt because he had
come upon an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, and in his towering rage he had
killed the Egyptian with one stiff blow of his heavy stick. In Egypt he is
now wanted for murder. At the same time, a thornbush is the lowliest of
trees, worthless desert scrub (ordinarily, it would burn to ash in moments)
—and Moses is called the humblest man on earth (Numbers 12:3). He
describes himself as incapable of confronting the pharaoh and leading
Israel. But his unwavering passion makes him powerful and dangerous,
like the burning bush.
The vision is a prediction also, not just a statement of fact. It has no
proper end—the bush burns on—and Moses himself dies without reaching
his goal, overlooking the land of Israel without ever having set foot there.
(This is one of the Bible’s most remarkable comments on the nature of
human passion.) Moses dies with his passion unconsummated. Like the
bush itself, he never calms down, cools off, comes to rest.
Thinking in images is more natural to biblical civilization than to us;
words in the Bible are most important as bearers of images. (The images
of the Hebrew Bible—from the dove with the olive branch in its beak to
the lion lying down with the lamb, the chariot of fire, the writing on the
wall, and many others—are the basic images of Western art and literature.)
Images occur in the Bible not to underline or decorate a point; they are the
point. Words are only the medium in which they are presented. Thus, too,
for example, we fail to grasp that an all-night fight with an angel and a
vivid dream are virtually the same thing. The dividing line between dream
and reality is far more lightly drawn in the Bible than it is for us. The
Bible’s world is a down-spectrum world. The visual, subjective reality of
the lower spectrum is the Bible’s native landscape—and the theme circle
is its basic narrative form.
One of the most striking things about dreaming is that we don’t have
more nightmares than we do. Anyone who’s ever had even one has some
terrifying memories. Those bad thoughts are able to push their way into
consciousness when we are dreaming, when focus and control are at their
lowest. And our inability to control memory when we are dreaming
increases the likelihood that we will pull up a monster memory from the
deep. “Don’t dwell on it”; we are drawn to violent memories, even as they
repel us.

Why Dreams Predict the Future

Shakespeare’s Duke of Clarence is the future king’s brother in Richard III.

The future king is a murderer. Naturally, his brother isn’t eager to
acknowledge that fact. He tells everybody, including himself, that Richard
loves him. Clarence knows that Richard would murder him without a
second thought, but refuses to admit it—least of all to himself. He
conceives the feeling that Richard will murder him as a matter of course—
but he rejects it, refuses to feel it, and adds these blocked emotions to his
unconscious mind.
As he descends the spectrum, Clarence’s mind (like all minds) opens
up, drops its guard. Clarence dreams what he has on his mind but has
banned from his waking thought. He feels, in his dream, the emotions
(terror, hopelessness, shame) that his conscious self refused to feel. He
feels that Richard will kill him.
And, of course, Richard does.
Why do dreams predict the future? Because they tell us truths we know
but are not brave enough to acknowledge. They don’t so much foretell the
future as remind us what it was always going to be. “I feared those dreams.
They swarmed like reenactments of something foretold” (Cynthia Ozick,
Heir to the Glimmering World).

The Only Protection

The mind does protect us from the frightening content of dreams, by the
only means it has: making us (or letting us) forget. There is nothing else it
can do. On the other hand, the mind can reverse time, unwrite unreality,
and, under narrow but important circumstances, foretell the future.
The mind, in sum, follows a great tidal motion. At its logical peak,
reality and self are two separate things. Our reflective selves and the
reality on which they reflect are different. But from the start of our
journey down-spectrum, the borders begin to blur. And at the end of the
trip, our real selves have been absorbed into dream reality, and only our
hollow unreflecting dream selves are left on the narrow ledge of
consciousness—the place that remains after dreaming has taken what it
needs. Reality and self have both changed radically from what they were.
And in the morning? Reality, rubbing its eyes, moves out into the
external world again, leaving the reborn, full-fledged self cool and quiet,
slightly dazed—ready to start over.
 Four

A Map

I have outlined the spectrum in several ways from overhead, but many
points require a closer look—from the ground. We need to follow
examples of up-spectrum thought, of the mind acting normal in
midspectrum, of daydreams and fantasy and sleep-onset sequences and
actual dreams. I have made heavy use of the terms “conscious mind” and
“unconscious mind,” “memory,” “thinking,” “feeling,” and others. We
don’t need to analyze each of these topics. By and large, the mainstream
research community is working that project—from many directions, with
staggering resources wielded by some of the finest thinkers in this
particular universe. But we need a concise overview so that we can use the
basic terms with confidence. In some ways, the map I require is simpler
than any mainstream map.
I will concentrate on consciousness and memory and the two basic
facts of conscious mind: acting and being—thinking and feeling. My basic
map of mind has two regions: (1) conscious mind and (2) unconscious
mind, otherwise known as memory. Conscious mind divides into thinking
and feeling. There are additional subdivisions, but not many.
Mind is consciousness and memory. Consciousness deals only with
now; memory, with not-now, with the past. I can think consciously about
the past or future, but I can experience only the present moment and no
other. When I reexperience the past in sleep onset or dreams, the mind
brings the past to me, brings the past to the present rather than sending me
outbound to find it.
Consciousness anchors me to time—fastens me to the relentless
forward drag like a cable car gripped onto the moving steel rope beneath
the street.
 I am conscious of a sort of fading afterimage of the past moment or
two, and the near future in my headlights, just about to happen. Edmund
Husserl points out that I am always conscious of where I have just been
and where I am going. This knowledge of where I am going is no matter of
deliberate plan making. It is the mind’s glancing forward along the
trajectory of behavior that is already established. And as such, it is
important.
How do we invent dreams? For some of us, storytelling is natural and
easy; for others, it’s nearly impossible. Yet we all dream. How do the non-
storytellers manage it? The fact is that, when we improvise dreams,
clearly it is the near future in the Husserl headlights, our knowledge of
what must be coming up next, given our behavior and experience, that
guides the dream-plotting function. In waking life, we can foresee what’s
(almost) bound to happen in the next half minute (or even the next few
minutes, depending on circumstances). This knowledge, our mere mental
momentum, is what guides the production of our dreams.
Memory, for its part, deals only with not-now. I can’t recall something
while it happens—cannot create and recall a memory simultaneously.
In this sense, one might say that consciousness and memory are
orthogonal, like the horizontal and vertical beams in the frame of a
skyscraper. They exist at conceptual right angles. Consciousness deals
with objects and events that cannot now be part of memory, because they
are only just happening. Memory deals with items I cannot now just be
growing conscious of, because they have already entered memory.

Mind-Map Principle: Consciousness and memory are orthogonal, in the sense that
consciousness can deal only with the present, and memory, only with the past. I can
experience only the present moment. I can remember only the past.

Whatever is in memory, I have already been conscious of, at least once

before. In this sense, there’s nothing surprising in identifying memory
with the unconscious: one expects the conscious and unconscious minds to
exist at the same level, as orthogonal alternatives.
Years ago I was giving a talk on these ideas and needed a concise
picture of the mind’s changing relationship to the outer versus inner
worlds. I was attracted to a picture that was simple and useful, and even
though it appeared to be fundamentally flawed, I had to use it.
 The picture showed a sort of minimal, two-zone archery target: the
“up-spectrum” image had a bull’s-eye labeled “Memory,” surrounded by a
ring labeled “Conscious Mind”—surrounded by the whole outside world.
Up-spectrum, conscious mind can turn to the outer world on one side and
memory on the other. It is sandwiched neatly in between.
The “down-spectrum” image had the regions reversed: conscious mind
was the bull’s eye, surrounded by memory—surrounded, again, by the
world at large. When we sleep, signals reach the conscious mind only from
memory. Signals from the outside world reach sleeping consciousness
from a distance (so to speak)—from the other side of memory, from the
“far side”—only when they are strong enough to travel right through
memory. Proust describes a valet speaking to the sleeping Swann: as the
valet’s words “plunged through the waves of sleep in which Swann was
submerged, they did not reach his consciousness without undergoing the
refraction which turns a ray of light in the depths of water into another
sun” (À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time]). External
reality needs to penetrate deep to reach us when we sleep.

FIG. B.

During the trip down-spectrum, consciousness and memory trade

places. The outer ring becomes the bull’s-eye, and the former bull’s-eye is
transformed into the outer ring. This is a simple way to describe the basic
transformation in the mind’s structure brought about by the spectrum.
This seemed like a good and simple model. The problem was that
conscious mind and memory were a false pair—socks and kumquats. They
did not seem like counterparts, like two elements on the same conceptual
level. It seemed arbitrary and strange to say that, if you stripped mind
down to the basics, you found conscious mind and memory. Yet otherwise,
the picture seemed right.
Only years later did it occur to me that memory is unconscious mind.
Now the picture makes sense. Conscious mind and unconscious mind are
obvious counterparts. We merely need to remember that unconscious mind
is memory.
Having plotted the two basic regions of the mind map, we can go
further—if only a little. Conscious mind contains mental states that occur
on a spectrum from thinking to sensing and feeling. These two are also (in
another sense) orthogonal: you can think one thing and feel another
independently, at the same time. But you cannot think about two different
topics simultaneously. You can experience many feelings or sensations at
once, but they blend together like drops of colored ink in water. In this
sense, many separate feelings become one.
Continuing in this way, we can divide thoughts into perceptions,
recollections, and ideas.
Many other schemes are possible too. Consciousness can be
understood in terms of outer-field versus inner-field events. We could also
think of consciousness as a point traveling through time with memory
trailing behind it, reaching back into the past—as if consciousness were a
comet and memory its tail.
An old tradition divides mental or psychic reality into reason and will,
cognition and volition. Reason deals objectively with reality, or at least
aspires to. Will reflects the subjective reality of a thinking creature. But
for our simple, practical purposes, this is a wrong dichotomy. What’s
important to a practical view of the mind is that it can think and can sense
and feel, can act or just be. Volition often involves elements of thought
and feeling. I will raise the idea again, but it’s not central for our purposes.
FIG. C. Basic mind map.

FIG. D . Basic mind map (1).

FIG. E. Basic mind map (2).

Thinking

“Thinking” is rarely used as a technical or philosophical term. A thought

is a mere “pre-theoretical umbrella term,” says the philosopher Jesse
Prinz.1 But thinking has a clear intuitive meaning: the conscious,
deliberate manipulation of mental states to achieve a particular goal, given
certain raw materials. The flagship case is reasoning. I start with certain
givens (I am on a Manhattan sidewalk, am thirsty, have money, see a
hummus-and-soda cart on the corner) and a goal (to satisfy thirst). Then I
lay down a logical pathway that gets me from givens to goal—a mental
pathway, a sequence of thoughts. Converting this mental pathway into
action might require another round of reasoning. This is mental
manipulation, mental doing, the bringing to bear of mind on reality.
Just what are those “conscious mental states” that we assemble in the
process of thinking? We might call them, yes, thoughts! (Of course, I
already have called them “thoughts.”) For our purposes (these definitions
are brief and informal), a thought is a perception (“the rain has stopped”),
a recollection (“yesterday was dismal”), or an original concoction, a
product of the imagination—I’ll call this an idea (“Plato will have to
forgive me”). I can also perceive something that overwhelms me; a lion
slips out of an alleyway and comes roaring down the sidewalk. I stop
thinking about and am placed in the dangerous state of pure being, or at
least in a state where feeling dominates thought, until I pull myself
together. (Quickly, we hope.) Or I can recollect an overwhelming memory,
or invent an overwhelming idea. Nonetheless, thoughts are anchored in
perceptions, recollections, or ideas—even though feelings or even pure
experience can also grow from these sources.
The distinction between recollections and memories is important. A
recollection is an event. A memory is a snippet of experience, or a fact or
rule or something else we have learned, available for recollection. Any
thought—perception, recollection, idea—is a mental event in time. We can
remember having a thought just as we can remember having a sandwich.
A thought, as I have already noted, must be about something; it has
intentionality. I have “more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to
put them in,” says Hamlet, breaking it off with his girlfriend with all his
customary tact: by telling her how tremendously lucky she is to be rid of
him and, by the way, that she should put herself in a nunnery right away,
lest she have children and pollute the world. He is indeed a perfect jerk.
But she is in love with him. Never mind; the remarkable thing about this
casual statement is that it describes thoughts as containers for putting
things in. That is exactly what intentionality means: if you believe John
Adams was a great man, then your belief refers to something, is a basket
that (abstractly) contains John Adams.

Sensing and Emotions

Sensations and emotions are not mental containers. They are ways to be.
Sensations and emotions are different but closely related. “My foot is
painful,” “that thought is painful”: the first is called a “quale,” or
qualitative sensation; the second, an emotion. These two pains are
different, but they are both literally pain. They create the same cringing
urge to escape, can dominate all other mental states, and cause the same
exhaustion and despair over the long term. Sensations (or qualia) and
emotions are instances of one class of mental phenomena. Just as there are
several types of thought, there are several types of feeling.
We can see the closeness of sensation and emotion in a few simple
examples.
Consider a recollection: “Today is Valentine’s Day.” Your emotional
state might be happy, sad, embarrassed; in plain English, you feel happy,
sad, or embarrassed. The word “feeling” hints at the continuity between “I
feel the fuzzy flocking on the Valentine’s card” and “I feel embarrassed
that I forgot to get you a present.” Notice the qualitative closeness
between a sensation such as “this ice-patch feels slippery underfoot” and
the emotion of unease or anxiety. The two feelings are obviously related,
are similar—and not metaphorically! The actual feelings are similar, in
the sense that bricks and concrete feel similar to the touch.
“Feeling” and “emotion” are synonyms, in the right context, because
emotions are grounded in the body. “Emotion dissociated from all bodily
feeling is inconceivable,” writes the eminent late-nineteenth, early-
twentieth century philosopher and psychologist William James, older
brother of the great novelist Henry. “A dis-embodied emotion is a sheer
nonentity.”2 He was a radical on the subject, but one doesn’t have to
follow James very far to notice (as I mentioned earlier) that pure
emotions, like happy and sad, have obvious physical expressions. When
you are happy, your body feels different from when you are sad.
There is no clear dividing line between mental and physical where
feelings are concerned. In discussing Freud’s invention of the “drive” (as
in sex drive), Jonathan Lear writes that the concept “may even call into
question the idea of a sharp boundary” between mind and body.3 The deep
mutual interpenetration of mental and physical, interlaced fingers, is a
foundational fact of psychology in general.
Thoughts are always about something, are intentional states. Feelings
are ways of being and are about nothing; they are not intentional states.
Language helps us see this subtle distinction, which is easy to miss.
We can say, “I believe that we’re leaving” and “I’m sad that we’re
leaving.” It seems as if we have just heard about two intentional states—
one belief and one emotion, each about or referring to the same thing. But
language, having confused us, will also unconfuse us.
 “I’m sad that we’re leaving” is just another way to say, “I’m sad
because we’re leaving.” Leaving is the cause of my sadness, not its
content. But I cannot substitute “I believe because we’re leaving” for my
original sentence. Leaving didn’t cause my belief. Believing is an
intentional state. Sadness is not.
To say that the sensation of seeing turquoise is about turquoise is like
saying that the sensation of pain is about a painful stimulus. A skiing
accident might cause a broken leg, but the broken leg isn’t about skiing. It
isn’t about anything. We can understand tickling, itching, the pain of a
broken leg, the sensation of seeing turquoise independent of any cause.
But a belief or desire must be about something; one can’t be in a state of
simply believing nothing in particular. You can’t say, “I’m thinking, but
not about anything.” You can say, “I’m happy” (period); “I sense tickling,
turquoise, pain.”
“Fear of what?”
“I don’t know. Fear is fear.”
“. . . Kindness is kindness too.”
(Henry James, The Awkward Age)

It’s basic to what we mean by “emotion” that we can separate the emotion
from its cause. Wistfulness, happiness, sadness, hesitant optimism—these
are all states of mind we can ponder on their own, all ways to be,
regardless of how or why they came about.

Pure Being Achieved?

An important novel throws light on the lower spectrum.

Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K is about a man who just wants to
be. His intelligence is better than average, but he is often taken for
simpleminded because he is uncomfortable with language—the
paradigmatic up-spectrum way of thinking and communicating. We don’t
ordinarily decide to smile, frown, laugh, blush, or tremble in rage or fear;
the body communicates our emotional states implicitly, “automatically,”
because the body is part of our emotions. But it is separate from our
thoughts. To communicate thoughts we need a purpose-built system—
namely, language, which we invoke explicitly. We must decide to speak.
Michael K is uncomfortable with numbers and arithmetic too. He shrinks
from the upper spectrum. “I am not clever with words,” he says.
Sometimes he simply won’t speak at all.
K’s drive to be turns all-consuming as he comes to understand himself.
“I have never seen anyone as asleep as you are,” someone tells him.
(Recall von Neumann’s being “wider awake than anyone—a radically up-
spectrum, versus K’s radically down-spectrum, personality.) He lives close
to the very bottom of the spectrum, standing beneath an open tap and
“turning his face up like a flower” as he is drenched. Put in a hospital
against his will, “he lies looking up at the window and the sky . . . ,
smiling his smile.” In Coetzee’s words: “Always, when he tried to explain
himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which
his understanding baulked.” The bottom of the spectrum is no place for
self-awareness. It is a place where being drives out reflection.
K sleeps often, dreams often. He is childlike, presexual, and makes
himself a place to sleep nestled on the asexual breast of the South African
veld—where “two low hills, like plump breasts, curved towards each
other.” (Coetzee’s symbols are nearly always subtler than this.) K aspires
to live like a dream and leave no memories behind, to be translucent, to
half-exist. “He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks
behind it, but if anything as a speck upon the surface of the earth too
deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant-feet, the rasp of butterfly-teeth,
the tumbling of dust.” Yet people such as K “are in touch with things you
and I don’t understand,” says a medical officer. Michael K is a genius at
being. “He is not of our world. He lives in a world all his own.” As we all
do when we dream.
“Back to nature” is the easy, shallow course compared to living low on
the spectrum, in the mind’s deep end, too saturated with body and being to
have mind left over for thought. The novel is about Michael K’s decision
to live low and be. Saul Bellow’s heroes are obsessed with something
similar. Herzog at the end of his successful struggle: “I am pretty well
satisfied to be” (Herzog). “You have been summoned,” Mr. Sammler tells
himself, “to be” (Mr. Sammler’s Planet).

Thinking and Feeling: Parallel Minds

We assume, in casual thinking, that the mind is created by the brain or the
central nervous system. But we all know, on reflection, that there is more
to it. Our mental states include thoughts and emotions; mind is created by
the brain and the body, collaborating. Ronald de Sousa is one of several
philosophers who speak of a “two-track mind,” the tracks being “intuitive”
and “analytic” mental processes. This dichotomy (or something like it) has
occurred to nearly everyone who has ever thought about the mind. De
Sousa himself points out its relationship to Freud’s primary versus
secondary mental processes.4
We communicate in language, and also body language—which is
sometimes as simple as a smile. We can think out a solution or feel our
way. “In dance it is not the puppet-master in the head that leads and the
body that follows,” says a dancer in Coetzee’s Summertime. “It is the body
itself that leads, the body with its soul, its body-soul. Because the body
knows! It knows!” We know with our bodies, not just our minds. “He knew
she was there in the same way he knew when he was in the sun or in the
shade” (Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater). We decide and make plans not
just logically but emotionally. Churchill wrote in his memoirs about his
daring escape from a prison camp during the Boer War. He was behind
enemy lines and couldn’t think where to turn. “Suddenly without the
slightest reason all my doubts disappeared. It was certainly by no process
of logic that they were dispelled. I just felt clear,” he writes (italics mine);
he had made the decision in an “unconscious or subconscious manner”
(Winston Churchill, My Early Life).
Civilized bias in modern times runs strongly for the rational, against
the emotional. In normal talk, rational is clean, well lit, tastefully
decorated. Virtuous. Emotional is sticky and weak. “He doesn’t know what
he wants, no focus, too emotional” (Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies). Of
course, it’s also bad to have “no focus.” We believe in the upper spectrum.
We are warned not to let our emotions run away with us. “That is not
yourself, your rational self,” says Edmund disapprovingly to Fanny in Jane
Austen’s Mansfield Park. She has been acting on emotional impulses, and
he hopes to convert her to rational ones. It is no accident that her
emotional impulses turn out to be right—and her rational aunts, uncles,
and cousins are all thoroughly wrong. Jane Austen reminds us that there is
nothing foolproof about rationality.
 Sometimes we think our way to the solution of a problem. Sometimes
we feel our way. Sometimes these decisions disagree. We are often in the
position of Henry James’s Strether, who has decided to send a letter and
hurries out, because “if he didn’t go before he could think he wouldn’t
perhaps go at all” (The Ambassadors). We’re used to having our emotional
decisions overruled by our rational, thought-out ones, and sometimes, vice
versa. The emotional system is usually much faster, since its conclusions
are reached unconsciously. Sometimes we can make its decisions stick by
carrying them out before thought has had time to weigh in.
“I know he’s guilty” (having deduced the fact) and “I feel he’s guilty”
(having got that impression somehow) are different routes to the same
spot. It takes a writer of Jane Austen’s penetration to distinguish the
elements of thought from feeling in normal life. Miss Price to Miss
Crawford: “ ‘I shall always think of you’ said she, ‘and feel how very kind
you were’ ” (Mansfield Park). In Persuasion: “He walked to the window to
recollect himself, and feel how he ought to behave.” He could think it
over, but feeling is the better way. Again in Mansfield Park: “He did not
understand her. He felt that he did not.”
Sometimes we can feel our way straight to a conclusion. Feeling in
such cases does not play a part in thought; it replaces thought. “I never
think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say
the things I have found out in my mind without thinking” (Hemingway, A
Farewell to Arms).
Physical and mental feelings shade deep into each other. The physical
sensation of stepping outside into a brisk, beautiful fall day creates the
mental sensation of (let’s say) happiness plus freshness, briskness,
anticipation, and a jumble of undertones and recollections. The emotion of
happiness might cause you to walk a little faster, with more energy; and
the physical sensation of quick, springy walking might make you (in turn)
a little happier. Emotion, hence mind itself, requires brain and body.
Without brain and body, you cannot make a mind.
Sensations are simultaneously mental and physical phenomena, in a
sense that does not hold for (say) abstract thoughts. Wordsworth writes of
his memories of the river Wye: “I have owed to them / In hours of
weariness, sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; /
And passing even into my purer mind” (“Tintern Abbey”). Where does
physical stop and mental begin? There’s no way to draw a dividing line
across this continuum.
I might shudder on account of either physical cold or a cold, dislikable
personality I have just encountered. You hurt his foot, you hurt his feelings
—different types of pain, both real.
Body and mind make a feedback loop, positive and negative. You are
embarrassed; you blush; feeling yourself blush, your embarrassment
increases and your blush deepens. “A smile of pleasure lit his face.
Conscious of that smile, [he] shook his head disapprovingly at his own
state” (Tolstoy, War and Peace).
Thinking and feeling each have their own ways of communicating.
When our feelings are strong, our bodies show what we are feeling. Insofar
as the body is part of the emotion system, it reflects what is going on
emotionally. Emotional decisions are made outside conscious control and
expressed outside conscious control. “He throws up his hands in an odd,
unintended gesture. Astonishingly, he is close to tears” (Coetzee, Slow
Man). The face and body can be a nuanced and precise communication
system. Onlookers were “listening for those overtones of the voice, those
subtleties of the eyebrows that tell them my true meaning” (Coetzee, In
the Heart of the Country). We experience emotions bodily and
communicate them bodily.
Language is a poor way to tell people what we are feeling—and largely
unnecessary, because people can tell anyway, if they are half-decent
observers. In Jane Austen’s Emma, Jane Fairfax has “an air of greater
happiness than usual—a glow both of complexion and spirits.” Ulysses
describes the famously feminine, sensuous Cressida: “There’s language in
her eye, her cheek, her lip. / Nay, her foot speaks” (Shakespeare, Troilus
and Cressida). When emotion grabs the body and brandishes it like a flag,
the resulting gesture is usually clear—although not always. Sometimes we
see only the sheer force of an emotion, driving like a high-voltage wave
down to the feet and fingers, out into the universe. The power of emotion,
of Guy’s horror at the consequence of cheating on his wife, “was enough to
make him stop dead in the street and shake his hair with his hands raised
and clawlike” (Martin Amis, London Fields). Passion can deform or cut
off body language, just as it can reshape all other language.
Often we are at a loss to express powerful emotion that beats over the
seawall of language and comes crashing, tumbling down into everyday
life. King Lear howls like an animal when his beloved daughter is
murdered, but howling like an animal is heavily frowned upon; civilized
people do not howl like animals, so we are left to improvise. “At the
mercy of his grief, with no idea what to do with his misery, he grabbed the
janitor’s mop, a bucket of water, and a gallon can of disinfectant and
swabbed the entire tile floor, profusely sweating while he worked” (Philip
Roth, Nemesis).
“He said all this very clearly, in a voice without an opinion” (Cynthia
Ozick, “Bloodshed”). Words say one thing; the voice might say something
else. We converse over two channels at the same time. We control the first.
The second, the body-language channel, does what it likes. If words fail,
the voice all by itself might get through. Julie understands no Arabic, but
“the hoarse flow and guttural hum of the language reached her on a wave-
length of meaning other than verbal” (Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup). We
read tone and we read silence: “ ‘You must miss her.’ ‘Of course I miss
her,’ a little too quick” (Thomas Pynchon, The Bleeding Edge). We are
comprehension virtuosos.
The mental aspect of feeling is just one part of a larger picture. Freud
wrote: “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that
no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his
finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”5 Freud discovered
that reading his patients’ body language was just as important as hearing
their words.
“You were sent for,” says Hamlet to his sort-of-friends Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, who have been summoned, he quickly figures out, to spy
on him: “There is a kind of confession in your looks which your modesties
have not craft enough to color.” Our bodies, like TV reporters, babble
about our emotions ceaselessly. Witness this brief interchange when Ivan
Ilyich’s brother-in-law has come to visit (Tolstoy, Death of Ivan Ilyich):
He “looked up at him [at Ivan] for a moment without a word. That stare
told Ivan Ilyich everything.” Ivan was dying. “His brother-in-law opened
his mouth to utter an explanation of surprise but checked himself, and that
action confirmed it all.”
No words spoken; much meaning conveyed. By imitating in my
imagination someone else’s precise actions or facial expressions, I will
often feel his feelings as a result—or, at any rate, guess what they are.
Body language flows just as automatically as any other language. In Ivan
Ilyich, the brother-in-law’s actions are involuntary. They are physical
expressions of an emotional state.
Emotions get their messages across, one way or another. “He looked
very ill; evidently suffering under violent emotions, which he was
determined to suppress” (Jane Austen, Mansfield Park). Emotion will
speak, by making you sick if need be. It will speak even if you are
“determined to suppress” it.
Thoughts—which have no intensity scale, can’t be strong or weak—are
separate from the body. To communicate thoughts we therefore need a
purpose-built system—namely, language, which we invoke explicitly.
Brain and body are required, again, to make a mind. Today’s orthodoxy
is never further off course than when it teaches that, since a computer is
like a brain, a computer can create a mind. Even if computers were like
brains, the argument fails, because a brain isn’t sufficient for a mind. You
need a body too. It is a different question whether, if a mind has come into
being in the normal way, you can then dispense with a body. Maybe so. But
no normal mind could have been created in the first place, had the body
not been present at the start.

Feeling in the Service of Thought

Tolstoy shows us something important about feeling in the service of

thinking. He writes like a blind man feeling his way through life with
hands that miss nothing. He was not blind, but he had the supersensitivity
of a man who was. This is important because of the nature of
consciousness itself. Before Tolstoy writes or even thinks, he goes over the
ground intimately, half an inch above the surface. Thus we have the
incomparable realism of his writing—and a certain awkwardness too.
Emotional decisions are usually instantaneous. Because they are, they
can guide us in emergencies when thought is too slow. And because they
are instantaneous, it is natural to reach an emotional judgment of
everything that passes through consciousness. These emotional judgments
(as I will discuss) are powerful summaries, and they make big mental
leaps possible; they make possible the linking of two superficially
different ideas. Such leaps and links are basic to creative thought.
 Emotions are, finally, inflections of consciousness. They are colors,
tones, varieties of consciousness. If consciousness is bread, emotions are a
way to treat or transform it—toast it, cover it in jam, soak it in honey. You
can’t have “toasted” or “covered in jam” all by itself, without the bread (or
something like it). You can’t have “happiness” or any other emotion
without the underlying fact of consciousness.
A young mother has just lost a child and fears she will forget the fact
as she sleeps and will have to face it all over again next morning (a
startlingly beautiful piece of writing). But “no, all through her sleep she
had known that her child was no longer alive” (Jenny Erpenbeck, The End
of Days). She knew it by feeling it, and feelings inflect consciousness the
way colored glass inflects vision. We are conscious when we dream, and
consciousness peers through our emotions at the outer and inner worlds.
With this in mind, let’s consider, by way of conclusion, Peter Goldie’s
remarkably concise statement of the intellectual history of emotions:
There are, on the one hand, those theories that owe their ancestry to the work of
William James . . . arguing that emotions are bodily feelings or perceptions of bodily
feelings; and, on the other hand, those theories that owe their ancestry to Aristotle and
the Stoics, arguing that emotions are cognitive, world-directed intentional states. Other
philosophers [including Goldie himself] have argued that, whilst there are analogies to
be drawn between emotions and other kinds of mental state, emotions are, at bottom,
sui generis.6

The second idea, that emotions are intentional states, is wrong. The first,
however, seems basically right—even though most emotions have no
physical expression when one feels them in low-grade, dilute form. When
I’m very happy, my heart rate and energy surge. When I’m a little happy,
they don’t. Certainly, emotions are sui generis. But “inflections of
consciousness” is a more complete (albeit slightly mysterious) way to
describe them.

Summarizing Conscious Mind

Someone hands you a deep-blue wax crayon in a paper wrapper. You

experience smoothness, the moderate softness and color of the wax. You
experience slickness and the color of the paper, the look of the narrow
pointed wax cylinder, the waxy smell.
Are you aware that you are holding a wax crayon? Not necessarily. If
you think about it, yes. But the experience itself—the smoothness,
slickness, waxiness—can occupy your mind, and nothing forces you to
reflect on the experience. Or you might never have seen a crayon before;
to you it is merely an object, or a collection of small objects, or a piece of
a bigger object. While experiencing something, we are ordinarily, but not
necessarily, aware of it. Phenomenal consciousness is just experience,
pure and simple.
Consciousness can be a nuisance—and not only when you are
undergoing surgery.
We all know that certain actions that seem to require focused
concentration can go all wrong if one becomes “self-conscious.” If you are
(say) demonstrating an activity for a group, or teaching a class, you can
lose the thread if you become self-conscious—conscious of your own
thought processes. Of the activities you have mastered, some have been
mastered by your conscious mind, but many are mastered by the
unconscious. Walking is a classic example; we do it automatically, with
the unconscious mind in control. Concentrating at the wrong time can be
disastrous, because it hands over to the conscious mind control of
activities that should be controlled by the unconscious.
If you are a tennis player with a blazing first serve, it’s your
unconscious mind that knows how to do it. If you start thinking about how
you do it, you will ruin your next serve; you’ll have transferred control to
your conscious mind, disconnecting the real source of your expertise. If
you were finishing up junior high school and wanted to play an infantile
trick on a friend who was about to go up on stage and receive an award
that you should really have got, you would say merely (just as his name
has been announced and he is rising to go), “Be careful not to trip on the
stairs.” As a result, he would be almost guaranteed to trip—because you
would have made walking up the steps onto the stage a subject for his
conscious mind to ponder and take charge of—and probably make a mess
of. His unconscious mind is the region that actually knows how to walk up
steps.
Philip Roth writes about a washed-up actor:
 In the past when he was acting he wasn’t thinking about anything. What he did well he
did out of instinct. Now he was thinking about everything, and everything spontaneous
and vital was killed—he tried to control it with thinking and instead he destroyed it.
(The Humbling)

Memory, a.k.a. the Unconscious

We have a map of mind, then, with two major regions: consciousness and
the unconscious mind. Within the conscious mind, we can make out acting
and being, each with its own substructure. But we must also consider the
unconscious mind—although the problems here are noncartographic. We
don’t need further subdivisions, but we do need a clearer view of how
things work in this territory.
Our memories are subject to endless distortions, disappearances,
misplacements, rearrangements, rewritings. No one believes his memory
is flawless. Most of us figure out, too, that we can remember something
strongly, positively—and falsely. “Memory plays tricks on us.” It’s not a
deep observation, but it’s true and important.
Most of the time, our perceptions are laid out for the mind’s
consideration in order of arrival, like a crisp line of playing cards laid end
to end. If the mind reacts thoughtfully, it reacts insofar as perceptions
trigger recollections or ideas. We can imagine these nonperceptions laid
out as parts of the same line of cards. As new experiences join the front of
the line, slightly older ones are moved from the back of this “very recent”
line to the front of long-term memory, memory proper. There, neat
chronological sequence comes apart gradually, like the orderly line at an
airport gate turning into random chaos (as it always seems to). But some
chronological information is retained forever.
Freud knew well that later memories, “screen memories,” can distort
or corrupt earlier ones. What appears to be a single memory might, in fact,
have been stitched together out of several older ones. In such cases we
seem to remember something that never happened. For my purposes these
observations are important but point in a different direction—not to the
unreliability of memory, but to the ease with which memory converts a
collection of similar recollections into a single template or schema or
abstraction—a process that happens unconsciously but is crucial to
conscious thought.
Memory knows only the past but also lets us see into the future—in
several ways. Templates, or “schemata,” are one of its best tricks. One
remembers the recent past as a narrative outline, a temporal sequence.
Aside from this “retentional” aspect of memory, there is also (Husserl
noticed) a “protentional” aspect: we can see what will happen next. When
life has been following a series of steps, as it almost always does, we can
usually see the next one clearly enough that we won’t stumble. This
method of foreseeing the future is short-range but important. A cadence
that has paused on the dominant will resolve to the tonic; the harmony
won’t be left hanging. A bird that has stroked and glided halfway across
the sky will keep going and cover the second half too. The turning-over,
throat-clearing engine will thrum to life.
We make predictions over longer timescales too, and we learn to make
new ones as new predictable patterns crop up. Now that I have handed
money to the cashier in the little booth in the parking garage, my change
will be handed back out. Memory’s tasks go far beyond supplying
reminiscences and facts. Memory is a pattern recognizer, discovering and
supplying us with the knowledge of patterns we need in order to get
through the day. I have sent a file to the printer and will soon hear the
printer start to work. We have sat down at a table, so a waiter will
materialize and take our order. Such schemata work the same whether they
cover a short timescale or a long one—whether I have in mind a fast-
running template for flattening a mosquito or a slow-running template for
driving from New York to Washington.
Occasionally, we are taught such schemata. Usually, we discover them
for ourselves; to be more precise, memory discovers them for us. These
temporal schemata are the same as spatial ones: we know how a typical
school day is organized, and we also know how a typical school building is
organized. We know the template or schema of a typical suburban split-
level, or a table set for an informal dinner, or a southern-English medieval
cathedral, or a fast-food hamburger. We know these just as we know the
typical architecture of a visit to a movie theater or a dentist, or a TV
newscast, or the progress of a presidential election season—an
arrangement of elements in time.
 Some mind researchers insist that temporal and spatial schemata are
two different topics, to be understood separately. We have always found it
irksome, somehow, to recognize one pattern across space and time.
Midlength temporal schemata, such as visits to the dentist or a
restaurant, are sometimes broken out as a special category just in
themselves; they are called “frames” or “scripts.” But along with the
paradigm maple tree, or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich (in the National
Bureau of Standards), they are all just schemata, just templates.
We discover temporal patterns and spatial ones the same way. We learn
by forgetting. When many separate memories are largely the same, we
tend to forget the little differences and blend those memories together into
one abstract, heavyweight memory. The result is an idealization, based not
on analysis but on experience. David Foulkes writes: “The second time I
stay at a particular hotel I may be stimulated to think back to the first, but
by the tenth time I may simply have general knowledge of the hotel rather
than much vivid recollection of any one past set of experiences there.”7
Such blending (such melting together) is especially apt to happen when
we are children. Whether over space or over time, the process is the same.
Once I have seen many apples, my individual apple memories blend
together and give me a template or schema for a generic apple. It’s red, or
maybe yellow or apple-green, roundish, with a stem on top and a pucker at
the bottom, and it crunches when you bite it. Time blending and space
blending work the same way. A schema is a schema.

Feeling and Memory

Feeling is a creature of the conscious mind. Memory is the country next

door. But we cannot understand memory unless we understand the role
played by feeling in making memory work.
Up-spectrum, we create abstractions by focusing on one aspect of
many recollections. For example, think about color in hundreds of apple
memories. Down-spectrum, we tend to focus on one recollected episode at
a time—the whole thing, not just a piece of it. Just as one aspect of many
recollections yields an abstraction, all aspects of one recollection (or of
one experience as it actually happens) can yield an emotion.
 Some experiences are compact and simple. Look at your watch; decide
you’re late; get going. But some have many parts. The difference lies
mainly in how you choose to experience each event—the pace at which
you’re moving, your position on the spectrum. A multipart experience
might be the forest shrugging off a warm, mild breeze with a faint rustle
of leaves like dim applause, and a shuffling of sun prisms on the ground.
Add the smell of moist bark and moss and leaf-laden soil, busy flies, a
distant barking, and the soft humid air, the tentative trickle of a drowsy
summer brook; heat; mist; stillness. But that whole scene feels one
particular way; some leafy, summery, shadowy emotion without a name is
how it makes you feel. The whole scene creates one particular mood. One
of Cynthia Ozick’s characters aspires to compose a “dictionary of
feelings”—“feelings that everyone’s somehow felt, only there’s no name
for them” (Foreign Bodies).
If someone asked as you stood in the warm forest, “How do you feel?”
you might answer, “sweaty, peaceful, moody,” but the real emotion is a
single feeling, and more subtle than those three words suggest. That
feeling or mood is a summary of the one scene—just as a template or
abstraction (of an apple, a tree, a Manhattanite) summarizes one aspect (or
several) of many recollections. This sort of emotion summary can bait a
hook that lets you fish one particular recollection out of the deep ocean of
memory. You can’t recall a memory with nothing to go on. Something
must lead you to it—some clue, some fragment of the scene, some
association. At low focus, emotion summaries lead us to memories that
would otherwise have been lost. Without emotions as bait, we would have
been left with no way to recover them.
The role of emotions as summaries or abstracts is a deep, fundamental
fact about the mind. There will be more to say about it, when we look at
the spectrum zone that encourages this function’s emergence.
For now, “her memory of her father came to mind as we were talking
about her argument with Mark.” This is the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz
describing a patient. “The two events felt similar to her.”8 Why did the
first memory suggest the second? A shared emotion was the connector, the
memory cue. They “felt similar.” An emotion connected one memory to
the other.
The psychologist Endel Tulving laid down, in a seminal work
(Elements of Episodic Memory), the “encoding specificity principle,” now
widely accepted.9 “Encoding” means creating a memory; installing a
particular scene or episode in long-term storage. You are more likely to
recall something if you reproduce the environment in which the memory
was created. If you are in just the same place, or just the same mood, you
are re-creating some part of the original environment. And you are more
likely than usual to recall things you first memorized in the same
circumstance. The environment in which you memorized something is apt
to become part of the memory, so revisiting that environment creates a
powerful memory cue. The environment, which forms part of the memory,
naturally tends to bring the rest to mind.
You can look at a person and recall that you have met him or her
before. (Berowne to Rosaline: “Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?”
Rosaline, in response: “Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?”
[Shakespeare, Love’s Labours Lost].)
You can travel to a particular place and recall things associated with
that place. On arriving at a hotel in Rome where I had stayed before, I
recollected a market next door where you could buy bottled water but not
Tylenol. This fact couldn’t have come to mind under any other
circumstances.
This is a good example of Tulving’s “encoding specificity”; it’s also a
good example of the mind’s ability to distill the many elements of one
memory into one summary mood—just as it can reduce one element of
many memories to a template or abstraction. It wasn’t the golden-yellow
stuccoed façade or the small, darkish lobby of the hotel, or the room or the
furniture or framed prints on the walls, or any other single feature that
brought the place next door to mind. It was the whole package.
Software shows us how difficult it is to search for something given a
long list of criteria—façade this color, walls that color, rooms like this,
furniture like that—instead of just one. (What’s Dumbo Schwartz’s real
first name?) The best way to proceed is by computing a single code based
on all those criteria, often called a “hash code”; and that’s what memory
probably did in this case, as it does in so many others. All these details
together yield one particular ambience or mood or feeling. That feeling is
a search key that allows us to find other memories marked with that same
mood.
Consciousness can distill and synthesize. This is one of the mind’s
most important powers—a central facet of memory and recollection.
 Thought and Memory: The Map from Overhead

Conscious mind and memory each have their separate functions, but the
way they collaborate is essential to the whole works.
We dip into memory constantly as we think—as we tap the space bar
when we type. Reference to memory is part of thinking. Intercourse
between perception and memory is continual, and it grows in volume as
we descend the spectrum. We see someone and think, after a quick
memory check: “He looks happier than usual” or “older.” We feel a back
pain and think “not again,” hear music and think “isn’t that . . . ?”, see a
tree and think “it’s early for dogwood blossoms.” “Most researchers,”
writes Jerome Singer, “now believe in general that the act of perceiving
external stimuli cannot occur effectively without some matching of this
stimulus with material from long-term memory.”10
But how does recollection work? An external event or a thought can
make us remember—can serve as a “memory cue.” We might recall a day
at the races because we hear a bugle call, or because we have had one
described to us, or read about one, or otherwise come to think about a
bugle call.
Any thought or thought fragment can bait the hook that fetches
recollections out of memory, can be a “memory cue” or “retrieval cue.”
There is no difference between a memory cue and a memory. Each is a
snippet of experience. Each can be roughly approximated, for
convenience, by a list of features: forest, noon, sunny, humid, flies
droning.
Free association can be shallow or deep. The shallow variety can often
lead to something deeper. Superficially, I recall a movie I saw long ago in
a theater near the Plaza in Manhattan, then I recall something else that
happened near the Plaza or in it—or something associated with the movie,
or with Paul Scofield, an actor who was in the movie.
But this sort of superficial ramble often leads to deeper free
association—in fact, to theme-circling thought. In this deeper free
association, one memory as a whole suggests the next.
The theme might be trips to Manhattan when I was in high school, or
something deeper—slipping into forbidden R- or X-rated movies with
friends when I was in high school, and other banned activities, or
something else entirely. The theme isn’t stated explicitly. It is implied by
the thematically related sequence of thoughts. Yet despite being implicit,
the theme is stated plainly, in the sense that a circle shows us its center
point plainly, even if the point isn’t marked.
Theme-circling thought, then, is a series of related recollections, once
we have sunk a fair distance down-spectrum and conscious mind has
relaxed its grip and let memory go off on its own.

In Sum

We have the tide chart and the map. With both in hand, we can go out and
tour the spectrum, starting up in the hills at the high end (the spectrum has
now become a brook in New England) and continuing alongside rapids and
waterfalls until we arrive at the deep water and the past at the bottom.
 Five

Spectrum, Upper Third: Abstraction

In the upper spectrum, the conscious mind runs the show and memory is
subordinate, a tool to be used and controlled by consciousness. Conscious
mind takes action; this is the realm of doing, not being. How do we decide
what needs our attention? Usually we just follow routine. Sometimes a
pressing problem brings us up short: emotion calls. (Forgot I need gas. Do
I have time? Anxiety pang.) But often we make decisions the easy way:
whatever shows up first gets our attention. Usually we barely notice
ourselves choosing.
In the upper spectrum, emotion is important in getting our attention
(“our” meaning the conscious mind’s). Otherwise emotion is, mainly,
excluded.
The mind is made of consciousness (thought and feeling) and memory
(also known as the unconscious). In the upper spectrum, thought is in
charge and we are free to reason. Reasoning is usually our best route to
resolving an unfamiliar problem or deciding on a proper response. Before
we plunge into reasoning, though, we make a routine check: can I recall
the solution to this problem without thinking? just by remembering?
If the answer is no, we will think out our problems or plans rationally.
“Rationally” implies logically or systematically and, as far as possible, by
the use of abstraction. In other words, we will not be caught in irrelevant
detail; we will get straight to the point, right to the heart of the matter.
Abstraction yields conciseness. (The “abstract” in a scholarly paper is
the synopsis at the start.) Abstraction means skipping detail and special
cases. High analytic intelligence, high IQ, makes you quick. You are quick
because you wield abstractions confidently and use them at the highest
level—use the most abstract abstraction that seems promising.
Abstraction is the defining procedure of the rational mind.
 In rational thought as in all thought, we depend on constant queries to
memory. In thinking of all sorts, memory queries are like breathing. In the
rational upper third of the spectrum, the conscious mind’s relation to
memory is simple and well-defined. The conscious mind is in charge and
uses memory as a tool. Memory is kept on a short leash and is not allowed
to wander. The conscious mind makes focused, specific queries to memory
and gets information back. Not reminiscences; not anecdotes. Just
information.
We often think of memory as a warehouse of separately packaged
recollections. It is, but it is also a tap. Turn it on; information flows.
Memory functions in the upper spectrum mainly as a giant experience
juicer that squeezes memories for the data they contain. It is a computer
(or better, a wise reference librarian) that answers questions (how do I get
a large log out of the road?) with information. “Get many people to lift, or
chain it to a car or truck and drag, or cut it up small.” Sometimes the data
is fresh-squeezed. Sometimes you can recycle the answer from an earlier
occasion and don’t need to resqueeze it.
Memory uses the recollections it stores as fuel to satisfy requests.
Memory is, among other things, a great bin of oranges, grapefruits, and
pineapples awaiting juice orders. Orange juice is itself a synopsis, after all.
It’s the essence of a bunch of oranges. It’s an abstract.
Behind the scenes, memory does its own abstracting unconsciously;
sometimes concurrently with its conscious assignments. This unconscious
activity happens all by itself. No entity is required to give the order that it
be started. Templates, as I have said, are crucial to thought: a template, or
schema, is an abstract of a bunch of related recollections. Now that we are
discussing memory as an essence squeezer, as an “abstraction engine,” we
need to look at templates, or schemata, again.
What is a tree? What is a New England forest like, or a successful
Parisian businesswoman? These requests are about space, abstractly
speaking. A tree is an object with a certain structure. If we are asking
about the Parisienne’s appearance or the impression she makes, we are
asking again about a certain spatial structure. But if we are asking what
her life is like, or her typical day, we are asking about time. Templates
provide answers to both types of questions, spatial and temporal.
When it creates templates, memory learns by forgetting: by
strengthening or underlining points that are true for most maple trees (say)
and blurring out, or forgetting, details that are atypical. It is a simple,
powerful process, beautiful in its simplicity and generality. Beautiful in
the vast variety of things it can do, this one simple operation. It can make
a template for any sort of object, in space or time (an “object in time”
being merely the sequence or narrative, the “object” whose parts are
arranged in time—the visit to the dentist or gas station, using the ATM).
And the same simple operation allows you to forget details that are merely
cluttering things up.
Memory must conserve space and protect efficiency by sweeping away
clutter. It must conserve space and improve performance by creating
templates—so that it can make good guesses, anticipate what’s coming,
guide the boss’s behavior so he doesn’t make a fool of himself—if
possible. Memory must collapse, compress, meld eighteen similar gas
station memories or five Parisian businesswomen into a single template, a
concise guide. The exact same operation that gets rid of clutter.
The template creation I’ll describe is crucial to the mind’s functioning
—and is wholly passive. The mind doesn’t do anything—in the sense that
adding numbers, searching a poem in your mind, or reading a book are
mental doings. Template creation is the mere natural “settling” of separate
recollections, the way rocks and soil settle. If you heap a pile of soil or
leaves or mulch in your backyard, it will settle—will compact itself. A
heap of similar recollections undergoes a similar natural process.
The psychologist and memory specialist Ulric Neisser writes,
“Increased experience with any particular event class increases semantic
(or general) knowledge about the event and its context. Increased
experience with similar events, however, makes specific episodic
knowledge increasingly confusable, and ultimately episodes cannot be
distinguished.”1 In other words, ultimately we compact similar episodes,
losing detail but gaining a general guide.
We can also invoke this ordinarily passive process of settling on
purpose, consciously, when we are asked for general knowledge, for what
to expect, for the wisdom of experience.

Making Templates
Suppose you face an everyday problem: The car barely turns over and
won’t start. You can’t think of a present for Olivia. Someone hasn’t turned
up for lunch and won’t answer the phone. You left your coat at the doctor’s
office.
What do you do? You might recall an earlier experience and do again
what you did then. Or you might recall many earlier experiences and turn
them into a template on the spot, simply by superimposing or conflating
them.
How do you conflate or compress or “focus” a collection of similar
memories? You meld them together, letting frequently occurring aspects
of separate memories reinforce each other, and seldom-occurring aspects
cancel each other out.
Imagine superimposing a dozen translucent photos—twelve quick
snapshots, let’s say, of one fashion model. If her face shows up in the exact
same position, with the same expression, in all twelve (and they are
aligned), then the stack of superimposed photos gives a clear image of the
face. If her right arm is posed differently in every picture, you get a blur
instead of a right arm. If her left arm is straight up in nine photos and
straight out in three others, you get a straight-up arm that is stronger and
brighter than a fainter, straight-out image of the same arm.
Notice that you’ve lost information in creating the template. You no
longer know whether the photo in which the right arm is pointed forward,
say, included a straight-up or straight-out left arm. But ordinarily, you
don’t care. Your up-spectrum mind conflates twelve stuck-car memories in
roughly this same way. Elements that are nearly the same in each memory
are reinforced and stand out in the conflated memory.
Let’s say your car won’t start and you’re conflating twelve separate
recollections of similar events. (Of course, you aren’t aware of the twelve
separate memories or the conflation process itself; you are merely
remembering.) “The car barely turns over and won’t start” is part of each
recollection. That’s why they were all summoned to begin with. It stands
out. “Dead battery” is part of many of the same recollections, maybe all,
and it stands out. But the location where the car got stuck, the type of car,
the time of day, the year, the weather, and the occupant of the passenger’s
seat will vary. Those details probably blur out and disappear. It could be
that nine of the twelve memories all deal with the same lovable,
treacherous Audi you used to drive. In that case, “Audi” stands out almost
as clearly in the melded-together template as “dead battery.” But that’s just
an artifact of the data, an accidental detail. You edit it out “by hand,”
deliberately, because you know that stuck cars are not, in general, Audis.
This conflated, compressed supermemory is exactly a template,
schema, or abstraction. It is a memory sandwich, a “heavy-duty memory”
with two main elements that emerge clearly: “won’t turn over” and “dead
battery.”
The more separate memories become compressed or melded together,
the more likely it is that everything will drop out or blur out except those
elements that really do go together, that are essential and not accidental to
the template.2

Learning by Forgetting

You might think similarly about (say) trees: remember many separate
instances and conflate them. The result would be a compressed, conflated,
melded supermemory, the memory of a nonexistent object, of an abstract or
paradigm tree. This abstraction, template, or schema might consist of
trunk, branches, green (represented visually, not in language). Let’s say
two-thirds of your original memories had leaves and one-third, evergreen
needles. If so, your tree abstraction has leaves clearly defined, needles less
clear but plainly present. All other details are blurred out. And that’s your
tree, abstractly—the bare bones. It has trunk, branches, greenness; often
leaves, sometimes needles.
Usually such abstractions are created behind the scenes as part of
routine, unconscious mental housekeeping (as I have said) when you are a
child.
“Objects, on our first acquaintance with them,” writes the nineteenth-
century essayist and painter William Hazlitt, “have that singleness and
integrity of impression that it seems as if nothing could destroy or
obliterate them, so firmly are they stamped and riveted on the brain” (“On
the Feeling of Immortality in Youth”). But as memories are added on top
of memories, settling and compression are natural. If I saw my first maple
on Monday, my second on Tuesday, and today is Wednesday, the interval
separating the two sightings is half the age of the oldest. So the two
sightings do not blend together; their ages are very different. A month
later, the same two original sightings are separated by only one-thirtieth
the age of the oldest. Now their ages are similar and no longer prevent
their blending.
It’s natural for a child to forget (unconsciously) the distinction
between one tree memory and another. It’s natural for those memories to
blend together into a single conflated, abstract “tree”—which continues to
develop as more individual memories are added to the melted-down
abstraction. Only tree memories that stand out in some striking way
remain distinct.3
To put it differently, as you accumulate similar memories, you tend to
confuse them. Confusion appears in two ways. First, you can no longer
distinguish separate episodes; you can no longer remember that you saw a
large maple tree in a park last Sunday and a small one beside a house three
weeks ago. Your “episodic memory” is failing. On the other hand—second
—you can make assertions about maple trees in general and feel sure
about them, without thinking about any particular example. “Semantic”
memory is emerging as “episodic” memory fails—semantic memory
being your store of general facts, rules, principles, expectations.
Melding memories so that common features emerge and individual
details—atmospheric idiosyncrasies—disappear makes high-focus thought
powerful, and numb.
So we learn by forgetting. We learn what “tree” means by gradually,
when we are young, forgetting the differences among separate trees and
remembering the common points.
Event templates work the same way. We have pulled into a gas station
many times and know the routine. This template will be a timeline. Again
it’s convenient to imagine a memory or template as a filmstrip—in time
instead of space. Each image is later than the one before. The template is
created the same way as any other. We accumulate many memories of
buying gas and they settle; they meld together. Extraneous elements blur
out; those that occur every time emerge brightly.
A “timeline” or “event” memory is no different from an “object” or
“scene” memory. Memories are quotations from reality and can be read as
sequences. You pull up to a pump, get out of the car, swipe your credit
card, and choose your gas grade, or you wait for an attendant and say what
you need. Such templates can also be read as static images. What is a gas
station? It’s a concrete-paved rectangle with pumps on an island.
 As I’ve mentioned, some psychologists insist that templates for events
—often called frames or scripts—are different from templates for objects
(or templates for ideas). But if we are serious about psychology, Occam’s
razor applies: do not posit two mechanisms or three or a thousand when
one will do. Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate; plurality is not to
be posited without necessity.
Template creation—amalgamating separate memories so that aspects
shared among many are emphasized, and unshared attributes are de-
emphasized—is a neat and elegant operation. It accounts for the creation
of templates for objects in space and in time. It accounts for their gradual,
incremental accumulation over years, as new individual instances join
existing templates and blend in.
Those individual instances are attracted to the existing template by
exactly the same like-attracts-like principle that governs all of memory.
Someone asks the name of a tree, and I say it is a peach tree because the
attributes I observe call to mind—like attracts like—the memory of a
particular peach tree or a peach tree template. By just the same process,
when I see a maple tree and memory records it, that new maple tree
recollection is attracted by shared characteristics to the existing maple tree
template. Like attracts like.
The whole memory runs on like-attracts-like plus natural settling plus
momentum. Like-attracts-like handles queries (“tell me about orange
juice”) by marshalling memories that include, and therefore match,
“orange juice.” Like-attracts-like means that similar memories about
anything tend to cluster together. Natural settling means that two
memories that are closer than a particular threshold melt together.
Momentum deals with all the transitions from a well-behaved, docile
memory answering information requests to an off-on-its-own, free-
associating recollection surfer following the “isofeels,” following one
feeling from memory to memory.
When this sort of surfing turns up a blocked emotion as part of an
ordinary recollection, the emotion tends to take over. Blocked emotions
are powerful things—as an unsatisfied urge always is; as a natural action
cut short, sliced in half, left suspended in limbo, always is. When William
Blake wrote, “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted
desires,” this is, I think, what he meant. The power of a blocked natural
action is gigantic.
 The philosopher Georges Rey is right in saying that “there is every
reason to think that human beings are not ideally designed, but are a
hodgepodge of some very arbitrary evolutionary accidents.” 4 Fair enough.
Anyone can think of aspects of the human creature he would love to see
improved. (Immediately.) But at the same time, Rey and many other
mainstream mind thinkers give us the feeling that they don’t quite see the
beauty of the mind we have. It is buggy and fragile, and subject to
grotesque abuse (as any investigation into good and evil or into freewill
reveals). It is delicate, absurdly sensitive—a far more sophisticated design
than really made sense under the circumstances. It was a splurge that has
gone wrong in the field again and again, in a million ways. Still: how
beautiful.

Enter Reasoning

How do we assemble thought trains when we reason? What determines

which thought follows which other? How do we construct a train of
thought?
“Train of thought” does not mean that our thoughts are laid out neatly
end to end like dominoes. Often thoughts blend into one another, like
colors in a tube of light fading gradually from one to the next. Sometimes
we think of nothing and merely register external stimuli. (“What are you
thinking?” “No thoughts. Isn’t that nice?” “It’s sublime” [Philip Roth,
Deception].) Sometimes we get stuck and the mind spins its wheels. But
“train of thought” is a useful idea if we know its limitations.5
Simple problem solving is a place to start. Suppose you notice that you
have lost your keys. They’re not where you ordinarily keep them. You
need them.
Wherever you are on the spectrum, it is always simpler to remember a
solution than construct one. You aren’t obliged to perform careful
reasoning when you are up-spectrum; you are merely capable of it. When
you notice the missing keys, you might recall that the same thing
happened last week—and you had let your son take the car the day before,
and asked him to leave the keys on the kitchen table when he got back, and
that’s where you found them. And he took the car last night too. So you
look on the kitchen table, and there they are.
But suppose they’re not. Suppose memory has no easy answer. You
have to think. You switch on your powerful rational thought engine.
Scanning a timeline seems like a good first step. You drove home
yesterday evening, took the keys out of the car, and put them, presumably,
in your pocket. You follow the line forward: what could have happened
next?
You are supposed to be reasoning, but here we are talking timelines,
not modus ponens, not inference. Why?
Rational thought is more than logic; more than gathering all your data
and assumptions and pushing your way forward. Rational thought also
means picking out the right techniques and the right shortcuts—the right
heuristics. Following timelines is a crucial heuristic.
Timelines are also close relations of logic. Reasoning implies an
abstract timeline. Before I can split chunks, I need to cut up the log.
Before I can cut up the log, I must find a chainsaw.
Causation in time is not the same as logical implication. Having a
chainsaw implies that I can cut up a log. Here we say nothing about time.
We say merely that the truth of the first proposition guarantees the truth of
the second. But there is a natural path in the woods between the timeless,
elevated, pure road of logic and the more convenient path (winding
alongside the stream) of timelines and causation.
Timeline thought is close to abstract reasoning. The consistent time
thread that runs through our entire lives is a help in problem solving. I do
what is reasonable, and reason transcends logic.
Mentally you retrace your steps, then, from the moment you left the
car last night. What could make the keys disappear? Hole in your pocket?
Lent them to someone? You consider each possibility. This is rational,
systematic thought—unemotional, disciplined.
This sort of thought requires sustained attention. We tend to lay out
systematic arguments step by step like garden flagstones as we build a
path from premises to goals. But we rarely fill in the path sequentially.
Often we work backward; often we cover important points along the way
and then fill in the gaps.
Reasoning no less than reminiscing depends on a series of
recollections. It is driven forward by requests to memory satisfied one by
one. Consider some small examples.
In dire circumstances, Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, unluckily
shipwrecked on the shores of Illyria, makes a plan to survive. Shakespeare
has no interest in illustrating rational thought per se. But he gives us a
good example of emergency systematic thought: “I pray thee”—to the
captain with whom she is shipwrecked—
and I’ll pay thee bounteously—
Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent. I’ll serve this duke.
Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him.
It may be worth your pains, for I can sing
And speak to him in many sorts of music,
That will allow me very worth his service.

In other words, I’ll pay you to do this: conceal my identity. Help me

disguise myself. I’ll support myself as a servant to the local duke. You’ve
said he has banned women from his court, but no disguise will make me
look like a man. So, you’ll say I’m a eunuch. And I’ll succeed in getting a
job at court, because I can sing. In fact, I’m a versatile musician.
The goal? Survive. How? Get a job. Working at court for the duke is
the best job around. How to get such a job? (1) Offer useful services, and
(2) be male. So we’ve broken the problem down into two subgoals.
What services? Easy: I’m a musician.
How to be male? Disguise; but no disguise will make me look like a
man. Dead end. Can I think of a different way to move forward?
So far, we have seen systematic working backward from the goal to the
step right before, and the one before that. The process is accompanied by
frequent requests to memory for information. What does a duke need, and
is there anything on that list I can supply? Memory provides the data.
Then how can I seem like a man? Memory responds. You can wear a
disguise; but, if you are in close contact with the fellow, forget it. No
disguise will work.
Memory requests are incessant in rational thought. Bailing out from
abstract propositions to images is probably incessant too, although that
depends on the problem and the problem solver. Probably, Viola imagines
herself—pictures herself—in male disguise, in the duke’s presence. She
doesn’t conclude logically that it can’t work; she sees that it can’t work.6
We are at a dead end. Maybe there is some give in the requirements?
Having in mind, simultaneously, how can I disguise myself and what
might the Duke accept, “eunuch” pops out.
Memory operating up-spectrum, in juice-squeezer, information-please
mode, together with simple rules of logic and basic life experience,
produces an impeccable solution. Further down-spectrum, Viola’s train of
thought might have wandered off into sad recollections of better times, or
reflections on what makes a good disguise, or an excursus on courtiers she
has known. But up-spectrum, thinking is focused, disciplined, and
systematic.
In Anna Karenina (Garnett translation), Lyovin’s wife is about to give
birth, and he is “conscious of an increasing uplift of his physical powers
and of his attention to all that lay before him.” He makes his plan. “Kuzma
should go with a note to another doctor, while he himself would go to the
chemist for the opium; and if the doctor was not up when he returned he
would bribe the footman—or if that was impossible, he would enter by
force and wake the doctor at all costs.”
Again, the problem is broken down repeatedly. Lyovin rises to the
occasion; notice how he does. When you face emergencies, your body
moves you up-spectrum, like a chess piece. He feels the surge of energy, in
his physical powers—no doubt in his mind too. He feels focus: his mind is
now dealing with one problem alone, concentrating all its energy on his
wife. He works his way systematically backward from goal to starting
point and, having laid out a path, sets out.
Not everyone is capable of it, or willing to bother. Those who are
willing and able are most likely to do it when they are wide-awake,
energetic but calm—up-spectrum.
High-focus thought will not be blown away or pushed off course by an
interesting but irrelevant perception, recollection, idea, or (especially)
emotion. The high-focus thinker is deliberately “narrow-minded”—the
mind is focused (is undilate) and, like an eye’s narrowed pupil, admits a
minimum of external glitter and glare.

Exit Reasoning
It hardly needs saying that there is far more to reasoning and abstraction,
to the upper spectrum, than I have said here. But these have always ranked
among philosophy’s favorite topics. The mental phenomena of the middle
and lower thirds of the spectrum are the ones that suffer from inattention.
They are not only intuitive and unreasonable—or at least not reasonable.
They tend also to be concrete rather than abstract, visual rather than
language based, subjective rather than objective. For all these reasons, the
middle and lower spectrum thirds put modern thinkers on edge. They are a
bad match to our science-venerating intellectual climate, and (in many, if
not all, respects) to the modern philosophical tradition that dates to
Descartes and the proto-modern tradition that starts with Plato.
These middle- and lower-spectrum phenomena—the ones I will
discuss in the next two chapters—are also the ones that pose the hardest
problems if we are bent on computer minds. It seemed reasonable from the
start that computers could be used to simulate or reproduce logical or
rational thought. But no one ever said, faced with a first-generation
“electronic brain,” “I’ll bet I can make it happy. I know a joke it will like.”
There was no reason at all to imagine that these machines were capable of
being happy. Why would anyone make a machine that was capable of
feeling? Or consciousness? Even if you knew how to do it, what would be
the point?
In his famous 1950 paper about artificial intelligence, Alan Turing
mentions consciousness, in passing, as a phenomenon associated with
minds, in some ways mysterious. But he treats it as irrelevant. If you
define the purpose of mind as rational thought, then consciousness
certainly seems irrelevant. And for Turing, rational thought was indeed the
purpose of mind.
Turing’s favorite word in this connection is “intelligence”: he saw the
goal of technology not as an artificial mind (with all its unnecessary
emotions, reminiscences, fascinating sensations, and upsetting
nightmares), but as artificial intelligence, which is why the field has the
name it does.
In no sense did this focus reflect narrowness or lack of imagination on
Turing’s part. Few more imaginative men have ever lived. But he needed
digital computers for practical purposes. Post-Turing thinkers decided that
brains were organic computers, that computation was a perfect model of
what minds do, that minds can be built out of software, and that mind
relates to brain as software relates to computer—the most important, most
influential and (intellectually) most destructive analogy in the last
hundred years (the last hundred at least).
Turing writes in his 1950 paper that, with time and thought, one might
well be able to build a digital computer that could “enjoy” strawberries
and cream. But, he adds, don’t hold your breadth. Such a project would be
“idiotic”—so why should science bother? In practical terms, he has a
point.
To understand the mind, we must go over the ground beyond logic as
carefully as we study logic and reasoning. That’s not to say that rational
thought does not underlie man’s greatest intellectual achievements.
Cynthia Ozick reminds us, furthermore, of a rational person’s surprise at
“how feeling could be so improbably distant from knowing” (Foreign
Bodies). It’s much easier to feel something is right than to prove it. And
when you do try to prove it, you might easily discover that despite your
perfectly decided, rock-solid feeling of certainty, your feelings are total
nonsense.
We have taken this particular walk, from the front door to the far end
of Rationality Park, every day for the last two thousand years. Why not go
a little farther this time, and venture beyond the merely rational?
 Six

Spectrum, Middle Third: Creativity

How does creativity work? Few questions in all of mind science, or in

science, philosophy, and psychology in general, have been asked with such
keen interest in modern times. We worship creativity, and we know it is
rare. If only we could understand it; then we could teach it. And then
everyone would be creative! This simple and ultimately inspiring, even
moving, thoroughly unconvincing belief survives from the progressive age
—the generation after the Second World War. In those years, Americans
were sure that anyone could learn anything.
Creativity is a hard problem because there is no step-by-step way to
achieve it. We can learn how to solve elaborate logical or mathematical
problems, learn how to translate foreign languages or play baseball or fly a
kite or drive a car. To do any of these things in an inspired way requires
special gifts, but nearly anyone who tries can reach basic competence.
That’s what’s perplexing and frustrating about creativity. There is no way
to reach even basic competence.
We can understand creativity, or a good deal about it. Creativity has
much to do with the dynamics of the spectrum and two of the spectrum’s
major transitions: the gradual emergence of emotion, and the unconscious
mind’s gradual taking over from consciousness, as we move down-
spectrum.

Diffuse Attention Is Required

The physicist and philosopher Roger Penrose writes that creative thoughts
are apt to come to him as he thinks “perhaps vaguely” about a problem
—“consciously, but maybe at a low level just at the back of my mind. It
might well be that I am engaged in some other rather relaxing activity;
shaving would be a good example.”1
Penrose mentions, too, the great mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré,
who found the key to a hard problem while getting on a bus. “This
complicated and profound idea apparently came to Poincaré in a flash,
while his conscious thoughts seemed to be quite elsewhere.”
According to the literary philosopher and novelist George Steiner: “All
of us have experienced twilit, penumbral moods of diffuse attention and
unresistant receptivity on the one hand, and of tensed, heightened focus on
the other.”2
Thus, Penrose is creative when he is thinking “perhaps vaguely” about
a problem—“consciously,” but just barely.
Poincaré finds a creative solution to a problem “while his conscious
thoughts seemed to be quite elsewhere.” He must be barely conscious of
the problem, or not conscious of it at all.
Steiner awaits inspiration—he experiences “unresistant receptivity”—
during “twilit, penumbral moods” when his attention is “diffuse.”
In other words, creative solutions arise when a problem is lurking at
the edge of consciousness. Logical solutions require focused attention
(attention dialed up, metaphorically, to a bright, sharp spotlight), but
creative solutions arise at a much lower level of focus—attention,
metaphorically, creating a broad pool of light. Penrose uses the phrase
“low level” and Steiner writes “twilit, penumbral”; both thinkers have
used metaphors that fit the spectrum perfectly. Creativity occurs (in these
cases anyway) when focus is fairly low. We are not at the bottom of the
spectrum; if we were, our thinkers would be on the way to sleep and would
probably not be self-aware and reflecting on their mental states. So, “fairly
low focus” seems reasonable.

The Psychological Profile of Creativity

Creative inspiration is a mental event that has been discussed at length; it

has a well-defined profile. We know what to expect and can make
inferences from our expectations.
 You don’t creep up methodically to a creative insight. It hits you on the
head unexpectedly. You can make yourself work hard on a problem in
algebra and solve it step by step. But you cannot make yourself be
inspired, cannot make yourself experience a creative insight. In this
respect, creativity is like falling asleep. We can encourage sleep or
creativity by setting up the proper environment. But we cannot make
either one happen (short of using drugs in the case of sleep).
Creative inspiration does not give you a feeling that you are
approaching a solution, “getting warmer” as you work the problem. An
intriguing experiment by Metcalfe and Weibe showed that test subjects
searching for a creative, out-of-the-blue solution to a set problem felt no
closer to succeeding just moments before inspiration struck than they had
felt at the very start.3 When subjects solved problems calling merely for
correct application of rules, the opposite held. They reported feeling
closer, “warmer,” as they approached a correct solution.
Creative inspirations feel as if they hit us out of the blue. They are
unprovoked slaps in the face. The great classicist E. R. Dodds writes that
inspirations “come suddenly, as we say, ‘into a man’s head.’ ” 4 What does
this mean in spectrum terms? Ideas hit us out of the blue when we have
started to lose control over our own thoughts—that is, we are moving
lower in the spectrum. But we cannot have gone so low that we fail to
notice what is happening. We must be able to notice that we have scored
an inspiration, and be able to do something about it—or at least remember
it until we are more focused.

Analogies Are Basic

Creative problem solving is widely agreed to center often on inventing a

new analogy—sometimes called “restructuring” the problem. When you
suddenly see a connection between two things you don’t ordinarily speak
or think of together, you have the basis of a new analogy, or a creative
thought. That branch on the ground is like an arm and a reaching hand.
Whereupon you might pick up the branch and retrieve something that was
out of reach before.
 Most inspiration happens at this shrug-it-off level of ordinary,
everyday, unremarkable thought. But many important inspirations have the
same modest beginnings: new analogy. By comparing a puzzling
something with a something else to which it’s never ordinarily compared,
you tear an opening in the everyday fabric of mental life and peer through.
You can now think about the something in terms of the something else.
You can think about it in a new way.
In this view—not a view connected to the spectrum, merely a standard
idea in psychology—creative problem solving centers on discovering and
using a new analogy, and that equals recollection plus reflection. Inventing
a new analogy between A and B (say, a bat’s flight at twilight and a
cracked teacup) means recalling B when you think of A. (Rilke compares
a bat’s flight to the crack in a porcelain cup. A creative discovery might be
an engineering accomplishment—or a poetic one.) Just as an e-mail might
remind you of a quart of milk you need to buy, a bat’s flight might remind
you of a cracked teacup. To convert this unusual recollection into an actual
analogy, you must notice, think about, and remember it—that is, reflect.
A branch on the ground reminds you of, recalls, a skeletal arm and
hand. On reflection, maybe you can use the branch to pull tennis balls
under the fence from your neighbor’s lawn back home to yours. A new
thought. Not earthshaking, but a new thought.
When presented with a request for information (how far is it to
Hartford?), we recall the corresponding information, or memories from
which we can extract the information. The same mental operation that
answers routine questions underlies the invention of new analogies—if I
use it the right way.
The question then becomes: what made the recollection—bat suggests
teacup—come to mind in the first place? After all, few of us ever invent
such analogies. Creativity is rare, and it is probably the mental
achievement we value highest. If new analogies drive creativity, what
force drives the invention of new analogies?

The Origin of Analogies

We have traded the creativity problem for another that is better defined but
just as hard. How do we invent new analogies? The philosopher Jerry
Fodor wrote, in 1983: “It is striking that, while everybody thinks
analogical reasoning is an important ingredient in all sorts of cognitive
achievements we prize, nobody knows anything about how it works.”5 Not
even, he adds, in an “in the glass darkly sort of way.” No big
developments, unfortunately, have changed the picture since then.
Of course, there is more to creativity than inventing analogies.
Willingness to push your ideas to the outer limits and beyond is important.
Ignoring limits and rules that are merely conventional is important. A feel
for the elegance and economy of nature is basic. Curiosity is important;
your capacity to be surprised is all-important. But nothing is more basic
than the discovery of new analogies.
The problem is this: When I ask you, “What color is a sparrow?” and
you recall the image of a sparrow and answer, “Brown and white,” it’s
obvious how you recalled an appropriate memory. The question and the
recollected image overlap. They both include the name “sparrow.” (There
might be other overlaps too.) But a bat at twilight and a cracked teacup
don’t overlap. There is a certain abstract resemblance that Rilke makes us
see, but it makes no sense to suppose that this information is stored along
with the memory of the teacup. (Would the teacup memory include an
entry that says, in effect, “abstract resemblance to bat at twilight?” There
are hundreds or thousands of resemblances at this abstract level, and they
can hardly all be stored along with the cup memory.)
How do we accomplish this feat of recollection?

Recollection Using Essence Summarizers

If I could summarize the essence of a memory or experience—of a person,

place, scene—I could stamp each memory with its “essence summary”—a
sort of bar code or digital ID matrix. If two memories were each labeled
XU5Z—same essence summary in both cases—I would know that they
had something in common, even if they seemed very different. The same
would be true if their summaries were almost the same, or closely related.
The mind’s most effective essence summarizer is emotion. Two
objects, persons, or events that are wholly unlike on the surface might
make me feel the same way—or basically the same. And that similar
feeling suggests, in turn, that these two must have something in common.
 Hot coals make us feel burned—no thinking needed. Happy parties
make us feel happy—no thinking needed. And we are (or can be)
fantastically sensitive, delicate emotion readers. Two people who say
nearly the same thing to us, in nearly the same way, can make us feel very
different. It’s no surprise that this highly refined skill should be useful and
not just decorative. At our best, we are superbly sensitive emotiometers
(that’s “ee-moh-shee-AH-meh-terz”).
You and I might be equally sensitive, yet our readings might be
completely different. That doesn’t matter, as long as yours are self-
consistent and mine are too.
Imagine that I am at a fancy wedding reception. It amounts to
“unpleasant chaos.” In other words, the essence of the scene is unpleasant
chaos. How did I fix on this particular essence summary—or verdict, or
diagnosis? I might have done it by systematic thinking. Far more likely,
the event registered directly on my emotions. We are sensitive musical
instruments and the world gets distinctive sounds out of us by pressing the
keys and tensing its lips.
If someone challenged me after the fact, I might present a checklist of
attributes that made the wedding seem like unpleasant chaos. (Noise level.
Quality of music. People I know. Activity in the room. Atmosphere. Level
of drinking. Crowdedness.) But we rarely decide how an event makes us
feel; we just feel that way. The event presses our keys, registers directly on
our feelings. Human emotions are essence summarizers. They take us
directly from a real-world situation to a particular emotion that captures,
for us, the essence of the situation.
Now, the wedding reception might remind me of all sorts of other
things that are superficially unrelated but share its essential quality. These
other things might overlap the wedding scene in no obvious way at all—
except in the shared essence. Maybe I recall a scene from a movie about
gladiators in ancient Rome, or a high school graduation, or construction on
a narrow New Haven street. The essence of any of those scenes might be
unpleasant chaos.

VISUAL AND AURAL ESSENCE SUMMARIES ARE POWERFUL TOO

Suppose we are introduced to someone and soon afterward mutter to our
wives, “She looks just like Sheila Bernstein.” We have compared this new
person to Sheila. We have performed some kind of image-to-image
comparison to reach our conclusion.6 In making our comparison, the
mental image we use for Sheila might be a nearly literal memory of her
appearance on some occasion, but usually we have something less precise
in mind.
Clearly, the mind can work with visual summaries. Such a summary
captures various aspects of the original and reduces them to essentials,
boils them down, summarizes—with emphasis on what’s visually
important. We say, “the baby looks like his father,” or “this actress must
be the one who played Portia in that Julius Caesar we saw five years ago.”
Normally, we base such statements on a similarity between the person
before us (the Sheila look-alike, the baby, “this actress”) and a mental
summary, a visual summary, of the other person. That we can spot this sort
of resemblance (we can’t all, but many of us can) means that images are a
medium that can be used for summaries.
The same sort of essence summarizing can be done with aural
sensations as well: “sounds like Brahms.” One piece of music reminds us
of another, or reminds us of a musical template. We might have in mind a
template for the sound of Brahms. It holds no particular Brahms
composition. It’s an essence summary, in musical rather than emotional
form. We might lack all explicit, conscious access to this template. We
might not be able to describe it in words, or convey it in music, even if we
could call the template to mind. But we can deal, however we do it, with a
musical essence, synopsis, abstraction—of one composition or a whole
body of compositions—of Brahms. What’s important is that we can reduce
the essence of a piece of music, taken as a whole, to a musical summary.
Music is another medium that can be used for summaries.
But emotion is the most powerful essence summarizer by far.
Emotion is a hugely powerful summary medium, because an emotion
can summarize anything. This means not only that emotions are versatile
summarizers; they can be used to summarize people or places or cities,
novels, historical epochs, butterflies. Far more important, emotions can be
used to discover the shared essence (should there be one) of virtually any
two things we choose to compare, no matter how radically dissimilar they
seem. We can discover the shared essence (should there be one) between
an aircraft carrier and a bowl of Wheaties. Between a neutrino and a can of
Coke Zero, or a graduate program and the decayed medieval fabric of Old
Saint Paul’s in the center of London before it burned down, or asparagus
and a scramjet.

The Summary Power of Emotion

An emotion is inherently abstract. It is about nothing. It has a cause, but

the happiness caused by a faculty meeting’s being over might be just the
same (for you) as the happiness caused by a beautiful fall day. The
collection of separate kinds (shades, tones, flavors) of happiness is
boundlessly large. Each is abstract; none is an “emotional image” of any
particular event. Take a photo of a wedding party, and you get a photo of
that party. Take an “emotional snapshot” of the same event and you get a
summary like “unpleasant chaos” that suits many different occasions.
Emotions, like colors, can be muted or shockingly vivid. Their
variations are endless. Sometimes we feel several different emotions
concurrently: happiness that Susan is coming Friday, worry that my laptop
is failing and will be a nuisance to replace. I’m happy and worried. But
they all add up to one final color, taste, emotion.
The plain fact of continuous consciousness creates many more
emotional responses than we notice or remember: small blips or blats or
dips or sudden spikes (too quick to register) of the emotiometer.
Lady Macbeth, as her husband arrives home from war, is ready for
anything. “I feel now,” she says, “the future in the instant.” She feels—has
an emotional or even physical experience. The future—she and her
husband as queen and king—makes her feel some way. (Thrilled, awed,
cruelly proud, smug, recklessly powerful.) The whole vision fits into one
level instant because that’s what emotions do. They are abstract
summarizers. They can distill universes into teaspoonfuls of powerful
essence. One essence, one abstract distillate: she feels the future in the
instant.
Beethoven makes one statement about the mood in which some of his
deepest music must be performed. Etwas lebhaft und mit der innigsten
Empfindung: somewhat lively, with the most introspective feeling. One
emotion can have many ingredients. Langsam und sehnsuchtsvoll: slow
and full of longing. Geschwind, doch nicht zu sehr and mit
Entschlossenheit: quick, but not too much, and decisively. No matter how
many ingredients go into the mix, what comes out is one emotion.
“I feel pretty,” sings the heroine in Bernstein and Sondheim’s West
Side Story. What kind of emotion is pretty? But you can feel anything.
Everything you experience, you feel.

Emotions as Memory Cues— and the Evoking Power of Mood

Emotions or moods can be powerfully evocative memory cues. They work

like any other cue: if an emotion you experience now overlaps an emotion
stored in, associated with, a recollection stored in your memory, you can
reel in the memory. Material shared between cue and recollection makes
remembering happen. An emotion you merely think about but don’t
experience can also be a cue. “Think of times you were insanely angry.”
If you can’t recall any aspect of a forgotten memory, it will stay
forgotten. But sometimes an emotion will serve as a memory cue when
nothing else will work.
You are unlikely to stumble on any particular detail that matches
exactly a recollected scene from long ago—the same face or voice, sound
on the TV or radio, passing traffic, passersby with the same sort of clothes
or accoutrements—today, in the different world you inhabit now. But
emotions are abstract summaries, and the particular emotion you felt and
remembered long ago might crop up again, even though every sensory
detail is different.
The uncanny ability of mood to reel in past time is one of the central
facts about mind. Mood is emotion. Such recollections are likely to occur
closer to the bottom than to the top of the spectrum. So we are not apt to
be paying attention. We are apt to miss them.
This is the puzzle or (loosely speaking) paradox of mind. We have
already considered it in a different context. The most interesting mental
events happen at low focus, because of low focus. But you cannot (or can
just barely) remember them, just because they do happen at low focus.
How do these mood cues work in practice? There are few examples on
record, so I will supply some.
 Gazing across the choir in a medieval church, at the opposite wall sunk deep in
shadow, with the building dead quiet on a late afternoon and the gazer’s wife and
children temporarily invisible—gone off somewhere into the long, dark shadows—the
gazer finds himself recalling a tour of the Château de Chillon near Geneva with his
parents when he was five. On a cold winter’s day, the place seemed empty except
for his family and the guide. In a small room whose far wall was deep in shadow, he
looked around—and the guide had disappeared. He was uneasy. (He knew about the
castle’s famous dungeon and doubted whether he could find his own way out.)
“Where is everyone?” he asked (in just those words), and the guide said “I’m here,”
and stepped out of the shadows.

A silent, ancient, shadow-sunk building where the dark hides (or

consumes?) people feels a certain way, creates a certain mood.
Here’s another example in which Europe figures again in the cue.

In a fairly bare, austere Frankfurt hotel room that he is sharing with his son, the
thinker has just awakened in the early light; it’s quiet, and no one else is awake.
There’s a distinctly I’m-not-at-home feeling. Then he is thinking about the first
morning’s awakening at a summer camp when he was a child, in a room with four
steel bunk beds in the four corners, bare and bright and quiet; he was, apparently, the
only one awake.

The mood is bright, bare early morning in strange surroundings, with other
beds in the room, and not knowing what to expect. At summer camp, I had
no idea what the first full day would be like, and I would sooner have been
anyplace else. I didn’t mind being in Frankfurt, but I didn’t know what to
expect from a meeting scheduled for the afternoon.
The first example happened in late afternoon, when the thinker was
tired and down-spectrum. The second is unusual: it happened during the
low-focus period that intervenes between awakening and wide-awake
alertness. Both show a mood serving as memory cue to retrieve an
unexpected (eerily specific) memory of the past, an otherwise forgotten
moment of past time.
Here are two other examples in a different key.

In the late afternoon I am working on an early stage of this book, feeling discouraged;
then I recall myself on a particular New York subway platform at Penn Station in my
early twenties—postcollege, pre–graduate school, studying art and Talmud in
Manhattan, bound for Brooklyn to meet my parents at the apartment of my
grandparents in Brighton Beach. It’s probably Hanukkah. Part of the recollection is
the unusual center platform, with the uptown express on one side, the downtown on
the other. (You walk upstairs to reach this platform—which is nonetheless well below
street level).
The recollection centers on a happy occasion, but there is a strong element
of lonely sadness in my life at this time. It clings somehow to this
particular subway platform. There is almost certainly something more
here—mood-related—but I don’t know what.
Here’s another example:

Late one evening I came upon the phrase “I was nodding off without knowing it” while
reading an earlier draft of this book; then I was thinking about the author Karen Blixen
(pen name Isak Dinesen)—specifically as she appears in her published letters, at
home in Denmark. The phrase “without knowing it,” its appearance on the page in
italics, has something to do with the recollection.

My disappointment with Karen Blixen’s (later) letters, and all the rest of
her post-African writing, is connected to the idea of “nodding off without
knowing it”—suggesting an unnoticed, unacknowledged weakening of
one’s powers. And again, there is more to it than I can account for.
One final example:

“Buried and seemingly out of the way, such a memory is sure to haunt you, Freud
found, in the form of obsessions.” This phrase comes, yet again, from an earlier
version of this book. Rereading, I found myself thinking about the stairs leading to the
front hall at my grandparents’ in Flatbush—and remembered something I hadn’t in a
long time: a painting I’d made as a young teenager showing, from below, a man
crouching above a pit—a deliberately strange and disturbing image. As a child I gave
occasional paintings to friends, but most went to my parents; I wanted to keep them
close. They didn’t want any part of this one, though. Understandably. My
grandmother, however, with her love of art in every aspect, was happy to take the
painting, frame it, and hang it in her front hall. Superficially, the mood link has to do
with Freud: my grandfather had published on Freud, and arriving at the Flatbush
apartment meant entering a warm, welcoming scholarly enclave (as opposed to the
more science-centered enclave of my parents’ home). In deeper terms, the sentence
quoted above deals with avoiding unpleasant truths: my painting presented itself as
an unpleasant truth that my grandmother disdained to avoid—for which I was
grateful, especially given that this painting, as I knew at the time, was awkward and in
many ways unsatisfying. But still, I wanted to see it on a wall, not slumped or stacked
in a dusty pile of rejects.

One might have described the connection between the sentence I quote and
the long-ago childhood scene as an idea. Not a mood or emotion, but a
type of thought. The connecting thought: “our tendency to avoid disturbing
truth, and people who are willing to put up with it all the same” (Freud, of
course, specialized in disturbing truths).
 Yet I believe that the connecting link was, in fact, a mood, by which I
mean a mood that captures or includes this idea. I believe it was a mood
because the resemblance between the recently written sentence and the
forgotten old scene in Brooklyn hit me out of the blue—not like a
patiently made discovery; like a recognition. Like “Of course it’s Sheila!”
I was thoroughly puzzled as to why the analogy had come to mind.
Why did this memory of a long-ago scene suddenly occur to me in
connection with the statement about Freud? Clearly, the mind recognizes
two emotions’ being close or identical, just as it recognizes identical faces
or voices. Recognition is a kind of seeing, largely unconscious. Emotion,
in short, is not only a way to connect two deeply related though
superficially unrelated memories. It’s a way to recognize such a
connection unconsciously, almost instantly. Memory procedures that work
fast are crucial when we need to find one memory in a large pool.
Here are the two basic points:

1. A mood or emotion can be a cue that summons memories that include

this same emotion.
2. Such a cue can connect two memories that, in most ways, seem far
apart.

Analogies and Creative Inspiration

Many books and papers have discussed examples of new analogies and the
restructuring of problems, especially in science. I will merely sketch the
possibilities with a few examples.
Winston Churchill coinvented the tank during the First World War on
analogy, evidently, with the battleship. H. H. Asquith, prime minister at the
start of the war and a brilliant man himself, described Churchill as “a
curious dash of schoolboy simplicity” together with “a zigzag streak of
lightning in the brain.” Churchill, a member of Asquith’s government at
the start of the First World War, faced the problem of how allied soldiers
could advance over deep trenches against murderous German machine-gun
fire. When he met Major Thomas Hetherington, who had been thinking
about the same problem on similar lines, the result was the “Land Ship
Committee,” and an active project to build such a vessel.
Here we have an analogy between a real object (the battleship) and a
mere abstract set of requirements. No one had any idea what a tank would
be like. But the feel of those requirements evidently brought the feel of a
warship to mind: smooth, impregnable cruising; reliable protective shield;
aggressive weapon.
My own first publication in computing, having to do with a new
solution to problems of deadlock in Internet-like computer networks—
deadlock in such networks is like “gridlock” in a large city—centered on
an analogy between the movement of data packets in a network and of
commuters in Grand Central Terminal. Grand Central has two floors’
worth of train gates. Even if both floors were jammed up, one could
imagine a vertically moving loop flowing down one staircase from upper
level to lower and then back up another staircase. This analogy led straight
to the solution. There is an abstract visual similarity, but it’s very abstract.
Emotion coding seems like the main ingredient in making the connection.
Finally, here’s another case in a different domain. Rilke makes an
astonishing comparison in the eighth “Duino Elegy” between an infant
bat’s or bird’s first flight and a crack in a teacup. Poetic imagery exists to
make us see, make us look again at what we take for granted and usually
don’t bother to see, to look at something old in a new way. Rilke uses the
analogy to draw a conclusion: “So the bat’s track / fractures the porcelain
of evening.” Where did this strange and powerful analogy come from?
Presumably from abstract visual images that resembled each other.
Emotion is the most powerful and general of the sensory-emotional
summarizers—but not the only one. Visual summaries are powerful too.7

Do Emotions Really Work This Way?

Sometimes one can actually feel the feeling that connects two parts of an
analogy. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Anne must recover from her shock
at seeing someone unexpected in the distance, and get on with her life:
When she had scolded back her senses, she found the others still waiting for the
carriage.
What inspired the author to write “scolded back”? To settle down, to calm
oneself feels, in this context, like “scolding back.” One scolds back noisy
parties that can’t be physically pushed around. One scolds back a group of
noisy chickens or children; one throws up a screen of admonitions to settle
them back where they belong.
In La porte étroite [The Narrow Gate], André Gide’s narrator (who is
in love) tells us, “Every day I was awakened by my joy.” A simple,
unpretentious yet nearly perfect sentence: Chaque matin j’étais éveillé par
ma joie. No adjectives, no qualifications. I suspect many readers, over the
years, will have said to themselves: Yes, I have had that experience. I have
felt that way.
The sentence reminds readers of similar occasions in their own lives.
How? Some of Gide’s readers will use the feeling created by his sentence
to go straight to a memory that evokes that same feeling. In which case, an
emotion has arced the gap between Gide and you. You feel along with
Gide. One thinks of Heidegger’s idea of putting ideas “in relation.”
“The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at
times the being of another,” says Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Notice: not
“share the life,” but “share the being.” In spectrum logic, “being” means,
again, sensation and emotion unconfined, allowed to fill the pool of
consciousness and bring forth the moods and memories that follow
naturally.
A musical note can create resonance elsewhere, sympathetic vibration.
A sung note can make a nearby violin string vibrate. Emotion, too, can
“resonate,” can jump the gap between two people. John Carey discusses
resonance in John Donne: “In Donne’s [essay], orgasm fills the body like a
musical note setting up its lingering whispers. By likening his girls to pure
metal bells Donne suggests the secluded stirrings of their physical life: the
metallic image renders them more alive, not less.”8 Bells awaken
sympathetic vibration. One body picks up, or tunes in, or reexperiences, or
shares another’s being.
People used to say “a penny for your thoughts.” No one ever said “a
penny for your feelings.” Your thoughts are often inscrutable, but your
feelings are usually obvious. Sometimes we can feel (not just discern)
someone else’s feelings. We feel directly that someone is angry, uncertain,
exultant, as we feel a warm breeze.
 In all these facts we see the power of emotion to pull things together—
two silent people, an author and reader who have never met and never will;
two halves of a new analogy; two separate worlds.
The psychologist C. E. Osgood makes an important observation. The
discovery of new metaphors, he says, is driven by the fact that “such
diverse sensory experiences as a white circle (rather than black), a straight
line (rather than crooked), a rising melody (rather than falling), a sweet
taste (rather than sour), a caressing touch (rather than an irritating scratch)
. . . can share a common affective meaning.”9
Coleridge goes right to the point in a letter to his poet friend Robert
Southey:
I hold, that association depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of
resembling states of Feeling, than on trains of Ideas. . . . I almost think, that Ideas never
recall Ideas, as far as they are Ideas—any more than Leaves in a forest create each
other’s motion—The Breeze it is that runs through them; it is the Soul, the state of
Feeling.10

Clinical Evidence

Emotion as a memory cue is easy to understand. But does it happen in real

life? Yes. Evidence comes from a distinguished psychoanalyst who was
also a neurophysiologist, Morton Reiser.
Reiser reports, on the basis of long psychoanalytic experience, that far-
apart memories (concerning very different topics at different times) can be
“emotional analogues.” He means that two memories can evoke similar
feelings. He begins with Freud’s idea of “memory nodes”—gathering
points for many different thoughts with something in common, or many
aspects of one dream. Reiser tells us that shared emotion can bring a
crowd of varied thoughts or dream fragments together. Many seemingly
unrelated aspects of one dream might all evoke similar (or the same)
emotion.
“Contemporary data,” Reiser writes, in reference to psychoanalytic
experience and neurobiology, “implicate emotion as the glue that binds
memory elements to each other, enabling those that belong together to
stay together.”11 The glue that binds memory elements to each other; look
inside an episodic memory, Reiser tells us, and you will find its various
elements held together by their association with one shared emotion.
I believe that two seemingly different, unrelated thoughts might be
joined—proposed by the mind as a new analogy—insofar as they evoke
the same emotion. Reiser’s view is different. Yet he, too, speaks of the
power of emotions to join separate loci of the mind—separate thoughts,
ideas, memories. “Dream images and the memory traces they represent
may be associatively linked by a capacity to evoke the same emotion.”12
Dreams often contain strange images that seem meaningless—except to
the dreamer himself, who knows immediately that the tall, bald man
carrying a dolphin under one arm is actually a college girlfriend. How
does he know? Where does the strange image come from? Sometimes,
says Reiser, the image and the thing it represents—the bald dolphin man
and the college girl—evoke the same emotion.
Reiser speaks of “an entire network of stored memories that are related
to each other by shared affective potential.”13 He concludes that “sensory
residues in the mind are organized by affect and arranged as nodal
memory networks.”14 His “sensory residues” are memories. Within his
“nodal memory networks,” clusters of memories that share an emotion are
linked together.

In Sum

The summarizing power of emotions is poorly understood. Yet it is,

potentially, enormously important. I am thinking about a bat at twilight;
then, suddenly, about a cracked teacup. And I write a poem that will live
for as long as poetry exists. (Not based on this one image alone! But it
plays its part.) I am thinking about a gridlocked computer network; then,
suddenly, about crowds in Grand Central Terminal. The result is a
distinctly minor discovery. But lots of minor discoveries make science.
How does it all work?
This is such a challenging and important question that researchers have
gone all out in proposing solutions. One eminent thinker, for example,
believes that only quantum mechanics and the superposition of wave states
can solve the puzzle. Isn’t it more sensible to guess that I invent a new
analogy when two different-seeming things make me feel the same way?
I haven’t explained why and how feelings work as they do; my goal is
merely to explain how the building blocks of mind—such as emotion, such
as recollection—combine to create such phenomena as creativity. What I
have done is help suggest the extraordinary power and versatility of our
emotion-reading talents. We are champion feelers.
Creativity and new analogies are such hard problems that I must
underline, in closing, what’s been suggested. Creativity emerges when I
compare a bat’s flight to a cracked cup, a computer network to Grand
Central Terminal, a still-unconceived military vehicle to a battleship.
Simple enough. But how do I get the right pairs together? How do I find
just the right memory to pair with my bat, my jammed computer network,
or anything else, given the stupendously huge set of memories that exist
within the brain’s billion-odd neurons? “Your partner is somewhere on this
dance hall; just page through these five billion CVs and pick her out!”
This is the problem of creativity. And the proposed answer centers on
the mind’s skill at labeling any experience with an exactly appropriate
emotion—“exactly” for my own purposes, of course. Instead of billions of
prospective analogy partners, I can sweep directly to the few (if there are
any) that have the same essence summary as the object or experience I’m
starting with. The human memory is a champion at pulling, from our huge
collections, just the memory that is associated with the last time I walked
into this shop, or the last time I heard this song. If memories are labeled,
we are superb at finding the ones with the right labels.
Of course, I might still find far more potential analogies than I can
handle. (And I might have heard the song too often for my previous
hearing to mean anything.) None of that matters. Sometimes, we know,
creative thoughts do occur, and often they center on new analogies; and
now we have a plausible method for understanding the construction of
those new analogies—a method that involves no previously undiscovered
techniques or brand-new mind maneuvers. It centers merely on one of our
hugely powerful pieces of mental equipment: our sensitivity as
emotiometers.
We might now make some tentative progress on other questions too,
such as: What is consciousness for? What is the point; what is gained?
Why did nature (or God) bother with it?
 In a sense it is a ridiculous question. No human being is willing to give
up consciousness; life is meaningless without it. Consciousness gives
meaning to life. That’s hardly an insignificant piece of work.
Meaning has value to human beings. We need it. We lust for it. We are
bitterly unhappy when we are forced to live life without it. But
consciousness is a strange case. Without consciousness, our lives are
without meaning. Would living without consciousness make us unhappy
then?
Of course not. It would make us nothing at all. Without consciousness,
we are neither happy nor unhappy. We are nothing.
Philosophers (some, anyway) are worried. What is consciousness for?
“Zombies” intensify their worry. Suppose you built a robot that was an
exact, perfect replica of a human being in every way except that it was not
conscious. Does its lack of consciousness prevent its acting the role of a
human being in any detail? Does the lack of consciousness matter to its
performance in any way at all?
Seemingly not. When it says “I’m terribly unhappy,” it feels nothing; it
never feels anything, but it can run through its performance perfectly. We
kick it in the shins. It says “Ouch! You damned . . .” “Why did you just say
ouch?” we ask politely. “Because I’m in pain, you dumb bastard!” it
replies. It’s programmed to act exactly like a human being in every way,
all the time. Its lack of consciousness doesn’t seem to impede its
performance in any way. Why should it? How could it?
And if not being conscious wouldn’t impede our performance, why are
we conscious?
Maybe consciousness does do something for us after all; maybe the
unconscious zombie would not be indistinguishable from a human being.
A sung note is physically different from the same note on paper, or in
our minds. We can hear the note in our minds precisely, without singing it.
But the sung note creates sound waves—riles the air; might create
sympathetic vibrations: make a piano string tremble or a wine glass
quiver.
In very roughly the same way, a felt emotion is different from one that
is merely recorded in your brain. You might remember, right now, a
childhood occasion when you were terribly embarrassed. But you can
recall your embarrassment without feeling embarrassed. Knowing about
the emotion is different from experiencing the emotion.
 Emotions (I have suggested) are crucial to certain sorts of recollection,
including a sort that is essential to creativity. And feeling an emotion is
plainly different from merely being aware of one. What are the
implications of this difference for the process of recollection? It could be
that if we experience an emotion—feel it, are conscious of it—the result is
a more effective memory cue than if we merely think about the emotion.
The felt emotion might conceivably reach, discover, activate, summon
more memories—reach farther and deeper—than the unfelt, merely
thought-about emotion. Some analogue of resonance might work in favor
of the felt emotion.
Imagine a soprano waiting at the threshold of a large dining room
(belonging to some sort of fancy club or restaurant, let’s say), looking the
place over from a step or two higher than the main floor. If she holds up a
large sign that says, “Think of a high A-flat,” she’ll create a very different
impression than if she sings a high A-flat. (Loud.)
If felt emotions are indeed (sometimes, in some ways) better memory
cues than emotions we merely know about—and “felt,” of course, implies
consciousness—then a zombie would not be indistinguishable from a
human being. A human would recollect things differently. The human
being would be better at remembering based on emotion as a cue—and
would therefore be better at (among other things) creative thinking.
Whether we need consciousness or not, we do need emotion—at least a
faithful simulation of emotion, as in our zombie. We need to think, and
therefore we need to remember, as human beings do. Without emotion as a
cue to recollection, your memory would be a mere database, a mere
computer. With it, miracles happen. We discover analogies. We create.
 Seven

Spectrum, Lower Third: Descent into Lost Time

Three big principles, interrelated, shape the mind as we float gently,

gradually, on the great soft wings of daydream into the lower reaches of
the spectrum. Dreams are theme circles that pull the past into the present.
Daydreaming, fantasy—mind wandering on a large scale—make a
transition zone; then we approach sleep-onset thought, the hallucination,
and the dream.
We live our lives as if in a backyard with a high fence on one side that
we can’t see over. Naturally, we wonder about that fence and what’s on the
other side. But we can’t ever find out, and eventually we shrug it off and
barely see the fence any longer.
On the other side, just out of sight, is the past. We live side by side
with our hidden pasts, and never (or almost never) suspect. Right there, on
the other side, is your life on some afternoon when you were eight, or
thirteen, or twenty. That’s where dreams take place.
In normal life we can sometimes just barely hear (when the wind is
right) the play of hidden voices from the other side.

Daydreaming and Fantasy

Daydreams can happen anytime, but they become important in the lower-
middle zones of the spectrum.
Eric Klinger, daydream specialist: “Day-dreaming keeps reminding us
of our current concerns. . . . The concerns it comes back to most are those
emotionally most important to us.”1 Daydreaming and dreaming are first
and foremost remembering. Remembering is a process strongly biased—
other things being equal—in favor of our newest, freshest memories.
Daydreaming is biased the same way.
Daydreaming happens in the spectrum’s lower half. But don’t people
daydream in the morning? Of course; we oscillate over the spectrum more
than once in a typical day. For some of us, especially children, up-
spectrum thinking is never natural. Children spend more time than adults
in the daydream-rich regions of the spectrum. The association of
daydreaming with the lower spectrum—no matter the time of day—is
obvious: daydreams presuppose relaxation. To say you are “alert to your
environment” and “daydreaming” makes no sense.
Daydreaming at any time of day means we are down-spectrum,
increasingly outside the conscious mind’s control. Sometimes we actively
decide to daydream. But often, daydreams choose us. Jerome Singer,
daydreaming authority, believes that daydreams are usually involuntary,
tending to happen when our surroundings grow quiet or boring. Even when
we do choose to daydream, often with an explicit goal in mind (“it would
be fun to mull this over”), daydreams are like ordinary dreams in being
narrative. Daydreams tell stories.2
What kinds of stories? Daydreaming as a topic often suggests “just
suppose” or “if only” daydreams. When Elizabeth Bennet visits the
magnificent country home of her rejected suitor in Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice, she daydreams that she might have been mistress of the
place. These are wistful thoughts, a bit sad. The author leaves us to fill in
the blanks ourselves; she is not for lazy readers. (Which might be why
Henry James, who eventually decided that filling in every last blank was
his authorial duty and right, never understood her.)
But a short time later, the rejected suitor himself unexpectedly and
embarrassingly appears, chats deferentially, winningly; departs again.
More daydreams! Now Miss Bennet’s emotions are all turmoil, and she is
wondering, urgently, what he really thinks of her. Her daydream continues
until “the remarks of her companions on her absence of mind roused her.”
This second daydream would have been pressing, perhaps anxious. Not
pleasant.
Daydreams can be unhappy, and they are sometimes disliked by the
serious-minded on principle. Anna Karenina’s husband “regarded this
mental activity as pernicious, dangerous daydreaming” (Tolstoy, Anna
Karenina, Bartlett translation). Teachers have never been crazy about
daydreaming students.
Daydreams resemble low-focus hallucination more than up-spectrum
reasoning in being enveloping and engrossing. (Miss Bennet has to be
“roused.”) But sometimes the conscious mind plans and steers daydreams
explicitly, which makes them unlike dreams—where consciousness plays
an important but largely hidden, implicit part. Daydreams, in short, have
some down-spectrum and some up-spectrum characteristics—just as they
ought to. They are lower-mid-spectrum creatures.
Daydreams are not hallucinations. But they can come close. “When
you approached her,” writes André Gide, as I’ve noted, of a daydreamer,
“her eyes would not turn from their reverie to look at you” (La porte
étroite [The Narrow Gate]). We all know such people and moods. “Look
how our partner’s rapt,” says Banquo of daydreaming Macbeth. “Worthy
Macbeth, we stay upon your leisure.”
Macbeth’s tendency to raptness is crucial to the man and his
personality, and therefore to Shakespeare’s story. Macbeth is called “rapt”
three times in early scenes. His psyche is the strangest Shakespeare ever
invented—but it hangs together perfectly. He is a low-spectrum character,
a seer and a visionary; but he also has high courage, a weak character, and
a grasping wife he adores.
We know that thinking visually grows more important down-spectrum.
Far down-spectrum, just outside sleep, we encounter the hallucination line.
Now suppose we lop off the entire upper half of the spectrum and
substitute the lower half for the whole. Visual thinking is more important
in this truncated spectrum than in the whole, untruncated spectrum. We
reach the hallucination line sooner in the truncated spectrum, relatively
speaking, than in the untruncated version.
Macbeth has a powerful visual-thinking bias. To think something is to
see it. And the pictures he imagines often boil over into a scalding mist of
hallucination. Of course, Macbeth is a master of words too. The fantastic
power of his visual and linguistic imagination suggests one other man
only. A certain playwright.
A daydream is easily interrupted. A daydreamer is easily roused, but
daydreams can be engrossing. Naturally, sexual fantasies can be even more
so.
 Chateaubriand was ardent and deeply imaginative, an impoverished
nobleman, a romantic, swashbuckling monarchist during the French
Revolution, a daring fighter, a daring author. An original all through. As a
teenager in late-eighteenth-century, pre–Revolutionary France, growing up
in the family’s ancient, beat-up château in the Brittany backwaters, he
faced a stiff challenge. He desperately wanted, he needed, to fantasize
about girls, but he found it hard because—growing up in strict circles, in
strict times—he had never met any (only children and his sisters
excepted). But he rose to the challenge. He invented a girl, working only
with the meager data at his disposal. Then he worshipped her devoutly
every day. His imagination was gigantic (Chateaubriand, Mémoires
d’outre-tombe [Memories from Beyond the Grave]).
In Chateaubriand’s adolescence (he tells us), he was impatient to get to
bed, where he would unleash his majestic fantasies. “All the powers of my
soul were exalted to a state of delirium. . . . The world was delivered into
the power of my amours.”
Daydreams are visual, narrative, engrossing—in other words, down-
spectrum. Yet we control them deliberately (at least sometimes), we are
recognizably our own selves in them, we remember them—not perfectly,
but far better than we remember dreams. We have descended a long way
down-spectrum, but there is farther to go.

Dream Thought

When we dream, memory has the floor. Conscious mind still has the power
to reject highly upsetting memories. But most memories are admitted
when we are near or at the bottom. The price we pay is the occasional
nightmare, and frequent vague upset or uneasiness. Nature balances the
books by arranging for us to forget nearly everything. What we don’t
remember never happened to us. Except, forgotten dreams can have a
subtle influence over waking life.
Happy dreams (especially sexual ones) will sometimes burn bright for
many hours. On the eve of Saint Agnes, when maidens were said to dream
of their lovers, Keats’s Madeline looks forward as she climbs into bed to
“all the bliss to be before tomorrow morn” (“The Eve of St. Agnes”). (To
all the blissful dreams, that is.)
 James Joyce’s alter ego awakes after a good night:
An enchantment of the heart! The night had been enchanted. In a dream or vision he
had known the ecstasy of seraphic life. Was it an instant of enchantment only or long
hours and years and ages? (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

We don’t have to remember anything about the dream except that it was
erotic or good in some other way. Joyous dreams cast their glow whether
we remember the details or not.
“Enchanting” dreams don’t crop up often. But ordinary dreams can
affect daily life too, even if we have forgotten them almost entirely. By
chance, we do or say something related to an almost-forgotten dream—
and we feel a faint answer; a mysterious pale answering glow beneath the
sea surface of memory. Elements of the dream tremble or tingle when we
land on a thought (like a lucky square in a board game) that matches some
part of the dream.
More common than an accidental memory is a moment of awareness
too vague to be traced. We pause for a moment, for reasons we can’t
explain (we rarely try; the pause itself usually goes unnoticed). We merely
stop for an instant; that’s all. All we feel is the slightest quiver, the
slightest sense of something somewhere answering back. But these little
unnoticed pauses, graceful quarter rests in the rhythm of life, help us live.
If we choose to confront our dreams or sleep-onset memories, we will
learn what is on our minds. Sleep-onset thoughts are especially valuable in
this respect (though harder even than dreams to monitor), because they are
apt to be less distorted. They can take us way back into the past, into early
childhood.
Dreams are governed by several principles.

1. Memories of recent events come first.

2. Memories that appear in a dream record events of the outer and inner
fields of consciousness—memories of external reality and memories
of our own thoughts. But dreams speak in pictures. Words appear in
dreams, but we distrust them. So words take a secondary role. When
we remember an idea in a dream, it is translated into a picture, and
then we remember it.
3. Dreams are theme circles. In fact they are often multiple circles, with
some elements of a sequence belonging to one theme, others to a
 different theme.

A theme can be anything, but it is almost always an emotion-steeped

image. The emotion is most likely to be a blocked emotion—a smoldering,
unresolved emotion—because those are the strongest around, the stiffest
drinks in all of memory.

Remembering Creates the Bizarreness of Dreams

The same construction principle that leads to illogical dream sequences

leads to illogical dream scenes and dream images.
The principle is simple. If a dream includes a strange or illogical
sequence (you’re at the beach as a child, then looking for a space in a
parking garage near your office), that same illogical sequence yields an
illogical image if the two scenes appear concurrently, superimposed, or
jumbled together, instead of one after another. Instead of the sequence
“beach, parking garage,” you would see an image that is part beach, part
garage.
We know that a memory cue can yield many recollections. And we
know that conflation of separate recollections allows us to create
abstractions. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that separate
recollections might also be conflated during dreams.
Memory presents us with an armful of close fits to a search cue, in no
special order—except for a consistent bias in favor of emotion. Suppose
my search cue is an image that I have just seen: a macaw stretching his
left wing and right foot simultaneously, as he likes to do. Lots of
memories overlap the cue. Some will be visual; some will overlap an
emotional summary of the little scene.
At low spectrum, your memory is pumped up full of energy—as is
your conscious mind at high spectrum. Your memory is eager to go to
work: to fetch recollections based on cues, to gather the best or closest-
matching recollections and push them straight into consciousness—the
whole process without waiting for any requests from the conscious mind.
By the same token, at high spectrum our conscious minds jump eagerly to
work, solving problems and making plans, without necessarily waiting for
an explicit problem or request.
 So our memory cue is a bird image. Memory responds by marking or
putting forward recollections that match the cue. The closest, best matches
are pushed forward into consciousness.
Sometimes memories are pushed in a bunch into conscious mind,
instead of going one by one in a neat, orderly fashion. If memory grabs
recollections A, B, and C all at once and shoves them en masse into
consciousness, the result is an overlay. Memory knows how to do overlays,
as it does in creating abstractions or templates. But in this case, the
overlay’s separate elements have nothing to do with one another except
that they all answered the same call. Assuming that these are all images,
the resulting overlay is visual nonsense, which your conscious mind does
its best to understand.
This point is important; the bizarre images and scenery of dreams are
one of their most striking characteristics. Freud has an elaborate
explanation in terms of the “dream work”; many modern dream
researchers attribute the strangeness to pure chance. It is chance, but not
pure. Not at all pure. The recollections that are awkwardly overlaid into
strange images, and intertwined into strange sequences, have all
responded to the same cue. It’s a subtle relationship. But it is definitely a
relationship.

Dream Themes

There are endless possible themes, but certain themes are ubiquitous as
foundation ingredients in other emotions. Of these, the most important is a
special kind of homesickness, for a home that no longer exists and never
will again. (“I was homesick, had been homesick for months. But home
was hardly a place I could return to. Home was something in my head. It
was something I had lost” [V. S. Naipaul, Bend in the River]. “Everyone
alive mourned the loss of his home-world.” [Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s
Gift].)
“Lost-home-sickness” (homesickness for a lost home) is a sign of good
luck, in a way; those who experience it think of their past lives with love
or at least fondness—or at very least, nostalgia. But we find lost-home-
sickness even among those whose childhoods were rough. It is a powerful
and nearly universal impulse—one that underlies not only our own
recollections but our collective memories of the good old days, and golden
ages past.
Dreams fulfill the deepest of all human wishes: to go home. We can’t.
Yet we can and do, on the inside, every day.

The Dreamworld: Why We Forget It

“Overconsciousness” means that we lack the resources to create solid

memories; we lack a proper sense of self and have no assets to spend on
handling and hardening brand-new memories so that they last.
But there are other reasons why we forget our dreams. For one: our
companion time thread breaks when a dream starts. Since late infancy or
earliest childhood, we have been aware of the steady progress of time. We
all have a mental clock. Think of it as a tape measure we drag constantly
behind us. It rules off the past into minutes, hours, months. It doesn’t
reach terribly far back. Usually it starts to blur out and disappear beyond a
few months into the past. But it’s often useful.
One reason it’s hard to remember dreams is this “tape measure.” When
we look into the past, we follow the route of the tape. We can easily say
what we were doing (roughly speaking) ten minutes ago, or half an hour or
three hours or two days ago. But the tape measure doesn’t cut through
dreams; it steers around the outside like the beltway that avoids downtown
traffic. If it’s eight in the morning and we ask what you were doing three
hours ago, you will probably say “sleeping.” You will almost certainly not
say, “battling a giant goldfish in a dream.” We have no consistent,
continuous measure of time that reaches into our dreams. Each dream
inhabits its own separate world, with its own separate clock.
Each dream’s timeline is separate from the one that runs alongside our
lives. Each dream has a timeline that runs parallel to that master timeline,
in the sense that (at least for the brief lifetime of the dream) the two
timelines, the dream’s and the other, never meet.
There’s one last simple reason why dreams are hard to remember.
Each dream defines its own world of experience; we aren’t normally
reminded of a dream by looking out the same window we were looking
through during a dream, or speaking to the same person, or sitting in the
same chair—because we are usually transported into strange dreamworlds
that have their own scenery and furnishings and, in a sense, people; dream
people don’t quite align with real ones.
But it’s not merely that we are located in a different house or a
different street or lawn or sidewalk from the ones we know in reality.
Imagine that you have just barely awakened from a dream—so just barely
that you can still look right back into it, as if you had just stepped out of a
tunnel (say, the enclosed walkway that connects your plane to the airport
terminal) and paused to look back in.
What do you see, looking back into the dream from reality? You see an
entire world that is just slightly, but noticeably, misaligned with reality. As
if the entire dreamworld were tilted slightly on its axis—say, by fifteen
degrees. Enough so that nothing lines up. Even if your dream were set in
your own bedroom, as you lay in your own bed—as some dreams are—the
texture of every surface, the feel of every object is different in a dream.
After all, a reality made of perceptions has been replaced by one made of
recollections. There must be change!
You will see this yourself if you look back soon enough, before the
whole thing has “melted into air—into thin air.” Recall that Shakespeare
put this famous line in the Tempest to describe the dissolution of dreams.

Transitioning to Dreams via Free Association

You know that you are no longer merely drowsy, that you are sliding down
the slipway toward sleep, when you notice a thought hanging around
consciousness (perhaps modestly, in back) that you didn’t put there.
Often we become aware of thoughts at the edges of our dreams,
seemingly ripe to be missed, just as we notice things at the edges of
waking consciousness. (A certain recollected garden pavilion on his
father’s estate in vanished imperial Russia “hangs around, so to speak,
with the unobtrusiveness of an artist’s signature,” writes Nabokov about
his adult dreams. “I find it clinging to a corner of the dream canvas, or
cunningly worked into some ornamental part of the picture” [Speak,
Memory].) That “I didn’t put it there” observation marks the start of free
flow or free association, and your steady descent into sleep and dreams.
Let’s return to your lost keys. After some daydreaming in
midafternoon, more hours pass and now you are home at the end of a long,
exhausting day. It might be about nine o’clock. You find that your keys are
gone. You’re annoyed, angry. Maybe you check your pockets mechanically
and cast around the room—attempting to solve the problem with a sheer
minimum of thought, or none. Maybe you yell at the kids or sulk, making
no attempt at a rational solution.
Now let’s move the whole scene later: 11:30 and you’re sleepy, about
to go to bed. Or maybe you already have. You notice that your keys are
gone; what to do? First, maybe, sigh and take a long look at the ceiling.
Next moment, you’re thinking about a day last spring when your wife lost
her keys. (You didn’t decide to think about that day; the thought just
happened.) Then, a childhood afternoon when your father accidentally
dropped a sheath of papers into the water as the family walked off a ferry.
You make the effort to haul back on the heavy net of thought. Once again,
you think about your keys. Soon after, you find yourself (again) far away.
Eventually, thought starts to flow. You start to free-associate—
automatically, unconsciously—although you are conscious of each stop
along the way. Memory is taking over, putting thoughts into
consciousness.
Below the daydreaming regions, we enter the realm of free flow, which
leads to sleep. This free flow is just free association, but I use the term
“free flow” to make a distinction. A friend or psychoanalyst might ask you
to “free-associate,” and you might oblige. Given a starting point, you say
the first thing that comes to mind. Then, from this new spot, you leap
again. Then again. You have made your mind blank, as far as you can. You
try just to leap, not think.
But this deliberate free association, with the conscious mind
intervening to help each step forward, is not free association. It is, at any
rate, different from the flow that occurs as you approach sleep—although
it can cause, can turn into, real free flow, which happens entirely by itself,
at no one’s request, and without any helpful intervention by the conscious
mind. Deliberate free association is, finally, a contradiction in terms.
Later those thoughts will grow in vividness and become whole scenes
—at first static and brief. That will be “sleep-onset thought.” Finally, they
will become more elaborate, the breaks between them will close, and the
conscious mind will need to struggle even harder to get meaning from
them. It will struggle to make them into stories. That will be dreaming.
 Let’s look at an example of free flow. A young boy narrates, describing
his experience as he sits and thinks during dinner:
First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then another
term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation.
It was like a train going in and out of tunnels and that was like the noise of the boys
eating in the refectory when you opened and closed the flaps of the ears. (Joyce,
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

Three ideas form this flow: vacations and term time; trains and tunnels;
sounds of the crowded dining hall. The first suggests the second, which
suggests the third. The thought sequence as a whole goes nowhere. It’s a
simple theme circle; it curves back on itself. Each of these three ideas is a
variation on a theme: alternation. We could think of them as a loose three-
point circle with “alternation” in the center.
Free flow is like ordinary daydreaming—only more so: more
sustained, less under control. We are less able to rouse ourselves. We are
approaching sleep. The “key” to the state of sleep itself, Foulkes notes, is
“relinquishing voluntary self-control of ideation.”3
Relinquishing it to what? To the unconscious mind. Memory, the
unconscious mind, merely pushes the latest retrieved recollection into
consciousness. And there, emerging into consciousness, is our next topic
of conscious thought. When an entire thought or recollected scene is taken
as a memory cue, any element can be used to fish out more recollections—
or the whole memory can be used as a next cue, via a powerful summarizer
like images or emotion.
In these periods, your thoughts often flow. But sometimes, separate
thoughts are framed in silence—when you think no thought at all. The
mind is empty. Other times you have the impression that, whenever you
scoop a hole in the sands of time, your thoughts fill it like seawater.

Blocked Emotion: The Main Creator of Theme Circles

Emotions are blocked when, as Freud explains, we refuse to let them

express themselves—refuse to let the dissonance resolve. We turn our
backs on them. Sometimes we ban them not only from waking thought but
from all thought. A blocked emotion that cannot speak even in dreams
resorts to other methods of expressing itself.
But it’s likely that blocked emotions are allowed into low-spectrum
thoughts (not just in dreams, but in sleep-onset thoughts and sometimes
even in free flow) far more often than they are turned away at the door.
After all, blocked emotions dominate our dreams. Neurotic symptoms are
indeed common—but most of us are largely free of them. Common sense
suggests that, by and large, blocked emotions are allowed to speak, but
only in the relaxed conditions of the lowest spectrum.
Where do all these blocked emotions come from? In a sense, every
emotion aroused by the past is blocked. Nothing stops us from expressing
it now. But the scene itself is over, gone forever. In most cases we are
feeling emotions we did not feel or express (not in their current form) in
the past. We missed that chance. They are forever incomplete: fuel
unburned; potential energy unspent. They dominate the lower spectrum.
Why should these emotions be important? We are attracted to strong
emotion, and we seek out patterns—always. We seek meaning, the
opposite (in a sense) of randomness or chaos. Blocked emotions are the
greatest organizers of thought in the lower spectrum. In those regions,
memory is liberated to shove recollections into consciousness; thoughts
flow free. Strong emotions, especially blocked emotions, are sheepdogs
that organize the woolly, baaing, free-roaming thoughts and recollections
of the lower spectrum.
Free flow seeks a theme as it moves along. Again, we need themes, we
need meaning. We see the process operating in our dreams: we notice,
sometimes, that the plot seems to be improvised by conscious mind as we
go along, to fall in with some theme. A dream seeks a theme as liquid
seeks the lowest level. Thought allowed to flow free on its own always
seeks a theme. Humans are meaning-seeking creatures. After we have
found food and drink and shelter, sex and companionship, we seek
meaning.
How does free flow hit on a theme? The magnet that started the flow
running is almost certainly an emotion. Strong emotions in the area, often
associated with images, are good candidates for a theme.
Memory pulls out recollections that match the theme and pushes them
into consciousness. There might be several themes, working sometimes
individually and sometimes together. But we need to see actual sleep-onset
sequences and dreams to see these principles operating.

Sleep-Onset Thought: Hallucinatory, Theme-Circling Thought

Toward the bottom of the spectrum, we enter the zone of “sleep-onset

thinking,” in which some recollections are replaced by hallucinations. The
elements of the free flow grow more vivid and complete. Each becomes a
separate scene, expressed as an image. Often these images are
hallucinations.
Sleep-onset thinking has been found to consist of several distinct
phases. With each successive stage,
there was a steady decline in control over the course of mental activity and an
awareness of the immediate environment and a steady rise in the frequency of
hallucinatory experience.4

By some measures of content and quality, sleep-onset thought is closer to

waking fantasy than to the dream sleep that immediately follows it. On the
whole, researchers can distinguish (with some errors) sleep-onset-thought
reports from dream reports. But other tests confirm the “essential
similarity” of sleep-onset-thought and dream reports. Once again, the
spectrum is a plain fact. Sleep-onset thinking comes between waking
fantasy on one side and dreaming on the other, showing resemblances to
each.
Hallucinations arise first in sleep-onset thought. This is where we
cross the hallucination line. Where do hallucinations come from? Of your
memories, some are “episodic,” remembered scenes or experiences, as
opposed to remembered skills or procedures (how to read, ride a bicycle,
buy a drink).
Each episodic memory is, potentially, an alternate reality.
Sometimes remembering “the beach last summer” means reentering
the experience: seeing the water, feeling the sand and sun, hearing the
shouts and crashing surf; falling through the thin, brittle crust of memory
(like the surface of newly dry lava) into the red-hot stuff itself.
EXAMPLES: SLEEP-ONSET THOUGHT

Let’s consider a typical sleep-onset example, experienced as a series of

separate hallucinations. I have already discussed this example, but there’s
more to say.

(1) Our macaw stretching his left wing. (2) Ping-Pong. (3) The iridescent colors on a
pigeon’s gray neck. (4) Rabbi S. in a car; he is driving. (5) Rain on Yale campus. (6)
The smell of spring rain on campus and on the streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn. (7) C.’s
long, dark, silky, fragrant hair; Palestrina, Rilke. (8) A feeling of turbulence in which
many memories are dissolved.

The real theme here is a blocked emotion. In fact, the blocked emotion:
lost-home-sickness. Here I am missing my college years, and my two pairs
of grandparents and their homes in Brooklyn.
The sequence has a characteristic look too, a visual theme: a pearl-
clouded opalescence. The mist-gray pigeon with its iridescent neck
feathers fits perfectly.
My mother’s parents lived in Flatbush—in the 1960s, it was an
ordinary middle-class neighborhood. Their area was full of sturdy, four-
square, two-family houses built between 1900 and 1930: tiny front lawns
carefully tended, small backyards, one lot separated from the next by the
width of a driveway (two tracks of concrete) leading to the garage in back.
Houses of unhealthy-looking yellowish stucco and purplish-red urban
brick, smooth and cold as metal. Too many dogs. Flatbush dogs were all
small, with the air of hardened criminals.
But the lush, towering rows of huge sycamores between sidewalk and
street redeemed everything. My grandparents were renters and lived up in
the treetops on the second floor, eye to eye with the canopies (landlords
were on the first floor). The living room had a line of windows along the
front, and the leaves surrounded you. In April and May, the festive yellow
green of the sycamores was the spring, and the trees drizzled their winged
seedpods all over everything.
On important Jewish holidays the streets were full of middle-class
families dressed up, with their children and pretty daughters, and
sometimes their grandchildren too, all headed to various synagogues.
Right on Avenue I to the liberal one, left to several that were orthodox—
everyone greeting everyone else.
 During my freshman spring in New Haven, I watched from a high-
overhead dorm window as the hard-beaten yard of Old Campus was
reseeded and the garden edgings of the buildings and yards exploded into
daffodils. I felt, as always, part of and not part of Yale simultaneously.
In the lower spectrum, all memory trails lead to the past. As we fan out
through memory, casually beating the bushes, we quickly come upon some
strong, distinct emotion that becomes the center of a theme circle. Here
there are two related themes, joined by spring rain. The macaw memory,
which must have come from only a few minutes earlier, leads to a
sequence that is quickly captured by one emotion theme and then another,
long-ago Flatbush and long-ago Yale. The remembered images swing
round the two themes like spaceships captured by a large object’s gravity
(two large objects in this case) and slung into orbit.
The thoughts in this sequence circle the theme like a maypole. Theme-
circling thought restates the theme repeatedly in a series of variations.
Ping-Pong, rain on campus, and lovely C. are views of Yale. Rain in
Flatbush, and probably the pigeon, are views of Brooklyn. Ping-Pong in
element 2 was something we did as undergraduates, and also probably
refers to my sense of bouncing back and forth between home and away—
two states of mind.
Sleep onset and dreams are made of imagery. Language can play a part,
but in dreaming and sleep onset we have no command over language, as
we have none (or little) over our own memories. We encounter phrases
seemingly overheard, not invented on purpose. We state our themes in
imagery. Imagery seems as obedient as language is fractious. You will
notice, if you watch carefully in dreaming or sleep onset, thoughts in the
conscious mind forming and being turned into images as they emerge
from the chrysalis.
Images can be richer than words, but they are often ambiguous. An
image plus an emotion, not the image alone, is the low-spectrum mind’s
proper replacement for language. Not the equivalent of language in any
sense, but a different way to record and remember ideas.
Here’s another sleep-onset example, in which the unconscious shows
off its cleverness. I had recently seen Bizet’s opera Carmen on DVD.

(1) Carmen’s aria at the start of act 2. (2) Shampoos. (3) Sixth Avenue woman “lost
her nerve”; falls from high building. (4) Vacuum cleaners. (5) Beehive—laundry clang
(washing machine bell or buzzer). (6) Korean children—computers—“they don’t
 understand their language.” (7) Raffael (spelled just like this); Vittoria Colonna. (8)
“I’m not an unstrategic doer”—companionways on a navy ship. (The word
“companionways” means stairways leading below from the main deck, but I pictured
them connecting many levels of deck and superstructure, running outside.)

A series of separate, brief hallucinations. Sometimes detail has been lost

in the transcription (which is based, like the others, on brief, half-asleep,
spoken descriptions). The quoted phrases occurred as out-loud, overheard
language in the hallucination. But I pictured the word “Raffael” as written,
with two f’s instead of ph as in English, and without the final o used in
Italian.
The sequence is incoherent in itself—although as a whole it points
clearly to a theme at the center of the circle. Note that the incoherence of
individual images is made of the same stuff—reflects the exact same
phenomenon—as the incoherence of the sequence itself. This is important
to our understanding of the bizarreness of dreams. In a dream, a spurious
narrative would be stretched over the whole framework, and it would be
harder to see the underlying architecture.
Obviously, vacuum cleaners have nothing (or nothing much) to do with
beehives and the buzz or ding of washing machines. The sequence is just
an accident. Memory has shoved vacuum cleaners into consciousness
followed by an image involving beehives. The beehive image is—by the
same token—an obvious result of two separate memories (beehives,
washing machines) being shoved into consciousness simultaneously
instead of separately, in sequence.
In a dream, the plot would be worked up in such a way that the
washing machine and the beehive were somehow related. But in sleep-
onset thought, the conscious mind has yet to enter its dream-spinning
state. Storytelling comes into full bloom only at the bottom of the
spectrum.
The bizarreness of dream imagery isn’t merely a matter of strange
combinations or superpositions. We sometimes see things in dreams that
don’t exist anywhere else. For example, a wraparound sales counter of the
sort used in department stores for displaying watches, jewelry, and so forth
(customers around the outside, salesclerks inside), except the counter is
replaced by a narrow, trough-shaped, chest-high swimming pool—a
rectangle whose edges are made of swimming channels—in which
customers are invited to take a brief, refreshing dip. Or a roller-coaster car
whose left and right halves sometimes run together and sometimes veer
apart. The car itself looks “like a Gehry building or maybe a stadium from
the Chinese Olympics,” my notes say.
My guess is that these strange items are simple attempts to make sense
of odd combinations of images, recollected concurrently by accident. A
sales counter and a narrow canal, or trough of some sort, or swimming
pool. We experience these images; we always make the best of experience.
When we round the bend as we drive north on I-95, we don’t say, “That
city can’t be there to the north of the highway; this must be some sort of
brain misfire.” We figure out the scene as best we can and do the same
when we dream.
Let’s return now to the sleep-onset sequence. It is a classic theme
circle around a blocked emotion. I had shouldered the emotion out of
waking thought because I resented it’s even arising. It was a warning
against something I was in no danger of doing—had never done, will never
do. There was something bookish and conventional about the warning; it
was connected to things I had been reading and writing, not doing. In any
case, the blocked warning was this: married men do not get involved with
pretty young women. Many thanks to my unconscious mind for this vote
of confidence. I include it because it is such a good example of memory’s
plotting and planning.
One act of Carmen (although not act 2) takes place on a high mountain
pass. In our film of the opera, it looks dangerous. One could easily fall.
Danger of falling connects element 3 to Carmen. So does the phrase “lost
her nerve” (notice “her”); Carmen never loses her nerve. Daring is one of
her striking attributes. (Danger of falling connects Carmen and the
companionways too.) Carmen and her lovers, Don José and then the
bullfighter Escamillo, make a Latin-sounding pair, like the one named in
element 7. “Shampoo” has to do with washing and thus laundry, as in
element 5; it also has to do with a young woman I had been friends with,
K.F. “Sixth Avenue” probably refers to an essay by E. B. White about the
old Sixth Avenue el. Along the way you could see right into second-story
windows, and I associate this scene—which suggests 1930s–New York
paintings by Edward Hopper—with laundry hung out of windows to dry.
To start, the theme seems to be danger: danger of falling, for one. A
beehive can be dangerous too. Likewise “not understanding the language.”
But Carmen is about a specific danger: of falling for an unprincipled,
seductive woman (and of leaving the person you love, as Don José leaves
his fiancée for Carmen).
There was nothing at all unprincipled about my friend K.F. But
element 7 is the giveaway; it tells the whole story. K.F.’s last name is
related, by a single memory hop, to one of the names mentioned in
element 7.
We notice now that element 7 includes two glaring mistakes. Raphael
(or Raffaello) is spelled wrong, any way you look at it. And Vittoria
Colonna is famous as Michelangelo’s friend, not Raphael’s. Theme:
“Danger: you are making an obvious mistake!” (Obvious to all those who
are obsessed with Michelangelo and know a little about his life. Hardly a
small group.)
This element of the sleep-onset sequence was a warning: “Don’t even
think about it.” My friend’s last name was related to one among these
paired two-part names; and ordinarily, I spend much of my time painting
—like Raphael (in a sense). Furthermore, literal-minded dreams and
sleep-onset memories might easily misunderstand “companionway” as a
walkway for companions. They sound dangerous, like “lovers’ lanes.”
There is more to this sequence—some of which I understand, some
not. But the sense is clear. The theme is clear, and the theme circle is clear.
Dostoyevsky operated down-spectrum, in the realm of intense and
saturated imagining. Dreams were important to him, and so were dream
techniques. “It is a peculiarity of the narrative structure of The Brothers
Karamazov that a given motif will appear in a number of variations, and a
given moral or psychological theme will be represented by a number of
different motifs.”5 Thus a theme gives rise to a family of motifs, and each
of those appears in a series of variations. For my purposes, these are theme
circles: motifs circled by themes, each circled in turn by variations.
One final example, with another pointed theme:

(1) Birthday in Briarcliff (aged ten): my Grandpa Sam buys me two miniature toy
rifles in town (Ossining). (2) Backyard in Briarcliff, summer; we’re going into White
Plains for dinner. (3) The large Briarcliff pool late afternoon; getting out of the car,
wearing plastic pinned-on tags, walking over to the outdoor shower at the pool’s gate.
(4) Pet shop in Ossining at the foot of the main street; yellow plastic sheeting in a
display window nearby; also nearby, the barber who had a big stack of Playboys but
wouldn’t let us small boys read them, though we often tried. (5) Croton Station; to the
city (Brooklyn) by train with my Grandma Bea: she shows me how to slip the ticket
into the clip for the conductor to punch.
 We lived in Briarcliff—a village in Westchester not far from New York
City—until I was twelve. The towns of Ossining and Croton were nearby.
Element 4 is about frustration: I wanted a pet, but my parents didn’t. I
wanted badly to look at those Playboys, but the surly barber, who
distinctly disliked children (or at any rate, me) wouldn’t allow it.
Notice element 2: one reenters some past moment entirely, and the
future seems just what it seemed then. We were going out for dinner that
evening—and that long, long ago dinner (of which I have no memory, as
far as I know) still lay in the future.
The theme is a blocked emotion. I took for granted, paid too little
attention to, my father’s parents as opposed to my mother’s. My father’s
parents never went to college, and they both spoke with Yiddish accents.
My grandfather spoke English well enough, but he had learned it as an
adult and was never comfortable speaking it. My Yiddish was near zero.
My grandfather worked hard all his life, as a waiter, cook, manager, and
everything else but owner in kosher delicatessens and vegetarian
restaurants in Brooklyn. My father’s parents had less money than my other
grandparents (who didn’t have much either), but they indulged me. They
liked being with me, and I with them. But I didn’t do it right. I didn’t do it
well enough.
I was close to my Grandpa Sam and Grandma Bea, but even closer to
my mother’s parents. My Grandpa Sam was kindly, gentle, taciturn,
strong-muscled; he had come to America after serving in the Austro-
Hungarian army during the First World War. I never talked to him as much
as I wanted to, or ought to have. My Grandma Bea was comfortable with
English, but she, too, had a pronounced Yiddish accent. (My other two
grandparents spoke fluent, exemplary English.)
On my birthday once, we walked toward evening down main street in
the hilly, riverside town of Ossining, and my Grandpa Sam bought me just
what I wanted, what I pointed out to him—–some miniature toy rifles,
copies of Revolutionary War weapons. As always, he said little, but he was
quietly, warmly pleased that I was so pleased. At the Croton terminal once,
I got on a train with my Grandma Bea, bound for their apartment in
Brighton Beach near Coney Island. She showed me what to do with the
ticket, explained the transfer to the subway, and so forth.
The theme of this circle tells me: never forget how much they loved
you, and how much they knew and taught you. This is not a blocked
emotion; I would never refuse to allow it into consciousness. But it might
as well be blocked. It appears constantly in my dreams and sleep-onset
thoughts—but rarely even in the waiting room of consciousness.
All these thoughts and memories were news to me, unknown until I
saw this transcript and others like it. I spent far more time with my
mother’s parents, and I was deeply influenced by the two of them in a
million ways. Yet although all four grandparents appear in my dreams and
sleep-onset thoughts often, my father’s parents seem—to my great
surprise—to appear more frequently by far. During some periods of my
recent life, they have appeared every day.
Figuring out these sequences is a game of “know thyself.” Element 4
includes two things I wanted very much but couldn’t have. My Grandpa
Sam was the most indulgent of grandfathers. This memory appears here
not only because it fits geographically, but because it slips into the
framework of his generosity. If he had known about the dog or the
Playboys I wanted, he would have done his best to get me at least one of
each.

And Thus We Reach Dreaming

In dreaming, memory puts forward a sequence of hallucinated thoughts

that are turned into one continuous hallucination, a story of sorts, by the
conscious mind. One narrative episode turns into the next for no clear
reason, as if the author of a novel were constantly receiving strange
communications from Mars and were forced to work each one into his
plot. It would work only if his listeners were amazingly gullible. But of
course the sleeping self is amazingly gullible. We have only one mind.
When we dream, one part is developing a sequence of hallucinated scenes,
and another part is making them fit together into a story. So it’s no surprise
that we lack sufficient mind power for our third concurrent mental activity
to be any more than passive and unreflective.
The dream is hallucinated, but not everything in it is imaginary. If you
hear a car alarm in your dream, it might be hallucinated—or a car alarm
might actually be howling in the streets.
An experimental psychologist summarizes the evidence from sleep
labs—from experimental subjects deliberately awakened during periods
when electronic monitors showed the body in the rapid-eye-movement
(REM) state, which generates our more striking and memorable dreams.
(The awakened subjects report what they have been dreaming and go back
to sleep. At such times they probably envy their lab-rat colleagues; no one
wakes them up.)
Compared to waking thought, dreams are “more visual, more
perceptual, more affective, less thoughtlike.” 6 More visual and
perceptual: they express themselves in images and other sense
impressions. Obvious but nonetheless crucial to bear in mind is that
language is the abstract, up-spectrum way to express ourselves. Dreams
are “less thoughtlike”: unlike thoughts, they are not a response to,
explanation of, or commentary on reality. They are reality, the world as
our minds have made it.
They are, furthermore, “less concerned with contemporary life and
more concerned with past life; more bizarre, implausible or novel . . .
under less volitional control; accompanied by less awareness of the
environment.”7 Obviously; but the “past life” is central.
A physiologist expresses it somewhat differently: dreams are “more
emotional” than waking thought (treating “waking thought” as an
undifferentiated blob). Compared to waking thought, dreams show
“diminished self-awareness, diminished reality testing, poor memory,
defective logic, and, most strikingly, the inability to maintain directed
thought.” Dreams are “perceptually intense . . . instinctive and emotional .
. . hyper-associative.”8 (They show, that is, a large tendency to change the
subject on the basis of free association from the last subject.) Notice the
unreflective, collapsed self: “diminished self-awareness; diminished
reality testing.”
Losing touch with reality—withdrawing from external into mind-made
reality—is a necessary, inevitable part of gliding down-spectrum: out of
the world, into your mind. “Dissolving,” writes Rilke, describes your sense
of reality as you approach sleep. But from the opposite standpoint, of the
remembered-yet-hidden past, “materializing” is the word. The immaterial,
usually inaccessible sense of your own past starts to take shape just as
your reality sense dissolves. Your whole-you sense materializes out of the
mist; your sense of your life as a real object in time slowly materializes as
you approach sleep through free flow, sleep-onset thought, and the
outskirts of dreaming.
Moving down-spectrum, you gradually lose control of your thoughts,
and your thought stream starts tampering with reality.
The dark side of consciousness, the low end of the spectrum, is poorly
known by science—although it is a perennial obsession of mankind, one of
the grand obsessions of human history.
Rilke, in the third “Duino Elegy,” writes:

How he surrendered—. Loved.

Loved his interior, his inner wilderness,
this primal forest within him.

It is the poet’s privilege to speak of many things at the same time, but here
a central topic is dreaming: “He was entangled in the farther-spreading
tendrils” of his dream, of some “inner event,” of his “inner wilderness,” of
“this primal forest within him”—diesen Urwald.
Falling asleep is a physical process associated with changes to your
brain state. Ordinarily, “Is he asleep?” is a yes-or-no question. But one of
the most important facts about thinking is the smoothness and steadiness
of falling asleep. It is like walking down an inclined beach toward the
water. At some point you are in the water; you are asleep. But you continue
to walk slowly, gradually downhill. Your physical state has changed—you
were dry, now you’re wet—but the gradual downhill descent continues.
Proust begins the famous “overture” of his magnum opus with a
beautiful description of continuity between awake and asleep: Sometimes,
my eyes closed so quickly that I didn’t have time to say to myself, “I am sleeping.”
And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to go to sleep woke me up: I wanted
to put aside the volume I believed I was still holding and blow out my light; I had not
ceased, in my sleep, to reflect on what I had just been reading, but these reflections had
taken a slightly peculiar turn. (À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time])

We must recognize the continuity between sleepy and sleeping

thought, as well as the physical transition that marks the start of sleep.
(Dreams soon after one has fallen asleep seem to be somewhat different
from the “classical dreams” of REM sleep.)
Here’s an example in which the dreamer is me:
 (1) The dreamer is in London, deliberately formulating the phrase “I will not go another
day without stopping at the British Library.” He notices that the London streets are the
same as the Yale campus; the British Library is the Yale Law School. (2) Somewhere
on campus (or in London), the dreamer is watching a fencing class for girls that
involves weightlifting too; the dreamer is on the floor of the gym, lifting high with his
left hand a 25-pound plastic-covered barbell weight. He hands it to the (female)
teacher, or class leader. (3) The dreamer is shagging tennis balls, thrown or batted;
the other players in this game are staffers working for President John Kennedy. The
dreamer is catching the tennis balls left-handed and throwing them back left-handed.
He understands that he now has “excellent access” to President Kennedy. (4) JFK
appears, friendly and jovial, wearing a formal morning suit or cutaway. (5) Waking
suddenly, the dreamer feels very happy; in his mind are the words, “Now I have good
access to JFK, and proper press credentials.”

This is a continuous narrative instead of separate, disjoint hallucinations.

But the real difference is small. Everyone knows that the “plot” of a dream
can take odd twists at any time. There is no more actual, logical continuity
in a dream than in a series of sleep-onset thoughts.
This dream is a good example of a theme circle around a blocked
emotion. The theme is a traumatic memory that is ordinarily banned from
the thinker’s consciousness. Twenty years before, he had suffered an injury
that made it impossible for him to use his right hand in sports, and made
sports difficult in general. He had been an enthusiastic (rather than
talented) tennis player and occasional weight lifter in earlier life. He has
come to admire President Kennedy for coping with constant pain and
medication, but he dislikes (consciously) acknowledging his admiration,
because he dislikes hero worship generally, because it is a cliché to admire
JFK in particular, and because he is lukewarm on JFK’s record as
president. He never dwells consciously on JFK. Ordinarily, he also repels
the traumatic injury from his conscious thinking—one result being that he
dreams about it constantly.
Movies have a strong influence on the dream: one in which a woman
learns to fence; another, an old movie we had just seen, in which men in
formal cutaways man the front desk at a fancy hotel. (JFK wore formal
morning clothes at his inauguration.)
Despite the somber theme, this was a (rare) happy dream—the
happiness coming from the widely observed sense of gratitude and
contentment when a person who is sick or hurt meets another with the
same sort of problem—a person who will understand the accompanying
inner reality.9 The strange uses of journalist jargon—“good access,”
“proper press credentials”—are versions of a classical Freudian wish
fulfilled: to talk to JFK. But there is more to it.
The dream shows Freudian wish fulfillment and an underlying need to
tell ourselves the truth—and our quest to revisit the past.
When we are down-spectrum, we think in pictures. If we are dreaming
and hungry, we picture food. (We don’t need to be asleep; it happens
during normal, down-spectrum waking thought.) If we’re down-spectrum
and sexually hungry, we envision the right sort of object. If we’re down-
spectrum and want to be athletes again, or left-handed athletes, we
envision an appropriate situation. In sleep-onset or dream thought, our
envisioning takes the form of hallucinating.
“Girls fencing” was floating around in the dreamer’s mind because of a
movie; combining that thought with his wish to be an athlete again, he
shows off his re-created prowess to (naturally) a group of girls. Switching
to tennis balls—well-loved objects long ago—he shows off, next, by
joining an elite group of sporting young men. A White House staffer is
elite by definition, none more so than a staffer in JFK’s White House. This
is all classic wish fulfillment, but it grows from the deeper and more basic
force that lets banned memories slip into consciousness when you are
down-spectrum and your guard is low.
“Access to JFK” means what it says, but it also means access to the
whole glamorous, fabulous world of Washington and New York and other
trend-making places—a world of people the dreamer often likes and
admires. He had cut off his own access to that world, though—partly
because of the injury, partly because of the gathering weight of obsessions,
things he must do. And partly out of cranky reclusiveness and his failure
to fit any standard, prestocked shape or size for academic intellectuals.
Thus his wish to have “proper credentials”—in his case, impossible. His
interests cut straight across half a dozen separate fields, like a biker
roaming cross-country on his ridiculous Harley. Wherever he’d gone in
life, he had been accused of (in effect) lacking proper credentials. Again,
this dream shows classical wish fulfillment.
It also shows the usual reversion to the past—to the sporting past; to
the days when the author was a sort of, tentative part of the “young elite”
himself. Memories of JFK have many sources. Among them are early
childhood memories of the man on TV, in picture magazines, and
prominent in the conversation of adults and children alike.
 Wish fulfillment dreams resemble sleep-onset thought, but dream
thoughts show more distortion. Why? In part because dreams allow more
time than isolated sleep-onset thoughts for a plot to build up and develop.
(A big wave requires space and time to grow.) And a dream has narrative
continuity. Narrative continuity is an expression of the same “continuity
principle” that is expressed in our insistence on reading inner
consciousness as reality when no outer reality is available. Likewise,
believing that our experience of the world is continuous and not a series of
separate bursts, we take the separate recollections of sleep-onset thought
and throw a blanket of continuity, gently, over the whole.

When We’re Dreaming, We Know It

According to Freud, the best dream observer we are ever likely to get, “I
am driven to conclude that throughout our whole sleeping state we know
just as certainly that we are dreaming as we know that we are sleeping.”10
But we must add an important qualification: we know this, but we usually
ignore it. When we watch a movie, we often experience exactly the
emotions the film maker intended: anxiety, fear, excitement. Of course we
know we are only watching a movie. But we set that fact aside. Dreams are
not merely projected on a screen; they engulf us. If we set aside “this is
only a movie,” it’s no surprise that our tendency to set aside “this is only a
dream” is stronger; dreams seem more real than movies ever can.

In Sum

In the lower spectrum we revisit lost time and tell ourselves the truth. We
know all sorts of truths we’re not willing to tell anyone, including our
conscious selves. But we need to tell someone, somehow, in a whisper, or
we cannot rest. So we tell ourselves—and then forget. It’s a compromise.
We yearn to revisit the past, perhaps to be young again—at any rate, to go
home. If this yearning were permanently unsatisfied, and there were no
hope of anything different, our lives might always have that bitter, cynical
edge they take on temporarily when some hope has collapsed or some
project gone wrong. So we do revisit the past on the sly, in secret—a secret
we keep from ourselves. We need the lower spectrum to do this for us.
 Eight

Where It All Leads

Here I will discuss two questions that focus on applying the spectrum
theory to the world at large. First: Does experience build confidence in the
theory? Second: Does the theory help us understand psychological
problems beyond the original one we attacked, the daily dynamics of the
mind?
I will look at one fundamental problem and another that is peripheral
but interesting. First, the mental development of children between infancy
and the start of adolescence, at which point they are close to having adult
minds (although they don’t yet know what to do with them). Second, the
meaning of visionaries in the modern world, and of the often-mentioned
“spiritual state of mind” in which all nature seems connected. (By
“visionary,” I mean literally the seer who sees visions, not merely a big-
picture thinker.)
The mental process of growing up resembles (as I have remarked)
steady motion up the consciousness spectrum. It’s as if infants were
restricted to the very bottom of the spectrum, and in growing up, their
mental romping grounds expand steadily at the high end. The mind is a
sandbox with one end fixed in the low-focus world of sleep and dreams,
the other moving slowly upward from the concrete into the abstract and
logical.
Our mental romping room, this mental sandbox, expands steadily.
Eventually, the far end reaches the point where it will stay throughout
adulthood, and the spectrum-based aspects of mental maturing are
finished. The child’s spectrum grows steadily longer until maturity, the
way a twig grows. But of course the spectrum is not a mere straight path of
a given length.
 As I discussed in considering mental personalities (a Napoléon versus
a von Neumann), one person’s spectrum might be much roomier in some
areas than someone else’s. The lowest segment might take each one of us
from sleep to the edge of daydreaming; but your spectrum might be a
straight walk, whereas mine involves huge flights of steep stairs straight
into the depths—and then a long climb back out again. By
(metaphorically) scooping out the terrain in any part of the spectrum, we
gain more depth and space in which to move. The spectrum is simple, but
we mustn’t make it too simple to account for the vast variation in mental
personality.
Visionaries and spiritual states of mind give us a chance to consider
atypical relations between a mind and the spectrum. I’ll conclude that the
spectrum is indeed a fundamental part of human psychology that helps us
unravel some significant problems.

Children Developing

In standard terminology (where there is some disagreement, but not

much), “infants” range up to eighteen months, “small children” to seven
years. “Toddlers” are low-end small children. “Medium children” range
from seven to twelve. The mental life of an infant is not easy to study, but
I’ll conclude this section with infants, who raise fascinating questions and
possibilities. My main topic is small children. When we ask what’s
distinctive about them as compared to adults, we see a set of attributes
associated with the lower spectrum. The process of maturing mentally,
especially between eighteen months and seven years, suggests a slow
march up-spectrum.
Children journey up and down the spectrum just as adults do; they are
capable (just like adults) of different mental feats when they are fresh and
wide-awake versus sleepy. But the highest focus a child can reach
evidently creeps upward as he matures: the mental feats on which children
improve as they mature are just the ones we associate with higher-focus
thinking. Logic and analysis, abstract and systematic thought, sustained
concentration, self-control—these tricks gradually enter a child’s
repertoire as he moves from infant to toddler to small child and onward.
This is important, because it allows us to surmise new points about the
spectrum and the value that I have called “focus level.”
As we look back from the vantage point of adulthood, our memories
begin somewhere between ages four and two. (Shakespeare took three
years old as the starting point.) Cutting the road at that “somewhere” is a
drawn curtain we can never see past. Freud called it “infantile amnesia.”
We recollect nothing earlier than that cutoff.
Growing up represents a taming (or breaking) of gigantic childhood
powers of consuming the world, grabbing hold of it with both hands and
chewing it over as you grab more. Children’s curiosity has a purely
physical side: childhood world-lust is a state in which looking over a
fence, or down a pit, or over the heads of adults to a distant stage, or
around a beckoning corner yields all but orgasmic satisfaction.
A small child’s powers include aggressive, pushy consciousness
expanding into every nook of outer and inner reality. A willingness to use
any tool—to make up words or whole grammatical constructions, draw
pictures, act, mime, whine to get points across; and the art of watching
passively but ravenously. These small-child powers must all be cut down
and sanded smooth to fit the needs of school and society. It all gets sorted
out (we hope) just in time for the emotional chaos of puberty.

Spectrum Development Principle: The small child of about eighteen months

starts with many low-focus mental attributes that he gradually sheds as he
matures. In the maturing of small children, we see the development of logic and
ideas of object constancy, of objective as well as subjective reality. We see
aptness for concrete and visual thinking gradually fade, short attention spans
and a focus on local instead of global knowledge gradually disappear, the
gradual growth of mental discipline and self-control, the emergence of language,
the abandonment of a passive “it must all be understood” view of information in
favor of rejecting bad information and actively seeking out what is good. All
these trends are consistent with motion away from lowest focus levels and
toward higher spectrum points.

Suppose It Were True

Suppose children’s development did follow an up-spectrum route. What

would the spectrum alone lead us to expect? If we project the adult’s daily
trip down-spectrum onto the development of small children, in reverse—
the adult moves down-spectrum, the child up—we see striking
similarities. We see spectrum changes echoed in slow motion in a child’s
maturing. In one case, centering on infancy, the spectrum suggests a
strange and radical guess that, nonetheless, is supported by interesting data
—and by William Wordsworth.
The timescale of the child’s maturing is very different from that of the
adult’s day. Nor does a single rate of change govern the whole process of
maturing. The child’s intellectual achievements move gradually up-
spectrum, but other lower-spectrum mental powers and habits might be
filled in afterward. We expect the greatest changes between ages two and
seven. But these ideas are deliberately vague. Much information is
missing.
If small children do linger in consciousness zones corresponding to
the lower reaches of the adult spectrum, short attention spans should
be prominent in small children. After all, sustained attention to
established tasks and problems disappears in the spectrum’s lower
half. (I’ll use boldface to highlight what we would expect if the spectrum
did predict the general shape of childhood development.)
Infants and small children do, indeed, have short attention spans.
Studies (as well as most parents and teachers) confirm it.
Strongly related to short attention spans is the small child’s tendency
to concentrate on local neighborhoods, not on global or overall
consistency. Children do not do well at coordinating and integrating many
separate information sources either. It’s only logical that they would build
understanding of the world bottom-up, starting with details, not the big
picture.
“Endless contradictions did not offend them,” writes a kindergarten
teacher; “the children did not demand consistency”1—meaning “global,”
or big-picture, consistency. Thus one of Piaget’s most famous results: If
you pour a fixed quantity of water from a wide, short glass into a tall,
narrow one, have you increased the quantity of water? Small children,
looking only at the height of the water level above the table, say yes. Older
children take the big picture into account and say no.
For small children, in short, life is a series of chunks or incidents or
events, each with its own coherence.
 Now let’s imagine a child who has finally made it to the rational,
commonsense region of the spectrum, about halfway up. Most minds can
achieve this level around age four at the earliest. The child awakens into a
mental world where he can make himself pay attention, at least in short
bursts. He draws on memory as an aid to thought. He uses informal,
commonsense logic. His thinking is still concrete; in many cases it is
visual. He does not use abstract words or ideas. His language is simple.
But he is a rational thinker who can follow what’s going on around him,
listen to what he’s told, pay attention. What do we expect from this child’s
mental life, if the spectrum idea is right?
We expect a steady rise in the highest attainable spectrum point until
the age of sixteen or so. At sixteen, mental capacity is almost complete,
and the rate of advance slows. Does the spectrum describe the facts of
childhood development?
What would we mean if it did? A small child spends far more time
than an adult down-spectrum simply because he has no up-spectrum. He’s
got nowhere to go, nowhere but down-spectrum to pass the time. (His
colonization of the upper spectrum is steady but will take years.) So we
expect low-spectrum phenomena to be prominent, emphatically present, in
small children’s lives.
Children also sleep more than adults, so they have fewer waking hours
to dispose of. It could be that they sleep more, in part, because their
spectrum is drastically compressed and may require less time to cover.
Since the climbing rope is shorter, they hit sleep and the bottom sooner.
Perhaps, then, the spectrum plays a part in a child’s needing more sleep
than an adult. We don’t know.
In short, we should find lower-spectrum states strongly evident in
small children, and upper-spectrum states not evident—but emerging
gradually as months and years pass. Stronger command of language.
Growing competence with abstractions—with numbers and measurement
and arithmetic and time. Growing capacity to follow and construct logical
arguments, and to solve real-world problems by reasoning.
Those traits do emerge as we expect them to. Language and number
competence grows; at around seven, average children no longer need to
count on their fingers. Abstractions become real to the mind. Between
eleven and sixteen, children learn to think logically and to invent
hypotheses.
 What about low-spectrum states? Are they “emphatically present” in
young children?
The small child who starts his day in the commonsense zone, and then
moves down-spectrum as he loses focus and energy, should move
downward through a mind-wandering phase, then a daydreaming or
fantasy zone and a free-association zone, leading straight into sleep-onset
thought and sleep itself. Does it happen?
Yes. Mind wandering, or not paying attention, is a house specialty with
small children. Their conversation is noted for illogic and a tendency to
veer around. Daydreaming is characteristic of small children. Sometimes
they daydream like adults. But they also get caught up in “external”
daydreams, where topics are fed to the passive mind not by memory but by
the outer field of consciousness. Small children used to get lost in picture
books. In modern times, many seem capable of watching TV or following
a computer screen in a semi-trance. The result is an “out-of-body”
daydream. Its contents come from the outer and not the inner world, but
they are handled by a mind that is just as entranced, just as numb to
everything else, as a normally daydreaming mind.
Thus, daydreaming is strongly evident. Free association and the
sideways slide of thought are also childhood specialties, like mind
wandering and short attention spans. “A common characteristic of young
preschool children’s conversation is chaining—that is, free-associating.”2
Children are good at thinking metaphorically, at understanding and
inventing metaphors.3
Broadly speaking, things work out as expected.
Self-control dissolves dramatically as we move down-spectrum. From
the point where the adult mind starts to wander, we gradually lose
conscious control over our own thinking. Daydreams and fantasy are
sometimes chosen but sometimes impose themselves. Inspiration and
creative insights hit unexpectedly; if we try to make them happen, we fail.
Sleep-lab subjects “lost their control over the course of mentation” as they
drifted off;4 we have little control over dream thought.
Running things backward, we would expect small children to gain
control steadily over their minds and behavior as they grow up.
They do. They gain the beginnings of self-control during early
childhood.
 Self-control requires alertness and energy. It also requires mental
organization and discipline. It is acquired gradually in early childhood and
is molded by many factors. One factor is, evidently, children’s growing
ability to internalize or say to themselves what adults tell them: stop
talking, pay attention, stop fidgeting, stop tormenting your little brother.
Also essential is the growing development of the idea of self as distinct
from the rest of the world, which begins toward the end of infancy. (Small
children are capable of such explanations as “the marble goes down the
shoot because it wants to.” The answer means, presumably, that the marble
is more or less like me.)
We would expect the first self that the child develops to be
unreflective and egoistic, like the dream self. Infants and very small
children are wholly un-self-aware and unreflective. “The cognition of the
infant is an entirely unreflective, practical, perceiving-and-doing sort of
intelligence . . . not conceptual, self-aware, symbol-using.”5
In the lower spectrum we would expect a strong bias toward inner
versus outer field consciousness, as in down-spectrum daydreaming,
fantasy, sleep-onset thought, and dreams. Needless to say, the child in
the womb must be mainly inner-focused; there is not much going on
outside. A newborn seems to engage the external world gradually: he
sleeps (for one thing) between sixteen and twenty hours a day.
We would expect a strong bias toward concrete thinking, as in
dreams; a bias toward visual thinking, as in dreams; the absence of
language in the earliest period and its gradual introduction after that.
Small children are no good at abstraction; they deal with the world
concretely. The conversation of toddlers has a plastic quality, veering
illogically from one topic to another. But each topic or subtopic is treated
with reasonable narrative consistency.
Closely related is the observation that, of the many mental changes
that accompany the infant’s growth to small and medium child, the most
important might be the transformation of a world of seeming to one of
being, or (same thing) the crucial discovery that seems is not is. “In a
kindergarten classroom,” writes a teacher, “the appearance is as good as
the deed.” 6
This is one way to interpret Piaget’s celebrated idea of object
constancy, or object permanence—an understanding that develops between
roughly six and eighteen months, continuing to mature throughout early
childhood. A physical object remains itself, although its surroundings and
appearance might change—even if it temporarily vanishes. The child
gradually reproduces mankind’s momentous discovery of the objective.
The discovery requires noticing the mind’s power to model and keep track
of the local environment—to build and update a mental microcosm of
reality. It also requires the child’s gradually turning his attention outward,
from the engrossing inner field of consciousness to the outer field. Both
developments imply that the child is learning to distinguish himself from
the rest of the cosmos.
We would expect a bias toward visual thinking. We don’t encourage
children to develop their talent for visual thinking. Still, small children are
rarely at a loss to express themselves with a crayon in hand. Even a child
who draws badly (most children do, after all) will make an attempt to put
down on paper the pictures he has in his mind. “Children under the age of
seven are more responsive and attuned to nonverbal language—gestures
and actions—then they are to words. They interpret words by relying on
their understanding of the concrete circumstances around them.”7
“Dante’s attempt is to make us see what he saw” (T. S. Eliot, Dante;
italics mine). The first duty of language after emergencies and
propositions—the first duty of descriptive language—is describing
images. Children show us mankind’s original down-spectrum bias; Dante
was sufficiently down-spectrum to see visions and think in images, but not
far enough down to draw, instead of describe, the images he conceived.
William Blake, poet and painter, is the perfect uninhibited low-
spectrum genius. His paintings are consistently awkward (and he was
taught draftsmanship), but their originality, rhetorical force, and sheer
energy make them compelling. Young children are uninhibited when they
draw; no one has yet explained to them that they are no good at it.
Mankind’s neglect of drawing and painting as means of expression is one
of the untold stories of culture making. It’s true that a lack of suitable
material for drawing is part of the story (although reeds and ink or
something like them, and broken ceramic pots, have rarely been in short
supply). But a deeper inhibition holds.
It’s striking how much great twentieth-century art centers on
intentionally childlike drawing: Matisse (in his early work and then his
late cutouts), Miro, Vlaminck, Derain, and other fauves; Chagall, some
Modigliani, some Franz Marc, some Bonnard; some Picasso (think of the
1950s); Dubuffet; many others. Great twentieth-century art pushes
deliberately down-spectrum.
Storytelling is the down-spectrum counterpart of logic. Logic has
another kind of down-spectrum counterpart in “magical thinking,” the
idea that one can manipulate the physical world by thought alone. In
magical stories, objects are created and destroyed, and their shapes
and identities can change, when the right sort of thinking takes place.
We find all these magical touches in dreams. Do we find them in early
childhood waking thought?
Children love stories—both hearing and telling them. “She wants
stories. I could imagine a woman who would make the child happy, filling
her with tales from a past that really happened” (J. M. Coetzee, In The
Heart of the Country). The two themes of stories and magic intertwine
naturally: “Just thinking about magic was satisfying to the [kindergarten]
children. If, in addition, they could talk about it, act it out, and put it into
stories, they had strong feelings of contentment, of being in their own
milieu.”8
“Magical thinking,” one species of illogic, is a prominent part of
young childhood and continues strong into the middle period. In certain
ways it is the opposite, or negation, of Piaget’s object concept. But a
child’s tolerance for logical contradiction allows both to thrive.
Anthropologists introduced the term “magical thinking” in trying to
understand ancient and primitive peoples. Investigating a child’s magical
tendencies and where they come from is crucial to understanding
childhood and infancy.
In magical thinking, things you only imagine become real. Objects,
people, and places change identities. To small children, it is all perfectly
natural. “Magic weaves in and out of everything [small] children say and
do.”9
A small child at a zoo saw a penguin and said “bird.” As the penguin
jumped into a pool, she followed it, examined it through the glass sides of
the tank and said “fish.”10 Belief in a single object’s unchanging identity
increases dramatically between ages three and six.11 In one study, three-
year-olds petted a cat.12 Then, while they watched the cat’s tail end, its
head was temporarily hidden and researchers installed a realistic-looking
dog mask. The whole cleverly disguised cat was then revealed, and the
children were asked whether the cat had changed into a dog. Many three-
year-olds said yes. (See for yourself!) Six-year-olds were more likely to
say that a cat can’t change into a dog, period. An application of principle
—of fixed identities in an objective world.
Unrealistic, illogical, or magical thought is a child’s first guess at how
things are. “As a child one can do without explanations. One does not
demand that everything make sense” (J. M. Coetzee, Summertime).
Children are famous for curiosity and asking questions. But they can make
do without answers. They show more emotion than adults; but when they
grow upset, it is not for lack of explanations. They can live without
answers because, for one, they can always invent their own.
As children turn outward and make more contact with the outer world,
they gradually tune the A-string of consciousness to the universal,
uniform, world-standard pitch of logic. But over our lifetimes, the contrast
between the “how does it work?” up-spectrum personality and the “look
how beautiful!” down-spectrum variety remains marked. Some adults are
restless if they don’t understand the mechanism of whatever tool they use.
Others retain the child’s knack for awe, and thirst for sights and sounds for
their own sakes.
Goethe’s epic Faust is partly the story of a man’s following the
spectrum downward toward childhood, on a pilgrimage to the roots of
consciousness, away from doing, analyzing, and understanding and toward
pure being. If Faust is brought to say Verweile doch, du bist so schön
(“Stay—pause—hold everything; you are so beautiful”), then the devil
(Mephistopheles) has made him happy. He thereupon wins Faust’s soul.
Faust does indeed tell Gretchen, the perfect girlfriend, whom
Mephistopheles has supplied for him, Ein Blick von Dir, ein Wort mehr
unterhält, als aller Weisheit dieser Welt—“One glance from you, one word
is worth more than all the wisdom of this world.” One of the loveliest
couplets ever composed. So Faust the “master doer” does come to rest for
a moment on the soft shore of pure being, with translucent infinity lapping
at his feet. Mephistopheles and Gretchen reduce him to deep and simple
happiness (although his soul is rescued in the end).
 Magical Reality

Before we leave magic, this strange jewel has one important facet that is
widely neglected. But it is central to the child’s mind—and to the soft,
golden glow that childhood casts, so often, over the whole rest of life.
The infant’s world is magical. For the infant, magic exists; magic is
real. The central event in this world might be hunger and its satisfaction.
The infant reacts to hunger instinctively by crying. Soon after, milk and
mother (or a decent facsimile) materialize. (Not the inevitable but the
usual case.) The child sucks, hunger disappears, satisfaction takes its
place. Magic! The child has no world model to tell him that his crying
causes milk to appear. Crying happens to the child, just as hunger does.
Milk is what is needed to make you feel better, and at the crucial point,
milk happens too. The infant’s world is magical.
It’s just because the infant doesn’t understand causation, or the value of
crying, that his magical thinking is realistic. There is nothing wonderful
about a mother responding to her baby’s demand for food. What is
wonderful, what is awe-inspiring from the child’s (or any) viewpoint, is
the mother’s simply appearing at the right moment and making things
better. This is just what seems to happen if no ideas about communication,
or cause and effect, clutter your worldview. For the small infant there is
only hunger and the breast and sucking and feeling better. When a problem
is solved, but we cannot say how, that is magic. The infant’s enforced
passivity, his careful watching (with a degree of attention and
astonishment we can barely imagine), and his constant attempts to fit the
puzzle pieces together, dispose him to see magic as a basic world force.
The child will come, in time, to see the mother as an agent who makes
choices, not an impersonal force. But what kind of agent? Plainly, one who
dominates and enfolds the child, and has the power to transform bad
feelings into good. Some kind of goddess. (Infants, we assume, are born
with no such concept but, gradually, invent it.) When the child feels bad,
the mother-goddess appears and often makes him feel good again.
In short, an aging toddler, getting on toward two, looks back on a past
that was magical and a present that continues to be magical in many ways
(again, if things work just right but we can’t imagine how, then they are
magical). Eventually, the child realizes that his mother is a creature
something like himself. But when he does, will he go back and touch up
his memories of the benevolent goddess? His episodic memory is just
barely emerging. His ideas about the magical past could be built into his
mind as “basic principle” or “goddess concept,” just as there comes to be
an “object concept.”
Freud’s Oedipus complex, the “family romance” (as he calls it,
ironically), is a dark reality in many lives. The small boy falls in love with
his mother and sees the father as a rival; the small girl falls hard for her
father and sees the mother as a rival. (The “Electra complex” is the girl’s
version.) It is all real. Not many memoirists choose to talk about it; it
takes the brutal, beautiful honesty of a J. M. Coetzee to do that. “He does
not want to have a father, or at least does not want a father who stays in
the same house.” He refers to the child Coetzee. “He denies and detests his
father. . . . Since the day his father came back from war service they have
battled each other in a second war” (Boyhood).
But we need to keep another primal myth in mind too—a joyful one;
we might call it the “Wordsworth complex.” It doesn’t hold for everyone;
neither does the Oedipus complex. But they are both common. Once upon
a time, an all-powerful being was assigned to your personal care. Your
own private goddess. The Wordsworth complex helps make adults see
infancy as a sacred time.
Wordsworth believed that infancy is a stunningly luminous time when
we grasp things we will never grasp again—although we might remember
having grasped them, and that memory itself is precious. Wordsworth’s
mother died when he was eight. He was never close to his father. Naturally,
his earliest life seemed like a dream. Yet the shape of his life and his gifts
merely intensified for Wordsworth an experience that plays a part in many
lives.
And in mentioning the mother-goddess myth as one origin of
Wordsworth’s belief in the sanctity of early childhood, I don’t mean to
diminish the spiritual significance of his vision. I only want to emphasize
its solid foundation. He was not inventing the sublime glow that peeks out
from behind the long-ago figure of the man’s infant forerunner. For
Wordsworth, and many others too, that glow was and remains real.
People of all religions and antireligions, and no religion, pray. The
Prayer Book for the Human Race, that perennial best seller, includes
familiar brief phrases to be muttered in emergencies. The most frequently
used prayers in the book are probably the ones that express gratitude. We
have powerful gratitude instincts—most of us. Partly they are
superstitious, and obviously they are more. To whom are we praying?—
those of us who are atheists, agnostics, nothings? For whom are we
searching with our heartfelt thank Gods, with our flashlights in the dark?
For the mother-goddess of infancy? Too easy an answer.
We cast off too many other childhood habits too gleefully. I think that,
in truth, nearly all of us do believe in God, although we don’t realize it
ourselves. The idea of God shocks and horrifies us. The original, most
basic repressed idea of the modern psyche is our belief in God. The fact
that we do believe proves nothing, except how much mind fashions
change, and how much they matter. It’s just interesting. Atheists, switch
off your flashlights! Go back to bed. You only thought you heard a noise in
the night.
Down-spectrum, memory is used concretely and associatively (we
move freely along a chain of loosely related memories), not in abstract
database-lookup style. At some point in late infancy comes a
momentous conceptual discovery: the common time thread starts
ticking, and it continues all the rest of one’s life.
Infants have some sense of time long before the common time thread
emerges as a constant background presence. They must distinguish the
uncertainty of now from the certainty of then. They come to know when to
expect important daily events. The light outside the window keeps
changing in that certain way, and a vague idea of time opens a bud
somewhere in the dense wildflower field of infant mind. The small shoot
grows, presumably, into the idea of the unknown future threading the
needle’s eye of the present to emerge as the past. Then the common time
thread, the ticking we always sense (although we lose it now and then)—
the tape measure marked in time units unrolling beside us always—is
unveiled. It becomes the master guide to all our memories.
Personality always matters, and sense of time varies from person to
person like sense of space—better known as sense of direction. Some are
born gifted; some are hopeless in these areas. Most fall in the middle.
Nearly everyone can improve what he was born with if he likes. Sense of
direction is the automatic plotting of our movements on an inner map.
Landmarks and scenery can help, but true sense of direction is independent
of all external markers.13
A strong sense of time is simpler: with the same independence of
external markers, one always knows what time it is. Simple. Even if I have
no watch and haven’t seen a clock or the sun for hours, I can usually bring
the correct time into focus.
Some children are born with a strong sense of time; others are not. If
you have one, it varies—like all our senses—with circumstances, with our
sense of danger versus security. “Bobby’s sense of time became acute.
Without looking at his watch he could measure off quarter-hours” (V. S.
Naipaul, In a Free State).
We all look back at our pasts with some feel for what happened five
minutes ago, or an hour, a day, a week. Accuracy, and the rate at which
accuracy declines with growing distance from now, depends on your time
sense. But we all have a built-in timekeeper of some kind. Our sense of
direction gets us around the landscape even if there are no clear markers,
and our sense of time is our guide to memory in the absence of memorable
incidents. Generally, the outer and inner fields of consciousness play
symmetric roles. We look into the distance outside, or (within our minds)
into the past. When we look into the past, the tape measure of our time
sense guides our view.
We expect a powerful, enveloping (although usually not
hallucinatory) imagination, as in fantasy and daydreams. We expect
emotions to be vivid, and central to mental life (as they are in dreams
and other low-spectrum states). We expect poor-quality memories that
are hard to locate or recall (as in dreams and low-spectrum thought).
We expect a passive, “dilate,” permissive approach to stimuli from the
outside world. Keats’s perfectly dilate, low-spectrum openness to
outside stimuli (his role being not to judge, but to feel and understand)
is a model for what we might find in children.
Freud believed that infants hallucinate wish fulfillments. In effect,
they experience brief waking dreams. A hungry child hallucinates the
breast. But we have no way of testing this guess. It is relevant and
suggestive that adult memories of early childhood are sometimes
hallucinatory (as in Salaman memories)—and sometimes merely intense.
Small children do have vivid imaginations. We all know it, but consider,
for example, Singer and Singer’s work on imaginary playmates.14
Some authorities go further—for example, if they are followers of the
great visionary poet and painter William Blake. Blake believed, according
to the author of the first standard biography, that seeing visions was “not
an uncommon gift”;15 Blake “said to me that all children saw ‘Visions’
and the substance of what he added is that all men might see them but for
worldliness or unbelief, which blinds the spiritual eye.”16
When Blake wrote in his poetry “We see no Visions in the darksom
air,”17 he was saying that one fails to see visions when the atmosphere is
wrong. An atmosphere (dark or bright) can be cultural as well as physical
—as Blake well knew. We know that small children spend much of their
time in the lower spectrum, on the long tidal flats that lead ultimately to
sleep and dreams—where imagination is strong and bright. So it’s not too
strange for Blake to say that most children, in the right surroundings,
would see visions routinely.
Children live in a rich imaginative world and are confronted with new
information constantly, in huge quantities. The torrents they face reflect,
partly, the lower-spectrum atmosphere in which they live; they have less
control over their minds and the influx of information than adults do. And
partly, they can’t tell good information from bad, important from trivial—
so they must try to make sense of it all.
Children must suspend judgment when torrents of new data overwhelm
them. They take it all in. In the lower spectrum, the conscious mind is
increasingly powerless against memory; it tries to make sense of each new
dream scene that is pushed into consciousness. Recall that loss of control,
the appearance in consciousness of a thought we did not put there, is the
indispensable first step in falling asleep.
Infants are often, we assume, unable to judge even where one thing
(anything) stops and the next starts. But adults, including the experts who
run experiments, sometimes cannot follow small-child thinking.
Thus, one researcher found that small children are willing to reply to
such nonsense questions as, “Is milk bigger than water?” This passive
refusal to reject might be due (researchers speculate) to a child’s
eagerness to please adults, or to a lack of “metacognitive knowledge” that
makes it possible to tell sense from nonsense. Far likelier, refusal to reject
reflects a child’s need to make sense of masses of new information hitting
him in the chest like a swollen river; he is wading through as fast as he can
go, as far as he can get. In a small child’s world, “Is milk bigger than
water?” is just another question to be analyzed as best one can.
Passive readiness to accept any and all new information and
reluctance to reject information, ideas, or possibilities are crucial to a
small child. Together, these two are strangely like the state of mind in
which psychoanalysts are supposed to listen to patients. Passive readiness
and openness suggest, too, the sleeping conscious mind’s approach to
whatever memory puts forward. The sleeping adult mind makes the best of
what it gets and tries to assemble it all into a coherent narrative.
Adults, and children too, have nightmares. We are unable to reject
painful or frightening thoughts when we are asleep. Nightmares—the mind
is open to anything, even what is painful—echo the small child’s
willingness to make sense of “milk is bigger than water.” The child’s mind
is open to anything, even questions that don’t seem to make sense—and
anything else that arises.

Dreaming and Waking

Suppose we apply the analogy between an adult’s quick trip down-

spectrum and a child’s slow trip up-spectrum in the simplest, most direct
way: the end of the adult’s journey equals the start of the child’s. For an
adult, that final phase is part of one day; for a child, the starting phase is
part of growing up. Suppose, then, that the child’s eighteen-odd months of
infancy roughly correspond to an adult’s eight-odd hours of sleep and
dreaming. The adult spends his end phase cycling between conscious
dreaming and unconsciousness. The child should spend his start phase,
infancy that is, cycling likewise between conscious dreaming and
unconsciousness. Yet we are speaking of months, not hours, of the child’s
life. For much of that time he is awake. So how could he possibly spend
his time cycling between conscious dreaming and unconsciousness?
While infants sleep between sixteen and twenty hours per day, Foulkes
argues compellingly that infants and very small children do not dream;
when they sleep, they are simply unconscious.18 So the infant’s periods of
unconsciousness would be merely his periods of sleep.
 Foulkes puts dreaming on the list of skills that small children must
learn. The dreams of small children, he believes, develop gradually, like
other mental skills. The earliest reported dreams are static images. Then
come moving images. Then, finally, a “self” character emerges who takes
part in the action. This emergence of a normal type of dream self doesn’t
happen, ordinarily, until past age seven.
Dreaming, Foulkes points out, is visual thinking in narrative form.
Dreaming is picturing a story. We must learn how to do that. Are infants
born capable of telling stories or of thinking coherently in pictures?
There’s no basis for thinking so. Foulkes also points out that infants have
experienced too little to have amassed a good stock of memories as a basis
for dreaming, even if they did remember things as we do—which they
don’t.
Now, if infants (theoretically) spend part of their days unconscious and
the other part dreaming—and their sleep is, in reality, unconscious—where
does the proposed “dreaming” component fit in?
Infants must dream awake. Many hints suggest they do.
Newborn consciousness does the sheer minimum to start. In adult life,
that sheer minimum equals the role that consciousness plays in dreams. In
dreaming, the conscious mind is pressed to the wall, and memory (or the
unconscious) calls the shots. Memory feeds sequences of scenes into
sleeping consciousness—memories of events, memories of ideas turned to
visual form, sometimes a confusion or overlap of separate images. The
memories might be recent, or they might have been summoned by a
theme, often a blocked emotion. The conscious mind accepts these images,
makes what it can of them, and strings them into a loosely structured
narrative. The conscious mind, when asleep, is wholly unreflective—a
mere intensely absorbed onlooker.
The most striking characteristic of dreams is that they are
hallucinations. Despite Freud and Blake, there is no real basis for
believing that infants hallucinate. But there is every reason to believe that
infants’ conscious experience has an intensity, unexpectedness, magic, and
mystery that recall, as Wordsworth says, “the glory and the freshness of a
dream” (“Ode: Intimations of Immorality”).
If an adult merely exposes his awake but zero-focus, fully dilate mind
in an entirely passive, open, Keats-like way to the external world, he might
find himself wondering, as Keats did: “Do I wake or sleep?” (“Ode to a
Nightingale”). He has just barely skirted a waking dream. And infants
have far more to make their waking experience dreamlike.
Adults can barely grasp the surprise to an infant that is created by the
unfolding scene. An adult always knows what to expect. Always knows
where one object ends and the next starts. Can almost always explain what
he sees. (The mother hears the child crying, which tells her he is hungry,
which means he must be fed, and she feeds him. Where is the magic?) An
adult has seen it all.

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
(“Ode: Intimations of Immortality”)

Wordsworth wants to know—looking back from adulthood. The infant’s is

a unique state of consciousness we experience once and then lose forever.
But there are enough hints to let us reconstruct it, by doing psychological
archaeology. (Freud invented and loved this image.)
Do infants dream awake? Consider an infant’s mental life:

1. It is wholly unreflective.
2. It is dominated by sensations and emotions.
3. It is nearly empty of self-generated language and logic.
4. It is magical.
5. It seems to create no memories—or none that we can locate.
6. Wordsworth attributes to infant experience a huge, transcendent
potency—a breathtakingly inspiring, transformative, yet peaceful
excitement. “Infant sensibility,” he writes, is the “great birthright of
our being” (Prelude, Book 2).

Points one through five are all true of dreams too—the unreflective self,
the dominance of visual and sensory elements, the illogic, the absence of
newly created language, the magic; and of course, we remember dreams
poorly.
Infants are perfect candidates for overconsciousness—consciousness
burn, in which we are overwhelmed by sensory or emotional data and have
no attention to spare on the recollections that form automatically within
memory. Accordingly, these new memories are never hardened, never
consolidated—and most can’t survive.
The infant, awake, is alert and interested. But the texture of his
experience is so wildly vivid that it crowds out analytic or reflective
thought. The child is a mere entranced, passive, wide-eyed watcher; reality
is always new, surprising, unpredictable. All this makes his ordinary
daytime experience more like dreaming than waking.
Most memories of these earliest months can’t survive. But some
probably do. What would they be memories of? Presumably they would
reproduce the general feel of infant consciousness, which (again
presumably) would be a fine-textured blur in which one object or event
melts into the next. The infant has yet to grasp fully that there is an
outside world apart from his own mind.
But memories of continuously changing textures, one region blending
smoothly into the next—memories like Monet’s huge water lily paintings
from the end of his life, where constellations of fine dabs create cosmic
color clouds slowly evolving over yards of canvas—are impossible to
recollect because they are impossible to grab hold of. No obvious search
keys exist. Of course, those memories also have emotional content, are
steeped in emotion. If we managed to grab on to such a memory by its
emotional content, the rest of the memory would be a blur; there would be
nothing else to it.

Spectrum Projection Principle: Adults asleep, at the bottom of the spectrum, spend part
of their time dreaming and part unconscious. One quick description of the adult
spectrum is reality, dreaming, unconsciousness. “Reality” covers everything from the
top of the spectrum to the brink of dreaming sleep. There are reasons to guess that an
infant’s spectrum is the same without the top segment: dreaming, unconsciousness. In
the abbreviated adult spectrum, the top zone is awake and the rest is asleep. In the
infant’s, same thing: the top zone (dreaming) is awake and the rest (unconsciousness)
is asleep. The infant’s awake dreaming isn’t the same as adult dreaming. But it is
closer to adult dreaming than to adult waking.

What is it for an infant to dream awake? Perhaps it’s like confronting

great crashing breakers that dominate the mind and leave the observer
transfixed. The subject matter of these “dreams” comes from outer instead
of inner consciousness—from perception instead of memory; from now
instead of then. But the dreamer’s attention is glued to the scene before
him, whatever it is; and his “self” barely exists.
 Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” includes a fascinating reflection on the
closeness that children experience between daydreaming and real
dreaming, and the intermingling of awake and asleep. As a homesick child
at school in London, “With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt / Of my
sweet birthplace,” far away. The child Coleridge would continue
daydreaming:

till the soothing things I dreamt,

Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!

The Spiritualist and the Visionary

We don’t, ordinarily, value a talent for being as we value a gift for doing.
People whose best gift is simply to be who they are, having their
personalities and no others, instead of some art or craft or knack, are
sometimes admired and respected and loved within their own worlds—and
that, after all, is what counts. But their voices rarely carry very far.
Some people do have spiritual gifts, though: they can be a certain way,
and feel part of something larger than themselves. This is not the same as
religious yearning or feeling, although a spiritual gift can sometimes make
a person more religious. In itself, spirituality is a talent like perfect pitch,
or the ability to draw likenesses. They are all mere psycho-physiological
quirks. Yet they grant entry (which you might use or ignore) to a deeper
world—of music, art, metaphysics.
Perfect pitch is a retentive memory for pitch. You almost certainly
remember middle C from the last time you heard it; you don’t have to look
it up. A good ear makes it easier to hear music with analytic
understanding. As for the spiritual gift, it has many possible consequences
but centers on one particular feeling. This one feeling can be grasped in
terms of the lower spectrum, where heightened emotions make it easy to
summon recollections using shared emotion as bait, and to surf the long,
subtle seams of memory—the “isofeels,” the many recollections that feel
the same and must therefore be, somehow, related.
At the start of “Mont Blanc,” Shelley writes:
 The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark, now glittering

Everything flows together in review, thing by thing, a single wave. In The

Brothers Karamazov of Dostoyevsky, Alyosha “began quietly praying, but
he soon felt that he was praying almost mechanically. Fragments of
thought floated through his soul, flashed like stars and went out again at
once; to be succeeded by others. But yet there was reigning in his soul a
sense of the wholeness of things.”
Wordsworth writes in “Tintern Abbey”:

And I have felt

...
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Now let’s define. The spiritual gift allows a person to feel (not deduce
or decide) a transcendent unity among far-flung objects and events. This
experience of cosmic unity often (though not always) suggests one creator
who stands outside his creation. A feeling of cosmic unity can make a
person feel outside of—over and against—creation. The connection
between spiritual feelings and creativity is obvious: if creativity centers on
discovering new analogies—connecting a pair of different-seeming things
and drawing conclusions—spirituality centers on making long chains of
such connections. The creative person discovers something. The
spiritually minded person experiences something: the unity of many
people, objects, or events—or of everything in the cosmos.
This is no belief in underlying unity; it is the direct experience of
underlying unity—a far more formidable thing. Cosmic unity becomes an
emotion, “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart” (Wordsworth,
“Tintern Abbey”). It is important that we understand the spiritual gift—
first, because of its intrinsic interest (and association with interesting
people); second, because it is a major force behind some religious
experiences, especially in the mystical strains of Judaism and Christianity.
This feeling of pervasive unity has several possible consequences:
1. It shows some spiritualists that there is more to life than one can
measure or objectively classify. After all, the many objects caught up
in that unifying mental tide don’t seem related at all.
2. It gives some spiritualists a sense of duty to all mankind, or to all
living things. They might seem radically different from each other
and ourselves, but one feels that they are parts of a great unity.
3. It makes some spiritualists feel the presence of God. This felt
presence of God is (again) not at all a belief. In principle, one can be
argued out of a belief, but never out of a feeling.

We know that two persons, scenes, or anythings that seem very

different can evoke the same, or almost the same, emotion. And emotional
response isn’t random or arbitrary. We don’t know how it works; we
assume that it works differently for everyone. In any case, something
accounts for two different things evoking the same emotional response—a
particular attribute that the two things share, though it might lie deeper
than can be detected in plain thought or described in words. You walk into
a hotel room you’ve never seen before. Something reminds you of your
kindergarten teacher and your first day of school. That something might be
significant or trivial; anyway, it exists. Two things producing the same
emotional response in the same person must share something.
When two different things are tagged with the same emotion, it
becomes possible to recall the second when we encounter the first.
(Assuming we can recall the emotion that the second thing produced.
Sometimes we do.) If I encounter A and am reminded of B, my mind is
proposing an analogy. Since A reminds me of B, it’s natural to suggest an
analogy between A and B.
Emotions aren’t just remarkably powerful summaries or abstractions.
They are content-transcending abstractions—meaning-transcending. The
same emotion might be produced by two entirely different-seeming things.
An emotional response might (often does) reflect a particular surface
attribute, but it might also reflect a deep attribute that has nothing to do
with the thing’s meaning or significance in any obvious way. (A certain
person’s face with a certain smile, and a single close-fitting quartet of
small Virginia creeper leaves, orange in the fall, picked out against a dark
trunk by late-afternoon sun, might cause the same flavor of joy.) The fact
that emotional response can transcend (or be independent of) content or
meaning gives it the power to inspire surprising new analogies.
Because emotional responses transcend content or meaning, they make
it possible to move “sideways” freely from thought to thought: thinking
about trees in forests, I find myself thinking about high-rise buildings in
cities. A small, subtle shift in emotion might lead me onward to flower
beds in a Victorian-style garden, then to a movie about the painter Renoir,
and a painting at a certain museum, and a girl I once knew, and a shop in
New Haven, and the elderly owner behind the cash register, and a
swimming pool in Westchester, and on and on. The spiritually minded
person makes the subtle adjustments in emotion that allow him to ride this
current indefinitely, like a bird gliding along a boundary between air
masses, or a surfer making the delicate, constant adjustments to his
position that let him ride a wave’s inner curl forever—or so it seems.
The ability to sustain this mental swoop is the gift of spirituality. The
meaning-transcending nature of the connections the thinker follows
creates the impression that he is surfing on rather than in meaning.
Important! He feels unity, insofar as he passes from one thing to the very
different next and the next and the next while feeling just one emotion—or
one slowly, subtly varying emotion—as he goes.
All those dramatically different persons, scenes, events, objects make
him feel almost the same way; he glides from one end of the world to the
other on one gently varying emotion—and there is the feeling of unity.
That feeling transcends the meaning or nature of all these separate things,
and so he feels himself transcending meaning. Once again, Shelley:

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark, now glittering

But a spiritual gift isn’t merely the ability to sustain long associative
chains. It is the turn of mind that makes one aware of these thoughts. It’s
normal to free-associate as we slide toward sleep. As we move down-
spectrum, our thinking grows increasing more likely to slip sideways—
from one topic to a completely different one, and another and another—
rather than burrowing deeper along logical lines, sticking to one topic. But
ordinarily, by the time this happens we are sufficiently far gone toward
sleep, toward pure being, that we experience our mental states
unreflectingly and recall little or nothing afterward.
By reflecting on the free-associative chain, the spiritually minded
thinker makes himself aware of what is happening in his mind. This gives
him a chance to feel the encompassing unity. One needn’t recall each (or
any) of a free-flowing sequence of thoughts. One need only recall the
feeling of the experience as a whole—of gliding smoothly from one
thought to another and another above the level of meaning, where the
overarching unity of all persons, creatures, or things makes itself felt. Felt.

The Sanctity of Long Ago

For Wordsworth, the past is sacred as a fire is warm: the past feels sacred
as you approach in your mind. He refers to his own past. But other poets,
and thinkers of all sorts, have felt warm sanctity in ancient history. The
past nearly always attracts us—if we are not time-blind innocents who
cannot see ten minutes into the past—because we can take it in our palms
and see it whole. We like, we need, to control our own worlds—although
we rarely can. But the past seems controllable, therefore safe. It’s an
illusion, but harmless. We know it to be an illusion as we know a movie is
a movie and a dream is a dream, but we set these facts aside. And it is easy
to guess that we project the sanctity of our own early childhoods onto
history at large.
But not so fast. The same stretch of spectrum that separates early
childhood from adulthood separates ancient civilizations from our own.
The lower spectrum zones make spirituality possible by allowing
certain people an experience that doesn’t happen up-spectrum. They feel
the unity of the cosmos. When poets tell us about the sanctity of ancient
times, they are referring to eras when people lived lower on the spectrum
than most moderns do, and when spiritually minded people were more
common than they are nowadays.
Jews, Christians, and the faithful of many other religions believe in a
spiritual golden age long ago. If we dismiss their beliefs, or put them
down to a mistaken admiration (subtle as Stonehenge) for old things we
don’t understand, we are missing something important. Let’s glance
briefly at a couple of poets instead.
 Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience deals with two worlds in
tension, coexistent in history and within each soul—innocence and
experience—but also an “innocent” married world versus a world of
sexual longing and passion. (“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than
nurse unacted desires,” Blake wrote, as I’ve mentioned, in the Marriage of
Heaven and Hell. Yet he was himself a gentle man with a happy marriage.)
In the Songs of Innocence:

Piper pipe that song again—

So I piped, he wept to hear.

Such, such were the joys.

When we all girls & boys,
In our youth-time were seen,
On the Ecchoing Green.

But the Songs of Experience speaks of departed sanctity:

Hear the voice of the Bard!

Who Present, Past, & Future, sees;
Whose ears have heard,
The Holy Word,
That walk’d among the ancient trees.

The Bard, insofar as he knows the past, has heard the holy word, which
walked among the trees of antiquity. The ancient world seems thick with
spirit. Feelings leapt from man to man, and one man’s direct spiritual
experience of cosmic unity was easy to communicate—though not (not
mainly) in words.
In “Ode to Psyche,” Keats calls to the pagan goddess across time:

O brightest! though too late for antique vows,

Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire.
Sanctity long ago was in the very air, the water, and the fire.
The spiritually inspiring feeling of cosmic unity would never have
been widespread, in antiquity or any other time. But surely it was less
uncommon long ago than it is today. It might even have been fairly
familiar at second hand.
Spectrum theory suggests that the average person in such societies was
“more emotional” than we are. Such people were readier to entertain
emotion when it appeared, in either a recollection or an immediate
reaction (to a recollection or idea, or to the outer world). Such people
would have made society a better conducting medium for emotion than we
are, we cold fish. We are well insulated in our mental worlds of abstract
thought and heavily suppressed, harshly sat-upon feelings. Emotions
would have spread more readily in lower-focus societies, flashing across
the gaps between person and person. Spiritual feeling might have spread
far in a society that was obsessed with the sacred and the spiritual.
We know that the body speaks its feelings. People read each other’s
feelings with no words to help. Sometimes they feel each other’s feelings.
Members of ancient societies (not any old society, but certain ones) would
have been more aware of each other than we are today. They would have
been more “plugged into” each other, more apt to feel each other’s
feelings.
To learn how to communicate with their fellow human beings, young
people must turn off Facebook, shut down their computers, and look
people in the eye, listen to their voices, watch their gestures. They must
look for subtleties and ponder their meanings. They must learn to read, not
words (which are easy) but people—and that requires a whole childhood
and adolescence to learn. Some people never manage it, although they try;
this sort of reading, the important kind, requires intelligence and talent,
not just a few years’ dogged practice. By allowing children to play with
computers when they should be dealing with each other face-to-face, we
are damaging the most important learning process of their lives.

The Visionaries

Seeing visions is a different low-spectrum effect. This is the zone of

mental halfwayness. We are caught between awake and asleep. This
“borderground” as Edgar Allan Poe calls it (Marginalia) is one of the most
fruitful in the spectrum for the intense imagining that creates poetry, vivid
language, and striking mental experience. We can feel the closeness of
sleep—of sleep-onset thought and dreams. And just as we can pull mental
energy out of the up-spectrum zone when we need it, although we are not
up-spectrum—as we might catch a drifting rowboat and haul it out of the
water onto the beach—we can pull parts of dreamlike thought out of the
sea onto the low-spectrum borderground.
Poe was a poet with a deeply musical ear. He describes the
borderground as “where the confines of the waking world blend with those
of the world of dreams.” This borderground is (naturally) “upon the very
brink of sleep.” For Poe, it is a mental realm unlike any other; it’s not
surprising that he should emphasize its sensual richness—here we are deep
into the world of being, of sensation and emotion versus rational thought.
“It is as if the five senses were supplanted by five myriad others alien
to mortality.” We are overwhelmed by sensation. As we withdraw into
mind, into the inner field of consciousness, we are no longer directly
connected (via the body) to the outside world. Now our thoughts look
through memory (as if through stained glass) at the outside world, and
their texture has changed. We have lost the sense of direct linkage to the
world outside.
Coleridge was intrigued by the state of “half-awake & half-asleep”; he
composed “Kubla Khan”—he called it “a psychological curiosity”—after
he had slept and dreamt in an opium haze. He conceived the poem in his
dream and set to writing it down as soon as he awakened. But someone
interrupted him midway through, and he forgot the rest.
Büchner’s slightly insane Lenz tells himself, “If I could only decide,
whether I am dreaming or awake.”
Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a man who lives in the borderground. He
experiences inner reality as vividly as outer reality, or more vividly—as if
his two fields of consciousness had got confused. Macbeth “stands in
doubt between the world of reality and the world of fancy,” writes Hazlitt;
he lives “in a waking dream” (Characters of Shakespear’s [sic] Plays).
Kafka alone ventures all the way to the spectrum’s bottom. That
Kafka’s greatest works make sense only as transcribed dreams—that they
obey dream form strictly—is so obvious and important that many critics
don’t even bother to say it. (The best take it for granted or discuss it
explicitly. Some seem unaware of it.) Kafka composed dreams and wrote
them down. He used the dream form with the freedom any great artist
brings to a new and original structure. But his starting point is clear.
Kafka himself spoke of “the dream-like life of my soul.” His work is
so true to dreaming that, beyond a certain point, we stop using dreams to
understand Kafka and start using Kafka to understand dreams.
Understanding Kafka’s genre can’t explain his complex works; it is merely
the indispensable first step—like getting the clef and key signature right
when you look at music. If you miss this point about Kafka, you miss
everything.
In most of his stories, the mood is that vague but persistent
unhappiness, or “dysphoria,” that psychologists find so often in dreams.
One scene transforms itself into another; characters enter, disappear, and
are forgotten; the spotlight wanders as new facts replace old ones; scenes
elaborate themselves just insofar as the narrator turns his attention their
way—a central facet of his work, and of dreaming. The main character’s
goals and motives change (again, a central attribute of dreams), and the
story slips and slides forward as if it were walking on sheet ice in a gale.
Just as dreams do.
Often Kafka’s narrator can’t quite make out what is happening: “The
verger started pointing in some vaguely indicated direction” (The Trial);
“a noiseless, almost shadowy woman pushed forward a chair” (The
Castle). Bizarre events call forth exactly the unreflective, incurious,
matter-of-fact response that is the very essence of the unreflective dream
self: One morning, Gregor Samsa “found himself transformed into a
gigantic insect” (The Metamorphosis). “Nobody knew where to bury him
for a while, but in the end they buried him here”—under a table in a tea
shop (“In the Penal Colony”). Any Kafka reader will recognize instantly
that this catalog could go on for a hundred pages. Dream is as plainly
Kafka’s chosen form as the five-act play is Shakespeare’s and the three-
volume novel Jane Austen’s.

In Sum

Often the first step is obvious: start the car; write one chapter; ask her out.
Then the complications set in. A normal adult spectrum cannot match up
better than approximately with a child’s gradual development. But it’s easy
to picture the unfolding, blossoming mind of a child resembling (in
reverse) the gradual withdrawal of the adult mind from outer reality. This
is a matter of amassing and then artfully charting large numbers of data
points.
Spectrum hermeneutics are different. The spectrum is ready right now
to make practical contributions to the understanding of the Hebrew Bible,
and other ancient literature, and literature and culture in general. Yes,
reading is out of fashion nowadays. But the wheel will turn. Some
scholars, including Professor Ruth Morse,19 believe the turning has
already begun.
Modern-day relations between science and religion are all wrong.
“Science” has no more right to pontificate about religion than it does
about field hockey or dog shows. Science does have an unmatched record
of producing useful tools. It should produce intellectual tools for the use
of religious thinkers as it does for so many other fields, deliver them, and
keep its adolescent wisecracks to itself.
Nothing is sadder than an eminent thinker’s making a fool of himself
by explaining or denouncing things he doesn’t understand. Of course, there
is no reason a scientist shouldn’t become an expert on religion or atheism
and speak of those things with authority. The problems arise only when
scientists believe themselves qualified, just by virtue of being scientists,
to tell the rest of us how to think and what to believe.
Is the spectrum one of those tools that could help religious thinkers
understand their topics better? I hope so, and in this book I have tried to
show how that might work.
 Nine

Conclusions

The Basic Points

1. THE MIND’S STRUCTURE

(a) The mind has two separate regions: conscious mind and memory.
Memory is equivalently “unconscious mind.”
(b) Conscious mind deals only with now; memory deals only with then.
The only instant of time we can ever experience is now. When we
reexperience the past in the hallucinations of sleep-onset thought
and dreaming, the past comes to now, not vice versa.
(c) Conscious mind is a spectrum from pure thinking about to pure
feeling. A feeling is a sensation, emotion, or mood.
(d) Conscious mind is a spectrum from pure acting to pure being—
from pure mental action to pure states of being. “Being” means
participating in, specifically experiencing, the state of an object—in
particular a human being: body and brain. The mind experiences or
feels the state of the object in which it participates. Happiness,
sadness, moodiness, pain, sleepiness, joy, and so on are the results.
(e) Feelings are inflections of consciousness. Feelings cannot be
unconscious.
(f) Being is not computable. That is, software cannot yield being as its
result or output. Being is the sentient element of an object in a
particular state. Being presupposes a physical object in some state.
“French fried” is not computable. Why not? Because it is a
particular state of a physical object. It describes a physical
phenomenon—as do “rusty,” “broken,” “feathered,” “transparent,”
“ferrous,” and so on. “French fried” means that a certain part of the
 universe is in some particular state versus some other state. It
reflects the physical nature of an object and its recent history. It is
not a mapping from numbers to numbers (that is, it is not a
mathematical function) and can’t be created by any such mapping.
Happiness is not computable. Feelings are not computable.
Thinking about (as a process yielding a result or outcome, an
action) is, in many cases, computable; states of being are
intrinsically not computable. A mind entails thinking about and
being. Computationalism, therefore, is wrong. The analogy that
likens the mind to software and the brain to a digital computer is
deeply misleading.
(g) Thoughts are independent of the body. Feelings are part of the body.
(h) Thoughts must be about something. Feelings cannot be about
anything. All thoughts are intentional states, and all feelings
(properly so called) are nonintentional states.
(i) A mind requires a body and a brain.
(j) In descending the spectrum, we pull out of the world and into the
mind.
(k) Logic and storytelling are counterparts—different ways to account
for reality. Logic assumes that all main actors are logical actors and
offers logical explanations of their actions. Storytelling assumes
that all main actors are human actors and offers psychological
explanations of their actions.
(l) Hallucinations are the logical end point of the increasingly
attention-monopolizing, external-reality-excluding series of mental
states starting with mind wandering and daydreaming.
(m) Thoughts are expressed deliberately in language; feelings are
expressed involuntarily (in the first instance) by the state of the
body. “State of the body” means facial expressions, tone of voice,
gestures, and so on. Feelings can be expressed in language, but
language is secondary to body state in communicating feelings.
(n) We understand each other’s thoughts on the basis of understanding
language. We understand each other’s feelings on the basis of
implicit pointing out: one person points out a feeling, known to
another person, that corresponds to the first person’s feeling. The
implicit pointing out is done by facial expressions, gestures,
positions and attitudes of the body, and so on. We can know another
 person’s thought even if it has never occurred to us. We can’t know
another person’s feeling unless we have experienced it (or
something much like it) ourselves. Thought can be communicated
only in language. Feelings are ordinarily communicated without
language.

2. MEMORY

(a) Memory’s spectrum of functions ranges from supplying abstract

information, through returning specific recollections, to (finally)
supplying specific recollections or groups of recollections that are
transformed into hallucinations.
(b) Memory creates and retrieves recollections, or information yielded
by recollections, and allows recollections that are similar to settle
(compress, or compact), thereby yielding abstractions (templates, or
schemata) and tidying up memory by replacing many entries with
one and forgetting unimportant details.
(c) Both the creation and the retrieval of recollections are ordinarily
unconscious—but they respond to events in the conscious mind.
(d) Compaction (template formation) is ordinarily unconscious—and
independent of events in the conscious mind.
(e) There is only one kind of template, rule, or archetype, whether it
deals with an object in space or an event in time.

3. FEELING

(a) Emotion runs the mind. Up-spectrum, we choose the goal or topic
of our thoughts on the basis of emotion. Down-spectrum, explicit
emotion becomes increasingly prominent in determining state of
mind, in recollection, and in associative chaining.
(b) Emotion is our most powerful essence summarizer, or content-
independent summarizer, of a complex, multipart scene or
recollection. It is abstract insofar as an emotional summary depends
only indirectly on the contents of the summarized scene or
recollection. One emotion can serve as the summary for seemingly
very different scenes or recollections.

4. CONSCIOUSNESS
(a) Consciousness has two fields, outer and inner; we switch gradually
from outer to inner as we move down-spectrum. Perceptions define
the outer field; recollections and ideas, the inner field.
(b) Consciousness always has a “quality,” sometimes a “target.”
(c) Feeling is the quality of consciousness. Feeling is the current value
of the quality of consciousness.
(d) Feelings are inflections of consciousness. Feelings define the
quality of consciousness.
(e) When we are just happy, we are conscious of nothing. Yet we are
conscious. When we are just happy, our quality of consciousness is
“happy” and the target of consciousness is null. If we think about
ourselves being happy, then the target of consciousness becomes
“our own happiness.”
(f) Consciousness is the sight and the seer simultaneously—the
observed and the observer.

5. PARADOXICAL EXPERIENCE

(a) An experience is “paradoxical” if it happens to us but creates no

memory, so it never happened to us. We experience it as an event in
the present but never the past. Informally, paradoxical experience
falls out of our lives. If we can’t remember it, it was no part of our
life experience.
(b) A paradoxical experience is not part of our lives.
(c) A paradoxical experience of X is paradoxical only because of the
nature of X (only because we were in the right spectrum region for
X—always low-spectrum).

6. DREAMS

(a) Dreaming is remembering. A dream is the conscious mind’s attempt

to understand the unsolicited output of memory. Blocked or
frustrated emotions are especially important in determining
memory output at bottom focus.
(b) In the right circumstances, dreams are good predictors of the future.
They are good predictors when they expose attitudes or facts we
know but are unwilling to allow into waking consciousness.
(c) Infants dream awake—but their dreams are fed by outer rather than
inner consciousness, by now instead of then.
(d) A dream is a theme circle, a collection of scenes or incidents all
attracted by the same memory cue.

7. CASUAL OBSERVATIONS

(a) The most widely repressed public emotion in modern Western life
is belief in God. God is not “dead.” In Western society, God is a
widespread, powerfully repressed belief. This observation has
nothing to do with the existence or nonexistence of God.
(b) The most widely repressed private emotion in modern life is
homesickness for homes that no longer exist—are lost in the past,
or in some other way: lost-home-sickness.
(c) If we confront our dreams and sleep-onset thoughts, we will learn
what’s on our minds.
(d) Every night, our minds tell us who we are. Every morning we
forget.

Where Do We Go Now?

Forgetting protects us from the painful bouts of remembering, self-

accusation, and plain honesty that flourish in the spectrum’s lower reaches.
But we might accept the danger if we knew how to expand our lives into
these lush, vivid lower regions where the past is hiding. We gain greatly
when we learn to see things we never used to notice before. That’s what
happens when we learn to recognize trees or flowers or birds or butterflies,
or buildings and architects, for that matter. Knowing each one’s identity is
never the real achievement. The achievement is seeing better—looking
carefully at things we barely glanced at before.
All sorts of people have invested time in studying the worlds around
them. Most of us invest almost none in knowing ourselves. This book
could almost have been a Field Guide to the Mind from Inside, but it’s far
harder to make ourselves at home in the lower spectrum than in fields and
forests. Nature means for us not to remember the lower spectrum.
 Still, anyone who chooses can learn something about the depths of his
own mind, visited and forgotten every day. One can learn to step back—
just a bit, now and then—from the sleepy states in which wandering
thoughts turn into a free-flow of recollections. Stepping back to reflect is a
habit one can learn like any other. To step back from sleep-onset thoughts
or dreaming is harder but not impossible. The way to start such a project,
though, is probably to rouse yourself (you can’t wake yourself because
you’re not sleeping) during sleep-onset thought and look around. You
might be surprised. Of course, just figuring out when you are apt to be in
this state is a project in knowing yourself.
Different views of mind have different consequences: therapeutic,
scientific, philosophical. The spectrum view cries out for research in
physiology and psychology. But its immediate uses are hermeneutic. How
do we read literature, culture, and ourselves, our own lives? The spectrum
broadens and sharpens our view of mind. It suggests many topics for
study: memory as an information source versus a source of anecdotes,
analogies, and alternate realities; theme-circling narrative as a system in
its own right; the dream as a literary form; the tremendous encoding and
summarizing power of emotion.
That emotion coding (the powerful information-processing capacity
that is so different from digital computing) is inherent to the human mind
is suggestive and important. People differ greatly in their talent for
emotion coding—in the robustness, accuracy, and nuanced precision of
their performance—and the differences must be studied and understood.
(Accurate emotional response, anticipating such responses and allowing
for them in one’s own plans, are focuses of Peter Salovey’s Center for
Emotional Intelligence at Yale.)
Access to the relatively creative, bold, improvisational, unconstrained
precincts of your personality depends on normal access to your lower
spectrum, normal lowering of your mental focus. We all know people who
don’t seem to have that normal access—who seem stuck in the
emotionally limited, abstraction-rich upper spectrum not because of
boundless mental energy or joy in mathematics or abstract thought, but
only because something keeps them up-spectrum when they want and need
to move down. We know nothing about the meaning of such phenomena.
Could focus-lowering therapies—talking cures, drugs—be useful? We are
nowhere within shouting distance of an answer.
 There are many other topics on this list of barely scratched surfaces. In
some cases we lack even the proper words for asking our questions.
We must know how the body changes during down-trips versus up-
trips along the spectrum. We must understand mental focus in physical
terms. We require this knowledge to satisfy our curiosity, but also to help
in treating spectrum-related illness, especially insomnia, which can be
devastating and is not always taken seriously. We want psychological data
from many detailed interviews to fill out the bare outlines of the spectrum
presented here.
The spectrum underlines how much of our lives we miss, insofar as we
can’t remember them. Most of our dreams, of course, and nearly all the
mental life that leads up to dreaming, and those strange dreamlike
moments during the day—the common sort that Börne discusses and the
(probably) rare Salaman type. We might choose not to miss them because
these moments include passages of childhood and youth that we would
like to reexperience—even though they might not be pleasant in
themselves.
We could teach ourselves not to miss this experience if we chose to.
We are capable of bending mind to will in all sorts of ways. We acquire
and lose neurotic symptoms; master new languages; learn to hear, with
understanding, a sonata-form movement or an engine or the crack of a
baseball bat. There is reason to believe that an older society’s tolerant
interest in visions encouraged the emergence of visionaries.

There is a powerful tendency in philosophy and cognitive science to

ignore sleep and dreams, or at least to toss them into a separate category—
a bargain basement for intractable merchandise. By neatly shearing off the
bottom of the spectrum, the shear wielders create the illusion that there is
no spectrum, no change over the course of the day. Just thought, period;
mind, period—two great gray static lumps. Granted, it is harder to
understand a dynamic, time-varying system than a static one—but that is
the human mind!
Mind researchers do the same thing when they ignore childhood
thought. Shearing off childhood leaves, again, the illusion of one
unchanging slab of thought: by age twelve, children perform much like
adults on many scales. But again this result is false to nature. In nature, the
mind is dynamic: it changes slowly over time as we mature, quickly as we
move through the day. That is nature as we find it.

The arc of mental life between doing and being, thinking and feeling, is
the place where we live. It has boundaries. You can see one end from the
other. But the field in between is infinite because it contains a continuum
of possibilities, like the space between 0 and 1.
It’s easy to see that wide-awake energy yields a different mental life
than tiredness does, or drowsiness or sleep. Easy to see, also, that the short
ride from the first stop to the last is no simple decline. Metaphor and
creativity, and the less abstract yet more vivid, more teeming life of the
low end make the mind richer. All that is simple. What’s harder to see is
the whole world of mental attributes progressively transformed as the
great sphere of mind turns on its axis.
The thinking world is fundamentally objective; the being world,
subjective. You can think only in some medium—words or pictures or
images, melody, harmony, numbers, physical gestures, pure ideas—which,
however pure, the mind must somehow represent to itself. Thinking is the
mental activity that needs a medium, and any medium is a potential
method of communication. Thoughts can be expressed and therefore
communicated. States of mental being, on the other hand, imply the
existence of an attached body, because mental and physical states of being
are intimately associated. States of being need not, cannot, be represented
except by themselves. Green is a color state that cannot be represented
except by itself; itchy is a physical state likewise; happiness is a mental
state.
In a sense, then, thinking is an objective activity because its essence
can be communicated. Some thoughts are easy to communicate, and some
are nearly impossible. Yet we have represented that thought to ourselves,
and we can represent it to other people too. A state of being, on the other
hand, has no representation and cannot be communicated. It is strictly
subjective. It can only be experienced by the person to whom it belongs
and communicated indirectly, by pointing out which of the other person’s
repertoire of feelings equals your own current feeling.
There is, accordingly, yet one more way to understand the spectrum of
consciousness: as a transition from what can to what cannot be said.
Wittgenstein famously told us, in the very last sentence of the Tractatus,
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”1 He is wrong.
At that moment, he was seeing only the spectrum’s upper surface—in
other words, not seeing the spectrum at all. Better to say, What we cannot
speak about we can still feel. And even better: What we cannot speak
about, we must still feel.

Although my earliest fascination with the mind was Freud-centered, I had

no Freud bias when I began this project except a bias against the
unthinking, uninformed rejection of Freud that I was seeing all over
academia. Today, Freud is still mostly missing from academia. But as of
this writing, troubled patients are again being referred (sometimes) to
psychoanalysts—and are (sometimes) being helped. People are even
reading Freud again. The pendulum swings; the whirligig of time brings in
his revenges.
Still, Freud (like every genius) made many mistakes, failed to touch
crucial topics, and above all, thought of the mind medically—as a sick
organ to be healed. William Wordsworth took a broader view. Let us be
“Prophets of Nature,” he urged his old friend Coleridge, and show the
world “how the mind of man becomes / A thousand times more beautiful
than the earth / On which he dwells” (Prelude, Book 13). He even told us
why the mind is beautiful: because the destiny it creates for us is “Effort,
and expectation, and desire, / And something evermore about to be”
(Prelude, Book 6).
Nothing is more beautiful than the human mind. Freud’s is not the last
word; it is—on human psychology proper, on depth psychology, in all of
history—the very first. Let’s return to depth psychology. It’s time to move
forward and learn new things.
 Acknowledgments

My editors, Bob Weil and Phil Marino, were a crucial part of this project.
They are professionals at the superb level that makes lawyers or financiers
or physicists (not to mention ballplayers) rich and famous. They are
maestros who rate with a Szell or von Karajan or Abbado. My copy editor,
Stephanie Hiebert, went so far beyond the call of duty that she deserves a
Distinguished Service Cross and an Eddy. (I trust that sleek gold Eddies
will be handed out to the year’s top editors at star-studded New York galas
annually, starting soon.) My agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, made this
happen through agenting genius.
I will always be grateful to Professor Drew McDermott of Yale for
arguing with me about philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence
endlessly over the years with amazing grace and patience—although, in
his view, virtually everything I have ever said on the topic is wrong. Drew
is thoughtful, he is brilliant, but (above all) he is the real thing. He shows
the whole world how a scientist is supposed to operate. He is too modest;
he is a hero in a field with far fewer heroes than it needs. David Berlinski
and Jonathan Lear were generous with their time in ways that were
essential to this book. But all three are totally innocent respecting the
views expressed here. They endorse nothing!
An assortment of Yale students, especially the undergraduates of
Computer Science 150 over the years, were essential to this project. The
best of them—they know who they are—are as sharp, thoughtful, and
intellectually aggressive as the best minds I have ever come across
anywhere. They have never let me get away with a thing. My generation
failed them—we made an ugly mess of their education—but they haven’t
failed us. We ought to be ashamed. As a nation we ought to put fixing our
schools and colleges at the top of the list of urgent necessities instead of
where we always do put it, in the sub-basement, or the trash.
 I would be nowhere on this project or any other without four people
who have always helped me think straight: Susan Arellano, Nick Carriero,
Neal Kozodoy, and Martin Schultz. They don’t know, they could never
guess, how much they have done for me. They do it out of sheer
generosity. All four rank among the mysteries of the universe.
Without my boys and without my wife, I wouldn’t even be nowhere.
My boys are grown up, and they are the best readers, critics, and fellow
thinkers in the world. They and Jane keep me alive.
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Svevo, Italo, Zeno’s Conscience (1923; trans. by William Weaver): 40
Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina (1877): trans. by Rosamund Bartlett: 90, 97, 175; trans. by
Constance Garnett: 63, 145; Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886; trans. by Peter Carson): 120, 266;
War and Peace (1869; trans. by Rosemary Edmonds): 118
Valéry, Paul, “Le cimitière marin” [“The Cemetery by the Sea”] (1920): 42
Wordsworth, William, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807): 225, 226; Prelude, Book 1
(1815): 22, 38; Prelude, Book 2 (1815): 93, 226; Prelude, Book 5 (1815): 4; Prelude, Book
6 (1815): 18, 251; Prelude, Book 13 (1815): 251; “Tintern Abbey” [full title “Lines
Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”] (1798): 51, 118, 229, 230
 Notes

Preface
1. John R. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980):
417–24.
2. See especially Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian
Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
3. See, for example, Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material
World (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

Chapter 1: The Tides of Mind

1. J. Allan Hobson, Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 122.
2. Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (New York: Norton,
2013), 212.
3. John R. Searle, “Consciousness and the Philosophers,” New York Review of Books, March 6,
1997.
4. John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 21.
5. Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian
Psychoanalysis (New York: Farrar, Straus, 2000), 3.
6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York:
Macmillan, 1953), II.iv, 178e.
7. lham Dilman, Philosophy as Criticism: Essays on Dennett, Searle, Foot, Davidson, Nozick
(New York: Continuum, 2011), 2.
8. Cited in Shaun Gallagher, Phenomenology (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 30.
9. Ibid., 29.
10. Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature, 11.
11. David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 4.
12. Charles P. Siewert, The Significance of Consciousness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1998), 5.
13. Hobson, Dreaming, 15.
14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), 19e.
 Chapter 2: Three Thirds of the Spectrum
1. Ulric Neisser, “Literacy and Memory,” in Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural
Contexts, ed. Ulric Neisser (San Francisco: Freeman, 1982), 241.
2. David Foulkes, Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 145.
3. Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (New York: Norton,
2013), 9.
4. Foulkes, Children’s Dreaming, 16.
5. Cited in Jonathan Lear, Freud (New York: Routledge, 2005), 102.
6. Cited in Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 143.
7. Inge Strauch and Barbara Meier, In Search of Dreams: Results of Experimental Dream
Research (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 234.
8. J. Allan Hobson, Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 5.
9. Ibid., 61.
10. David Foulkes, Dreaming: A Cognitive-Psychological Analysis (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum,
1985), 12.
11. Hobson, Dreaming, 6.
12. Brian O’Shaughnessy, “The Id and the Thinking Process,” in Philosophical Essays on
Freud, eds. Richard Wollheim and James Hopkins (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1982), 107.
13. Cited in Lissa N. Weinstein, David G. Schwartz, and Arthur M. Arkin, “Qualitative Aspects
of Sleep Mentation,” in The Mind in Sleep, Psychology and Psychophysiology, 2nd ed., eds.
Steven J. Ellman and John S. Antrobus (New York: Wiley, 1991), 197; italics mine.
14. Cited in George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (New York:
Pantheon, 2012).
15. See William Lane Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (London:
MacMillan, 1980).
16. lham Dilman, Philosophy as Criticism: Essays on Dennett, Searle, Foot, Davidson, Nozick
(New York: Continuum, 2011), 2.

Chapter 3: Every Day

1. Richard A. Griggs, Psychology: A Concise Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Worth, 2009),
68.
2. Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian
Psychoanalysis (New York: Farrar, Straus, 2000), 11.
3. See Lear, Love and Its Place, 18, 26.
4. Cited in Jonathan Lear, Freud (New York: Routledge, 2005), 102.
5. Inge Strauch and Barbara Meier, In Search of Dreams: Results of Experimental Dream
Research (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 231.
6. Eric Klinger, Daydreaming (Los Angeles: Archer, 1990), 25.
 7. See, however, Jerome Singer and Kenneth Pope’s anthology The Power of Human
Imagination: New Methods in Psychotherapy (New York: Plenum, 1978), and Donald
Spence’s Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in
Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1982).
8. David Foulkes, Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 15; italics in the original.
9. See Dorthe Berntsen, “Involuntary Autobiographical Memories: Speculations, Findings and
an Attempt to Integrate Them,” in Involuntary Memory, ed. John H. Mace (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2007), 24.
10. Jerome L. Singer, Daydreaming and Fantasy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981),
108.
11. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
12. Strauch and Meier, In Search of Dreams, 224.
13. Ibid., 218.
14. Cited in Leon Edel, Stuff of Sleep and Dreams: Experiments in Literary Psychology (New
York: Harper & Row, 1982), 14.
15. Letter to Georges Izambard, May 13, 1871.
16. See, for example, Lear, Freud, 55ff; Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, “On the Psychical
Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication,” in The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, trans. and ed. J. Strachey
(London: Hogarth, 1955), 1–18. Note, on page 7, the famous observation “Hysterics suffer
mainly from reminiscences” (italics in the original).
17. Cited in Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, eds. L. Trilling and S. Marcus
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 160.
18. Berntsen, “Involuntary Autobiographical Memories,” 5.
19. For example, R. D. Ogilvie and J. R. Harsh, eds., Sleep Onset, Normal and Abnormal
Processes (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1994) is a collection of
papers devoted entirely to sleep onset. The collection contains only a handful of transcripts.
20. Cited in David Foulkes, Dreaming: A Cognitive-Psychological Analysis (Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, 1985), 13.
21. J. Allan Hobson, Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 41.
22. Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (New York: Norton,
2013), 212ff.
23. David Gelernter, Judaism: A Way of Being (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009),
135ff.

Chapter 4: A Map
1. Jesse Prinz, “Emotion,” in Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 193.
2. William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, in Writings 1878–1899 (New York: Library of
America, 1992), 350.
3. Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian
Psychoanalysis (New York: Farrar, Straus, 2000), 122.
 4. Ronald de Sousa, “The Mind’s Bermuda Triangle: Philosophy of Emotions and Empirical
Science,” in Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed. Peter Goldie (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 101.
5. Cited in Jonathan Lear, Freud (New York: Routledge, 2005), 23.
6. Goldie, Oxford Handbook, 4.
7. David Foulkes, Dreaming: A Cognitive-Psychological Analysis (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum,
1985), 82. See also Marigold Linton, “Transformations of Memory in Everyday Life,” in
Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts, ed. Ulric Neisser (San Francisco:
Freeman, 1982), 77–92.
8. Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (New York: Norton,
2013), 89; italics mine.
9. Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983).
10. Jerome L. Singer, Daydreaming and Fantasy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981),
78.

Chapter 5: Spectrum, Upper Third: Abstraction

1. Ulric Neisser, “Memory: What Are the Important Questions?” in Memory Observed:
Remembering in Natural Contexts (San Francisco: Freeman, 1982), 13.
2. Psychologists know that “the mind may, in fact, superimpose representations into composite
memories.” Janet Metcalfe, cited in Relating Theory and Data: Essays on Human Memory in
Honor of Bennet B. Murdock, eds. W. E. Hockley and S. Lewandowsky (Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum: 1991). The point of such superimposition doesn’t clearly emerge in the literature.
But the psychologist Janet Metcalfe cites the mind’s ability to superimpose in a fascinating
context: She discusses a late-nineteenth-century fad for superimposing photographs of
individuals of some particular variety in order to see, supposedly, a typical specimen. Photos
of “twelve mathematicians” or “sixteen naturalists” were said, when superimposed, to yield
images of a typical mathematician or typical naturalist. In forming its focused abstractions,
the mind does not literally superimpose recollected images. But its operations have that
effect.
3. I proposed learning-by-forgetting and abstraction as a natural control on the growth of
memory, as mental realities and software techniques long ago (The Muse in the Machine:
Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought [New York: Free Press, 1994]). They are still
obvious and powerful.
4. Georges Rey, Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: A Contentiously Classical Approach (New
York: Blackwell, 1997), 181.
5. Here’s an index of how natural the idea is: Stephen Grosz reports a patient’s dream in which
she is riding on a train. She herself interprets it for him: the train stands for her train of
thought. The dream handles the metaphor matter-of-factly, like the normal part of everyday
language that it is.
6. Will your thinking computer be capable of this simple maneuver? A quick check on an
invented image? There’s no reason a computer shouldn’t be able to do this sort of thing. But
the details are as tricky as they are critical to a well-working imitation mind.

Chapter 6: Spectrum, Middle Third: Creativity

 1. Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computation, Mind and the Laws of
Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 429.
2. George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (Boston: Faber & Faber,
1989), 181.
3. J. Metcalfe and D. Weibe, “Intuition in Insight and Noninsight,” Memory and Cognition 15
(1987): 238–46.
4. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951),
11.
5. J. A. Fodor, The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1983), 107.
6. We could, in principle, announce a resemblance in view of the similar aspect ratios of the
two faces, or the exact same cubic inches of nose. But we probably wouldn’t.
7. Philosophers and psychologists have worked hard for decades—as I have discussed—trying
to explain how analogies are put together, how creativity works. Often their explanations
wrestle with two subproblems: “putting up” and “shooting down.” “Putting up” means
proposing possible creative solutions, or new and original analogies. “Shooting down”
means getting rid of bad or invalid possibilities.
Some thinkers call the process itself a solution: to be creative means that you’re good at
generating large numbers of possibilities and rejecting the bad ones.
One reason this answer is unsatisfying is its failure to match the accepted psychological
profile of finding a creative solution. Eureka—“I have found it” in Archimedes’s Greek—is a
famous exclamation partly because it exactly matches everyday experience. There are few
creative geniuses among us, but nearly everyone hits on a creative idea occasionally. We
know what a eureka moment feels like. When it happens, we tend to recognize it as we do a
friend’s face. We feel that we have discovered a solution or a valid new analogy, that we
have accomplished something—that inspiration has arrived out of the blue. We have all
experienced those moments of recognition. But if, on the other hand, you have found the
right answer by beating the bushes exhaustively, searching through a pile of wrong ideas,
and finally finding a solution by sheer persistence, you are unlikely to feel inspired—
unlikely to feel that the idea came to you suddenly, out of the blue.
Some thinkers have resorted to quantum mechanics to explain how a large collection of
possibilities could suddenly yield one correct answer. It’s an interesting, exotic, wholly
unnecessary maneuver. Mind scientists don’t pay enough attention to emotion and sensation,
feeling and simple being. The answer is right under their noses—but not in the upper
spectrum, which is the only place they like to spend time.
8. John Carey, John Donne, Life, Mind and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981),
138.
9. Cited in A. Paivio, “Psychological Processes in the Comprehension of Metaphor,” in
Metaphor and Thought, ed. A. Ortony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 159.
10. Cited in B. Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Norton, 1957), 96.
11. Morton F. Reiser, Memory in Mind and Brain: What Dream Imagery Reveals (New York:
Basic Books, 1990), 11.
12. Ibid., 46.
13. Ibid., 47.
14. Ibid., 92.
 Chapter 7: Spectrum, Lower Third: Descent into Lost Time
1. Eric Klinger, Daydreaming (Los Angeles: Archer, 1990), 7; italics mine.
2. Jerome L. Singer, Daydreaming and Fantasy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981),
78.
3. David Foulkes, Dreaming: A Cognitive-Psychological Analysis (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum,
1985), 18.
4. Gerald W. Vogel, “Sleep-Onset Mentation,” in The Mind in Sleep: Psychology and
Psychophysiology, 2nd ed., eds. Steven J. Ellman and John S. Antrobus (New York: Wiley,
1991), 126.
5. Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion (Madison: University Wisconsin Press, 1981), 103.
6. Vogel, “Sleep-Onset Mentation,” 128.
7. Ibid.
8. J. Allan Hobson, Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 113.
9. “Those about him did not understand or would not understand it, but thought everything in
the world was going on as usual. That tormented Ivan Ilyich more than anything” (Tolstoy,
The Death of Ivan Ilyich).
10. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams II: Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 5, trans. and ed. V. J. Strachey (London:
Hogarth, 1955), 571; italics in the original.

Chapter 8: Where It All Leads

1. Vivian Gussin Paley, Wally’s Stories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 18.
2. James Garbarino, Frances M. Stott, and the Faculty of the Erikson Institute, What Children
Can Tell Us: Eliciting, Interpreting and Evaluating Critical Information from Children (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992), 78.
3. R. M. Billow, “Observing Spontaneous Metaphor in Children,” in Child Language: A
Reader, eds. M. B. Franklin and S. S. Barten (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
4. Gerald W. Vogel, “Sleep-Onset Mentation,” in The Mind in Sleep, Psychology and
Psychophysiology, 2nd ed., eds. Steven J. Ellman and John S. Antrobus (New York: Wiley,
1991), 131.
5. John H. Flavell, Cognitive Development (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 65.
6. Paley, Wally’s Stories, 1.
7. Garbarino et al., What Children Can Tell Us, 68.
8. Paley, Wally’s Stories, 8.
9. Ibid., 29.
10. Garbarino et al., What Children Can Tell Us, 47.
11. Flavell, Cognitive Development, 75.
12. Ibid.
13. This was brought home to me years ago in a gigantic department store in Manhattan by my
future wife. On a Sunday afternoon, we had trekked and shopped our way from one vast
windowless floor to the next along a convoluted path of clusters, zones, counters, racks, and
 display shelves: spirals within spirals. At last we arrived at a zone that had a pleated linen
skirt, not too long, in which she looked lovely. That concluded our shopping. (I hoped
forever.) Time to get out. How? We had corkscrewed around for so long, I had no idea where
we stood relative to the actual world. We were in the middle of a vast waste of noise and
crowds and women’s fashion; for all I knew, we might have been down a coal mine in West
Virginia. “Shouldn’t we head towards Thirty-Fourth Street?” she said calmly, and pointed.
We walked off in that direction. Right!
14. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome S. Singer, The House of Make-Believe: Children’s Play and
the Developing Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
15. Peter Ackroyd, Blake (New York: Knopf, 1996), 30.
16. Ibid., 35.
17. Ibid., 34.
18. David Foulkes, Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 6ff.
19. Ruth Morse, “Daggers Drawn,” Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 2015.

Chapter 9: Conclusions
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. Pears and B. McGuinness
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922).
 Index

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s
search function to locate particular terms in the text.

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

aboutness, 27–31
Absence of Mind (Robinson), 17
abstraction engines, 133–39
abstracts, 128–29, 231–32, 244, 247
abstract thought, 2, 26, 52–54, 55, 66, 76, 118, 127, 133–48, 198, 205, 207, 210–11, 213, 220,
227, 231–32, 235–36, 243, 249–50
accidental memories, 178
Across the River and into the Trees (Hemingway), 67–68
actions-in-time, 13–14
Ada (Nabokov), 42
Adams, John, 111
“After the Theater” (Chekhov), 79
Age of Iron (Coetzee), 33
agnosticism, 219–20
AIDS, 99–100
À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) (Proust), xxiv, 23, 36, 50, 106–7,
199–200
alcohol consumption, 63, 64–65
algebraic expressions, xiv
algorithms, xiv
altered states, 63, 64–65, 237, 248
Ambassadors, The (James), 117
Amis, Martin, 9, 18, 34, 119
analogies, 152–54, 230, 231, 247, 264n–65n
ancient cultures, 4, 215, 233–36, 239, 248–49
Ancient Light (Banville), 35
anesthesia, 15
anger, 64–65, 68
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 63, 89–90, 97, 145–46, 175
Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim), 82–84
anti-Freudians, 57–58, 98–99
anxiety, 112, 133, 175, 203
applied AI, xiii
archetypes, 244
Archimedes, 265n
Aristotle, 27, 122
art, 52–54, 101, 162, 213–14, 229
artificial intelligence (AI), xiii–xviii, 146–48, 264n
Asquith, H. H., 164
atheism, 219–20, 239–40
aural memories, 156–57
Auschwitz concentration camp, 34
Austen, Henry, 71
Austen, Jane, 18, 22–23, 42, 50, 67, 68, 70–71, 72, 116, 117, 118–19, 120, 165, 174–75, 239
Awkward Age, The (James), 113

banned memories, 89–90, 92

Banville, John, 18, 35
Bartlett, Rosamund, 90, 97, 175
battleships, 164, 169
bedtime stories, 22–23, 24
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 158
behavior:
emotional, 72–73, 82–84, 116
impulsive, 116
instinctive, 68, 123–24, 219
trajectory of, 102, 105
beliefs, 29, 111, 113
Bellow, Saul, 60, 115, 181
Bend in the River, A (Naipaul), 181
Bernstein, Leonard, 158
Berntsen, Dorthe, 86
Bible, 4, 18, 100–101, 239
Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 26, 75
Bizet, Georges, 92–93, 191, 193–94
Blake, William, 18, 71, 141, 214, 222, 225, 234–35
Bleeding Edge, The (Pynchon), 119
“Bliss” (Mansfield), 86
Blixen, Karen (Isak Dinesen), 18, 35, 96–97, 161–62
blocked emotions, 82–84, 102, 141, 179, 186–87, 189, 193, 195–97, 225, 245, 246, 247–48
“Bloodshed” (Ozick), 119
body language, 26–27, 116, 117–21, 243
Boer War, 116
“borderground,” 236
Börne, Ludwig, 85–87
Boyhood (Coetzee), 35, 40, 218
Brahms, Johannes, 156
brain function, xi–xxiv, 4, 60, 115, 117–18, 120–21, 138–39, 146–48, 197, 199–200, 241, 264n
Brentano, Franz, 29–30
Breuer, Josef, 84
Briarcliff, N.Y., 195
Brighton Beach, 161, 195, 196
British Library, 200
Brontë, Charlotte, 18, 44
Brooklyn, N.Y., 94, 95, 161, 162–63, 189–90, 195–96
Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoyevsky), 194, 229
Büchner, Georg, 18, 34–35, 237
burning bush, 100–101

Carey, John, 166

Carmen (Bizet), 92–93, 191, 193–94
Castiglione, Baldassare, 51
Castle, The (Kafka), 238
“Cemetery by the Sea, The” (Valéry), 42
central nervous system, 115
Cézanne, Paul, 53
Chagall, Marc, 214
chaining (free association), 211, 244
Chalmers, David, 12–13
chaos, 186–87
Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (Hazlitt), 237
Chateaubriand, François-René de, 18, 176–77
Chekhov, Anton, 79
chess, xiii
childhood, children:
attention span of, 207–8, 209, 211–12
of civilizations, 233–34
curiosity of, 207, 216
dreams of, 211–12, 223–28, 245
education of, 209–10, 213, 215, 224
emotions of, 83, 216, 226, 227
Freudian analysis of, 218–19, 221, 225
infancy of, 38, 181, 205, 206–8, 209, 212–13, 217–19, 220, 221, 222–28, 245
intellectual development of, xxiii–xxiv, 22–23, 24, 174, 207, 209–10, 211, 213, 215–16, 224,
226, 249
learning by, 26, 27, 127, 138–39, 209–10, 239, 248–49
memories of, 4, 18, 38, 43, 45, 55, 85, 89, 162–63, 178, 180–81, 184, 202–3
remembering by, 220–22, 228
sense of time for, 220–21, 228
sleeping by, 63, 210, 211, 213, 223–28
spectrum transitions in, 205–28, 239, 248–49
thinking processes of, 174, 211, 215–16, 226, 249
unconscious states in, 223–28
visual ability of, 213–14
Childhood of Jesus, The (Coetzee), 59, 68
Chillon, Château de, 160
“Chinese Room” thought experiment, xxii
Christianity, 22, 230, 234
chronology, 14–15, 45, 125
Churchill, Winston S., 116, 164
circadian cycles, 60–63
Coetzee, J. M., 12, 18, 33, 35–36, 40, 44, 59, 60, 68, 72, 82, 89, 92, 114–15, 116, 118, 166,
215, 216, 218
cognitive personality, 51–52
cognitive science, xxii–xxiv, 6–8, 38, 54, 104, 149, 248–51
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 18, 26, 34, 75, 167, 228, 237, 251
Collection of Moments, A (Salaman), 34, 85
Colonna, Vittoria, 191, 194
color, 158, 250
common sense, 1, 19, 186, 209–10, 211
compaction, 125–30, 135–41, 156–57, 179–80, 243–44, 263n–64n
composite memories, 26, 156, 179–80
computationalism, xi–xii, xvi–xxii, 10, 71, 80–81, 170–72, 242, 247
computers:
artificial intelligence (AI) in, xiii–xviii, 146–48, 264n
brain model for, xi–xxiv, 120–21, 146–48, 264n
code for, 130
digital, xi–xii, xvii–xviii, 146–48, 242, 247
emotional dimension of, 146–47
instructions for, xx–xxi, xxii
memory of, xix, 80, 130, 147
microchips in, 80
networks of, 164, 169, 236
organic, xvi, xix, 146–48
programs for, xi, xii–xiv, xvi–xvii, 130
research on, xi–xxiv, 164, 169
software for, xi, xii, xiv, xviii–xix, 130, 147, 242
speed of, xix–xx
super-, xix–xx
as “thinking machines,” xvii–xviii
computer science, xi–xii
Comte de Monte-Cristo, Le (Count of Monte Cristo, The) (Dumas), 91, 95
concreteness, 54, 104–5, 208, 210, 213
consciousness:
in ancient cultures, 4, 215, 233–36, 239, 248–49
attention or focus level in, 81–82, 150–51, 159–60, 207–8, 211
awakened, 14, 56–57, 114, 145–46, 161
clarification of, 10, 54
continuous state of, 93, 158
creative activity in, 39, 149, 151–52, 167–68, 230, 249–50, 264n–65n
definition of, 10, 54, 104
dilate or passive, 221–22
dreams in, 56–57, 73–74, 85–86, 182–83, 197–98, 215, 221, 224–25, 227, 236–37, 243, 245
emotions as inflections of, 121–22, 242, 244
 inflections of, 121–22
interactions in, 12–13
map of, 104–32
memory in, 41, 55, 104–10, 107, 108, 109, 130–31
mental energy in, 60–63, 64, 72–73, 79, 82, 117–18, 122, 143–46, 179–80, 186–87, 211–12,
247–48, 249
outer vs. inner field of, 39–46, 47, 48, 55, 59–60, 65–68, 92–93, 106–10, 178, 203, 207, 208,
211, 212, 221, 227–28, 244, 245
over-, 32–38, 47, 52, 90, 181, 226
phenomenal, 12, 40, 123–24
pre-, 81–84
present time experienced by, 104–5, 106, 241
pure being in, 31–32, 36–38, 47, 52, 56, 67, 78–79, 85, 110–11, 114–15, 213, 216–17, 242,
250, 265n
qualities of, 1, 10, 12–13, 16, 54–55, 104, 129–30
as self-awareness, xxii–xxiii, 3, 32–38, 39, 47, 48–49, 99, 170–72, 197–98, 204, 211–12,
224, 228, 245, 246–49
spectrum transitions in, 106–10, 109, 145–46, 244–45
stream of, 93, 198–99
sub-, 116
synthesis by, 129–30
targets of, 106–7, 244–45
transhuman, 80–81
“consciousness burn,” 33–38
content-transcending abstractions, 231–32, 244
continuity principle, 203
contradictions, 209–10, 215–16
“Contre Sainte-Beuve” (“Against Sainte-Beuve”) (Proust), 87
Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 6
Cornwall, 99
cosmic unity, 229–35
cosmological proof, 53
counter-reality, 57
creativity, 39, 149–72, 230, 249–50, 264n–65n
Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), 68
Croton Station, 195, 196
curiosity, 153–54, 207, 216

dancing, 11
dangerous emotions, 87–88, 90–91, 193–94
Dante, 3, 214
“Dante” (Eliot), 3, 214
Dasein (being there), 53
data records, xv
daydreams, 3, 19, 22, 31, 39, 41, 62, 66, 67–68, 73–74, 75, 78, 88–89, 104, 173–77, 183–86,
206, 211–12, 221, 243
Death of Ivan Ilyich, The (Tolstoy), 120, 266n
Deception (Roth), 142
decision-making, 114, 116–17, 118, 121–22, 222
“Deep Blue” program, xiii
department stores, 267n
depression, 29, 72–73, 155, 161–62
depth psychology, xxiii
De Quincey, Thomas, 18, 34
Derain, André, 214
Descartes, René, 5–6, 16
descriptive analysis, 10
de Sousa, Ronald, 115–16
diffuse attention, 150–51
digital computers, xi–xii, xvii–xviii, 146–48, 242, 247
dilate consciousness, 221–22
Dilman, lham, 10, 54
Dinesen, Isak (Karen Blixen), 18, 35, 96–97, 161–62
direction, sense of, 220
Disgrace (Coetzee), 44
distractions, 62, 67–68
Dodds, E. R., 151–52
Donne, John, 18, 63–64, 71, 166
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 18, 68, 194, 229
dreams:
in adults, 223–28
analysis of, 94–96, 99–101, 186, 201, 203, 264n
awareness in, 31–32, 36–38, 91–96, 103, 176–78, 197–98, 203, 246
bad, 31, 97–98, 102, 103, 147, 223
of children, 211–12, 223–28, 245
concrete nature of, 98–99
control of, 41, 47, 67–68, 74–75, 75, 176–77
day-, 3, 19, 22, 31, 39, 41, 62, 66, 67–68, 73–74, 75, 78, 88–89, 104, 173–77, 183–86, 206,
211–12, 221, 243
emotional content of, 57–58, 83, 86, 95–102, 128–29, 154–58, 167–70, 176–81, 185–87,
191, 193–94, 198, 203, 225, 231–32, 244, 247
events in, 37–38, 87, 93–94
forgetting of, 103, 178, 181–83, 204, 226, 246
free association in, 93–96, 183–86, 187, 198, 211–12
Freudian analysis of, 73, 186, 201, 203
as hallucination threshold in, 36–38, 42–43, 45, 47, 49–51, 59–60, 73–75, 75, 79, 86, 91–96,
100–105, 176, 178, 183–88, 191–92, 200–202, 211, 212, 221, 225, 241, 246, 247
illogical nature of, 73–74, 75, 97–98, 179–80, 191–92, 198, 200–201
involuntary, 67–68
light, 56–57, 59
as low-spectrum states, 21, 39, 57, 59–60, 62, 78, 86–89, 98, 101, 173–204, 205, 212, 215,
222, 236–37, 245
memory as basis of, 2–5, 44–45, 47, 59–60, 79, 95–102, 176, 179–82, 186–97, 202–3
narrative in, 56–57, 100–101, 176–77, 180–81, 191–97, 223, 224
origins of, 59–60, 105
 past time in, 43–46, 47, 57, 87, 181–82, 202–3, 204
predictions based on, 102
principles of, 178–79
pure, 241
reality in, 59–60, 65–67, 73–74, 98, 103, 197–99
recollection of, 3, 59, 91–96, 103, 176–77, 178, 179–83, 188–97, 200–203, 204, 226, 246
reports on, 188–97, 200–203, 238–39
research on, 68, 73–74, 180, 186, 197–98, 201, 203, 212, 238–39, 249
sexual, 177, 202
sleep-onset mentation in, 13, 15, 22–23, 36–40, 43–44, 47, 59–60, 73–75, 75, 79, 84, 86, 91–
96, 100–105, 151, 176, 183–203, 211, 212, 221, 225, 236–37, 241, 246, 247
themes in, 180–81, 191–97
in unconscious state, 5, 13, 15, 41, 103, 115, 168, 192–93, 197–203, 204, 246
visualization in, 24–25, 65–66, 98–101, 168, 176–77, 178, 179–80, 189–92, 197–98, 201–2
waking, 56–57, 73–74, 85–86, 182–83, 197–98, 215, 221, 224–25, 227, 236–37, 243, 245
wish fulfillment in, 57–58, 201–3, 221
“dream work,” 180
drinking, 63, 64–65
drowsiness, 60–63, 249
drugs, 63, 237, 248
Duino Elegies, The (Rilke): 199
eighth “Duino Elegy,” 30, 164–65
third “Duino Elegy,” 199
Dumas, Alexandre, 91, 95
Dusklands (Coetzee), 35–36, 40
duty, 230
dysphoria, 97–98, 238

education, 209–10, 213, 215, 224

egoism, 212, 226–27, 228, 238–39
Egypt, 100–101
“Ehmals und jetzt” (“Then and now”) (Hölderlin), 52
Electra complex, 218
electronic brain, xi–xxiv, 120–21, 146–48, 264n
Elements of Episodic Memory (Tulving), 129
Eliot, T. S., 3, 214
embarrassment, 112, 118, 171
embodiment, 79, 112–13, 122
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 17
Emma (Austen), 22–23, 50, 67, 68, 118–19
emotiometers, 155, 170
“emotional snapshots,” 157–58
emotions:
as abstracts, 128–29, 231–32, 244, 247
axis of, 38–39, 47
behavior influenced by, 72–73, 82–84, 116
blocked, 82–84, 102, 141, 179, 186–87, 189, 193, 195–97, 225, 245, 246, 247–48
of children, 83, 216, 226, 227
conception of, 82–84
control of, 64–65
in creativity, 165–68
dangerous, 87–88, 90–91, 193–94
decision-making based on, 116–17, 118, 121–22
in dreams, 57–58, 83, 86, 95–102, 128–29, 154–58, 167–70, 176–81, 185–87, 191, 193–94,
198, 203, 225, 231–32, 244, 247
embodiment of, 112–13, 122
as essence summarizers, 154–58, 169–70, 185–86, 244
experience of, 19, 28–29, 31, 108, 146–47, 159, 191–92, 231–33
expression of, 3, 68–75, 116, 250–51
external vs. internal, 64–65, 67, 72–73, 82–84
as feelings, 104, 110–13, 127–28, 154–58, 165–67, 170–72, 218, 242, 244
Freudian analysis of, 82–84
as inflections of consciousness, 121–22, 242, 244
intensity of, 2, 26, 55, 87–91, 120, 186–87, 198, 225
“isofeels” in, 141, 229
language of, 19, 30–31, 72–73, 113, 117–21, 243
liberation of, 68–75
as low-spectrum states, 31–33, 38–39, 42, 68–73, 79, 83, 124, 127, 149, 186–87, 234, 235–
36, 244, 265n
meaning of, 112–13
as memory content, 70, 82–84, 87–90, 110–11, 127–30, 162–63, 169, 170–72, 179–80, 189,
193, 195–97, 245
as memory cues, 159–63, 167–68, 171–72, 179–80, 185–86, 244, 245
as mental states, 28, 111–21, 168, 242
in moods, 79, 128, 130, 158, 159–63, 241
in narratives and themes, 24–25
negative, 29, 64–65, 68, 72–73, 82–84, 97–98, 113–14, 155–58, 171, 175, 177, 180–81, 203,
218, 238
in neurotic symptoms, 82–84, 88–91, 186, 248
as orthogonal states, 108
personality and, 70–73
physical nature of, 26–27, 28, 83–84, 117, 143–46
positive, 72–73, 112, 113–14, 117–21, 122, 147, 155, 177–78, 241, 242, 244–45, 250
power of, 119–21, 167–68
psychology of, 82–84, 108, 112–13, 122, 154–58, 167–68
public or spiritual, 246
pure, 112–13
quality of, 154–58, 244
reason and, 70, 91, 116–17, 133–34
research on, 82–84, 167–68
resonance of, 8, 165–67, 171
as sensations, 2, 28–29, 67, 92, 110, 111–14, 117–21, 147, 165–68, 170–72, 226, 236–37,
241, 265n
shared, 128–30
specificity encoded by, 129–30
 suffering and, 89–90
as sui generis phenomena, 122
suppression of, 64–65, 70–71, 82–84, 88–90
tone of, 63–64, 81–82, 119–22
transcendent, 230–36
visualization and, 19, 26, 165–68
End of Days, The (Erpenbeck), 122
engineering, 65
Enigma of Arrival, The (Naipaul), 12
episodic memories, 76–77, 139, 188
Erpenbeck, Jenny, 18, 122
essence summarizers, 154–58, 169–70, 185–86, 244
Euclid, 57
eureka moments, 265n
“Eve of St. Agnes, The” (Keats), 51, 93, 177
“evolutionary accidents,” 141
external stimuli, 130, 221

Facebook, 236
face recognition, 264n
face-to-face meetings, 236
facial expressions, 26–27, 120, 243
fantasies, 3, 5, 31, 36–38, 42–43, 45, 47, 49–51, 59–60, 66, 73–75, 75, 79, 85, 86, 91–96, 100–
105, 173–77, 178, 183–88, 191–92, 200–202, 211, 212, 221–22, 225, 241, 243, 246, 247
Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway), 33, 117
Faust (Goethe), 216–17
feedback loops, 118
Fertig, Scott, xiv–xv
Flatbush, 94, 95, 162, 189–90
Flaubert, Gustave, 18
Fodor, Jerry, 153
Foreign Bodies (Ozick), 36, 50, 60, 116, 128, 148
foreign languages, 149, 248
foreign relations, 65
Foulkes, David, 25, 38, 127, 185, 224
frames, 37–38, 87, 93–94, 139–40, 244
Frankfurt, 160
free association, xv, 5, 13, 15, 38, 49–50, 66, 93–96, 131, 141, 183, 186, 187, 198, 211–12,
233, 244, 247
free will, 141
French Revolution, 176
Freud, Sigmund, xiv, xxiii, 7–8, 18, 25, 38–39, 57–58, 73, 81, 82–84, 85, 96, 98–99, 116, 119–
20, 125, 162, 163, 167, 180, 186, 187, 201, 203, 218–19, 221, 225, 251
“Frost at Midnight” (Coleridge), 228

Gachet, Paul, 53
Gallagher, Shaun, 10
Garnett, Constance, 63, 145
genius, 48–51, 265n
geometry theorem prover, xiii
gestures, 26–27, 243
Giacometti, Alberto, 53
Giacometti, Diego, 53
Gide, André, 68, 165–66, 175
Glatstein, Jacob, 82
Glatstein Chronicles, The (Glatstein), 82
global reality, 209
God:
belief in, 31, 170, 246
existence of, 53, 219–20, 231, 246
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 216–17
Goldie, Peter, 122
Gordimer, Nadine, 119
gossip, 61
Grand Central Terminal, 164, 169
gridlock, 164, 169
Grosz, Stephen, 2–3, 25, 58, 99–100, 128–29, 264n
guilt, 68, 117

Halévy, Ludovic, 93
Half a Life (Naipaul), 24
hallucinations, 3, 5, 31, 36–38, 42–43, 45, 47, 49–51, 59–60, 66, 73–75, 75, 79, 85, 86, 91–96,
100–105, 173–77, 178, 183–88, 191–92, 200–202, 211, 212, 221–22, 225, 241, 243, 246,
247
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 111, 120
Hanukkah, 161
happiness, 72–73, 112, 113–14, 117–21, 122, 147, 155, 177–78, 241, 242, 244–45, 250
hash code, 130
Hazlitt, William, 138–39, 237
Heidegger, Martin, 10, 52, 53, 166
Heir to the Glimmering World (Ozick), 87, 102
Hemingway, Ernest, 18, 31, 33, 67–68, 69, 117
hermeneutics, 239–40, 247
Herzog (Bellow), 115
Hetherington, Thomas, 164
heuristics, 46–48, 143–46
Hobson, J. Allan, 2, 13, 37, 87, 98–99
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 18, 52
Holocaust, 34
homesickness, 180–81, 189–90, 204
Hopper, Edward, 193
horror films, 90
Hottentots, 35–36
Hugo, Victor, 18, 91
humanity (human-ness), 53, 80–81
Human Stain, The (Roth), 14, 34, 36
Humbling, The (Roth), 124
Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow), 60, 181
Hume, David, 70
hunger, 201–2, 217, 221, 225–26
Husserl, Edmund, 9–10, 17, 105, 125
“Hymn to Apollo” (Shelley), 53
hypnagogic thought, 92–96
hypotheses, 211
hysteria, 84

IBM Research, xiii

illogical sequences, 73–74, 75, 97–98, 179–80, 191–92, 198, 200–201
imagery:
of dreams, 25, 98–101, 168, 176–77, 178, 179–80, 189–92, 197–98, 201–2
static, 224
in visualization, 3, 24–25, 65–66, 98–100
imagination:
of children, 221–22
ideas as products of, 110–11
visual aspect of, 3
impulsive behavior, 116
In a Free State (Naipaul), 221
infantile amnesia, 38
infants, 38, 181, 205, 206–8, 209, 212–13, 217–19, 220, 221, 222–28, 245
inference, 143
information:
artifacts in, 137–38
in memories, 70, 76–79, 80, 82, 83, 125–26, 129, 134–38, 141, 143–46, 152–53, 168, 172,
210, 243
processing of, 247
storage of, xix, 76–77
in thought, 41, 208, 209–10
insomnia, 248
inspiration, 30–31, 150–51, 163–65, 264n–65n
instincts, 68, 123–24, 219
intellectual development, xxiii–xxiv, 22–23, 24, 174, 207, 209–10, 211, 213, 215–16, 224, 226,
249
intelligence:
analytic, 134
artificial (AI), xiii–xviii, 146–48, 264n
definition of, xviii
measurement of, 80–81, 134
intentionality, xxii, 29–30, 111, 113, 122, 242
interiority, 6–7, 11, 12, 16–19, 130, 221
Internet, 164
In the Heart of the Country (Coetzee), 12, 118, 215
“In the Penal Colony” (Kafka), 239
intuitions, 6
involuntary dreams, 67–68
involuntary memories, 84–87
IQ (intelligence quotient), 80–81, 134
“isofeels,” 141, 229
Israel, 100–101

James, Henry, 18, 112, 113, 117, 174

James, William, 93, 112, 122
Jane Eyre (Brontë), 44
Jeopardy!, xiii
Jewish holidays, 189–90
Jews, 100–101, 189–90
Joyce, James, 177, 185
Judaism, 22, 100–101, 161, 189–90, 195–96, 230, 234
judgment, 114, 116–17, 118, 121–22, 222
Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 100, 156

Kafka, Franz, xxiv, 18, 238–39

Kant, Immanuel, 6, 40
Keats, John, 9, 18, 51, 93, 177, 221, 225, 235
Kennedy, John F., 200, 202–3
kindergarten, 209, 213, 215
King Lear (Shakespeare), 12, 16, 53, 59, 91, 119
Klinger, Eric, 62, 174
“Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 237

Land Ship Committee, 164

language:
ancient, 4, 18, 100–101, 239
body, 26–27, 116, 117–21, 243
as communication, 19, 66, 114, 210, 211, 217, 236, 243, 250–51
descriptive, 214, 250–51
development of, 114, 210, 211, 213, 214, 226
dreams and, 178, 190
of emotions, 19, 30–31, 72–73, 113, 117–21, 243
materialization of, 198–99
meaning in, 236, 250–51
memory and, 77–78
nonverbal, 25–27, 116, 117–21, 214, 243
laws, 27
Lear, Jonathan, 7, 11, 57, 58, 112
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 53
Lenz (Büchner), 34–35
Letters (Rimbaud), 76
Life & Times of Michael K, The (Coetzee), 92, 114–15
light dreaming, 56–57, 59
literal memories, 156
Lizard, 99
logical thinking, 14, 20, 21–22, 25, 27, 47, 48–49, 56, 116–17, 133–34, 143–48, 149, 150–51,
198, 205, 207, 208, 209–11, 214–16, 217, 222, 223, 226, 242
logic-versus-narrative axis, 21, 47
London, 200
London Fields (Amis), 9, 119
long-term memories, 125, 129, 130
Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 129

Macbeth (Shakespeare), 90, 97, 158, 175, 176, 237

magical thinking, 214–15, 216, 217–26
Mansfield, Katherine, 86
Mansfield Park (Austen), 116, 117, 120
Marbach, Eduard, 10
Marc, Franz, 214
Marginalia (Poe), 236–37
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The (Blake), 71, 234
masochism, 87–88, 90–91
Master of Petersburg, The (Coetzee), 60, 82
materialism, xxii, xxiii
mathematics, 48–49, 53, 57, 149, 210, 211
Matisse, Henri, 214
McGinn, Colin, xxiii
meaning-transcending abstractions, 231–32, 244
meditation, 63
Meier, Barbara, 37
Meilhac, Henri, 93
Mémoires de Madame Rémusat (Rémusat), 49
Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Memories from Beyond the Grave) (Chateaubriand), 176–77
memories:
access to, 81–90
accidental, 178
accumulation of, 140–41, 156
in adults vs. children, 223–28
analogies in, 152–54, 230, 231, 247, 264n–65n
aural, 156–57
awareness and, 33–34
banned, 89–90, 102
blanks in, 33, 38
Börne, 85–87, 248
childhood, 4, 18, 38, 43, 45, 55, 85, 89, 162–63, 178, 180–81, 184, 202–3
composite, 26, 156, 179–80
computer, xix, 80, 130, 147
concentration or focus of, 133–39
conscious levels of, 41, 55, 104–10, 107, 108, 109, 130–31
creation of, xiii, 3, 6, 32, 56, 59–60, 115, 181, 226, 243–44, 245
details of, 129–30, 135–36, 243
distortion of, 124–25
of dreams, 3, 59, 91–96, 103, 176–77, 178, 179–83, 188–97, 200–203, 204, 226, 246
dreams based on, 2–5, 44–45, 47, 59–60, 79, 95–102, 176, 179–82, 186–97, 202–3
embodied, 79
emotional content of, 70, 82–84, 87–90, 110–11, 127–30, 162–63, 169, 170–72, 179–80,
189, 193, 195–97, 245
emotions as cues for, 131, 159–63, 167–68, 171–72, 179–80, 185–86, 244, 245
episodic, 76–77, 139, 188
of experiences, 14–16, 22, 25, 33, 36, 39–40, 43, 47–48, 80, 91, 111, 127–29, 131, 154–58
forgotten, 15–16, 33, 38–39, 76, 135–36, 138–41, 159, 161, 177–78, 264n
information in, 70, 76–79, 80, 82, 83, 125–26, 129, 134–38, 141, 143–46, 152–53, 168, 172,
210, 243
inorganic, 80–81
intensity of, 88–90, 221–22
involuntary, 84–87
learning and, 135–36, 138–41
literal, 156
long-term, 125, 129, 130
as low-spectrum states, 3, 14–15, 32, 39, 78–79, 86–87, 124–28, 131, 133, 137, 145, 220,
243–44, 245
nodes of, 167–68
nonperceptions in, 125
object or scene, 139–40, 245
orthogonal structure of, 105–6
partial, 25
past time in, 104–5, 106, 108, 159, 241, 245
perception and, 124–27, 130
personality and, 80–81
predictable patterns in, 125–26, 245
procedural, 76–77
protentional vs. retentional aspect of, 125–26
psychology of, 4–5, 23, 79, 80–81, 105–6, 140–41
of recent events, 97, 125, 178
reconstructed, 25, 42–43
repressed, 82–84, 87–90
retrieval of, 36, 38–39, 55–56, 65, 76–81, 87–90, 105, 108, 110, 124–27, 129, 130–38, 143–
46, 147, 152–53, 169, 171–72, 183, 185–86, 198, 220–22, 228, 243–44, 247
Salaman, 34, 85, 86–87, 221–22, 248
screen, 125–27
semantic, 76–77, 136, 139
short-term, 97, 125, 130, 178
similar, 125–31, 136–41, 162–65, 169–70
sleep-onset, 42–43, 45, 47, 49–51, 178
specificity of, 129–30
templates for, 125–30, 135–41, 156–57, 179–80, 243–44, 263n–64n
 threatening, 87–90, 97–98
threshold of, 140–41
timeline for, 139–43
traces of, 168
unconscious, 41, 55–56, 104, 107, 133, 185–86, 243–44
visual, 25–26, 89, 156, 164–65, 185–86
“mental touching,” 12–13
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 10
Messiah of Stockholm, The (Ozick), 61
Metamorphosis, The (Kafka), 238–39
metaphors, 166–67, 211, 250, 264n
metaphysics, 229
Metcalfe, Janet, 151, 263n–64n
Michelangelo, 194
Milton, John, xiv
mind:
altered states of, 63, 64–65, 237, 248
analytic vs. intuitive (primary vs. secondary) aspects of, 115–16, 146–47
awareness of, xvii, xxii, 28, 32–38, 41, 47, 81–82, 86–87, 114–15, 150–51, 159–60, 174,
207–8, 211
being vs. doing in, 2, 14, 27–39, 41, 48, 56, 104, 109, 110, 124, 133, 166, 228–29
body compared with (physical vs. mental states), 63–64, 70–71, 80–81, 112–13, 115, 117–21,
145–46, 207, 242, 243
brain function and basis of, xi–xxiv, 4, 60, 115, 117–18, 120–21, 138–39, 146–48, 197, 199–
200, 241, 264n
collaboration in, 130–31
computational view of, xi–xii, xvi–xxii, 10, 71, 80–81, 170–72, 242, 247
concentration or focus of, xv, 50–52, 55, 64–65, 86–87, 143–46, 159–63, 207, 211–12
control of, 41, 47, 64–65, 75–78
dynamics of, 1–5, 17–19, 63–64, 105, 141, 159–60, 205, 249–51
emotional tone of, 63–64, 81–82, 119–22
evolution of, 141
external stimuli for, 130, 221
interiority of, 6–7, 11, 12, 16–19, 130, 221
literary conception of, 3–4, 6, 9, 12, 18–19, 22–27, 33–36, 44, 49, 59, 63–64, 70–71 94, 101,
238–39, 247
map of, 104–32, 107, 108, 109, 124, 130–31, 132
momentum of, 63–64, 105, 159–60
orthogonal structure of, 105–6
paradox of, 159–63
personality development and, 45–46, 48–52, 70–72, 118, 206, 228–29, 247–48
philosophy of, xi–xxiii, 5–7, 17, 32, 66, 110–11, 146–48, 149, 170–71, 247–49, 264n–65n
regions and states of, xii, xiii–xiv, 27–30, 47, 63–64, 75–78, 85–86, 104–8, 110, 111–21,
150–51, 168, 205, 242, 249–51
as “room with a view,” 6–7, 12
science of (cognitive science), xii–xxiv, 6–8, 38, 54, 104, 149, 248–51
shape and structure of, 17–18, 241–43
subjectivity in, xxii, xxiii, 5–10, 17–19, 30, 42–43, 52–54, 55, 65–67
 tides of, 1–19, 46–47, 48, 56, 132, 230
two-track, 115–16
“waiting room” of, 81–90, 196
Mind, xvi
Miró, Joan, 214
Modigliani, Amedeo, 214
Monet, Claude, 227
“Mont Blanc” (Shelley), 229
moods, 79, 128, 130, 158, 159–63, 241
Morse, Ruth, 239
Moses, 100–101
mother-goddess, 218–19, 225–26
movies, 201, 202, 203
Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Bellow), 115
music, 30–31, 69, 92–93, 156–57, 158, 166, 171, 229, 237, 238, 248, 250
My Early Life (Churchill), 116
myths, 218–19

Nabokov, Vladimir, 18, 26, 42, 43, 76, 79, 183

Nagel, Thomas, xxii, xxiii, 7, 30
Naipaul V. S., 12, 18, 24, 181, 221
Napoléon, 49, 50, 206
narratives, 22–27, 47, 48, 56–57, 100–101, 105, 176–77, 180–81, 191–97, 223, 224, see also
storytelling; theme circles
Narrow Gate, The (La porte étroite) (Gide), 68
negative emotions, 64–65, 68, 72–73, 82–84, 155–58, 171, 175, 177, 180–81, 203, 218, 238
Neisser, Ulric, 136
Nemesis (Roth), 119
network deadlock, 164, 169
neurobiology, 167–68
neurons, xix, xxi
neurosis, 82–84, 88–91, 186, 248
New Haven, Conn., 190, 232
nightmares, 31, 97–98, 106–10, 109, 145–46, 244–45
“night people,” 61
nonperceptions, 125
nonsense, 211, 213, 215–16, 226
nonverbal language, 25–27, 116, 117–21, 214, 243
nostalgia, 180–81
Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) (Hugo), 91
novels, 18–19, 24, 33, 67–68, 70–71, 91
number competence, 211
Numbers, Book of, 101

object constancy, 213, 215–16, 218

object memories, 139–40, 245
Occam’s razor, 140
“Ode: Intimations of Immorality” (Wordsworth), 225, 226
“Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 9, 51, 225
“Ode to Psyche” (Keats), 51, 235
Oedipus complex, 218–19
“On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth” (Hazlitt), 138–39
opium, 237
O’Reilly, Sean, 59
organic compounds, xiii
organic computers, xvi, xix, 146–48
orthogonal structures, 105–6, 108
Osgood, C. E., 166
O’Shaughnessy, Brian, 38–39
Ossining, N.Y., 195, 196
Othello (Shakespeare), 64
Out of Africa (Dinesen), 35, 96–97
out-of-body daydreams, 211
overconsciousness, 32–38, 47, 52, 90, 181, 226
overlays, 125–30, 135–41, 156–57, 179–80, 243–44, 263n–64n
Ozick, Cynthia, 18, 36, 50, 60, 61, 87, 102, 116, 119, 128, 148

pain, 8, 111–13, 118, 171, 201

painting, 52–54, 162, 214, 227
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 95, 189
Pappenheim, Bertha (Anna O.), 82–84
paradigms, 125–30, 135–41, 156–57, 179–80, 243–44, 263n–64n
“Paradox VI” (Donne), 64
paradoxical experiences, 15–16, 245
“paradox of the mind,” 159–63
parameters, xiv
partial memories, 25
pattern recognition, 125–26
Pennsylvania Station, 161
Penrose, Roger, 150
perfect pitch, 229
personality:
cognitive, 51–52
development of, 45–46, 48–52, 70–72, 118, 206, 228–29, 247–48
emotions in, 70–73
memories and, 80–81
psychology of, 48–52, 248
spectrum levels and, 14, 16–19, 62–63
Persuasion (Austen), 42, 70–71, 72, 117, 165
phenomenology, xxiii, 9–11, 12, 17, 18, 38–39, 40
photography, 263n–64n
Piaget, Jean, 209, 213, 215
Picasso, Pablo, 53, 214
Pickup, The (Gordimer), 119
pictures, 25–27, 66, 213–14
Plato, 6, 110
Playboy, 195, 197
playmates, imaginary, 222
Poe, Edgar Allan, 236–37
poetry, 30, 152, 154, 164–65
Poincaré, Jules Henri, 150
politics, 65, 81
Porte étroite, La (The Narrow Gate) (Gide), 68, 165–66, 175
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 177, 186
positive emotions, 72–73, 117–21, 177–78
Prague Orgy, The (Roth), 70
Prayer Book for the Human Race, 219
prayers, 219, 229
preconsciousness, 81–84
predictions, 102
Preface to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (H. Austen), 71
Prelude (Wordsworth), 4, 18, 22, 38, 93, 226, 251
Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 174–75
primal myths, 218–19
primitive peoples, 215
Prinz, Jesse, 110
problem-solving, 14, 117, 133–34, 136–38, 150–52, 183–84, 210, 264n–65n
procedural memories, 76–77
productivity, 61–63
programs, computer, xi, xii–xiv, xvi–xvii, 130
Proust, Marcel, xxiv, 18, 23, 36, 50, 85, 87, 106–7, 199–200
psychology:
archaeology of, 226
body vs. mind in, 112–13, 247
of creativity, 151–52, 167–68
depth, 7–8, 58, 251
of emotions, 82–84, 108, 112–13, 122, 154–58, 167–68
folk, 10, 19
Freudian, xiv, xxiii, 7–8, 73, 226
of memories, 4–5, 23, 79, 80–81, 105–6, 140–41
of mind, xii–xxiv, 6–8, 38, 54, 104, 149, 248–51
of personality, 48–52, 248
textbooks on, 57–58
pure being, 31–32, 36–38, 47, 52, 56, 67, 78–79, 85, 110–11, 114–15, 213, 216–17, 242, 250,
265n
pure dreams, 241
pure emotions, 112–13
“putting up” problem, 264n–65n
Pynchon, Thomas, 119

qualitative sensation (quale), 111–12

quantum mechanics, 169, 265n

Racine, Jean, 18
randomness, 186–87
Raphael, 51, 191, 194
rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, 60, 197, 200
reading, 239
reality:
alternate, 247
of ancient cultures, 4, 215, 233–36, 239, 248–49
apprehension of, 1, 21, 77, 162–63, 169–70, 229–30
beliefs and, 29, 111, 113
chronicles of, 14–15, 45, 125
cosmic unity of (transcendence), 229–35
counter-, 57
in dreams, 59–60, 65–67, 73–74, 98, 103, 197–99
experience of, 14–15, 21–22, 33, 50–51, 56, 104–5, 123–24, 242, 245, 248–49
global (big picture), 209
good vs. evil in, 141
magical, 214–15, 216, 217–26
meaning of, 170–72, 186–87, 208, 231–32, 236
objective, 6–7, 39–40, 55–56, 65–67, 91–92, 178, 198–99, 208, 212–13, 216, 227, 230, 237,
243, 250
participation in, 43–44
perception of, 65–67, 108, 108, 110, 111, 124–27, 146, 183, 197–98, 228, 236–37, 242
physical, 30, 66, 214–15, 242, 246–47, 249
randomness in (chaos), 186–87
recognition of, 77, 162–63, 169–70
spatial vs. temporal patterns in, 126–27, 135, 139–40
subjective, xxii, xxiii, 5–13, 17–19, 30, 42–45, 47, 52–56, 65–67, 178, 208, 212–13, 216,
227, 237, 243
transformation of, 21, 43–44, 48
reasoning, xvii–xviii, xxiv, 2, 3, 4, 14, 48, 55–56, 63, 70, 91, 108, 110, 114, 116–17, 133–36,
142–48, 175, 209–11
reconstructed memories, 25, 42–43
recursive structure, xiv
Reiser, Morton, 58, 167–68
religion, 22, 27, 100–101, 161, 189–90, 195–96, 205, 206, 219–20, 230, 234, 239–40, 246; see
also spirituality
Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) (Proust), xxiv, 23, 36, 50, 106–7,
199–200
Remorse (Coleridge), 34
Rémusat, Madame de, 49
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 232
repressed memories, 82–84, 87–90
resonance, 8, 165–67, 171
restructuring, 152–53
revulsion, 82–84
Rey, Georges, 141
Richard III (Shakespeare), 102
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 18, 30, 95, 152, 154, 164–65, 189, 198, 199
Rimbaud, Arthur, 18, 76
Robinson, Marilynne, 17
robots, xiii, 80–81, 170–72
romanticism, 27
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 64
“room with a view,” 6–7, 12
Roth, Philip, 14, 18, 34, 36, 70, 116, 119, 124, 142

Sabbath’s Theater (Roth), 34, 116

sadism, 87–88, 90–91, 241
sadness, 29, 72–73, 97–98, 113–14, 238
Salaman, Esther, 34, 85, 86–87, 221–22, 248
Salovey, Peter, 247
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 10
scene memories, 139–40, 245
Scheherazade, 23
schemata, 125–30, 135–41, 156–57, 179–80, 243–44, 263n–64n
science:
cognitive, xxii–xxiv, 6–8, 38, 54, 104, 149, 248–51
of dream research, 68, 73–74, 180, 186, 197–98, 201, 203, 212, 238–39, 249
of emotions, 82–84, 167–68
methodology of, 169, 239–40
Scofield, Paul, 131
screen memories, 125–27
scripts, 37–38, 87, 93–94, 139–40, 244
Searle, John, xxii–xxiii, 7
“Second Anniversary” (Donne), 71
self:
awareness of, xxii–xxiii, 3, 32–38, 39, 47, 48–49, 99, 104–10, 123–24, 149, 170–72, 197–98,
204, 211–12, 224, 228, 241, 245, 246–49
behavior of, see behavior
control of, 64–65, 207, 208, 211–12, 222
forgetting of, 31–32
identity of, 216, 246–47
reflective, 103, 226, 233
subjective, 42–43
unreflective, 212, 226–27, 228, 238–39
semantic memories, 136, 139
sensations, 2, 28–29, 67, 92, 110, 111–14, 117–21, 147, 165–68, 170–72, 226, 236–37, 241,
265n
sensory residues, 168
sequences of (mental pathways), 22, 110, 142–43, 167–68, 264n
sex drive, 112
sexual fantasies, 176–77, 202
sexuality, 27, 87–88, 90–91, 112, 176–77, 202
Shakespeare, William, 6, 12, 16, 18, 19, 31, 53, 64, 87, 90, 91, 97, 100, 102, 111, 119, 120, 129,
144–45, 156, 175, 176, 183, 207, 237, 239
shared emotions, 128–30
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 53, 229, 232
“shooting down” problem, 264n–65n
short-term memories, 97, 125, 130, 178
siestas, 62
Siewert, Charles, 13
Singer, Dorothy G., 222
Singer, Jerome, 68, 130, 174, 222
Sixth Avenue elevated line, 193
skills learning, 224
sleep:
awakening from, 56–57, 59–61, 182–83
of children, 63, 210, 211, 213, 223–28
circadian cycles of, 60–63
disorders of, 248
drowsiness and, 60–63, 249
emotional expression in, 83, 89–90
free association in, 49–50
hallucination and onset of, 42–43, 45, 47, 49–51, 178
interiority of, 106–7
interruption of, 93–94, 197–98, 237
as low-spectrum state, 5, 16, 31–32, 39–40, 55, 59, 91–92, 106–7, 151, 176, 199–200, 203,
205, 222
memory in, 43–44, 106
patterns of, 16, 60–61, 224
as physical process, 199–200
rapid eye movement (REM), 60, 197, 200
research on, 45, 57–58, 59, 60, 151, 197–98, 212, 249
semi-conscious, 91–92, 97–98, 176, 183–86
unconscious nature of, 106–7, 197–98
see also dreams
sleep labs, 73–74, 197–98, 212
Slow Man (Coetzee), 118
social media, 236
software, xi, xii, xiv, xviii–xix, 130, 147, 242
Sondheim, Stephen, 158
songer (to think), 92
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Blake), 234–35
soul, 8
South Africa, 35, 115
Southey, Robert, 167
Soutine, Chaim, 53
Soviet Union, 81
Spanish Armada, 99
Speak, Memory (Nabokov), 26, 43, 76, 183
specificity, 129–30
spectrum:
aboutness dissolves in, 27–31
author’s experience with, xxiii–xxiv, 94–96, 155–63
basic points of, 241–46
brain-active periods in, 60, 197, 200
continuum of, 20–54, 55, 56, 63–68, 71–79, 106–10, 109, 132, 133, 145–46, 149, 150–52,
159–63, 173, 179–80, 224, 242, 244–51
daily cycle of, 55–103
end and start phases of, 224
focus levels in, 13–16, 20, 21, 27–28, 57
hermeneutics of, 239–40, 247
laws and principles of, 21, 38–39, 97, 167, 203, 208, 227, 235–36, 239–49
lower level of (low focus), 2, 3, 4, 13–16, 21–54, 56, 104, 106–10, 132, 173–204, 246–51
middle level of (medium focus), 2, 3, 4, 67–68, 104, 149–72
personality and, 14, 16–19, 62–63
physiology of, 60–65
rules of thumb (heuristics) for, 46–48, 143–46
upper level of (high focus), 2, 3, 4, 13–14, 20, 26, 28, 31, 40, 41–42, 48–49, 55, 56, 104,
101–10, 132, 133, 149, 246–51
spirituality, 206, 214, 219, 222, 228–39, 248–49; see also religion
static images, 224
Stein, Gertrude, 53
Sterne, Laurence, 18
Stoics, 122
Stonehenge, 234
storytelling, 22–27, 48, 56, 61, 75, 100, 105, 174, 214–15, 242
Strauch, Inge, 37
stream of consciousness, 93, 198–99
subconscious, 116
suffering, 89–90
sui generis phenomena, 122
Summertime (Coetzee), 68, 72, 116, 216
Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway), 31, 69
supercomputers, xix–xx
surgery, 15
Svevo, Italo, 40
synagogues, 189–90
synopsis, 157
systematic reasoning, 14

talking cures, 248

Talmud, 161
tanks, 164, 169
target model, 106–7, 244–45
technology:
 development of, 65, 147
progress based on, 80–81, 149
Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 31, 183
templates, 37–38, 87, 93–94, 139–40, 244
“Temporal Reference of Manifest Dream Content” (Verdone), 45
theme circles, 24–25, 47, 84, 89, 98, 131, 173, 178–81, 186–97, 200–203, 245, 247
theoretical AI, xiii
thinking, thought:
abstract, 2, 26, 52–54, 55, 66, 76, 118, 127, 133–48, 198, 205, 207, 210–11, 213, 220, 227,
231–32, 235–36, 243, 249–50
alternation in, 185–86
analogies in, 152–54
arrangement of elements in (temporal patterns) in, 126–27
associative (free association), xv, 5, 13, 15, 38, 49–50, 66, 93–96, 131, 141, 183, 186, 187,
198, 211–12, 233, 244, 247
beliefs in, 29, 111, 113
candidates for, 88–90
in childhood, 174, 211, 215–16, 226, 249
conciseness or efficiency of, 133–36
concrete, 54, 104–5, 208, 210, 213
as conscious activity (cognition), 51–52, 104, 108, 122, 198, 242
control of, 75–78, 75, 151–52, 222, 233
creative, 39, 149–72, 230, 249–50, 264n–65n
crisis or emergency, 143–46
curiosity in, 153–54, 207, 216
decision-making in (judgment), 114, 116–17, 118, 121–22, 222
dreams compared with, 58, 174, 177–80, 198, 201–2, 215
emotions as influence on, 104, 110–11, 115–22, 143–46 154–158, 235–36, 241, 242, 247–48
focus of (concentration), 61–67, 133–46, 174, 207–11, 247–48
fragments of, 131
goals of, 110, 143–46, 174, 244
habits of, 133–34, 139–40
as high-spectrum state, 65–67, 104, 114, 127, 137, 142–43, 174, 179–80, 198, 216–17, 235–
36
hypnagogic, 92–96
ideas in (ideation), 76, 88, 91, 96, 108, 108, 125, 127, 140, 146, 150–54, 162–63, 166–67,
185–86, 191, 208, 210
information in, 41, 208, 209–10
inspired, 30–31, 150–51, 163–65, 264n–65n
intentionality of, 111, 113, 122, 242
interruptions of (distractions), 62, 67–68
introspective, 10–11, 17–19
language as communication of, 19, 66, 114, 210, 211, 217, 236, 243, 250–51
logical, 14, 20, 21–22, 25, 27, 47, 48–49, 56, 116–17, 133–34, 143–48, 149, 150–51, 198,
205, 207, 208, 209–11, 214–16, 217, 222, 223, 226, 242
magical, 214–15, 216, 217–26
memory as influence on, 130–31, 133–38, 142–46, 181–86, 236–37
narrative or plot in, 21, 22–27, 47, 48, 105
 organization of, 2, 22, 25–26, 108, 110, 123–24, 167–68, 186–87, 231–32
as orthogonal state, 108
pattern recognition in, 125–26
perception and, 124–25
political aspect of, 65, 81
pure, 56, 241
rational (reasoning), xvii–xviii, xxiv, 2, 3, 4, 14, 20, 48, 55–56, 63, 70, 91, 108, 110, 114,
116–17, 133–36, 142–48, 175, 209–11
reflective, 28, 32–38, 47, 56, 66, 99, 103
sequences of (mental pathways), 22, 110, 142–43, 167–68, 264n
sideways movement in, 231–32
sleep-onset, 13, 15, 22–23, 36–40, 43–44, 47, 59–60, 73–75, 75, 79, 84, 86, 91–96, 100–105,
151, 176, 183–203, 211, 212, 221, 225, 236–37, 241, 246, 247
theme circles in, 24–25, 47, 84, 89, 98, 131, 173, 178–81, 186–97, 200–203, 245, 247
trains of, 142–43, 264n
unrelated, 167–68
visual, 25–27, 65–66, 176–77, 208, 213–14, 224, 250
“thinking machines,” xvii–xviii
thought experiments, xx–xxi, xxii
time:
awareness of, 220–21
chronology in, 14–15, 45, 125
events in, 37–38, 87, 93–94, 139–40, 244
future, 102, 104, 105, 125, 158, 245–46
measurement of, 139–43, 210
objects in, 135, 198–99, 213, 215–16, 218, 244
past, 39–47, 55–56, 57, 85–87, 104–5, 106, 108, 159, 161, 173, 181–82, 202–3, 204, 218,
220–21, 228, 241, 245
patterns of, 126–27
present, 40, 55, 56, 104–5, 106, 220, 228, 241, 245
sense of, 220–21, 228
space compared with, 40, 135, 220, 244
timeline for, 181–82, 220–21
“Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 51, 118, 229–30
Tolstoy, Leo, 18, 63, 89–90, 97, 118, 120, 145–46, 175, 266n
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 250–51
transcendence, 229–35
transhumanism, 80–81
translation, 149
Trial, The (Kafka), 238
Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 119
truth:
avoidance of, 162–63
objective, 27
revelation of, 201–2
Tulving, Endel, 129
Turing, Alan, xvi, xviii, 147
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 144–45
two-track mind, 115–16

unconscious:
awareness in, 104–10, 123–24, 149, 241
in children, 223–28
definition of, 104
dreams in, 5, 13, 15, 41, 103, 115, 168, 192–93, 197–203, 204, 246
Freudian conception of, 57–58
instinct in, 68, 123–24, 219
memory as basis of, 76–79, 99–100, 104–10, 107, 108, 109, 124–27
as region of mind, 104–5
spectrum transitions in, 66, 106–10, 109
unfocusing, 14
unhappiness, 29, 72–73, 97–98, 113–14, 238

Valéry, Paul, 42
van Gogh, Vincent, 52–53, 54
Verdone, Paul, 45
visionaries, 206, 214, 219, 222, 228–39, 248–49
visions, 3, 5, 31, 36–38, 42–43, 59–60, 66, 73–75, 75, 79, 85, 86, 91–96, 100–105, 173–77,
183–88, 191–92, 200–202, 211, 212, 221–22, 225, 241, 243, 246, 247
visualization:
in dreams, 25, 98–101, 168, 176–77, 178, 179–80, 189–92, 197–98, 201–2
emotions and, 19, 26, 165–68
imagery in, 3, 24–25, 65–66, 98–100
of memories, 25–26, 89, 156, 164–65, 185–86
in thinking, 25–27, 65–66, 176–77, 208, 213–14, 224, 250
Vlaminck, Maurice de, 214
voice, tone of, 26–27, 243
Vollard, Ambrose, 53
von Neumann, John, 48–49, 50, 114, 206

walking, 123
War and Peace (Tolstoy), 118
Watermark (O’Reilly), 59
“Watson” program, xiii
Weibe, D., 151
West Side Story, 158
White, E. B., 193
Wigner, Eugene, 48–49
will (volition), 108, 110
Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 87
wish fulfillment, 57–58, 201–3, 221
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 17, 250–51
Wordsworth, William, 4, 18, 22, 38, 51, 87, 93, 118, 208, 219, 225, 226, 229–30, 251
workday schedule, 61–63
working programs, xiii
World War I, 164, 196

Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, 247

Yale University, 189, 190, 200, 247
Yiddish, 195–96
Youth (Coetzee), 89

Zeno’s Conscience (Svevo), 40

zombies, 170–72
Zone of Interest, The (Amis), 34
 ALSO BY DAVID GELERNTER

America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture

(and Ushered in the Obamacrats)

Judaism: A Way of Being

Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion

Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology

Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber

1939: The Lost World of the Fair

The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought

Mirror Worlds: Or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox . . .
How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Gelernter is a BA (Yale 1976), MA in classical Hebrew (Yale 1977), and PhD in
computer science (SUNY at Stony Brook, 1983). He is now a professor of computer science at
Yale. His work in the 1980s with Nick Carriero on the parallel programming system Linda led to
the development of high-speed database search techniques that subsequently proved important to
several leading Web-search efforts and companies. His 1991 book, Mirror Worlds: Or, The Day
Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox . . . How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean,
“foresaw” the World Wide Web (Reuters) and was called “one of the most influential books in
computer science” (Technology Review, July 2007). It led to the development of the Web
programming language Java. His 1990s work with Eric Freeman on the Lifestreams system
created the first modern social network (see Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2015) and predicted
the rise of blogs, activity streams, Twitter streams, and other time-ordered data feeds. In recent
years he has published pieces about technology and society (mostly in Commentary, the Wall
Street Journal, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), worked on the “Glassbooks”©
alternative to conventional ebooks, and—mainly—pursued research that has led to The Tides of
Mind.
Gelernter has also served for several years on the advisory board of the National Endowment
for the Arts (appointed by President George W. Bush) and has shown his paintings many times;
his first museum show was Shm’a/Listen: The Art of David Gelernter (2012) at the Yeshiva
University Museum in lower Manhattan. His works are in the permanent collections of the
Yeshiva University Museum, the Tikvah Foundation, and several distinguished private collectors.
 Copyright © 2016 by David Gelernter

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