The dreamer is someone who lives as if there were no world – nothing to
be irrealized. “A consciousness that dreams is always nonthetic con-
sciousness of itself as being fascinated by the dream, but it has lost its
being-in-the-world and recovers it only on awakening” (Imaginary 170 ).
His captivity is complete (Imaginary 49 ).
The mental image
As Sartre repeats later on: “The essential characteristic of the mental image: it
is a certain way that an object has of being absent within its very presence”
(Imaginary 72 – 73 ). Does the matter–form duality continue in the case of the
mental image? Sartre doggedly insists that it does, but with this qualification:
as mental, its “material” component is purely psychic. When one ceases to
function in this mode, there is no material residue available to perception as
was the case for the photograph. His argument seems to turn on the
“essential necessity” for an analogon here as with the other images. If
consciousness merely faced its “external” object directly, we would be dealing
with perception. Were it to aim emptily toward a thing, it would be sign
consciousness. He posits the analogon as what he describes as a “transcend-
ent” representative of the object.^23 His point is to distinguish imaging from
perceiving and image from sign without falling back into the illusion of
immanence. That is why he assures us that the “transcendence” of the
analogon does not mean its “externality.” But this leaves us without any
“object” for reflective examination, since the psychic datum disappears as
soon as we cease from the imaging. The upshot is that we cannot hope to
grasp this content by introspection. “If we wish to determine more clearly the
nature and the components of this datum, we are reduced to conjectures.”^24
This means we must leave the domain ofphenomenological description and
turn to experimental psychology. We must enter the realm of the probable.
“Part II: The Probable”“The Analagon in the Mental Image”
“In imaging consciousness,” Sartre insists, “one can distinguish know-
ledge and intention only by abstraction...Knowledge is the active
(^23) He seems to mean what Husserl called “transcendence within immanence” of a “reduced”
24 world, though Sartre does not use this expression.
Imaginary 53.
116 Consciousness as imagination