perception. If I reflect on my perceiving, that perception is reenforced by
the implicit comparison “and not dreaming.” But if I say to myself in a
dream “thank heavens it’s only a dream,” Sartre insists, the implicit
contrast “and not perceiving” means that I have momentarily awakened,
if only to be quickly reabsorbed in the “enslaved” realm of the dream
with its inevitabilities, its “belief ” as opposed to knowledge, and its
incompatibility with the evidence of perceptual consciousness. As Sartre
will remark inBeing and Nothingnessapropos of his famous category of
“bad faith”: “One puts oneself in bad faith as one goes to sleep and one is
in bad faith as one dreams” (BN 68 ).
Still, the problem of believing in the reality of the image in a dream
when you are aware of its irreality remains unanswered. Sartre returns to
the hypnagogic image for an illuminating parallel and contrast. Both
kinds of imaging involve physical analoga such as phosphemes, muscular
contractions and inner speech. But the oneiric image cannot be taken for
“real,” Sartre insists, because what characterizes the consciousness
that dreams is that “it has lost the very notion of reality”; it is what he
calls a “closed consciousness” – one on which it is impossible to take an
external point of view:
This is the genuine explanation of oneiric symbolism: if consciousness can never
grasp its own worries, its own desires except in the form of symbols, this is not, as
Freud believed, because of a repression that obliges it to disguise them: it is because
it is incapable of grasping what is real in the form of reality. It has entirely lost the
function of the real and everything that it feels, everything that it thinks, it cannot
feel otherwise than in the imaged form.
(Imaginary 168 )
So “it is not that the nonthetic consciousness of imagining ceases to
grasp itself as spontaneity, but that it grasps itself as spellbound. This is
what gives the dream its nuance of fate.” In other words, “a conscious-
ness that dreams is always nonthetic consciousness of itself as being
fascinated by the dream, but it has lost its being-in-the-world and
recovers it only on awakening.”^36
In sum, “the dream is not a fiction taken for reality, it is the odyssey of
a consciousness dedicated by itself and in spite of itself to building only
(^36) “So, contrary to what one might believe, the imaginary world is given as a world without
freedom, it is the inverse of freedom, it is fatal” (Imaginary 169 ; see also 47 ).
128 Consciousness as imagination