Aristotle on sleep and dreams 179
referred to are to be explained within the overall theory, he does not make
clear.
3 on dreams
In his treatment of dreams, the approach is likewise psycho-physiological,
as emerges clearly from the questions Aristotle asks in the course of his
discussion:
(i) To what part of the soul does dreaming belong (i.e. how is dreaming re-
lated to other mental faculties such as sense-perception and thinking)?
( 458 b 1 )
(ii) How do dreams originate? ( 459 a 23 )
(iii) What is a dream, what is its definition? ( 459 a 23 )
In these questions, we can again detect the typically Aristotelian pattern of
the four causes; only the final cause is lacking, and this has to do with the
fact that Aristotle does not attribute any natural purpose or end to dreams.
This absence of a teleological explanation of dreams is significant, and I
shall come back to it at the end of this chapter.
InOn Dreams,asinOn Sleep and Waking, Aristotle again begins by
stating rather bluntly that dreams cannot be an activity of the sense faculty,
since there is no sense-perception in sleep ( 458 b 5 – 10 ). However, in the
course of the argument he recognises that the fact that sense-perception
cannot be activated (energein) does not mean that it is incapable of being
‘affected’ (paschein):
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.( 459 a 1 – 8 )
But perhaps it is true that we do not see anything [in sleep], but not true that sense
perception is not affected, and perhaps it is possible that sight and the other senses
are somehow affected, and that each of these affections makes some impression
on sense perception as it does in the waking state, but not in the same way as in
the waking state; and sometimes our judgement tells us that this is false, as it does
when we are awake, but sometimes it is withheld from doing this and follows what
it is presented with.