184 Aristotle and his school
sense-movements. Number 13 serves as an illustration of the ‘extrusion’ of
weak movements through stronger ones. Numbers 14 – 17 are concerned
with the physiological conditions that influence or disturb the transport
of sense-movements from the peripheral sense-organs to the central sense-
organ. Numbers 10 – 12 and 18 – 20 illustrate the ‘experiencing’ or ‘noticing’
of the sense-movements by the dreaming subject: the experiences of illusion
in the waking state serve as analogy for the fact that the dreaming subject
often does not notice that what (s)he experiences is only a dream.
(iii) Aristotle’s answer to the third question of the definition of the dream
is best studied through a quotation from the last chapter ofOn Dreams( 462
a 15 – 31 ):
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From all this we have to conclude that the dream is a sort of appearance, and,
more particularly, one which occurs in sleep; for the images just mentioned are
not dreams, nor is any other image which presents itself when the senses are free
[i.e. when we are awake]; nor is every image which occurs in sleep a dream. For, in
the first place, some persons actually, in a certain way, perceive sounds and light
and taste and contact [while asleep], albeit faintly and as it were from far away.
For during sleep people who had their eyes half open have recognised what they
believed they were seeing in their sleep faintly as the light of the lamp, as the real
light of the lamp, and what they believed they were hearing faintly as the voice
of cocks and dogs, they recognised these clearly on awakening. Some even give
answers when being asked questions. The fact is with being awake and being asleep
that it is possible that when one of them is present without qualification, the other
is also present in a certain way. None of these [experiences] should be called dreams,
nor should the true thoughts that occur in sleep as distinct from the appearances,
but the appearance which results from the movement of the sense-effects, when
one is asleep, in so far as one is asleep, this is a dream.