Dreaming can often offer us a wonderful escape from our daily life. Indeed it is well known that we can be so enamored with our dream-state that our mind can integrate external distractions in order to prolong it. Taking sounds and feelings that would otherwise wake us and finding a way of embedding them into the dream itself. In this way, we are able to fight off the inevitable moment when we have to enter reality and face the myriad of issues that present themselves to us.

However, this morning I was reminded of another experience. One that is more interesting and unnerving. This morning I had a dream that so disturbed me I woke myself up. This dream did not help me escape my mundane reality, but rather was of such an intensity that I needed to escape the dream itself by entering back into reality.

Why? Simply because the dream itself was more real than my daily reality, the dream brought me face to face with the Real of my life, and I did not want to cope with it, I could not bare to stand in its presence. Hence I had to escape the Real of the dream into the fiction of my everyday life.

Lacan provides an insightful example of this escape into reality when he describes a dream recorded by Freud. The dream takes place when a man falls asleep while keeping guard over his sons coffin in an adjacent room. In the dream this man is confronted by his son, who proclaims, in an anguished voice, ‘Father, can’t you see that I am burning?’ At this point the man wakes up and notices the smell of smoke. He discovers that a candle has fallen over in the room next door and set the coffin alight.

The dream itself was no doubt set in a type of hell because the smell of smoke was integrated into the dream. The question we must ask is why he awoke. The standard explanation, of course, is that the smell of the smoke could not be fully integrated into the dream-State and so woke the man up to the reality of what was taking place. However Lacan posits another possibility, namely that the dream itself was so horrific that the Father sought to escape it. Commenting on this Zizek writes,

So it was not the intrusion of the signal from external reality that awakened the unfortunate father, but the unbearably traumatic character of what he encountered in the dream – insofar as ‘dreaming’ means fantasizing in order to avoid confronting the Real, the father literally awakened so that he could go on dreaming. The scenario was the following one: when his sleep was disturbed by the smoke, the father quickly constructed a dream which incorporated the disturbing element (smoke-fire) in order to prolong his sleep; however, what he confronted in the dream was a trauma (of his responsibility for the son’s death) much stronger than reality, so he awakened into reality in order to avoid the Real.

Hence ‘reality’, however dissatisfied with it we are, can act as a screen which protects us from a direct encounter with the horrific Real. In short, reality is structured as a fantasy.

Sadly, there are some who find it difficult to sleep because, in their dreams, they encounter this Real all too often. Here obsessive late night partying, drinking, drug taking and socialising are not to be thought of as attempts to make mundane reality more interesting and exciting (a common misunderstanding). Rather they can often be futile attempts to ward off the real that awaits them in their dreams (an idea that may well explain the unnerving power of Freddy Kruger).

Does this line of thought not help us understand the depth and insight of Freud’s claim,

What we repress by day will haunt us by night

I wish to offer two philosophical reflections on the subject of believing through the other. The first relates to the common situation in which someone who no longer has religious beliefs, or who is riven with doubts, lies to their parents: pretending that they still believe and attend church regularly. Knowing that revealing their true thoughts to their parents would be traumatic for them.

The common sense understanding of this situation is that such deception is designed to protect the parents from the distress of thinking that their child no longer believes and thus may be in danger of either forsaking their own salvation or putting their own children at risk.

However, there is a much more interesting and insightful interpretation of this behaviour, one that can help us gain insight into one of the ways that we can hold belief. We can call this, following Lacan, the act of believing through the other. Believing through the other refers to the way in which our own beliefs can be externalised into another who then believes on our behalf.

Take the example of emotionally charged music. Sometimes we may listen to such music as a way of unlocking and touching the depth of our own pain and suffering. Yet, more often, we listen to such music in a more composed manner, allowing the music to suffer on our behalf. Kierkegaard understood this when he wrote,

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.

Here the poet is the one who suffers for us, on our behalf. They suffer so that we don’t have to. So that we can feel the cathartic relief of crying out without the pain that provokes it. Hence, we go to concerts and listen to emotional music for recreation, paying the artists to suffer in front of us, to scream with such talent that their pain will be sublimated into beautiful music that will weep on our behalf. And at the end we feel better, just like we would feel if we had ourselves been weeping.

In a similar way it can be said that a parents uncompromising and seemingly strong religious belief is often very tenuous and maintained only in so far as it is perceived to be held by ones children. Hence the discovery that ones child doesn’t actually believe is deeply traumatic, not because one is confronted by the child’s doubts and uncertainties but rather because, in the confession, one is now confronted with ones own doubts and uncertainties. In the confession we are no longer able to believe through the other and must confront instead our own fears and doubts.

The child is thus not protecting his or her parents from facing up to the child’s own lack of belief but rather protecting his or her parents from facing up to their own.

While this is an interesting phenomenon perhaps the most interesting aspect of this believing through the other takes place when we realise that often the ‘enlightened’ child actually believes through the ‘naïve’ belief of their parents. This will be the subject of the next post.

I remember a wise old story from my youth in which a minister tells all his friends and family that he engages in charity work on a Sunday afternoon. In reality he sneaks off and plays a round of golf. When the angel’s get round to telling God what the minister is doing God decides to teach the minister a lesson.

Sure enough, as always, the next Sunday he kisses his wife and children goodbye, tells them he is on his way to the homeless shelter and leaves for the golf course. But this Sunday God decends from heaven and quietly assists in the game. As a result the minister plays the perfect round of golf, every swing is flawless and at each green the ball finds the hole in one shot. At the eighteenth hole God silently withdraws with a smile, leaving the minister in tears.

In this story the punishment that God gave to the minister was the punishment of not being able to tell anyone what had taken place (for if he did they would all know he had been lying to them all this time). Here the minister is punished because he could not use the perfect golf game to evoke the desire and respect of others. This story beautifully illustrates Lacan’s insight that what people really desire is the others desire.

But whose desire do we desire? Instead of losing ourselves in our fantasies it is useful to ask who we create these fantasies for. If we were a famous model or actor or sports person or writer etc. who would we want to achieve this in front of? Who would our audience consist of? By answering this question we can come to understand who has power in our lives (whether positive or negative) and who we employ in order to provide our lives with meaning. This other will tell us something important about ourselves.

When you are alone, looking in the mirror before going out for an evening, who is really looking at you?