On Dreams (Aristotle)
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~4,840 words · 23 passages
Cite this work
- APAAristotle. (n.d.). On Dreams (Aristotle). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/on-dreams-aristotle
- MLAAristotle. "On Dreams (Aristotle)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/on-dreams-aristotle.
- ChicagoAristotle. On Dreams (Aristotle). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/on-dreams-aristotle.
What it is about
What a dream is, if it is neither perception nor thought. The answer: residual movements of the senses continuing when the object is gone.
Context and history
Notable for its sobriety: in a world that read dreams as messages, Aristotle gives a purely physiological account. The image of ripples still moving after the stone has sunk is his. Part of the Parva naturalia, the eight short works that continue the De anima by applying its theory to particular phenomena of the living body. They are transmitted as a group and read best together.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
We must, in the next place, investigate the subject of the dream, and first inquire to which of the faculties of the soul it presents itself, i.e. whether the affection is one which pertains to the faculty of intelligence or to that of sense-perception; for these are the only faculties within us by which we acquire knowledge. If, then, the exercise of the faculty of sight is actual seeing, that of the auditory faculty, hearing, and, in general that of the faculty of sense-perception, perceiving; and if there are some perceptions common to the senses, such as figure, magnitude, motion, &c., while there are others, as colour, sound, taste, peculiar [each to its own sense]; and further, if all creatures, when the eyes are closed in sleep, are unable to see, and the analogous statement is true of the other senses, so that manifestly we perceive nothing when asleep; we may conclude that it is not by sense-perception we perceive a dream. But neither is it by opinion that we do so. For [in dreams] we not only assert, e.g. that some object approaching is a man or a horse which would be an exercise of opinion, but that the object is white or beautiful, points on which opinion without sense-perception asserts nothing either truly or falsely. It is, however, a fact that the soul makes such assertions in sleep. We seem to see equally well that the approaching figure is a man, and that it is white. [In dreams], too, we think something else, over and above the dream presentation, just as we do in waking moments when we perceive something; for we often also reason about that which we perceive. So, too, in sleep we sometimes have thoughts other than the mere phantasms immediately before our minds. This would be manifest to any one who should attend and try, immediately on arising from sleep, to remember [his dreaming experience]. There are cases of persons who have seen such dreams, those, for example, who believe themselves to be mentally arranging a given list of subjec
What is On Dreams (Aristotle) about?Summarize On Dreams (Aristotle) brieflyWhat are the key ideas in On Dreams (Aristotle)?
← Back to Aristotle