Dreams inside Dreams

Metaphysical dependencies between things crop up all the time, and are of different kinds. A shadow is metaphysically dependent on the object which casts it, a reflection on what is reflected, a quality on a substance, a whole on its parts. Although it seems to make no sense to say that a shadow can itself cast a shadow, it is not generally the case that entities which are metaphysicaly dependent on other entities cannot themselves serve in the role of ground. We find no difficulty in thinking of a picture of a picture, and a whole is made of parts, each of which may itself be a whole made of parts.

Such nestable grounding relations form chains of dependence, which may or may not be transitive, meaning that if A grounds B and B grounds C, then A grounds C, and may or may not be well­-founded, meaning that the chain begins somewhere.

Is heteronymic simulation, too, nestable? Pessoa assumes the heteronym Caeiro, writing poetry in the style of Caeiro. To my knowledge, Pessoa never, though, considers this scenario: Caeiro himself assumes a hetero­nym, who then speaks and writes as this embedded heteronym. Pessoa treats his heteronyms more like shadows than like pictures, foreclosing the possibility that a heteronym can cast its own heteronymic shadow. In all Pessoa’s writings there is not a single case involving a heteronym of a heteronym.¹ That is not to say that Pessoa is unfamiliar with the idea of nesting per se.

He says, for instance, that ‘this makes me fantasize about whether every­ thing in the sum total of the world might not be an interconnected series of dreams and novels, like little boxes inside larger boxes that are inside yet larger ones.’² Dreams inside dreams, and their implications for the distinc­tion between dream and reality, is also a strong thematic element in his play The Mariner, where the second watcher reports dreaming of a stranded mariner who dreams up a fictitious homeland.³ In this dreamed­-up home­ land, Pessoa emphasizes, the mariner lives as a person among others, with friends, acquaintances, and a remembered past. When Pessoa writes, ‘Then he travelled, with his memory, through the country he’d created’⁴, the pro­noun ‘he’ appears twice, once to refer to the mariner who is the dreaming subject, and again to refer to the subject­-within­-the­-dream. The dream acquires such vivacity that in the end it seems to be his actual life and he is unable to remember his true homeland: ‘Whereas in the life he thought he’d merely dreamed, everything was real and had existed . . . he couldn’t even dream, couldn’t even conceive, of having had any other past.’⁵ The second watcher says that all is explained by another detail in the story: when a boat arrives at the island on which he had been stranded, the mariner is not there. As embedded within the context of a dream, it is the subject­-within­-the­-dream who is real, the dreaming subject less so. Embedding, the lesson seems to be, inverts metaphysical priority.

These are, evidently, Borgesian topics, and the character of dreams inside dreams is the implied theme of Borges’s story The Circular Ruins. Borges introduces the idea that the relation between dreaming subject and simulac­rum is nested when he has the ‘foreigner’ who dreams a youth into being discover, in the dramatic final sentences of the story, that he is himself a simulacrum in another dreamer’s dream. What the foreigner learns in this moment is that the Cartesian dream hypothesis is true: all this is a dream, a dream within which there is a dream in which the youth is dreamt into being.

Nested dreams, together with their implications for the reality of sub­jects, are more explicitly the theme of a remarkable passage in the third­ century BCE Daoist classic, the Zhuangzi. Here is how the passage reads in Brook Ziporyn’s translation:

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about joyfully just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and there he was, the startled Zhuang Zhou in the flesh. He did not know if Zhou had been dreaming he was a butterfly, or if a butterfly was now dreaming it was Zhou. Surely, Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities! Such is what we call the transformation of one thing into another.⁶

A similar double scenario features in Julio Cortázar’s story ‘The night face up’ . A man in a hospital ward falls asleep and dreams he is a Moteca, fleeing from the Aztecs. He awakens, but on falling asleep again has the same dream, and repeatedly so. At long last it occurs to him that he really is a Moteca, dreaming of being a contemporary man in a hospital bed.⁷ The Zhuangzi version has an intriguingly complex structure. There is a framing dream exhibiting self­-alienation, Zhou’s dream being such that, within the dream, the one at the centre of the landscape of presence is a butterfly. There is then an ‘emergence’ from the dream, a ‘waking’ with Zhou now present in the flesh. Immediately, however, two alternative explanations of this ‘emer­gence’ are countenanced. One is the commonplace idea that Zhou, having fallen asleep, now awakens and recalls the dream he just had. The other, more complicated, suggestion, is that the butterfly falls asleep and has its own self­-alienated dream, within which the one at the centre of the land­scape of presence is Zhou. Some interpreters prefer to read the second alter­ native as simply that it was a butterfly all along, dreaming it was Zhou. Yet in this reading there is still nesting, because the butterfly dreams it is Zhou who dreams he is a butterfly. Either way, then, the story is about a nested dream.

With the apparatus of Pessoa’s philosophy of self to hand, we can under­stand this complicated story in a fresh light. The framing dream represents a by­-now familiar case. It is just the same as Valberg’s example of dreaming that he is X. This is not a case of Zhou dreaming that he, Zhou the human being, inhabits the body of a butterfly; rather, in Zhou’s dream, it is the butterfly which is the one at the centre of a butterflyish field of conscious­ness. We might retell this stage of the parable thus: ‘Once Pessoa imagined he was a fly, fluttering about joyfully just as a fly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Pessoa.’ That is almost exactly the same as Pessoa’s actual remark: ‘I really felt like a fly when I imagined I felt like one. And I felt I had a flyish soul, slept flyishly and was flyishly withdrawn.’⁸ The personal pronoun is, therefore, used positionally.

Classical Chinese indeed has two words for ‘I’ , wu and wo. In an earlier pas­sage of the Zhuangzi Ziqi says, ‘Now I (wu) have lost myself (wo).’9 Commentators generally associate wu with ‘an idea of naked subjectivity of experience’ or a ‘thin subject of experience’¹⁰, and wo with the fleshed­-out human being. Yet, exactly as with Pessoa’s statement, ‘I am no longer I’ , what we should say is that the first person is used in two distinct ways: the first use of ‘I’ is a positional use and the second use is a simple indexical use.

Classical Chinese, unlike English, marks the positional use of the first per­son lexically. It is no longer the human being Ziqi who figures as the one at the centre of the field of consciousness: the fugitive self has lost track of the human being with whom it has long, but still only contingently, been one. Likewise here: Zhou has ‘lost himself’ in the sense that, within the dream, he is a butterfly and no longer a human being.

Two distinct scenarios are now envisaged, each of which might constitute what it is to ‘emerge’ from the dream. One is that Zhou awakens and recalls that, in the dream, he was the butterfly. Valberg and Johnston have both provided accounts of what it is to emerge from a dream in this mundane sense.

For Johnston, it is a repopulating of the phenomenal field now with veridical perceptions. He writes, ‘When I awake and recall that I was dream­ing that I was flying, an apparently common frame grounds these “I”­uses. That apparent common frame is an arena that with my awaking has appar­ently come to include a host of veridical perceptions.’¹¹ Valberg, in the grip of the idea that the field is unique and alone, instead represents emergence from a dream as consisting in a widening of the horizon, a larger horizon that now includes the contents of the dream.¹² The alternative scenario is harder to understand. What is now envisaged is that, still in the dream, the butterfly falls asleep and dreams that it is Zhuang Zhou. This second, embedded dream is also self­-alienated, but now it is the butterfly who is the dreaming subject, and it is Zhou who is, in the nested dream, the subject­ within­-the­-dream, the one at the centre of the landscape of dreamt sensations.

Were all this to be put in terms of heteronymic simulation, Pessoan ‘dreaming’ rather than actual dreaming, it would be an illustration of nested heteronyms and of a rather particular sort. It would be as if Pessoa assumes the heteronym Caeiro, who then assumes a heteronym. The heteronym Caeiro assumes, however, is Fernando Pessoa himself! In his actual writings Pessoa does not consider the possibility of heteronymic nesting, and even less does he consider the possibility the Zhuangzi explores, that of circular heteronymic nesting. The nearest he comes is in recounting how he com­posed an ‘early Campos’ poem:

I suggested to Sá­ Carneiro that I write an ‘old’ poem of Álvaro de Campos’s—a poem such as Álvaro de Campos would have written before meeting Caeiro and falling under his influence. That’s how I came to write Opiary, in which I tried to incorporate all the latent tendencies of Álvaro de Campos that would eventually be revealed but that still showed no hint of contact with his master Caeiro. Of all the poems I’ve written, this was the one that gave me the most trouble, because of the twofold depersonal­ization it required.¹³

Heteronymic nesting, were it even to be possible, would involve a similar sort of twofold simulation. It would require Pessoa, as Campos, to assume another heteronym, Caeiro say. The case we are now considering would complicate matters still further, for the heteronym Campos would assume would be Pessoa.

When this hypothetical ‘Pessoa’ writes poetry, it is Pessoa­-as­-Campos­as­ Pessoa who is writing, and the puzzle is to know how this poet stands in relation to Pessoa. ‘Surely,’ the Zhuangzi says, ‘Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities! Such is what we call the transformation of one thing into another.’ A ‘transformation’ of one thing into another, in the context of self­-alienated dreaming, is a switch in the occupancy of the subject position.

Valberg ‘transforms’ himself into X, in this sense, when he dreams he is X. When the butterfly ‘transforms’ itself into Zhou, because it has a dream in which Zhou is the one at the centre, are we to suppose that this embed­ded ‘Zhou’ , a subject within an embedded dream, is the same as the framing dream’s dreaming subject? That is the question about identity and equiva­lence the story is seeking to explore.

I suggest that we answer this question by making use of a concept I have already introduced, that of an orthonym. The correct thing to say is that the embedded ‘Zhou’ is an orthonym of the dreaming Zhou. This embedded Zhou is the double of the dreaming Zhou and is his shadow self. Each, it is affirmed, is as real as the other, but they are not identical. Recall Giorgio Agamben’s description of the orthonymic mechanism: ‘ A new poetic con­sciousness, something like a genuine ēthos of poetry, begins once Fernando Pessoa, having survived his own depersonalization, returns to a self who both is and is no longer the first subject.’ Zhou, surviving a transformation first into a butterfly and then back into himself, returns as a self who ‘both is and is no longer’ the original, dreaming, Zhou.

What the parable teaches us, then, is that simulating subjects are no more real than simulated subjects, and no less so. Or, as Pessoa himself puts the matter, ‘The author of these books cannot affirm that all these different and well­-defined personalities who have incorporeally passed through his soul don’t exist, for he does not know what it means to exist, nor whether Hamlet or Shakespeare is more real, or truly real.’¹⁴ In extending Pessoa’s discussion with the introduction of a double and circular application of dream embed­ding, the brilliance of the parable of the butterfly in the Zhuangzi is that it constructs a device to answer that question: Hamlet (qua heteronym of Shakespeare, not merely a character in one of his plays) and Shakespeare are equivalently real.

1 John Frow is the only author I know of to have observed this fact. He takes it to show that heteronymy is not a nestable relation, writing that ‘one of the ways in which the heteronyms and the orthonym are distinguished from “Fernando Pessoa himself” is that the heteronyms cannot themselves have heteronyms: there is no inf i nite spiral of multiplying and named selves.’ Frow, John. Character and Person. Oxford, 2014, p. 221. Frow does not, however, offer any reason to deny that heteronymy is nestable other than that Pessoa does not consider the possibility. He also, here, conflates nesting with well­-foundedness.

2 The Book of Disquiet,
3 The Mariner. In Selected Prose, pp. 20–34.
4 The Mariner. In Selected Prose, p. 28.
5 The Mariner. In Selected Prose, p. 29.
6 Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, translated by Brook Ziporyn. Hackett, 2009, p. 21.
7 Cortázar, Julio. La noche boca arriba. In The End of the Game, and Other Stories, translated by Paul Blackburn. Pantheon,1963.
8 The Book of Disquiet,
9 Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, p. 12.
10 Hung, Jenny. ‘The theory of the self in the Zhuangzi: A Strawsonian interpretation’ .
Philosophy East and West 69 (2019), pp. 376–94.
11 Johnston, Surviving Death, p. 188.
12 Valberg, Dream, Death, and the Self, p. 121.
13 Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, 13 January 1935, Selected Prose, p. 257.
14 [Aspects], in Selected Prose, p. 2.

Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves Fernando Pessoa and his Philosophy
Jonardon Ganeri