The Epistemic Limits of Impactful Dreams: Metacognition, Metaphoricity, and Sublime Feeling

Dreams that continue to influence the dreamer after waking fall into three types: nightmares, existential dreams, and transcendent dreams. Existential and transcendent dreams involve metacognitive appraisal of the tension between metaphoric and literal assertions, producing a felt sense of inexpressible realizations. The poetic effect arises from juxtaposing semantically dense but abstractly distant metaphoric topic and vehicle, leading to emergence of abstract attributes shared by both. Successive metaphoric/literal transformations yield higher-level metacognition consistent with a neo-Kantian account of sublime feeling—sublime disquietude in existential dreams, sublime enthrallment in transcendent dreams. Aftereffects are thematically iterative living metaphors with abstract but not totalizing ontological import.

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Abstract

Taxonomic studies of dreams that continue to influence the dreamer's thoughts and feelings after awakening have distinguished three types of impactful dreams: nightmares, existential dreams, and transcendent dreams. Of these, existential dreams and transcendent dreams are characterized by recurrent metacognitive appraisal of the epistemic tension between complementary (a) metaphoric (A "is" B) assertions and (b) literal (A "is not" B) assertions. Metacognitive appraisal of such complementary metaphoric and literal assertions is detectable as the felt sense of inexpressible realizations. The poesy of such inexpressible realizations depends upon the juxtaposition of a metaphoric topic and vehicle that are both "semantically dense" but at an abstract level "distant" from each other. The result is "emergence" of attributes of the metaphoric vehicle that are sufficiently abstract to be attributes also of the metaphoric topic. The cumulative effect of successive metaphoric/literal categorical transformations produces a higher-level form of metacognition that is consistent with a neo-Kantian account of sublime feeling. Sublime feeling occurs as either sublime disquietude (existential dreams) or as sublime enthrallment (transcendent dreams). The aftereffects of these two dream types are thematically iterative "living metaphors" that have abstract (but not "totalizing") ontological import.