The quote in my title plays a pivotal role in David Lynch’s movie Fire Walk with Me and in Season 3 of his show Twin Peaks. I was reminded of it recently when I came across a passage from Arthur Schopenhauer quoted by Joseph Campbell and Henry Robinson in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. In discussing the way that HCE and his accusers often blend with each other in the Wake, they cite Schopenhauer’s description of the world as a kind of dream: “It is a vast dream, dreamed by a single being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Thus everything interlocks and harmonizes with everything else.”

This post reflects on the idea of dreams in the work of David Lynch and Finnegans Wake.

What does it mean to live in a dream?

In Season 3 of Twin Peaks, during Gordon Cole’s dream, Monica Belluci says, “We are like the dreamer who dreams, and then lives inside the dream.” This is a reference to the Hindu sacred text The Upanishads, which contains the famous lines, “We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.”

The first possible meaning is a supernatural, mystical one: Hindus believe that the reality we experience is an illusion (maya). We are apparently trapped (they believe) in a cycle of life, death, and rebirth, and only enlightenment can allow us to escape. The true reality is the atman, the soul, which is one with the divine and with the various godforms. The soul/divine has created this illusion of our lives, and we then live in it, forgetting that it is an illusion that we ourselves have made. Something like that.

This idea is also present in Buddhism: in some sects, the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, and the idea that it is illusory, is considered literal; in others, it is a figurative representation of the dissatisfying nature of desire. I personally favor a figurative interpretation: chasing a desire, and then either failing to fulfill it or fulfilling it temporarily, only leads to more desire. We never arrive at satisfaction so long as we are trapped in the cycle. The difference for Buddhists is that they do not believe in the atman/soul/self. The Buddha instead taught “anatta,” no self. The distinction between atman and anatta is to some extent one of semantics (I suspect that many mystics have experiences that some would describe as “losing the self” and others would describe as “discovering the True Self”). But there are important philosophical differences between the two approaches, and I think the idea of “no self” is the one that can actually be supported by evidence (from fields of study like neuroscience). I will return later in this post to a figurative take on the idea of “escaping the cycles of life, death, and rebirth.”

Another way to interpret the idea that “we live inside a dream” is to consider that, from the perspective of our first-person experience and our brains, there is no difference between a “dream” and “reality.” When I have a dream during the night, the parts of my brain that produce the images and sounds I see and hear are the same parts of my brain that produce the images and sounds I’m seeing and hearing right this moment while writing this blog post during my waking life. DItto for the other senses, of course.

The difference is that — I assume — my brain is constrained during my waking life by inputs from an external reality, and my brain is not so constrained during dreams. In the strictest sense, the previous sentence must remain a supposition because there is no way to gather evidence to demonstrate that a world exists apart from my senses. Any evidence I obtain would have to be taken in first by my senses.

Of course, I’ve discussed elsewhere how pointless I find this supposed conundrum. It’s worth quoting myself at length from this post:

Incidentally, I’ve never been much impressed by this philosophical “problem.” Questions about whether the world is “really real” — which crop up throughout the history of thought, from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to the movie The Matrix — have always struck me as kind of silly. My senses reveal a world that is apparently external to me, that is distinct from my thoughts about it, and that works on regular, consistent rules of which I appear not to be in control. Whatever the ultimate ontology of this world, it is clearly different from my thoughts and feelings, so I am fine with conventionally calling it “the external world” or “reality,” without making any claims about what it “really is,” if that’s even a sensible question. However, the mere fact that I speak of an “external world” does not mean that I deny the role of our mind in shaping our experience through the power of storytelling, as I’ve explored in a number of posts. [see, for instance, here and here]

So I don’t think it’s fruitful to spend much time wondering if the world is “really real” or supposing that my dreams are “just as real” as this computer I’m typing on.

But the advantage of seeing waking life as akin to a dream is that it reminds us that our direct experience is a flow of consciousness, a bunch of images and sensations generated by our brains, and that many of the ideas we have about that flow are not true.

And that brings us to my favorite way to interpret the idea that we live inside a dream: throughout our daily flow of consciousness, we construct elaborate fantasies for ourselves that are more akin to dreams than they are to factual reality. How many of us, for instance, have been angered by another person during a brief encounter and then spent several minutes (or much longer) replaying the encounter in our head, coming up with things we ought to have said, planning things we intend to say to the person next time, thinking about what the other person might think of us, etc., all the while continuing to make ourselves angry (or even getting angrier) long after the encounter has ended. Some people spend hours or even days in a state of anger, sustained by thoughts and fantasies about a situation that is long gone.

Multiply that trivial example by a thousand, all day long: we spend our days talking to ourselves and constructing all kinds of fantasies about our lives that relate perhaps only tangentially to the flow of our experience in the moment. We view everything we experience through a veil of discursivity, an endless mental chatter in which our thoughts are difficult to disentangle from our experience. One of the things meditation teaches us is to focus on the present moment, apart from the thoughts, feelings, and narratives that the mind insists on imposing on it. And one thing that meditation reveals, even with a little practice, is that our attention tends to be swallowed up by stories that have reality primarily, or only, between our ears. In short, we live inside a dream.

One of the most persistent fantasies is the idea of a “self.” People often misunderstand this point: they think that denying the existence of a “self” means denying that people exist. But people obviously exist. The word “self,” in this context, refers to a specific psychological phenomenon inside people’s minds: it is, basically, the idea that there is some “you” that is separate from the flow of consciousness.

I’ve covered this ground on the blog before, especially the post about The Prankquean and Identity. To sum it up briefly, the “self” exists only as a story, or rather as a set of stories that could be told a variety of ways. In everyday life, most people don’t think of themselves that way. They are convinced that there is a self: that “I” am in “here” in my head, and the world is “out there,” separate from me; and that the “I” is, in some sense, an unchanging observer who has some essential properties that are what I “really am”: under this view, I’m a certain gender or race or family or kind of person, and so on. “That’s what I am,” we might say. “I’m not some flimsy stories built on the back of ever-changing experience; I am an essence.”

This belief in the self, and in the truth of all of the stories about it, is the primary dream that we all live in, and it’s the source of suffering in the Buddhist sense. It is, more or less, what keeps us removed from our own lives. It erects a barrier between ourselves and our experience, which is the only life that we have.

I don’t know if all of the above is exactly what David Lynch intends to convey with his films. He’s certainly interested in meditation, but some beliefs endorsed by his preferred brand — called “Transcendental Meditation” — sound somewhat questionable or supernatural to me.

But regardless of Lynch’s personal beliefs or intentions, his films can easily be read as exploring the ways that our minds trap us in certain harmful stories and suggesting that we can pursue liberation from them. One need not believe in anything supernatural to find value in the idea of escaping our insufficient ideas about the self and the world.

Lynch’s movie Mulhollad Drive, for instance, is easily seen as a fantasy spun by Naomi Watts’ character to avoid facing her own feelings of loss, jealousy, and murderous rage (and perhaps, under one interpretation of the film, to avoid coming to terms with abuse she suffered early in life). In a similar way, Twin Peaks too can be viewed as the elaborate fantasy of a victimized young woman, and other characters in the Twin Peaks universe also dwell in fantasies that keep them from understanding themselves and Laura Palmer’s tragic situation. Season 3 of Twin Peaks strikes me as, among other things, a consideration of nostalgia’s potential to go awry. Made during a wave of “revivals” of other television shows, Twin Peaks Season 3 almost reads like an “anti-revival” show, deliberately frustrating viewers’ expectations, doing things like delaying the appearance of fan-favorite character Dale Cooper and experimenting with new kinds of stories, and sometimes off-putting non-sequiturs, instead of just giving the audience more of the Twin Peaks it remembers. At the climax of the season, Dale Cooper literally travels back in time to the original Twin Peaks series, both revisiting the way things were and desperately trying to change the bad things of the past. The scream that ends of the season is a haunting reminder that nostalgia is often little more than a fantasy, and that attempts to ruminate on the past, bring the past into the present, and “fix” the past are often misguided at best. They are another dream in which we might dwell, visions to distract us from the reality of the here and now.

Finnegans Wake, as I have discussed, deals in part with how we create stories for our lives, as illustrated by way that HCE continually dons new clothing and lives new incarnations. A study of Finnegans Wake can help us to break the hold that our own stories have on us. I have proposed that Joyce’s novel is “one tool among many that may help us cultivate that ability to look at reality differently.” In reviewing my earlier posts, I found one that speaks to the idea of the cycle of life/desire being unfulfilling. I suggest that “desire,” in the Buddhist context, primarily refers to grasping things (wanting permanence, seeking permanent fulfillment, continually avoiding displeasure, or wishing certain aspects of reality didn’t exist). I’ll quote from the end of the post:

the same cycle that is unsatisfying when seen from one perspective can be infinitely satisfying if we accept that everything in it is impermanent; if we accept that there are no eternal things, or stable “things” at all; if we stop insisting that things in it “have to” be a certain way for us to be happy ; if we stop insisting that certain things “shouldn’t be” (since every part of reality depends on the rest of it); if we start embracing the nature of things as change, without grasping onto part of it and trying to insist that it never change or go.

Another way to put this is that this same world of cycling and recycling generations that is “suffering” from one perspective becomes joyful if we can figure out how to regard it differetly (to “read” it from another perspective). Finnegans Wake — which trains us to read in ways we have never read a text before — can also train us to “read” life and history in new ways, drawing connections that can induce a direct perception of the interdwelling of all “things,” the ultimate emptiness of all “things,” which are impermanent and in flux. The only stable thing is the flux, the riverrun. You cannot step into the same river twice.

Many people seem to think that the Buddhist idea of “giving up desire” means renouncing all worldly things and living alone on a mountaintop. But a better interpretation of this idea, in my estimation, is relinquishing the notion that any one thing will make us happy or that any one thing should be (or is) permanent. Joy does not consist in the attainment of any particular “thing” — all of which are just mental categories anyway; it consists in an embrace of the flux of riverrun.

This idea of “relinquishing the notion that any one thing will make us happy” is part of escaping what I’ve been calling “fantasy” or “dream” in this present post. We live inside a dream, in our fantasies that seek to protect us from loss. Enlightenment is the waking up from that dream and embracing reality in all of its impermanence.

In Hinduism, enlightenment is described with the word Moksha, which means something like “blown out” or “extinguished,” emptied of the normal ways of thinking about the self, and released from the cycle of maya. Joyce refers to Moksha in I.4, after HCE first splits into Shem and Shaun. This moment in comes at the end of a complete cycle described in the “Humphriad,” after HCE has been buried, resurrected as Festy King, split into two sons, and returned again through Shem: in the guise of King, Shem relives HCE’s story by being acquitted in court but condemned by public opinion. He is forced to hide in his home/coffin, like his father before him. At this point in the novel, we have observed an entire turn of the wheel of generations, which is the wheel of maya, the wheel of life, death, and rebirth, the wheel of desire. It is an appropriate time to have a symbolic summary of the action. The narrator comments,

And so it all ended. Artha kama dharma moksa. Ask Kavya for the kay.

Fweet.org traces the list of Sanskrit words to a French book on Hindu poetry, which reads,

Poetry is a means of facilitating the study of the four kinds of motives [of human conduct: artha, material goods; kâma, pleasure-pain, attraction-aversion; dharma, good-evil, knowledge of the law; finally moksa, desire for deliverance, effort to free oneself from the preceding motives]

The presence of four motives brings us back to the Four Old Men and the importance of the number 4 in the Wake. These motives seem to ascend the hierarchy of needs, from basic material necessities, to the pursuit of pleasure, to higher considerations like ethics and spirituality. Perhaps each motive can be attributed to a different Old Man or a different Book of Finnegans Wake. I imagine they can also be mapped to the four Viconian ages (gods, heroes, aristocrats, common man). This may all be fodder for my future posts.

What is important here is that the four terms seem to sketch out a way of ascending out of our delusive fantasies. Artha, or material goods, represents the physical substance out of which our lives arise. Kama is the “desire” in the Buddhist tradition (grasping what is pleasurable, avoiding what is unpleasant: seeking a permanent pleasure or end of displeasure). Dharma signifies the moral codes that our minds impose upon reality in an attempt to grasp what is pleasurable and avoid what is unpleasant. Under this way of understanding the terms, kama and dharma are the essence of the dream in which we live, the fantasies that distract us from life, that separate us from our experience. We judge things good and bad. We seek to cling to certain things. We condemn and avoid other things. We live inside a dream.

Moksa is actually not the opposite of artha: it is an embrace of artha, our physical, earthy life as it actually is. It is the extinguishing of the idea of the self, the false stories about the self and the notion that there is a self separate from direct experience. It is an utter embrace of the flux of riverrun, the endless Becoming of physical reality, out of which emerge our minds and their need for stories, which create suffering only when we allow ourselves to be lost in the dream. To be liberated from those fantasies is to join with the riverrun, to accept this glorious, impermanent reality fully.

“Kavya” is Sanskrit for poetry. It is poetry — and, more broadly, all literature — that gives us the keys to the kingdom. Another post will one day explore the symbolism of keys in Finnegans Wake, but a glance at the last page of the book will confirm the importance of this symbol. Here, there is also a reference to Kate (the elderly form of ALP) giving the key to the Museyroom in Chapter I.1: “For her passkey supply to the janitrix, the mistress Kathe. Tip.” More will be said in later posts on this figure, who is a muse and/or who provides a key to the room of the muses (which is also the museum of history, and which is also a mushroom or penis). The nature of this “tip” will also be explored, both in its sexual and monetary senses.

It’s worth noting that if Kavya gives up her K (kay), then the word becomes Avya, which one online dictionary says is the Sanskrit word for “coming from a sheep.” Perhaps this is a reference to the way that literature can bring us to a kind of innocence, traditionally symbolized by a sheep — maybe even how literature can bring us to Blake’s idea of Organized Innocence, which I discuss here and describe in this way:

[Blake’s] contraries can be coordinated within the same mind, brought into a state of dynamic interplay — a new state of Organized Innocence, which looks a lot like Innocence but without the naivety, where the insights perceived through Experience have been incorporated without the cynicism or resentment.

The way this happens is through an internal process, which Blake illustrates in his long poems and which Joyce explores throughout the Wake. Their works – especially their bizarre artistic styles that challenge conventional expectations – stimulate this kind of internal process.

The poetry of Finnegans Wake is a means of leading us through the steps toward Moksha, which is back toward an embrace of embodied existence, without the restrictions of the limiting fantasies, the dreams, that inhibit and restrict our conscious experience.