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

TL;DR

This paper explores how certain impactful dreams create a sense of the sublime through complex metaphoric and literal thinking.

Contribution

It introduces a neo-Kantian framework linking metacognition in dreams to sublime feelings and living metaphors.

Findings

Existential and transcendent dreams involve metacognitive tension between metaphoric and literal assertions.

Sublime feelings emerge from abstract categorical transformations in these dreams.

The aftereffects manifest as iterative living metaphors with abstract ontological significance.

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.