Dreams have attracted the curiosity of humankind for millennia. Elliot
R. Wolfson's A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the
Prism of Imagination grapples with the allusive and elusive place
dreaming occupies in the panorama of human experience. Drawing on a
variety of contemporary academic disciplines, Wolfson returns to and
rethinks past explications of the dream: that the dream state and waking
reality are on an equal phenomenal footing; that the sensory world is
the dream from which one must awaken by waking to the dream in which one
is merely dreaming that one is awake. By interpreting the dream within
the dream, Wolfson articulates how a productive paradox emerges to
reveal the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of
wakefulness.
Wolfson utilizes psychoanalysis, phenomenology, literary theory, and
neuroscience, to elucidate the oneiric phenomenon in a vast array of
biblical, rabbinic, philosophical, and kabbalistic texts. No one
morphology of the dream phenomenon is either sufficient or
comprehensive. Rather, Wolfson proposes a linguistic archaeology of the
dream, a philosophically inflected excavation of a psychological
phenomenon that celebrates the contingent and ambiguous as signifiers of
truth conceived as proportionate to, but not prescribed by nature. As
such, the dream is classified as the immanentizing transcendence under
the sign of the imaginary.
Through close readings, Wolfson interprets the mythologic of dreams. He
discovers therein how and in what form dreams uniquely display the
concurrence of purportedly contradictory and incongruent images. To heed
the cadence of the dream is, therefore, to appropriate a calculus of the
noncalculable, and to embrace the paradox of fictional truth whose
authenticity can be gauged only from the standpoint of its
artificiality. Through Wolfson's artful, lucid, and erudite readings,
the dream is shown to be an imaginal excessiveness, at once foreseeable
but unprecedented, the semblance of the simulacrum wherein truth does
not oppose deception, wherein the appearance of truthfulness is
impossible to determine independently of the truthfulness of appearance.
A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream will ultimately call forth a new
way to think the effects and transformations of phenomenological
experiences, affective, corporeal and cognitive.
