Clutches of Somnos and His Son’s:

Morpheus (Dream) and Phobetor (Nightmare)

“King Sleep was father of a thousand sons — indeed a tribe — and of them all, the one he chose was Morpheus, who had such skill in miming any human form at will. No other Dream can match his artistry in counterfeiting men: their voice, their gait, their face — their moods; and, too, he imitates their dress precisely and the words they use most frequently. But he mimes only men…”

I. You’re Fucked

Constantly caught in the web of others desires, their fangs are made of nightmares for us, and while they penetrate our lives; their desires, their wants, their dreams are fulfilled. Just like the fly caught in the web of a spider, we’re fucked in the dreams of the other. Deleuze warns us of being trapped in someone else’s dream, he says:

“The dream of those who are dreaming concerns those who are not dreaming. Why does it concern them? Because as soon as someone else dreams, there is danger. People’s dreams are always all-consuming and threaten to devour us. What other people dream is very dangerous. Dreams are a terrifying will to power. Each of us is more or less a victim of other people’s dreams. Even the most graceful young woman is a horrific ravager, not because of her soul, but because of her dreams. Beware of the dreams of others, because if you are caught in their dream, you are done for.”

Given in a lecture called, ‘What is the Creative Act,’ by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, this quote in isolation means something different than within the overall framework of not only this work but his thoughts on the entirety of the enterprise of philosophy. Engaging with the rest of this essay and his other work, ‘What is Philosophy?,’ a collaboration with the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari, might help to gain a better understanding of what could have been meant.

II. Creation, Concepts, and Philosophy

In the lecture, ‘What is the Creative Act,’ Deleuze attempts to distinguish how one creates. He wants to know what’s different in the creative process when one creates cinema and when he does philosophy. In the lecture, he attributes the quote, or the idea, to the director Vincente Minnelli. But an idea is not a concept, a concept belongs in the domain of philosophy. For Deleuze, to create a concept is to perform philosophy. But what is philosophy to Deleuze? To understand what philosophy is, we need to understand what can be contrasted with philosophy.

Philosophy can be contrasted with the other two modes of creative thinking, science and art. In their book, ‘What is Philosophy?’ Deleuze and Guatarri say:

“What defines thought in its three great forms — -art, science, and philosophy — -is always confronting chaos, laying out a plane, throwing a plane over chaos. But philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it consistency: it lays out a plane of immanence that, through the action of conceptual personae, takes events or consistent concepts to infinity. Science, on the other hand, relinquishes the infinite in order to gain reference: it lays out a plane of simply undefined coordinates that each time, through the action of partial observers, defines states of affairs, functions, or referential propositions. Art wants to create the finite that restores the infinite: it lays out a plane of composition that, in turn, through the action of aesthetic figures, bears monuments or composite sensations. Thinking is thought through concepts, or functions, or sensations and no one of these thoughts is better than another, or more fully, completely, or synthetically ‘thought’.”

For Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy is the creation of concepts, science is the creation of functions and art is the creation of sensations to put it bluntly. Minnelli’s idea is simple, and not a concept.

Confined within the realm of philosophy, concepts are a form of creation that stem from ideas, as do other modes of creation, the seemingly ethereal manifested in the world of extension. Our thoughts and ideas are crucial to our ontology, to our mode of being, “Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master.” We need to let our ideas evolve, we cannot lose them. This simple idea of dreams needs to be juxtaposed with concept. An idea has, “the quality possessed or to be possessed,” the beginning of the creative process. Ideas have the capacity to evolve into one of the three modes of thought — -philosophy, science, or art. In the history of philosophy, many of those who are considered to be the great philosophers have concepts as their legacy. Plato’s ‘world of forms’, Descartes’ ‘cogito’, or Kant’s ‘noumena’, all qualify as concepts. Minnelli’s simple idea can be cultivated into one of these three modes and Deleuze incorporates the Nietchzean concept of the ‘will to power’ to illuminate how one could understand the idea.

The will to power is the psychological concept that proposes that human beings will do what they can to self actualize, even at the expense of others. This concept can be contrasted with Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to life, which suggests that we are all at the will to live and procreate. We will activate our will to power at the expense of others, even if we aren’t necessarily aware of it, and we have all done it at one time or another, what benefits us has the potential to cost another. From the beginning of human culture to now, from the first picked apple to the last job we have taken, it is at the cost of someone else to miss out, an ethical consequence for every action taken or not taken. The concept of the will to power is intimately entwined within Deleuze’s quote about dreams. “Dreams are a terrifying will to power.”

What follows from how Deleuze thinks about ideas, concepts, and philosophy, is in the context of the lecture. This is Deleuze’s interpretation of Minnelli’s idea, not his own developed concepts that surround the psychoanalytic tradition of dream interpretation. Deleuze’s philosophical structure has the chassis of machines, thus there is less about the individual parts and more about how each machine functions within a more colossal machine, grasping beyond phenomenological qualities of the individual. In one sense, Deleuze rejects the common notions of psychoanalysis from Freud, Jung, and Lacan. For Deleuze, dream interpretation is itself dangerous in the sense that dreams never really go away, they always tend to have some kind of slippery nature, falling in and out of the cracks of social consciousness. For example, in the Freudian framework, the Oedipal complex plays an important role, which Deleuze and Guattari reject. This rejection of the Oedipal complex in the Deleuze and Guattari framework doesn’t entail that the concept will go away, these dreams and concepts of the Freudian structure have a hauntological feature that will still permeate social consciousness.

So, if this isn’t Deleuze’s concept but Minnelli’s idea, what is Minnelli’s thoughts on dreams? Joe McElhaney, a professor of film studies writes about Minnelli, “If Minnelli’s work has a strong utopian dimension it is not a simple one and the films repeatedly dramatise the extent to which one person or group’s utopian dream is another’s nightmare.” Even in Thomas More’s Utopia the slaves must be living a nightmare in comparison to the others utopian dreams. But there is another sense in which Minnelli thinks about dreams, “Hence the importance of not simply the dream but also the world of sleep or any states of mind which exist between waking and dreaming (including drunkenness or alcoholism).” He continues, “It is somewhere within these ambiguous waking/dreaming states that Minnelli’s world often springs to life. Furthermore, this relationship to the world of sleep and dreams that Minnelli’s characters have often results in their somewhat detached, trancelike personalities.” There appear to be two ways in which we could look at the combination of Deleuze’s quote and Minnelli’s idea of dreams, that which any great utopia or even small action, for we all aim at some good, can be a monstrous nightmare for another; or there seems to be something ominously dangerous about being caught within the vague state of neither dreaming nor wakefulness of another. (no memories/memories and consequences?)

There is another interpretation available as well, which engages with the concept of the virtual. Virtuality as a concept might have been completed by Henri Bergson, as Deleuze suggests, and functions as part of the foundation of Deleuze’s own philosophy. The virtual can be real but not actual, and the real is in opposition of the possible. In this sense, memories are virtual, predictions of the future are virtual, or in an important way dreams are virtual. All of those things are real, but not actual. Let’s say that an acquaintance tells you that you weren’t invited to a party of a good friend that happened over the previous weekend, and you believe this acquaintance, but there was actually no party. Your behaviors about how you interact with the world have changed with this information, it is real to you but not actual. Now the virtual impacts the world and has become actualized. You may confront your friend or you may choose to not say anything, but you may become resentful and distant towards them because of the virtual’s manifestation into reality.

III. Machine Dreams and Mechanical Nightmares

All three of these potential interpretations have possible safeguards against being trapped within the dream of the other. No matter the interpretation, making the realization that you are trapped is important, as sometimes it might be too late to notice it. We don’t want to be the insect in the venus fly trap, our dreams digested before our eyes, helpless.

If dreams really are a terrifying will to power as Deleuze interprets Minnelli, then to know what another’s will to power is after; how could someone else use us, intentionally or unintentionally to get what they want, even if they are virtuous. Perhaps this is what Kant meant in his criticism of virtue when he says,

“Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will. Intelligence, wit, judgement, and other talents of the mind, however they may be named, or courage, resolution, perseverance, as qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects; but these gifts of nature may also become extremely bad and mischievous if the will which is to make use of them, and which, therefore, constitutes what is called character, is not good. . . For without the principles of a good will, they may become extremely bad; and the coolness of a villain not only makes him far more dangerous, but also directly makes him more abominable in our eyes than he would have been without it.”

Regardless of our own personal values, this means that even the most virtuous person is capable of becoming lost in their own dreams enough for it to impact those around them, even their precious loved ones. A virtuous person with a good will is also capable of listening to reason, enough that you could get yourself out of the snare of their fantasy. As for combating those who are not as virtuous, or not within sight (strangers), the awareness of what are or could be potential ends for others, or what means are available to reach those ends could be the branch to reach for out of the quicksand. A timid nature allows one to be wrapped up in multiple dreams of others, the viciousness of the will to power of many.

The second interpretation, directly from Minnelli, is the danger of the nebulous state that is neither dreaming nor awake. The dreamlike state of drunkenness, can plague those around the drinker. They may not even remember the pain they caused, everyone involved could be in the grasp of Phobetor, the god of nightmares. Especially those who the drunkard may never see again, and it’s possible they may never feel the moral consequences of the nightmare someone else faces due to a lack of memory. Beware of being caught in the nightmares of others, more so than just their dreams. These ambiguous states could also include the distractions of technology. Mobile devices extract the spirit of those who are engaged with them, not quite awake yet not quite dreaming. A new state that Minnelli was not familiar with, yet we have all seen the frustration of interacting with individuals consumed within their extended minds.

The concept of the virtual is entwined with much more than dreams. As I type this I’m engaged with the virtual, my thoughts, using the machine in front of me as a conduit between my consciousness and actual reality, making the possible real. We must be careful when we interact with the virtuality of others, dreams or not; their simulation, as are ours, are real.

IV. Still Fucked

We will always be somewhat ensnared by the dreams of others, but there will also be times when they are imprisoned within ours. How many times has someone been caught in your ethereal web? How many more times will your virtual desires drive it’s pain inducing fangs into anothers, even if you are unaware? Minnelli’s idea through the lens of Deleuze is fascinating to think about. Yet this idea is yet to be thought about philosophically, to evolve into a concept, and even though there may be many concepts embodied within this idea, Minnelli’s work through film (art) is not the only way for this idea to transform, more can be created. In his lecture Deleuze says, “A creator is not someone who works for pleasure. A creator only does what he or she absolutely needs to do.”

“In the first courts and entrances of Hell

Sorrows and vengeful Cares on couches lie :

There sad Old Age abides, Diseases pale,

And Fear, and Hunger, temptress to all crime;

Want, base and vile, and, two dread shapes to see,

Bondage and Death : then Sleep, Death’s next of kin”