The Dream of Agamemnon

Julian Jaynes, lecture presented on November 1, 1985.
In Marcel Kuijsten (ed.), The Julian Jaynes Collection (Julian Jaynes Society, 2012).

Excerpt: Any theory of mind, any theory of consciousness, has to also be a theory of dreams. And the theory I am representing very simply says that dreams are consciousness operating primarily during REM sleep. Now what does that mean? That means that all of these things in consciousness are what are so involved in dreams. In a dream you have mind-space, in a dream you have an analog ‘I’ that is going around doing different kinds of things, you have narratization, and what comes into prominent importance in dreams is consilience – or we can call it conciliation. My first word for it was compatibization but that takes a little bit long to say. This is the very obvious thing that comes in to create a lot of the bizarreness of dreams – where things are pushed and made to fit together when they do not really – and if we had the test of our external world we would not do it because our conciliations are much more automatic in our waking life. The other features of consciousness also fit into this. …