Thank you, Max Palmer, for a great question!
There is a famous nightmare that was had by one of Freud’s patients and that was subsequently interpreted by a French psychoanalyst, Lacan, and more recently by the popular Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. The patient had this nightmare after falling asleep beside the coffin of his little child: his (now dead) son, whose body was on fire, approached the man, crying to him “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?”
The practical explanation of this dream rests in a phenomenon that we have all experienced: a storm disturbs our sleep and suddenly the storm becomes a feature of our dream. This is a simple but ingenuous strategy that our brain employs so that we can hang on to our sleep (and our dreams) for a few more minutes. In the case of Freud’s patient, a candle had tipped over, setting fire to a piece of cloth that rested on the child’s coffin. The fire that was in the ‘real world,’ whose heat and smell the man could probably sense even though asleep, was thus translated (in the original Latin sense of ‘trans-latum’, that is, transported) into the dream.
But wasn’t the dream, now a nightmare, getting at something deeper, something that was already inescapably there before the candle tipped over and set fire to the coffin, something which this event simply brought to light? Wasn’t there a ‘daymare’ that the father was living and that the nightmare simply exposed?
That the patient unconsciously put the words, “Can’t you see I’m burning?”, in his son’s mouth revealed the father’s terrible worry: ‘Am I responsible for my son’s death? Even if I am not, could I have done more?’ Wouldn’t any father be confronted with the same devastating questions if their son had died? The son’s vocative use of the word “Father” points exactly to this: you, my father, have allowed my death.
Isn’t this the everyday daymare of life? The fear of guilt, of the possibility of having done more, or less, or otherwise; which is but another formulation of every human’s constant struggle with what Nietzsche called “the burden of the past.”
Not only, then, can we have daymares, but some daymare or another is always at work to disturb the calm of our mind. One could go as far as to say that nightmares are in fact only possible because we have daymares – not-so-rational, but inevitable fears that haunt us in our waking life and that we chase away by working, talking to our friends, getting drunk, going for a run, but that sometimes come back to haunt us in our sleep, turning dreams into nightmares. Pascal’s analysis of the word ‘divertissement’ (French for ‘fun, entertainment, recreation’) was on point. Divertissement comes from the Latin ‘divergere’, that is, ‘to diverge’; having fun, keeping busy, is exactly how to distract one’s mind from the worries, the questions, the fears, the daymares that would otherwise consume us.
What do you think? Can we really have daymares? Let us know in the comments.
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Image: The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli (1781)
I did a BA in Philosophy and Politics at the University of Exeter, and I am now pursuing an MA in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. I have read a lot of Nietzsche and I have studied Philosophical Anthropology for a while, but I am now focusing on Gender Studies. I am also interested in Ancient Greek philosophy, and I study Ancient Greek. My favourite philosophical idea is Nietzsche’s concept of life-affirmation and his critique of Christianity. I also like provocative texts like Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto.