Dream World

Signe Boe, Sabine Kongsted, Arthur Køpcke & Thomas Bo Østergaard

Dream World

May 24 – May 26, 2019

As if I were not a man who sleeps at night, and regularly has all the same experiences while asleep as madmen do when awake indeed sometimes even more improbable ones. How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire when in fact I am lying undressed in bed! Yet at the moment my eyes are certainly wide awake when I look at this piece of paper; I shake my head and it is not asleep; as I stretch out and feel my hand I do so deliberately, and I know what I am doing.

All this would not happen with such distinctness to someone asleep. Indeed! As if I did not remember other occasions when I have been tricked by exactly similar thoughts while asleep! As I think about this more carefully, I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep. The result is that I begin to feel dazed, and this very feeling only reinforces the notion that I may be asleep.”

– Descartes’ dream argument