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Continuity of Experience in Dreams

March 2, 2018

Philosophy

dream, experience, life, musings, time

Dreams and Waking Life

Here’s a question for you: Which are the major differences between your dream consciousness and your waking life consciousness? Pondering on this, you would perhaps come up with some of the following answers: a) you can’t (really) control your dreams; b) limitations don’t exist in dreams; c) dreams aren’t real. This latter possible answer I consider controversial, but let’s leave that aside for another day. Let’s instead focus on another major difference between dreams and waking life: the continuity of experience.

continuity of experience
How would it be, if there was continuity of experience in dreams?

You see, when you wake up in the morning, you still remember what you did the day before. You remember your plans for the present day. And if you left a book in the middle before going to bed, you can pick up from it remembering the plot that far.

The same almost never applies for dreams. With extremely rare exceptions, when you dream you don’t just continue doing what you were doing in a previous dream. There is no continuity of experience in dreams, unlike waking life.

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Types of Fiction Characters: How to Use Them in Your Novel

February 26, 2018

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

characters, comparing, experience, fiction, literature, writing

To speak of character categorization might be a self-evident matter for some authors, and yet it might appear nonsensical to others. Surely, a writer of the latter group might say, you can’t just divide every character of every novel into just a few categories? The truth is neither “yes” nor “no” – or, if you’d rather see the glass half-full, it’s both. It’s true, that a skillful author can make the most stereotypical character appear as unique and original. At the same time, many character functions are similar. More counter-intuitively, perhaps, character functions need to be similar for reasons we will see further below. Today I’ll tell you a few things about the various types of fiction characters.

I’ll show you why it’s important to recognize, understand, and use these character categories. This article is based on various established sources (for further reading I’d recommend Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale), on my academic expertise, as well as on my own writing experience.

types of fiction characters
They all serve a role!
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Neo-Hegelianism and F.H. Bradley’s Absolute

February 24, 2018

Criticism

academia, change, criticism, experience, idealism, time

Note: the following article on Neo-Hegelianism and F.H. Bradley’s Absolute is a modified excerpt (pp. 53-56) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the list on the main website.

Introduction

Neo-Hegelianism is the branch of idealism that is historically most pertinent to the Victorian era. As the name implies, this school of thought draws from the works of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Typical representatives of British Neo-Hegelianism were Hutcheson Stirling, in his The Secret of Hegel (1865), the brothers Edward and John Caird, in several works in the late Victorian era – such as An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1880) – and also F. H. Bradley, in works such as Appearance and Reality (1893) and Essays on Truth and Reality (1914).

Bradley’s Absolute: “No Truth which Is entirely True”
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