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The Epistemic Limits of Impactful Dreams: Metacognition, Metaphoricity, and Sublime Feeling
Version 1
: Received: 13 April 2024 / Approved: 13 April 2024 / Online: 15 April 2024 (04:53:22 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Kuiken, D. The Epistemic Limits of Impactful Dreams: Metacognition, Metaphoricity, and Sublime Feeling. Brain Sci. 2024, 14, 528. Kuiken, D. The Epistemic Limits of Impactful Dreams: Metacognition, Metaphoricity, and Sublime Feeling. Brain Sci. 2024, 14, 528.
Abstract
Taxonomic studies of dreams that continue to influence the dreamer’s thoughts and feelings after awakening have distinguished three types of impactful dreams: nightmares, existential dreams, and transcendent dreams. Of these, existential dreams and transcendent dreams are characterized by recurrent metacognitive appraisal of the epistemic tension between complementary (a) metaphoric (A “is” B) assertions and (b) literal (A “is not” B) assertions. Metacognitive appraisal of such complementary metaphoric and literal assertions is detectible as the felt sense of inexpressible realizations. The poesy of such inexpressible realizations depends upon the juxtaposition of a metaphoric topic and vehicle that are both “semantically dense” but at an abstract level “distant” from each other. The result is the “emergence” of attributes of the metaphoric vehicle that are sufficiently abstract to be attributes also of the metaphoric topic. The cumulative effect of successive metaphoric/literal categorical transformations produces a higher-level form of metacognition that is consistent with a neo-Kantian account of sublime feeling. Sublime feeling occurs as either sublime disquietude (existential dreams) or as sublime enthrallment (transcendent dreams). The aftereffects of these two dream types are thematically iterative “living metaphors” that have existential (but not totalizing) abstract ontological import.
Keywords
metacognition; metaphor; sublime feeling; impactful dreams
Subject
Social Sciences, Psychology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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