Descartes Dream Argument Analysis

In his first meditation, Descartes proposes that there is no way for a person to tell whether or not they are always dreaming. “I see so plainly that there are no definitive signs by which to distinguish being awake from being asleep” (Descartes 10). According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Descartes holds dreams in the received view of dreaming, better understood as sleep in folk psychology. The received view, in addition to maintaining that dreams are experiences that occur during sleep, holds that dreams do not consist of inaccurate memories,dreams are experiences that occur during sleep in realtime, and in sleep we can actually judge and reason.Therefore, by refuting these claims that folk psychology holds, Descartes’ dream argument is undermined. I will argue it is impossible to verify dreams, that there exists such a thing as dreams that are produced at the moment of waking, and that it is impossible to communicate logically during sleep.
According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “[t]he received view is committed to the claim that we do not wake up with misleading memories.” To expand, let’s say that my friend and I have a sleepover. I tell my friend to tell me the next morning the dream he had the night before. He tells me of a dream in which he had a vague memory of being chased down by a bear in a forest. According the the received view, I should not for a second doubt this friend's presentation of what happened in his dream. He could certainly be leaving out certain details, but there is no way that that he is mistaken with the concept of a bear and woods. Where the received view, and therefore Descartes are undermined though, lies in the fact that there is no way of verifying dream