Discussion Of The Arguments Of Descartes Discourse

Descartes claims in his Discourse on Method that our dreams and conscious thoughts are untrue, but is this truly the case? Because of these questions of existence, it seems like, if Descartes’s arguments are taken a certain way, his arguments might be taken to imply that our lives are just a dream. Are we living in a universal soap opera directed by the Divine, and the question of who shot J.R. will never be resolved because we will all wake on Judgment Day from the dream of existence? If we are questioning existence, how can we know that our lives are just dreams? Descartes says in marginal 32 that “[…] the same thoughts we have while awake can come to us also while we are sleeping, without there being any that are then true […],” which
But, is this idea necessarily true? Dream reading as a whole may be a finicky and unreliable undertaking, but there are plenty of instances in the Bible and the Church where dreams either directly predicted events, such as the events with Joseph in the Old Testament, or where the dreams were enlightening, such as the revelations St. Julian of Norwich, or both, in the case of the Revelations of St. John in the New Testament. Descartes says that he accepts religion, specifically Christianity, without doubt. If so, then the importance and experience of dreams cannot be part of the reason we suppose that both thought and dreams are untrue. Even if dreams are only sometimes true, by ignoring all of them, we are losing a particular way of gaining insight and truth that the Divine gave us access to, even if that insight is only into the important and effects of our waking
But, though my dreams reflected my conscious thoughts and obsessions, they are not the same as those thoughts. My waking thoughts are more organized and deeper, so my dream about Henry V was shorter and more shallow than my nearly 25 page paper about Henry V. And I doubt that Descartes could actually write his Discourse on Method while asleep, much less think these thoughts cohesively while asleep. The higher functions of our Minds are more readily accessible when we are awake, which is why most every teacher prefers conscious students to sleeping ones. So, this idea that our conscious thoughts coming to us at night may be part of why we can trust either does not seem to carry the weight of Descartes’s