The Dreams of Objects

Footprints of the Buddha

A few months ago I wondered fancifully as I sat watching Inception whether objects dream. Now I'm happy, though slightly weirded out, to report that yes, they do.

This is a larger argument to be made in Realist Magic and it has nothing ostensibly to do with panpsychism. But when an object samples another one, it retains an impression of the sampled object. Think of a footprint. It's sand's dream of a foot.

Put this together with the idea that objects have “insides” that are larger than their outsides and you have dreams “within” objects. (Surely I don't mean “spatially” within.)

I was thinking about this today, because I'm teaching Frankenstein. Now Frankenstein is set of Russian doll style first-person narratives. They are nested one inside the other. This is significant in itself since I've recently remarked that object mereology is Russian doll-like.

The strangeness of this nesting is that each time-frame has a different temporality. Not increasing necessarily as you go “down” into stories within stories—as is the case in Inception—but widely discrepant. It's exacerbated by the truism that narratives narrate sequences of events at widely varying durations and frequencies (so that there is the time of narration and the time of events):

• The outermost frame (Mrs. Savile's reading of the whole thing as letters from Walton) takes an indeterminate time.
• Walton's framing narrative takes days.
• Frankenstein's narrative takes fewer days than Walton's. Yet his narrated experiences happen in years.
• The creature's narrative takes hours. Yet his experiences take weeks, even months.
• The story of Safie (witnessed by the creature as he hides outside the De Lacey cottage) takes years but is narrated in a few moments.

Fictional objects have more time inside them than outside them. As in a dream, which from the outside takes a few seconds, but which to the experiencer can take years.

But this is also true of objects in Einsteinian spacetime. They can literally undergo longer or shorter temporalities than we might expect depending on their relative speed.

And it's also true of real OOO objects, since they are Tardises that are bigger on the inside than on the outside in a mereological sense. Strip the anthropocentrism out of phenomenology (a la Guerilla Metaphysics) and you have all the as-structure you need in encounters between non-human, even non-sentient objects, to add to the potent mix of parts that are bigger than the wholes that contain them. Objects dream.