Memo from Daniel Dennett, 1942-2024

a mysterious message in my inbox

Dear Readers -

This email is dated April 22, but I just found it in my Inbox this evening. Can anyone explain this for me?

- Josh

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Daniel Dennett <Daniel.Dennett@tufts.edu>
Date: Tue, Apr 22, 2024 at 4:28 PM
Subject: At last I understand
To: Josh Mitteldorf (aging.advice@gmail.com) <aging.advice@gmail.com>

I’m dreaming right now. Of course I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming that I’m telling you that I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming that I’m writing down my dream. I’m dreaming about my work, about the philosophical writing that I create, from my own brain, from day to day. Freud talked about this — the content of our everyday life that is transformed and emerges in our dreams. 

This is an unusual dream, a dream I have not had before. And it is a dream from which I can learn a great deal. Until now, I couldn’t understand how people maintain the silly, irrational positions that they do about “consciousness”, as if it were something apart from the brain, as if it were something that had to be explained. People talk of near-death experiences. People claim to have memories from times when the brain is flat-lined, and they cite this as evidence that “consciousness” can exist apart from neural signaling. This seemed such a perverse way of thinking that I could never relate to it until now. Now I see how powerful is the illusion of this experience. Of course it is a manufactured memory, a false memory created during the time when the brain is disabled by restricted oxygen flow, but still functional enough to fantasize, to dream, to imagine. 

I am dreaming. I have dreamed. I dreamed that I met my father (who died when I was a child) and that he told me that I was dead. It was a very realistic dream. If I didn’t know better, I might have succumbed to the illusion. I, too, might have reported that “I met my father when I was dead.” It was very convincing, a very realistic dream.

In my dream, I argued with my father. I told him, “Of course I’m not dead. If I were dead I would not be talking to you right now.”

“But I am dead, too,” said my father. Somehow, I had forgotten that. But his statement was the wake-up call I needed. I realized I am dreaming. I am in a lucid dream. I am in the first lucid dream of my life. Indeed, lucid dreams are another thing which I never could understand because I had no experience. But now I do. I understand why people who have this experience find it so compelling.

I told my father, “I am dreaming. I am dreaming that you are here. You cannot really be here, because you are dead. This is how I know I am dreaming.”

Then he put his arm around me. He became quite tender, more fatherly than I ever remember him while he was alive. “Here, son,” he said, “let me show you.”

He took me to the funeral parlor. I saw my body tagged on my toe, and prepared for cremation. Then he took me to Tufts, where there was a gathering of students and faculty, discussing my life and my teaching, and how I affected them. He reminded me that I am sick. Yes, I remember. Interstitial lung disease. Difficulty breathing, that became more and more severe. Of course, my brain was deprived of oxygen. Of course, that accounts for the experience I am having now. 

If I survive long enough to write about this, I can, at last, explain to people who talk about “life after death” and “consciousness without a body” that this is an illusion. I can tell them from my own experience.

DCD