Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [18]
In addition to these slips, Freud also thought there were a few other avenues by which the secret truths of the unconscious could seep out. One of these, dreams, is relevant to us all. Another, relevant only to the unfortunate few, is insanity. At first, dreams and madness might not seem terribly germane to this book. But what these two conditions have in common with each other is the misperception of reality—which, you’ll recall, is also one definition (indeed, the earliest and most pervasive one) of being wrong. To better understand our mundane misperceptions, it pays to look closely at our extreme ones. So that is where I want to turn now—to dreams, drug trips, hallucinations, and madness; and, by way of those examples, to a closer look at the notion that, through error, we perceive the truth.
However far-fetched this connection between wrongness and whacked-outness might seem, you yourself invoke it routinely. I say this with some confidence, because our everyday ways of thinking and talking about error borrow heavily from the argot of altered states. For starters, we commonly (if crudely) compare being wrong to being high. Try saying something patently erroneous to a member of my generation, and you’d better be prepared to hear “what are you smoking?” or “are you on crack?” Likewise, we seldom hesitate to impute insanity to people who strongly hold beliefs that we strongly reject. (Witness all the mudslinging about “liberal lunatics” and “right-wing wingnuts.”) Finally, we talk about snapping out of our false beliefs as if they were trances and waking up from them as if they were dreams.
Of all these analogies, the association between erring and dreaming is the most persistent and explicit. “Do you not see,” asked the eleventh-century Islamic philosopher and theologian Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, “that while asleep you assume your dreams to be indisputably real? Once awake, you recognize them for what they are—baseless chimeras.” The same could be said, he observed, of our waking beliefs. “In relation to your present state they may be real; but it is possible also that you may enter upon another state of being”—and from the vantage point of that future state, he continued, your present one will seem as self-evidently false as your dreams do when you awake.
Although we treat errors and altered states as analogous in certain ways, there is one important respect in which we treat them very differently. As I began this chapter by noting, mistakes, even minor ones, often make us feel like we’re going to be sick, or like we want to die. But altered states—some of which really can sicken or kill us—frequently enthrall us. We keep journals of our dreams and recount them to our friends and family (to say nothing of our therapists). We feel that our lives are illuminated and enriched by them, and we regard those who seldom remember theirs as, in some small but important way, impoverished. We are highly motivated to seek out the reality-altering power of drugs, despite the danger of overdose, addiction, or arrest. The delirium of extreme illness is arguably even riskier, not to mention harder to come by and all-around less desirable. Yet I will say this: once, while running a very high fever in a tropical rainforest, I carried on a long conversation with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was sitting on the end of my bed, knitting. Coleridge, of course, was long dead, and as for me, I’ve never been sicker. But I’ve almost never been so mesmerized or