I Had a Dream
Last night, I had one of the most epistemically interesting dreams I can recall. In the dream, I was deceived and came to discover this (or infer it).
In my dream, I was me; I experienced the dream through my own eyes. I had written a book critiquing the religious epistemology of Richard Dawkins and he invited me to some museum for an interview for some television show he was running. In order to entice me to do the interview, he promised me a small honorarium, though he didn’t state the amount up front. At the interview were two people. To Dawkins’ right was a heavy-set gentleman who appeared to be his publicist (I don’t know if Dawkins even has a publicist but he did in my dream). To his left was a woman but I wasn’t sure why she was there. She appeared to be an assistant of some sort. I sat directly across from him at a small table.
Dawkins began the interview asking me some preliminary questions about myself and my position. After a few minutes he asked me about my teaching position and how much I got paid. I said, somewhat hesitantly (I didn’t know whyit was important) around $220/hour. This itself is odd since I don’t get paid by the hour but if I broke my salary down per hour it would be far less than that. In any case, that’s what I said and Dawkins slowly started mocking me for it. He had his signature smirk on his face asking me how I could call myself a professor of any decency when my students have to neglect their studies to work so they could pay my inordinate salary.
Frequently during this exchange, he would look at his colleagues with incredulity and they would support his position though not overtly. In my dream, I felt myself becoming more and more angry and feeling as if I had walked into something. I could also feel a strong sense of shame and that I could not let Dawkins get the upper hand on me for something not related to religious belief. Dawkins then stops his invective and says something like, "Speaking of money, here’s the $313 honorarium I promised you." and slid an envelope across the table. I was so angry at his mocking and somewhat shamed that I refused and slid the envelope back saying, "You keep it. I don’t want it." "No" Dawkins said, "I promised it to you and I keep my word." I again refused the honorarium and said, "Give it to charity if you want. I’m not taking it."
After a minute or so of this, the woman speaks up and says, "I have an idea. Let me take the $10,500 and donate it to a "Squirrel Rescue" fund I know of. " (don’t ask me where the squirrels came from) as she slowly pulled the check out of the envelope exposing the amount. The woman explained her plan. Dawkins agreed and states to both the man and the woman that no changes to this plan are to be made. Dawkins continued with the interview.
Here’s where the dream is fascinating to me from an epistemic point of view. As Dawkins continued to talk and I thought about how I just gave up 10K, I slowly became aware that Dawkins plan all along was to get me to reject the money so he could have it "donated" to a cause in which he was interested. I began to see that his taunting and mocking were a psychological tactic to get me so upset that I would be unable to accept a $313 honorarium (I found out later in the dream that he broke the honorarium into three parts: $313 for the introduction, $9500 for the main part of the interview, and the rest for the conclusion of the interview — this breakdown was so he didn’t have to "lie" when he offered me the original $313).
In my dream, I went into the interview thinking nothing of anything being amiss. As the interview went on, I discovered Dawkins tactic through subtle looks to his colleagues, intonation of words, the cadence of the interview and the like. In my dream I became aware of the strategy though I wasn’t aware of it when the dream began. What striking is that I constructed Dawkins, his two colleagues and my conscious self. My mind "created" all four minds for the purpose of the dream, I created the deception, I created the mockery, I created it all. Yet in the dream, "I", the me in the dream, didn’t know what Dawkins and his colleagues were up to. I had the dream just before waking (which is why I remember it so vividly) and remember being struck by how "deceived" I had been in the dream. How is that possible since I was all four persons?
In this dream, I can honestly say, I didn’t know what Dawkins was thinking. Yet I knew intimately because I was him.
