
Waking Life: Johan Varendonck had to study what was available: his daydreams - apollinaire
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/waking-life
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rendall
This thoughtful essay ends with a codicil that I'm glad was at the end and not
the beginning, otherwise I would not have finished it, and it was otherwise
delightful: "... [the book] is far from perfect. Centered and based on the
experience of a white male not only in war but also in life writ large, it
could be said that his theories discounted and excluded many."

This wasn't a tax-payer-funded, expensive clinical survey that excluded a
demographic it shouldn't have. It was a solitary soldier daydreaming at a war
front in WW1 Europe. The nature of the study itself and its creation
necessitated that it be solitary and introspective, which by definition
"excludes many" \- everyone not the soldier, in fact.

However, literally anyone in the world, without permission or funding, can
document their daydreams using the method described in the book.

I believe these oddly interjected, gratuitous observations will not age well
and will be viewed by our future selves and descendents as symptoms of
collective psychosis

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jaynetics
Varendoncks conclusion as cited in the article: "daydreams betray
preoccupations with unsolved problems, harassing cares, or overwhelming
impressions [...] they all seem to prepare some accommodation, [...] they are
attempts at adaptation: such is their biological meaning". I am astonished how
much more balanced this sounds compared to the ideas of his contemporaries. To
a certain degree it even seems to pre-empt some very modern theories about
dreaming, e.g. this one that has been discussed here recently:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23956715](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23956715)

