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But none of these unusual occurrences need happen in a dream, and it is not on account of such occurrences that dream-objects are called "unreal." It is their lack of continuity with the dreamer's past and future that makes him, when he wakes, condemn them; and it is their lack of correlation with other private worlds that makes others condemn them.
We come now to cases like dreams, which may, at the moment of dreaming, contain nothing to arouse suspicion, but are condemned on the ground of their supposed incompatibility with earlier and later data. Of course it often happens that dream-objects fail to behave in the accustomed manner: heavy objects fly, solid objects melt, babies turn into pigs or undergo even greater changes.
But it is open to two objections. First it is difficult to see how an activity, however un-"transparent," can be directed towards a nothing: a term of a relation cannot be a mere nonentity. Secondly, no reason is given, and I am convinced that none can be given, for the assertion that dream-objects are not "there" and not "given." Let us take the second point first.
Meinong maintains, then there would be a difference in respect of givenness between dreams and waking life. But if, as we have maintained, what is given is never the thing, but merely one of the "sensibilia" which compose the thing, then what we apprehend in a dream is just as much given as what we apprehend in waking life. Exactly the same argument applies as to the dream-objects being "there."
Unable to distinguish the subconscious operation of a non-sexual context, from that of the more familiar sexual context, the interpreter is at the mercy of superficial resemblances between the properties of the dream-objects and those of the well-known sexual symbols.
The belief that dream-objects are not given comes, I think, from failure to distinguish, as regards waking life, between the sense-datum and the corresponding "thing." In dreams, there is no such corresponding "thing" as the dreamer supposes; if, therefore, the "thing" were given in waking life, as e.g.
I tumbled backward into bed again and lay in a daze during which dream-objects mixed with reality and my room walked full of people from all the books I had read all to evaporate as my father's face grew, from a cluster of white foreheads and myriads of eyes, into him. "Johnnie, wake up ... are you sick?" "Please go away from me and let me alone." I turned my face to the wall in loathing.
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