The Concept of Dreaming: On Three Theses by Malcolm

In his monograph Dreaming (1959), Normal Malcolm puts forward the following three theses: (1) The temporal location of dreams as taking place in one’s sleep is not an empirical fact, but determined by grammar. (2) This grammatical determination does not allow dreams a precise date in physical time. (3) Dreams do not consist of mental occurrences. I argue that (1) is indeed perfectly true, whereas (2) is false; (3) is not borne out by Malcolm’s verificationist main argument, although it can be shown to be largely true for other considerations.