home articles love letters identity the mag the space TR
WATTS, AND THE DREAM THAT WAS ALREADY THE LIFE
On a passage from Alan Watts's Out of Your Mind lectures, the dreamer who chooses risk, and an argument about uncertainty as the condition of meaningful experience.
FROM THE LECTURE OF ALAN WATTS
THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS (PART 1) / OUT OF YOUR MIND 1 (1969)
A seminar about “what there is.”
Watts asked his listeners to imagine they could dream any dream they wanted at night. The exercise ended with the dreamer dreaming the life they already had. The argument was not consoling. It was structural.
The argument the passage makes is short and exact. Watts asks the listener to imagine that, every night when they go to sleep, they are given the ability to dream any dream they choose, perfectly, in full sensory detail, for as many hours as they want. The first night, the listener would naturally dream of every wish fulfilled. Pleasure, beauty, success, love, mastery, every thing they had ever wanted to have or to be. The dream would be perfect.
After some weeks of unbroken fulfillment, the dreamer would, Watts said, begin to grow bored. The fulfilled dream would lose its taste. The dreamer would start, almost inevitably, to introduce variation. Difficulty. Then real risk, then genuine danger, then, eventually, forgetting they were dreaming, being inside the dream so completely they did not know whether it was a dream or not, not knowing how it would end. And at that point, Watts said, the dreamer would dream a life that was indistinguishable from the life they were actually living. They would dream this life. The one they have. With its uncertainty, its work, its risk of failure, its absence of guaranteed outcome.
THE REST FROM THE LECTURE OF ALAN WATTS
THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS (PART 1) / OUT OF YOUR MIND 1 (1969)
A seminar about “what there is.”
This was the argument. It is not a meditation on gratitude. It is not a soft observation that things could be worse. It is a structural claim about the architecture of meaningful experience. The conditions a person normally takes to be defects in life, the uncertainty about how things will go, the effort required to make anything happen, the possibility of failure, the absence of any guarantee that the work will pay off, are precisely the conditions that make experience interesting in the first place. Without them, no experience stays meaningful for more than a few nights.
The dream with everything in it becomes the dream nobody wants.
What Watts had identified, in 1972 or 1973, was something that the surrounding culture was just beginning to want to engineer away. The technologies, the systems, the ideologies that have come to define the half-century since were already taking shape: the optimisation of outcome, the elimination of friction, the management of uncertainty as a problem to be solved, the productivity discourse that treats effort as a cost to be minimised rather than a substance the life is made of. Watts was making the opposite argument, in a recorded talk in California, half a century before the technologies that would test it had been built.
The argument has not aged. It has gotten sharper.
Alan Watts
What Watts was saying, in plain terms, was that the difficulty of a life is not separate from its meaningfulness. The two are the same thing. A person who is offered the chance to remove all uncertainty from their existence is being offered, without realising it, the boring dream. A person who is told that the goal of a life is to arrive at a state of permanent comfort is being sold the dream that, after a few nights, no one wants. The risk of losing is not the cost of the life. It is the structure that makes the life feel like something rather than nothing.
The dreamer, in Watts's lecture, ends up dreaming this exact day, in its exact uncertainty, with the same problems and the same effort and the same unknown outcome, because that is the dream that, when constructed honestly, an unconstrained mind chooses. The fact that the listener did not choose this life, and is in fact often resentful of it, is what makes the lecture sharp. Watts is not claiming that the listener wanted this life. He is claiming that, given infinite freedom to construct any experience, the listener would eventually, after exhausting the alternatives, build something very close to it.
Alan Watts
This is the point. The conditions of ordinary life that the culture treats as problems are, on closer examination, the same conditions that make experience worth having. The control we do not have, the outcomes we cannot guarantee, the work that may or may not succeed, the possibility of real loss. These are not the obstacles to a meaningful life. They are what a meaningful life is built out of.
Watts gave the lecture at a moment when the dominant therapeutic and cultural discourses were beginning to promise something different. Eliminate suffering. Optimise outcomes. Achieve the state. Remove the friction. The fifty years since have produced increasingly sophisticated technologies for delivering on these promises, or appearing to. Watts had already explained, calmly, in a recording most listeners can now find on a phone in seconds, why the project would not work. The dream with no risk becomes the dream the dreamer wakes from, looking for risk again.
The lecture has continued to circulate because the argument has continued to be true. Watts said this kind of thing several times across his lectures, but the most circulated version was given in his sixties on a tape that was being made because someone happened to have a recorder.
The recording outlived him. It is now listened to by an audience that did not exist when he made it, in a cultural moment that has given the argument more weight than it had at the time. That was the claim. It still is.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Watts, Alan. The Nature of Consciousness, Part 1. From the Out of Your Mind lecture series, recorded c. 1960 to 1973. Alan Watts Electronic University archive.
Watts, Alan. The Wisdom of Insecurity. New York, Pantheon, 1951.
Watts, Alan. The Way of Zen. New York, Pantheon, 1957.
Watts, Alan. The Book, On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. New York, Pantheon, 1966.
Watts, Mark, editor. Out of Your Mind, Essential Listening from the Alan Watts Audio Archives. Boulder, Sounds True, 2017.
Alan Watts Electronic University. Lecture archive, administered by Mark Watts.