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It will not serve us to "interpret" Descartes's dreams in either a Freudian or a Cartesian manner. As Susan Bordo (14) has pointed out, an act of interpretation at such a remove almost inevitably becomes a cultural analysis rather than an individual one, and such an analysis is best served by an acknowledgement of that very distinction. Yet the dreams of Nov. 10, 1619, cast a crucial light on the issue of hypertext and its relation to the Cartesian schemes of consciousness and meaning with which (post)modernity struggles, if only because the dreams -- particularly the third -- as well as their documentation are so relentlessly hypertextual. If Descartes provides the model of selfhood with which we still grapple, and if we may think of dreaming, after Lacan and Ulmer, as a mode of textuality -- a linguistic and rhetorical structure in which the play of difference is manifested as image -- we require a distinctly different kind of reading. What is common to "interpretation" of whatever stripe is the prerequisite that we understand the dreams as other than themselves, as representations of some more substantial reality anterior to the dream images. As indicated in the title of the dream-book of verse, Corpus Poetarum, each image is an inert embodiment of a concept awaiting discovery. Hence Descartes's own allegorical reading of the dreams presumes a fixity of ideas to which the images refer: science, poetry, divinely inspired choice. For Descartes -- as for those whose interpretations contradict and supersede his own -- the dream is a relatively stable, referential text that must be rendered transparent. Yet the images themselves all manifest precisely the opposite; they are images of books subject to a new and baffling indeterminacy, texts within the text of the dream that refuse to gesture "outward" but rather implode in their signification, pointing only to themselves and their antecedents, their possibilities and their failures. Were it not for the knowledge that Descartes's dreams were recorded three and a half centuries before the appearance of the technology of hypertext, we would immediately recognize here the dynamics of hypertext: the juggling of multiple texts and versions; the constant revision and re-visioning of appearing and disappearing texts; the problematic interplay of word and image in the primitive "hypermedia" of copperplate engravings; the "body" of the dictionary text that is not inert at all, but rather is stunted and marginalized by neglect; the atmosphere of disorientation, stifling in the first two dreams, challenging in the third; the search that is deflected and expanded by the discovery of new possibilities but also constrained by repeated steps and recursive references; the pleasures and tensions of collaborative reading and commentary; the simultaneity of presence and absence (Est et non); the construction of meaning as a geography of multiple pathways and crossroads (Quod vitae sectabor iter?). Speculation by Lancelot Law Whyte, Karl Stern, and Etienne Gilson (15) that Descartes "chose" the "wrong" path -- toward the reification of self and deification of rationalism -- on the basis of the dreams of Nov. 10, 1619, then, does not transcend the Cartesian project so much as it reinforces it by taking on the role of the loyal opposition, all the while maintaining the duality of the subjective "mind" and the textual "body." The alternative is to understand Descartes as having briefly imagined a way of constructing knowledge -- of assembling texts and negotiating meaning among them and with other readers -- that the rationalist project was otherwise unable to account for. He in fact never mentioned the three dreams again following the morning-after rush of the Olympica, but his long preoccupation with the epistemological problems posed by dreaming in general suggests that the shifting text remained at the margins of consciousness, a present absence.
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