Dreams: The Royal Road to Metaphor

I have often wondered if the persistent notion that art is both useful and pleasing might also apply to the dream. I get pleasure out of most of my dreams and I’m told by various scientists and therapists that they are useful. We might even say that this is a slightly redundant notion if you consider the biological likelihood that pleasure and usefulness may refer to the same benefit, seen from two different perspectives. To be more specific: the mind obviously delights in such things as discovery, symmetry, resemblance, contrast, the detection of causal series, unity, crescendo, and so on. But all of these delights of mind are obviously indispensable to survival as well. Perhaps from an evolutionary standpoint, we could say that if they weren’t useful they probably wouldn’t be delightful. So how can you separate the two? After all, look at sex. In other words, I suspect that we continue to say that poetry has two functions–to instruct and to delight–only because we have no single word for the wholesale thing it does for us.