On Certainty #383: The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.
What is senseless (sinnlos) here is not the dream argument, but what Wittgenstein says about it. It is a plain fact that people have dreams in which they know that they are dreaming, and in which they think to themselves, 'I am dreaming.' In those dreams they are not dreaming that they are dreaming, if dreaming that p entails that one does not know that p.
I once had an extremely vivid dream about my dead cat, Maya. There she was: as (apparently) real as can be. I saw her, I touched and petted her, I heard her. It was all astonishingly vivid and coherent. There was an ongoing perceiving in which visual, tactile, and auditory data were well-integrated. And yet I knew within the dream that she was dead, and I knew that I had buried her in April 2001 in the desert behind the house.
And so I began to philosophize within the dream: I know that Maya is dead and that I am dreaming, and so these perceptions, as vivid and coherent as they are, cannot be veridical. Coherence is no guarantee of veridicality. I did not dream that I was dreaming, I knew that I was dreaming; and I did not dream the reasoning in the second-to-last sentence, I validly executed that reasoning. And the meanings of the terms in the reasoning was in no way affected by their being grasped within a dream.
Wittgenstein seems to be assuming that, for any proposition p, if one becomes aware that p while dreaming, then one has dreamt that p in a sense that entails that one does not know that p. But this assumption is false, as Descartes appreciated. Becoming aware that 2 + 3 = 5 while dreaming is consistent with knowing its truth in the way that dreaming that one is sitting before a fire is not consistent with knowing its truth. So there is no reason to deny that one can become aware that one is dreaming while dreaming. To become aware that one is dreaming while dreaming is not to dream that one is dreaming in a sense that implies that one is not in reality dreaming. And to use words within a dream is not to dream the meanings of those words in a sense that implies that they do not in reality have those meanings.
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