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I’ve got three examples of a similar phenomenon:

• Just now I was reading a hard copy of an article, printed, not stapled. I was also sitting in front of my computer. I was just finishing the page of the article I was reading, and I reached for the touch pad as if to scroll down. I knew that my intention was to turn the page, or I guess you might have to say that my intention was to bring up the next section somehow or another.

• I got this program that allows me to control my home computer remotely. I was sitting at school, and I think I had just used the program to do something on my home computer. Just then I had this notion to take some frozen chicken out of the freezer (while I was sitting in class). I can tell you that it wasn’t just an, “damn, I wish I had taken some chicken out of the freezer” idea, it was more like “now that I can control my computer remotely, oh, I should take some chicken out of the freezer too!” I remember the thought/intuition: it was a thought that followed right on the tails of the previous thought, and (possibly in reflection immediately after the thought) the thought seemed premature and unscreened or something.

• The last example was one time I was with a few people in an auditorium and I had a video camera that I had plugged in so that the image would be projected live on the screen. I was aiming it at one of the guys there, and he turned around and saw himself on the screen, and asked me something like: “can I see you in the screen?” I seem to remember him realizing that the question didn’t make any sense as he was asking it. I remember being really curious about the question, and was asking him describe what he meant, but I don’t think he understood why I was interested, and thought I was trying to make him look stupid or something.

What these examples all have in common is a kind of misapplication of a concept, or a kind of unrefined intuition.
In the first example, this isn’t just an example of doing something different with each hand and getting them confused; there had to have been some recognition/similarity between reading this article and reading articles on the internet, possibly at some level at which the two were indistinct, and it seems like this awareness must’ve been subconscious. Either that or, the intention to turn the page is/was at bottom not specific as to how to turn the page – a more general intention to bring about the next section of text. These are the possibilities I’d thought of.

The second example is similar to the first. To have the notion to take chicken out of the freezer remotely, after controlling my computer remotely, it would seem like I was carrying this new accessibility/channel to other objects pre-rationally, in a way. Of course I can’t take something out of the freezer just because I can turn on bittorrent while I’m at school. How could one confuse those? It seems like somehow that idea got out before those rational voices were able to intervene.

On the third example. I don’t remember if the following is what the guy in the third example told me, or if this was my theory of what he must’ve meant, but he had been looking at me while I was aiming the camera at him, and he turned to see himself live on the screen, and he had some strange mirror-like intuition, which would make sense since he was seeing himself on the screen. On one level, of course he could see me in the screen because he was looking at himself. Just now I had the thought that the intuition might’ve been something like looking through a periscope/telescope or tube or something. If I am looking through a telescope at someone, and they have access to what I’m seeing, it might make sense that they could look in the other side of the telescope and see my eye or something. That might have something to do with the intuition, but I was just thinking that it might be something a little different. When I look at you, and I see that you are looking at me, I assume you are perceiving an image of me. When he saw himself on the screen, he was in a way seeing what I was seeing. He saw himself, and was possibly asking whether the image of himself (from my perspective) was seeing me (in the same way that when I see you looking at me, I assume you are perceiving an image of me). Anyways, it seems to belie a kind of mirror/window intuition with respect to other perceivers, screens, cameras, etc.

I think it is really strange that the dream hypothesis (how do you know that you aren’t just dreaming?) is really argued as if it makes sense. Do philosophers really have such vivid dreams? Here is an example of how detailed dreams must be: if someone were to ask me to visualize (or draw) the pattern of the carpet in the hall of my apartment building, I would hardly be able to come up with the colors, and that it is kinda floral looking. I know that it is actually much more detailed than that. In a dream, if I were to walk out into this hall, I am going to say that the detail of the carpet in this dream is exactly that degree to which I am able to picture it right now. Maybe I just don’t have very detailed dreams, or maybe I just don’t have the kind of memory as some people do, but I haven’t been amazed by the superior memory of everyone around me in comparison to my own, which makes me think that my memory must be pretty standard. Thus it seems to me that memory is very vague. I am not used to remembering things in such detail, and I have never even surprised myself with the recollection in vivid detail, something along the lines as this pattern. Rather it is vaguer ideas about what happened that are remembered. There could be countless examples – the baby blanket that slept with until I was far too old to be sleeping with a baby blanket. I could tell you vaguely that there were Richard Scarry characters on it (cats wearing clothes, doing normal things) and it was green and yellow, but I have no vivid memory of particular pictures on this blanket. I am guessing that were I to come across this blanket in a dream, it would have just this detail, and because this is the detail I remember it in, it would appear to actually be the blanket in the dream. In your dream, go to a bookshelf and pick up a book that you have read many times. Do you think that your memory contains every word of that book? Some people have photographic memories, and some artists likewise have photographic memories when it comes to such patterns and other scenes. But I’m guessing that they probably dream in much sharper detail than the average person. But they will both claim to have vivid dreams.