Life & Wisdom Quote by Brian Aldiss

Aldiss is making a quiet power move: he grants the subconscious a legitimacy that rational culture keeps trying to revoke. The line is careful, almost British in its hedging ("sort of", "may not"), but the wager is bold. He separates "scientific truth" from "psychological truth" not to dismiss science, but to point out how often we use science as a bouncer at the door of meaning. Dreams, free associations, sudden images - the mind's unruly output - might fail a lab test and still land a direct hit on who we are.

Coming from a science fiction writer, the intent reads as both craft note and philosophical defense. SF is frequently accused of being "just" imagination, escapism, speculation. Aldiss flips that: speculation can be diagnostic. The subconscious becomes an instrument, not a glitch - a way of registering buried fear, desire, guilt, and social pressure before the conscious mind has translated them into acceptable language. That's why it works: it rebrands the irrational as data, just of a different kind.

The subtext is also a critique of respectability. If your inner life doesn't count unless it can be quantified, whole categories of human experience get marked as noise. Aldiss argues for a dual-track reality: the world of measurable facts, and the world of felt patterns that govern our choices anyway. The "truth" in a dream isn't that it happened; it's that it reveals the story you keep telling yourself when you stop policing the script.