Consciousness

• seCtIon FIVe: BoRDeRLAnDs

ARE DREAMS EXPERIENCES?

Of course dreams are experiences, you might say, and many would agree. The

Oxford English Dictionary defines a dream as ‘A series of images, thoughts, and

emotions, often with a story-like quality, generated by mental activity during

sleep’ (January 2018). Psychology textbooks usually include dreams in sections

on ‘states of consciousness during sleep’, and many philosophers and conscious-

ness researchers accept this, too: ‘Dreams are a form of consciousness, though

of course quite different from full waking states’ (Searle, 1997, p. 5); ‘Dreaming is

a subjective phenomenon of consciousness’ (Revonsuo and Tarkko, 2002, p. 4);

‘Dreams are conscious because they create the appearance of a world [. . .] Dreams

are subjective states in that there is a phenomenal self ’ (Metzinger, 2009, p. 135);

they are ‘a second global state of consciousness aside from wakefulness’ (Windt

and Noreika, 2011), or ‘an altered state of consciousness that is difficult to recall

in waking’ (Hobson, 2014, p. 4). Hobson defends the commonsense view like this:

‘Our dreams are not mysterious phenomena, they are conscious events. Here’s the

simplest test: Are we aware of what happens in our dreams? Of course. Therefore,

dreaming is a conscious experience’ (Hobson, 1999, p. 209).

But are we really aware in our dreams? Suppose that I  wake from a dream and

think, ‘Wow, that was a weird dream. I remember I was trying to get some coffee’.

At the time of waking, I seem to have been having the dream. Indeed, I am com-

pletely convinced that a moment ago I  was dreaming of being in the cafeteria,

even if the details slip quickly away and I cannot hang onto them, let alone report

them all. But there are some serious problems here.

Some concern the self. Although I  am sure that ‘I’ was dreaming, the self in the

dream was not like my normal waking self. This strange dream-self didn’t realise

she was dreaming; she accepted that the people and the food kept changing in

impossible ways, showed little disgust or surprise at the state of her body, and

in general treated everything as though it was real. Was it really me who dreamt

it? Maybe not  – but perhaps, as Metzinger would argue, this does not matter

because there was some kind of phenomenal self in the dream and this is enough

to support a PSM, a phenomenal self-model.

Other problems concern the lack of insight during dreams. Taking Tart’s subjec-

tive definition of an ASC (Chapter 13), there is clearly ‘a qualitative alteration in the

overall pattern of mental functioning’, but unlike in most drug-induced states, or

during sensory deprivation or starvation, it is not true that ‘the experiencer feels

his consciousness is radically different from the way it functions ordinarily’; the

experiencer, at least in non-lucid dreams, fails to notice this ‘radical’ change. So, by

this definition, we are forced to the curious conclusion that the ordinary dream,

that most classic of all ASCs, is not really an ASC at all. Oddly enough, by the same

definition, a lucid dream is an ASC because now the experiencer does realise it is

a dream.

Other peculiarities concern the status of the dream: if I  start to doubt whether

I  really did have that dream, the only evidence to call on is my own memories,

and those are vague and fade fast. One response to such doubts goes back to

1861, when French physician Alfred Maury described a long and complicated

dream about the French revolution, culminating in his being led to the guillotine.

‘dream consciousness

is not normal

consciousness, but

it is consciousness

nonetheless’

(Damasio, 2014, p. 111)