Dreams

Dream State

Immersion in a dream

Dreams Here we are all, by day; by night, we’re hurled By dreams, each one into a several [separate] world — Robert Herrick (1591 - 1674)

• We experience being in the dream
• Two ways of experience
  • Identification with dream ego from first-person (field perspective)
  • Identification with dream ego from third-person (observer perspective)
• We cannot inspect (nonlucid) dreams directly
  • We can inspect only our waking memories of dreams
  • We have certain cultural and linguistic practices of dream reporting whereby we make stories of our dreams (linguistic relativism for dreams)

Different views (Simulation Models of Dreaming)

1. Orthodox View
   • Precepts: dreaming involves senses that we experience when we are waking, except the experiences of things that are not there or have weak correlation with what is there
   • Beliefs: when we dream $p$ we believe $p$ to be true. In most cases, these are false so dreaming involves mainly false beliefs
2. Hallucination model
   • Dreaming is immersive spatiotemporal hallucination
   • Immersive: full immersion in the dream world
   • Spatiotemporal: full immersion in a here and now
   • Hallucination: experience that seems exactly like a perception but has weak stimulus correlation with the environment
3. Imagination model
   • Dreaming involves experiences of the sort we have when we imagine (mental images)
   • When we dream that $p$, we imagine that $p$ (however, imagining that $p$ does not entail believing that $p$)
   • Dreams can be indeterminate in their sensory features (e.g. indeterminate in colour)
   • Object: what about emotions? Some emotions can only arise from belief
     1. When I dream that $p$, I experience fear, elation, etc.
     2. Such emotions arising from an attitude that $p$ can only arise from a belief that $p$
     3. So when I dream that $p$, I believe that $p$
   • Counterargument: contradiction, you still feel these emotion reading fiction
     • Same premises as above, but final conclusion is that: when I read in a fiction that $p$, I do NOT believe that $p$.
     • Way out of this contradiction is to deny premise 2)
   • Eye movements during lucid-REM sleep resemble waking perception more than they resemble waking imagination
   • Upshot: to dream is to imagine a dream world and to identify with the dream ego immersed in that world

Lucid Dreaming

• A dream in which you can direct your attention to the dreamlike quality of the state
• Features
  • Greater clarity/vividness
  • Realism
  • Emotional exhilaration
  • Sense of freedom
• Sense of self in lucid dream state
  • Self-as-dreamer: “I am dreaming” (knowledge of being asleep in bed)
  • Self-as-dreamed (dream ego): “I am flying” (default conceptualizations of self)
• Is lucid dreaming knowing you’re dreaming or dreaming you’re dreaming?
  • Did they just dream that they were aware that they were dreaming?
  • Knowing you’re dreaming seems to involve a certain kind of attention and cognitive control that is missing when you dream you’re dreaming
  • Seems to be a tell-tale LRLR eye moment signal during REM sleep when participants realize they are dreaming