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Poster
Association for the Scientific Study
of Consciousness
ASSC8
Antwerp, Belgium, 25-28 June 2004
Dreams are a form of
consciousness
(Searle 1997 p 3)
"it is not like anything to
dream,
although it is like something to have dreamed."
(Dennett 1976 p 138)
"Are we aware of what
happens in our dreams?
Of course. Therefore dreaming is a conscious experience."
(Hobson 1999 p 209)
2
conflicting facts
1. Dreams
sometimes seem to be concocted at the moment of waking up.
2. There is
evidence that dream events occur in real time
(e.g. incorporation studies, lucid dreamers signaling from times dreams)
Can
the two be reconciled?
No
Cartesian Materialism - this is the natural assumption. Dreams
are experiences happening during sleep.
There must be an answer to the question "What is he dreaming about
now?"
On this view 1. and 2. conflict.
Yes
To avoid the conflict we must give up CM and the idea that there is an
answer to the question
"What is he dreaming about now?"
Here is one way ......
The
gist
Are
dreams experiences happening during sleep?
When someone is asleep and dreaming, is there an answer to the
question
"What is happening in the dream now?"
Conventional theories say Yes
I say No.
The illustration (simplified from
the actual poster) shows how the theory works. During dreaming the brain
sustains numerous different trains of thought, and perception. None of
these is "in consciousness"; none of these is "what is
happening in the dream". Rather they are all possible threads that
may be called on later, in an indefinite number of possible combinations.
When the sleeper awakes, a dream is concocted, backwards, by selecting any
one of the possible multiple threads that might have been selected. The
illustration shows just three possible dreams that might have been
concocted from the scraps of memory that remained.
Abstract
Dreams are commonly described
as experiences or altered states of consciousness, but there are problems with
both these characterisations. There is also conflicting evidence suggesting
both that dreams happen in real time, and that they can be concocted at the
moment of waking up. This poster describes a theory that allows both of these
to be true. The retro-selective theory of dreaming avoids the danger of
treating dreams as experiences that happen “in consciousness”, or in a
Cartesian theatre.
During REM sleep numerous
brain processes go on in parallel, with none being either “in” or
“out” of consciousness. On waking up, any number of stories can be
concocted by selecting one of a vast number of possible threads through the
multiple scraps of memory that remain. The chosen story fits the timing (e.g.
of incorporated external events) but it is only one of many such stories that
might have been selected. There is no actual dream; no story that really
happened “in consciousness”.
References
Blackmore,
S. (2003) Consciousness: An Introduction. London, Hodder &
Stoughton; New York, Oxford University Press
Dennett,
D.C. (1976) Are dreams experiences? Philosophical Review, 73,
151-171 also in D.C. Dennett Brainstorms Penguin 1978, 129-148
Dennett,
D.C. (1991) Consciousness Explained. Boston, MA, and London; Little,
Brown and Co.
Gackenbach,
J., and LaBerge, S. (Eds) (1988). Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain:
Perspectives on Lucid Dreaming. New York: Plenum.
Hobson,
J.A. (1999) Dreaming as Delirium: How the Brain Goes Out of its Mind.
Cambridge, MA., MIT Press
Searle,
J. (1997) The Mystery of Consciousness. N.Y. New York Review of Books
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