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Our forgotten dream lives: a case for scepticism about oniric consciousness?| old_uid | 19094 |
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| title | Our forgotten dream lives: a case for scepticism about oniric consciousness? |
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| start_date | 2021/05/25 |
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| schedule | 16h15-17h45 |
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| online | no |
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| details | En ligne |
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| summary | When we wake up, do we remember conscious experiences that occurred during sleep? It’s hard to deny that some form of conscious dreaming occurs. Beyond this quite general claim, however, there is much disagreement about the nature of this experience: whether dreams are hallucinatory, imaginations or some other mental state. Whatever the phenomenology, dreams, it is said, are conscious experiences. After waking, we sometimes remember and report our dreams, to varying degrees of accuracy. Memory of such experiences, however, is very poor. Awakening subjects during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep suggest that dreams occur in nearly every REM session, and some non-REM sessions too. However, we rarely report more than one dream, if any, upon waking normally in the morning. This suggests that a large majority of dreams – nearly all – are forgotten. Here an alternative interpretation considered: rather than having a diverse conscious mental life that occurs during sleep, most “dreams” are not in fact conscious. Not only do we have poor recollection of dreams upon waking, in-dream memory is also severely lacking, both of recent dream events and our waking lives. If memory is part of what makes an experience conscious and dream memory is sufficiently diminished, such mental states might not pass a threshold for consciousness. Under different theories of consciousness, dream mental events might not make it to the ‘global workspace’ or alternatively, lack requisite higher-order thoughts or access. This leaves open the possibility that, when a subject is woken up during REM sleep, they become retroactively conscious of these unconscious mental states, consistent with Dennett’s cassette theory of dreaming. According to this view, most dream reports would be, in some sense, of false memories. Here the plausibility of such an interpretation is reviewed. |
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| responsibles | Perret |
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