A comprehensive proposal for a conceptual framework for describing conscious experience in dreams, integrating philosophy of mind, sleep and dream research, and interdisciplinary consciousness studies. Dreams, conceived as conscious experience or phenomenal states during sleep, offer an important contrast condition for theories of consciousness and the self. Yet, although there is a wealth of empirical research on sleep and dreaming, its potential contribution to consciousness research and philosophy of mind is largely overlooked. This might be due, in part, to a (...) lack of conceptual clarity and an underlying disagreement about the nature of the phenomenon of dreaming itself. In Dreaming, Jennifer Windt lays the groundwork for solving this problem. She develops a conceptual framework describing not only what it means to say that dreams are conscious experiences but also how to locate dreams relative to such concepts as perception, hallucination, and imagination, as well as thinking, knowledge, belief, deception, and self-consciousness. Arguing that a conceptual framework must be not only conceptually sound but also phenomenologically plausible and carefully informed by neuroscientific research, Windt integrates her review of philosophical work on dreaming, both historical and contemporary, with a survey of the most important empirical findings. This allows her to work toward a systematic and comprehensive new theoretical understanding of dreaming informed by a critical reading of contemporary research findings. Windt's account demonstrates that a philosophical analysis of the concept of dreaming can provide an important enrichment and extension to the conceptual repertoire of discussions of consciousness and the self and raises new questions for future research. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the relationship between bodily experiences in dreams and the sleeping, physical body. I question the popular view that dreaming is a naturally and frequently occurring real-world example of cranial envatment. This view states that dreams are functionally disembodied states: in a majority of dreams, phenomenal experience, including the phenomenology of embodied selfhood, unfolds completely independently of external and peripheral stimuli and outward movement. I advance an alternative and more empirically plausible view of dreams as weakly (...) phenomenally-functionally embodied states. The view predicts that bodily experiences in dreams can be placed on a continuum with bodily illusions in wakefulness. It also acknowledges that there is a high degree of variation across dreams and different sleep stages in the degree of causal coupling between dream imagery, sensory input, and outward motor activity. Furthermore, I use the example of movement sensations in dreams and their relation to outward muscular activity to develop a predictive processing account. I propose that movement sensations in dreams are associated with a basic and developmentally early kind of bodily self-sampling. This account, which affords a central role to active inference, can then be broadened to explain other aspects of self- and world-simulation in dreams. Dreams are world-simulations centered on the self, and important aspects of both self- and world-simulation in dreams are closely linked to bodily self-sampling, including muscular activity, illusory own-body perception, and vestibular orienting in sleep. This is consistent with cognitive accounts of dream generation, in which long-term beliefs and expectations, as well as waking concerns and memories play an important role. What I add to this picture is an emphasis on the real-body basis of dream imagery. This offers a novel perspective on the formation of dream imagery and suggests new lines of research. (shrink)

The paper proposes a minimal definition of dreaming in terms of immersive spatiotemporal hallucination (ISTH) occurring in sleep or during sleep–wake transitions and under the assumption of reportability. I take these conditions to be both necessary and sufficient for dreaming to arise. While empirical research results may, in the future, allow for an extension of the concept of dreaming beyond sleep and possibly even independently of reportability, ISTH is part of any possible extension of this definition and thus is a (...) constitutive condition of dreaming. I also argue that the proposed ISTH model of dreaming, in conjunction with considerations on the epistemic relationship between dreaming and dream reports, raises important questions about the extent to which dreams typically involve a detailed body representation—an assumption that plays an important role in philosophical work on dreaming. As a commonly accepted definition of dreaming is lacking in current dream research, the ISTH model, which integrates conceptual analysis and epistemological considerations with results from empirical research, is an important contribution to this field. By linking dreaming to felt presence, full-body illusions, and autoscopic phenomena such as out-of-body experiences in wakefulness and in the hypnagogic state, the ISTH model of dreaming also helps integrate dream research, both theoretically and experimentally, with the study of other altered states of consciousness involving hallucinations. It makes straightforward and investigable predictions by claiming that all of these experiences have amodal spatiotemporal hallucinations as their common denominator. Finally, it is theoretically relevant for the philosophical discussion on minimal phenomenal selfhood. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the different ways in which dream research can contribute to interdisciplinary consciousness research. As a second global state of consciousness aside from wakefulness, dreaming is an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness. However, programmatic suggestions for integrating dreaming into broader theories of consciousness, for instance by regarding dreams as a model system of standard or pathological wake states, have not yielded straightforward results. We review existing proposals for using dreaming as a model system, (...) taking into account concerns about the concept of modeling and the adequacy and practical feasibility of dreaming as a model system. We conclude that existing modeling approaches are premature and rely on controversial background assumptions. Instead, we suggest that contrastive analysis of dreaming and wakefulness presents a more promising strategy for integrating dreaming into a broader research context and solving many of the problems involved in the modeling approach. (shrink)

Contentless experience involves an absence of mental content such as thought, perception, and mental imagery. In academic work it has been classically treated as including states like those aimed for in Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation. We have used evidence synthesis to select and review 135 expert texts from within the three traditions. In this paper we identify the features of contentless experience referred to in the expert texts and determine whether the experiences are the same or different across the (...) practices with respect to each feature. We identify 65 features reported or implied in one or more practices, with most being reported or implied in all three. While there are broad similarities in the experiences across the traditions, we find that there are differences with respect to four features and possibly many others. The main difference identified is that Shamatha involves substantially greater attentional stability and vividness. Another key finding is that numerous forms of content are present in the experiences, including wakefulness, naturalness, calm, bliss/joy, and freedom. The findings indicate that meditation experiences described as contentless in the academic literature can in fact involve considerable variation, and that in many and perhaps most cases these experiences are not truly contentless. This challenges classical understandings in academic research that in these so-called contentless experiences all content is absent, and that the experiences are therefore an identical state of _pure consciousness_ or consciousness itself. Our assessment is that it remains an open question whether the experiences aimed for in the three practices should be classed as pure consciousness. Implications of our analysis for neuroscientific and clinical studies and for basic understandings of the practices are discussed. (shrink)

Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation are said to aim for “contentless” experiences, where mental content such as thoughts, perceptions, and mental images is absent. Silence is understood to be a central feature of those experiences. The main source of information about the experiences is texts by experts from within the three traditions. Previous research has tended not to use an explicit scientific method for selecting and reviewing expert texts on meditation. We have identified evidence synthesis as a robust and transparent (...) method that is suitable for this purpose. In this paper we use evidence synthesis based on expert texts to examine silence/quietness as a feature of the contentless experiences in the three practices. Objective criteria were used to select a sample of 135 expert texts. A database containing the expert descriptions of the meditation techniques and experiences was produced by extracting the relevant material from the publications and coding that material to differentiate individual features. The database, which forms part of the supplementary material for this paper, identifies each feature of the contentless experiences referred to in the expert texts, including silence/quietness. Our key finding is that the experts indicate silence/quietness has a particular connection with stillness, and the absence of concepts, mental activity/noise, thoughts, and disturbance. Further analysis leads to the following insights. The silence/quietness reflects the absence of thoughts and sounds, and this fits neatly with a conception of silence/quietness as the absence of internal and external noise. In some cases the terms silence and quietness may also reflect the absence of other disturbances such as non-auditory perceptions, mental images, and negative feelings. That would fit with a conception of silence/quietness as complete calm or absence of disturbance. It is not clear from the expert texts how silence/quietness is distinct from other features such as stillness that also reflect the absence of disturbances. As a separate matter, silence/quietness has connections with all the other features of the contentless experiences, but the closeness of the connections varies. Our work uncovers fine distinctions and ambiguities which lead to new research questions that can be explored in future studies. (shrink)

In contentless experience there is an absence of mental content such as thought, perception, and mental imagery. The path to contentless experience in meditation can be taken to comprise the meditation technique, and the experiences on the way to the contentless “goal-state/s”. Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation are each said to access contentless experience, but the path to that experience in each practice is not yet well understood from a scientific perspective. We have employed evidence synthesis to select and review (...) 135 expert texts from those traditions. In this paper we describe the techniques and interim-states based on the expert texts and compare them across the practices on key dimensions. Superficially, Shamatha and Transcendental Meditation appear very different to Stillness Meditation in that they require bringing awareness to a meditation object. The more detailed and systematic approach taken in this paper indicates that posturally Shamatha is closer to Stillness Meditation, and that on several other dimensions Shamatha is quite different to both other practices. In particular, Shamatha involves greater measures to cultivate attentional stability and vividness with respect to an object, greater focusing, less tolerance of mind-wandering, more monitoring, and more deliberate doing/control. Achieving contentless experience in Shamatha is much slower, more difficult, and less frequent. The findings have important implications for taxonomies of meditation and for consciousness, neuroscientific, and clinical research/practice, and will provide new and useful insights for meditation practitioners. (shrink)

Sleep is phenomenologically rich, teeming with different kinds of conscious thought and experience. Dreaming is the most prominent example, but there is more to conscious experience in sleep than dreaming. Especially in non‐rapid eye movement sleep, conscious experience, sometimes dreamful, sometimes dreamless, also alternates with a loss of consciousness. Yet while dreaming has become established as a topic for interdisciplinary consciousness science and empirically informed philosophy of mind, the same is not true of other kinds of sleep‐related experience, nor is (...) it true of sleep itself. I argue that this is a mistake. Conscious experience in sleep is more diverse than dreaming and we need to explain its different forms as well as the alternation between conscious and unconscious sleep states. We also need to ask how different kinds of sleep‐related experience relate to foundational issues about sleep and wakefulness as well as sleep stages. I survey recent findings and theoretical developments from sleep and dream research to show how the traditional view of sleep and its relation to wakefulness and consciousness is flawed. I then suggest that by refining our frameworks of sleep‐related experiences and sleep staging in tandem, we can work toward a better view. As we are only beginning to understand the diversity of consciousness in sleep, an important aim is programmatic: We need a philosophy of sleep and of consciousness in sleep, not just a philosophy of dreaming, and a future theory of sleep needs to integrate phenomenological considerations with neuroscientific and behavioral evidence. Working toward such a theory will radically transform our understanding of sleep, wakefulness, and our conscious minds. (shrink)

Evan’s book is in many ways an exercise in remapping. The first is suggested by the book’s title. Waking, Dreaming, Being challenges existing ways of mapping the conceptual relationship between conscious states across the sleep-wake cycle. The idea that waking and dreaming are not discrete states but can interpenetrate each other—that, to use Evan’s words, they “aren’t opposed but flow into and out of [one] an other” —is a central theme running through the book. If Evan is correct, then the (...) taxonomy of conscious states that underlies large parts of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience has to be redrawn. As Evan tells us in the introduction, the book’s organizing principle... (shrink)

In this commentary, I confront Ganeri’s theory of self with two case studies from cognitive neuroscience and interdisciplinary consciousness research: mind wandering and full-body illusions. Together, these case studies suggest new questions and constraints for Ganeri's theory of self. Recent research on spontaneous thought and mind wandering raises questions about the transition from unconscious monitoring to the phenomenology of ownership and the first-person stance. Full-body illusions are relevant for the attenuation problem of how we distinguish between self and others. Discussing (...) these examples can help refine key transitions in Ganeri’s theory of self and ensure its empirical plausibility. This discussion also identifies points of contact between Ganeri's self and cognitive neuroscience, raising new questions for future research, both philosophical and empirical. (shrink)