Neurophenomenology (Part 1)

Discussion of dreaming and sleep-related conscious phenomena has been largely absent from phenomenology and embodied mind discourse. Insights about the nature of consciousness in cognitive neuroscience mainly come from studying an awake and alert subject, interacting with his/her environment. While dream science is quite a vibrant field, enaction and embodiment have rarely been applied to oneiric phenomena. Thompson covers quite a vast territory, discussing hypnagogic experiences (images and sensations happening at sleep onset), dreams, lucid dreams (dreams during which the dreamer is aware of the fact that it is a dream) and 'dreamless' sleep, and as well as out-of-body experiences.

To account for the multiplicity of possible ways of being in a dream, Thompson distinguishes between the dreaming self and the dreaming ego, where 'the dream ego is like an avatar in a virtual world; the dreaming self is its user'. The balance between the two can be thought of as a degree of lucidity – awareness of the dream state. The more one is aware of dreaming, the more the dreaming self is able to distinguish itself from the dreaming ego. Conversely, in non-lucid dreams the dream self has an impression of being one with and the same as the dream ego: the dreamer is fully immersed in the dream scenario.

Dream neuroscience has traditionally seen dreaming as synonymous with a specific sleep stage, known as rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep. Experiments show that if a research participant is awakened from REM sleep, the chances are that she should will recall a dream experience; thus much of neuroimaging research has used REM sleep as a neural proxy for dreaming. It is possible, however, to have vivid and immersive experiences in other stages of sleep, and the REM dreaming view is currently being challenged. As the domain of sleep studies expands and neuroscience uncovers more possible functions of sleep, such as memory consolidation or emotion regulation, dreams have been seen as either epiphenomenal to or reflecting the underlying brain activity during REM sleep. One view of dreaming proposes that dreams are hallucinations (i.e., images and experiences that arise in the brain despite the lack of appropriate stimulation from the environment), and that the parallels in brain activation patterns between REM sleep and some psychotic states suggest that dreaming may be seen as either a model for psychosis or a kind of delusion. Lucid dreaming – dreams where the dreamer is not only fully aware that she is dreaming, but also has access to his/her memories and may be able to control the course of a dream – challenges such a fatalistic and passive view of dreams, returning the sense of agency to the dreamer. The common explanation for lucid dreams is that these are dissociative states – i.e., overlapping wake/REM sleep states, suggesting, in an almost pejorative way, that a normal process, whereas sleep and wake are entirely different states, is altered. Thompson disagrees with the delusional/hallucinatory and dissociative approach to dreaming and proposes the imagination conception of dreaming: 'a dream isn’t a random false perception; it’s a spontaneous mental simulation, a way of imagining ourselves a world'.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0YPnR7N93Hg