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Whatsapp During deep sleep the brain remains very active

Aristotle gave them some thought and Rene Descartes lost his bearings over the very idea of them. That’s understandable; dreams bring up a bunch of deeply philosophical questions that remain largely unresolved, from the nature of consciousness to personal identity and selfhood. Can you really dream you are someone else? Olivia Willis reports.

‘Once I had a dream I was an older man having a heart attack. I actually died in the dream, but I was still in the body, looking up and seeing everyone moving around me, doing what people do after a person dies.’

Melanie Rosen, a lecturer in philosophy at Macquarie University, recalls her experience of what science describes as a ‘vicarious dream’—a dream dreamt through the perspective of a character within the dream.

In dreaming, I completely drop out of the picture altogether. It doesn’t seem like I’m there dreaming of being someone. It’s just a dream protagonist who is someone else.

‘Vicarious dreams bring up some issues in terms of sense of self and sense of personal identity,’ says Rosen. ‘Who is that person? I refer to them as the protagonist of the dream. If you say, “I’m dreaming that I’m someone else,” you’re kind of making the assumption that it’s actually you in that dream.’

That raises philosophical questions about who we are in our conscious state, who we are when we’re dreaming and who the people in our dreams are.

‘Saying “I am someone else” is metaphysically difficult,’ says Rosen. ‘What does it even mean to say “I am someone else”? Who is the holder of the first person perspective of the dream?’

The concept of dreams and dreaming certainly stirred up 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes.

Descartes’ problem is really the most famous: ‘how can I ever be sure that I’m not dreaming right now, that I’m really awake?’

‘If I can’t tell the difference, as Descartes thinks we can’t between dreaming and wakefulness, then how can I ever really trust my sensory-based beliefs about the world?’ asks Jennifer Windt, philosophy lecturer at Monash University.

According to Windt, dreaming has been a topic of philosophical interest since antiquity.

‘So where do dreams come from, do they have meaning, is there something like prophetic dreaming? The main issue in western philosophy has been the connection between dreaming and knowledge.’

For his part, Descartes eventually came back to revise his view on dreams, realising that in all their bizarreness they fail a kind of coherence test, and thus concluded that we can be reasonably sure when we are awake.

‘To me, that’s interesting, because it suggests that the way one thinks about the nature of the dream experience and the types of things one experiences in dreams ... is going to shape epistemological considerations about dreaming as well,’ says Windt.

Descartes appears to address broader questions about the relationship between dreaming and the conscious experience, or dreaming and waking perception.

According to Windt, this is a logical place to begin to try and understand the concept of dreaming within a philosophical framework.

‘I think only when we have a comprehensive understanding of what it really is to dream, only then can we really ask further questions like “what is it for a dream to be deceptive?”’

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Whatsapp Flaming June, by Frederic Lord Leighton (1830-1896)

Philosophical inquiry into dreaming in the 20th century was in some ways spearheaded by American philosopher Norman Malcolm, who for conceptual reasons dismissed the possibility that dreams bear any significance.

‘In a nutshell, he was basically saying that sleep is a state of unconsciousness. It’s a state that is diametrically opposed to wakefulness, and that [in dreams] we’re not reacting to any events in our environment, we’re not manifesting any type of behaviour,’ says Windt. ‘So there are really no reasons to think that there’s anything like conscious experience going on in dreams.’

With that, Malcolm became resolute in his belief that dreams are no more than what we subjectively recall them to be, and that we should scrutinise them accordingly.

‘It’s interesting because in this, he was really reacting to what I think was the major turning point in scientific thinking about dreaming, and the real beginning of actual scientific research on dreaming—the discovery of REM sleep in the 1950s,’ says Windt.

REM—or rapid eye movement sleep—is the state of sleep characterised by almost wakeful brain activation. According to Windt, the discovery of REM sleep was ‘revolutionary’, because until then, both philosophers and scientists had understood sleep as a ‘uniformed period of the mind and the brain being mostly turned off—a period of inactivity’.

‘It was very surprising to see that there’s actually a lot of brain activity going on in sleep and that there are different stages of sleep. They found that when you awaken participants from REM sleep they’re very likely to report dreams.’

The correlation between dream reports—the subjective recollection of what we believe we have been dreaming about—and REM sleep saw a shift in broader philosophical thought on the subject.

Although Malcolm’s dogged theories on consciousness were sometimes perceived as counterintuitive, his work sparked a bigger philosophical conversation about the content of dreams.

‘There are interesting questions to ask. Is it really me in my dreams? The dream character I identify with... how different is that from my waking self?

‘Sometimes I can dream of myself being a completely different person, I can dream of myself being a man, or an animal or a younger version of myself. So there might be interesting questions about the narrative self, about person identity,’ says Windt.

Melanie Rosen has attempted to investigate some of these questions in her research.

‘My question is not “who are you when you’re dreaming”, but “who is the protagonist of your dream?”’

According to Rosen, the protagonist characters in vicarious dreams seem to operate independently of our waking self and memory.

‘If you are talking about identity in the sense of memory continuity over time—what makes me me—in dreams you might have no access to your waking self.

‘So usually when I’m dreaming, I don’t know much about myself [as an awake person] and sometimes nothing at all,’ says Rosen.

According to the philosophy lecturer, this seems to work in both directions.

‘Studies show that most dreams are forgotten, so if you’ve had one of these vicarious dreams, then you’ve probably forgotten it. If that’s the case, then that dream is entirely shut off from your waking self.’

In essence, Rosen contends that our dream state—and our dream protagonist—is not able to access the memory of our conscious or awake self.

‘I tried to apply the concept of imagining that you’re someone else to the case of dreaming,’ says Rosen.

‘In dreaming, I completely drop out of the picture altogether. It doesn’t seem like I’m there dreaming of being someone. It’s just a dream protagonist who is someone else.

‘Do we have a case for separate entities, separate identities that exist, while my brain is doing interesting dream activity?

‘It’s very hard to define them, one way or another.’

What is it to dream? Listen to this episode of The Philosopher's Zone to hear more about dreaming.

The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.

