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Dreaming of a stable world: vision and action in sleep

  • S.I. : Between Vision and Action
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Abstract

Our eyes, bodies, and perspectives are constantly shifting as we observe the world. Despite this, we are very good at distinguishing between self-caused visual changes and changes in the environment: the world appears mostly stable despite our visual field moving around. This, it seems, also occurs when we are dreaming. As we visually investigate the dream environment, we track moving objects with our dream eyes, examine objects, and shift focus. These movements, research suggests, are reflected in the rapid movements or saccades of our sleeping eyes. Do we really see the dream world in the same way that we see the real world? If we do, how could dreaming, usually assumed to be mind-generated hallucinations, replicate such an experience? This problem would be deflated if dreams are not hallucinations at all, but rather imagination, illusion or simply unrealistic. I argue that imagination and illusion views do not satisfactorily explain away the problem of vision and action in sleep. The imagination model is not a complete description of dreaming that is consistent with empirical research, and it is unlikely that the visual dream world is an illusion. Given that the dreaming visual experience is most likely active, hallucinatory, and at times a realistic world simulation, there are important implications for our understanding of visual perception and its relationship to movement. Evidence suggests that our dream eyes investigate the dream world as our waking eyes investigate the waking world. If changes to the unconsciously generated dream environment are perceived as external and unintentional while dream body movements are perceived as self-generated and intentional, current theory of visual perception may have to be expanded to account for how the dreaming mind generates a stable world in which we track and visually explore mind-generated objects.

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Notes

  1. There is debate about whether hallucinations are perceptual, however, my discussion concerns whether dreams can be convincingly life-like in the absence of mind-independent objects. If the distinction between perception and imagination is merely that the experience is caused by an external stimulus, this is theoretically problematic (Siegel 2005) and would arbitrarily discount dreams as perceptual experience. Whether hallucinations should be termed ‘quasi-perceptual’ (Nanay 2016) or otherwise need not be debated here. For simplicity, I refer to hallucinations as perceptual.

  2. There are other uses of the term “imagining” such as to make-believe, but for Ichikawa’s discussion of dream phenomenology, the relevant type is the bringing about of an image or sensation to one’s imagination.

  3. Some might argue that inner speech is a different phenomenon all together from imagining speech, for example, “sub vocalisations”, which may account for some auditory verbal hallucinations (for an in-depth discussion, see Wilkinson 2014), but imagination seems the most accurate description in these cases.

  4. Known as “propositional imagination” (Ichikawa 2016, p. 124).

  5. Liao and Szabó Gendler (2011) characterise delusions as “belief- like mental representations that manifest an unusual degree of disconnectedness from reality [and] seem to exhibit features of both belief and imagination” (p. 87). Although they note that delusions can involve elements of imagination, this does not necessarily support the imagination model, as dreaming can involve both imagination and hallucination, consistent with the pluralistic model of dreams (Rosen 2018b).

  6. Taken from Sleepanddreamdatabase.org, a publicly accessible database storing tens of thousands of dream reports. Dream Text: Most Recent Dream - Q15), 41 words, harris_2013s:001465 [Answer Date Unknown].

  7. Although saccades are defined as voluntary, if there are cases of, for example, involuntary REM saccades generated by PGO activity, these would be exceptions to their voluntariness. For my purposes, I use ‘saccades’ to refer to all eye movements that are rapid and remain neutral on whether they are voluntary.

  8. An alternative interpretation is that the tACS was ineffective at modulating frontal lobe activity in 23% of cases, thus lucidity should not be expected. It is unclear whether the EEG monitoring performed during these experiments can disambiguate. Thanks to a reviewer for this point. However, it is also important to note that in Voss et al. (2014) work, “lucidity was assumed when subjects reported elevated ratings (> mean + 2 s.e.) on either or both of the LuCiD scale factors insight and dissociation” (p. 813) where “dissociation” refers to taking on a 3rd person perspective. The definition of lucidity relevant to my discussion, the realization that one was dreaming, is more specific than this scale, and thus the percentage of dreamers who realized that they were dreaming may be less than the 77% noted here. The potential for increased cognitive ability to occur without explicit awareness that one is dreaming supports the view that dreams can at times stand up to rational scrutiny.

  9. Note that there is some debate about what age this development is completed (Sándor et al. 2015).

  10. Thanks to a reviewer for suggestions in this section.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank John Sutton, Peter Menzies and three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Funded by the Carlsberg Foundation distinguished postdoctoral Grant No. CF16-0804.

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  1. The Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 4, Building 1483, 3rd Floor, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark

    Melanie Rosen

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Rosen, M. Dreaming of a stable world: vision and action in sleep. Synthese 198 (Suppl 17), 4107–4142 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02149-1

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